Topics: Small business, Co-tenancy, leasing,

Sweet Success: Building a Cookie Empire with Angie Snediker

In this episode of Retail Retold, host Chris Ressa welcomes the founder and owner of Half Baked Cookies, Angie Snediker. Angie shares her journey from baking in her home kitchen to expanding her cookie business to three locations, including Lockport, Williamsville, and Buffalo. She discusses the challenges and triumphs of starting a business, the importance of providing freshly baked cookies for customers, and her unique flavors that set Half Baked Cookies apart from competitors. Angie also touches on her strategic approach to selecting store locations and her plans for future expansion.

00:00 Introduction
00:19 Meet Angie Snediker: Founder of Half Baked Cookies
00:47 The Journey from Kitchen to Storefront
01:47 Expansion and Success in New Locations
02:34 Unique Selling Points of Half Baked Cookies
03:43 Business Challenges and Triumphs
04:34 Choosing the Right Locations
08:54 Williamsville Store: A Success Story
14:49 Future Plans and Industry Insights
18:58 Fun Questions with Angie
20:59 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

What You’ll Learn:

1. Co-tenancy from the way it reads in a lease and what the future of that will become
2. What are the two most common co-tenancies?
3. How many tenants terminated their leases in the US due to a co-tenancy violation?

About Retail Retold:

The Retail Retold Podcast highlights community retailer stories from across the country and gives a behind-the-scenes perspective from business leaders in both retail and real estate industries. The show’s episodes contain valuable insights that help solve the needs of entrepreneurs and real estate pros. Join host Chris Ressa and new guests weekly for amazing insights and thought-provoking stories.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] This is Retail Retold, the story of how that store ended up in your neighborhood. I’m your host, Chris Ressa, and I invite you to join my conversation with some of the retail industry’s biggest influencers. This podcast is brought to you by DLC Management. Welcome to Retail Retold, everyone. I’m your host, Chris Ressa, and I’m excited for you to join me today.

[00:00:17] Chris Ressa: Welcome to Retail Retold everyone. Today I am joined by Angie Snedeker. I’m excited for Angie to be here. She is a tenant at a DLC-owned property and the founder and owner of Half Baked Cookies. Welcome to the show, Angie.

[00:00:35] Angie Snediker: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:38] Chris Ressa: My pleasure, Angie. Why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about who you are and what you do?

[00:00:47] Angie Snediker: So I own a cookie shop. We have three locations. It started from my kitchen at home five years ago, I think now maybe six years ago. I was just looking for a little bit of a hobby that might be able to bring in some money, but more than anything, I was just trying to satisfy my own sweet tooth, and that’s how Half Baked Cookies was born. I started selling to a local cafe, and you know, my name got out there, and people were really loving it. And then I transitioned into opening a brick-and-mortar store, and that was in Lockport, still is in Lockport.

[00:01:22] Angie Snediker: We’ve been open three years there. We knew we wanted to expand. When I say we, I mean like me and my team because I run everything by the team before I do things because I need just a little reassurance, and they’ve been there with me from the beginning. So, we knew we wanted to open another location, and that’s when we started looking in Williamsville, which is where we have our spot with DLC.

[00:01:47] Angie Snediker: We opened that one year ago just over a year ago. It’s been awesome and then just this last month we opened opened a third location in Elmwood Village in Buffalo so yeah, we are expanding we are trying to just like stick with our basics that we know like great cookies and great customer service. And the rest kind of fills itself in.

[00:02:12] Chris Ressa: Amazing.

So this started out as satisfying your own sweet tooth in your own house. And you were selling them to bakeries. What made you decide to open your own shops instead of selling to more bakeries or grocery stores?

[00:02:34] Angie Snediker: I think that the most important thing about Half Baked Cookies is that we’re providing the freshest, warmest possible cookies to our customers.

And it’s tough to do that in a grocery store and it’s tough to do that even with a bakery or a cafe. I felt like the best way to do that would be to, have the cookies laying out before them. They just came out of the oven. You can see everything you can choose, that everything was made super fresh, just baked.

And our location in Lockport is right across from a park. So we also do ice cream at all three of our locations. So going into it, I was like, I don’t even know if this is going to work. I was hoping to, you know, if the cookie thing didn’t work out, rely on the ice cream thing because across from a park, you can’t really go wrong.

We’re selling Perry’s ice cream, which everybody knows and loves. So that was the fallback plan. You know, the ice cream’s there and it’s great, but it’s about 10 percent of our business in Lockport and even less than our other locations because the cookies are such a hit.

[00:03:42] Chris Ressa: Wow. And before this, did you have any entrepreneurial or business experience or was this your first? Venture of your own owned business.

