At 22, Loren Castle found herself at a crossroads in life.
She was a fresh communication graduate from the University of Southern California, a certified Hatha Yoga instructor and a baking enthusiast who apprenticed at New York City’s famed Levain Bakery. She also just discovered, right after her graduation, that she had cancer. The stage 2 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma took her through six months of chemotherapy, and once she was healed, she deleted foods from her diet one by one to preserve her health. That included anything inflammatory, ultra-processed, artificial and most dairy.
But there is one thing she could not quit: a warm chocolate chip cookie.
When the self-professed dessert lover could not find healthy cookies on the market, Castle decided to take matters into her own hands. One batch of natural-ingredient cookies led to another; and when friends started to ask her if they could buy them, Castle realized there was an underserved niche in the dessert market. The 26-year-old seized the chance and launched Sweet Loren’s Inc. – which, 16 years later, has evolved into a $120 million baked goods powerhouse.
“I originally started to create recipes to solve my own problem,” Castle, now chief executive, told the Business Journal. “When I saw the response from other people and the excitement of ‘wow, you can have it better for you and have it taste so delicious,’ that’s when I just knew that there was something really exciting here, and there was a real need in the market that I felt like I could solve.”
Retail expansion
Originally selling in a farmers’ market, Sweet Loren’s cookies quickly gained the attention of major retailers and the everyday shopper. A year after Castle started experimenting with the idea, her products landed on the shelves of a few Whole Foods Market branches in New York. Then five years later, in 2016, Castle found herself running a multi-million-dollar business overnight when Publix Super Markets Inc. and The Kroger Co. started distributing Sweet Loren’s ready-to-bake cookie dough nationwide. Today, customers can pick up Sweet Loren’s products in over 30,000 grocery stores, including Target Corp., Wegmans Food Markets Inc. and Walmart Inc.
The retail expansion came with more innovations and recipes. Castle described her business endeavor as a learning experience; the more customers she reached, the more she realized the vast range of dietary restrictions and lifestyles that needed her attention. She took out all allergens from the cookie dough in 2018 and expanded into breakfast cookies and puff pastry two years ago. This year, she started offering oatmeal bars and scones.
I think the whole success of Sweet Loren’s has honestly been because I’ve been listening to the customer and really trying to make the product the best it could be, and feed as many people as possible,” Castle reflected.
“It really showed me that creating something that was free of the top allergens was this incredible gateway to just bringing people together and making it easy to please everyone… that was real white space in the market.”
Teamwork and self-reliance
Today, Sweet Loren’s is facing an increasingly discerning customer base.
The demand, on one hand, is growing. San Francisco-based market intelligence firm Grand View Research Inc. valued the global bakery premixes market at $1.1 billion in 2023 and projected its growth to $1.8 billion by 2030. Cookies and biscuits still dominate the market, having generated 58% of the global revenue in 2023, but bread is quickly gaining popularity as a convenient and affordable option for a globalized appetite.
On the other hand, consumers also increasingly value health.
The researchers found a rising demand for premixed baked goods that check all the boxes at once: taste, convenience and added health benefits in one package.
“Ingredients such as ancient grains, superfoods, and natural sweeteners are being integrated into premix formulations, aligning with the overarching wellness trend in the food industry,” according to the report.
That means business could be coming to Sweet Loren’s, which has stayed with natural, plant-based ingredients since its foundation. The business saw a surge of growth during the pandemic, which Castle attributed to the heightened awareness of health and the popularity of cooking in the home with packaged goods.
In 2024, the business generated $97 million in gross sales, expanded into a variety of categories and landed a high-profile partnership with El Segundo-based Mattel Inc. this April for a heart-shaped Barbie cookie dough.
Sweet Loren’s also rolled out a birthday cake-flavored cookie dough to celebrate Hello Kitty’s 50th anniversary.
Castle, having delegated the day-to-day operations to President Doug Radi and other C-suite members such as Chief Financial Officer Matthew Riegner, is now laser-focused on the company’s vision. That includes building an authentic brand that connects with a growing Gen Z consumer base and experimenting with fun, seasonal flavors, from gingerbread to pumpkin spice. For the next five years, Castle said, “the sky’s the limit.”
“The top priority is to continue to grow great products that people love and need, really fill white space, create better-for-you favorites, and make sure the brand stays beloved and trustworthy and continues to reach our potential,” she said. “We’ve been a profitable business for the last eight years, and we also built a very aggressive business plan … We haven’t taken big outside funding, so you know we really rely on our own growth and profitability, and I’m really proud of that.”
