Baking & Snack - July 2016 - 29

OPERATIONS
Ellison Bakery

Ellison Bakery uses its cookie expertise to pave
new avenues for growth as an ingredient supplier
to other segments of the food industry.
by Charlotte Atchley

For more than 50 years, Ellison Bakery, Ft.
Wayne, IN, supplied cookies for Archway
Cookies. When Archway declared bankruptcy
in 2008 (it is now a brand of Snyder's-Lance),
however, Ellison wasn't up a creek. That's because in the 1980s, a chance opportunity to
bake a cookie as a component in an ice cream
sandwich snowballed into a full-fledged business of making cookie-based ingredients for
all sorts of ice cream, yogurt and confectionery products. While the cookie industry itself
may be experiencing flat sales, these other
food industry segments are seeing plenty of
growth, and so is Ellison.
For the past few years, all that growth had the
bakery running full-out, filling up a major expansion done originally in 2006. It was time to
add to production capacity, and Ellison's put in
a new mixer and oven line at the end of 2015.
"We have had tremendous opportunities
as our existing customers' volume has grown,
and we have also brought on several wonderful
new customers, so we were operating at nearly
100% capacity," said Todd Wallin, president.
"Running at 100% capacity is very difficult on
resources, both equipment and, more importantly, our people. In addition, we had potential
customers who wanted to come on board with
Ellison, and we could not accept new business
since we were, in essence, out of capacity."
With these latest additions, Ellison now operates three production lines with Line 1 running at 85% capacity, Line 2 at approximately
65% and the latest, Line 3, at 45%. That leaves
Ellison Bakery poised to take on new business
that Mr. Wallin expects will continue due to
the company's capabilities and size.
"There are fewer and fewer flexible, privately held, independent bakeries out there today,"
he said. "This leads to more opportunities for
those of us who are still in that space, have
the flexibility and don't need a million pounds

of one item to build it into our system," Mr.
Wallin said. "We are fully capable of handling
huge volumes or smaller volume projects and
are nimble enough to do it very quickly in a
cost-effective manner."
The latest production line installed at
Ellison Bakery only enhances the company's
ability to produce the wide variety of products
its customers demand.

A company's evolution
Like many bakeries in the industry, Ellison is
an established family business. Started in Don
Ellis' garage in 1945, the company has stayed
in the Ellis family throughout its history. Mr.
Wallin is the first company president to not
bear the name Ellis; however, he might as well
be family.
When he was 14 years old, Mr. Wallin met
Rob Ellis, current chairman of the board,
when his family moved to Ft. Wayne. When
he returned home after college in 1982, Rob
offered Mr. Wallin a job at the plant. Mr.
Wallin has worked in various roles at Ellison
Bakery ever since - shipping, distribution,
plant management, sales - before taking
over as president in 2010.
Rob and his two sons Jeremy and Jon Ellis
remain the sole owners of the bakery and are
heavily involved in the business, with Jeremy as
QA/R&D manager and Jon as plant manager.
The family was supportive of Mr. Wallin taking
over as president and made the transition easier because, as Mr. Wallin said, the Ellis family
treats its employees like family. Many of those
employees have worked at Ellison Bakery for
decades. "It has felt like family for many of us
for many years and continues today," he said.
Cookies leave Ellison Bakery's newest tunnel oven to cool. When
cookies are going to be crumbled as a component in an ice cream
product, they don't need to look perfect.
Vito Palmisano

Baking & Snack - July 2016

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