Allie’s Cookie Table: Woman-owned bakery expanding custom cookies with $650,000
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Allie Adams expanded her Sharon bakery with a $650,000 automated cookie line.
- Funding came from local development groups and enabled new distribution capacity.
- Adams started baking at home as a single mother and now ships nationwide orders.
A western Pennsylvania business owner is expanding operations to keep spreading the joy of cookie tables nationwide.
Allie Adams is the founder of Allie’s Sweet Tooth, which she started 17 years ago at her home and is now located in downtown Sharon.
She’s expanding and starting Allie’s Cookie Table: an automated distribution line of specialty cookies made in her Sharon bakery.
Adams secured the new equipment with financial support from Shenango Valley Enterprise Zone Corp., Penn-Northwest Development Corp., the city of Sharon and Sharon Community Development Corp.
“This allowed us to expand into this new market that just diversifies my company, so that we have different multiple streams of revenue, but making the same product, which is pretty cool,” she said. “We’re waiting on one more machine. It’s being made in Italy.”
In May, Adams hosted an event celebrating the launch of their Cookie Table bakery expansion into an automated specialty cookie line.
Several speakers celebrated Adams for her accomplishments, including State Senator Michele Brooks, Mercer County commissioners and Allie’s daughter Kailyn.
“We have faced the world together,” Adams said. “My girls are my biggest achievement, and they are the most important thing to me. Kailyn has been there through this entire process. She’s always helping me and she helps me stay on track. That’s all of my girls now. Even when we’re so crazy busy, it’s really important to me that family is involved.”
Starting a cookie baking business as a single mom
Adams started the business with a single cookie sheet and her at-home oven, and now is selling thousands of cookies a day.
“I actually had to bungee cord that oven closed, so I was really trying to make it work on nothing,” Adams said. “That’s how I started. My dad kept pushing and eventually helped me. He made a logo and a website that I didn’t even know about, actually, until there was orders coming in already.”
Adams was a single mom with two young girls at home when she started Allie’s Sweet Tooth. Her then-two-year-old daughter Kailyn told Adams she wanted a princess-themed birthday party.
“I couldn’t go out and buy her the specialty cakes and cookies that she wanted. I started teaching myself how to do it at night time while they slept,” Adams said.
Growing up, Adams said she’d spent some time in the kitchen on holidays with her grandma and mom making cookies for holidays.
But these cookies required her to learn specialty decorating skills with trial and error at first in her at-home Cleveland kitchen.
“My girls are the reason I started. I wanted to do something nice for them,” Adams said.
Adams worked multiple jobs to support her family, baking and decorating cookies at night learning from mistakes.
Then she started selling specialty cookies with custom designs and characters like the Super Mario Brothers and Sesame Street.
“My dad kept insisting that I could make a business out of this and I could be home more,” Adams said. “That was my ultimate goal, but I just genuinely did not think that cookies were ever going to be able to support me and my girls enough. But everyone kept saying, ‘Allie, this could really be something.’”
Shipping thousands of Allie’s Sweet Tooth cookies to customers
As her business grew across northeast Ohio and the Mahoning Valley, Adams started shipping cookie orders for local and national celebrities, Fortune 500 companies, Major League Baseball owners and teams like the Cleveland Browns.
“I remember sitting in the drive-in movie, just me and my girls, and I cannot remember what we were watching, but I always used to take them on a date on Fridays,” she said. “I got a phone call while we were at the drive in, and it was the order for Gene Simmons. I remember screaming in the car, but it was cool things like that that just kept me feeling like I can do this.”
With a new home base in Pennsylvania, orders for Allie’s Sweet Tooth increased and she opened a bakery at 47 E State St. in Sharon.
“We were contacted then by the Kentucky Derby, so we were doing 9,000 or 10,000 cookies at a time out of our house,” Adams said. “Everybody rallied around me and really believed in me that I could do it.”
