
Winning a Private Kitchen in the Nation’s Premier Food Incubator
Winning a Private Kitchen in the Nation’s Premier Food Incubator through Mid-West Dairy
Butter – a novel ingredient that in the world of cookies. I’d even go as far to say it has become a little passee…over 95% of the cookie dough market is made up of brands who use palm oil because it is INSANELY less expensive and just never focused on quality.
That was my pitch to the Mid-West Dairy team who came and judged a competition at The Hatchery (My Food Incubator, where BAKR was born!). To be honest though, I’m surprised that this is even a problem we need to solve…real food ingredients you can find in the kitchen should be a non-negotiable and butter should be the star of the show when you are talking cookies.
Let me be clear…your grandma was not using bleached flour and over processed sugar in her cookies. I can’t imagine she was packing them full of God knows what preservative or artificial flavorings to store them in the refrigerator for 6 months. And I know for a FACT, she was not unscrewing a cap of palm oil in the kitchen to whip up those cookies you were so fond of growing up. All very important reasons why they tasted so much better than the store-bought garbage you buy today, but the last of which was what I drove home to my judges.
Of course, there is the premium nature to my cookies, coming with flakey salt, brown butter, no preservatives, nothing artificial, but when you are in a pitch competition that is all about Dairy, butter is the talking point. To say it went over well would be an understatement and at this time I only had one flavor! I WON THE WHOLE THING, with the grand prize being a large, private kitchen at The Hatchery, in the West Loop of Chicago.
They tried our OG Brown Butter Chocolate Chunk and loved that butter was not only a primary ingredient in our dough, but that I was making it the LIFE of the party with browning it in small batches. It was front and center, the bell of the ball and for good reason…butter is delicious and brown butter is even better. They loved the flavor and most importantly, they saw the vision BAKR had to bring real butter back to cookies, because BUTTER. IS. BETTER.
Now I get it, we are bucking the trend a bit by not being vegan, or gluten-free, or allergen free. At the end of the day we are just making cookies the way we would want to eat them and people have seemed to agree. We get asked all the time if we will ever make gluten free for vegan cookie doughs and we absolutely have thought about it. After all, part of the reason we started BAKR is to make delicious cookies more accessible to everyone and anyone and not having an inclusive offering as part of our lineup would not be living up to that. So trust me when I say, it is on our radar for you gluten and dairy free people who just want cookies that don’t taste like cardboard…yes, we’re looking at you, Sweet Loren’s and Capello’s. Your cookies don’t move an inch…and who actually wants to eat that? Mark my words, friends – we will absolutely expand our lineup as we grow. In just one year, we are now at 5 flavors, just imagine what we can do with another year!
But for now, it is just me and my husband cranking out the dough that we have brought into this world in the form of BAKR. It is unapologetically butter forward, it is delicious, and it’s my greatest source of happiness, which has made for an unforgettable first year of business. In the future, I hope to expand into new offerings and time will tell what that looks like. Over the next year, we plan to live in the moment, enjoy the journey, and appreciate every minute of our entrepreneurial rollercoaster, private kitchen and all.
We’d like to thank Mid-West Dairy for being a part of the BAKR story and we are so excited for the future. We know it will be packed with buttery, golden brown delicious, cookie goodness.
Happy Baking
Lex