22 years of service.
A career, then a calling.
This is the story of Thomas P. Shipp — soldier, husband, baker — and how a small Franklin, Tennessee bakery became a vehicle for something much bigger than cookies.
Service.
Thomas spent 22 years in the United States Army, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He came home with the kind of weight that a uniform can’t fold up and put away. PTSD is a clinical phrase. For Thomas, the experience was a daily one — and a quiet one.
Tamika.
His wife, Tamika Shipp, watched him find a kind of quiet in the kitchen that he couldn’t find anywhere else. The rhythm of measuring, the sound of a stand mixer, the smell of brown butter — they slowed his nervous system in a way nothing else had. He baked for the family. Then he baked for friends. Then friends started asking how to buy a dozen.
Tamika told him: this should be a business.
A new acronym.
Thomas refused to let the four letters PTSD stand only for what they meant in the field. He gave them a second meaning, and built his entire menu around it:
Franklin, Tennessee.
The bakery is in Franklin, TN — a small town with a long memory. The ingredients reflect it: Tennessee pecans, Georgia peaches, real butter, real vanilla, recipes refined batch by batch. Every box that ships from this kitchen has Thomas’s hands on it somewhere.
The pledge.
5% of every order goes to organizations that provide mental-health support to veterans and their families. We publish the list on the PTSD Resources page, and we’d rather you spend an hour over there than buy a single extra cookie.
“Baking is the quietest part of my day. I think of every box as something I get to ship a little of that quiet to someone else.”— Thomas Shipp
