Ashley Cameron - From Labor & Delivery Nurse to H-E-B and 1,500+ Doors

On this episode, we're joined by Ashley Cameron, Founder & CEO of Love&Cookies - the clean-label frozen gourmet cookie dough brand you bake straight from the freezer in  ess than 15 minutes. 

Ashley was a labor and delivery nurse with no CPG background before her cookies landed on H-E-B shelves. Baking with her son Charlie during his recovery turned into a clean-label product built on a simple insight: freeze the dough and you no longer need preservatives or shelf stabilizers. 

Ashley shares how a customer pushed her to enter H-E-B's Quest for Texas Best, which she won six months after opening her Lakeway store, catapulting her into 250+ H-E-B locations.

We get into hard pivots, co-packers' resistance to run her stand-up pouch which led Ashley build her own manufacturing facility and the tough call to eventually move to a co-packer.

Ashley walks through resizing each cookie by half an ounce to make pricing work, and closing three brick-and-mortar stores to put capital behind retail.

Ashley also breaks down the packaging decisions that set the brand apart, from color-coding every flavor (because most stockers were merchandising by color) to dropping her kids' names off the cookies to lift velocity.

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Episode Highlights:

🍪 Baking with her son after a Kawasaki diagnosis becomes a brand
❄️ Why freezing the dough replaces preservatives and shelf stabilizers
🏆 Winning H-E-B's Quest for Texas Best six months after opening
🏭 Building an in-house facility when no co-packer would take her
🔄 The hard pivot from own factory to co-manufacturer for margin
🎨 Color-coding every flavor so stockers and shoppers find it
💸 Resizing the cookie half an ounce to fix distribution pricing
🏷️ Dropping the kids'-names branding to lift velocity
🛒 Live demos and the BOGO that cleared the shelf in three days
🔪 Closing three brick-and-mortar stores to fund retail growth
🤝 The key hires that put the business on solid footing
💰 Scaling on under $500K, then a seed round toward profitability
👀 The clean-label white space she's watching next

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Table of Contents:

00:00 – Intro
00:56 – Origin story and Charlie's diagnosis
02:26 – Designing a clean-label frozen cookie dough
03:46 – Opening the store and finding Quest for Texas Best
04:32 – Scaling the recipe and sourcing at volume
05:57 – Nailing the 13 to 15 minute bake
07:24 – Building an in-house manufacturing facility
10:03 – Outgrowing it and pivoting to a co-manufacturer
12:04 – Packaging design and color differentiation
15:53 – Removing barriers at the freezer door
16:29 – Pricing strategy and resizing the cookie
18:57 – Inside the Quest for Texas Best pitch
22:11 – Dropping the cookie names for velocity
24:24 – Driving trial with demos and BOGOs
26:09 – Closing the brick-and-mortar stores
28:22 – Key hires that steadied the business
30:45 – Financing growth and the seed round
33:47 – Why the whole store is your competition

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Links:

Love&Cookies – https://cookiesilove.com/
Follow Ashley on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-cameron-534b00238/
Love&Cookies on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/company/getloveandcookies/
Follow me on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-steinberg/

For help with CPG production design - packaging and label design, product renders, POS assets, retail media assets, quick-turn sales and marketing assets and all the other work that bogs down creative teams - check out KitPrint.

Shout out to my friends over at Glimpse, the go-to partner for automating retail-related back-office operations and unlocking margin trapped in invalid fees and manual processes.

Are you in the market for a new flexible packaging partner? Check out HD Packaging. Third-generation, family-owned and built for the needs of category leaders like Newman’s Own and A Dozen Cousins. Faster launches, lower costs, and no artwork fees. 

