Kathryn Bricken: Founder & CEO of Doughlicious

Episode 649

In this episode of The Kara Goldin Show, I sit down with Kathryn Bricken, Founder and CEO of Doughlicious, The London Dough Co. Kathryn shares her journey of transforming cookie dough into a modern, health-conscious snack brand that resonates with consumers in both the UK and the US.
We explore the differences between the US and UK markets, the challenges of expanding into a new country, and the steps Kathryn took to position Doughlicious for success at major retailers like Target and Whole Foods. Kathryn also discusses how she continues to innovate and improve her products while staying true to her brand’s commitment to natural ingredients and gluten-free options.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking to scale internationally or simply curious about what it takes to bring a unique snack to life, this episode is packed with insights and inspiration. Tune in to hear Kathryn’s incredible story and learn more about how Doughlicious is redefining the cookie dough category. Now on The Kara Goldin Show!

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Super excited to have my next guest. Here we have Kathryn Bricken, who is the founder and CEO of Doughlicious. And if you have not heard or tasted Doughlicious, you are truly missing out Doughlicious. Launched in the UK in 2017, not very long, not very long ago, with the vision to redefine cookie dough and by crafting treats that are not only indulgent, yummy, yummy, yummy, yummy, she also included lots of natural ingredients and gluten free oats and no refined sugar. We’re going to get into all of how Kathryn is making these creations. And recently, the end of 2023 launched into Target Whole Foods in the US and also available on Amazon too. So I cannot even wait to hear more about her journey, taking it back to the US, where the majority, not everybody, listening, is the US, but a big piece of the audience is in the US, but it’s, I think you’ve got an incredible, not only an incredible product and company founding story, but also the story about taking it across the ocean, I think, is one that is very interesting to many. So welcome, Kathryn, so nice to meet you. Yeah.

Kathryn Bricken 2:18
Thank you. So nice to be here. And I love to tell my story, because mine began later on in life, when I was 50, I really started growing Doughlicious and, and I think that’s kind of eye opening, because you you know, women aren’t done at 50. We’re just getting started, and there’s so much we can do. And, and I think I truly believe that Doughlicious, starting it at this phase of my life brought kind of like it was, it was exciting. It keeps me going every day. It’s it’s challenging. It’s this crazy, crazy time when a lot of people might be doing something different. And I’m this cookie lady that runs around and growing a brand. So it’s really exciting time for us. And so when I guess the natural trajectory was for Doughlicious to always go into the US, I just never knew when it was going to happen. So I started the brand in 2017 as you mentioned, and then kind of had this lucky moment where Jason, the incoming CEO of Whole Foods, was touring the UK, and he was, I guess he suggested to the team, I never really found a whole story, but he suggested to the whole foods team, Oh, I’d love to see a factory and a farm, and we were chosen as the factory. So he came by the factory, and we showed him all of our products, and we showed him the cookie dough and the gelato bites and how unique they were, and we took one of them and we dipped in a meringue and torched it to make mini baked alaskas. And I think that was the wow moment, like, oh my gosh, this is insane. And it’s not only a great snack that is cookie dough gelato, better for you, and tastes amazing, but it’s also a snack hack. So there’s a lot of different things you can do with it.

Kara Goldin 4:14
I want to start with really jumping in to, did you always think you were going to I mean, was this a family recipe? I mean, how did you start? How did you get this idea to actually start this company?

Kathryn Bricken 4:28
Yeah, well, I’m, I’ve always been food obsessed, like I’m the type of person I wake up in the morning and I think, what am I going to eat? So I think there are two people, types of people out there. There’s people that eat to live, and those that live to eat, and I definitely live to eat, so I’ll think, okay, if I’m gonna eat this, I can eat that. And, and whenever growing up, when my mom would go to the supermarket, I would get upset if she went without me, because I love to see new products and and in the summer. Day paper when they used to have, I’m aging myself now, but when they used to have coupon booklets, I would go through the coupon booklets to look at new products and see, like, what was out there, what was innovative. So, yeah, like, Oh, he’s thinking about food and thinking about what I could do with it and how I could make it more. I could make it better for you. So if I was to make something and I would make pancakes, I would always make them with oats rather than white flour, because I felt like I could eat more because they were better for me.

