I decided I'm going to remake a chocolate chip cookie. I know it's been done a million times, but I'm going to figure out how to make it so that it's more whole food based, less processed, less inflammatory. But it tastes incredible.
How do you make a splash in the global cookie market, which is expected to grow $28 billion by 2028? For Loren Castle, founder of Sweet Loren's, it started with making them as healthy as possible. I just wanted to eat my favorite foods.
Just having them be cleaner, and I wanted to make sure, of course, that it was the most incredibly delicious thing I'd ever eaten, too. While battling cancer at the age of 23, Loren searched for a way to still do what brought her joy --w bake and eat cookies. However, to avoid inflammation, she had to be sure that they were more natural and less processed.
This would ultimately turn into a business selling packaged cookie dough at grocery stores nationwide. I was like, I want to feed myself healthy food for the rest of my life because I want to thrive. I don't want to ever be sick.
I want my body to feel great. I want it to heal. Today, Sweet Loren's products are sold nationwide in over 35,000 stores and are exclusively vegan, gluten free and allergen free.
The company, which says it's expecting to bring in $120 million in gross sales in 2025, has expanded beyond packaged cookie dough to include breakfast biscuits, puff pastry dough and thin crust pizza. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of batches later, I finally came up with these cookie recipes that I was like, this is the best cookie I've ever had. During her summers home from college in 2005 and 2006, Loren worked at her local bakery.
My local bakery, growing up in New York City on the Upper West Side, was a bakery called Levain Bakery, and I saw people line up down the block for them. I think that's really where I fell in love with the magic that baking can have. Then, right after graduation, Loren was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma at the age of 22.
It was soul crushing. This was not what I had planned for myself. I was actually supposed to move back to LA, and my doctor said, you're gonna have to cancel that plane ticket.
We have a lot of testing. After they did a biopsy of one of my lymph nodes, I was diagnosed with stage two Hodgkin's lymphoma. I had to start six months of chemotherapy immediately.
Loren began to see a therapist at the time and attributes her with helping her change her mindset. She helped me rewire my brain as opposed to feeling sorry for myself. Something in me just changed.
I didn't want to be sad anymore, and I decided to take control of the situation as much as I could. I just took my life so seriously. I wanted to make sure I was taking care of it.
I wanted to make sure that I was living my life to the fullest every day. During her chemotherapy, Loren turned to baking at home. It brought so much joy to me.
It was like a natural therapy to just kind of escape from the world and be in your own kitchen and be creating something magical that always makes everyone happy. In 2007, Loren was cancer free and tried to begin her career again. I had no idea what I was going to do with my life.
If anything, I was very lost. I tried to work for a PR company. I tried to work in finance, I tried to work in the food and wine industry, and I just, I was miserable.
I just didn't find my thing. At the end of the day, after I was trying one of these jobs, I'd come home and I would always be because I was like creating a whole recipe binder. For Loren, it became very important that the cookies she baked were made with natural ingredients.
My doctor, he just said, eat kind of normal, simple foods. I just started to look within and figure out what intuitively was nourishing my own body. I brought in every single type of sugar and sweetener I could find, all the different types of natural, less processed flours, whole grain flours, different types of oils, different types of salts.
I just became in love with natural ingredients. I couldn't find any great recipes. And so kind of out of that frustration, I decided I'm going to remake a chocolate chip cookie.
I know it's been done a million times, but I'm going to figure out how to make it so that it's more whole food based, less processed, less inflammatory. But it tastes incredible. Loren began to sell her homemade cookies at farmer's markets for 2 to $3 a cookie.
Over the next few years, she worked tirelessly on her recipes. Baking is science. It's chemistry.
I just became really good at finally understanding how these ingredients work together. The amount of feedback was so positive and it was showing me that there was a need out there, that people were so excited to find something that was better for you and so delicious, that started to grow from a hobby to, wait a minute, is this a little business? Loren decided to take a business writing course to help her launch her passion.
She would often bring a fresh batch of cookies to class for the other students. I was deciding, should I open a bakery or should I create a CPG consumer packaged product? And if I do create a packaged product, what type would it be?
Would it be a baking mix? Would it be cookie dough? Would it be baked cookies?
And this guy in the business writing class worked in Whole Foods in the overnight shift to restock shelves. And I asked him, how does one even get into Whole Foods? And he said, let me talk to my boss.
He called me the next day and was like, Loren, you have a meeting on Wednesday with the head buyer at the Columbus Circle location, which was my local Whole Foods. And so I didn't have a packaged product yet. All I had were recipes.
I made 12 different flavors of cookies and put them in a beautiful red box. Both the buyer and I fell in love with the concept of cookie dough, because everyone loves a warm, fresh baked treat. He said, no one's built the next brand name that stands for natural in cookie dough.
And then he call me the next day, after he met with the rest of the buyers and the team and he said, Loren, everyone loved it. I told him it would take a month, and of course it took seven months to find a factory designed packaging, scale up recipes, you know, figure out how to really go from my kitchen to a packaged product. Loren says she used $25,000 of her personal savings to start her company.
In 2011, the first five flavors of packaged cookie dough hit the shelves at Whole Foods in New York's Columbus Circle -- Chocolate Chunk, Oatmeal Cranberry, Brownie Batter, Peanut Butter Oatmeal, and Espresso Chocolate Chunk. If someone like Whole Foods is ready to trust me and to place an order for my cookie dough, then I have to be all in and ready to show up 100%. I'm the one who's going to either make this work or not.
Loren's company faced many obstacles in its early years. I was the only employee for the first couple of years, and I was just exhausted trying to figure out where the best factories were, how to come up with new flavors, how to think about growth, how to get into more supermarkets. Those were the really challenging, hard years of figuring out how to get to scale, how to prove our concept not just in natural, better for you supermarkets, but in mainstream grocery.
The company has decided to switch factories five times over the years to meet its needs. I realized packaging needed to improve and get better and to get into other supermarkets. I needed to really look like the packaging of the big guys that were on the shelf.
It's so competitive in a supermarket, you have to be able to grab someone's attention and say what you're about and what your most important attributes are in three seconds. In April 2016, Sweet Loren's was able to attain national distribution at Publix and later on at Kroger the same year in August. Both Publix and Kroger really kind of helped us launch nationally and prove the concept in conventional supermarkets.
And so through that distribution, I was able to start really growing the company. After listening to customer feedback and making many minor tweaks to the recipe, Sweet Loren's changed the nutrition of its whole lineup starting in April 2018. All of the company's products were vegan, gluten free, and allergen free.
We were really different than anything else in the supermarket, and we could raise our price point so that we could afford our cost of goods and these more expensive natural ingredients, but also have a healthy margin. From that moment on, Sweet Loren's was profitable and healthy, and we could sustain our own growth. And I never had to raise a big VC or private equity funding.
Loren's company, which today has 24 employees, is projecting $120 million in gross sales for 2025. I think what we've done really well is focus on one product for a long time. We focused on cookie dough for a decade.
I could cry thinking about. . .
Sorry. . .
The positive impact that Sweet Loren's has had. It's it's the reason I get emotional. But from day one of launching, I've gotten hundreds.
Of messages from people that have said it's just changed their life. And I don't feel like we're selling another product or cookie. I just really feel like we're creating a lifestyle for people that makes them feel their best.
