Sweet Loren’s: Loren Castle. How A Recipe Makeover Built a National Cookie Brand

Guy Raz (0:00)

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Loren Castle (4:26)

I'm talking every day in my apartment. I would just test different types of potato starch and tapioca starch, you know, in different proportions of it. So honestly, it was just so much playing around. I tried to hire food scientists to help me because I thought like that would be the easy solve.

And the food always tasted like a science project.

Guy Raz (4:56)

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how Loren Castle made cookie dough taste good, even without gluten, dairy, and eggs, and then grew that into Sweet Loren's, a brand that sold in more than 30,000 stores.

A lot of founders think that to build a great brand, you've got to come up with a totally original idea. But the fact is, a lot of really great products and brands built around them are simply more creative versions of what's already out there in the market. For example, Graza Olive Oil. The founders realized most people have no idea how to choose olive oil. So they made it simple. Three oils for three different uses. Two for cooking and one for drizzling on salad or tomatoes. They packaged it up in a fun, squeezy bottle, and it's become a national brand in less than four years. In fact, we really should do an episode on it. Anyway, today's story is precisely about taking on a category that wasn't very innovative. Refrigerated cookie dough. And for most of the past few decades, it was dominated and probably still is by tubes of Nestle Toll House. So when Loren Castle decided to start selling her own brand of refrigerated cookie dough, she saw an opportunity not only to offer up an alternative to the usual brands, but eventually to make it gluten, allergen, and dairy-free and vegan. Which sounds like a buzzkill for a cookie. I mean, you kind of want all those things in a cookie, right? But what if you could take all of those things out, the gluten, the dairy, the allergens, and actually make the cookie dough taste good? That was how, over many, many years, Loren was able to grow Sweet Loren into a national brand that's now sold in more than 30,000 stores across the country. And the thing is, Loren used to sell cookie dough that wasn't gluten and allergen free. But when she launched it as an option, it quickly outsold all her other cookies. So she pivoted and turned Sweet Loren's into a brand entirely aligned with consumers looking for an allergen-free cookie that didn't taste like cardboard.