Hey Pizza Friends, (Edited 9-19-11 by author)
Do you have room for a baking oven and a counter mixer…you’re in! My wife and I started a warm cookie/cake delivery business years ago out of a pizzeria in Minneapolis with one simple mission, “To bring warm cookies to a world that sorely needs them”. Turns out that the warm cookie cravings were more intense than we realized. We’d already worked our first careers for over 20 years and decided there had to be another way to make some money and have fun at the same time. We’ve proven you can add a significant revenue stream to your pizza business and set yourself apart from everyone else. Before you go any further watch our movie at www.tankgoodness.com.
It’s a lot easier than you think…you already understand the delivery mechanism and we can you show you how to make an incredible cookie and keep it warm for a couple of hours. We set up Tank U, our micro-university, right in the front room of the pizzeria and over 2 days we give you all the hands on training you’ll need including multiple ways to reach new customers. We’re looking to set up one person and one only in each city which means you don’t have to compete with anyone for market share.
I’m posting here on the Think Tank forum because I’d love to start a conversation about warm cookie delivery and answer any questions that anyone might have. I’m sure everyone’s thinking why can’t I make the cookies in my pizza oven…you can if you want your cookies to taste like garlic and pepperoni. Tanks for your time and have the best day ever!
(New Paragraphy added 9-19-11)
I felt a need to add this paragraph after reading the responses to this original post. I’m a little frustrated that I don’t see anyone thinking outside the box here. If all you do is bake off the same frozen cookie puck that your competitor is already doing you haven’t set yourself apart. I’m not talking about throwing a few pucks in the oven and sending them out the door. I am talking about making an incredible cookie from scratch with the best butter and chocolate and delivering them in a super cool box with ice cold milk. This is an experience that brings people back to their childhood! If you are the independent pizza operator in the middle of the big guys this will give you the marketing edge that you’ve always been looking for. You added value and quality to your business and this alone should replace the need to ever offer a coupon if you do it correctly. If anyone is serious about learning more please check out our website and send me an email. Tanks again.
Dennis Tank
Warm Cookie Chauffeur
I’ve been running cookie pucks thru my conveyor for many years now…
never had a problem with an aftertaste…
we cook 'em on a 1/2 sheet pan w/silicone paper & put it into a 16" pizza box, silicone paper & all…
Hey Pizza Friends,
Let me say first that I’m not here to tell you that you can’t bake a decent cookie puck off in your oven. My belief is if you offer the best in quality and service you compete with no one. Let me give you a little more background on what we’ve done with warm cookies. We make one and only one cookie, an oatmeal chocolate chip, with the best local ingredients available and ALWAYS deliver them warm from the oven in a custom box (with air chambers) that has won many national design awards. People care now more than ever where their food comes from. We put a time sticker on each box to let the customer know when the cookies left the oven. We’ve never spent a nickel on advertising and have added over 8,000 customers by “word of mouth” alone. We do between $150K and $200K annually in cookie sales Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 3:00. Most of our cookie deliveries go out with a message card as people send them for gifts, client appreciation, etc. and ice cold milk. We do not even turn our pizza ovens on until almost 4:00 every day. As our business has grown so has the size of the orders we do each day. Many of our deliveries are for multiple dozens and at $21/dozen we can bake $105 worth of cookies every 30 minutes. Sure, there’s more to it than that but if you’re open to a little innovation you can rock the world with warm cookies. What we deliver is an experience and you can use that experience to direct customers back to your door for pizza.
Dennis
Warm Cookie Chauffeur
PS I love this forum and the willingness of people to share their ideas. Thanks PMQ!
I think your business could be useful to many operators. I found that my ovens baked cookies with no off flavors . . . and hot, soft cookies delivered with an ice-cold 6-pack is absolutely irresistible in college towns. 6-pack of MILK!! get those little half pint or pint bottles, and it is great.
