What Are All These New Cookie Dough Brands Bringing To The Table?
Cookie dough has always been there for us, acting as a symbol of comfort, nostalgia, and one of the best things life has to offer. It's a classic for a reason. Yet, over the past few years (and especially in 2022), several new cookie dough brands have joined the mix, offering new takes on the timeless treat.
"Historically, there has not been a market for gourmet cookie dough," Jami Changaris — the founder of Home Dough, launched in December 2021 — tells Hunker. "The choices were limited to a few brands that were inexpensive and lacked high-quality ingredients. Recently, young, fun, and independent cookie companies have come into the market, and through social media and digital channels, have made cookie dough cool and trendy."
At its core, Home Dough was created so that people wouldn't have to spend time shopping for their own top-notch ingredients after sorting through countless "best cookie recipe" search results. Now, you can skip the recipes altogether and still get that homemade taste.
Home Dough/Instagram
Gabrielle Brulotte, who co-founded Hot Take with her sister Elise, felt similarly before she took her brand nationwide in March 2022. "My sister and I made the dessert we wished we could find," Brulotte tells Hunker. "We chatted so many times about how frustrating we would get about not being able to find a high-quality dessert that was single-serve."
While both Hot Take and Home Dough provide ready-to-bake frozen dough, there are other new brands — like Doughp and Deux — that offer mixes you can safely eat raw and bake in the oven. Plus, both are on a mission.
Hot Take
After getting sober in 2015, founder Kelsey Moreira created Doughp in 2017. Following an appearance on Shark Tank in 2019, she was named on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list, and this year, Moreira made her second appearance on the TV program. This reaffirmed the company's #Doughp4Hope mission to do away with the stigma surrounding addiction recovery and mental illness. A portion of every cookie dough sale is donated to the She Recovers Foundation to support women seeking recovery.
"[A factor] contributing to cookie dough's current rise to the top are products, like Doughp, that you can eat raw and bake," Moreira tells Hunker. "Edible, bake-able cookie dough is taking a long-time American 'guilty pleasure' into the mainstream."
Doughp/Instagram
As for Sabeena Ladha, she founded Deux (another Shark Tank favorite) in 2020 to whip up a gluten-free, vegan, enhanced cookie dough. In partnership with a naturopathic doctor, all of Deux's doughs are designed with good-for-you ingredients — its chocolate chip flavor, for instance, provides immune support.
"There's a comforting and nostalgic element of snacking on raw cookie dough that just puts you in a good mood," Ladha tells Hunker. "The reason people love Deux specifically is [because] you get the delicious taste and texture of cookie dough, but made with great ingredients like oats, almond butter, and flaxseed, plus vitamins and supplements."
While one may think that creating a new cookie dough brand is akin to reinventing the wheel, there is clearly a lot of space for different takes and improvements. Whether it involves dough you can safely eat straight out of the carton or gourmet ready-to-bake cookies, one thing is for sure: The more cookie dough that's out there to comfort us, the better.
Now, the question is: What classic dessert will get a modern makeover next?