Kara Goldin 5:32
Yeah, definitely, you jumped into this a bit. But just to give people an idea, a visual of this, for those who have not heard about Doughlicious what makes it different than other snack brands on the market? Well,

Kathryn Bricken 5:46
so when I was starting it, I decided I loved cookies, but I wanted them to be use really good ingredients, and again, bring those oats in which are high fiber. Give you all these benefits of health. Um, there’s metabolizing diets that are made with with oats. So I am I created it with unique flavors, unique ingredients. We don’t use any white sugar in our factory. We don’t use any white flour. We run on our factory on 100% renewable electricity. So always trying to do good dough, better better ingredients. And so I created this dough, and it just tasted so good. And then I figured out that the the oats that I was using were actually gluten free. So then I decided, okay, well, my orders will make the whole product gluten free. So that’s what makes Doughlicious so unique. It’s ingredients. They’re gluten free that, and we like to say we’re the most amazing tasting cookie that happened to be gluten free because it just it didn’t. It wasn’t meant to be, but it just happened to be that way. And and then also, we’ve modernized the basic cookie dough that you knew you loved you grew up with by unique flavors. So we infused the dough with caramel. We have matcha, white chocolate, cookie dough and and then what makes the product so unique in the US is that is our collection that nobody else has has done before. It took me two years to create it, where I took cookie dough and wrapped it around gelato, and then I saw it, and I was like, Okay, it’s beautiful. It tastes beautiful, Doughlicious, but it needs something more. So then we decided to give it that textural component by rolling it in a cookie crumb, which nobody knew how we were going to do this on the in the manufacturing line. So I was like, Okay, how? You know, let me think out of the box. So I started looking at products like, okay, there’s chicken nuggets, right? How do they get crumb on chicken nuggets? There’s meatballs. How do they get crumb on meatballs? So that’s how we then tweaked our manufacturing process to give the customers this not only like chewy cookie dough with soft and creamy gelato, but then a textural component to make it more interesting. And it took us two years to create That’s wild.

Kara Goldin 8:12
So you were not in this industry before, as as you said, you decided to start, you were making it in your kitchen, and it sounds like you were creating a process that was also totally new too, that it wasn’t like you were going to a co packer and they were just creating it. What kind of challenges in those early days when you were trying to start a company? Here you are coming in. I have lived through this myself, where I had this idea for a beverage company that was not I didn’t want to use preservatives. I wanted to use real fruit extracts and all of those nuances, uniqueness, many of the manufacturers didn’t want to co pack my product because I come from Pepsi or Coke or some established brand. So can you talk about some of those challenges in the early days? Yeah, well, it

Kathryn Bricken 9:13
was, it’s so hard I I’m a perfectionist. So I tried a co man for four months, and it was my, one of my first ready to bake does that. We launched into the UK, and it went on shelf. And I bought one because I always want to do that. I’m like, I’m I buy it so I can see how it arrives and and make sure the customer experience is 100% so I bought it. I got it home. I baked the dough and all the edges fizzled like the fats did not combine. Everything was off. And cookie dough, as you know, is really particular. It’s chemistry. So I could give a room of 100 people the same recipe, and every cookie would turn out different, because it comes down to. Temperature, mixing time, the way the ingredients are scaled. So after that, I was like, forget it. I’m too this is, this is my baby. Now my children were raised, so now this is going to become my new obsession in life. And so I took out a room in a larger factory, and I decided I was going to do it myself. I hired one person to help me, and bought a machine, bought mixers, and did everything myself. Would I think I gave myself? Well I did give myself carpal tunnel, hurt my shoulders, but made it happen. And then we were really fortunate to grow from there to another smaller factory, which was about 1000 square feet, and half of it was freezers, because I decided I was going to create a frozen product, not thinking how hard manufacturing and distribution from logistics of a frozen product is and and then have now grown into The factory we’re in now, which is 22,000 square feet, and in, pretty much in central London, which is pretty

Kara Goldin 11:06
cool. That’s awesome. And so do you own your own manufacturing or, yes, did you? Oh, that’s amazing.

