Students craving delicious cookies may be disappointed to find Dough to Door missing when they walk to the Delmar Loop via the Overpass.

Dough to Door, the local cookie bakery well known to the Washington University community, has moved a half mile east from Melville Avenue to Delmar Boulevard and is now located near Pi Pizzeria and the Delmar MetroLink station.

With their three-year lease on the Melville location expiring, the co-owners of the bakery decided to move to a larger store that would be more convenient for deliveries and have more visibility to the St. Louis community.

“We had a lot of good memories [on Melville]. But we had to look at what was best for our business, as well as the logistics of getting in and out of the Loop because traffic was a huge issue, especially on the weekends,” co-owner Ernest Dixson said. “Being where we are now is a lot more convenient for us and hopefully the customers. Being on Delmar also means more visibility, which we definitely need.”

While the move may result in a loss of business from Wash. U. students living near the Overpass, Dixson believes that the benefits of the move will compensate for those losses. Those benefits include a faster delivery time, which will be 30 minutes instead of an hour. This improvement, Dixson expects, will make delivery a much more popular method for students. He hopes the bakery will gain more revenue from this change.

“Our walk-up traffic is going to decrease and we knew this would happen going in,” Dixson said, “but our improved delivery time will continue to attract students. We’ve also established ourselves pretty well in the Wash. U. community for the past three years, so I’m not expecting a significant decrease in Wash. U. student customers.”

The new store also features a larger kitchen, giving the bakery the ability to deal with a larger quantity of orders than it could previously. The store’s small kitchen on Melville restricted the number of orders that the bakery could take, often keeping it from filling orders. For example, when Wash. U. ordered Happy Hour cookies on Thursday afternoons, Dough to Door couldn’t handle any other orders at that time, pushing customers away. With new, upgraded bakery equipment and more workers in the kitchen, Dixson is confident that Dough to Door can fix these issues.

“When we looked for a new store, size was definitely near the top of our list because we knew how much of an issue it was in limiting our business,” Dixson said. “Customers are going to benefit from this in the long run, and the large space gives us the potential to continue spreading our business.”

Dixson hopes that being on Delmar will expose the store to more St. Louis natives who were not aware of the store’s existence on Melville. In addition, the new store features easier parking, in contrast to the small curbside parking spaces on Melville.

Dough to Door currently only offers Bear Bucks as a method of payment at the store; however, the owners are working on the option of allowing students to pay with Bear Bucks for deliveries. Dixson said the process has been challenging, and he is uncertain whether this will be a feasible option in the future.

Student reactions to Dough to Door’s move were mixed. Some expressed their disappointment in how far the new location is from campus.

“Living on Greenway, I was looking forward to stopping by Dough to Door from time to time,” senior Brian Basco said. “The extra walking is really not that great, especially if you want to use Bear Bucks.”

Other students are excited about the new delivery system, although they hope Bear Bucks will quickly become a delivery option.

“I like how they’re decreasing the waiting time,” senior Sydney Kapp, who lives on campus, said. “Time is an important factor, and I think more students will be more willing to choose delivery. They should definitely include Bear Bucks as an option since it’ll attract even more students.”