Meet Grant Melton, the Man Behind Bake Sale
- Montana Edit
- Aug 10
- 7 min read
Grant Melton grew up in Brookville, Ohio, a tiny rural town outside Dayton. Both his parents were great cooks, and somewhere around 1999, his dad decided that when Y2K hit and civilization collapsed, the family needed to have the Toll House chocolate chip cookie recipe memorized. Grant doesn't remember the recipe to this day. But he remembers making those cookies, and that feeling stuck with him in a way that would end up shaping everything that came after.
After high school he moved to Chicago for college, studying television, theater, and broadcast journalism, not quite sure what he wanted to do but certain it would involve entertainment. He also picked up a job at a cupcake bakery and spent the next few years trying to figure out what connected those two worlds.
His last year of college, he landed an internship at Rachael Ray's daytime talk show in New York. He joined the team full time and stayed for almost ten years, leaving as a senior producer with an Emmy on his shelf.
Now he lives in Missoula and runs Bake Sale, a cookie company he started at the farmer's market. The cookies are genuinely the best we've had. We sat down with Grant to hear how all of it happened.
You spent nearly a decade at Rachael Ray. What did you do as a producer?
Any segment on the show that involved food was produced by one of the culinary producers. That could be an everyday viewer coming on to share a recipe, a little cooking competition, or a celebrity coming to promote their cookbook. Your job was to take that recipe and make it digestible for people watching at home within a certain time limit, then collaborate with the food stylist and the other producers to actually make it happen. It's a lot of moving parts, high pace, high drama. I always thought the behind the scenes should be its own TV show.
You didn't go to culinary school. Was that ever an issue?
To me it wasn't, and that was because of the environment my boss Emily created. Her hiring strategy was not necessarily to hire the people that had the most experience, but to hire the people that you'd want to be around all day, because we're in this kitchen together in tight quarters and we can teach each other what we need to learn. So even without a culinary degree, I never felt like there was anything I couldn't figure out.
Tell us how you ended up appearing on the show yourself.
I used to make green room food for celebrities coming in and out of the show. One time I made an oatmeal fennel raisin cookie. Rachael tasted it and said, "This cookie's amazing. You have to make these on the show sometime." That didn't end up happening, but she had this idea that I could be on television. So it was slow cooker week, she needed someone to make a dessert in a slow cooker, and she said Grant can do it. I spent two weeks testing the recipe. Two days before the segment, I found out the co-host that day was Emeril Lagasse.
So not only am I cooking with Rachael Ray, who I grew up watching, I'm cooking with one of the most iconic celebrity chefs of all time. We made a peanut butter and jelly cheesecake in a slow cooker together, and Emeril threw peanuts on top and said bam. I was like, what is my life right now?
After that she started putting me on more often. She's a cook who doesn't bake, and there was a need for more dessert content. So I started making random dessert recipes on the show pretty regularly.
Tell us about winning an Emmy.
The whole show won for Outstanding Daytime Talk Show. It was my last season there, and honestly I had been thinking about leaving for a while. I felt like I'd experienced everything I could experience there, and then winning an Emmy, I don't think it gets any better than this.
The Emmy is very large and very heavy, and anywhere you put it seems a little obnoxious. It was in the bathroom for a while. Now it's in my dog Huckleberry's bedroom. It's his.
What was next?
My now-husband got a job offer in San Francisco. We decided to go on the adventure together and move across the country to a city neither one of us knew anything about. Then the pandemic happened. We were in this tiny apartment in a city where we didn't know anybody, so we packed a rental car and drove to Missoula because his parents live here and he grew up here. We said we'd stay for a couple weeks. That was several years ago. We never left.
Was Missoula a hard adjustment coming from New York?
People ask me that a lot, but honestly it felt right pretty quickly. I grew up in a tiny rural town in Ohio and I think there was a part of me that missed that small town feeling without realizing it. Missoula is this perfect combination of feeling rural and small but also feeling like a city at the same time. And I should mention that when I met my husband Desi thirteen or fourteen years ago in Brooklyn, the first thing he told me was there was no point in dating him because he was moving back to Missoula one day. I said, we'll see about that. Here I am.
So how did Bake Sale start?