Transcript

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Today we're speaking with Ashley Cam Cameron frozen cookie dough brand based out of Lakeway Texas Ashley grew up on a pecan farm in New Mexico became a labor and delivery nurse at Texas Children's Hospital eventually and then I believe started loving cookies in 2021 or at I think age 5 and he asked her to bake some cookies with her during recovery and long story short here we are with loving cookies um a few years later and I think since then you know she's won H E b's quest for Texas best scaled the 500+ doors across HEB as well as I think Sprouts Wegmans Thrive Market as well built an in house manufacturing facility along the way all with I think a pretty minimal amount of outside capital which is super love and cookies I'd love to just start just getting a quick lay of the land just in terms of kind of the origin story and why behind the brand and then kind of core awesome well Adam thank you first and foremost for having me I'm super excited to be here and share our story so thank you very much yeah we so 11 cookies as you said is a clean label pre portion gourmet frozen cookie dough that you find in the frozen aisle of your grocery store so often merch in that frozen dessert set next to your ice cream and frozen pies and all of that good stuff so as you mentioned we got our start so my oldest son Charlie was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease at the age of five so for some context Kawasaki disease is an acquired heart condition in children so he was not born with this he got a really bad virus that attacked the coronary arteries of his heart and he had to undergo life saving treatment and then long term treatment at home for quite a few years so when he came home from the hospital after his first treatment he said what was the one thing in the world or I asked him what was the one thing in the world that you wanted to do and his answer was simple he just wanted to bake cookies with Mommy so that's what we did and through that journey you know I had to be very mindful of what he was eating because the disease process is an inflammatory process so we had to be very mindful and I want him to be a kid and enjoy all the things that he that we should enjoy but let's do it a better way and so I started you know really reading labels and I was like wow the what's on the market is so not good for you in the sense that there's just so much additive and preservatives and food dyes and so through this journey we started baking I was like we can do this better like and if we freeze them that acts as our preservative we don't have to add any of that shelf stabilizers and preservatives so we were baking all these wonderful flavors and then my husband was like you know these are really good you should think about starting a cottage home food bakery so we did and then shortly later Covid hits and I thought well nobody's gonna want product from a home food baker but actually I was wrong it made our cottage home food bakery explode to the point where I had a commercial mixer on my kitchen counter at one point and my husband was like there's flour and chocolate everywhere we gotta get out of here so we found this small little tiny brick and mortar where we opened and launched pre baked cookies but one of the things that people were asking us for was this frozen cookie dough so you know at scale we were already baking from frozen I'm like well wait what if we just repack this into a little bit smaller format and we sell it for people to take and bake at home so we felt like we designed this product that is all butter no seed oils free of food dyes and preservatives no shelf stabilizers but we also wanted to create an experience right so it's pre portion so as a consumer you can bake just one or you could even mix and match flavors cause they all have the same bake times and then of course the bag reseals easily for you to store nicely in your freezer so I felt like we were hitting all the high points and so when we launched this product out of our small retail store it flew off the shelf and so we opened the store in October of 2021 and about a few months later somebody from my local HEB had come in bought a whole bunch of product comes back the next day and was like you have got to apply to the H E B Quest for Texas best program knew nothing about it Learned a lot but decided to apply and then started getting phone calls that ended up making the top 10 which then put us into this very pitch style format and ended up winning first place and it just catapulted us and if the timeline was eight months from the time my first store opened to the time that we were winning that competition to then now I'm in going into Texas largest retailer and so it was a whirlwind and such a fun experience along the way or kind of iterations you made along the way from those first few recipes when you're just making in your kitchen to in retail today going into HEB like is there any big kind of variables you had to tweak in order to be able to make a formulation recipe that could actually scale to per month or is it pretty much everything translated pretty easily definitely some reiteration so as you know we've been in this industry for like when you are making cookies at home you're measuring by the cup right we're gonna do one cup of this two cups of that can't do that at scale so we definitely had to play with the weights and formulations to make sure that we were still getting the same quality product that we would get if we were making this in in tiny batches right we went from making a five pound batch to a 14 pound batch and they don't translate the same so we definitely had to tweak it but the the other biggest thing that we had to really focus on was the sourcing of ingredients at that scale so what you can buy at the shelf in grocery doesn't always translate to being able to buy in bulk behind the scenes right and then we also wanted to make sure that we were looking at the quality of those ingredients are we are we truly out there sourcing the best chocolate the best butter the best flour that we can put our hands on while the product still tastes good right cause it is a fine line of we wanna be as clean