Thingdrop preview: Meet Home Dough, a bake-at-home frozen cookie dough brand
Launched in December, Home Dough offers frozen cookie dough free of preservatives and GMOs. It's also our next Thingdrop.
In celebration of our 100th newsletter issue tomorrow, we’re partnering with Home Dough on 100 Thingdrop codes for Thingtesters. Reminder that Thingdrop is our product testing program that offers newly launched brands to our community at a heavily discounted price in exchange for your honest feedback.
Be sure you're signed up to our newsletter to get access. Ahead of the drop, we asked Home Dough a few questions to get to know them a bit better.
To celebrate our 100th newsletter, we've partnered with Home Dough to offer Thingtesters 100 discounts in exchange for their honest feedback.
FOUNDER INTERVIEW
Thingtesting: What opening did you see in the cookie category? How does Home Dough differ from grocery store brands?
Home Dough: There are limited options for cookie dough that consumers can buy in the grocery store and bake at home. The main cookie dough products are by multi-billion-dollar corporations and are refrigerated cookie doughs that have a short shelf life or have preservatives and other not so desirable, low-quality ingredients (artificial flavors, food dyes, and oils).
We saw an opening for a ready-to-bake cookie dough that is preservative-free and made with as many high-quality, organic ingredients as possible. Since Jami [Home Dough's founder] has been baking cookies since she was a little girl, we've used her recipes she's been fine-tuning for 50+ years to bring a higher quality and far better-tasting cookie dough to market.
What do you think is behind the recent rise of dessert brands offered direct-to-consumer?
The pandemic probably contributed to the direct-to-consumer trends we are seeing but there was a growing population of consumers interested in ordering their desserts such as ice cream and cookies from delivery services such as Door Dash and Uber Eats in the several years leading up to the pandemic. Perhaps technology and the ease of ordering dessert through phone apps is the main reason for this rise.
What goes into shipping Home Dough frozen to customers?
Shipping frozen products come with certain logistical challenges that other direct-to-consumer brands likely don't have to deal with. To ensure our cookie dough arrives frozen to our customers, we use sustainable insulated packaging filled with dry ice. We calculate how much dry ice we need to use based on a customer's shipping location.
Because we don't want the dry ice to evaporate during transit, we normally don't fulfill orders on Friday, so our cookie dough isn't sitting in the carrier's facilities over the weekend waiting to be delivered. Like many other brands that sell frozen goods, we have an order minimum on our site (you can use a discount at checkout to go below that order minimum) to help account for the extra care and cost it takes to ship frozen products.
Have you heard any interesting feedback from customers since you've launched?
We've been fortunate to get an overwhelmingly positive response to our cookie dough since we've launched. Many customers have suggested we make our bags resealable, which makes so much sense and we are now looking at.
We are waiting to receive one of those humorous negative reviews that we can scratch our heads at, joke about, and perhaps share on social media. Our favorite review comes from Dave who said, "Thank you for creating such a delicious cookie. Home Dough takes the cake…and certainly the Cookie."
How did you land on your current flavors?
Jami has been making all three of these flavors for decades and the chocolate chip for 50 + years. They are her favorite flavors and offer something a bit different for everyone.