Brinkley Erb admits she wasn’t “a pancake person.”
Until one morning.
She had a craving for pancakes, but she wanted “a good healthy pancake,” says Erb, 23. She got online to see what people put in their recipes. “I saw some common ingredients in the various pancake recipes.”
Then she made her own. “I experimented and it turned out it was super yummy.”
Erb didn’t want to have to clean up the kitchen every time she made the pancakes. “I had the idea to try and freeze them and toast them and see what happened. And they were actually yummier.”
And, she says, “That’s when I thought we might be onto something.”
People are now flippin’ over Brinkley’s Good Flippin’ Pancakes. It’s the first product in Erb’s business, Brinkley’s Foods LLC, which she owns and operates along with her sister Connell and their stepfather Tom Sikes. The pancakes are now available at High Point Grocery, South Point Grocery, Big River Market, Grind City Grocer, and Cordelia’s Market.
A graduate of Hutchison School, Erb wasn’t a business major in college. “I majored in psychology and Spanish.”
She created her pancakes out of necessity. “In 2015, I got diagnosed with some food allergies, which excluded eggs and dairy from my diet.
“Vegan was not trendy. I just kind of had no other options, really, except to try and make these alternative things for myself.”
She also made the pancakes for her friends. “It became kind of a thing.”
They fit in perfectly with her lifestyle. “This is so nice for me when I go teach yoga. I can pop one in the toaster and there’s my breakfast.
“It’s something you can eat before a bike ride or a workout and be pretty sustainable. It’s nourishing.”
Erb describes her pancakes as “both a bite of a warm sunny day at the beach and some cozy ski lodge.”
Many people think pancakes are unhealthy. But not hers, she says. “At our tastings we actually take a little bowl and we fill it with a banana, some oats, some cinnamon, and some salt. And we have a sign that says, ‘This is all that’s in these pancakes.’ Because you really have to get in people’s faces about it a little bit for them to understand.
“Sometimes they think the little pinch of salt we put in the bowl is sugar. But it’s salt. We are not going to put any cane sugar in any product we make.”
News of her pancakes originally spread by word of mouth. “I started telling my yoga clients about them.”
She continued perfecting the recipe, as well as figuring out packaging and getting a business license.
Good Flippin’ Pancakes come in three flavors. “We have the original, which is just the bananas, oats, cinnamon, and salt. And then we have blueberry, banana, oats, cinnamon.”
They also have a chia flavor, with chia seeds as one of the ingredients. “It has a more nutritious kind of profile as far as fiber and proteins.”
She and her sister and stepfather make the pancakes at Memphis Kitchen Co-Op Marketplace in Cordova. Connell is the taste-tester, as well as the designer of the packaging and marketing materials. Sikes handles the paperwork.
Brinkley isn’t stopping at pancakes. She plans to introduce a Baked Oat Bite before Christmas. “It’s kind of a hybrid between a granola bar, a muffin, and a cookie. It’s got bananas, oats, and almond flour. Those are the main ingredients.”
The Bite, which also will be sold frozen, can be prepared in a microwave or toaster oven. They can be an “on-the-go snack” or a dessert “with a scoop of ice cream.”
For now, Brinkley’s Foods products are only available in stores. “We would love to get to the point where we’re doing online orders and shipping. But we are not there yet.
“My favorite part about this is the creative aspect. Getting in the kitchen and playing and experimenting really is what it is for me.
“That’s what I love. That’s the passion that started all of it.”