Brownies, Cakes, And Ex-Im Bank Collide

If you’ve eaten cheesecake, chocolate cake or brownies at a major chain restaurant, there’s a good chance it was made by Love and Quiches Gourmet in Freeport, N.Y.

Susan Axelrod, the company’s chairwoman and founder, started the company in her home kitchen in 1973 and knocked on thousands of doors to get people interested in her quiche and desserts. The company grew from there and now has several hundred employees who help the company sell pastries and a variety of cakes all over the world.

That success, Ms. Axelrod said, is partly attributable to the U.S. Export-Import Bank, a small government agency that could be shut down if Congress doesn’t act by the end of September. Love and Quiches started using the Ex-Im Bank almost 20 years ago and, like thousands of small business around the country, found it crucial to its success.

Love and Quiches relies on the Bank’s credit insurance program. The Bank charges the company a fee for insurance in case a foreign customer fails to pay for the desserts the company ships abroad.

But in the nearly two decades since Ms. Axelrod starting using the Bank, her company hasn’t had to file a claim with the Ex-Im Bank. “We’re very careful who we do business with. We’ve never had a claim – never,” she said.

The Ex-Im Bank named Love and Quiches its 2014 Small Business Exporter of the Year, an award that Ms. Axelrod is proud to discuss.

She said the company doesn’t want the Ex-Im Bank to go away.

And that, she said, would make it “harder for us to compete with all the other bakery companies in the world that get more support from their government.”

She said other small businesses don’t have the same flexibility as her company and, without Ex-Im Bank, they “would have to walk away from their export business.”