Kathryn Bricken 11:11
We do it all. We do it all. So we do, I figured out we do. We can do up to 500 gelato bites a minute.

Kara Goldin 11:22
Wow, that’s that’s incredible. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy when you think about it. How did you know how to figure out the go to market strategy? Then, if you think back on those early days, where were you selling the product originally?

Kathryn Bricken 11:38
Well, we started just with supermarkets, and I would just sit there on the computer and send out letters telling them how great my dough was and would they like to try it. And I remember getting the first person to respond. It was an online delivery supermarket in the United Kingdom, and I was so excited, like, Oh my gosh. They responded. They wrote back. They want the product. And I think that was a real wow moment, like you know that somebody else wanted to buy this product and liked my packaging and and their experience was fantastic and, and one of the reasons I created Doughlicious was just to make people happy, because I loved eating better for your products. So just to to see that smile on people’s face and and make them feel good, because, you know, like food is, food is it’s nourishment, but it’s also it’s memories, it’s, it’s entertainment. You know, you’d like to talk to your friends about what you’re eating, and it’s, it’s enjoyment, and it’s something you do with family and friends.

Kara Goldin 12:41
I love it. So when you launched in 2017 I’m sure that was a crazy time going through the pandemic as well and trying to figure out exactly, how do you grow this brand, new brand, when you think about that time, what comes to mind?

Kathryn Bricken 13:03
Yeah, it was, well, my COO, my now, COO, which was my small helper. Then we would be there from 7am to 11pm at night, and we that’s when actually, we’re not a D to C brand, but we did grow our D to C. Then, because during COVID, people wanted cookie dough. But then that was also the time where a lot of a lot of people could only go to certain supermarkets. So we actually grew the brand immensely in Costco in the UK. So it was really good. I know like COVID was not good for a lot of people, but for us, it was a good opportunity for us to grow and for people to be at home and want something to snack on all day. So it was actually a really strong growth period for Doughlicious that’s

Kara Goldin 13:54
incredible. And you started to talk about so the buyer from the US Whole Foods reached out to you. Were you in Whole Foods in the UK as well? Yes,

Kathryn Bricken 14:05
yeah. So Whole Foods was one of my first stockists, retailers in the UK, but they’re quite small here. They have, I think they had seven stores and and now they’ve just closed down two to open one big one. So they’re opening a new one right in the Chelsea area of London, and but they’ve always been amazing to work with, super supportive of the brand, supportive of me being a woman founder, led brand. And actually they’ll bring different groups from their stores to come visit our factory. And I love it, because sometimes we’ll create a new flavor. And so I’ll, I’ll get their opinion. I’ll say, Okay, I want you to rate this. What it I’ll do a little, a little test for them. What is it? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it? Do you wish there was something different? So it’s, they’ve been just a. A fantastic retailer to work with

Kara Goldin 15:02
that’s incredible. So being this is your first food product, and it’s a frozen product, yeah? I mean, you are nuts, right? Jumping into that, how hard for those who might not be able to visualize the challenges of not only a perishable but a frozen product. How difficult was that to to jump into that make that decision, to actually embark on that company?