I was freelancing as a recipe developer and food writer during the pandemic. I wrote a few recipes for Bon Appetit, one for The New York Times which is actually our buttermilk banana pudding that we now sell at Worden's Market. Then I had a remote job at Food52 for a while, but I wasn't loving working remotely. I was used to a fast-paced kitchen environment with a lot of moving parts, and that wasn't happening. When Food52 went through layoffs I took that as a sign to start my own thing.
I'd been going to the Missoula Farmer's Market and I loved it and wanted to be part of it. I've always loved cookies because they're so accessible. I don't know anybody who doesn't like chocolate chip cookies. I put chocolate chip cookies in the same category as ice cream and Keke Palmer. Everybody loves them. So I had this idea to do a very cookie-focused thing at the farmer's market. The name Bake Sale came up, and I liked the idea of calling it that because the whole concept is taking foods you'd see at a bake sale and making them a little more special.
Where do you find your inspiration for developing recipes?
A lot of it comes from nostalgia, this idea of what you would see at a bake sale, but elevated. My grandma used to make this dessert called Watergate salad, which was instant pistachio pudding, multicolored marshmallows, crushed pineapple and Cool Whip all tossed together. I haven't had that in years, but the taste of pistachio pudding just takes me right back to childhood holidays. So our version is a proper pistachio pudding base, folded in whipped cream, homemade pistachio cake pieces, and salted pistachios on top. It tastes like something you had as a kid but in a completely new way.
Our number one is the chocolate chip cookie, but I guarantee it's unlike any you've had. It has a little more salt than normal, and we use milk chocolate and dark chocolate together, so it's sweet and bitter at the same time. Then we have banana pudding, but it's not the traditional version made with instant pudding. It's a homemade pudding with buttermilk, homemade cake pieces, and bananas. That recipe is actually the one I sold to The New York Times back in 2019.
How did the Big Dipper cookie dough ice cream collaboration happen?
I asked the owner why they didn't have cookie dough ice cream on the menu. He said they could never get it to taste right. So I figured out a way to make cookie dough that actually tastes like cookie dough frozen, and now they carry it. I make the frozen cookie dough pieces exclusively for them.
What's the next chapter for Bake Sale?
Frozen cookie dough! Which you can now buy in the grocery store. I came up with the idea because we've been doing wholesale cookies for three years, and a packaged cookie is great, but it's been sitting there for a couple days. The best way to experience a cookie is warm out of the oven. So now you can have that at home.
The three flavors are salted chocolate chip; almond croissant, which is a sugar cookie with almond paste and slivered almonds; and birthday cake, which is a vanilla sugar cookie with sprinkles and white chocolate. I designed the packaging myself on Canva.
Photography by Reid Graham Photography by Reid Graham Photography by Reid Graham
On the front of the bag it says “Every bag sold fights hunger.” What does that mean?
Since access to food is becoming more difficult for so many people, I wanted to come up with a way to give back to a community that's given us so much. So with every bag sold, a dollar goes to fight food insecurity locally. And there's a QR code on the back of the package that takes you to a donation tracker so you can see how much we've raised.
If you haven't tried a Bake Sale cookie yet, you must. Find them at the Good Food Store, The Roxy Theatre, Gary's Local Burgers, and Chug Soda Shop, pick up the cookie dough ice cream at Big Dipper Ice Cream, or grab the frozen cookie dough at the Good Food Store, Orange Street Food Farm, Big Dipper Ice Cream, Worden's Market, and Yoke's Fresh Market. Follow @bakesalebakeshop on Instagram or TikTok to see their next pop-up. Grant is just getting started. Getting Bake Sale into stores across the country is next.
RAPID FIRE
Favorite cookie?
Chocolate chip. Always.
Favorite restaurant in Missoula?
For dinner, The Keep. Last time I ordered chicken. I'm not afraid to order chicken at a restaurant. You don't go to a nice restaurant and order chicken? I do, and I'm doing just fine.
Go-to drink?
Margarita on the rocks with salt.
Favorite Montana vacation spot?
Seeley Lake. We have a family cabin there. That's summer to me.
Ideal summer day in Missoula?
Breakfast at Clyde, Coffee and Turkish breakfast if they have it. Then float the Clark Fork. Then tacos and sparkling rosé at GILD. That's it. That's the whole day.
Favorite place to shop in Missoula?
Birdie Thatcher first, always. Then the Montana Antique Mall.
Favorite non-cookie dessert?
Tony's Chocolonely sea salt caramel bar, Big Dipper ice cream, and a Verra donut.
