Dempsey Bakery turns family dilemma into a business

Little Rock parishioner’s sweet treats have a food-sensitive growing audience

Published: September 17, 2013

by Dwain Hebda
Associate Editor

Dwain Hebda

Paula Dempsey shows off some of the bakery’s products of the day. The lifelong Catholic launched a specialty bakery in Little Rock two years ago, catering to people with food sensitivities.

Dwain Hebda

Paula Dempsey shows off some of the bakery’s products of the day. The lifelong Catholic launched a specialty bakery in Little Rock two years ago, catering to people with food sensitivities.

If someone were to swap out your favorite baked item with one of Dempsey Bakery’s, chances are you’d never know the difference.

But work the equation the other way for someone with a food allergy or food intolerance and the results are decidedly different. Depending on the individual, getting hold of the wrong food can mean at least digestive problems and at worst, breathing or neurological failure.

Paula Dempsey, a member of Our Lady of the Holy Souls Church in Little Rock, knows firsthand the difficulty of the simplest grandmotherly functions, like baking cookies, when multiple members of the family have food issues.

“The big thing you hear over and over, especially among children, is, ‘I just want to be like everybody else,’” Dempsey said. “I just want to have a pretty cake on my birthday, I just want to be able to go out and eat, just like everybody else.”

Dempsey noticed a lot of people were in the same boat with her children’s and grandchildren’s gluten intolerance; so much so that two years ago she launched Dempsey Bakery, a business to provide what she couldn’t find anywhere else — baked goods that everyone could enjoy.

“If we had known about all of things that we were in for, it would have probably scared us off altogether. But, it’s two years later and we’re still here,” she said. “It’s only by God’s grace that we are here.”

Put bluntly, there’s absolutely no other reason the cheery red-and-white slice of 1950s Americana at 323 Cross Street in Little Rock should exist. Forget baking acumen, a business plan or suppliers, Dempsey started without so much as a recipe.

The first six months were grueling, with the kind of long days common to new entrepreneurs. Replacing wheat flour in baked goods is a tough enough trick because the substituted ingredient (or more commonly, multiple ingredients) must satisfy the same chemistry requirements in the finished product. Add to that Dempsey’s determination to also be soy-, nut-, barley-, rye- and wheat-free (plus feature some items that are egg- and dairy-free) and the level of complexity went off the meter.

“I wanted to do this,” Dempsey said. “When you are committed to something, you just figure it out.”

Slowly, recipes were developed that met both her dietary and taste requirements and suppliers were located for the replacement ingredients. It’s not cheap — it takes up to four alternative flours to fill the role of regular wheat flour, derived from rice, sorghum and millet, as well as starch from potato or arrowroot — costing up to three times as much.

Her employees all agreed on one thing.

“They don’t let me anywhere near the baking,” Dempsey said. “They don’t let me ice a cake; they don’t let me make one sandwich. And that’s OK, I know what my strengths are and I stick to them.”

Two such strengths — strategic planning and marketing — could now get her full attention. Not content to limit her products to one outlet, she also launched a wholesale business, baking goods for restaurants. The company’s gluten-free hamburger buns, hot dog buns and other goods are served in 23 area eateries and markets. Recently, a California company hired Dempsey to develop, produce and package a proprietary grain-free cookie. And a line of mixes and heat-and-eat pizza crusts allows people on special diets wider options for cooking at home.

Along the way, the bakery has been featured in several publications, including Travel & Leisure, which named it one of the Best Bakeries in America last spring.

Seated in the dining area, Dempsey takes a long look around. On one wall hangs a line of oversized black and white publicity portraits of her children and grandchildren enjoying the bakery’s products. Through the display case, she sees the products cards for the day’s freshly baked goodies, some named for individual family members.

“Children come in here, crying, because they’ve never been in a bakery, never been able to have a fancy birthday cake. When you see that, how can you not know that you’re doing the right thing?” she said. “I’m constantly amazed and astounded how this place turned out exactly like I pictured it. It had to be divinely inspired.”

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