as we can get but the product still has to taste good and I am very confident that I think that we we nailed that you could totally correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like a bake from frozen in 15 minutes that feels pretty short cookie portions I can bake faster but was there any things you had to kind of work out to be able to I guess be able to stand by that claim yes well and it's actually even better than that it's 13 to 15 minutes we put a range we put a range on there and we definitely had to play with it a lot to really nail down it definitely is dependent on the size right if we went to a bigger cookie it takes a little longer into a smaller cookie a little bit less so we put a range in there and there's they're also air fryer friendly which is super great too wow especially if you got you're the only one in your household or two two cookies fit perfectly in that air fryer and so it's a super efficient and that takes even less time but we wanted to find a time that was efficient from like the concept of going freezer to oven right um cause the whole idea is that this is a convenience thing as well so that we we didn't want people to have to wait 15 minutes to let them thaw or soften and so this it was a lot of tweaking a lot of playing back and forth with time temperature but this seemed to be like the best fit that also allows us to have the best quality right so with quality maintaining that quality at home is and we put the range on there because everybody's oven is a little different and everybody likes a cookie at a different level you may like more on the warm dough side where somebody else may like an ultra crispy cookie and so that way you can kind of get what you want manufacturing facility in house instead of going the the co packer route which you can process looked like you know what was the trigger the right co packer you just wanted really full control over the really clean ingredient deck or just capacity or yeah what was kind of the LED to building out a facility in house so I love this question I love this story because I don't always get to talk about it and it was I want to preface it by we've had to make a lot of pivots a lot of pivots so to back up into 2022 when I won the quest program and I was being given the gift of launching into H E B right and my feet were being I was being put to the test right my feet to the fire how can you support 250 grocery stores and you touched on it earlier I do not have a CPG background I was delivering babies prior to this so I I really had my learning curve was super steep and I had some really great mentors though from HEB who really helped kind of help me think about things you know going long term what is the priority as far as scalability and all the way down to like the food safety aspect as well because as we know that's also a big deal so at that time we were still very much in a covid era and I tried so hard to find a co packer because that is like the natural process but I could not find one that would make the product the way I wanted and the biggest part was the pack out the stand up pouch because that's a fairly newer thing in frozen and so in the sense that when you are filling that pouch there's lots of issues with sawing and product getting stuck and it was not an easy find so it was more about the pack out as why I could not find a co maker co packer in addition people were not taking new brands at that time so if you remember that time people were often firing small brands because they were scaling back their manufacturing they were distancing people inside those plants and so it was really hard and so my husband was like hey listen we're not gonna give up on this opportunity let's go build let's go build our own so we found a building that we came in and made completely food safe we got a loan to help build that out and came in redid the whole facility and invested in equipment that would at least get us started because as you know equipment manufacturing it's super expensive and so we found enough equipment that would help us get started and help to have a successful launch at H E B so we won this competition in August my facility we're gonna talk about speed at January of 2023 the facility opened we launched into H E B in July of 2023 and so it was the world win I will say that having not had the a the CPG experience we did not build our facility big enough with how quickly we have scaled so we have since outgrown that facility and we had to really take a look at the hard like the financials looking at our gross margins and understanding okay I either need to go build a big building and a bigger with much larger equipment and invest a tremendous amount of capital to help make this to where we can scale or we can pivot and move to a co man our gross margin increases significantly I can support upcoming launches at really big retailers and we can pivot and really squirrel away that and become profitable and so I was faced with this challenge at the end of last year about how are we gonna pivot and what are we gonna do and ultimately we decided to move away from that so that we can adequately support from a production lens the upcoming growth and launches that we're gonna see this year interesting yeah that's other founders that are probably going through some similar decision points as well but maybe not with some of the covid complications I guess yeah that definitely added a an element to it that hopefully we never see again but it it was definitely a challenge and you know I'm pretty tenacious and I was like I'm we're not gonna give up on this and we're not gonna forgo this opportunity and so that's kind of where we had to make that hard decision and but I'm so glad that we went through it because it allowed me to really understand what it takes to be a manufacturer because I think understanding that side of the business I knew what questions to ask when picking the right co manufacturing partner right totally in addition to that is something as basic as like how do you wrap a palette how do you build a palette how do you how do you understand what quality control is and purchasing power and and all of those elements that go into making a product and it was