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An enterprise that started as a date night ritual is now a business ready to expand into a major production.
And it all started with $15,000 from credit cards.
“It was a leap of faith,” said Doug Taylor, co-owner of Taylor Chip Cookie Co.
Taylor and his then new bride, Sara, decided to venture into the cookie business after creating their own recipes while dating.
“Sara is a healthy eater and didn’t want Crisco used in the cookies. So we created our own recipes,” he said.
When they married in May 2017, they gave their guests cookies as wedding favors and a seed was planted.
The couple started out small, making cookies to sell at a stand in Lancaster in 2018. They then found space in Intercourse to produce the cookies, and a new location in Lancaster from which to sell them.
This spring, they will be opening a shop at Hershey Town Square and, by the end of summer 2023, they will have a full production facility on Columbia Avenue in Lancaster to not only make cookies, but ice cream as well.
Taylor Chip Cookie Co. employs about 60 people, and Taylor said he sees that expanding as the production facility comes to fruition.
The facility, a much bigger investment, according to Taylor, is being funded by a Pennsylvania Dairy Investment Program grant of $480,000. The grant will be used to construct the facility and automate production.
“That [the grant] gave us confidence,” he said.
The growth of the company came from word of mouth and Facebook and Instagram.
The Taylors’ first break came when a Lancaster business reached out to them to offer a stand at Lancaster Market Place in Hawthorne Centre along Fruitville Pike.
“The rent was $400 a month with a one-year lease,” Taylor said. “It was a great opportunity.”
While the market, according to Taylor, wasn’t always full of customers, his company’s social media presence led to growth.
“I had a Facebook page at the time and customers found us,” said Taylor, who had used Facebook ads as a tool in his other job as co-owner of a recording studio.
With kitchen equipment and licenses in hand, the couple opened a shop in Intercourse that was large enough to do the baking, packaging and distribution. They also opened a 1,400-square-foot shop at 1573 Manheim Pike, a strip mall on the outskirts of Granite Run, to stay close to their first location.
“We’ve already outgrown it,” Taylor said, who noted that it gets crowded baking in a kitchen with eight people.
Even with the pandemic raging while the couple was starting up, their business has continued to grow. Taylor said it has grown 150% this month over the same month last year and, “Year over year, we’ve seen 300% growth and this year we’re on track to do better than that.”
The Taylor’s make their cookie dough from scratch and plan to do the same with their ice cream.
“We know all the ingredients that go into our products, so we know they are good,” he said.
Taylor said the growth of the company has been slowed by vendors having trouble finding workers and, therefore, being backed up.
“It was especially slow during the shutdown,” he said.
That, he said, was a good thing because it allowed them to grow the company more slowly.
The long-range plan is to wholesale the dough and ice cream, but right now, because direct customer sales are so strong, “we don’t want to do wholesale.”
That could change by the end of 2023, when the automated production facility is up and running. Just like the company does now, the dough is made on site and shipped to the shops where it is baked.
Taylor said the Columbia Avenue facility will be full-on retail as well.
“We would like to have a drive-through and retail store as well as the production facility,” he said.
Taylor said he and his wife quit their jobs two weeks before opening the first stand to get things in order and get the word out.
“My dream has always been to have ice cream and cookies,” he said. “This kind of blows me away. I mean, who knew. We have something people love, and they share it all the time. The cookies sell themselves and by word of mouth.”