Walk into Foodie’s, head on over to the frozen dessert specialty items and featured prominently is a shelf full of 600lb. Gorillas Chocolate Chip Cookies and ice cream sandwiches with a sign taped to the freezer door: Duxbury’s own.

That’s because the oddly-named company (think about it) is owned by Duxbury’s Paula and Chris White.

“It sells great here,” said Foodie’s store manager Bobby McPhail. “I can’t keep the case filled. I think it’s great.” Recipients of the Massachusetts Small Business Person of the Year Award last week, the Whites run their multi-million dollar company out of an office adjacent to their kitchen – and often right from their kitchen table while their three children buzz around them and their specialty cookies bake in the oven. On this day, Paula was managing the business while youngest daughter Raegen, 8, colored nearby, son, Mickey, 15, was out with friends and calling in multiple times, daughter Rylee, 13, remained at school and husband Chris, was resting upstairs, recovering from a virus that ran through the family.

By all appearances, the Whites are an average Duxbury family. They live in a sprawling antique on Washington Street and spend their free time coaching basketball, volunteering with PTA, and lolling away summer afternoons at the beach, but life wasn’t always so rosy. Both engineers, neither their professional nor personal lives fulfilled them when they had their first child. Paula, who grew up in New Bedford, always dreamed of living in an antique home near the beach and she didn’t believe her then career path would bring her there.

“Once we had our son, the corporate world wasn’t working anymore,” said Paula White, referring to that time in 1999. “I was spending only two hours a day with my baby and there was no way out. It was a kick in the butt.”

That kick was what they needed to make the leap to – cookies?

“We ate them all the time,” said Paula, referring to the prepackaged cookie rolls. “We would bake two or three cookies in the toaster oven at night that weren’t very good, so we decided to be the Ben and Jerry’s of cookies.”

Chris, whose father was involved in the food industry, worked on creating a great recipe (think a heaping helping of chocolate chunks and butter, lots of butter). He came up with the idea to package individual balls of cookie dough that could go from freezer to oven, no mess, no fuss. Paula, who isn’t as familiar around the kitchen as evidenced by daughter Raegen warning her not to burn the cookies while Paula told their story, got to work learning how to finance their dream.

She attended a free seminar through her local Small Business Administration (SBA) to guide those interested in starting a business. She studied packaging and marketing, and when they were ready, approached John Mannion at South Shore Savings Bank for an SBA secured loan.

Armed with a great recipe, a little bit of know-how and seed money, they were ready for their first consumer show in Boston. Putting her new-found marketing knowledge to good use, Paula handed out countless cookies and with them postcards addressed to supermarkets asking them to stock their freezers with their product. As a result of Paula’s savvy, Gorilla cookies were stocked in every market the Whites approached.

“We thought we had made it by April 2000,” said Paula, as she pulled warm chocolate chip cookies from the oven. “We had over 600 supermarkets, but because we didn’t know any better, our cookies went straight to the bottom shelf.”

What followed was years of driving up and down the east coast, visiting stores to offer samples to supermarket shoppers, meeting with buyers and weekend overnight shifts at their Connecticut packing company. Paula remembers eight-hour shifts on her feet while pregnant with daughter Rylee, as Chris continued working fulltime during the week.

“When you don’t have a lot of money,” said Paula, “you get creative.”

The Whites knew they had to expand. They believed so strongly in their cookies, they knew that if they could get people to try 600lb. Gorilla once, they would buy their cookie again. So in 2004, they tried the mother of all club stores, BJ’s Wholesale Club, and like every other step on their journey, they came up against yet another obstacle.

“[The buyer] said he’d give us the whole enchilada,” said Paula, who was pregnant with Raegen at the time. “But it’s a little different, there it’s on consignment.”

That meant if their product didn’t sell, they wouldn’t get paid. Worse, after five years in business, they still weren’t able to take a salary.

“We had maxed out all of our credit cards, used our house as collateral and I was eight months pregnant with my third child,” said Paula, of that time in 2005. “We went to John Mannion again. It was the first time in five years we could breathe. It was a credit to the SBA and South Shore Savings Bank because they really helped us.”

Soon, business began to pick up for the Whites. Real Simple magazine and The Washington Post ran cookie taste tests and 600lb. Gorillas won both, said Paula as she set a plate of cookies on her long kitchen table. After sampling a bite, it was easy to understand why.

Yet there wasn’t meaningful financial progress until the day a buyer at BJ’s suggested they expand their line to include ice cream sandwiches. As with the cookies, the Whites used only premium all natural ingredients and soon business picked up.

“We were stinking poor,” said Paula. “In 2007, we had our first small profit. In 2008, we started drawing a salary.”

After the introduction of the ice cream sandwich, everything changed and her dream that they had worked for so hard and so long came true. Said Paula, “We moved to Duxbury on Christmas Eve 2009.”

Bob Nelson, the state director of the SBA said the Whites are the perfect example of what a Small Business Person of the Year exemplifies.

“It’s a public/private partnership,” said Nelson. The bank provided the money, we provided the guarantee to the loan, and Paula and her husband provided the commitment and perseverance.”

Nelson was so impressed with the Whites, he went to his local supermarket to buy both their cookies and ice cream, and is now hooked.

Sitting in her kitchen, in the house she long dreamed of, as her kids politely interrupt her workday, Paula serves her cookies and looks around at all she and her husband have accomplished.

“There’s not a day that I don’t appreciate this house,” she said. “And when you think about it all, it’s kind of amazing.”