Cookie dough is the latest dessert trend
The line for Dō, a sweet shop in Greenwich Village in New York, wound halfway down the block on a recent Thursday evening. Inside, employees wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words “eat dessert first” offered tastes of flavors like chocolate chip, chocolate dream and saltyand-sweet to customers — college students and young professionals — who just could not make up their minds.
Dō is set up like an ice cream parlor. There are circles of kindergarten colors on the bright white walls; servers wield scoops and a menu that includes sundaes, milkshakes, waffle cones and, yes, ice cream. But the big draw is brick-thick cookie dough, just like grandma and your mother used to make (or would have if they had had Nutella in the larder and a heavy hand with sprinkles).
Kristen Tomlan, Dō’s owner, like other purveyors in the emerging category of edible cookie dough — is aiming for the sweet spot between nostalgia (oh, those childhood memories of licking the beaters and the bowl), and guilt. Oh, whose warnings from Grandma that raw batter wasn’t good for you or safe to eat, even if the nature of the danger (salmonella from raw eggs; E. coli from raw flour) was never explained.
And that, of course, is part of what makes the edible cookie dough business tricky: The need to make clear to customers that this dough is perfectly fine to eat (because it’s egg-free and made with specially treated flour) yet every bit as delicious as the dough they remember from way back when.
Initially, “there were all these questions of about whether it was safe to eat,” said Tomlan, who started her business online in 2015 and opened the Dō store in January. “There was a bit of a challenge to get over that hump.”
Purveyors of rival cookie doughs describe the same learning curve — one that did not afflict, say, a recent sweet-of-themoment, the Cronut. Some people misunderstand the product entirely and leap to the conclusion that it is just another iteration of refrigerator case sliceand-bake cookies.
To combat confusion, the Cookie Dough Café uses the slogan “Eat it! Don’t Bake it!” for its business, which sells edible dough online and through supermarkets. And Unbaked: A Cookie Dough Bar, a small online company, uses the tagline “Forget the oven, grab a spoon!”
At Edoughble, a 4-year-old Los Angeles-based business that sells edible cookie dough online and in a few supermarkets, the founder, Rana Lustyan, a former pastry chef, said that there was “a lot of consumer education” involved.
“When we first launched, people were baffled by the idea of raw dough,” Lustyan said. “Everybody thought you were supposed to bake it.”
Wrong. Well, mostly wrong. Dō’s dough, unlike most others in the category, can be baked as well as well as eaten exactly as is.
While people may be moved by nostalgia to try flavors like “Chocolate Chip Off the Ol’ Block” (from Edoughble) or “Brownie Batter” (from Dō) or “Cake Batter” (from Unbaked), the challenge, according to food industry experts, is getting them to come back for seconds.
“A lot of these trends are built on emotions,” said Phil Lempert, an industry analyst who calls himself the Supermarket Guru. “The feeling of eating that raw cookie batter when your mother was making it is very strong for a lot of people, and that’s what this plays on. It brings us back to a moment when we felt safe and really good.”
Lempert added, “I’m not sure the taste profile of cookie dough is exceptional, but the emotion is.”
And there is this: millennials don’t want to eat the same new food twice, Lempert said. “It’s either got to taste really good or be good for you to get that repeat business, and I don’t see that with cookie dough,” he said. “People will say, ‘I did it and I don’t need to do it again.’”
Joan Pacetti and her sister Julia Clark, the founders and owners of Cookie Dough Café, beg to differ. They got their first account in 2012 and are now in 9,500 stores nationwide, among them, Fresh Market, Kroger, Walmart and Albertsons.
“We came up with the recipes ourselves using different ratios of butters and sugars,” said Pacetti, who previously worked in the compliance department at State Farm Insurance. “We’d mix up a batch and get feedback from friends and family, who’d say, ‘that’s a cute idea.’”
Those taste testers didn’t think the product was marketable, but the sisters were undaunted. “We knew what we had,” Pacetti said. At dinner one night, they talked about how much they loved batter but didn’t want to eat the cookie once it was baked, Pacetti recalled, “and we thought, ‘We can’t be the only ones.’” They have since learned, she said, that “Ninety percent of our customers eat the cookie dough right out of the container.”
Olivia Hops, the owner of Unbaked, who had had a small baking business as a teenager, had her own aha! moment while standing in line one day at Coldstone Creamery and taking note of an ice cream flavor called “cookie dough.” “I thought, ‘what about forgetting ice cream and going straight cookie dough?’”
Hops, 21, had a brief unhappy stint editing video at the NFL Network before deciding she wanted to be her own boss. She began experimenting in the kitchen of her apartment in Woodland Hills, Calif., using standard recipes but removing the eggs and leavening. When she opened for business online in April 2015, the first month’s sales were decidedly unimpressive: $300.
Last month, by contrast, she grossed $17,000, thanks in part to concerted marketing on social media. Teala Dunn, an actress and Youtube star, has become a steady Unbaked customer, and posted to Twitter about it.
“We’re trying to get into convenience stores on college campuses,” said Hops, who still does all the dough preparation out of her apartment with a pair of Kitchenaid mixers and a 20-quart mixer (though she has conscripted her boyfriend to take all the orders — an average of 35 a day — to the post office).
Darren Seifer, the food and beverage analyst at the market research firm NPD, said that consumers were becoming increasingly mindful of their sugar intake — particularly at home — although they can be wooed by an indulgence while away from home. “But you have to feel you’re getting something different, a treat, a reward,” Seifer said, and cookie dough would seem to qualify.
Plus, he said, “the concept of eating raw cookie dough isn’t new, and that’s important for consumers. Innovation that asks for only slight changes in habits has a greater likelihood of success.”
That is exactly what propelled Tomlan of Dō. During her childhood in St. Louis, she would routinely make double batches of cookies with her mother, gobbling down almost an entire bowl of batter before it got to the oven.
Fast-forward to 2013 when she was driving to Philadelphia with friends. They stopped at a cookie shop, but rather than choosing cookies, they bought a tub of dough intended for at-home baking. “We started passing it around, Tomlan recalled, “and I had this lightbulb moment of, ‘Why is this not a thing? Why are we sitting in a car and feeling bad about eating it and worrying about getting sick?’”
Why indeed? At the time, Tomlan was an associate at a brand strategy consulting firm and putting her trend-spotting skills to work after hours. “It was just after cupcakes had come and gone, and I was thinking that maybe the cookie dough could be the next big dessert craze,” she said.
Given the warnings on her website — that there is a fouritem limit per customer, that the line at the store starts forming before the shop opens at 10 a.m., and that people should expect to stand in line for 30 minutes to three hours, depending on the day and the time — she called the craze correctly. “The response,” Tomlan said, “has been amazing.”
Many customers come into her store with a story to tell. It invariably begins, “when I was little and baking with my mom ...”
“The nostalgia is unlike with any other dessert concept,” Tomlan said. “There’s an emotional connection that you can’t manufacture. It’s inherent in the product and unique to cookie dough.”