Our Story

Panbangers started in a kitchen that was already too full.

In 2025, Jourdan and Tobin Ludwig were caregiving for both of their aging fathers — one with cancer, one with Alzheimer's — inside a house that already had three kids under ten, one very good dog, and zero extra bandwidth. Life got loud. Life got heavy. Some days it was impossible to hold it together, let alone leave the house.

So Tobin baked. Not as a hobby. As a lifeline. When you can't fix the hard things — the decline, the exhaustion, the grief that arrives before anyone is actually gone — you look for something you can control. For Tobin, a CPG veteran and co-founder of Hella Cocktail Co., that thing was dough. The measuring, the mixing, the waiting. Every tray out of the oven was small, warm proof that something could still come out right.

The recipe, with an abundance of butter, spreads and ripples as it bakes. Halfway through the bake you open the oven and bang the pan against the rack. The impact flattens the dough mid-rise, creating those signature rippled edges — crispy where it should crunch, impossibly soft where it should give and enough surface area for a very generous sprinkling of large flake sea salt. 

Another thing about the bang: it felt incredible. After a day of holding everything together between the kids and the grandpas, there was something deeply satisfying about picking up the pan and slamming it down.

We couldn't yell. We couldn't fall apart. But we could make the dough and we could bang the pan. It became a beautiful and necessary release. 

Soon, it also became a signal. With every bang, both grandpas would slowly make their way to the kitchen. Grandpa Lud with his walker, Grandpa Andy with his cane. They would sit at their counter stools and wait for their cookie. Not long after, the kids would burst through the front door and land right at the kitchen counter with the grandpas, looking for cookies. Three generations in one chaotic household, gathered by a bang. 

It was in one of those moments where Grandpa Andy, a retired award-winning business professor from the Ross School of Business, looked at us and said, "you could sell these."

Panbangers is a family brand in the most literal sense — born in sandwich generation chaos, refined through obsession, made with everything we had left.

We hope you taste all of it.

— Jourdan & Tobin Ludwig