A gourmet cookie bakery that started in Port Moody and recently opened its first shop in New Westminster is a finalist for a Small Business BC Award.
Bak’d Cookies is competing for the Premier’s People’s Choice Award that is voted on by satisfied customers. It’s up against a cleaning products company in Ucluelet and a clothing company in Courtenay.
Bak’d was borne from the COVID-19 pandemic when siblings Jessica and Andy Nguyen started baking giant, gooey New York-style cookies to cheer themselves up through public health lockdowns and frustrating job searches.
Jessica Nguyễn had just graduated from Simon Fraser University with a degree in business administration but all the interviews she had lined up for prospective jobs went away at the onset of the pandemic.
Younger brother Andy also lost his part-time job at a pie shop.
When Jessica posted photos of the cookies on her Instagram account, friends started asking about them, so Andy started baking more.
From baking 100 cookies a week in the oven of their mom’s Port Moody townhome to sell to friends and family, they progressed to a commissary kitchen in Burnaby to produce 5,000 cookies a week for sales at farmers markets around Metro Vancouver, as well as local craft breweries and a pop-up shop at the Coquitlam Centre mall.
The effort made Andy a better baker, he said, while Jessica earned real-world experience starting and running a business.
Using the reach of social media, the siblings built a following for their cookies by staging monthly “flavour battles” that give followers a chance to determine upcoming batches of unique flavours like key lime pie and strawberry cheesecake.
“It’s like being in a research lab,” said Andy Nguyen. “It’s a fun time for everyone.”
In June, the Nguyen’s opened their first retail shop in New Westminster’s Brewery District, and they’re now baking 1,000 cookies a day and they have 27 employees.
Andy Nguyen said having shop allows them to serve customers their cookies fresh from the oven in back.
“I think that was our biggest point with the store,” he said. “We wanted customers to have the same experiences we would have in sneaking a cookie out of the oven.”
The Small Business BC Awards will be presented at a special reception at the Vancouver Convention Centre on Nov. 1.
— with a file from Theresa McManus, New Westminster Record
