Wallace “Wally” Amos, founder of the chocolate chip cookie brand Famous Amos, has died. He was 88.
Amos died Tuesday at this home in Honolulu, his children Shawn and Sarah Amos told the New York Times. The cause was complications of dementia.
Born on July 1, 1936, in Tallahassee, Fla., Amos moved to Harlem in his early teens to live with his aunt, Della Bryant, who would bake cookies for him.
After serving in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, Amos returned to New York and joined the William Morris Agency. He started in the mailroom and worked his way up the ranks to become the agency’s first Black talent agent. He notably signed Simon and Garfunkel and worked with Motown artists such as the Supremes, Diana Ross, Sam Cooke and Dionne Warwick.
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In 1967, Amos moved to Los Angeles, where he began to bake as a pastime as he struggled to set up his own personal management company.
“I began to bake as a hobby; it was a kind of therapy,” Amos told theNew York Timesin 1975. “I’d go to meetings with record company or movie people and bring along some cookies, and pretty soon everybody was asking for them.”
With the help of a $25,000 loan from his celebrity friends, music legends Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy, Amos opened the first Famous Amos store on Sunset Boulevard in L.A. The bite-sized cookies, derived from a recipe Amos learned from his aunt, were known for their natural ingredients and lack of preservatives. Famous Amos sold $300,000 worth of cookies its first year and reached $12 million in revenue by 1982.
Due to mismanagement and financial struggles, Amos gradually sold off equity stakes in Famous Amos through the mid-to-late ’80s. In 1988, he sold the remainder of the cookie brand to a private equity firm, the Shansby Group, for $3 million. Amos went on to sell baked goods under other names, including Uncle Noname, Uncle Wally’s Muffin Co. and the cookie Kahuna.
Outside of the Famous Amos cookie empire, Amos appeared as a guest on the television series “The Office,” “Taxi” and “The Jeffersons.”
Amos is survived by his wife, Christine Harris-Amos, and children Shawn, Sarah, Gregory and Michael.
