Love rules at local cookie company's Love Shack

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

What the world needs now is love - cookie love.

At least that is what Suzanna Miller and Paul Seyler, husband-and-wife owners of Vermont Cookie Love, have to say. They have been spreading their brand of cookie love since June 2007 when they started a small stand at the Shelburne Farmer's Market. They now sell their frozen cookie dough at 26 stores around the state and packaged fresh cookies at five of those stores. The biggest step for Vermont Cookie Love came three weeks ago when they opened the doors to The Love Shack, their affectionately-named cookie shop on Route 7 in North Ferrisburgh.

"The plan for the store is to continue to grow awareness that we're here," Seyler said. "What we're trying to do is bake and sell more fresh cookies and fresh pastries, but then we'll also use [the store] as a way to [improve] the frozen dough side of things, as a production facility."

Before opening the Love Shack, Seyler and Miller had to run their business out of Seyler's Subaru. They would pick up their ingredients, drive them to one location for mixing and another for baking, and finally drive their finished products to stores and farmer's markets. Cutting transportation costs is an important step towards the completely local, low-cost product Seyler and Miller envision.

"A big part of our company is following the model of a farmer's market, which is to try and keep things as local as we can and to keep things all natural or as close as nature intended," Seyler said.

Following their farmer's market philosophy, Seyler and Miller get their three main ingredients right here in Vermont: butter from Cabot, flour from King Arthur Flour in Norwich and chocolate from Barry Callebaut, a specialty chocolate manufacturer with a production facility in St. Albans. Even their logo is local - Gotham City Graphics, a graphics boutique in Burlington, designed it. Seyler and Miller said keeping the business local is important, but it is not just where the ingredients come from that makes them special.

"We're taking slice-and-bake cookie dough that everybody knows, but they know it one way," Seyler said. "We're now introducing it as a premium product that's made with the best ingredients we could find, and you really taste it. You taste the difference and it's better for you in the sense that there are no preservatives, there's no corn syrup, there's no hydrogenated oil. It's a real artisanal cookie dough."

Seyler and Miller market their flavors as kinds of love, reflecting the love they say goes into each cookie. First Love is their chocolate chip cookie, Forbidden Love is their triple chocolate indulgence and True Love is their oatmeal with dried cranberries. Six other kinds of love, including three seasonal flavors, round out the lineup.

There is a lot of love in the cookie kitchen, too. Seyler and Miller run the kitchen with the help of their two small children and Annie Seyler, Paul's sister. Matilda, their youngest child, knows as many words as any other two-year-old, but she has learned the power of staring up at her aunt as she mixes dough and saying, "Dough, please?" Making that appeal to a machine would be much less effective. The only machines in Seyler and Miller's kitchen are the oven and the large Kitchen Aid-equivalent used to mix the 30 kilogram batches of dough.

"Everything is hand-cut, rolled and packaged," Annie Seyler said. "Regardless of whether it goes the frozen direction or goes the baked cookie direction, it's all manual. There's no automation - it's either my hands or Paul's."

Seyler and Miller sell hand-made, all-natural, local frozen cookie dough, but that was not their lifelong dream. Seyler had always wanted a burrito stand like the ones he loved when he lived in San Francisco, but Miller dreamt of making cookies like the ones she and her whole family used to make together. Miller suggested they combine their ideas into 'dough'-ritos and now the cylindrical pounds of cookie dough are their trademark product.

But Miller and Seyler share their cookie love in many forms, through 'dough'-nations of cookies and dough.

"To their credit, Suzanna and Paul have done a lot of philanthropy," Annie said. "They really have made a commitment to the community by providing free product for lots of different events and that, I think, has helped build their customer base."

The duo said that community has always been a big part of their business plan.

"It was important that we find a way to connect to the community as fast as we could," Seyler said. "The big reason we started this company was the experience Suzanna had baking cookies with her mom. It's extremely communal; you're all right there in the warm kitchen with the smell of cookies and it's fantastic. We really wanted to extend that to other families and schools."

If their business plan does not show those motivations enough, Seyler and Miller intentionally named the business with the larger Vermont community in mind.

"I'd never want to do this any place else," Seyler said. "People love stories; people love to feel connected to the food that they're buying and to know what's in it, and also where it was made. All of these things are, I think, more common in Vermont."