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.
Thomas and Tamika at a Cookies and Shipp market day.
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
