Pancakes – Memphis Flyer

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.”

Staks Pancake Kitchen is about to have a new home outside the Mid-South. Ten new homes, in fact.

Owner Brice Bailey recently announced plans to franchise the Staks brand at 10 new locations through his LLC, The Bailey Group, in partnership with Lynda Sanford, CEO of Atlanta-based Classics Dining and Hospitality group.

“We’ve been working on this for 11 months now, and signed a Franchise Disclosure Document back in June,” Bailey says. “Lynda came to us with a good plan, and we really like the market. She’s done a great job of identifying locations across the state of Georgia, but mainly in the greater Atlanta area.” There have been approaches for franchises in other states as well, but Bailey doesn’t want to rush the process. So for now, the focus remains on Atlanta.

The expansion comes as an added boost for Staks, which bucked the trend and saw increased sales during most of 2020 and 2021. That leaves Bailey confident that the new restaurants can make a big impact beyond the comforts of home.

“We’re a breakfast and lunch place, but I think our uniqueness really helps,” he says. “We’ve got some menu items that are really creative and have become favorites here. For example, our Bomb Melts are made from bomboloni bread, which is used to make Italian donuts. I haven’t seen that anywhere else. It’s just a lot of items you won’t see at your typical upscale breakfast and lunch places.”

Oreo Praline pancakes at Staks Pancake Kitchen

Many of the familiar favorites will remain constant from franchise to franchise, but Bailey wants each new Staks to be a reflection of its environment. He and other leadership at the Bailey Group will urge new owners to add some of their own ideas, all while incorporating ingredients sourced from farms local to the restaurants’ respective areas. “It should feel like a hometown store in whatever market we go into,” he explains.

Bluff City breakfast lovers need not worry — in coming up with new creative items, Staks isn’t turning its back on its two Memphis locations. “We’ve been workshopping a few new things here,” says Clint Kelso, COO of the Bailey Group and general manager at Staks’ Germantown location. “We’ll have stuffed French toast made with that same bomboloni bread. It’s stuffed with cream cheese, covered with a blueberry glaze, and topped with fresh blueberries and strawberries.

“We’re also adding a breakfast Reuben sandwich. The bread is French toast, and it will have cinnamon sugar sauerkraut instead of a traditional thousand island dressing.”

One new item that Bailey is particularly interested in is a barbecue hash recipe. “It’s like a hash-brown from the skillet,” he says, with ham, pulled pork, sausage, and Staks’ own jerk sauce.

But the most exciting development for pancake lovers is proposed additions to an already robust selection of “Sophisticated Staks,” the restaurant’s list of inventive takes on pancakes. Bailey says that pancakes and French toast sales soared during the pandemic. Coupled with plenty of extra time in the kitchen, the team has plenty of ideas.

“We’re definitely going to expand on those menus,” says Bailey. “So if you want to switch it up with something like cinnamon roll French toast, things like that, we’ll be able to accommodate you.”

The Bailey Group plans to be hands-on with all the upcoming Staks locations (including a third local branch in Southaven slated to open within the next six weeks), and has training all planned out. “It’s too early to tell when the first Atlanta location will open,” Kelso says, “but Lynda has plans to open two to three new locations per year.”