If you’re delivering goods, it makes sense to use a van. But in the States one man, Alex Reponen, decided to use his 2012 Volkswagen Golf.
The DC area baker delivers more than 900 cookies in one day on his weekly frozen cookie run. Although he had been baking all sort of stuff for years, from April 2020 Reponen started selling frozen bake-at-home cookie dough with unique flavors like brown butter pecan toffee as, during the COVID-19 pandemic, cookie sales skyrocketed.
According to Research and Markets, cookie sales are up by 147% through the pandemic as people reach for snacks. Part of that increase is down to people not ordering from cafes, which is where Reponen’s Golf comes in.
The owner of Dapper Fox Bakery says that walking traffic was, as you’d expect, down during the pandemic. He was staying afloat with large commission orders, but when he baked his wife a single cookie with leftovers from one of those commissions, he got an idea. Why not sell frozen cookies to individual customers?
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“The product is filling a niche that people want,” Reponen told Volkswagen recently. “They aren’t going to their local bakery now, but there’s certainly still a need to reward yourself for enduring the stay-at-home orders or just the monotony during this pandemic.”
Reponen calls his Golf a “rock star.” He says it hasn’t missed a beat on his 10-hour delivery days helping him deliver hundreds of cookies on his 70-stop runs. To do that, he stuffs the car with six coolers, which apparently fit with no issue.
It’s been working so well that Reponen reckons he’ll keep doing it even after things go back to normal.
“I discounted at first how much joy the cookies bring people, but also how lucky I was to be out of the house and interacting with people,” he said. “The fact that it’s as a result of a successful baking business is great, but it’s one of those things that you almost feel like you would do for free if you could.”
