Juan Morel, a 38-year-old professional bodybuilder, has several nicknames. One is “Diesel,” for his resemblance to the similarly smooth-headed and muscled actor Vin. Another, “King of New York,” he earned for winning his second New York Pro competition last May.
“And now,” Morel said recently over FaceTime from his Long Island home, “the ‘Cookie Monster.’ ”
Since June 2019, he and his wife, Karen, have been running My Cookie Dealer, an online-only bakery that operates primarily via Instagram. While many food purveyors have struggled in recent months with a socially distanced reality, My Cookie Dealer has always been a delivery-only business. That model has now proved itself crisis-proof.
One recent shipment included some 3,000 orders for more than 35,000 cookies and weighed nearly 9 tons, Karen Morel said. All of the cookies were ordered within a 14-minute window.
My Cookie Dealer’s cookies are huge. Each mound of dough is weighed by hand to ensure its half-pound size and then cooked and packaged at the Morels’ 2,400-square-foot bakery in Nesconset, N.Y. The flavors change so regularly that the Morels are not sure exactly how many types of cookies they have sold.
Their cookies are available for purchase only twice each week, typically at noon local time on Wednesday and Saturday, in “drops” reminiscent of the limited-edition sneaker releases that have become popular in recent years. Each cookie costs $5 to $6; orders must be made in quantities of 10 or 20. Tens of thousands of cookies usually sell out within 9 to 15 minutes, the Morels said.
“People that get the cookies love it,” Karen Morel, 40, said. “The people that didn’t get the cookies will swear at you, send you hate mail, send you hate DMs, use profanity.”
In 2018 Karen Morel, who had worked in retail management before the birth of their daughter, decided to get back into a dormant hobby: baking. Juan Morel started bringing his wife’s cookies to a gym near their home in Deer Park to share with his workout buddies.
He also began posting photos of her confections on his Instagram account, where he regularly chronicles his quest to ingest the 20,000 daily calories needed to build and maintain his 5-foot-10-½, 270-pound physique.
Those posts prompted hundreds of messages from followers looking to buy the goodies themselves. Morel suggested his wife begin selling her wares.
The couple soon sold the cookies in the parking lot after bodybuilding competitions, from the trunk of their SUV. Each cookie came in a small plastic baggy. A winking air of illicitness took hold and helped inspire the company’s name.
The couple now refer to My Cookie Dealer’s drops as “moving weight.” They call their delivery drivers “pushers.”
The company’s first online sales were made in the frenzied comments section below Instagram posts. Karen Morel was working out of a friend’s commercial bakery during off hours.
Now she leads a staff of nearly 30 out of their own workspace, which the Morels bought and renovated last December.
The bakery closed briefly in March as New York shut down in response to the coronavirus outbreak, at which point the company’s typical drop contained around 1,000 orders. When it reopened two weeks later, scarcity had once again helped fuel an even greater demand.
The Morels said they have also had to contend with copycat sellers who have begun aping their methods.
Competition does not appear to be slowing the company’s growth. The Morels recently bought a second 2,400-square-foot space in the same industrial strip as their bakery to better accommodate their shipping operations. In June they bought a four-car fleet of Mercedes GLEs for their pushers to use when making local deliveries.
The Link LonkAugust 03, 2020 at 02:02AM
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