Web Sites: Dancing Deer Baking Company
Why I am recommending STEP UP Women's Network:
Cookies and baked treats are great gifts to give at the holidays. If you don't have time to do the baking yourself - FEAR NOT! Dancing Deer bakes and delivers all while being creative and socially conscious...
Click here to visit STEP UP Women's Network
From the Website:
We are a company of people who are passionate about food, nature and aesthetics. We are dedicated to excellence in all we do - sometimes we pull it off!
Pleasing the Eye and the Palate
Our products are known for straight-up yummy-ness, innovation, artful but simple packaging and pure, high quality ingredients. We blend traditional artisan baking with innovative flavor combinations and package our products with a somewhat whimsical disregard for the expected. We think packaging should be as artful, honest and as good as the food.
Using All-natural Ingredientsaring for the Environment
To the extent possible we make choices in our packaging, production and facilities management, which are friendly to the environment.
Supporting the Community
We try to give back from our modest successes in a variety of ways. Our main philanthropic efforts are devoted to helping homeless families through the Sweet Home Project
Enjoying our Work
We strive to achieve both financial and market success, while achieving personal and professional rewards for all "deers". There's more to life than selling cookies - but it's not a bad way to make a living.
All Dancing Deer employees are stakeholders in its profitability and share in the rewards of a well run, growing company. We believe that if people love what they're doing, it shows in the food. We developed this philosophy from the earliest days when we observed that baking "angry" would ruin a cake.
Our production facility and offices are in a rehabilitated brick factory building that was built in the early 1900s for the Star Brewing Company in the Roxbury section of Boston. We are told it was once seven-stories high with vats of beer all the way to the top. Five stories burned down long before we arrived. Our neighborhood no doubt benefits from the aroma currently wafting from 77 Shirley Street. But we think of those upper stories and miss them particularly on steamy summer days. We enjoy the inner city location and we're pleased to be home growing jobs in a section of Boston that has seen better days.
Where we're sold
You'll find us in premier gourmet and specialty food retailers and catalogs throughout the country, and also in all-natural and bakery sections of some progressive grocery chains. For a comprehensive listing click here.
There were three company founders; a talented baker, Suzanne Lombardi, who originated many of Dancing Deer's recipes, a theoretical physicist/business strategist, Ayis Antoniou, who loves to cook, and a business woman/artist, Trish Karter, who's passion is nature and the environment. Trish is still with the company as President and CEO. Suzanne and Ayis, have moved on. Trish shares heavy cookie tasting responsibilities with her two children.
Incorporated in April 1994 to provide high quality, all-natural baked goods to accompany the growing market for gourmet coffee, we started out in a former pizza parlor on a busy street corner with a couple of convection ovens. Our specialty was cakes, sold primarily to cafes and restaurants. In 1996 we brought out a line of packaged consumer goods under the Dancing Deer label. Not long after that we opened the doors to passers by who demanded access and forced us in to having a small retail operation. We surprised ourselves, and a lot of other people, when we won the Food Industry's equivalent of the "Oscars" in 1997 for our Molasses Clove Cookie. That same year, a food writer from (no kidding) Hollywood arrived at our counter looking for directions. Before we could really comprehend what was happening, Dancing Deer was on national TV being touted as making the "best cake in America". We had managed to have a toll free number up and running within 24 hours of receiving his call, and thus our mail order business was launched. Many more awards and honors have followed.
It has been an interesting journey. Our successes are due to luck, a tremendous amount of dedication and hard work, and a commitment to having fun while being true to our principles. We have had failures as well - and survived them with a sense of humor.
Click here to visit Dancing Deer Baking Company