[00:03:54] Angie Snediker: This was pretty much my first venture. My dad’s an entrepreneur, so I had that kind of instilled in me from a young age. My mom also has done some different things, like having a little antique shop for a while and selling fresh cut flowers, and so we just have that kind of “go get them” entrepreneurial spirit, but for myself, this was like a big step.

It took a lot of courage and a lot of confidence that I might not have had yet at the time, but I’m like gaining as, as the days go by. But yeah, it was a major leap of faith and I’m so glad I did it.

[00:04:32] Chris Ressa: Congratulations. And so Lockport was your first location. Why Lockport?

[00:04:39] Angie Snediker: I live in the town next to Lockport, so it was just kind of like Convenient for me as a mom at the time of two kids Now I have three. It was just like it’s right there. It’s convenient. It’s Again, like across the street from a park and it was an it was a foreclosed building that we got so we got it super cheap, we did the renovations and then that it just all fell into place.

I’m very into “whatever will be will be.” And that’s what it was.

[00:05:09] Chris Ressa: Got it. Yeah. I know Lockport pretty well. We used to own the tops shopping center there. And then I don’t know if you know where Runnings is. Yeah we built the Wellnow up on the road in front of Runnings there, so I’m pretty familiar with Lockport. Tell me about Half Baked Cookies. What makes Half Baked Cookies different from other cookie shops?

[00:05:32] Angie Snediker: First of all, the cookies are huge. They’re five and a half ounces each. So they’re like probably at least three of your average cookie. They’re super thick.

They’re super like gooey in the middle, crispy on the outside. We have, we’ve done like over 200 flavors, probably close to 250 now. Every week we have rotating flavors. So we have our classic lineup, which is like 11 flavors that we always have. That have just been like tried and true. And then we have gluten free and vegan options.

And then we have our five specialty flavors, which change every week, which some of them, like you might see a few times a year, some of the time, some of them, you might see one time a year. So when you see when you want, you gotta come and get it because you might not see it again for six months or a year.

[00:06:17] Chris Ressa: Clever. And. What’s the most popular cookie these days?

[00:06:23] Angie Snediker: Chocolate chip is always the favorite. But outside of that, like we do a sea salt caramel that we always have. It’s one of our classics. It’s chocolate chips, caramel cups. It has a gooey caramel center that we like hand pour the caramel into and then close it up.

And then we sprinkle it with sea salt. People love that. They go crazy for that. It’s an awesome cookie.

[00:06:48] Chris Ressa: Amazing. And when you opened up your first location, the, yeah, you usually have to put together a business plan and like revenue forecast coming out of the gate. Did you beat the plan? Was it bad? Not as expected. Did you have to, did it really start off slow and ramp up? Tell me about that experience.

[00:07:09] Angie Snediker: Yeah. So I tried to, I tried to be as a prepared person. So I did like sit down and attempt a business plan and I was just so unsure of what would work and what wouldn’t that, I like took a stab at it and we planned on having food at first. That’s why the one in Lockport’s called Half Baked Cafe. We planned on having food options. And then opening day the cookies went like crazy like we were like, oh my god, we got to go make more right now like in the back while the customers are here. Let’s get going.

So like I did drop some numbers and I had a little forecast of what I thought might be what we would be doing and I was like very conservative with that. I’m like I just what do we have to do just to stay afloat, and we well surpassed that like we went above and beyond.

Our sales were much better than that, to the point where like we were actually making a profit. We we’re paying off for the building and the work done on the building and all that but we’re actually like, we have some cash flow. This is awesome, which is what kind of inspired us to keep going and Okay, this is this can work.

Bakeries have very slim margins, so we have to be creative with how we do things and pricing and, like we have a quantity discount that we do. So the more cookies you buy, the better price you get. We keep it fresh with the new ideas every week, but like our cookies are very labor intensive and we use the best ingredients. It’s real butter. It’s real eggs. It’s not vegetable oils and all that. All

[00:08:50] Chris Ressa: the good stuff.

[00:08:51] Angie Snediker: Yeah.

[00:08:52] Chris Ressa: Yeah. So then success happens in Lockport and then you decide to move on to a place near and dear to my heart in Williamsville. So, tell me about how you decided on the market of Williamsville. And then. How you landed on our property.

[00:09:15] Angie Snediker: So when we started looking, I was actually trying to go a little bit further. I didn’t want to cannibalize any of our business in Lockport. But we started looking further and then like me and my real estate agent Caitlin Coder, she’s amazing, we started looking like more towards Buffalo. And then we just every time we looked, we’d get a little bit closer to home, And then eventually, like we were looking through Williamsville or like on main street and there just wasn’t anything that really made sense, like parking wise.

