Maya Madsen is the founder and CEO of Maya's Cookies, a vegan bakery that went from a homemade cookie hustle into a nationwide company practically overnight. Maya got her start baking cookies from scratch out of her own San Diego kitchen.
But when the pandemic hit, and her story went viral, her business exploded. Sales increased by an unfathomable 10,000%. Maya was inundated with orders, offers, and opportunities. Through it all, she has retained the core identity that makes her operation special.
We wanted to find out exactly how somebody goes from baking cookies at home to presiding over a rapidly growing national business. To learn more, we invited Maya to chat all about it with co-hosts Claudia Saric and Spencer Michiel on our most recent episode of So You Want To Run a Restaurant.
Training for the Big Show
“I spent 30 years as a personal trainer and fitness instructor who happened to be vegan,” Maya said. But even a vegan fitness instructor deserves a cheat day. Sadly, her quest to find an entirely plant-based chocolate chip cookie with that perfectly soft gooey consistency proved futile.
So Maya did the only logical thing — she perfected the vegan chocolate cookie all on her own. And once she had proven to herself that it was possible, it was time to test her results.
“I began sharing the cookie with my clients on their birthdays,” said Maya. “I wanted to show them the merits of plant-based eating and prove that you can still enjoy desserts.”
At the time, Maya had no idea just how far that premise would take her.
From Friends and Family to the Farmers Market
As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. For Maya, necessity came in the form of college tuition. It was 2015, and Maya recalled, “I had two kids in college at the same time, and I was just buried in bills so I decided to start selling my cookies to my clients and friends.”
Maya’s expectations at the time were pretty modest. But her cookies were an instant hit with her crowd. Before long, she was churning out 20 dozen a week for her nearest and dearest. Of course, one question occurred to her.
“Are my friends just being nice because they know I'm broke right now,” pondered Maya, “or do these cookies actually have some merit?”
So, Maya told us, “I decided to enter the county fair, and I won. That gave me the courage to start a business. I said, ‘Okay, they have merit. Let's go.’ And I started researching the best way to start a business and sell, and it turns out it was farmers markets.”
Five Takeaways From Our Chat With Maya
Becoming part of the farmers market scene in San Diego proved an excellent decision. It was here that Maya’s cookies really started to pick up traction. Ironically, it was also in this highly localized setting that Maya discovered her cookies had national potential.
1. Going Nationwide
Setting up at the farmers market created a tremendous opportunity for exposure. As Maya explained, “We're a tourist city, and thousands of people come here for vacation. And when they do, they go to our local farmers markets. So I would get customers from all over the country who happened to be vegan and found my little booth and loved the product.”
And then a funny thing started to happen. These tourists would go home but they couldn’t stop thinking about Maya’s cookies. It turned out that her instinct was correct. There was really nothing quite like her cookies in the plant-based food space. So she started receiving emails – people from all over the country who had tasted her baked goods and wanted to know if she shipped.
“I didn't,” said Maya. “but I just said yes, and voila, my e-commerce site was born. And that's how it grew.”
2. Gaining Exposure
Now that Maya’s cookies were available everywhere, the orders started to come in at a steady clip. It was time to graduate from her own kitchen. In fact, Maya conceded, her oven actually broke from overuse. Still, the next step was hardly a glamorous one.
“I was renting a commercial commissary space out of a kimchi and sauerkraut kitchen because I was broke, and it was the cheapest commercial kitchen I could find.” Maya recalled. “So not only was I smelling like sauerkraut, but I always wondered if it affected the flavor of the cookies. Fortunately, the customers never complained.”
Not only did they not complain, they kept ordering. And Maya’s Cookies continued to attract attention. She told us, “A nationwide food publication stumbled across my product and ran a little story and did some social media, and that was my next little bump in growth.”
3. Feeding Growth
“It was all very organic,” said Maya. This is not only a fitting way to describe a growing plant-based food business. It’s also an accurate way to describe Maya’s next step forward, going from behind-the-scenes baking biz to a customer-facing operation. It all happened very naturally, and with some unexpected help from the U.S. Postal Service.
“I outgrew that commercial kitchen and had to find my own space. We were using it at night in order to afford the rent,” said Maya. “We happened to be across the street from a post office, and so there were thousands of people passing by. They could smell it. I was baking in there to support our online sales and our farmers markets, but people kept knocking on the door trying to buy cookies.”
At first, Maya turned people away. She’d explain that Maya’s Cookies wasn’t a store. But finally, after enough people knocked on the door, Maya conceded, “Maybe I should open a store here. So I turned our front lobby into a little small, 10 by 10 storefront attached to our commissary kitchen. And that's how our first store was born.”
4. Finding Your Regulars
Before no time at all, that little storefront became a destination spot. Maya noted, “People flocked to it, especially in the vegan space. When they come to visit San Diego, we're one of those foodie stops.”
Still, noted Maya, if tourists and out-of-town visitors helped put her business on the map, it was the loyalty of her regulars that allowed her to truly grow. She explained, “I developed a strong customer base. Some of our same customers that I met in 2015 are our customers today, and I watched their families expand and I’ve been part of their lives. So that was instrumental in stabilizing us and getting brand recognition.”
Maya operated as the face of the business — “the maker, the baker, and the seller,” she told us. It allowed her to develop strong bonds with her earliest customers, to rely on them for meaningful feedback and, as she would soon find out, to lean on them in trying times.
Maya explained, “Your regulars are your biggest critics and your biggest champions. That came back twofold for me, because in 2020 that same customer support created an avalanche of online orders for me during the pandemic.”
5. Going Viral
While so many other businesses retreated during the pandemic, Maya’s mail order cookie business seemed almost perfectly built to weather the storm. But she did far more than weather it. When a social media post about her business went viral, suddenly Maya’s little operation got huge overnight. She woke up one morning to find her Shopify account suddenly overflowing with orders.
“The orders weren't stopping,” said Maya. “The post was continuing to show through different algorithms. And so the orders weren't stopping. They were ongoing. And that’s when the panic kicked in.”
In a matter of days, Maya’s two-person operation was inundated with thousands of orders. She found herself drowning in a sea of questions. How am I going to get supplies? How am I going to scale up? What am I going to do? At one point, Maya even contemplated turning off her website to stop the constant influx of new orders.
But, Maya recalled, “One of my mentors said, ‘Don't you dare do that, because businesses corporations would kill to have an opportunity like this, and you need to figure it out no matter what it takes.’ So I curled up and cried for a minute, and then I pulled up my big girl pants and figured it out.”
Putting All the Pieces Together
To hear the full story of how Maya figured it all out, and how she ultimately became the CEO of an enormously successful nationwide vegan cookie brand, you really should hear it directly from her. Check out the whole podcast above.
And for all the tools and tech you’ll need to scale up your own business, schedule your free, personalized consultation with one of our in-house restaurant tech experts and we’ll figure it out together.
