06/16/2026
Business in Cozad produces frozen dough products to sell to retailers throughout 12 states
COZAD-When Gale Evans of Cozad gets ready to experiment, he goes to a kitchen not a science laboratory.And the results of his work are bakery products that might end up on the shelf of your neighbor-hood grocery store.EVANS, WHO owns Evans Frozen Bakery in Cozad, said creating new products is his pet project; something he often starts in his kitchen at home."I do a lot of experimenting at home," he said. "I have my own mixer. I develop the recipes myself. I start small, then transpose the recipe to larger batches... If a recipe looks good and I think I can mass produce it, I will try it."It's not only his opinion that counts when a new recipe is tried. Evans said he has about 12 area people taste-test the products."I have these people taste the product and then tell me what they think of it," he said. "We also do market tests. I had one creation, my no-time dinner roll, where you just saw off a piece and bake it. I thought it would go over big. We even test-marketed it, put it in mass production and nobody bought it."EVANS SAID sometimes when a product doesn't go over well, he will try it again several years later, maybe in a different market.Evans Frozen Bakery mass produces frozen and raw dough products and frozen bakery products. The food is sold to retailers across the Midwest."We are wholesalers that produce a retail bakery-type product," Evans said. "We sell to bakeries, convenience and grocery stores in 12 states."Those states are Nebraska, Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee.The products usually are sold in stores under the retailers' names. Evans said he has accounts with IGA, Nash Finch, Jack and Jill, Hinky Dinky, United AG, Affiliated Food Stores, Food Service of America, Cash-Wa and Gillette Dairy.HE SAID people in different parts of his sales region have different tastes. For example, people in Texas and Oklahoma want three times more cinnamon on their rolls than people in northern states."Nebraskans seem to like the doughnuts, cinnamon rolls, Bohemian and German items," Evans said. "Actually, they like pretty much anything."Evans ran a retail bakery in Cozad before he began his wholesale business more than 25 years ago."The biggest reason I got away from the city bakery is because of the night work required," he said. "I thought if I could freeze the products at night, then I could come to work in the morning. It just so happened I started freezing for other bakeries besides my own."HIS CITY bakery hours were 5 p.m.-9 a.m. Now, Evans has an 8 a.m.-5 p.m. routine.He began his wholesale business with 30 products. Today, Evans offers more than 200 products, including Danish rolls, fried goods, croissants, dinner rolls, hamburger and hoagie buns, turnovers, cookies, pies, muffins, cakes and 22 bread items."We have five lines operating all the time," Evans said. "Certain items are made certain days."The Cozad plant includes lines for bread, Danish and sweet rolls, buns and dinner rolls, doughnuts and fried goods, and cakes and cookies.Evans said knowing what products to make and in what volume comes with more than 35 years of experience in the bakery business.He said he worked at his father's bakery in Kearney, the Royal Bakery, when he was in high school. He graduated from Kearney High School in 1944 and then joined the military.HIS FATHER, Al, sold the Kearney bakery in 1946, moved to Lexington and bought the City Bakery, now known as Karre City Bakery. Evans said he attended baking school after being discharged from the military in 1947. He graduated from the American Institute of Baking of Chicago in 1950 and purchased the Cozad City Bakery in 1954. His first frozen products were Danish and puff pastries, such as turnovers."Those were easy to freeze because you spread margarine on the dough, which helps them flake up," he said. "You don't need as much yeast."Evans said the hardest pastry to develop was raised doughnuts, because it was hard to find the correct fermentation and mixing times so they could be frozen."I REALLY got lucky when I found that formula," he said. Adjustments for freezing also had to be made in easier recipes."When making bread commercially, you can mix dough for 15 minutes at a temperature of 80 degrees," Evans said. "When you want to freeze it, you must only mix the dough 10 to 11 minutes at a temperature of 65 degrees."He said his freezing method is called "blast freezing." Bakery products are put into a cooler at a temperature of 30 degrees below zero.Once frozen, they are boxed, 'packaged and put in a holding freezer at 15 degrees below zero."We deliver the goods to our customers on our trucks that carry them at 10 degrees below zero," Evans said. "All our customers have to do is thaw the product, cook it, if necessary, and sell it."
ALTHOUGH EVANS does much of his work in sales, his favorite part of the business still is to develop new products."Right now we're working on new products for the health-minded consumers," he said. The company recently changed some of its product ingredients to meet the demands of those consumers."I've even developed a high-fiber, low-cholesterol loaf of bread that should be on the market by the first of August," Evans said. "We also have a low-cholesterol frosting."The plant uses all vegetable shortening instead of a mixture of animal and vegetable shortening. Other changes include using a dairy whey product instead of whole powdered milk, a soybean-based product to replace whole eggs and corn sugar instead of granulated sugar."For the first time in history," Evans said, "bakery goods can actually be good for you."HE SAID flour is purchased in Kansas, but most of the other products come from Nebraska suppliers. While the Cozad plant employs 85 people, Evans said he has six other employees who do nothing but go to stores and train bakery staff."We teach them how to bake and finish our products," he said. "We've probably trained over 30,000 people in the last 25 years."As company president, he handles sales and product development, while his wife, Judy, is vice president and office manager.