Kathryn Bricken 15:38
Well, I think every day that I should have done something with candy or drinks. I’m always like and I’m actually really jealous of people that do a gummy bear or a soda or something like that, because first of all, to get people to go down the frozen aisles is a challenge, so the shopper marketing is more difficult. But then also just the whole manufacturing process, keeping everything cold, from freezers to temperature rooms, spiral freezers, blast freezers. I think I know every type of chilling component there is out there, and then the logistics, so moving it from one place to another. And it’s been really, really hard in the US, because it’s so big. I mean, we ship containers to Saudi Arabia, we ship containers to Australia, we go trucks to Switzerland. But for some reason, we’ve, we’ve had a hard time in the US moving product, because right now we will start manufacturing in the US. Probably the plan is for end of 2025 beginning 2026 but right now we have capacity in our factory in the UK, so it just makes more sense to container it over and it lands in Philadelphia, and then needs to move all the way across the US, and it’s, it’s not easy, and having a frozen product, there’s waste, there’s, you know, you know how sometimes people go into stores and they they take something, and then they put it back, not in the right area, so then there’s ruined product, and then somebody else might get it, because they’ll put it back in The freezer and it’s all melted. So it’s some it is challenging. It’s challenging from a manufacturing to a supply chain to, you know, hoping that the customer gets it home and gets it in at their freezer so they can enjoy it at the right the right temperature. 1,000%

Kara Goldin 17:37
agree with you. My dad had started a frozen brand many, many years ago called Healthy Choice.

Kathryn Bricken 17:45
Yeah, I know, and I love healthy choice. I love

Kara Goldin 17:49
I grew up with hearing all of the stories of frozen and it’s so when I decided to actually start a drink company, my dad was like, at least it’s not frozen. Of all the challenges around that. So I totally appreciate everything that you’re saying. So when you are educating the consumer, I think so many people don’t understand that you’ve got the small space in the frozen case. You’re competing against all this other frozen products that aren’t even necessarily in your category, but they’re still in a frozen case. So you’re competing against that and they’re in a store. How do you educate the consumer about your brand in that market? You know, there’s a lot of tools out there. There’s social media, and you’re not just doing it in the UK, you’re also doing it in other parts of the world, including in the US. How do you do all of that?

Kathryn Bricken 18:52
Yeah, that’s a that’s a good question, and it’s really difficult, and there’s so much we’re learning every day. So I mean, the obvious ones are trade marketing, right? You do promotions so you want the person to try it. You hope there’s a repeat purchase. So you do a well in target. Next week, we’re doing a buy one, get one, 50% off, because we’re expanding from 480 stores to just under 3000 stores for a Valentines promo. So we want to get people to try it. And then but and then there’s social media, which, when I grew the brand to 38,000 followers, I never spent a penny on social media. But then you grow and you get to the point that the algorithm I’ve learned all this now because this is not my my specialty, the way the algorithms work. So you have to put spend behind that, and that’s expensive, and now going into the US, we’re now doing shopper marketing, so working with aisle and I bought a and, um. Amazon and trying to you’re always you just need to get the customer’s attention. Because especially being in the frozen aisle, there’s your dad would know this, you don’t get the opportunity for end caps. It’s hard to do different you know the big cardboard promos. I when I look at Doritos, I’m like, Oh, how do they get to do that? Because you can’t do that in the frozen so it’s literally trial and error. And right now, I think the most important thing we’re doing is trying to see what our cost, our customer acquisition cost, is. So what? What do we do? And then being able to look at the data and monitor it, because we’re now at that size that we can. But when you’re small, you just, it’s sadly you you just try, right? You try a lot, and and you hope it works, and you hope that the customer sees you. But, um, I wish I knew the secret sauce. Yeah, maybe you know the secret sauce. I We haven’t learned it yet.

