Allie’s Banana Bread is on the rise — both in the oven and in the skies — thanks to a new partnership with Jetblue. “I’m on their transatlantic flights, from Boston and New York to Europe,” Allie Chernick ’12, the company’s founder, told us recently. To fill that mile-high order, her production has increased as well – to 30,000 loaves of banana bread a month!

We “kneaded” to know how her booming banana bread business was born, especially with today being National Homemade Bread Day. “It was sort of an accident,” Allie said. “The first time I made it was at Wheeler.” She was in 4th-grade and decided to make her grandmother’s banana bread for a potluck during the annual immigration unit. It was a delicious hit with her classmates, “and then that kind of became my thing at school,” she recalled. “I would bring it in all the time, whenever we needed food for an event. Like I was in the Philanthropy Club in Upper School, and when we had a bake sale, I brought it in.”

To help meet demand – and her own curiosity – she started making different variations of the banana bread, doled out as cupcakes. “My friends from Wheeler, even after we graduated from college, would still ask me if I could make them a loaf to bring to their office. I started doing that, and more people began asking for it. This was probably about 2017, and it’s been very organic growth since then.”

But how did this popular office offering truly take off? There’s a Wheeler connection to that, too. About a year and a half ago, Allie ran into one of her friends from Wheeler who now works at JetBlue. “I told him I was still making banana bread and had just gotten a manufacturing partner. He made what seemed like a joke at first, asking, ‘What if you had it on JetBlue?’” As it happened, the airline was looking to replace a croissant in their in-flight meals, and he introduced Allie to some of his colleagues. After trying out her banana bread, they gave the green light to bringing it on board JetBlue.

Congrats to Allie and @alliesbananabread for reaching new entrepreneurial heights! We’ll have the rest of their story in the next issue of “Now & Then” magazine.