“Using your head” has a dual meaning for Elizabeth Kizito, founder and proprietor of Kizito Cookies in Louisville. Carrying her locally famous assortment of cookies in a basket on her head harkens back to the Ugandan culture of the city’s “Cookie Lady,” as she is known. But it also is a stroke of marketing genius that has brought attention and success she didn’t envision when she began selling cookies downtown almost 40 years ago.
Not long after starting her business, Kizito playfully balanced a basket on her head at home, a skill she had learned as a toddler in her homeland. She was dancing around, and her husband at the time remarked, “That’s what you need to do with your cookies because you’ll be so different.”
That was an understatement, as the response of Louisvillians was immediate and positive. “I got such a reaction because people had never seen anything like this. They’d only seen it in National Geographic or something. Everybody was honking their horns,” Kizito says. She was embarrassed—but embarrassed all the way to the bank.
Hard work preceded this watershed moment for the ever-smiling Ugandan whose warmth and joy are as much a trademark as her cookies. She started with some justified trepidation.
“A lot of people sell things on the street in Uganda,” she says, but “I was always scared of getting ‘busted’ because I was baking my cookies at home, and you’re not supposed to sell them to the public.”
It was after getting her food production permit that Kizito began using the basket with a line of baked goods that now includes more than a dozen different cookies, brownies, a variety of biscotti and more.
The business began by accident and then continued by necessity, according to Kizito. She started by simply giving chocolate chip cookies she had baked to co-workers in Louisville restaurants. The quality—apparently as good then as it is now—created demand that led to selling them in quantity to co-workers. Kizito says nothing has really changed since then in how she bakes, adding that she still uses real butter.
The need for money to buy her then-1-year-old’s birthday present launched her business. She took to the streets with cookies, selling at that point from a bag she carried. Mission accomplished: Her son got a pair of new shoes, and, more importantly, Kizito got the idea for a business.
She realized she needed a kitchen with more capacity than her own at home. Working for a pizzeria, Kizito negotiated the use of its kitchen from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. in exchange for cookies. Getting established meant rising in the middle of the night, baking cookies in her four-hour time window, and then traveling to Fifth and Jefferson streets in downtown Louisville to sell cookies after working a shift at the pizzeria.
Three years into this, Kizito’s mother, visiting from Uganda, helped her daughter take her business to a whole new level. “She said, ‘You need to find a place where people can come and buy your cookies,’ ” says Kizito, not to mention a place where she would have her own kitchen. Her mother even found what seemed to be a promising location on Bardstown Road in the heart of Louisville’s Highlands neighborhood. The location and business idea were great but, at the time, not practical.
“I didn’t have money to rent it, much less buy it,” Kizito says with a laugh. Her persistent mother insisted, however, that she “just go look at it.” A bond between Kizito and the city became cemented, perhaps, when her landlord had an idea, Kizito says. He co-signed a lease on the store location and helped with six months’ rent to get it ready.
“I’d go sell cookies and make money, and I’d buy the sink. Then I’d go sell more cookies and buy the floor. And then all the pieces added up,” she says. “That was like 38 years ago. I’ve been in business a long time.”
Surprisingly, Kizito’s cookie-baking genius was not something learned in Uganda, even though her father owned a bakery in her home country. “My dad’s bakery made bread and cakes, but I never had cookies till I came to America,” she says.
Business acumen and an obviously strong work ethic may have come from her father, who, she says, was “Superman” in her eyes. “He was so positive and such a businessman.”
Kizito’s coming to America may have resulted indirectly from a vow made by her father to her mother. Her parents had married young, and he promised his wife that their first daughter would have a formal education—not the norm in Uganda at the time. Catholic boarding school was part of that pledge and led to an important encounter. Kizito befriended an American teacher and helped the educator adjust to East African life in addition to performing chores for her. The teacher took an interest in Kizito, met and got to know her parents, and eventually helped her to get to the United States and high school in Denver. She enrolled in Eastern New Mexico University, where she met and married a Louisville native who brought her home to the city after graduation.
Kizito’s reality of life in Denver, New Mexico and then Louisville were comically far from the expectations she had growing up in Africa. “I used to watch the American show Bonanza,” and thought all American were cowboys, she says with a laugh.
An interest in America accompanied a wanderlust and curiosity. “I used to see the jets in the sky with ‘steam’ [vapor trails], and I used to fantasize being in one of those planes.
“We used to call to each other in the house, ‘The plane is going! The plane is going!’ We’d all come out and look at it until we couldn’t see it anymore.”
On each Kizito Cookie package, a brief narrative includes: “I was born under a banana tree in Africa.”
“That’s really true,” she says. “We didn’t have too many hospitals when I was born.” Ugandan mothers observed “a kind of tradition,” Kizito explains, in giving birth there. Banana trees offer both convenience and their leaves a ready-made bedding, of a sort.
Kizito grew up picking bananas and other vegetables and fruits daily, because of the absence of refrigeration in the home, as was typical in the country. This led to the skill that helped launch her business. “Kids mimic their parents, and I’d go with my mother to the garden,” Kizito says. “She’d be there all day cultivating different things, and then when she was done, we’d all put it in the basket. Of course, you see what your momma does, and you want to do it.”
Street vending with a basket atop her head is probably unnecessary at this point in Kizito’s business career. Her retail store is a mainstay for cookie lovers; her cookies are found in coffee shops in Louisville and Kentucky locales as far away as Paducah. Her shop also offers an extensive collection of arts and crafts from Uganda, Kenya and Zambia.
Street vending, however, became a labor of love and pays homage to Kizito’s African roots. She is as much an institution at Louisville Bats baseball games as the players themselves, strolling up and down the aisles, her trademark basket atop her head, greeting friends as much as selling cookies. “They miss me, and I miss them if I don’t go,” she says.
Kizito, in all likelihood, also will never go from Louisville and not just because she has no plans to retire. She is grateful to a city that has given her a new home. “Louisville is a city that protects its own,” she says. “They like me, and they like things that are local. They look at me as their own ‘Cookie Lady.’ ”