For the past 15 years, weekend shoppers at the Overland Park Farmers’ Market have dutifully lined up at Frannie Franks’ stand for coffee cakes.
Every Saturday, owner Jill McEnroe said, roughly 2,000 cakes are sold at the market. Now, instead of just Wednesdays and Saturdays, Johnson County customers can get coffee cakes almost all week long at the coffee cakery’s new brick-and-mortar store in Leawood.
The store celebrated its grand opening Thursday, with a ribbon-cutting event.
Frannie Franks operates at 11828 Roe Ave.
- The shop occupies a space on the east side of the Town Center Plaza shopping center, just off West 119th Street and Roe Avenue.
- Healthy eatery Ruby Jean’s Juicery previously occupied that space before it closed its Leawood location earlier this year.
- Frannie Frank’s operates from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Saturday.
Frannie Franks serves coffee cakes in a variety of flavors
The Frannie Franks brand makes coffee cakes in up to 150 flavors — of which the Leawood store offers roughly 30, in addition to holiday and weekend specials.
Flavors at Frannie Franks range from classic ones like chocolate chip and the bakery’s best-selling cinnamon streusel, to “decadent” flavors like pumpkin crumb and caramel apple.
Customers can get almost all of those flavors gluten-free and dairy-free.
In addition to its traditional coffee cakes, Frannie Franks also serves cheesecake coffee cakes which come with a layer of cream cheese inside. (The cheesecake flavors and the chocolate flavors with dairy are the only ones that don’t offer gluten-free and/or dairy-free options.)
The Frannie Franks brand has several ties to owner Jill McEnroe’s family. The name itself is a combination of her mother’s first name, Frannie, and her grandfather’s first name, Frank.
Her mother’s senior photo is also depicted in the company’s logo, and it’s present in the Leawood store — at the top of a family tree of photos on the wall. Also pictured is Jenny Thompson, McEnroe’s niece who also helps run Frannie Franks.
This is Frannie Franks’ first store in Johnson County
The idea for the coffee cake company came initially as a surprise to McEnroe, who baked a coffee cake for her boss’s birthday 15 years ago.
That cake, along with two more she’d baked for her husband to take to work, was met with high praise and insistence that McEnroe could easily sell her cakes. She’d never considered herself a baker, she said, but she decided to give it a shot.
“I just wanted to create things,” she said at Thursday’s ribbon-cutting event. “Little did I know, I needed to create 150 flavors of cake.”
McEnroe found success at the Overland Park Farmers’ Market and with a wholesale account with grocery store company Dean & DeLuca for several years before opening her first brick and mortar store in Independence, Missouri, in 2021.
By opening the new Leawood store, McEnroe said she looks forward to being closer to the brand’s Johnson County regulars, and continuing to grow the Frannie Franks brand as a whole.
“We’ve been delivering out in this area since the very beginning, eight to 10 times a week, so there’s always been a demand here,” she said. “This is just such a huge moment for us, I can’t wait for what the future holds.”
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