If you do a full size cookie pizza, then it’s a cookie pizza and a 6-pack. Offer toppings to go on the cookie pie: choc chips, m&m’s shredded coconut, melted PB, shaved white chocolate, raisins, chopped pecans/peanuts, be creative. Really, a sugar cookie base, with a raspberry jam sauce and shredded white chocolate would be a fine cookie . . . then add stuff to make it their own. Use mix or freezer dough, or better yet mix your own since you have a giant mixer already! Use a scoop to portion out your own pucks or weigh out an press a full 12" cookie between waxed paper.
You could offer this as a course in the Cookie College.
i bake cookies in my pizza oven. THEY ARE DELICOUS
DeaconV - I’ll try to answer your PM Q’s here…
I’ve cooked cookies in both my CTX and my MM 360…
In the 360 we use defrosted/tempered pucks…(we store 'em in dough boxes, a few dozen @ a time…they last for a long while…)
We use a 1/2 sheet pan & cut some silicon paper in half…
Best results seem to be 460/475 @ 7.5/8 minutes…about the same as our pizza…(our oven tho has extra fingers on the bottom)
We do flatten them slightly as well…
We jerry-rig a few pizza screens over the top of the sheet pan & put it in, trailing edge of the pan @ the entrance…
Cookies continue to bake after removing them from the oven, so we pull 'em off the sheet pan & put the silicone sheet in a 16" pizza box…
They finish off fine in the delivery bag…
We have a local restaurant that does nothing but cookies: http://www.bakedofbloomington.com/
Might be an interesting idea for a companion business for someone in a giant city or college town.
In response to the OP new paragraph,
Most of us do get it. Really. Thing is, we live day in and day out in our markets and see every day what our customers will and will not spend money on. We know that we are already up to our pizza peels in preparing all the other food items on our menus. “Significant revenue stream” feels like salesman language that really over-hypes the product given that there are TONS of different markets out there.
I do not by any means disparage your business idea and process; after all, pizza is just bread, tomatoes and cheese baked in an oven. It sinks in to me that if we wanted to bake our own cookies, then there are scores of recipes for making cookies. Our grandmas and aunties and pastry chef friends have cookie recipes. Cookies are, at their very foundation, creaming sugar and butter together, adding the rest of the dry, then the wet. Now portion and bake off. It ain’t rocket science . . .though there are various techniques to achieve thin/crispy to chewy and so on. Your team is most likely skilled in that last part in fine tuning the process for finesse and consistent results, and that is a marketable skill.
Consider that your pitch did not hook the audience here. Make it meaningful to US. Perhaps you have not found a way to make your product enticing and attractive to us and our operations. We see you make $200K in cookie sales . . . what if we want to be more profitable pizza places and not cookie shops? Answer the question: “Why should I pay YOU to come tell me how to bake expensive cookies in my pizzeria?” Me, personally, just closed my shop almost 2 months ago. If I had gotten your message a year ago, I would still have walked by since I was in financial strife, and saw nothing in your pitch that would suggest a fast ROI, that it was an affordable by-in, what my obligations would be, and how it would be the “significant revenue stream” in a town of <3000 people. I can’t get $13 for a 16" pizza, so expecting $21 for a dozen cookies is just plain hallucination.
Your website was vague with even less information to entice me to contact you. For example, a cadillac cookie that yields a final 60% COGS just doesn’t make my cheese melt. What sort of space is required? Any contract or obligations? What is special about your cookies vs. the gourmet all-butter brands our vendors can supply in VERY CONVENIENT pre-portioned pucks and free cookie ovens? What is the time and space commitment for this venture? Power requirements (since I can’t use my pizza oven)? Do I have to use your boxes (see, I already spend a ton for my own boxes with my own label on them)? I have customers allergic to chocolate . . . yet your marketing only offers choc chip; other options? What’s my time (labor cost) investment, since I am not using my existing staff and oven?
We are a nuts and bolts group. If it were free, every one of us would be interested. It obviously is not, and the information that would encourage me is not readily available for my assessment for my business.
Hey Nick,
I love your response and it’s what I was looking for. I think I’ll give you a buzz to chat before I post back. Tanks again and have the best day ever.
Dennis
Warm Cookie Chauffeur
PS It basically is free that’s why it will work!
Then sign me up. FREE means that I have no risk whatsoever, which is my favorite kind of risk 