Let's Send Cookie Dough Creamery Fans to Your Ice Cream Shop!

As you can see from The Story of Kelly's Famous & Cookie Dough Creamery, we have tens of thousands of Cookie Dough Creamery fans, that are potential customers for you, that we can send to your Central Ohio located ice cream shop.

Our fans still love and miss the "Cookie Dough Creamery" experience even 5+ years after we closed. We simply want to hand that existing consumer demand we created over to your ice cream shop, just for being our customer. It's a win/win/win scenario for all parties involved!

When you purchase Kelly's Famous products, we use 5% of the amount you paid on Meta ads targeted to fans of our Cookie Dough Creamery Facebook page (over 19,900 fans) in the zip code of your business. The ads will call for our fans to be patrons of your business, because you are offering edible cookie dough flavors with the help of the Cookie Dough Creamery founders. 

Not only will you benefit from the Cookie Dough Creamery fans we send your way, but you will also benefit from a boost of sales from your existing customer base simply by adding a quality edible cookie dough product to your ice cream shop. See: Edible cookie dough is to ice cream shops as French fries are to fast food restaurants. 

What is the process to get up and running?

We offer "Onsite Production and Training" to get you started.

We will come onsite to your ice cream shop with plenty of Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mixes, butter, flavorings, mix-ins, food containers, and an NSF mixer, in order to make 8 double batches of edible cookie dough flavors for your shop (approximately 96 pounds). 

You can either have us make it all by ourself, or you can have up to 8 of your staff be trained on what we are doing while we are doing it. 

You will need to provide a table of around 10 square feet, with an electrical plug for our mixer, as well as refrigeration space for around 12 gallons of edible cookie dough we make. 

You can order an "Onsite Production and Training" as many times as you want. If one day of us onsite is not enough, order as many onsite days as you need. Keep in mind however that each double batch we make is costing you around $20 in labor for us to make it onsite for you (around 10 cents per ounce). Once your staff is trained and can make it, they can make a double batch for around $4 (or even less) in labor (around 2 cents per ounce). 

What does your ice cream shop need to make edible cookie dough?

When you purchase Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mixes you will need additional ingredients, such as:

• Butter
  
• Chocolate Chips
• Medium ground/chopped Oreo (or generic brand)
• Peanut Butter

The above list would enable you to make the four flavors we carried Cookie Dough Creamery 365 days a year for four years: Chocolate Chip; Sugar Cookie; Cookies & Cream; and Peanut Butter. We provide some detail below about what it will cost. 

To create your own unique flavors, simply treat the "White Sugar" mix like vanilla ice cream. In fact, if you don't flavor the White Sugar mix, it will produce "Sugar Cookie" edible cookie dough. We recommend however, when you want to make Sugar Cookie, add a tablespoon of vanilla extract to really make the vanilla flavor pop. But don't add too much vanilla extract, because the White Sugar mix is already flavored with real vanilla beans. 

A sugar cookie is essentially a vanilla cookie. If you make your own ice cream flavors, you know that many ice cream flavors can be made simply by adding flavors and inclusions (mix-ins) to a vanilla ice cream base. Do the same thing with Kelly's Famous "White Sugar" mix to produce an infinite number of new edible cookie dough flavors. The vanilla beans in all Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mixes will work well with any flavor you turn a mix into. 

But don't make the mistake of making all your flavors by only using the "White Sugar" mix. Kelly's Famous "Brown Sugar" mix is not only used to make the traditional Chocolate Chip cookie dough, it is also used to create "Blondie" doughs, as it is a vanilla and brown sugar base mix. Blondies may not get the same attention that brownies get, but a blondies vanilla and brown sugar base is a perfect foundation for so many other confectionary flavors, which is why the chocolate chip cookie is hands down the most popular cookie in the world.

The chocolate chip cookie is essentially a blondie, despite rarely ever being called one. Simple to make blondie doughs include replacing chocolate chips with M&Ms, Reese's Pieces, crushed Heath Bar, and butterscotch chips. Or you can make some even more extravagant blondies, like Maple Cinnamon Brown Sugar Blondies. We recommend that 1/3 to 1/2 of your flavors be made with the Brown Sugar mix. 

Refrigeration:

When you purchase Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mixes, the only product that will need refrigeration space prior to making your edible cookie dough is the butter. One pound of butter will be used to make around 6 pounds of edible cookie dough, which means this "make it as you need it" method requires only 17% of the surplus refrigeration space that "ready to serve" edible cookie dough you can buy wholesale does, saving you 83% of your refrigeration space. 

When you consider that you need a surplus of each "ready to serve" flavor to avoid running out of a flavor, refrigeration costs for "ready to serve" wholesale offerings can skyrocket. This means there is additional refrigeration savings beyond the 83% mentioned above, because with Kelly's famous you don't need surplus refrigeration storage for each flavor. The butter you store for Kelly's Famous can be used to make any and every flavor, simplifying even more what you need to store in your refrigerators. 

And if you decide to use vegetable oil instead of butter, since many vegetable oils are shelf stable, you may be able to offer edible cookie dough with zero need for refrigerated surplus storage. 

Once you produce your edible cookie dough from a Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mix, it will need to be refrigerated up to the point of being served. We recommend that it be displayed for your customers to see, much like hand dipped ice cream. But we recognize that would require remodeling and capital expense for refrigerated display equipment. Thus many shops will decide to store the prepared edible cookie dough behind the counter in existing refrigeration that the employees can scoop from. 

