About a year ago, Great Falls resident Amy Dean started playing around with recipes for nut-free energy bars. Now, Jesse Bars LLC, named for her youngest daughter, is a licensed business, and Dean packages and distributes dozens of the bars she makes in her kitchen.

Two of her three children have nut allergies and her daughter, Jenna, now 14, was tired of watching her volleyball teammates eat granola bars and energy bars during tournaments, when she had no comparable snacks for herself.

While food allergies are on the rise, it has become increasingly difficult to find high-energy, healthy snacks that do not contain traces of nuts, said Dean, who also coaches volleyball at Langley High School. Those that she was able to find were generally expensive and did not go over well with her children.

OVER THE YEARS, Dean had experimented with healthy, allergen-free recipes but without much luck, "and this recipe I came up with turned out really, really good," she said. She researched many recipes and started experimenting with a few of her own. "I threw in everything I knew my kids would like and I took out everything that would kill them," she said.

When the recipe turned out well, she started taste testing the bars among local people with allergies. "I started thinking, ‘Wow, we could really fill a need with this,’" she said. She tweaked the recipe for a month or two and came up with three flavors — "Choc-Oat Chip," "Berry Oat" and the combination "Choc-Oat Berry."

Last May, she started her business. She named the bars after Jessica, also known as Jesse, 10, who has the most severe allergies in the family and has gone into anaphylactic shock four times as a result of accidental nut consumption. Dean said most of her customers now are local residents and their friends, only about half of whom have children with nut allergies. Some weeks, she makes 300 bars and other weeks only a dozen.

Jessica often brings home money that classmates have given her for orders of bars.

When large orders come in, the kitchen becomes a bakery and the dining room is a packaging area. "We basically don’t eat really good meals that week because it’s all about the bars," Dean said. As a stay-home mother, though, she can do much of the work while the children are in school.

The Great Falls-based Media Plus Design created the Web site and designed the labels and Dean said she hopes to one day increase production to the point that the snacks will come in regular wrappers like other mass-produced energy bars. By that point, the business would have to move out of the kitchen and into a separate facility.

MEANWHILE, she said, she is taking it slow, perfecting her business model and making sure she can keep up with demand. Once the business is turning a profit, a portion will be donated to food allergy research. "Our dream is to have a big enough business where we could give them a whole lot of money to cure this," Dean said.

Also in the future could be new flavors and bars that cater to those with dairy, gluten and soy allergies. For now, Dean said, she just likes seeing Jesse Bars eaten around the nut-free lunch table at Jesse’s school.