On one table, cream-filled chocolate cakes await a squiggle of icing, Hostess style. On another, trays of Big O’s—giant chocolate chip cookies sprinkled lightly with sea salt—are ready to be packaged. We’re at a third table, and somebody brings over a bowl of Bear Candy.
Five handfuls in, I’m wondering how I can reach for more and remain within the bounds of propriety. “I’ll be in a diabetic coma!”
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“You could be,” agrees Peter Wallace, supervisor of Laughing Bear Bakery. “You have to pace yourself.”
One of the employees, Eric, chuckles, remembering the woman who bought five boxes of Bear Candy for her kids and had polished off every one of them by the time she got home.
We talk idly as we crunch into the airy puffs’ caramelized surface. This is the pumpkin spice version, I’m told, devised by an employee.
“Everybody here has added something, a technique or a recipe,” says Kalen McAllister, the bakery’s founder. “The Big O’s recipe came from Orville’s mom. He couldn’t get the size right, so we decided to just make big ol’ cookies. One of the guys was playing around with some leftover dough from the gooey butter cake, and he ended up with what’s now called the Hardy Lombardi, one of our best cookies.”
It’s named for George Lombardi, former director of the Missouri Department of Corrections and one of the bakery’s staunchest supporters.
McAllister dreamed up this idea when she was retiring from her position as the first Buddhist chaplain in the Missouri correctional system, because people kept coming to her worried sick about finding a job when they got out. More than 20 employees have come through since the bakery opened, and many have gone on to full-time jobs with benefits.
There’s a fairy-tale aspect to this place, a hint of magic beans. And all its employees found their own ways through the woods to get here.
“I was new to the area, so I was looking for meditation centers,” Wallace recalls. “I stumbled into the Zen center”—Inside Dharma, which McAllister also established—“and met Kalen and found out about the bakery. I said, ‘I’m an ex-con! And I grew up in the kitchen. My grandma was Lebanese; we made baklava.”
Another employee, C.S., leans forward: “A friend of mine said, ‘They hire people who have difficult backgrounds. I had a career before, but because of my problem, my trouble, I couldn’t do that job anymore. I thought, ‘I’ve gotta find something I enjoy, and it’s not a lot of stress, and if I’m lucky, it’s a family atmosphere.”
Travis showed up for his interview in attire suitable for Wall Street. “Everywhere else I’d filled out an application, people were coming in in flip-flops,” he says, frowning. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to dress to impress. They ain’t fighting the same battle I am.’”
One of the first things that McAllister said to him was that Laughing Bear only hired felons. “That kind of threw me,” he admits. What went through his head? “Thanks. You got somewhere for sure who actually wants you? Other places, you got to second-guess yourself. And baking is like therapy for me. Mopping the floor is, too.” (Other chores rotate, but they can’t pry the mop away from Travis.)
Eric was at Farmington Correctional Center, and at a fundraising sale, he’d sampled Laughing Bear’s gooey butter cake. “But I thought there would be all sorts of applicants here,” he says, “so I tried everywhere else first.” He was aiming for white collar, but “not a lot of offices are wanting to give felons a chance. Here, it’s who you are, not who you were 15 years ago.”
McAllister has no idea what sentences her employees served or for what crimes. She’s never asked, never even wondered.
They adjourn to the kitchen and sling aprons around their necks. “There’s no premixed anything,” Wallace promises. “Everything we do is from scratch”—whether it’s zesting limes for the Key lime pie or peeling and slicing 100 pounds of apples. They use top-notch ingredients, including organic pasteurized eggs, at $8 a carton, for the French silk pie.
But do they have a bear? “Oh, yeah,” McAllister says, grinning. C.S. tells me about a video with the boss in the bear costume, sitting on a barstool at Civil Life and holding a beer. “You never know what the bear’s gonna do,” she says, cheeks pink.
With a crash and wheeze, a pipe organ begins rehearsal overhead. The bakery rents a kitchen on the lower level of United Centenary Methodist Church, amicably sharing space—and leftovers—with a Korean food truck. “We have some interesting people on the street out here,” McAllister says. “C.S., who’s Jewish, answered the door one day, and a woman told him, ‘I’m Christ.’ He said, ‘That’s the other door.’”
No matter the dogma, what C.S. likes about this job is “the give-and-take. If somebody needs help with something, we help each other. We have each other’s backs.” When McAllister recently found a little storefront near Tower Grove Park that could serve as a walk-in bakery with more employees, C.S. panicked.
Was Laughing Bear Bakery going to turn corporate?
She smiled. “Never.”