Kara Goldin 21:05
Yeah, well, it’s challenging. And I think social is is definitely, even though it seems expensive at times, I think that there’s that carry over where, I mean hint, still to this day, does a lot on social, and we know that the sales that end up happening in stores or on Amazon or on hints website are definitely spillover from people who have seen something cool on social. So yeah, I think that it’s but it’s hard to measure that, right? And I know it’s really hard. Yeah, it’s really tough. But I think, you know, it’s, it’s just because you can’t measure it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be doing it. Because you know that something is definitely happening. So it’s,

Kathryn Bricken 21:53
I’m waiting for the moment, the moment, but I believe it’ll happen. It just, it just takes time. The other thing that you know I what I love about the food business is that people are really friendly, and I’ve never met a mean foodie, and we’ve had so much luck with meeting people and then they introduce you to somebody else. So the people at Kings Hawaiian, I met one of their like, somebody who’s quite high up, and he’s been so helpful, and he’s introduced us to their team. And they’re so established. They are like, they’re so up there, and we’re so down here and little but I can’t tell you the the friendship that has blossomed from just one person being like, oh my god, I love your brand. You’re really good, you’re really cool, and sure, I’ll help you. And, and I think that’s also like, made me want to help more people. It’s almost like the the, you know, the person that pay for you pay forward you somebody buys, somebody a McDonald’s, through, through the checkout, and then the next person does something nice, and somebody else does something nice. And I think it’s great when that happens. The guy who owns Sun noodles, he was looking at entering the UK, and I said, and he contacted me, and I was like, Sure, let me help you. So he just launched in Whole Foods UK, and, yeah, you want to help others, and I can’t. I’m so thankful for the support that we’ve received from the King’s Hawaiian team. I don’t know if you’ve met them, but they’re so nice and and it it just it makes me happy that that people are out there still willing to help other brands grow.

Kara Goldin 23:42
I love it. So what do you wish you knew going into launching Doughlicious that maybe you’ll share with other entrepreneurs along the way, that you know you either learn the hard way or you learned a lot later, that would have been really helpful.

Kathryn Bricken 24:01
Yeah, I think. And it the hard thing is to say no, right? Because we all want to grow. We want to grow fast and furious and get the brand out there. But I don’t think new founders realize the consequence of growing fast, and that was something that I made a huge mistake. We launched in Australia, way too early. We never should have gone there. It was far away. Once you’re there, you’ve got to market the product. You have to get it off shelf. It’s expensive. I don’t have a team there, so I trusted other people, and nobody’s going to represent your brand like you. So in hindsight, I should have said no. I should have said it’s okay. I don’t need to be there right now. I’m fine growing in the UK and closer markets and then pushing that for later and making sure it’s right. But instead, we were too eager, and we launched with we didn’t have our trademark yet, so our. Packaging was in no man’s land. We didn’t have control of the technical because technical is different there. We couldn’t call it gluten free. Yet, all of our things on our social said gluten free. So customers were contacting us and saying, Are you gluten free? Are you not gluten free? Because something can only be called gluten free if it’s manufactured in Australia. Their laws are different. So I think it was just a catastrophe from the beginning. And I wish I would have learned to say no, yeah.

Kara Goldin 25:33
Well, and how long so at that point you pulled out. And yeah, we just

Kathryn Bricken 25:38
recently pulled out. And I have to say some investors were not happy, but I just said, I would rather succeed in other markets where I can control what we’re doing, than just throw a product there and fail, because that’s not what we want.

Kara Goldin 25:57
Yeah, I think that’s very, very smart. So I mean, it’s interesting. We actually, at hint, we went into the UK, and we probably went in way too early. We thought we had a lot of people calling to ask us to come there. And the problem for, you know, we needed to put money behind marketing. We, you know, the product beverages are a little different in terms of distribution, because you’ve got to really have up and down the street, the sell through is a lot different. So you’ve got to be able to have somebody who’s making sure it’s on the shelves and stores. Yeah, even, you know, big and small, they don’t take care of actually stocking the items, I think like they do in other categories, so the sales,

Kathryn Bricken 26:44
marketing must be insane, yeah, so,

Kara Goldin 26:46
I mean, that was such a big so we were successful in the UK, but we just decided that we didn’t want to be a little bit successful, and so we decided to really put the emphasis on the US. So that was, you know, an inter an interesting learning for sure, what is the biggest difference that you’ve seen so far in launching in the UK versus launching in the US? Do you see a lot of difference between the two markets?

