Juli Novotny’s Kookie Karma cookies are organic, vegan, sustainable wheat-free, gluten-free, and peanut-free.
Taste-free, too, one might imagine. But that’s not the case.
Cookie lovers find them delectable, and that has enabled Novotny, 27, to get her products into health food stores, including Whole Foods Market Inc. Her lines of raw and holistic cookies, at $2.50 to $2.75 retail, are pricey. But they have nonetheless found their way to health-conscious cookie cravers.
The raw cookies are made with dehydrated cashews and dried fruit, such as cherries; the holistic cookies are made of almond meal and chocolate or carob chips. She sweetens them with agave nectar.
Novotny also has a line of snacks, including cashew granola and salt and pepper “Crawkers” crackers made with celery, carrots and beets. They’re designed for people with food allergies or who are on strict diets.
Lisa Cheek picked up a holistic carob chip cookie at the Santa Monica Co-op when she was trying to give up sugar. She was hooked. Now she also likes the raw cherry cashew and lemon fig.
“They’re just delicious,” said Cheek, who isn’t vegan but said the cookies fill her up until dinner without the sugar crash of a candy bar.
Kookie Karma products are sold in 75 stores nationwide, up from 25 last year. Revenues more than doubled in 2006 and are expected to double or triple in 2007. Novotny now has seven employees.
Novotny started looking for small business loans four years ago, but as a recent college graduate, she didn’t have any collateral. She eventually hit up two health-conscious aunts, who gave her a $25,000 loan that established Juli Novotny Inc. An additional $20,000 bank loan got her kitchen built in Poway, a site she chose for its lower expenses and because she found a facility there she could customize. She was making money within the first year.
“I was really lucky,” Novotny said. “Now people come to me and ask me how I got started. The problem is always finding the money to get started.” Novotny credits her graphic design skill and Internet savvy with saving on hefty front-end expenses such as packaging and Web design.
Novotny has been vegetarian since age 11, and is now essentially vegan, which means she consumes no milk, eggs or other animal products. She’s always been interested in baking, and she even ran the baking operations of a coffee shop when she was just 16.
“I’d just pour in flour and sugar,” she remembered. “And when I saw people eating, I wanted to tell them what was in it.”
Novotny is currently working on her master’s degree in nutritional science at Clayton College. On the side, Novotny, also counsels clients on how to eat right, which she’s been doing for some time. That’s part of what got the business going. The next thing for Kookie Karma will be to find national distribution. Novotny’s products are distributed throughout California and are sold on her Web site.
