Nut-free bakery fills niche

SEATTLE – For 12 years, the owner of Little Rae’s Bakery has prided himself on what goes into his pastries: real butter, real fruit, “quality ingredients.”

Now, though, he makes note of what’s missing. Like the maple-walnut scone that is now just a maple scone, or the almond-poppy seed muffin reformulated into lemon-glazed poppy seed muffin. The chocolate chip cookies no longer contain walnuts, and the “peanut butter pillow” dessert was permanently struck from the menu.

The 12-year-old Seattle bakery, which supplies more than 150 coffee shops and markets in the region with fresh-baked pastries, is now one of just a handful of nut-free bakeries in the U.S. Little Rae’s owner James Morse made the move in July – changing recipes, scouring his 8,400-square-foot factory with a team of employees and tracking the path of every ingredient in Morse’s 60-plus products to make sure vendors follow his nut-free requirements.

Morse said he didn’t make the switch to boost sales. They initially dropped 4 percent, in fact, because of the cookies he discontinued. But the market is there – and, sadly, is growing.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported recently that food allergies are on the rise among children in the U.S., with four out of every 100 children now affected. Peanut allergies alone affect about 2 percent of the population, according to the Allergy and Asthma Foundation of America, and “are the most common cause of death due to foods,” with even a trace amount able to trigger a reaction. It makes a nut-free bakery, especially one with such a broad reach, a surprisingly rare and unimaginably welcome treat.

Nuts are “just an accoutrement” to baked goods, Morse said, so it wasn’t too tough to remove them and redo his “great-grandma”-style recipes. The company’s best-seller has always been a peach-passion fruit scone, which was already nut-free. But it was a time-consuming commitment to make.

Morse first became aware of the nut issue on a personal level. He is allergic to nuts, and has wound up in the hospital from unpredictable hazards such as the invisible traces of peanut butter left on the table or toaster at a bagel shop. For his sake, Little Rae’s had always used a “peanut protocol,” producing goods with nuts separately.

Then, Morse started getting calls from people saying, “I heard you guys are careful with nuts.” He heard they were seeking out his cookies, scones and muffins for that reason, assuming they wouldn’t contain trace allergens.

It was a dangerous assumption. If people were taking a gamble on his baked goods, Morse said, he figured there was “definitely a need” to make sure they were safe. Even now he warns about suppliers unwrapping his goods or mixing them with other brands, or other moves that take their safety out of his control. (Check out his Web site, littleraesbakery.com, for the full story and his safety warnings.)

The FDA has no standards for what nut-free means, making it a challenge to figure out how to carry through that commitment. Morse scrubbed the facility “starting at the roof and cleaning our way down.” Employees agreed not to bring products with nuts into the building. Morse’s vendors signed allergen statements guaranteeing that the products were nut-free – and, in the process, he discovered that his chocolate chips had been packaged on the same line as peanuts before the vendor changed practices last year.

Elise Purcell, head of the Northwest chapter of the nonprofit Food Allergy Initiative, said Little Rae’s is an innovator, “onto something big” in a field in which Canada is far ahead of the U.S.

The need is emotional, as well as practical – the nut-free treats mean the world to children whose allergies otherwise leave them out at parties.

“I had one parent say to me, ‘My daughter got a napkin from the class party because that’s all she could have,’ ” Purcell said. Her own kindergartener, who has a life-threatening nut allergy, chooses to just drink water at parties rather than eat the nut-free treat she packs for him. He doesn’t like being different.

This Halloween at his school, though, the 6-year-old was able to eat Halloween treats along with every other kid. How? The school ordered holiday cookies from Little Rae’s.

“I think it’s just starting,” Purcell said. “I called (Morse) and said, ‘Can’t you go for cupcakes?’ ”