OXFORD, Miss. — R & R Cookies owner Jessica Franks turned an injury into a bakery.
In December 2012, Franks and her son Noah, who was 12 at the time, were attacked by a neighbor’s dog.
When they pulled into their driveway after school, the dog, whose home was two houses down, was in their front yard.
Noah got out on the passenger side and the dog didn’t recognize him. It walked over to the boy and he waved it away. The dog attacked, biting the young boy’s shoulder, leaving deep puncture wounds that required stitches. Despite his injuries, he returned to school a few days later.
His mother wasn’t so lucky.
When Jessica Franks ran around the front of the car to help her son, the bog bit her several times on the right arm, leaving multiple gashes that had to be closed with stitches.
Hearing screams from the mother and son, a neighbor dialed 911 as others rushed over to wrestle the dog away from them.
Franks’ injuries were severe and kept her away from her job as a physical therapist assistant at Baptist Memorial Hospital in Oxford for nine weeks.
She used that time to start a new career.
It all started with a Kitchenaid mixer
It was her mother and grandmother who started it. They suggested that if Franks were to use her injured hand more, it would get stronger.
So, in February 2013, they bought her a KitchenAid mixer.
Franks had baked cakes for her family for years, but cookies were a new venture. She started by baking for her family, of course. Then, in August 2013, she baked a batch of sugar cookies for a back-to-school luau.
It wasn’t long before she started getting requests to bake cookies for children’s birthday parties.
Franks created her own special recipe and, over the years, has tweaked it. Over time, she and her husband, Chad Franks, experimented with different flavors. Lemon. Chocolate chip. Pumpkin spice.
If it tasted good, it got baked into a cookie.
“Like most Mississippians, we like food and we like what tastes good to us,” Chad Franks said. “And we thought ‘Maybe other people will like that.’ The more that people tried cookies and said, ‘Hey we like this flavor, we like that flavor,’ it does encourage you but also confirms, ‘OK, what we’re doing is right.’”
From dough and icing to brick and mortar
For the first few years, Jessica Franks operated the cookie business out of her home. She sold cookies from 2013 to 2017, operating under Mississippi’s Cottage Food Laws, which limit the amount of products you can produce and sell.
It got to a point where she either had to slow down or open a storefront. So when a location opened on Highway 30 in 2018, Franks quit her job at the hospital and started making cookies full time. Her husband quit his job teaching and joined her later that year.
“I had done therapy for 21 years and I was honestly a little burned out,” Franks said. “I was doing cookies all night and working all day.”
Despite the pandemic, the business grew so much the couple was forced to move to a new location on West Oxford Loop in December 2020.
R & R Cookies sets itself apart by being a nut-free bakery that offers countless customization options. The bakers have hundreds and hundreds of cookie cutters on hand, and they even purchased a 3D printer to print their own cookie cutters when needed.
“When we say custom, we’ve gone as custom as we possibly can,” Chad Franks said.
Except for writing names or drawing logos, which are sometimes done with the help of a projector, every cookie is decorated freehand.
R & R Cookies has five employees, including the husband and wife duo and their daughter, Sarah Franks, who has worked full time there for three years.
It’s truly a family business: Chad Franks makes the dough, cuts the cookies and bakes them; Jessica Franks does all the decorating for orders, along with taking orders and managing the money; and Sarah Franks decorates cookies that go in the store’s display case.
On average, they bake 1,500 cookies per week. At their busiest times, they have baked upward of 2,500 in a week.
“They’re a process,” Jessica Franks said. “It takes a day to make the dough, a day to bake them, two or three days to ice them. So it’s not an overnight thing.”
They’ve come a long way from operating with one mixer, one oven, one bun rack and decorating on plastic tables. Over the years, they’ve added mixers, a commercial oven and now have six bun racks that are routinely filled with colorfully decorated of various shapes and sizes.
Chad Franks said he approaches his work with painstaking attention to detail.
“It doesn’t bother me at all, other than the wasted time, to throw a tray of cookies away if I leave them in the oven a minute too long,” Chad Franks said. “Because they’re not our cookies.”
Franks said, to him, there’s no such thing as “good enough.”
A business built on faith
For Jessica Franks, giving up a stable job at the hospital to open her own small business required “a huge step of faith.”
It’s this faith that continues to drive the family and their business.
The store’s name, short for rest and relaxation, comes from the Bible verse Matthew 11:28, which reads, “Come to me, all ye who are weary and heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.”
“When Noah and I were off recovering from the dog bites, obviously we had to rest a lot,” Jessica Franks said. “To do a cottage food bakery, you have to have a name, and so that was the name that God gave us during that time.”
When Chad Franks thinks about the business, he can’t help but draw parallels to the story of Joseph in the Old Testament.
“His life took a terrible turn,” he said. “He thought it was the worst thing that he would ever experience, and God somehow took a series of terrible events and wound up saving a whole group of people.”
Those nine weeks of recovery were difficult for the entire family, Chad Franks said, but family and church members helped them persevere. And now they have the business to show for it.
Franks said that while the hard work and long days can occasionally get the better of them, the family finds comfort in knowing that they’re doing something unique.
“It’s easier for us to have faith because we know that God has always taken care of us,” he said. “Even through the hardest time of our lives.”
R & R Cookies
■ Address: 2686 Oxford Loop #120, Oxford
■ Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Saturday
■ Website: randrcookies.com
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Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 37 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.
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