Bakery provides alternatives all can enjoy

With the cold weather comes the fall and winter holidays, but for those who have dietary restrictions, this can be a sad time of year missing out on the classics like stuffing on Thanksgiving and cookies warming the home in winter. However, Laurie’s Grain-Free Bakehouse in Lansing is here to make all your delicious wishes come true.

Started in 2005 by mother and son team Laurie Geis and Elijah Cole, Laurie’s Grain-Free Bakehouse boasts a wide variety of gluten- and grain-free baked goods. Geis explained her journey to opening the business.

“I started out, just like everybody else, most people, just eating wheat normal, and then I had Elijah and shortly thereafter I developed … an inflamed thyroid,” Geis said. “And there wasn’t a whole lot they could do to solve that problem. It was touch and go for a few years, and then, during the early part of that time, I realized I couldn’t have wheat or gluten, and so, I began to pull it out of my diet. One of the things, though, that we struggled with back then, it was almost 25 years ago, so there wasn’t really any good healthy tasty options out there. So it was a struggle, and it was discouraging at first.”

Although gluten-free baked goods are now much more accessible and available at grocery stores, that was not the case back when Geis started the bakehouse.

“The worst part was around the holidays,” Geis said. “ I remember Christmas time, it was a real special time for us, and [Elijah] was not even 1 yet, and I wanted to make Christmas cookies and stuff with him, but we couldn’t do it. So, that led us onto this journey and trying to figure it out, create it. And then, once we created it, we started with something else, and slowly, we developed an entire line of products.”

The trouble was not yet over for the two, as five years into the business, cutting out just gluten was no longer an option.

“In 2010 life threw us a curve,” Geis writes on the company website. “At the height of our success, we realized we could no longer eat the food we were making. Pain, inflammation and severe adrenal fatigue became debilitating. Grains simply had to go.”

So, the two closed up shop for three years and spent the time reworking all of their recipes, which are now entirely free from grains, gluten, dairy and nuts.

Opening again in 2013, the bakehouse now sells over 50 products at stores both locally and nationwide, and the pair is always working on new recipes — most recently, bagels.

“We’ve been wanting to for years,” Geis said. “We used to do bagels years ago before we transitioned to grain-free, but it’s a process. … It’s been trial and error. You’re always working out things, like its ability to retain moisture, handle shipping, either sitting on a shelf for so many days without going moldy or sitting in a freezer and not breaking down and falling apart, being able to handle packaging, being in confined spaces, humidity levels, it’s a process.”

The bakery, which takes up the bottom floor of Geis’s home, was drawn into the house’s architectural plans before construction began as she knew she wanted a successful, commercial bakery with space to grow. And alongside Geis and Cole, Pat Geis can often be found in the bakehouse assisting with the baking.

And while working with your parent or child may seem like a challenge, for this mother-son team, it’s a dream.

“It’s a fun process,” Cole said. “It’s very different from, I think, other business models, but it’s a fun process. We’re both extremely creative-minded people so it tends to be fairly easy to run creative though processes and brainstorm out ideas that, I think, maybe, would be more difficult if we weren’t so creatively minded, but it’s always worked out well. It tends to be with anything we do.”

Laurie echoed Cole’s statement.

“We like to solve problems, and so it’s fun,” she said. “And we like to help people so between the two of us, we get along good. I find it to be a real blessing to be able to work with my son. He’s more like a best friend to me than a son, but he’s both. We laugh a lot. Very rarely is there any tension, but when there is it’s not really anything major. We practically spend, I don’t know, 90% of our time together so we have a pretty awesome dynamic.”

And if you are looking for vegan products, you’ll be happy to know that all of Laurie’s bread varieties, including flatbreads and panko bread crumbs, are vegan, as well as their Chocolate Pumpkin Spice and Banana Bread muffins and their Crispy & Dunkable Cookies line.

Orders can be made online for pickup at the bakery, located at 19 Gulf Rd. in Lansing, or the team will deliver locally or ship it to those farther away. And if you are looking for something specific, Laurie’s Bakehouse will work with you to accommodate special requests.

“We do get calls where people ask us to work with them to create a product for their situation, their holiday, their celebration, and we do that, we do that all the time,” Laurie said.

Laurie’s Grain-Free Bakehouse products can be found locally at GreenStar Food Co+op and at Lansing Market. To order online and for more information, visit the website at lauriesgrainfree.com.