Sweet NO Wheat: Whitefish couple finds niche for gluten-free bakery

It’s taken three years of painstaking trial-and-error research, but Jennelle Cassidy finally has a loaf of bread that tastes like “real” bread.

The feat moved her to tears.

This is no ordinary loaf of bread. It’s gluten-free, dairy-free and egg-free.

And it’s one of nearly three dozen special products offered at Jennelle and Scott Cassidy’s new Sweet NO Wheat Bakery at Mountain Mall in Whitefish.

After Scott and Jennelle Cassidy’s youngest son, Houston, now 11, was diagnosed with celiac disease at age 8 and also was found to have egg and dairy allergies, the Cassidys began a quest to find foods their son could eat.

The entire Cassidy family suffers from food allergies: Jennelle also has celiac disease (a digestive condition triggered by eating gluten), Scott is sensitive to gluten, daughter Lexi has a dairy allergy and son Dawson is sensitive to gluten.

What they found on the market was gluten-free bread that tasted like cardboard, and no products made without the trio of allergens affecting their family.

So Jennelle started baking.

“I love to cook, but I wasn’t a baker,” she said. “I’m not a recipe girl and I was used to throwing in anything to make something. Baking is more precise.”

It’s chemistry, really, Scott added.

“I did a lot of research and made loaves of bread every night,” Jennelle said. “Our kids ate a lot of flops.”

Slowly, but surely, she developed flour mixes from sorghum, millet, potato, sweet brown rice and gluten-free oat flour. Jennelle ruled out bean flour, since she’s also allergic to beans. Many of their products also are yeast-free.

The Cassidys monitor their baking ingredients with heightened awareness because gluten shows up in so many unsuspecting places. Spice companies must be consulted to make sure there’s no gluten. Even frozen vegetables can be encased in gluten to prevent them from sticking together.

One by one the products began to materialize, from Italian focaccia bread to cranberry scones to snicker-doodle cookies.

“By year two, we were saying, ‘Wow, this is edible; it’s really good,’” she recalled.

Along the way they discovered three secret ingredients, which they won’t reveal, that give Sweet NO Wheat products a texture that makes all the difference.

Jennelle has been so consumed by perfecting recipes that she dreams about them.

“I had a dream to make cinnamon rolls and I was told the recipe [in my sleep],” she said. “I came in that morning and I made cinnamon rolls — and they turned out.”

Divine intervention came into play with her recently perfected loaf bread recipe, too, when it came to her in her sleep the exact proportions of ingredients to mix together. When she had Luizanne’s Catering owner Louise Gulick sample the bread, Gulick’s response was, “Now THIS is bread.”

Their youngest son took one bite of the bread and asked his mother, “Why are you feeding me real bread?”

Buoyed by their baking successes, the Cassidys decided to take the leap of faith last October and start a bakery.

They spend the early morning hours baking in the commercial kitchen at Luizanne’s, also located in Mountain Mall. Gulick has been a sounding board, a taster and a good friend as the Cassidys have developed their product line.

“We drained our retirement accounts and now we’re reinvesting in this,” said Scott, who owns Precision Painting and still does some painting in the Flathead Valley.

Jennelle also owns and operates a bead shop at the mall, where the retail bakery now is located alongside her bead business.

The Cassidys recently began selling their baked goods at both the Tuesday night Whitefish Farmers Market and Thursday night Columbia Falls Farmers Market. The response, they said, has been phenomenal.

“Our story is so personal; we’ve lived through it and can now help others,” Jennelle said. “Our motto is to make people healthy and happy.”

Oftentimes parents of toddlers approach their food booth, desperate to find items their allergy-prone children can eat.

One woman broke down crying in the privacy of her vehicle after eating one of their lemon bars at the farmers market, because it had been years since she’d been able to eat a pastry.

“That’s rewarding,” Jennelle said. “We want it to be personal, where someone can pick things up and we can give them help.”

She has a particular soft spot for parents like herself who are trying to find solutions for their allergy-prone children. As she knows from experience, “You’ll do anything for your kids to get them well.”

It didn’t take long for the gluten-free population to find Sweet NO Wheat Bakery, and response has been more than the Cassidys could have imagined.

“It really just took off,” Jennelle said. “We have something really unique. There’s nothing on the market like this.”

The one-of-a-kind products already have caught the attention of investors who want to help the Cassidys take the business to the next level by building a manufacturing facility for their baked goods.

“They want to take it across the nation,” she said. “Hopefully we’ll one day make it into the freezer aisle” of grocery stores.

They’re beginning to tap into the local market. Restaurant owners are pursuing them to see about getting gluten-free products on their menus.

In Whitefish, Jersey Boys Pizzeria uses Sweet NO Wheat gluten-free pizza crusts. Taco Del Sol, also in Mountain Mall, sells the bakery’s cookies and brownies.

“Once we get the manufacturing part, then we’ll be in coffee shops,” Jennelle said. “We’d like to be consultants to restaurants, because there are a lot of misnomers out there about gluten. We want to get our products to the mainstream.”

The Cassidys are adamant about keeping the quality of their products a top priority. At $7 a loaf for bread, their baked goods don’t come cheap, but they’re not inexpensive to make, either. The cost of the special flours used is about quadruple the price of regular wheat flour.

They also want to use their own story to inspire others, because living with food allergies can be a challenge.

“It’s our story,” Scott said. “We’ve walked it and lived it.”

Sweet NO Wheat Bakery is located at 6475 U.S. 93 S. in Mountain Mall in Whitefish. The Cassidys can be reached at 261-5992, or email sweetnowheat@hotmail.com.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.