Wally Amos, Famous Amos cookie creator, dies at 88: Reports
Wally Amos appears in an episode of "The Jeffersons" in 1980. (Photo by CBS via Getty Images)
Wally Amos, a talent agent turned cookie master who transformed a single Los Angeles bakery into a national brand, has reportedly died. He was 88 years old.
His children, Shawn and Sarah Amos, confirmed his death to The New York Times and TMZ. They said he died of complications from dementia.
Amos was born in 1936 and served in the Air Force before joining the William Morris Agency, where he started in the mailroom and eventually worked his way up to being the music industry’s first black talent agent, according to the History Channel. He signed Simon and Garfunkel and worked with The Supremes, Diana Ross and other superstars.
In 1975, Amos was living in Los Angeles after a job there had backfired. He began baking cookies as a hobby to relieve stress. That same year, with his aunt’s recipe – and the help of celebrity investors like Marvin Gaye and Helen Reddy – Amos opened his first bakery on Sunset Boulevard.
Famous Amos was the talk of the town in Hollywood, with celebrities lining up to get the handmade cookies. Amos made $300,000 in revenue his first year in business. By 1981, the company was worth $12 million. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan gave Amos one of the first Awards of Entrepreneurial Excellence.
The monumental success proved to be short-lived: His son said Amos was a great marketer, but a not-so-great businessman who made some poor business decisions.
According to The New York Times, Amos sold off equity stakes through the 1980s, selling the remainder of his company to a private equity firm in 1988 for $3 million.
He would go on to try a few other cookie ventures before briefly coming on as a spokesperson for Keebler – which owned Famous Amos – in 1999.
In 2016, Amos appeared in an episode of "Shark Tank," the reality TV show in which entrepreneurs pitch ideas to five business moguls. He sought a $50,000 investment for 20% equity in his Hawaii-based company, Cookie Kahuna.
Amos didn’t get an investment, but he did see a spike in sales for a while. Cookie Kahuna went out of business in 2018.
Amos authored multiple books about his experiences. His son Shawn has said Amos was a big advocate for literacy. In 1991, President George H.W. Bush gave Amos a National Literacy Honors Award.