Trolley Stop Bakery in Chesterfield offers aspiring bakers a place to grow their business
Customers can buy from eight bakers with unique specialties.
Courtesy of Trolley Track Cookies
Home bakers who love to share their cakes, pastries, cookies, and pies might dream of opening a baking business, but the prospect of starting from scratch can be far more daunting when you’re talking about building a business instead of baking a cake. That’s where Diane Wood and Trolley Stop Bakery (67 Forum Shopping Center, Chesterfield) come in.
Courtesy of Trolley Track Cookies
The Concept
Trolley Stop Bakery now features Trolley Track Cookie Co. and six other bakers’ creations. Each baker has a specialty, Wood notes, and customers often leave with items from several bakers.
Wood reels off the list of mouth-watering items that customers can find at Trolley Stop from Tuesdays through Sundays: The Tipsy Goat macarons, Delectable Dough strudel, Mama Boogie cheesecake and bread pudding, Broyt Baking croissants and danishes, Gooey Louie gooey butter cake, and Lefty’s Bagels, which plans to open its own brick-and-mortar location soon.
“This is a great place for bakers to start their business," Wood says. "They can move from a home kitchen to a regulated, commercial environment where they can produce larger quantities to sell to local grocers. We work with the bakers here at Trolley Stop to help them learn how to scale up their recipes and teach them about making their products most appealing to customers and marketing them appropriately. So this is really an excellent jumping-off point for aspiring bakery owners.”
Wood coaches the other bakers at Trolley Stop, helps them troubleshoot challenges, and leverages her previous business contacts when opportunities arise—all the while continuing to bake. In fact, Wood stocks more than 30 dozen cookies per week and regularly bakes batches of several thousand individually wrapped cookies for corporate clients and holiday orders. She recently produced 3,000 cookies for Washington University’s commencement, for instance, “and I’m not the only baker at Trolley Stop producing that kind of volume,” she adds.
Wood hopes to open additional Trolley Stop retail outlets as early as next year and would like to welcome a baker specializing in decorated cakes and cookies to the Trolley Stop family. “The camaraderie is remarkable, and the customers benefit from the synergy that we have here,” she says, adding that she plans to expand from two to four commercial kitchens to include more bakers and remain flexible with baking time.
“It’s fun to create the products and to watch the companies here grow and flourish,” Wood says. “I hope we encourage more bakers to follow their dreams and create more outstanding, fresh-baked goodies for the local community in the process.”
Courtesy of Trolley Track Cookies
The Background
Wood, an avid home baker and cook for decades, created Trolley Track Cookie Co. in 2012, when she baked 600 cookies for her daughter’s wedding. After selling her insurance IT business in 2013, she realized the cookie business was her next act. “I really started the cookie company as a retirement project,” she says.
Wood soon needed a commercial kitchen, however, to produce cookies for her growing customer base, which expanded via word of mouth until Wood had several corporate clients who purchased her cookies for special events and gifts.
Trolley Track Cookie Co. got its name from the “trolley track” marks on the bottom of Wood’s chocolate chip cookies, created by the racks on which the cookies cool. “My kids and their friends spent a lot of time at our house when they were younger, and I always had cookies available for them,” she recalls. “The warm cookies were still a bit soft when I took them out of the oven and put them on the cooking racks, and the kids looked for the soft, gooey one with the ‘tracks’ on the bottom.”
After joining a local baking co-op, Wood knew her business experience could combine with her baking passion to continue growing her own business while helping other fledgling bakers develop thriving businesses of their own. She offered to buy the co-op. Within a month, Wood was the new owner.
The co-op provided an outlet for her cookies, along with all of the other baked goods coming out of its ovens. “Several other bakers were using the co-op facilities, and I wanted to make sure they could continue baking while also answering any questions they might have about the business side of things,” she says.
Courtesy of Trolley Track Cookies
This post was created by SLM Partner Studio on behalf of Trolley Track Cookie Co. To learn more, visit trolleystopbakery.com.
