The recipe for a good cheesecake features a number of important ingredients. The list may vary depending on who’s in the kitchen, but it often includes cream cheese, sugar, eggs, vanilla, among other things.

The list of items needed for a successful cheesecake company, it turns out, is a longer, more complicated list. Eli’s Cheesecake is a third-generation bakery operation that’s been turning out tempting desserts and treats for more than four decades. In the case of this particular company, the recipe includes premium ingredients, high-quality standards, and, (perhaps most importantly) a people-first philosophy that started with its namesake founder, continues with his son, and is set to carry on through the next generation (and beyond).

The early days

Eli Schulman was born in Chicago in 1910. When his father died in 1926, young Eli had to drop out of high school and pursued a number of jobs, in business and politics, to keep his family fed.

In 1940, Eli spotted a foreclosure notice on the front door of the neighborhood coffee shop—despite the rough economic climate and the challenges of being a businessman in wartime America, he turned that flagging business into the beginnings of a successful career as a restauranteur. Among the beloved eateries run by Eli and the rest of the Schulman family was Eli’s Stage Delicatessen—opened in 1962, the joint eventually became as well known for feeding Barbra Streisand and other marquee names as much as the food itself. Then came Eli’s Place for Steak in 1966, an upscale restaurant that delighted diners like Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. with the finest cuts of meat and décor for several decades, with Eli himself greeting guests nightly.

Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

“My Dad had this almost 50-year career in the restaurant business being known as a great host, serving great food leading up to Eli's The Place for Steak,” Marc relates. “He was always a dreamer. He'd always think about what something could be. He wasn't a trained chef, but he just created wonderful food and ambience.”

Eli pondered ways to offer customers a way to savor a piece of the restaurant outside of the dining room. In addition to its top-tier service, the place was famous for savory chopped liver, trays of chilled vegetable crudites, and bread baskets piled high with fresh-baked matzoh and raisin pumpernickel. Another treat diners raved about was his cheesecake that he developed in the kitchen at the steak house.

Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

“His signature cheesecake made its debut at the first Taste of Chicago, which was on July 4th, 1980,” Marc shares. “He came out there in a coat and tie—they were hand-cutting cheesecakes, and there were thousands of people there, and Eli's Cheesecake quickly became a Chicago staple.”

Marc says throughout the growth of the business Eli created and fostered over 80 years ago, and which the subsequent generations of culinary and business talents in the Schulman family have helped stoke, the company has worked with two values at top of mind:

• Charity will never bust you
• Treat others as if you were the other

Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

“The wonderful thing is today, here we are, third generation, 84 years after my dad went in the restaurant business, telling his story,” relates Marc. And while it’s true that the company has executed a number of impressive projects for high-profile celebrities—including special cheesecakes to celebrate the birthdays of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, just this year, the 20th anniversary of Chicago’s famed Millennium Park—Marc, his wife, Maureen, who his head of public relations at Eli’s, and his daughter Elana treat the Eli’s Cheesecake staff as if they are the true stars.

When Marc was growing up as the only child of Eli and Esther Schulman, the family restaurant was “the center of our life,” he relates. Still, there was a stretch where it did not necessarily seem inevitable that he would follow in his father’s delicious footsteps.

“My parents really wanted me to get a good education,” he says. “I went to college at the University of Denver, then I went to Northwestern Law School.” Then, he said, he tackled some internships, then spent five years practicing law, including real estate, corporate, and historic preservation work.

However, the sweetness of the family business called to him, and in 1984, Marc left his successful legal career behind to head up Eli’s Cheesecake. Since then, he hasn’t looked back.

“When you're a lawyer, everything's transactional--you buy a building, sell a business, etc.,” Marc confides. “Here, I feel I have a dream job—we have this amazing team that supports us, and it's so much more fun than being a lawyer.”

While he states the business has its share of concerns—customers, products, the safety of the food, and its workers among them—he feels fortunate that he gets to go every day to a job that gets him excited.

“I always say you wake up for work at 4:00 in the morning either because you're terrified, or because you're excited," he says. “Here, that things are happening every day, both within the business and in the community, and you’re just magnifying your impact. I think the idea that we get to do that is just, ‘Wow.’ It's a labor of love, but how else could you do something like this?”

Workforce cultivation

Eli Schulman believed in investing in his people when he was growing the business in the 20th century. Now, as the guardian of the Schulman legacy in the 21st, Marc is carrying on that people-first philosophy, including in the policies behind recruiting, retaining, and developing Eli’s Cheesecake staff. When Marc was still relatively new at the helm, he looked for ways to partner with other like-minded companies on efforts to attract and educate staff. Not everyone was on board.

Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

“Thirty years ago, we approached Chicago food companies about the importance of education and working together, saying, ‘Hey, we have some training opportunities.’ One company, which wasn’t a bakery, effectively said, ‘Nah, we'd rather keep our people stupid.’”

