We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Molly Blakeley a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Molly, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s something crazy on unexpected that’s happened to you or your business

I’m so grateful to be able to say that there have been many huge unexpected blessings along the way with Molly Bz.
One that came to light that I thought was really neat was when I went to the Walmart open call.
My vice president and I went to Bentonville Arkansas and I woke up with the flu the day that we were supposed to pitch. So I said a prayer and said God if you give me a window of time to be better I promise I’ll come home and I will rest and within 10 minutes. I felt better took a shower and went down to the open. Call by Walmart.
The energy was crazy. There were brands all over the place out of 14,000 brands only 700 were selected to pitch in person.
For months and months, they told us how important it was if you got a golden ticket. This meant that a buyer liked what you had and wanted it just as it is and you didn’t need to change anything about it and they wanted to place a purchase order.
So we knew we wanted a golden ticket!
We had two meetings and we didn’t know what the second one was for we only knew what the first one was for. It was the grab and go section by the registers at Walmart. Right before we went in I told Frank my vice president I don’t want to use a pitch deck. I wanna just talk to them old school. Look them in the eye give them bites of my cookies and explain to them why our brand is great and why our flavors are awesome.
At the end of that 20 minute pitch meeting, we had a golden ticket in hand! Not knowing what would come next Walmart had a man in a red white and blue suit that marched down the middle of Walmart headquarters in a parade when he saw our golden ticket he grabbed me, sweep me off to their publicist and took a photo shoot and an interview and it was really really wild!
But we still had another meeting. And we had no idea what it was for while there we found out it was actually for the cookie and cracker aisle of Walmart a completely different area.
We did the exact same thing again and we got our second golden ticket!
Two golden tickets and the sea of brands were they only gave out three double golden ticket winners that day and I was one of them. What a fun ride.!!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was a single mom from a tiny Alaskan town of only 3000 people. I fell on hard times and found myself down to my last $150. I was panicked. Not sure what I was going to do so I decided to just make some crazy gourmet cookies. In three years, I became a national brand! What a ride it’s been they’ve used my cookies for the Oscars the Emmys, the Grammys gifting Sweets we’ve been on the Wheel Of Fortune Food Network said that we were the ones to watch in 2024 for trends with our new Bobadoodles (a shortbread with Boba gels in them).
It truly has been such a blessing

Then last year 2025 we went to the Sweets and Snack Show and they had the most innovative product of the year and we ended up winning it! It’s been an incredible journey. We’re an over 3000 locations and growing daily hourly by the minute. It’s been so much fun and I’ve learned so many things. I’m very very blessed. I have a tremendous team who has my back and always wants me to win. You can’t ask for more than that.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Being in Alaska, it has been a little tricky for me to find Co-packer to do product production. We’ve worked with many throughout the years.
Some saw are rapid growth and thought that they wanted to do it too and without notice we were asked to leave facilities so that they can grow their own brands. That’s a hard thing to happen in the middle of our growth, but we are now with people who really truly want to see us win.
We’ve even had people steal our packaging in our ingredients and say they didn’t receive it and make product for another country. We’ve had all kinds of crazy, weird wild things happened to us. But we’re still standing and will never quit!
The difference between successful people and people who aren’t are the successful people never quit.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

We were starting to grow rapidly, Costco target all these opportunities coming as left and right and so we knew that we needed to hire strategically to get somebody that would be able to help us that had a background in the Cpgh business. All of us are new to it, and we were just shooting off the hip.
So we hired a fractional CFO that was referred to us by a reputable company.
And all of a sudden, all of our money, just started leaving my account and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.
He had put it into another way to pay the bills and said they were all getting paid out of this other thing that was the new way to do it. Me not wanting to micromanage trusted him because of his background. After the third month, he told me I needed to prepare for bankruptcy at the beginning of the year. I was shocked because we had so many wonderful things happening. I couldn’t understand why that would be an issue.
So when I looked more into it and got access to where he was paying our bills, it turns out that he was paying himself five times what we agreed to, and basically was embezzling from us for over three months.
It was a very hard time because two weeks later my best friend and brother died suddenly right before Christmas. So I went into the year 2025 broken, devastated, depressed and broke.

But I knew God had a plan for my life and for this company and that’s what kept me going and in one week we were invited to Target headquarters and from that moment on the momentum kept going and going and going, and we made it through! We ended up doing over double in 2025 that we did in 2024. God is good.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Www.mollybz.com
• Instagram: Mollybzcookies
• Facebook: Mollybzcookies
• Linkedin: Mollyblakeley
• Youtube: Mollyblakeley