Donna Hill might be the only person in Fairhope who uses her Auburn home economics degree every single day, and she has the bakery to prove it. Cake by Donna, the business she built from a home kitchen into a regional brand, now puts her hand-rolled Rosemary Butter Cookies and old-fashioned cheese straws on shelves in eight Southeastern states, from Mobile grocery stores to a New Orleans institution.
The road there started, as so many Gulf Coast businesses do, with a friend and a car trunk. Donna’s Fairhope neighbor, Bob Ford, would load his car with her Rosemary Butter Cookies and drive them to I-10 in Spanish Fort, handing them off to his friend Jamie Cater, owner of gourmet shops in Starkville and Meridian, Mississippi, who was making her way back from Grayton Beach. The cookies sold out quickly in her stores.
600 Guests and One Perfect Cookie
The business found its scale through the social circuit. Donna had chaired the Thomas Hospital Foundation Grand Summer Ball, and a year later the board asked her to create a take-home favor for 600 guests. She baked her Rosemary Butter Cookies, the guests fell in love, and demand in Fairhope took off. “I had everyone in town rolling cookies,” she says.
Everything about the product is deliberately old-fashioned. The cookies are hand-rolled, sliced, baked, and packaged by hand. The rosemary is grown in Donna’s own backyard, then ground fine, like coffee, in a coffee grinder she added after deciding the flavor needed to distribute more evenly through the dough. “Baking is a science,” she says. “We buy everything local, even the packaging.”
From a Church Kitchen to a Lodge Kitchen
Scaling up required jumping through every legal hoop in order. When Greer’s Market called, Donna wasn’t yet licensed to bake for commercial sale. She got her business license, took the health department course, passed inspection, and rented the commercial kitchen at the Methodist Church in Fairhope. Using her graphic design background from a decade in Blue Cross and Blue Shield’s marketing department, she designed her own packaging and tested it on her bridge club.
Demand outgrew the church kitchen, and an answer appeared close by: her friends Boyd and Gay Little had just built the Lodge at Oak Hollow Farm with a commercial kitchen they weren’t using. Donna moved in, and the operation now bakes four to five days a week with a staff of seven, many of them mother-daughter pairs and long-timers, including one employee who had spent 27 years at Mary Ann’s Deli in Fairhope.
Mentorship and Slow Growth
Donna credits Copeland Wood of Wood Fruitticher Grocery Company, the Birmingham food broker, with two pieces of advice that shaped the company: charge all wholesale customers the same price, and grow slowly. She has followed both. “We’re still evolving,” she says. “Every now and then we have an aha moment.”
Today Cake by Donna products reach stores across eight states. The company recently delivered 25 cases of cookies and cheese straws to Langenstein’s Grocery in New Orleans. Locally, the products can be found at Greer’s, Rouses, Piggly Wiggly, Happy Olive, Provisions, Mosely’s, and Wine Knot in Mobile. Holiday packaging comes in red and green tins, and wedding gift baskets get special treatment.
Cakes Still Come First
The name came from the cakes, and Donna still bakes them: Italian cream, a six-layer lemon Doberge, an eight-layer chocolate Doberge, fudge bites, and her best-seller, the strawberry cake. She stepped back from heavy cake production after a breast cancer diagnosis, a period she describes as a reevaluation of priorities, but the diagnosis did not slow her general pace. On the day of one visit she had a luncheon table already set, two days ahead.
Her energy is a running joke among people who know her. “When I hit the floor in the morning, I’m like the Energizer Bunny,” she says, “and that’s what people sometimes call me.”
A self-described Southern lady and hostess who loves entertaining, sewing, arranging flowers, and playing bridge, Donna Hill has turned the rarest kind of career success: the kind that looks exactly like the life she wanted, with a cookie that carries it from Fairhope to eight states.