The story of Kodiak Cakes flapjack mix, sold in thousands of grocery stores, began during the 1950s in an Ogden kitchen and expanded through a series of unexpected coincidences.

The recipe originated with Wallace Christofferson, who made whole-wheat flapjacks that his family insisted were much heartier than ordinary pancakes and nearly as light.

He hand-ground wheat into flour and mixed it and other ingredients into a batter made bubbly by stirring in baking soda and vinegar. He then whipped up egg whites and folded them into the bubbly mixture --the old-fashioned way of making thick, fluffy cakes.

This fall, the Utah-based Kodiak Cakes launched its first retail store, selling its flapjack and other whole-grain baking mixes, locally produced fruit syrups and fresh-baked cookies. It's located in The Gateway in the spot once held by London-based Ben's Cookies.

As it happened, Kodiak Cakes President Joel Clark had opened the Ben's Cookies store before changing the outlet to sell products from his own family-owned company. Clark had taken a liking to Ben's Cookies in 2002, and contacted the founder while finishing his master's degree at Oxford University in the United Kingdom.

"I told him of my experience in marketing our flapjack mix and my educational background; he said we should talk. I learned a lot, but it eventually made more sense to have locally produced products."

Since the Kodiak Cakes store opened in September, sales were up by 5 percent for its Bear Country Cookies over sales at Ben's a year ago.

Clark, 35, grew up in the 1980s selling flapjack mixes in his Salt Lake County neighborhood. His mother, Penny Clark, who watched her father make flapjacks, ground up wheat in an electric grinder and carefully measured the flour, powered milk and soda into a brown paper sacks. She pasted the recipe and cooking instructions on each sack.

Joel in turn loaded the sacks into his red Radio Flyer wagon and, with his English sheepdog Moe trotting alongside, he sold the mixes to their Millcreek neighbors.

In 1994, Penny Clark urged her older son Jon to take the reins and again start the company, calling it Baker Mills -- the maiden names of her mother and grandmother -- which the family says is the best moniker for a whole-grain company.

Jon boned up at the University of Utah library on food ingredients, tested batch after batch in his kitchen, enlisted the graphic art help of a childhood friend and consulted with his older brother, Tim. Jon eventually decided to slightly modify the hot cakes recipe to an add-water-only mix, and Frontier Flapjack and Waffle Mix was ready to market.

The brothers settled on the name, Kodiak, for the grizzly bear found on Kodiak Island Archipelago in Alaska, which Jon says depicts nature and the frontier.

"I thought if I named the product Kodiak Cakes, I could take a sales trip to the island and deduct it as a business expense," Jon wrote in his book, The Story of Kodiak Cakes , now sold at The Gateway store. "However, fifteen years later, I still hope to make that trip."

Still, the Kodiak name can be confusing to customers, who mistake the cookies and mixes for products manufactured in Alaska.

"I often explain that we've always been a Utah company," said the store's assistant manager Kelsey Heck. "Then people get excited."

For the first 10 years, the company's only product was its flapjack mix. As sales increased the family outgrew its original manufacturing company. A second firm couldn't sustain orders, and a third went out of business. The family finally turned to Lehi Roller Mills, where coincidentally, Grandpa Christofferson had worked as a teenager nearly a century earlier.

Today, Jon, Joel, their mother and father, Richard Clark, a retired teacher, remain involved in Baker Mills. The company sells a variety of 100 percent whole-grain products nationwide in more than 3,000 grocery stores.

dawn@sltrib.com