A Story in Every Cookie
Khadija Adams was watching the Oscars when the cinematography award was announced. The winner’s face caught her attention. Adams looked her up, out of curiosity, and learned Autumn Durald Arkapaw was half Filipino and half Black Creole. “There’s a cookie there, I think,” she said. There was. It paired pandan, a fragrant plant used in Filipino sweets, with pralines, a flavor rooted in New Orleans.
“We like to say we are a storytelling operation masquerading as a cookie business,” said Adams, founder of Deez Cookies in Columbus, Ohio. The story comes with the cookie, giving customers something to read while the flavor gives them a way in.
Prince’s birthday and Black History Month have both inspired cookies. Another draws from Roberto Clemente, a legendary player for the Pittsburgh Pirates, with sweet plantains and banana liqueur folded into shortbread.
Before Deez Cookies had a name, Adams was baking for people she knew.
“We literally began in the fall of 2020 to ease some anxiety that my community friends were having,” Adams said. “They were like, ‘Can you just get in the kitchen? We’ll pay you.’”
It wasn’t meant to be a business. Friends asked for cookies, and Adams baked. But the requests kept coming.
“Very quickly, it evolved into a mechanism for telling important stories through food,” she said. “I can tell a story in a way that doesn’t make people feel scared, offended, or ashamed, but does make them think differently,” Adams said.
Before Deez Cookies, Adams had already spent years in church and university spaces where people didn’t always agree but still had to keep talking. At church luncheons and Bible studies on Tuesdays, she spent time with older women in the congregation. Later, their college-age granddaughters came across the street to her apartment to bake. Rolling dough and mixing batter gave their hands something to do, and the conversation started going places it might not have gone otherwise. Baking became an excuse for those stories to be told.
“I got into baking as an excuse to talk, but I learned I really liked baking,” she said.
Baking had rules, but not too many. Adams could learn them, bend some of them, and end up with something creative and delicious. What started as an excuse to talk became a way to help other people listen. Dough, jam, spices, and chocolate gave the story somewhere to go. “We may have more in common than not,” Adams said.
One of the first was Georgia on My Mind, a cookie shaped by Stacey Abrams’ work and the Georgia election. It uses toasted candy pecans, peach jam, and oat shortbread. It was the first story cookie that changed the business.
“Truth be told, that cookie, like, derailed my life,” she said.
People wanted it. The problem was making it. Pecans had to be prepared. Jam had to be made. The cookie that brought people in also took the longest to make.
“By the summer, I had to quit my job,” Adams said.
As orders picked up, the labor behind the cookie became harder to ignore. If Deez Cookies was going to grow, Adams needed a way to produce legally, consistently, and at a scale her home kitchen couldn’t handle.
Before Food Fort, even shipping cookies to out-of-town friends was a problem. Adams first moved from her home kitchen into a private catering kitchen, then eventually moved into ECDI’s Food Fort. The move gave her significantly more room to grow, expanding her baking capacity from two commercial ovens to six, along with unlimited dry storage and access to a walk-in freezer.
Through Food Fort, Adams could produce legally. She could ship. She could take on orders that had not made sense before. And she gained more than additional production space — she gained access to a team that has supported her business in ways large and small over the years.
“Access to the facility greatly increases my capacity to grow,” Adams said.
But Food Fort gave Adams more than a kitchen. There was a day when Food Fort Incubation Services Director Jacob Freisthler sat with her “with a timer, like a stopwatch,” she said, and watched every part of the Georgia on My Mind cookie being made. Afterward, he sent detailed notes about what she could shift to make the process faster.
Sometimes the help was smaller: 10 handouts printed before a market, a freezer shelf borrowed for a few days, or Freisthler walking past one of her storage racks and noticing the wheels might not hold the weight.
“That kind of attention is sort of invaluable,” Adams said. “No one owes you that. And the fact that people from this building live their lives thinking, ‘Oh, that would be cool for Khadija,’ is incredible. Working out of this space takes away from me the stress of all the other pieces.”
That support helped Deez Cookies take on higher-profile orders. Adams was commissioned by Ohio Wesleyan University to create cookies for a symposium honoring Melvin Van Peebles. Jasmine Guy was the featured speaker, and Adams was asked to create a custom cookie for her, too. She didn’t want to make a cookie about Whitley Gilbert, Guy’s character from A Different World. She wanted to make one for Jasmine Guy herself. Adams found an obscure interview where Guy talked about flavors she loved, then made an oat and apple cookie filled with salted caramel and rhubarb jam.
When Adams sent a custom cookie to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Jackson sent back a personal thank-you note. For Adams, that was the point: reaching the person, not just the public figure.
An awards-show close-up. An old interview. Adams keeps looking for the detail that turns a public figure back into a person.
“Some of me living in the world is me always looking for clues,” Adams said. She follows them to flavors that reach people before they decide whether the story belongs to them, threatens them, or asks them to defend a position.
“Getting someone to eat something really tasty while they read a story could get them to curiosity, to empathy, to joy.”