really it was a hard lesson and an expensive lesson but it was one that I'm really grateful that I had shifting gears a little bit from a brand and packaging standpoint thinking back to those early days when you're building building out the you know visual identity packaging design what were some of those key things that were top of mind for you that you really wanted to convey from yeah standpoint yeah so I mentioned the convenience and the experience factor from the consumer right so that stand up skirt cell pouch was such a fun easy way to hit all those high points that one was a big deal for us point two and I Learned this through my mentorship at H E B so originally all of our packaging was the same color and all of that was different on the front like I'm talking very first iterations of what we launched in the brick and mortar the only thing that was different was the cookie and if all that's different and and you know cookies are always this warm golden brown and if all that's you know visually if it only looks like the inclusions are what's different it's hard to tell what it is and I was given some statistics this was back in 2022 so it may have changed a little bit but it was like hey 80% of the stocking staff at our retailer at HEB could not read or write English so they stock based on color and if your product is being stocked wrong your consumer is purchasing it wrong so how can you Ashley be creative and help us differentiate this more and this is where we came up with colors like color differentiation in each flavor so it really helped identify with or help the brand create identity by saying I want the pink pack I want the blue pack I want the purple pack because if you think about it as a consumer you're like you're drawn to that color and it also has some benefits that if you look at the frozen dessert set there's a lot of white a lot of white a lot of sideways cardboard boxes a lot of Cool Whip and so it was a way for us to go into a shelf as a new brand with very little you know consumer base and for a way for us to pop out on the shelf and so that was probably our biggest takeaway that has helped with with the brand identity yeah that totally makes sense uncovered some of those kind of back at the previous company that I built that I mentioned and then the production design agency that I run now that's things that we often come across and and try to highlight for for clients and we Learned in the previous company where is even beyond this color is like exactly to your point if there's someone in the back of the store an employee if if they don't know can easily find your product in a back you know a dark lit room in the back of the store they may just say this is too hard for me to find I'm gonna put something else on the shelf instead and I think one of the things that has set us apart in the early days and helps cause it's it's eye catching when you compare to the white sideways box and you're like oh I'll try that and so then it has allowed us to reach customers that we had not yet reached totally founders that are you know I don't know a few years behind you and they're just going through this thinking back now what's I don't know one thing that jumps out that you tell them to keep top of mind or something to watch out for that might trip them up along the way beyond what you just kind of is always front and center right I would say and you you can correct me if you feel differently with your agency I just every time somebody picks up a pack this is love and cookies this is love and cookies and then let me look at the flavor but this is love and cookies cause the more that people are hearing our name reading our name I feel like is a super in addition to the color and the eye catching of the packaging but you want people to know what they're buying especially as you have competition in the set and different things like what who is gonna be the top of mind and who's gonna be the brand that people want to take home yeah to entry right you have like yeah you have the door you have the coldness and you have a lot of things that keep people sometimes from opening that door unless they already know what they want set and I was like what what if you could redesign the frozen set entirely entirely in retail what would that look like and entirely so at least you can remove one barrier of entry yeah you know some retailers will have those like reaching bins and they usually see them a lot more about holidays and stuff but those tend to work really well as well cause you're also looking down and you have a 3 60 view versus a vertical view and I feel like I agree with that it would help a lot yeah yeah in terms of pricing thinking back when you were launching into retail what did your strategy or process look like in terms of nailing down what you wanted your go to market price to be in relation to the market yeah that's a great question because it has changed and I and I and I will say it packaging and you have to be willing I think as a founder to always pivot and don't be married to something that is going to ultimately hurt your brand so when we started at HEB we actually had a each cookie it was a 16 ounce pack that with eight cookies but each cookie was a 2 ounce pack size so if you do your research it was the largest format on the market but you were getting this Superior Bakery style cookie but we were coming in at a high price at 9 99 per pack but we were able to go direct to warehouse I wasn't having to mess with like distributor fees and different things and it it worked for us like we did you know we sold $1 million worth of product in our first full calendar year at HEB it worked but the second I started going into distribution I realized that that price was not gonna work because of having to go through different distributors I had all these extra fees layered on and again this is something that I just didn't know I didn't understand at the time and didn't have that experience or background knowledge so we quickly Learned and said hey what happens if we reduce the cookie size to an ounce and a half so that we can create are we still gonna get the same quality product the same superior product and but yet a better price point for our consumer