ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 22, 1995 TAG: 9512220024
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: C-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CLEMMONS, N.C.
SOURCE: Associated Press
THE SMALL-TIME-TURNED-BIG Moravian Cookie Factory is now selling more than a million cookies a year, each one still cut by hand. The mailing list has grown to include more than 50,000 names.
It is getting harder for Evva Hanes to keep up an old family tradition - baking enough Moravian Christmas cookies for everyone on her list.
That's because this 63-year-old grandmother has about 50,000 loyal customers - including Martha Stewart, Barbara Walters and Gregory Peck - who crave her tasty, wafer-thin treats, which are still rolled and cut by hand at the Moravian Cookie Factory.
``I read a letter today from one of our customers who wrote that his family received their cookies at three o'clock and they were all gone by four o'clock,'' she said, taking a break from filling last-minute orders at the bakery in rural Clemmons, south of Winston-Salem.
Hanes learned how to bake Moravian cookies from her mother, Bertha Foltz. The wife of a dairy farmer, she would sell a few batches to friends and neighbors during the holidays to supplement the family's income.
``I started helping my mother because I felt sorry for her,'' she said. ``I never dreamed it would turn out like this.''
The recipe for Moravian cookies was brought to this country by German settlers of the Moravian Church. Named for the Czech province of Moravia, the religious group migrated to Germany when they were persecuted.
Moravians came to America before the Revolutionary War and established a settlement in Pennsylvania. Many, like the Hanes, moved south to the North Carolina piedmont.
According to Hanes, the original ginger Moravian cookie is paper-thin, distinguishing it from other European cookies.
After years of helping her mother, Hanes got hooked on baking herself, and in 1960, she opened a local bakery with her husband, Travis, also 63.
In the first years, the business was family run, with her sons, daughters, nieces and grandchildren all lending a hand around the store.
But word of their cookies began to travel and 35 years later, the Hanes are now selling more than a million cookies a year, each one cut by hand.
``There aren't too many bakeries that still make the Moravian cookies by hand,'' said Travis Hanes. ``There are some places that make them by machine, but it's just not the same thing.''
Demand has soared for the cookies - which come in flavors including chocolate, sugar, butterscotch, lemon and black walnut - and has forced the Hanes to expand their operation.
Now, 65 workers are needed to mix, roll and shape the delicate wafers
By year's end, more than 100,000 pounds of cookies will be shipped to mail-order customers in all 50 states and two dozen foreign countries. Much of their business comes in the last three months of the year.
The mailing list, which used to be kept on 3-by-5 cards, has grown to include more than 50,000 names and now requires a computer to keep things in order.
The Moravian Cookie Factory had $1.5 million in sales in 1994, Travis Hanes said, estimating 5 percent growth this year.
Soon, however, the Hanes will turn the bakery over to their daughter, Mona Templin, who will take the reins of this small-time-turned-big operation. The Moravian Cookie Factory has become so well known that school and church groups visit it for tours.
``I hope we can keep it going,'' she said between taking telephone orders. ``But how much longer can we continue to make a hand-cut cookie?''
LENGTH: Medium: 72 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. 1. Worker Dale Foust carefully packs Moravianby CNBcookies for shipment at the Clemmons, N.C., factory. 2. Sixty-five
workers are needed to mix, roll and shape the wafers. color.