Cooper Street Cookies
A cookie that’s yummy and just happens to be healthy sounds like a pipe dream. But Birmingham-based Cooper Street Cookies has a century-old recipe that proves it can be done.
“We started with the recipe that was the one everybody in our family loved,” says company president Max Surnow. The sliced, twice-baked, cinnamon-chocolate chip recipe goes back at least as far as his great grandmother. “We’ve changed it a lot to get more on trend with today’s consumer,” he says. It and all the cookies the company sells are free of nuts, dairy, soy, trans-fats and anything artificial.
“We didn’t used to call out that our product was nut free, dairy free,” he says. But customers noticed. Now, it’s the Cooper Street Promise.
Surnow and his mom, Elaine, founded Cooper Street Cookies, named a er a street in Colorado where the family has a cabin, in 2011. Max was just graduating from Michigan State University and finding the job market to be weak. Wanting to stay in Michigan, he proposed starting the business.
“I told my mom … if I’m ever going to try and start a business, it seems like a good time,” he says. “We started on day one together.” Elaine is the creative artist; Max handles the business side. They pooled their funds and decided to give it six months.
At MSU, Sam discovered the MSU Product Center, which provides coaching for start-up food businesses and has been instrumental in getting many up and running around the state. “I was able to leverage some of those resources,” he says. “It was a perfect situation.”
The first sales of Cooper Street Cookies were to local, independent markets. Once they began to develop a presence, Kroger gave the company its big break. e twice-baked cookie now comes in several flavors in addition to the original: orange-cranberry, Michigan blueberry and white chunk Michigan cherry. A new flavor, lemon blueberry, has been developed in conjunction with Costco.
A second line, chewy granola bakes, has been added in three varieties: blueberry pomegranate, chocolate cherry and oatmeal cranberry. "They’ve been on the market for about a year,” Max says. The granola recipe was developed from scratch based on “what kind of was lacking in the marketplace.”
In addition to Kroger, the cookies are available locally at Busch’s, Nino Salvaggio, Westborn Markets, Papa Joe’s, Market Square and Sam’s Club, Quicken Loans has made the granola cookies available to its staff as a healthy snack.
“It’s a really exciting time,” Max says. Now in its eighth year, the company has outgrown a home kitchen, an old bread factory in Pontiac and their own facility in Lathrup Village. They now use co-packers in Chicago and are distributed nationally.
In addition to making the world safe for cookie lovers, Cooper Street is committed to giving back to the community. They have established a children’s charity, Cooper Street Kids, which provides cookies to local children’s hospitals.
