We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Veronica Powell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Veronica below.

Veronica, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with what makes profitability in your industry a challenge – what would you say is the biggest challenge?

Inflation has been a huge challenge affecting profitability in the baking industry. Consumers will only pay so much for let’s say a cookie however the price of butter has tripled. So one of many challenges has been trying to see where else you can cut costs when your ingredient prices have increased. Here lately I have had to shop 4-5 different stores weekly for price savings. Little things like this is important to cut costs where you can to try to remain profitable.

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

Hi my name is Veronica Powell and I am the owner of The Cookie Crave. I have always loved to bake and in order to enjoy baked goods that were safe to eat I had to bake at home. I have a severe nut allergy which limited eats sweets outside of the house due to cross contamination and having a severe reaction. When I had my son I found that he had gluten and dairy intolerances so began baking gluten free vegan treats at home for him. I wanted to find a place that we could enjoy baked goods with out worry due to our allergy’s. This is why I started The Cookie Crave in the hopes to possibly help others with allergies find a safe space to enjoy our cookies and just serve some awesome cookies to everyone period. My bakery is completely Nut Free, we serve nut free cookies and also vegan gluten free cookies in various flavors. We have over 40 flavors now and we keep roughly 20 flavors in the store at any given time and rotate flavors monthly.

Have you ever had to pivot?

My store opened 1 week before COVID hit in March 2020, so everything I had planned to do in regards to marketing, getting on college campuses etc had to hault. Due to COVID we had to pivot to deliverys, signing up on delivery apps, coming up with more social media advertising and simply trying to stay open.

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

There has been plenty of times where we didn’t have much foot traffic in the store and could not afford rent. So I began doing more farmers markets then after that started doing larger scale events on the weekends to make rent. I didn’t have a plan since right after COVID, came inflation which raised all of our prices, then extreme heat this past summers which lead to lower sales again. So I also started doing larger festivals as well to raise website sales and let folks know about us. We have continued to take on additional events and think outside of the box to pay the bills monthly. Failure is not an option and because that has been ingrained in me I think I have tried several things to see what works and what doesn’t as this journey has all been a learning process for me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thecookiecrave.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/the_cookie__crave
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/thecookiecrave
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/thecookiecrave1