And it’s just like too busy up there. And is anybody stopping? And, so then we looked at the spot that we have now and we’re like, okay, awesome. Like Aldi is going in, this is like really everything’s filling in here. There’s ample parking. We’re like in a huge business medical district.

We looked at it and it was like, it was not done how we needed it, obviously. So that was like, it took some vision to see what it could be, which now it’s beautiful. It’s like bright and light and, clean and just like super welcoming, which when we first looked at it, it was like, you know how it is when you see something that used to be and now is not.

Let me like pedal back a little bit when we were in Lockport, like I remember one particular day I don’t know it must have been like a holiday because we had like a line going and I was just like wiping the counter I think like my team was waiting on customers more and it wasn’t like a stressful line.It was just like a under control line, but I was maybe like handing somebody their cookies or something. And someone was like, “you should do this in Williamsville.” And I’m like, “Oh!” And then the person behind one was like, yeah, I second that. Like I go to Williamsville. And that stuck with him wow, like two people in a row, like that’s gotta be a pretty good sample.

So, I had that information and there’d been other people too that were like, “if you do this again do it in Williamsville.” “We’d love to have you in Williamsville” so that stuck with me. Once we did open up in Williamsville, like opening day was Amazing. Absolutely just wonderful. Everybody was great. It couldn’t have gone better.

We have the manager in our Williamsville store, Cindy. She’s amazing. She’s just so good with the team. So calm so cool. So collected, so organized. I couldn’t ask for a better manager to have running that store. She’s made it just like impeccable, and I think that anybody who’s been there would agree. It just runs so well and so smoothly, everything comes out perfectly and customer service is on point.

We’re super happy to be in Williamsville. Now that we’re in Buffalo as well, we can see the differences in the areas. And it makes me like even more grateful for Williamsville and the like connection we have with everybody, because now we’re like working on developing that with Buffalo, it’s I think it’s taking a little bit more work just because there’s a lot more competition up there and it’s just a different area. The fact that like we were able to come to Williamsville and just be there and have our social media presence and that to bring everybody in was is super special and awesome. We’re super grateful for that.

[00:12:23] Chris Ressa: Amazing. So when you decided to take the shot on our property, did the, you mentioned you had to change it. What was like the cost to do the construction in the space? What, and was that what you expected to spend on it?

[00:12:42] Angie Snediker: It was like $150,000. It was a lot. I didn’t have any expectation. And I was raised that like whatever you put out into the world comes back and not to let money kind of scare you, you know you have to spend it to make it kind of attitude.

It was a lot it was definitely, but I think at the time it didn’t I don’t know. I don’t know why but looking back I feel like every year as I get older I get a little more anxiety, but like I feel like when we were doing that last year, I was “OK, let’s just do it and you know it’ll come back.” And it did like we have our sales there are great.

We’re working on paying that off still. I think we only have less than a year left paying that off. It was a lot of work, we did. We had to dig a trench from the back of the store to the front of the store, and it’s about 100 ft long to bring up plumbing.

We had to do bring in more amperage because there wasn’t enough amperage in the space. There was a lot of work, but it’s if you’ve been there, you’ve seen it. It’s pretty, it’s, we did good work.

[00:13:48] Chris Ressa: You did. It’s a great location. And so you feel like you got the right spot there in, in Williamsville.

That shopping center has come together. We put in Aldi and a bunch of other restaurants. There’s a lot of food uses there. Do you get people like going to the restaurant and then coming to you for dessert?

[00:14:08] Angie Snediker: Yeah, for sure. And that’s one of the big selling points of that plaza was like, okay, there’s at least 10 food spots right there. And like nowhere, not in the plaza, not just in the plaza, but like even in the area, there’s no dessert places. There’s not even like an ice cream place nearby. So, I we’re said this just seems like an obvious choice, like what goes better with food than more food, dessert,

[00:14:37] Chris Ressa: So awesome. That’s a good story. I love how, how much courage you have in this concept and opening the, and opening these locations up. Is there a fourth coming?

[00:14:52] Angie Snediker: We would love to get down to the south towns. A lot of people have asked if that was going to be our third move.

And then and then it wasn’t. And that, a spot opened up in Buffalo that was pretty ready to go. And, after forking out that money for the Williamsville build out, it was going to be nice and, not have to go through a six month build out process to just open something up.

But yeah, if you guys got anything for me down in Hamburger or Orchard Park, let me know.

[00:15:20] Chris Ressa: We used to. We sold two centers in Hamburg.

[00:15:23] Angie Snediker:  That’s what I thought.

[00:15:24] Chris Ressa: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so the dessert category. You know moving on from those locations specifically the dessert category from a retail perspective has been on fire post Covid. Crumbl Cookie had stormed the country opening locations.

[00:15:42] Angie Snediker: Yeah.

