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Over the past two years, Tracie Ritchie has built her cookie-making operation, Simply Homemade Pizzelles, from a one-woman business to a company that employs as many as 25 people at a time and sells cookies to 350 stores in seven states.
You might think Ritchie must really love pizzelles, the thin, anise-flavored Italian cookies that are especially popular around Christmastime. But she says pastry-making was never her biggest passion in the kitchen. In fact, she says, it was really mostly by chance that she became a cookie entrepreneur.
Apron Strings
Coming from a big family, with Italian and Albanian roots, Ritchie grew up cooking with her relatives. It was nothing to them to have 100 people over for a one-year-old's birthday party, she said.
In 1989, with a business degree from Assumption College and experience in financial fields, Ritchie decided to start a catering business.
"I wasn't big on pastries," she said, adding that she preferred to cook whole meals from start to finish.
But in 2000, when a friend with a bakery asked her to make some pizzelles, she couldn't say no.
Soon she started selling the cookies wholesale. She developed a technique to use several of the special waffle irons that home cooks use for the cookies at the same time. A few years later, she was making 12,000 cookies for a Christmas season.
Still, when another friend suggested she talk to a food broker about selling pizzelles on a much larger scale to grocery stores, she was skeptical.
"I just didn't think he knew what he was talking about," she said.
But, before she knew it, the Maine-based Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain had agreed to sell the cookies at 35 of its stores. Other chains weren't such easy sells, Ritchie said, but more and more of them slowly came on board. Today Big Y Foods, Roche Brothers and Shaw's Supermarkets, as well as many local stores carry here product.
Regional Reach
Gary Bolduc, bakery sales manager for the Springfield-based Big Y grocery chain, said the pizzelles fit the company's business plan of selling locally made, upscale items. And he said Ritchie has been a good businesswoman to work with.
"You can tell she takes a personal interest in the products," he said. "She's not just a salesperson."
Kevin DeNorscia, assistant vice president of commercial lending at Clinton Savings Bank, said he became a customer of Ritchie's when he was working at Leominster Credit Union, buying packages of pizzelles to give out as holiday gifts for his customers.
"There's no question that Simply Homemade is a small business, but she doesn't think like a small business," he said. "She really looks out at where she wants to be, and that's what she strives for."
As her sales increased, Ritchie set up a leased space in a Holden industrial building and filled it mixing machines, sacks of flour and sugar and 10 of the waffle irons. It might seem like an odd location for a bakery, with an auto parts store and a carpentry place as neighbors, but Ritchie said she really doesn't consider the operation a bakery.
"It's a manufacturing company," she said. "We make one thing."
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Worcester Business Journal presents a special commemorative edition celebrating the 300th anniversary of the city of Worcester. This landmark publication covers the city and region’s rich history of growth and innovation.
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