Fifteen years ago, with Stacey Marsh about to deliver their first daughter, her husband Mike rushed to her hospital bedside, his clothes covered in flour.

The birth of their daughter coincided with the opening of their bakery in Ann Arbor, which under Mike’s direction was just starting to produce the unique oval-shaped flatbread they call “Flatout.” The Marshes had a second daughter the next year and have since juggled parenting with the demands of a growing business.

“Flatout’s like our baby,” says Stacey Marsh. “It’s a part of your life, and you just plow ahead.”

Those years of plowing long hours into their business—with Stacey focusing on sales and marketing and Mike handling manufacturing—have seen their “baby” grow up even faster than their daughters. Originally an extension of their small chain of Yes Sandwich Cafes, the bakery quickly became their sole focus. In 2003, gross sales of their flatbreads and wraps were $7.5 million. The following year, Flatout moved to a 35,000-square-foot facility on Woodland Dr. in Saline’s Redies Industrial Park.

In 2010, the Marshes sold part of the company to the private equity firms North Castle Partners, headquartered in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Bloomfield Hills–based Glencoe Capital, as a way to gain needed capital and additional expertise. Two years ago, they spent $1.3 million upgrading their facility. Today, four lines turn out Flatout’s patented breads around the clock.

Sales rocketed upward to $52.3 million last year. With a staff of 150, Flatout is now one of Saline’s ten largest employers. Then, this past March, the Marshes and their co-investors sold Flatout, Inc., for $92 million to the T. Marzetti Co., a wholly owned subsidiary of Lancaster Colony Corp., based in Columbus.

The sale included the Marshes’ 35 percent stake. But that doesn’t mean their baby is leaving home. The Saline facility and the Flat-out team remain intact. Stacey, fifty, is now vice president for marketing; Mike, fifty-two, is vice president of operations.

“We have complete freedom to innovate in the future,” says Stacey Marsh in an interview in Flatout’s conference room. “They [Marzetti] want to operate the business status quo as much as possible.”

Marzetti senior vice president Bob Charleston says Flatout’s story mirrors Marzetti’s own: their founders first established local restaurants and then, heeding customer demand, turned to producing and selling the food specialties they developed there—flatbread for Flatout, salad dressings for Marzetti.

“The principal attraction to Flatout is that it’s a growing product,” Charleston says. “It’s ‘on trend,’ as the marketing folks would say. And it has tremendous growth potential.”

Part of that growth potential will come from an expanding product line.

In May, Flatout introduced new gluten-free and protein-enriched flatbreads, adding to an existing array of twenty-one distinct flatbread products, including fourteen different flavors of its signature flatbread. It also offers several different flavors in its figure-eight-shaped “Foldit,” as well as its classic white pinwheel lavash flatbread.

“We still have the vision,” Stacey Marsh says. “All of the creation and the trends and looking at what’s coming ahead, we still have all that.”

As one of Washtenaw County’s most successful food start-ups, Flatout had a number of suitors. Marsh says they judged Marzetti to be the best match.

“They are smart, savvy, and bring skills and ideas that match ours,” she says.

The Saline plant runs twenty-four hours a day, Monday through Friday, and turns out half a million flatbreads daily. On especially breezy days, the pleasant aroma of baking bread wafts across nearby neighborhoods.

“The goal is to make sure we produce a lot of good-quality products every day with happy employees,” said Omar Bunu, a production manager who lives in Ann Arbor and worked his way up from temporary bakery worker five years ago.

In the plant, giant mixers combine Michigan-milled flour, which is stored in three towering silos on site, with other ingredients to produce large sheets of dough. The dough is cut into flatbread pieces and then sent through ovens to bake for forty-five seconds.

After being inspected and cooled, the flatbread is stacked for packaging, then boxed and trucked to freezer warehouses, where it is stored until it’s shipped to retail and food-service customers in all fifty states, Mexico, Canada, and Puerto Rico.

Inventing a new food and creating a brand is every entrepreneur’s dream, but “if we were going to continue to grow and innovate we had to get support,” Stacey Marsh says. “And that’s why we sold to Marzetti’s.”

Flatout’s workers seem confident that Marzetti will be a good fit.

“I think it’s a good thing,” said Randy Anderson, a Flatout shipping and receiving supervisor who lives in Saline. “I think it’s going to help us grow.”

Twenty years ago, the Marshes chose the brand name Flatout. It’s apt both to describe their flatbread and its meteoric rise in the marketplace in meeting growing consumer demand for bread-alternative wraps and healthy eating options. But the name also says a lot about them.

“We love it,” Marsh says. “It captures our passion and the general way we live our lives.”