Maine bakery finds success as easy as pie

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RICHMOND – Just over a decade ago, Amy Bouchard drew on her love of baking to create a business in her kitchen making whoopie pies. In those days, she would crank out three at a time.

Now, she churns out 5,000 to 7,000 of the sweet Wicked Whoopies each day, shipping them all over the country and beyond.

The business has outgrown its bakery in a converted fishing goods shop and will double in size when it moves to a new site in January.

“I can’t believe how many whoopie pies we can pump out of this place. It’s like a whoopie explosion,” Bouchard, her apron blotched with dark brown batter, said during a break from the pre-Christmas production frenzy.

It is indeed tight quarters for the dozen or so workers at Bouchard’s Isamax Snacks, where the sweet aroma of baking cakes and fluffy filling permeates the air. Big mixers whip up snowy filling, while a baker fills trays with batter. Other employees hand-wrap the finished product in cellophane.

Workers wheel carts stacked with trays full of the saucer-shaped cakes to a giant oven that holds 48 trays. Like all whoopie pies, the finished product consists of a couple of chocolate cakes with a creamy filling. Devotees, Bouchard says, include Oprah Winfrey.

Bouchard and her husband David, both former shipyard workers, took a traditional New England treat and ran with it. Now they’re at a full sprint, trying to keep pace with orders.

Sales have mushroomed from $1,900 a decade ago to $1 million this year. Amy Bouchard estimates the latter figure will double by next year. Her husband acknowledges that the popular palate pleaser is still something of a regional culinary curiosity.

“We’re trying to change that,” he said.

The Bouchards’ success story began after she left her job at Bath Iron Works so she could be home with her young children. Bouchard, who always loved to bake, wanted a way to make money at home, and her brother told her she ought to sell her whoopie pies.

The business was born and christened Isamax (IZE-uh-max) from a mixture of her two children’s names, Isabella, now 13, and Maxx, 19.

Bouchard was soon filling her kitchen oven with whoopie pie batter, delivering orders with her kids in tow and keeping her earnings in a jar. At one point as the stack of orders grew, she burned out three mixers in a week.

Gradually, she expanded the selection of flavors, going from traditional chocolate devil’s food with vanilla cream filling to such cake flavors as strawberry, pumpkin and oatmeal cookie and fillings with peanut butter cream and sweet raspberry.

“I didn’t invent the whoopie pie, but I like to take something and make it better, then make it great,” said Bouchard.

New England-style whoopie pies are a cousin to the South’s moon pies, cookie-like sandwiches with marshmallow filling and dipped in chocolate. While Bouchard has competitors in her region, she believes her business is the first with a bakery devoted solely to whoopie pies.

A big break came in 2003 when Wicked Whoopies were featured as a great gift on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site and TV show.

“The phone would not stop ringing,” said Bouchard. National magazines and regional television programs also have shown interest in the product, whose suggested retail price of $1.39 can vary from store to store.

The bulk of Isamax’s buyers are small convenience stores and coffee shops, although bigger buyers like the Maine-based Hannaford Bros. Co. supermarket chain stock them. Major distributors deliver the product throughout New England and New York.

Hannaford has been selling them in three Maine supermarkets, but in January will add 25 more, including 12 in Vermont, said Caren Epstein, spokeswoman for the chain. Later, Hannaford is looking at stocking Isamax goodies in all 149 of its stores “because it’s a great product and a great opportunity to support a local business,” said Epstein.

Mail orders also come in from all over the country as the whoopie word spreads. Bouchard said orders have been sent to Japan, among other countries.

A few hundred soldiers returning from Iraq were given Wicked Whoopies during their first stop in the United States as part of the Operation Yellow Ribbon.

Now, instead of having to deliver product, trucks back up to Isamax’ modest, cedar-shingled production building and fill up with cases of whoopies.

The business has two retail shops in the nearby communities of Gardiner, the small southern Maine city where the Bouchards live, and Farmingdale. In the latter shop, visitors from as far away as California, Arizona, Florida and Hawaii have signed the guest register. One signer write, “Whoopielicious.”

Sherri Lawton of Parkville, Md., who learned about Wicked Whoopies on the Roker on the Road TV program, ordered a couple of cartons and a 5-pound Jumbo Wicked Whoopie cake for a holiday party Dec. 3 for 145 people.

“Everything I put out was gone,” Lawton said. But she also admitted hoarding a few slices for herself for later. “They really bring me to my knees,” she said.

A woman from Massachusetts who e-mailed the Bouchards also decided not to share her whoopies with her co-workers, saying they weren’t “whoopie worthy.”

Once Isamax moves to its new 7,500-square-foot bakery a few miles down the road in Gardiner, a new 70-pan oven will replace the 48-pan appliance, which will be used as a backup. The 80-quart mixer will be replaced by one with a 140-quart capacity.

Bouchard isn’t sure how that will translate into hours on the job, which can stretch to 18 a day during the Christmas season. But she’s not complaining.

“I do have a passion for what I do,” she said. “I can’t imagine not doing it.”