and so we can create this win win so there was a lot of back and forth and understanding and having to make that hard pivot right but what we found is that yes it reduced it just enough so that we can be at an efficient price point once we go into distribution it also gave our H E B consumer a much better price on shelf and by reducing the price where groceries right now are going up and we were able to reduce it but when the cookies bake they are almost the exact same size and so it's an efficiency that we created without cutting quality and out without hurting experience for the consumer and so that yeah and so it was just a transition and it's a it's a minute change we're talking half an ounce if you weigh half an ounce it's not a lot but it's enough to give a financial incentive to our consumer and a benefit to us being able to scale nationwide totally yeah that makes total sense I think that's really smart well you you touched on the H E b's quest for Texas best a bit at the beginning did you run first place in 2022 got that cash prize direct path to shelf on 250 I think plus doors nationwide gone started going through the this quest process yet yeah tell me a bit more about the the actual experience like how did you prep for the pitch what did you feel like the judges cared about anything you feel like you wish you'd known before you walked in now looking back well I will I wish that I would have known just how hard CPG was at the time I was the time when I you know when you get told you're you imagine this I had no experience I knew truly knew nothing about CPG and I had a retailer as amazing as HEB saying hey we believe in you we believe in your story we believe in your product we want you on our shelves like that is a like oh my gosh like 3 60 inside out career shift pivot as a brand an amazing experience so HEB has been an amazing partner amaze I have amazing mentors and friends from this whole experience and still to this day they are just an absolute phenomenal partner to work with but going through the process I this one of the sourcing managers who was walking me through this really was so wonderful and helping me talk through you know do you truly understand your margin do you understand freight do you understand all of these things that are gonna take for you to get your product from point a to point B into the consumer's house and so that guidance still and he's still one of my very dear friends today but was so beneficial but I will say if you're especially if you're a Texas based brand was the best experience I've ever had they I encourage people to apply to try it out because H E B really believes in this grassroots approach where they want they want to support Texas local economies they want to support Texas brands and I'm so thankful that they took a shot on us and hope that we're making a difference on their shelf and enjoy being their partner but it's definitely a worthwhile if you're a Texas brand experience to to go out on that limb and put yourself out there once we got notified that we were a top 10 finalist that's when things really started changing for us so I went I was not only prepping for the build out of this potential facility I was caught in limbo right because if we didn't win or if we didn't there's no guarantee that we were even gonna get a contract so I was having to navigate do I sign the lease do I build this out do I not until we actually went through the process right so this when you give this picture standing in a room with people watching you at this point in my life I had not given a speech since college in a small you know small speech class with 10 people and I'm here I am talking to 100 people telling trying to convince them that my product deserves to be on shelves and so I had to walk through our story about why and then why the Texas consumer would want loving cookies in their freezer and then of course they are a business so they wanna know do you understand your price point do you understand warehousing and so because I had the guidance from my mentor I was able to articulate and come to a point of understanding before that pitch and so it it kind of worked out for us and so I'm thankful for that opportunity great I'm not sure if if they were early enough involved in the process you're going through this where they could there wasn't a whole lot of things to go backtrack on but as you were going through the process or once you won between then and and when HBO is actually gonna put the brand on the shelf did they come back and say hey we want you to you know tweak the formulation this way or we want you to tweak your packaging this way are did they have any feedback before getting on shelf cause I know often times like brands that I hear and they talk to Whole Foods they're like before obviously I want to put you on the shelf but hey you need to make these changes to your packaging before you feel like you're ready for the the shelf so I would we were very blessed that they they had that conversation with us prior to us even purchasing our first round of packaging and our first nice reiterations of things and hey like as you know like with the brand like your packaging is ever evolving you're always gonna be like never done making efficiencies and it's never done you love to think it is like we just did a whole like kind of refresh recently and it's for it we're gonna do it again probably you know what I mean it's always changing and so what we launched with the H E B is not what's on the shelf today it's similar and people know it's the brand right so a good example of that is that in we loved it at the time and it worked at the time is that when we first launched we used all of our cookies were named after either my son or my other children or friends and family that were really supportive of us during Charlie's illness and it was a nod to them and it was a super fun personal thing but once we got outside of of Texas people are like well what the heck is a Charlie Cash cookie and you're like they just want a chocolate chip cookie and so we realized that people in other parts of the country who maybe they don't have the same understanding of the story but it was actually causing confusion on the shelf so we