Kathryn Bricken 27:17
Um, so there’s no shelf fees in the UK, but there’s a lot in the US. So I think one thing, I think is that, and again, it comes back to not only the marketing, but in the US, you definitely need to pay to play more, so giving more to the retailers to get it on shelf, just understanding the way they work is different, and also understanding the customers are different, like we’ve realized, like, what works one place doesn’t always work in the other from flavors to concepts, it’s just, it’s a different

Kara Goldin 28:02
culture. Yeah, definitely. Which flavor has worked in the UK, or reverse which flavor would have never worked in the UK, but you launched in

Kathryn Bricken 28:11
the Yes, so, so mint, mint chocolate chip is super popular in the US, not in the UK, and we had our distributors in from Switzerland, and they taste it, and they said, This is This is awful. This is like, what I brush my teeth with, and I, and I personally love it, but it’s just different cultures. Yeah, not, not one size fits all, definitely.

Kara Goldin 28:39
How many flavors do you have now total? So we

Kathryn Bricken 28:43
have, well, we have 11, but not some of them are new product development, so ones that we’re just completing, and that’s in that 11. So there’s three flavors, and there’s a new one that will be launching in target in April. That’s really exciting, but I can’t say what, so they’ll have to go check it out and then so. But on the shelves right now, we have six so in most of the retailers, and chocolate chip is always the favorite. You know, no matter what you do, chocolate chips the favorite. And we launched chocolate chip as a dairy free skew, well, all the cookie dough that goes around the gelato is dairy free, unless it has white chocolate in it or something like that, but, but none of them are milk chocolate, so most of that is dairy free. So it depends on the gelato, if the gelato has dairy or not, and and we just loved the vanilla, not knowing that this was going to go, go on this wild trajectory. And so now we’re kind of thinking, I think we’re going to do a chocolate chip dairy scoot skew too, because I think it’s, it’s really popular, but I think the dairy one will be more popular. Sure So, but then we don’t want to let our vegan friends down, so we’ll keep the vegan one too. And I love it. I love them both, but it just sometimes you make again, you make decisions, and you know, it’s always harder to back pedal. So

Kara Goldin 30:17
the the different channels of distribution. So you’re in direct to consumer, you’re in retail, you’re now in in multiple countries, have you done food service yet?

Kathryn Bricken 30:31
Yes, in the UK, we’ve done food service, and in some other countries in Europe. So we have a restaurant chain in France. We we do a lot of restaurants, and we just launched in the UK, an ambient cookie that started on train lines. And I was getting messages from people that were from Japan traveling in the UK, and they’re like, I tasted this cookie and it was so good, where can I buy it? And I was like nowhere, nowhere about the train. So then we, we launched it in a collection of four that are actually the final one is being completed this week, and those are now in Whole Foods. They’re in Ocado and some other stores in the UK, and they’re launching on launching on Amazon this next week. But they are so are also going on a Spanish airlines, and we’ve just submitted them to some other big airlines, so I’m hopeful that one of them will come through. But it’s a fantastic cookie. It’s an 82 gram OD, wonderful flavors. So we do a matcha white chocolate, we do a salted caramel, a chunky chocolate chip, and one that’s really unique, because it’s got, it’s a high protein good granola. So it’s got about 17 grams of protein in a cookie.

Kara Goldin 31:54
Oh, that’s that’s incredible. So Well, thank you so much. Catherine, Doughlicious is awesome. I’m so excited for you. And yeah, really, really great. And for everyone listening, be sure to check out in our show notes all about Doughlicious, where you can find it and and definitely share it with others too. It is super, super yummy. Catherine, good luck with everything. I’m very, very excited for you, and thank you again for coming on. And thanks everyone for listening. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book, undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building. Hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now. You.

 

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