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What started as a ritual to comfort her sick child who was healing from Kawasaki disease, a heart condition, turned into a retail and consumer packaged goods cookie business for Ashley Cameron.
Love&Cookies LLC offers frozen cookie dough sold in H-E-B, and it also sells a variety of thick cookies and baked goods in its three brick-and-mortar shops — such as triple chocolate chip, Oreo with chocolate chip, gluten-free cookies, brownies, thick cookie cake and cinnamon rolls.
But a cookie business was never the plan. Cameron left her nursing career in 2014 but didn't enter the cookie track until 2020. After coming home from the hospital with her son, the duo began baking cookies as a form of joy and therapy, and then her husband suggested she sell the baked goods. So in 2020, Cameron started selling cookies produced in her home bakery, a practice protected by the Texas Cottage Food Law, and eventually opened her first cookie shop in Lakeway in October 2021.
But Cameron didn’t cap her ambition at one store. Instead, she signed up for H-E-B’s Quest for Texas Best with her frozen cookie dough and won first place in 2022. Since then, she has opened two more stores, in Westlake and on South Lamar Boulevard, and she has raised money to grow the business, with a goal of $2 million.
Between 2022 and 2023, Love&Cookies doubled its revenue, Cameron said, and is on track to quadruple it this year. So far, Love&Cookies hasn't reached profitability, but Cameron expects the business to be EBITDA positive — meaning earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization — in about three months.
Cameron said she opted for a multi-channel approach between retail and CPG to diversify revenue and to try to ensure that if one side of the business failed the other would succeed. She said CPG brings more profitability to Love and Cookies due to higher production volumes.
To supply nearly 300 H-E-B stores, Cameron built a 5,500-square-foot manufacturing facility in Dripping Springs, now providing cookie dough to her stores and CPG business. Not only does the facility support CPG, but it’s also a way to provide consistent taste to consumers buying from Love&Cookies shops and to control costs. Over the next year or two, however, Cameron said she will consider moving into a larger production space.
H-E-B has "completely changed the trajectory of our life,” Cameron said. “They offered such amazing mentorship and guidance, but they certainly weren’t going to do it for me. They said you need to find high-capacity equipment. So the next day at 2 a.m. I’m like, what exactly does high-capacity equipment mean? What does a high velocity at the grocery store look like? … And I’m sitting here Googling and reading everything I can get my hands on to learn that myself.”
Though H-E-B provided guidance, Cameron was researching online and in person, flying to Boston and New York to find the right equipment to scale her CPG company.
Love&Cookies has raised $600,000 in a SAFE round, short for simple agreement for future equity. It gives investors the right to receive equity in the company at a future date for their cash contributions, typically connected to a future financing round. Cameron’s goal is to move toward a series A funding round, but for the time being Love&Cookies is still raising funds through SAFE, with hopes of securing $2 million that way.
“It takes a lot of working capital to run ... a CPG business, because you have your cost of ingredients (and) labor, and you have to be able to scale up and put the right people in place for you to be successful on the shelf,” Cameron said. “I describe this as kind of my Field of Dreams. Like, I've built the facility, I've built the machines, I have the infrastructure, the scale — we just need the working capital to help us grow and increase that velocity.”
There is still runway left from the funds raised, according to Cameron, though she didn't specify how much.
Her next goal is to expand into other grocery chains this summer, outside of H-E-B and Royal Blue Grocery. Ramping up production to be on new shelves comes with upfront costs, so funds are being used for retail growth. In addition, she said a small portion of the money raised so far was used on the South Lamar store, which opened about a month ago and also offers coffee supplied by Jo’s Coffee and ice cream from Dallas-based Howdy Homemade.
Cameron chose the Dallas-based ice cream shop due to an overlap in missions: Love&Cookies supports children with acquired heart conditions by working with Kawasaki Kids Foundation, while Howdy Homemade supports young adults with special needs.
After three stores, Cameron said she wants to divert attention to the CPG side of her business, even though she anticipates opening one to two more storesover the next couple of years. She said she'll likely explore the continuously growing northern part of the Austin metro.
On the CPG side of the business, Cameron said she is in conversations with a list of grocers about stocking her frozen cookie dough. Anofficial announcement of retail partnership is expected in August that could take the cookies to consumers outside of Texas.
She said Austin has been an inspirational for her because many companies that started here, such as the prebiotic soda Poppy, have received national recognition. She said she has leaned on another Austin-based company — frozen Middle Eastern food maker Afia — because it also was part of H-E-B’s CPG incubation team.
The founders of Afia "are amazing,"Cameron said. "And they have been a huge inspiration for me because they went through the H-E-B Quest journey as well. And so they have (provided) a lot of mentorship to me over the years. If I can be where they are in five years, that would be amazing, because I think they have just like crushed it."
The upshot is her cookie business is thriving. As for her son, he is too.
