It’s been almost two years now since Eric and Amy Lund opened their Dough Lady bakery here in Millcreek, and more than five years since first launching its online predecessor. That’s easily tens of thousands of cinnamon rolls ago. And do you know who still can’t quite believe it?
Amy. The Dough Lady herself.
“I’m genuinely shocked when someone comes through that door,” she says. “I still can’t believe they want to buy something I created.”
Who knew? All she wanted to do was bake.
That’s what launched what has grown into Utah’s latest sweet tooth phenomenon.
Well, that and COVID-19.
Amy grew up in Sandy with her sisters Lindsay and Aubrey, all of whom loved to bake because that’s what their mom, Janene, loved to do. Janene had a baking philosophy that made it fun and took the stress out. Just follow the recipe, she’d tell her girls. “If you can read, you can cook. The kitchen is a laboratory.”
“We did a lot of hobby baking,” says Amy. “Our whole activity on Sundays was, ‘What’re we gonna bake?’ My dream growing up was to one day own my own bakery. It was just a pipe dream, though.”
One she abandoned when she went away to college at Utah State, graduated in public relations and got a job working in marketing for a health care business.
But then two things happened, both in 2020, that changed the course of her life, one of them really bad, one of them really good: COVID-19 and marrying Eric.
The pandemic hit in the spring of that year, just as Amy and Eric — a fellow Utah State graduate with a degree in accounting — were getting serious about their relationship. Undeterred by social distancing restrictions, they were married in the fall and moved into a 1,300-square-foot townhouse in Woods Cross.
Luckily, they were both able to keep their day jobs, which they could do remotely, but like everyone else sheltering in place, they had a lot of time to kill and not a lot to fill it with. They started brainstorming about side hustles, which led to Amy saying, “Well, I can bake,” followed by, “You know, I can’t remember the last time I had a really good, gooey cinnamon roll.”
That’s paraphrasing, but not by much.
And so the Dough Lady was born.
“I’ve always had the mindset when I taste something, ‘I can make it better,’” says Amy, who set out to make the best cinnamon rolls in Utah. Her bedrock rule was (and is): “Don’t skimp on filling and don’t hold back on the frosting.”
“Utah loves sugar,” she adds, smiling. “Everybody has their vices, ours is sugar. We wanted to be high-quality sugar.”
The business was all online at first. Amy would advertise her frozen take-and-bake dough on Instagram, and on weekends, she and Eric would do what they called “pop-ups” at grocery store parking lots along the Wasatch Front to deliver the dough to their customers (and vice versa) and sell fresh cinnamon rolls.
They began doing this in November of 2020, just in time for the holidays. The first inkling they got that they were on to something was when they looked at the long lines forming in the parking lot. Standing 6 feet apart, people were queuing up to buy all the dough and cinnamon rolls the Dough Lady could make.
Amy is quick to add that it took a lot more than just great cinnamon rolls, however.
“None of it would have ever happened without Eric,” she says. “He was behind me from the start, encouraging us to do this. He knows accounting, he knows the numbers, he knows how to run a business. I’m just the girl who loves to bake.”
In 2024, the Lunds moved into the brick-and-mortar phase of their business when they leased a building on 2300 South in Millcreek that used to be a bakery. They’ve been adding customers and employees (they’re up to 23) ever since. In the near future, they have plans to open a second bakery in Lehi.
All of it continues to be a constant source of amazement to Amy.
She remembers back to when they first decided to go for it and bought a $3,000 mixer that they hauled into their tiny apartment and set up in the corner of the dining room.
She took one look at the machine, “and I started sweating; I had a hard time breathing. I said, ‘I’m gonna need a minute to lie down.’ I couldn’t believe we were actually doing this.”
Five and a half years later, the Dough Lady’s disbelief remains as consistent as the lines out the door.
