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The 26-year-old heiress of Bronx-headquartered Stella D'oro Biscuit Co. used to bake cookies in a toy oven.
"'How proud your grandfather would be if he could see you!' people would say," says Audrey Zambetti. "That was my gold star, no pun intended."
The Italian immigrant who started Stella D'oro ("star of gold" in Italian) would still be proud. His granddaughter has graduated from toy-sized mixes to help manage a company that is rare among food manufacturers today: Stella D'oro has prospered as an independent ethnic cookie company in a market dominated by well-financed conglomerates.
"A lot of family businesses blow themselves up by the third generation," Ms. Zambetti says. "We're not going to do that."
Under the direction of her father, Felice, chairman, and his cousin E. Val Cerutti, president, Stella D'oro has become the nation's largest manufacturer of Italian cookies and breadsticks, grabbing about $75 million in sales and 1% of the $5.5 billion cookie and cracker market.
Staunchly independent, the privately held company wants to keep tapping the surging interest in gourmet ethnic fare. Already it has brought out slick new television advertising aimed at a younger consumer, is test marketing a low-cholesterol line of snack sticks and is looking to introduce a line of premium cookies.
That's a bundle of activity for an essentially conservative company that began in 1930 making kosher breadsticks and anisette cookies catering mostly to Italians and Orthodox Jews in the metropolitan area. Very often, Ms. Zambetti says, her grandfather sat at his desk covered with flour.
As its traditional Italian and Jewish audiences shrank,...