Fully Baked Idea

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Coffee Bean coffees, California Pizza Kitchen pizzas, Marie Callender’s pies: All got their start in restaurants and have since made their way onto grocery shelves.

It’s a common strategy, but it’s one that May Cookie Co. is flipping on its head.

The bicoastal company, run by a mother and daughter team, got its start a few years ago selling whole-grain, vegan and gluten-free cookie mixes at Whole Foods Market and Bristol Farms, but it now aims to sell baked cookies to restaurants, coffee shops and food trucks.

Why the switch? It’s all about instant gratification – and higher profit margins.

The original thought behind selling mixes was that while grocery stores were stocking healthful alternatives to Oreos and other traditional prepared favorites, there were few options for home bakers who wanted to ditch Betty Crocker cupcake boxes.

However, Marissa Hanley, daughter of company founder Susan Nolte, realized a few months ago that customers at grocery stores and farmers markets were more interested in eating samples of the company’s gluten-free snickerdoodles and whole-grain oatmeal chocolate-chip cookies than in buying mixes to make them at home.

“People just want the cookies right there and then. It really made us readjust our business plan,” said Hanley, who runs operations in Los Angeles. “We realized if you like the mix, you might buy one every month or two, but if you like the cookie, you might buy two, three, four cookies per week.”

But with no shortage of healthful desserts in stores, Hanley said May is focusing on getting its product into L.A. restaurants.

“You go to healthy restaurants and they have all these healthy options, and then they have all these really unhealthy desserts,” she said.

The company is in talks with multiple restaurants in Southern California, but for now the cookies are only available at Greenleaf Gourmet Chopshop, a restaurant with locations in Century City and Beverly Hills. Cookies there sell for $1.25 to $1.50 – compared with May mixes that sell for $7 to $9 a box and make about two dozen cookies, or about 33 cents each.

“The mixes are a very, very low-margin business, whereas the prepared cookies are more reasonable,” said Nolte, who works out of her home in West Hartford, Conn.

Steve Stallman, of food consulting firm Stallman Marketing in Northridge, said that moving from the grocery store to restaurants isn’t uncommon for big food manufacturers, but is rare for a small company.

“Smaller companies often don’t realize there may be many alternative distribution channels,” he said.

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