Wally Amos launched and lost a cookie empire. His family reveals the trailblazer's baking secrets
On March 10, 1975, when Wally Amos opened Famous Amos, a shop dedicated solely to selling cookies at the corner of Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard and Formosa Avenue, it was an improbable idea in an improbable location.
There was a strip club across the street, recalled Shawn Amos, Wally Amos’ youngest son. And hanging out on the sidewalk outside the shop were sex workers and runaways.
Even so, it was a highly visible location — just a few blocks away from A&M Records, where Amos had an office next to Quincy Jones. And the 39-year-old entrepreneur was confident. After all, he’d been the first Black talent agent to work at the William Morris Agency — where he signed Simon and Garfunkel and worked with Motown stars such as Diana Ross and the Supremes, Dionne Warwick and Sam Cooke — before quitting, due to racism, Shawn Amos says, and starting his own entertainment management company.
That company failed, but Wally Amos was known in Hollywood circles for his cookies, having baked the treats following his Aunt Della’s chocolate-chip-pecan recipe and handing them out at meetings with record and movie executives. When he went searching for $25,000 in seed money from his former clients and associates, he easily persuaded Marvin Gaye, Helen Reddy and other entertainment figures to invest.
His timing was ideal. It was two years before Debbi Fields opened her first cookie shop in Palo Alto, meaning the premium cookie market was wide open. And though refrigerated dough for chocolate chip cookies had been available since the 1950s, the first major supermarket brand of chocolate chip cookies, Chips Ahoy, had been launched by Nabisco only 12 years earlier. The market was ready for a higher-quality, bite-sized cookie with an emphasis on taste over shelf life.
"He placed a large ad in the Hollywood Reporter and announced the cookie as one would announce a new movie," wrote Arizona Daily Star reporter Ken Burton in 1976 after Amos opened his third cookie store, and his first outside of California, in Tucson.
The Famous Amos stores’ success was swift, becoming a magnet for celebrities, counterculture figures and children’s birthday parties. Wally Amos became a pioneer in the upscale cookie business.
"They're the latest L.A. rage, already sharing the 'taste-sensation spot' with beluga caviar!" Vogue magazine raved not long after Amos opened in Hollywood.
His big personality helped promote his cookies.
“His cookie was his client,” said Gregory Amos, his middle son.
"They always give a good performance and I don't have to play to their ego," Wally Amos told the Arizona Daily Star's Burton in 1976.
Compared to the soft, oversized cookies seen in so many bakeries today, Famous Amos cookies were crisper and smaller. He didn't care for soft cookies, Shawn Amos said of his father, and he believed a cookie should be just large enough for just one or two bites. He was also very particular about how the dough was dropped onto the cookie sheet as well as the size of the pinch of dough. Once it was on the cookie sheet, he didn't shape the dough.
"The irregular, individual shape of each cookie was its chief attribute, according to our dad," Shawn Amos explained. "Each cookie has its own personality — with its own singular amount and placement of chocolate chips and pecan."
Wally Amos also made sure he talked to his cookies as he dropped the dough, said Shawn Amos, who described the process in his middle-grade novel titled "Cookies & Milk."
The key to much of their father's success was a strong work ethic and confidence, his four children — Michael, Gregory, Shawn and Sarah — said in interviews with The Times.
“I saw him belong wherever he went,” Shawn Amos said. “He was audaciously himself at all times and a perennial optimist.”
His positivity is perhaps the biggest takeaway from his life, his children and widow, Carol Amos, said.
Wally Amos, an Air Force veteran, died Aug. 13 from complications due to pneumonia at the age of 88. He passed away at his home in Honolulu with his wife by his side.
A native of Tallahassee, Fla., Amos grew up in the 1940s in the segregated South. He learned his determination from his mother, who refused to move with a young Wally Amos from their seats in the front row of a public bus.
This determination helped Wally Amos become a gifted marketer and great promoter, but he wasn’t much of a businessman, Shawn Amos said. Wally Amos struggled to keep up with his company’s growth and made some bad business decisions, eventually selling the company in the late 1980s.
In the early 1990s, he launched Wally Amos Presents cookies, but the new owners of Famous Amos cookies sued him for trademark infringement and forbade him from using his own name and likeness. In response, he changed the name to Uncle Nonamé but ultimately filed for bankruptcy a few years later.
Undeterred, he pivoted to muffins with Uncle Wally's Muffin Co. He even appeared on a 2016 episode of "Shark Tank," where he pitched the hosts on his new cookie company, called the Cookie Kahuna.
“He was the eternal optimist,” his eldest son, Michael Amos, said.
In the episode, Wally Amos can be seen wearing his signature panama hat and beaded necklaces, asking the hosts for $50,000 in exchange for 20% ownership in Cookie Kahuna. They declined. The store shuttered about a year later.
Wally Amos, who never finished high school, was also a lifelong children’s literacy advocate. He wrote eight books and served as a spokesperson for Literacy Volunteers of America for decades. He earned numerous honors for his volunteer work, including the Literacy Award presented in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush.
But he never replicated the success of Famous Amos.
“He spent the rest of his life chasing what he had created and wanting to be able to hit that success again,” his daughter, Sarah Amos, said.
All these years later, however, a reminder of the legacy of Wally Amos remains at Sunset and Formosa. The city of Los Angeles erected a sign in front of the original Famous Amos location (now Bossa Nova Brazilian Cuisine) commemorating the cookie pioneer.
"Famous Amos Square," it reads. "Wally Amos opened the world's first chocolate chip cookie store in 1975."
By the end of his life, Carol Amos said, Wally Amos had come to peace with the decisions he’d made in his life and the idea that he’d never have the same success as he did with Famous Amos.
“He had this frown on his forehead that I saw from the very moment that I met him,” she said. ”He didn’t have that when he left the body.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
