“When I was 20 years old, I had a cup of vanilla ice cream with peanut butter cookies in it. As I was eating, I thought, ‘Why hasn't anyone done anything fun with cookies and cream?’ It’s always just Oreos and vanilla ice cream, but there are SO many other kinds of cookies and flavors of ice cream that could work. And what if there was a ridiculously high proportion of cookies to ice cream, like a 50/50 mix? So, I went around the universe for 15 years – no joke – saying ‘Why hasn’t anybody done this before?’
Eventually, I started working as the marketing director for Woodchips BBQ and the owner, Patrick, asked me if I had any interest in opening a cookie and an ice cream shop across the street. Now, I had no intention of actually creating a brick and mortar shop, but when he asked me, I said, ‘Well, I have this idea…’ We ran over to Meijer, got generic cookies and ice cream, threw it in our mixer to do a 50/50 mix and tried it.
It was then we knew we were onto something, and the beginning of Kookys N Cream.
We opened in August of 2019. We’ve got all different flavors and textures. We have a lot of fun with it! It’s definitely for the people who like a lot of ‘stuff’ in their ice cream. You get the coolness and flavors of the ice cream, with the flavors and textures of the cookies. At first the purists might be skeptical, but you have to taste it—it sells itself! The mix can be hard to describe, so I really love giving people samples and seeing that smile creeping and them processing it all and being like, ‘I've never had anything like this before!’
I also have a really amazing team, so I have to give a lot of credit to the wonderful team that I have here. My head baker, Serena, is our head baker. She’s amazing and has a team that absolutely adores her. They're amazing and I'm very blessed.
Lapeer has a lot of heart. There’s a lot of pride here, and people are willing to support small businesses. People share our product with friends or even ship it across the U.S. and ‘This is the best.’ It feels like people have a sense of ownership of the businesses in the community—I also don't think any business owner here thinks that they're doing it on their own. Everybody acknowledges that this is a community effort—I love that about Lapeer.
We’ve received some notoriety on social media and now I ship my cookies across the U.S. We opened in August of 2019, which if you do the math, was six months before the pandemic. Not ideal for a brick-and-mortar location! So, I took my cookie shop online. I had some really big success on TikTok and from there, I was able to ship my cookies and support the business at a time where people weren't coming into the store.
We also just finished a remodel, and we also brought in retail. I think we have a great retail district developing down at the other end, but I don’t think there can ever be too much retail in a downtown. I brought in items that are very focused on this idea of whimsy. My new slogan is, ‘Baking transcends science. It's pure magic.’, so a lot of the stuff you will see is about the magic of life, whether it's about the moon cycle or growing flowers. In general, I think being alive is pretty magical, so it sort of pays homage to that.
Every month we put out new cookies. We have our traditional cookies, our monthly cookies, and we take desserts and turn them into easy-to-eat cookies. For example, every June we do an ice cream-inspired cookie month and we did a Strawberry Crunch Cookie sandwich with buttercream. It was so good! We also did an ice cream sandwich version of that.
We've also got our Banana Split, our Mint Chocolate, and one of our new cookies is this Moose Tracks cookie with mini peanut butter cups in it. Last year, we came out with a butter pecan cookie and it tastes so much like butter pecan. It's amazing, but this year we threw in even more toffee to make it more fun.
There's a lot of cookie competition, but what makes our cookies different is a lot of the cookie shops out there will have a base dough and throw other things in it. It might be M&Ms here, or Oreos there, but we do a unique dough for almost every single one of our cookies.”
– Jessica Harold, owner of Kookys N Cream
Written by Phil Eich, Storyville
This project was created in collaboration with the DDA (Downtown Development Authority) & Michigan Main Street for Kooky's N Cream