Let's compare Kelly's Famous Cookie Dough Mixes with other options. 

The "do it all yourself" Model

We learned first hand what it was like to do it all ourselves. Our back of house at Cookie Dough Creamery looked and functioned far more like a bakery than it did an ice cream shop.

When we made ice cream, all that our employees had to do was grab a jug of 10% vanilla ice cream mix from the fridge, pour it into a food safe bucket, add the measured flavor ingredient, mix it with an immersion blender, and then add it to the soft serve machine's hopper. Simple and easy. Literally every employee we hired was able to learn this on day 1, and be trusted to do it alone by day 2. 

But when we made cookie dough, the employee had to get flour from the stack of 50 pound bags of it, and weigh numerous pounds of it for the batch. Then get brown sugar from the stack of 25 pound bags of it, and again weigh numerous pounds of it. Then get white sugar from the 25 pound bags of it, and again weight it as well. Then get salt from the 10 pound bags of it, and also weight it. Then get a gallon bottle from the shelf full of gallons of vanilla and measure it out. All this had to occur BEFORE we got to the point where it became similar to making ice cream. It was time consuming and error prone. 

Many times we wished our cookie dough making could have been as simple as our ice cream making. It wasn't. Our back of house was stocked like a made from scratch bakery, and it functioned like a made from scratch bakery. Given there were so many steps in the process to make cookie dough from scratch, we only allowed senior, well trained employees to make it to avoid losing product simply because one of the numerous steps wasn't done right. 

Most of our employees were not allowed to make our cookie dough, which meant we had to plan when to make our dough. Would there be someone on the shift who could make it? If not, then all the dough for that shift had to be made ahead of time. That meant we needed enough refrigeration storage to store enough dough for the entire shift, sometimes for the entire day, and sometimes for the entire weekend. When the entire weekend needed to be prepped for, we had a two door refrigerator that was stocked entirely full of prepped cookie dough, and sometimes even that wasn't enough. 

We also had days where our supplier would be out of something, like brown sugar, or salt, and we would have to take time out of our day to source it from somewhere else. Every ingredient your business needs is a chance for your supplier to run out of something you need. The more ingredients you need the more often you will have a day you need to scramble to get one. 

As you will learn below, we created Kelly's Famous Cookie Dough Mixes to be what we wish we had done back then. At the time we were too busy to make significant changes to the model we used. But in hindsight, we could have avoided all the issues above with the Kelly's Famous model.  

The companies behind the competitors "ready to serve" offerings are focused on other sales channels. Selling their product wholesale to you is just another revenue stream to them. Ice cream shops are not their focus at all. They offer you no flexibility, no cost savings, nor any training, nor any experience they can share in being in your shoes as an ice cream shop owner/operator. They, for all intents and purposes, aren't really in the ice cream industry at all, except as a response to ice cream shops coming to them wanting edible cookie dough. 

Their cookie dough may not have the soft texture when refrigerated that we found customers overwhelmingly prefer over the hard, stiff, and crumbly cookie dough that the industry has produced for decades. In fact, most of them aren't soft when refrigerated. Or their product's soft texture may not be from real ingredients, having instead been achieved by the use of chemical thickening agents and emulsifiers to simulate a soft texture in a cold product. 

You also need to make sure to compare apples to oranges, as many "ready to serve" products are made with vegetable shortening, instead of butter. You can sometimes easily spot these, as they will point out their their product is "vegan", but sometimes they won't point that out even though they are using vegetable shortening.

You can choose to use vegetable shortening instead of butter with Kelly's Famous Cookie Dough Mixes. And sometimes it's a good idea to chose this option. But competitors "ready to serve" products don't give you that option at all. Without providing you that option, they can be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. 

For example, in the ice cream industry it is very common for "kid flavor" ice creams to be made with only 10 or 12% butterfat, where as the flavors that appeal to adults are made with 16 to 18% butterfat. This is done to reduce the cost of kid flavors, which are consumed by those who don't typically care that the butterfat is low in their ice cream. The cost of 16 to 18% premium ice cream is only incurred in flavors consumed by those who do care.

In the same way, your decision to use butter or vegetable shortening in your cookie dough will be greatly influenced by who typically eats the flavor you are making. Making kid flavor edible cookie dough with vegetable shortening saves you money, which in turn increases your profit. But making adult flavor edible cookie dough with butter will produce satisfied customers and create repeat, long term business. The competitors "ready to serve" offerings will either make you spend too much on kid flavors because all their flavors are are made with butter, or they will cause you to lose adult customer satisfaction and repeat business because all their flavors are made with vegetable shortening.  

You may also decide to make adult flavors with vegetable shortening to offer vegan and dairy free adult flavors. If you think your business would benefit from that decision, then make that choice. With Kelly's Famous Cookie Dough Mixes you have options the "ready to serve" offerings don't provide. With Kelly's Famous Cookie Dough Mixes you can make any flavor you chose, even vegan flavors... even dairy free flavors. 

And that points out another downside to competitors' "ready to serve" offerings... you are limited to only the flavors they offer. Maybe your ice cream shop would benefit from a custom flavor that celebrates a local high school's mascot, or a local festival that celebrates a specific kind of food. With Kelly's Famous Cookie Dough Mixes, simply make that custom flavor. With competitors "ready to serve" offerings, you're out of luck. 

And probably the most negative impact of using competitors "ready to eat" offerings is your cost of refrigeration space. It has to be refrigerated from the moment you receive it to the moment it is served. In order to not run out before your next delivery, you will have to dedicate significant refrigeration space to your surplus storage. And the more flavors you decide to carry, the more refrigeration space you will need, unless you don't care if you run out of random flavors. 

The Kelly's Famous "Create Your Own" Model