One of the winners of this year’s Editor’s Choice Food Awards is Dancing Deer Baking Co., specifically their delicious molasses clove cookies. These spicy treats put Dancing Deer on the foodie map when the company first launched as a small wholesale operation in 1994. Twenty years later, they’re still one of our favorite cookies (Dancing Deer […]
One of the winners of this year’s Editor’s Choice Food Awards is Dancing Deer Baking Co., specifically their delicious molasses clove cookies. These spicy treats put Dancing Deer on the foodie map when the company first launched as a small wholesale operation in 1994. Twenty years later, they’re still one of our favorite cookies (Dancing Deer CEO Frank Carpenito says that they’re the company’s top seller in the Northeast).
Dancing Deer has grown into a national brand, selling cookies, brownies and other baked goods in Whole Foods, Safeway, and specialty shops from coast to coast. They make cookies for Delta Airlines and produce sweets for Trader Joe’s and Williams and Sonoma. When they invited us to come in for a tour of their factory, we were delighted.
A section of a company timeline that decorates the break room. Photo Credit : Amy Traverso
The bakery takes up 50,000 square feet of a massive, quarter-mile-long industrial building that spans the border between Hyde Park and Dedham, Massachusetts. As you might expect, the whole place smells like chocolate and spice and sweetness, like a child’s fantasy workplace. As they gear up for their busy holiday season, the bakers were making Triple Chocolate Chip cookies, Chocolate Chunk brownies, and pumpkin bars during our visit. It’s hard to imagine how anyone gets any work done amid so much deliciousness, but marketing director Laura Stanton assured me that everyone becomes immune to the smell eventually.
The tour began in the enormous pantry and bakery rooms, where raw ingredients are stored, weighed and mixed, then formed into cookies, cakes, or bars.
The pantry looks more like the shelves of Costco. The bakery in mid-production. Each day it must be completely scrubbed down so that Dancing Deer’s gluten-free products can be made without risk of contamination. These mixers boast powerful engines and 140-quart bowls. Standard home mixers can hold about 5 quarts. Still, in the world of commercial baking, this is considered small batch production. Industrial manufacturers use mixers as large as 1200 gallons.
Here’s what it takes to move 140 quarts of pumpkin batter from the mixer to a dispenser that metes out exact portions of batter into each sheet pan.
Meanwhile, on the cookie side of the operation, this machine was dropping the batter onto baking sheets in even rounds.
Twenty cookies per sheet, all dispensed in seconds
Then it was time for baking.
The ovens consist of two rows of massive walk-in behemoths. Putting a rack of cookies into the oven involves quick timing and well-guarded elbows. Photo Credit : Amy Traverso
Once the cookies have cooled, they’re wheeled over to this area where they’re put into bags, sealed and labeled for retail.
In addition to using only natural, non-GMO ingredients, the company has an ambitious recycling program, so the parchment paper liners are sorted into separate red recycling bins. Photo Credit : Amy Traverso
During our visit, the bakers were producing a line of frosted shortbread trees and mittens. Each cookie is glazed by hand and all the color is derived from natural pigments.
Dipping the cookies into the glaze gives them a smooth finish. They’ll dry overnight before the white frosting “garland” is applied. The finished trees Photo Credit : Amy Traverso
Meanwhile, on the “bars” side of the operation, freshly baked brownies are cooled, then moved into this machine, which cuts them into even squares.
Then (and this is my favorite part), some of the brownies are wrapped for individual sale.
At the end of our tour, Master Baker Jennifer Shelly presented us with a lovely gingerbread house she created with one of Dancing Deer’s cookie kits. Yankee Assistant Editor Aimee Seavey will be bringing it to a special family cookie workshop she’s hosting on December 6 at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The workshop is part of Stockbridge’s annual Main Street Christmas celebration, which we feature in this month’s issue of the magazine. Aimee will share baking wisdom and samples of Dancing Deer gingerbread during her presentation, so please join her! It’s a great way to kick off to the season and get some holiday cookie inspiration.
In the coming months, we’ll be bringing you behind-the-scenes visits to other iconic factories, bakeries, and studios in New England. Many thanks to Dancing Deer for hosting our inaugural tour!
Amy Traverso
Amy Traverso is the senior food editor at Yankee magazine and co-host of the public television series Weekends with Yankee, a coproduction with WGBH. Previously, she was food editor at Boston magazine and an associate food editor at Sunset magazine. Her work has also been published in The Boston Globe, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure, and she has appeared on Hallmark Home & Family, The Martha Stewart Show, Throwdown with Bobby Flay, and Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Amy is the author of The Apple Lover’s Cookbook, which was a finalist for the Julia Child Award for best first-time author and won an IACP Cookbook Award in the “American” category.
In the coming months, we’ll be bringing you behind-the-scenes visits to other iconic factories, bakeries, and studios in New England. Many thanks to Dancing Deer for hosting our inaugural tour!
In the coming months, we’ll be bringing you behind-the-scenes visits to other iconic factories, bakeries, and studios in New England. Many thanks to Dancing Deer for hosting our inaugural tour!