It’s crispy on the outside, chocolatey, gooey, soft on the inside, and is always delivered warm.
Fresh warm cookies, that’s the catch of a Guelph woman’s new business born out of COVID.
Since its launch in May, founder of getcookies.ca, Bryanna Fox delivered nearly 1,500 cookie boxes across Guelph right to people’s doorstep. With four cookies in each box, that’s 6,000 4.5-inch wide chunky cookies.
“My thing is, it’s warm out of the oven,” says Fox, who left her career as a chiropractor during the pandemic to focus on her baking passion.
“I launched May 10 and I did a pre-order promo code and I had over 30 orders before I even launched for that first week ... the growth has just continued. It's just amazing.”
Now laughing at what she says might sound corny, Fox says the best part about delivering cookies is that she’s able to deliver smiles. And during the pandemic, she craved that human connection.
But leaving her profession to focus in the food industry was not an overnight decision.
After graduating from chiropractic school, Fox worked as a chiropractor for five years and felt it wasn’t the career for her. Fox was an associate chiropractor in Guelph and had a clinic in Waterloo. When the pandemic hit, her clinic was closed for three months.
“I was like, well this is a great opportunity to start,” said Fox about a business opportunity focused on her baking passion.
“It was the time where people needed a ‘lift me up.’ Delivery was growing hugely.”
So she started using her mother’s kitchen to test out some chocolate chip cookies.
“There’s a science to it,” she says of perfecting a recipe. “It really is a science. If the butter is too cold or too warm, it really is totally different.”
She says she tried over 50 different chocolate chip recipes and 100 different iterations and had for family and friends try out each recipe for texture, taste consistency and taste.
With many cookie businesses out there, she just wanted to focus on one kind of cookie, which was chocolate chip either made with semi-sweet chocolate chips or milk chocolate chips.
“I just wanted to nail down the best chocolate chip cookie,” said Fox.
Once she had the recipe down and the cookies ready to bake, orders just kept rolling in.
“You deliver warm cookies and people are so touched. I've just been getting such great feedback like ‘You made our day' and ‘I can't believe I had warm cookies delivered to me’ this is exactly what I needed today.'"
She said one part of the delivery she loves and didn't anticipate are surprises.
“I'll do birthdays, graduation, a dog, thinking of you ... like so many things.
“And it's a surprise so they have no idea I'm coming,” said Fox. “I have people like I'll deliver and their kid will answer the door or their husband or something and then the other person who ordered it will come running like ‘oh my gosh, do you bake these? I wanted to meet you.’”
By using a ghost kitchen in a building on Speedvale Avenue, Fox reduced her delivery time to six minutes on average to anywhere in Guelph. She says once she begins to sell out every day, she hopes to hire a driver to help with deliveries.
Fox said she noticed that people in Guelph are very supportive toward local business and it's important for her to also support local businesses whenever possible.
She said her boyfriend has been her main supporter and also helped her come up with the company name.
“He’s very business oriented and he was like well what do people get when they go on your website and I was like they get cookies and he was like well do you want to ‘get cookies’? And it stuck,” said Fox.