Mixer:

To make edible cookie dough from the base mix, it needs to be mixed somehow with butter (or vegetable oil) and your flavorings. If you are just making one bag of Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mix at a time (or 1/2 bag, or 1/4 bag), this can usually be done mixing it by hand with a spoon and a mixing bowl, or be accomplished a little quicker using a hand mixer. When doing double batches (2 bags at a time which produces around 12 pounds), a counter top mixer will likely be necessary to save time (and sore muscles).

At Cookie Dough Creamery we had two 8 quart KitchenAid mixers. One NSF certified KitchenAid 8 quart mixer retails for around $950. We rent these for $49 per month (note: availability is limited). 

One 8 quart KitchenAid mixer can produce a double batch (2 bags of mix which produces around 12 pounds). Thus, having two of these mixers doing double batches simultaneously allowed us to produce around 24 pounds at a time. 99% of the time we could always keep up with demand with this setup. But there were a handful of times where we were selling it faster than we could make it.  

Over the four years Cookie Dough Creamery was opened, we produced and sold an average of 78.8 pounds per day. That is 13.1 single batches, or 6.6 double batches per day. But not all days are the same. Weekends are busier than week days. Summer days are busier than winter days. Believe it or not, we did have some days where we made 500+ pounds, like on a Friday in July to prepare for a busy weekend. That is 42+ double batches, and two people would take around 6 hours to do 500 pounds with the setup we had. 

We recommend that you put at least one mixer in the front of the house, so that customers can see it. And if you can, have someone making dough with it during your busiest times, simply to add the "entertainment" value to your business. Kids will love to watch it being made. 

What does it cost to make edible cookie dough?

When using Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mixes, the final product will cost you around 17 to 28 cents per ounce (COGS) depending on: 1) the ingredients needed to make the specific flavor; 2) whether you use butter or vegetable oil; 3) where you are buying your ingredients from (a food service purveyor vs a grocery store; and 4) shipping/delivery costs.

The labor cost to make the above will be around 2 cents per ounce if you chose to make double batches. 

A three ounce serving of cookie dough can easily sell for $3.00 as an add on to a 4 to 5 ounce scoop of ice cream, making your COGS 17% to 30% of the price.  

Can cookie dough really sell at 17% to 30% COGS? Answer: Yes! In fact, it's possible to sell it for an even higher price. 

In 2019 (before six years of high inflation) Doughp made a pitch on the TV show Shark Tank and shared that they were making a scoop for $0.68 and selling it for $6.00.

$0.68 / $6.00 = 11% COGS

We don't recommend fleecing your customers with exorbitant prices. Our point here being that you don't have to do the opposite, and low ball your prices in order to move your edible cookie dough product. Edible cookie dough sells well at a fair price. 

What is involved in making the cookie dough?

1. Soften the butter (or vegetable oil). This can be done simply by leaving butter out of the fridge overnight. The Ohio Department of Agriculture and US FDA say that butter is safe when kept outside of the fridge for up to 48 hours. If you need to make dough in a pinch and don't have softened butter, if you have a microwave and microwave safe bowl, give the butter 30 seconds in the microwave and then rest for 30 seconds. Repeat until it is all soft. 
2. Add the softened butter (or vegetable oil) and water to the mixing bowl.
   
3. Add the flavor for the edible cookie dough flavor you want to make. Note: this is not when you add the mix-ins. Mix-ins are added last. If you add no flavor it will result in edible Sugar Cookie dough.
   
4. Mix until it is consistent. 
5. Slowly add Kelly's Famous Edible Cookie Dough Mix until it is all mixed in. Start with the sugar bag to let the sugar have a chance to dissolve, and then add the flour bag. 
6. Add the mix-ins such as chocolate chips, grounded Oreo, peanut butter, etc...
7. The cookie dough will be at room temperature now, so it will be really soft. It is edible at this point and can be served. But it will become a less "runny" product by being chilled in the fridge before serving. 

How does it need to be served?

That is up to you and the business model you chose to use. We were a self serve ice cream sundae bar, so we simply put pans of the edible cookie dough into a cold top buffet, and let the customers scoop it into their cups. But any model of serving it can be used.

You can offer it as just nothing more than a topping for ice cream. You can make unique sundae offerings with it. You can offer it as a upgrade to a scoop of ice cream ("would you like cookie dough with that?"). Or you can treat it like ice cream itself and let people just get scoops of cookie dough. It's up to you. We will still send our fans to you regardless of what model you chose. 

We also offered "to go" containers of cookie dough, and this accounted for about 10% of the dough we sold, which was just around 8 pounds per day. We opted for 12 ounce containers, and sold around 75 per week on average. 

Can we make our own flavors of edible cookie dough?

Yes! Please do! That's what we want you to do. That's the entire intent behind us selling you the mix. Take this ball we are handing to you and run with it! We are excited to see flavors we never produced at Cookie Dough Creamery. 

If you are making your own ice cream flavors, then making new edible cookie dough flavors is no different. Just treat Kelly's Famous Create Your Own Edible Cookie Dough Mix as you would an ice cream base that you get from a dairy, and turn it into new flavors the same way you flavor your ice creams. 

You can even offer dairy free and vegan cookie dough flavors by using vegan butter. But make sure your flavorings and mix-ins are also dairy free and vegan before you market the dough as such.