Allie’s Specialties, known for its gourmet desserts and specializing in French pastries and large cookies, should be ready to rock and roll next week at 31 Main St., Hellertown.
Allie’s bakes and operates out of Northampton. Lindsay Lloyd, who works in an operations management role, said Allie’s has had locations in New York and other parts of the world. The company has worked with numerous coffee shops and cafe-type sandwich businesses since moving to the Lehigh Valley area a few years ago.
The company is also unique for its same-day local deliveries.
“We are accepting online orders for local deliveries and wholesale business, but we’re very limited currently,” Lloyd said. “We are coordinating for as big of a range as possible. We’ve been doing deliveries from Easton to Macungie and from around the mid-part of Northampton (County) to as far south as Hellertown.”
The store at 31 Main Street, located next to DiMaio’s in the Shoppes at Hellertown, will be Allie’s first storefront location in the Lehigh Valley. Lloyd said Allie’s Specialties noticed that the Hellertown community is very much in line with the company’s values.
“Our business model is always about sharing, community, family values and tradition,” Lloyd said. “This is a family-owned business, owned and operated. It was started by the family’s grandparents over 40 years ago. It’s actually named after Allesandra, the nun who gave the grandmother (of the family) the baking bug. She essentially taught a high school course in baking, and it really was inspirational (to the grandmother). From there, the family’s grandmother went to study in France with her husband.”
Lloyd said the family’s grandparents devoted their lives to developing all of the recipes for Allie’s various food products.
“We’ve kept the same recipes and processes in place,” said Lloyd. “They passed on what I refer to as the baking bible, which is this huge notebook of detailed information that records every single test that they did. To give you a point of reference, the cookies, alone, were a 14-year ongoing project to develop up to 15 different varieties. They had over 180 tests to get to these cookies.”
Hellertown’s location will offer indoor and outdoor seating, weather permitting. Lloyd said coffee, tea and plenty of other specialty drinks will be served. As for the delicious treats, Lloyd noted the plan is for the entire menu to be offered–but not all at once.
“We’re going to have a rotating menu,” Lloyd added. “We’ll have some standard menu for each category. We do a number of different categories; layered pastries like croissants, and we also do cinnamon rolls, loaf cakes, pumpkin bread and banana breads, so we’ll rotate those. And we have, of course, our cookies. We do have other special categories that are a bit more exclusive, and we’ll pop those out here and there.”
Allie’s will be looking to integrate with the Hellertown community in multitude of ways. “We’re sourcing ingredients locally, hiring service locally and coordinating with other locally-based businesses,” Lloyd added.
In addition to offering same-day delivery in the Lehigh Valley, Allie’s also ships nationwide. Check them out on Facebook for more information and some mouth-watering photos.
A new bakery, Allie’s Specialties, is expected to open in the Shoppes at Hellertown on Main Street in early November.