[00:15:44] Chris Ressa: How are you thinking about competition and. The explosion of the dessert category.

[00:15:51] Angie Snediker: I would say like, how do I say this without being like pompous? Our cookies are really good. Our cookies are really good. Like I described, we put a lot of like love and manual labor into each cookie to get it perfect. And, our recipes are like on point. Our ingredients are the best that we can get. We don’t mess around. We’re not trying to save money, or you know cut corners in the cookie making process. We are looking to have a superior product and we do

And anyone who’s tried both, I can’t say everyone, but I would say 95 percent of people who have had our competitors cookies and our cookies would agree that like ours are definitely better.

And there’s those people that are loyal to those other places and people will like argue with them, “yeah, but have you had a Half Baked Cookie? And they’re like “no.” Well, ok then.

[00:16:53] Chris Ressa: So superior product gives you comfort. And can I order  online? Can you order online? Do you do delivery?

[00:17:04] Angie Snediker: Yep.

[00:17:06] Chris Ressa: Do you do delivery out of region? If I ordered them from my office in Westchester, New York, can I get them for the office here?

[00:17:20] Angie Snediker: Yep. You sure can. Yep. We deliver. They’re not going to taste as good as right out of the store hot, but  they’re going to be all right. We, with every shipping order we do, we send a little reheat card as instructions for how to reheat the cookies and they’ll be, yeah, just as good as if bought them off the shelf that day.

[00:17:31] Chris Ressa: Got it. And what percentage of your business is in the store versus online?

[00:17:37] Angie Snediker: We don’t do a ton of online. We don’t really push it too hard. I think mainly because of the success we have in stores. And my vision is to offer an experience and to, again, get people like the hottest, freshest right out the oven cookies. And with shipping like that’s not the experience. In my mind, if I had somebody on my team that wanted to drive online sales I’d be totally open to it. It’s just not my main focus orgoal. It would help us out, especially I think with our seasonal fluctuations, but like my heart and soul is in like the brick and mortar in the like face to face handing somebody fresh cookies.

Yeah, but anyways, sales wise I don’t even know,

[00:18:26] Chris Ressa: Speaking my language as a, a person who works for a landlord for brick and mortar stores. This is been fascinating. I really appreciate the time learning more about your business and the courage you had to continually expand, I hope you get some more and be on the lookout because I’m definitely ordering some Half Baked Cookies here.

And next time I’m in Buffalo, I’m definitely going to get some but thank you for coming on today.

But before you go, have three fun questions, you questioned me whether they were actually fun or not.

But I have three questions for you. Are you ready?

Question one, what extinct retailer do you wish would come back from the dead?

[00:19:16] Angie Snediker: I had to look it up. Blockbuster because of the, again, that experience and like that feeling you get when, when you were a kid and you’d walk into Blockbuster and even any video rental store. You’re getting a movie, you’re going to be having like candy and popcorn tonight. It’s just going to be like a cozy night in. You just can’t beat that, and that’s what I’m trying to create that with Half Baked Cookies. People coming into the shop know we’re getting a box of cookies  whatever they’re going to be doing tonight, they’re going to have a box of cookies by their side. So it’s going to be special

[00:19:56] Chris Ressa: Awesome. Question two. What is the last item over 20 you bought in a store?

[00:20:05] Angie Snediker: I would say, I don’t know. Oh my gosh. I think I did some school shopping last week for the kids. So, it was school clothes. Yeah.

[00:20:15] Chris Ressa: Last question. If you and I, Angie, were shopping at Target, and I lost you, what aisle would I find you in.

[00:20:22] Angie Snediker: I’ll give you two, either like the kids clothing section or the kitchen little trinkets, utensils, plates, bowls, that kind of thing, section.

[00:20:36] Chris Ressa: How old are your children?

[00:20:39] Angie Snediker: One, three and eight.

[00:20:41] Chris Ressa: Oh, we’re in the same neck of the woods. I’m six and seven.

[00:20:44] Angie Snediker: Yeah.

[00:20:44] Chris Ressa: Yeah. When and when do they start school in Buffalo. When do you guys start school?

[00:20:49] Angie Snediker: Next week. September 2nd.

[00:20:52] Chris Ressa: Same. Same with us. If you talk to anyone down south, they’ve been in school for a month already.

[00:20:56] Chris Ressa: It’s wild. Yeah,

[00:20:56] Angie Snediker: I know. It’s

[00:20:58] Chris Ressa: wild.

[00:20:59] Angie Snediker: Yeah.

[00:20:59] Chris Ressa: [00:21:00] Listen, Angie, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today. I wish you nothing but success and have a great start to the fall.

[00:21:07] Angie Snediker: Thank you. You too.