Everybody loves her chocolate chip cookies but Kim Heddon’s favourite is ginger snaps.
The Meadow Lake, Sask., woman is a partner in a business that sells pails of frozen cookie dough to fundraising groups.
Cookie Crumbles is based in the northwestern Saskatchewan town because that is home for Heddon and her partner Lorenda Friesen. Heddon bought into the business five years ago after her friend Friesen started in business in 1996 from her acreage. Friesen began with five recipes, which she developed herself, and added three more using ingredients such as rolled oats, chocolate chips and raisins.
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“I just knew my friend Lorenda is a great cook,” Heddon said.
A chat with her farming father convinced Heddon that cookie dough was a good opportunity. Not only were there profits, but she could work for herself on her own schedule.
This year they started mixing dough Nov. 1 in Heddon’s commercial kitchen and will deliver their last pail Dec. 17 for the busy Christmas fundraising season. They expect to sell 3,000-3,500 pails. Heddon has developed a second fundraising season in February and March, when she expects to sell another 1,500-2,000 pails.
“I will make as much in three months of work as someone who works full time year round at minimum wage.”
Heddon’s main job is to make contact with groups wanting to raise money. She often phones village offices to find names of groups in their sales area, which reaches from Prince Albert, Sask., west to Cold Lake, Alta.
She said 4-H is the best of the groups she works with “because the kids are so responsible and the parents are involved so everything runs smoothly.”
Other fundraising groups include air cadets, schools and hockey teams. Heddon said their business success is based on their dough’s homemade taste and quality.
“These people wait for the dough. They want it.”
Friesen developed the cookie recipes as a way to raise more income for her family. She said she was always experimenting with recipes, “sometimes disastrously.”
Friesen started with a mixer that could produce two pails of dough at a time. Within three months demand had built and she bought a larger mixer that did 30 quarts of dough. She said sizing up the recipes was not simple mathematics. More testing followed and her family had to eat a lot of cookies.
Cookie Crumbles’ next venture is to franchise its dough and business.
“Our dream is to keep growing across the country,” Heddon said.
“There’s lots of competitors out there but our product is so good and is 100 percent satisfaction guaranteed. We will not argue with a customer. If they don’t like one dough, we’ll replace it with another flavour.”
Heddon said the dough is nut-free and all the ingredients can be bought at Co-op stores across the West. Cookie Crumbles buys about $14,000 worth of groceries each season at the Meadow Lake Co-op.
