DAYTON, Ohio -- Every Monday, a woman wearing the traditional long dress of the Amish pulls up to the door of a Dorothy Lane Market in a suburb near here.
From the door of her car wafts the tantalizing aroma of fresh-baked cookies, hundreds of dozens of them, fresh from her kitchen at home and ready to be sold in the supermarket.
"We sell more of hers than we do of ours," said Scott Fox, director of bakery operations for the two Dorothy Lane units. "We sell around 150 dozen per store every week."
If it's an emerging trend for supermarkets to bring in regional homemade specialties, then Dorothy Lane is ahead of the trend in bakery.
Ed Weller, a supermarket bakery consultant based in Los Angeles, said such localized buying is one thing the independents or small chains can do better than the big guys.
"The major chains can't do it because their stores are too widespread and, generally speaking, their buying is all done out of corporate, so it's practically impossible. Independents, on the other hand, can do whatever they want," Weller said.
Dorothy Lane has been selling Amish cookies made by the same woman for years.
"Back then, our bakery was all frozen, thawed, bake-off stuff," said Fox. "Her cookies were the first scratch items we carried."
About the same time, as long as eight years ago, the two-store chain began making its Killer Brownies from scratch. Dorothy Lane Market registered the name and sells the popular brownies wholesale to many outlets.
Now the two DLM bakeries have branched out into scratch items baked in-store, including a full line of bagels and two lines of breads, as well as a full line of fancy wedding cakes.
But the Amish lady and her cookies started the whole thing. She supplies chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, peanut butter and Snickerdoodle cookies, as well as lemon bars and chocolate cheesecake bars. The 1.5-ounce cookies sell for 40 cents apiece or $4 a dozen.
"We also sell Sugar Creek Cinnamon Rolls, made by a woman who bakes at home, and Em's Sourdough Breads," Fox said. "When we buy from an outside purveyor, we want an exclusive. We look for unique products and we try to support them," he said.
The work that goes into finding such products pays off, Fox said. Dorothy Lane's two bakeries average 6% of store sales and are expected to reach 7% next year.
As much as Fox appreciates the success of the Amish lady's cookies, he's hoping she won't hold the cookie-selling record at his stores for long. Dorothy Lane recently launched a new line of its own scratch cookies, called DLM Classic.