actually have since dropped the names and just went to like what the cookie actually is which has actually helped in increase velocities so those are some minor things that we've had to change and tweak since that first iteration but to your original question I had a lot of guidance in the beginning before I had to make that first big you know 20 thousand dollar run of packaging so that I didn't have to just like that on fire so I was grateful for that that's great HEB doors look like from standpoint in terms of best way to drive trial or any of the other learning lessons things you feel like jump out now looking back yeah so you know we're based in the Austin area and so it was naturally very easy for us to support the Austin market and so I was doing in store demos all week long at all these different stores sampling like live sampling the product and when you're sampling and baking warm cookies it's pretty hard for people to say no when they're walking by very true you got the smell and then you add in the taste and it's so that was a really fun experience and we were able to you know share our story have more one on one conversations and again I think it goes back to that grassroots approach of being local and people want to support local especially here in Texas and so that was very beneficial the longer we were on shelves the less time and the more we started growing the less time I had for that right and of course just the reality of of growth yep so we started getting into promotional support like in yellow tags or you know different things that brands do and we saw a big jump in that and so then we had to learn well do people respond to different price points and what does that look like and I'll never forget when the first time we ever did a BOGO and I went on day three to like check out the shelf and it was empty after day three and I remember the first time that happened I was like wow so this one worked and so you and that was always really fun cause people get to try multiple flavors and so we Learned that those seem to be really beneficial which who doesn't love a good BOGO very true side really started to scale eventually just you made the decision to to close down the the retail the retail side of things yeah walk me through that okay so to open the manufacturing facility we got hit with Covid right so when we had our brick and mortar we had three locations in Austin and I I loved our brick and mortar it was so fun I loved having that local consumer base but we got hit with a really unique challenge so the grocery side was scaling we knew that we were gonna be launching into our first national retailer so this would have been like the fall of 2024 we knew that was coming we were in the we had just opened our third location but the construction had taken six months longer than it was supposed to which you know that will tell you as well yeah typical yeah but yeah for sure but we got hit with I was having serious labor shortages and issues and then to find anybody who would work it I was having to pay a significant amount for labor we were also at one of the peak egg crises where egg prices went through the roof yeah followed by butter followed by chocolate I don't know if you make cookies Adam but eggs butter and chocolate are kind of a staple and so I was looking at you know like our PNL and looking at these expenses and the brick and mortars were a fun to have they were just barely profitable and not enough to be a sustainable sure I mean they could sustain as they were but it wasn't they weren't handling these fluctuations of all these commodities the way that I would like and especially the labor just really added a hard element to it and so as we knew that this scale was coming I said well is that money better spent supporting our growth at shelf which this is the scalable these are the the bigger numbers and then at scale our gross margin is X versus what I'm having this struggling profitability over here and so yeah taking all those things into consideration we made the hard decision to shut them down and it was the right decision it was a hard decision but it was the right decision for the longevity of the business continued to scale I'm curious a bit about what what the team looks like in terms of and what's kind of on your mind take the company to the next level yeah so we have as we you know as we've scaled and we've also again shut down the facility we this has been a a process it wasn't something that happened overnight there was no magic bullet but as we were scaling one of the biggest things that I needed was a new head of ops and so I I refer she's she's a unicorn she's amazing at what she does and that was a really good big hire that really helped me and then with the the factory shifting the shifting to a co man and then all the cog efficiencies that she came in and made that was a really big step because again I don't know what I don't know and I as a founder your job is to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you and who can do own their previews way better than you and that are willing to teach you along the way right yeah also finance I have a great CFO who has a lot of experience with startups and she has really helped us own our spend and what you know are we being efficient here and then as we we started I started out there with those two that were key hires and because if the if the business is not on an operational strong foot it's gonna fall apart it doesn't matter how great your marketing is or your sales are or whatever it's gonna completely fall apart so operationally and with your supply chain we had to make sure that we were on sure footing and I'm so confident in where we are today with that so the next thing we realized is that we needed some help with with marketing right everything from socials to TPRs to you know influencers different things and so we I have a a new CEO who came to me from Lock Lome and um helped grow that business and so she's very seasoned in what she does there and so excited we've been working with her for about eight months and she's been a great addition to our team and then more recently I just hired a new uh head of sales so we are working on this larger growth plan cause