That was at a time, Marc relates, when labor was more affordable and easier to draw in a facility’s doors. Now, he points out, wages are higher, benefits are pricier, and it is much more of a challenge to attract and keep workers that are talented, dedicated, and in it for the long haul.

“The bottom line is whatever strategy you can use to have long-term people committed to the mission, is really good business,” he states.

One labor pool Eli’s has been diving into for years is the population of refugees, immigrants, and other new Americans that live in the surrounding area. With Chicago’s history of attracting and welcoming such people, it has a large number of diverse applicants for Eli’s Cheesecake to raw from.

“We, as a company, have had success hiring refugees and new Americans; we've been doing that for over 30 years,” he relates.

As part of its recruitment efforts, Eli’s Cheesecake collaborates with RefugeeOne, a Chicago-based organization that since 1982 has worked to connect people fleeing war, genocide, natural disaster, and other crises around the world with ways to build new lives in the area—including helping them find steady jobs. The Eli’s payroll is full of employees who left lives of turmoil to land in Chicago and find gainful employment making brownies, decorating cakes, packaging finished products, and filling other positions. One such success story is longtime staffer Elias Kasongo.

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Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

"He came to Eli's 30 years ago as a refugee from the Congo, had been in a camp in Zambia for four years,” Marc shares. “He didn't know where he would end up, but through RefugeeOne, he came to Chicago, and the place they took him to work was Eli's.”

Kasongo got his start in the facility’s dish room, washing plates. He worked his way up through various job descriptions, each time taking on new roles and responsibilities. Today, he serves as the vice president of procurement.

“Now he buys over $30 million of stuff a year and he's a senior operating officer,” Marc boasts. “As we go through the bakery, if you look at our managers in many different departments, they came from Kosovo or other places and Chicago became their home.”

Marc also points toward the company’s long track record of connecting disabled individuals with fulfilling work in various positions. The practice dates back three decades, and most recently Eli’s Cheesecake has tapped into Project Wright Access—founded in 2022, the program (a partnership among nearby Wilbur Wright College, the Chicago School for Agricultural Sciences, Jacqueline B. Vaughn Occupational High School, and Eli’s) brings people living with cognitive disabilities into the facility and provides them with work and formalized job training.

“We create opportunities and internships with students with cognitive disabilities, and that can either result in a full-time employment at Eli's, in the industry,” Marc explains.

The various hiring, training, and retention programs Eli’s Cheesecake has put in place over the years has led to a highly diverse workforce inside the plant. Visitors to the facility might see staffers on a line producing brownies wearing hijabs or turbans, they are likely to hear multiple languages as they walk the plant floor, and they might notice the prayer and meditation room as they wind their way through the offices. While other managers might see the array of varying cultures represented as a challenge, Marc sees the diversity as a positive.

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Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

“You want to have your company be a nice place,” he shares. “If I have a bad day, all I have to do is to walk into the bakery and see the good people and how hard they're working on our behalf. It always makes the day better,” he says. We can draw a lot of people, and our goal is to be an employer of choice. It's fundamental to our culture, and I think that's why it's one of the major reasons we've been successful.”

The next generation

As director of special projects, Elana is a fixture around the company and is poised to take the reins of the Eli’s Cheesecake empire one day. She has under her belt a degree in film studies from Vassar College and an impressive range of documentary and film experience (including with Vice Media, where she landed a 2016 James Beard award for her work on “The Sushi Chef: Oona Tempest and Toshio Oguma”). However, it seems the food business has been in her blood from early on.

Courtesy of Eli's Cheesecake

“I've always been obsessed with food and hospitality,” Elana relates. “I grew up in the restaurant. I loved being there. For my 10th birthday, I asked for a cordless vacuum and a table crumber. I loved that environment.”

Then Elana, along with her two sisters, spent her childhood summers at Eli’s; she worked the company’s popular booth at the Taste of Chicago festival, loving every minute.

“I just had so much fun doing it. I always knew that that's what I wanted to do eventually,” she shares.

In early 2019, Elana joined the Eli’s Cheesecake company. More than five years after jumping back into the family business, she’s as much a fixture at the facility as her dad Marc—walking around the ovens, strolling past the finished products as they roll along the conveyors, and greeting various staffers by name, with a wave and a smile.

“I love people, and I think that that definitely comes from my grandfather and from my dad being really people focused,” Elana shares. “I really like documentary producing because it was sort of this mix between really being creative but then also all the logistics that go along with production but then also developing relationships with people and helping them tell their story. It seems like it doesn't really relate to cheesecake, but I actually think it does in a lot of ways. We're telling stories every day, and so much of our brand is about telling our story and our heritage.”

And while others might find the prospect of carrying on a company legacy that dates back so many decades, Elana expresses excitement of carrying on the next chapter of the Eli’s Cheesecake story.