Yummylicious Cookie Co. proves that whole-grain treats can taste good

Jon Umsted’s sales pitch is irresistible: “Want to try a whole-grain cookie that actually tastes good?”

Stopping in my tracks, all but dropping a greenhouse-grown tomato, I accepted a sample of a white-chocolate macadamia-nut cookie. The wholesome treat came straight from the kitchen at Yummylicious Cookie Co., the baking company that Umsted started with his wife, Amber, in 2008.

Instead of white flour and refined sugar, Yummylicious cookies are made with a whole-grain base and a brown sugar that’s sticky with molasses. The exact recipe remains a secret, but as Umsted makes the rounds at area farmers markets and festivals, it’s becoming public knowledge that these cookies are delicious. They’re sweet, soft and chewy, and unlike many “healthy” treats, they don’t taste like cardboard.

“It took my wife 15 years to get the recipe right,” Umsted told me.

To learn more about these years-in-the-making cookies, I met Umsted a couple of weeks later at the Roasterie in Brookside. He arrived bearing gluten-free pancake mix for me to take home, as well as several varieties of cookies, including one featuring caramel, semisweet-chocolate chunks and the Roasterie’s Super Tuscan Espresso blend.

Confident yet unassuming, Umsted spoke gently and smiled easily. Lounging at a corner table in the café, he launched into the story of his company’s beginnings, explaining that Amber started making whole-grain cookies in search of the perfect post-workout snack in the late 1990s. In the pre-Google, pre-food-blog era, she developed the recipe through trial and error, employing her husband and their son, Brandon, now 25, as taste testers.

“We had a lot of bad-tasting cookies in the house,” Umsted said, laughing.

Slowly, it all came together — so slowly that Umsted can’t remember the exact day when his wife finally perfected the recipe. No one shared high-fives or proclaimed “Eureka!” The Umsteds never considered selling their tenacious treats until a friend suggested that they give it a shot.

Dean and Deluca became the first area store to carry Yummylicious cookies, six years ago. Since then, a lot has changed for the Umsteds. They’ve adopted their two adorable daughters, Gabby and Mikayla, now 5 and 2. They’ve spent several months living in Africa. And most recently, after a brief hiatus from the company, Umsted quit his corporate job to focus solely on Yummylicious.

“We’re all in,” he said. “There’s no plan B.”

With full-time dedication to growing his family’s business, Umsted has drawn on his background in engineering and finance (he also has an MBA) to develop a strategy that goes beyond simply making and selling cookies.

For starters, transparency, education and community are important to Umsted. He aims to build trust with his customers by using high-quality regionally grown ingredients, such as flour and oats from Heartland Mills, in Marienthal, Kansas. Instead of riding the hype surrounding “whole” foods and gluten sensitivity, Umsted wants to raise awareness and let people make their own decisions — though he thinks his cookies speak for themselves. He even gives them to his daughters as snacks in lieu of Doritos or Twinkies.

“If you eat one in the morning, you’re good until noon,” he said. “It provides time-released energy. It’s not the same crash as, say, doughnuts from Krispy Kreme.”

Yummylicious shares a kitchen with Smallcakes, a Cupcakery in Shawnee, but the Umsteds hope to have their own location soon. As the company grows — they hired their first part-time employee this spring — Umsted said he wants to hire single mothers and other people who need a decent wage to “help them get out of poverty.”

In the meantime, Yummylicious can be found every weekend at farmers markets. When people try one of the cookies for the first time, “99 percent of them love it,” Umsted said. And some really can’t get enough.

Earlier this spring, a woman bought Umsted’s entire supply of snickerdoodle cookies at the Overland Park farmers market. She had waited all winter for the cookies to return — a long wait after trying a sample.