now we have this foundation that is really set and then this way our tree won't topple so now we're just here to drive sales and grow grow cookie sales and become America's next favorite cookie and in the home and freezer of every every freezer across America love that well that kind of leads into next points I mean you've you've scaled to I think 500+ doors at this point I think you've raised less than 500,000 bucks still to business I know you mentioned you got a loan to help build out the at least like first version of the in house facility capital standpoint first off how are you financing working capital and you know so we actually are in the middle of a larger fund raise a larger okay our first like larger seed round and so which is almost completely funded so full transparency we have raised quite a bit of money to help us support this growth because as you know it is a a very expensive business um and especially if you wanna wanna grow and scale so good thing is though we're gonna tip that point of profitability this year which is great and then in addition to raising raising that money so prior to this yes we we raised just a little bit initially to help us with the facility or had a loan facility and raised a little bit to help support our growth at HEB but the time has come where we actually needed a little bit more so we're actually in almost 15 doors across the country now wow okay so yeah so we have grown quite a bit and with some some more exciting launches coming this year so we need to be able to adequately support that and help drive trial and I can't go into every retailer Adam unfortunately and do live demos as much as I would like to but we have to be creative as much as you probably like to do it that's just not your job anymore so I still show up sometimes I think it's really fun you gotta engage with the customer and for sure love sharing our story totally well last question for you you're obviously you've been in entrenched in this CPG world now for for quite a while any any particular brands or just trends in general across CPG outside of let's just say the the the the cookie category that you're particularly excited about or things you just been kind of tracking or things you've been buying a lot at the store lately well I am very much have a ADHD brain where I'm always looking and thinking of other ideas and and this is where my finance and ops team are very good about reigning me back in saying no no no we have to focus over here because I'm like oh we should do this we should do that so in my mind I had envisioned that you know love and cookies would be on every aisle in the grocery store with all different brands but that's just not your reality so I definitely think there is white space for you know clean label mixes and pre made products both like pre made cookies or other like similar things that can meet that shelf stable but clean label opportunity so those are definitely things that excite me they're not necessarily on the radar right now but I'm definitely interested in that and seeing where that can go cause I think there's a couple brands out there who have done that really well they started out with maybe a mix or a bar and next thing you know now they have frozen this and shelf stable this and it's a way to really saturate the grocery store and yeah totally and eventually I think that's where we would love love to be one of my mentor one time asked me I love I love sharing this quick story he I said hey like who is your competition so let's back up to 2022 where again how I knew nothing and I was like well at this point in time nobody because it's a whole door full of pies and there's no there's no other cookies and we're innovative and gonna do all these wonderful things sound does that sound like a typical founder I I'm unique I'm gonna do all this and then he was he laughed he literally laughed at me and was like okay well come back to me when you thought about that for a little bit and let's talk about this again and so then I realized what he meant and he's like truly the entire grocery store is your competition right you I am yes frozen cookie dough is not typical in the sense that people have been trained to buy it in the refrigerator section typically we're kind of essentially creating a new category a new place for people to go but it's not only that it's the dry cracker aisle like dry cookie aisle the cookie mixes anybody who's dealing cookies you have to find a way to like snatch them from that aisle to now come to the frozen set and so we're gonna start here but it's not what we're gonna finish and because the more we can get the brand name and like across the aisles the more it's gonna and grow our grow the brand love it that's great oh yeah actually what's the what's the best place to follow along with with you and your journey and then best place for people to follow along with the brand these days as well yeah so you can find us on all social media Instagram TikTok Facebook our handles are at get love and cookies and across the same for every platform of course on LinkedIn and then our website which is get love and cookies.com perfect Awesome Asher I appreciate the time I think the I think that's the pod this has been awesome Founder CEO of Loving Cookies the clean label and Charlie was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease the listeners that aren't all that familiar with products in the lineup and then we'll go from there you had to play around with the things that you can bake them from frozen in in 15 minutes was it just like you couldn't find a co pack the thought process that ultimately that's super helpful for I think for up and coming on brand identity positioning voice both the voice tone and also from a look and feel back of house things fairly early like looking back now for let's just say some up and coming year two behind you making sure that your the name of your brand set you have a ton of barriers for other brands that that are listening that haven't what did those first what was really moving the needle from a velocity decision process what hires have been the most pivotal over the next year or two in terms of what you need to ingredient purchases inventory that kind of stuff