KOLUMN Magazine
Cookies, Credit and the Racial Wealth Gap
Inside the quiet financial hustle behind America’s Black-owned cookie shops, from San Diego’s vegan darling to Cincinnati’s Target-bound stuffed treats.
Share
On a bright Saturday in San Diego, the line outside Maya’s Cookies curls past the pastel awning and into the parking lot. A teenager in a high school track sweatshirt scrolls her phone with one hand and cradles a cardboard box with the other; a couple in bike helmets share bites from a still-warm chocolate chip s’mores cookie; a father negotiates with a preschooler over whether “just one more” can really mean three.
Behind the glass, the cookies are arranged like small, edible biographies. There’s the Everything Cookie, crammed with pretzels and pecans and butterscotch chips; a caramel pecan circle that owes its existence to a college-scouting trip to New Orleans. Each one is a memory translated into sugar and salt and fat and, in this case, oat milk and vegan butter.
What most people in line don’t see is the paper trail behind the pastry case: the maxed-out credit card, the small-dollar community loan, the near-constant negotiations with landlords, banks, and investors that lie beneath this small moment of joy.
Black-owned cookie shops—like so many Black-owned businesses—are navigating a financial system that has never entirely welcomed them. Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey data show that startups owned by people of color are significantly less likely than white-owned startups to obtain funding through banks or other lenders, even though they apply at similar or higher rates. A 2019 survey found that only about 23 percent of Black-owned firms had a recent borrowing relationship with a bank, compared with 46 percent of white-owned firms.
Yet across the country, Black bakers have turned the humblest of desserts into a vehicle for family wealth and cultural storytelling—using every tool available: CDFI loans and pandemic grants, farmers’ market tents and food trucks, shared kitchens and Target distribution deals.
This is the story of five of those businesses, and of what it means to be a Black entrepreneur building a cookie company in a country where credit is unevenly distributed and sugar is cheap.
1. Maya’s Cookies — A $3,000 Credit Limit and a Big Vision
When she started Maya’s Cookies in 2015, Maya Madsen did not have a business plan so much as a spreadsheet of college tuition bills. Her three sons, all athletes, were heading off to school in quick succession. “I had $0 capital, $0 start up,” she recalled in one interview. Instead, she opened a single credit card with a $3,000 limit and used it to buy everything she needed: a farmers’ market tent, tables, permits, a banner, and the cheapest commercial kitchen she could find—space in a macrobiotic kimchi and sauerkraut factory on the industrial edge of San Diego.
She baked at night, taught spin classes in the morning, and sold cookies at the farmers’ market on weekends. Tourists tucked her business cards into carry-on bags and later ordered her vegan cookies from home. Online sales climbed. But the leap from scrappy side hustle to actual company would require more than a credit card.
At a San Diego farmers’ market, Madsen met a business development officer from Accion, the community lender now known as Accessity. In 2017, she took a $5,000 loan—her first institutional capital—to buy equipment, permits and supplies, and to move from a shared kitchen into a facility of her own. Within a few years, Accessity reported, revenues and production had increased by roughly 300 percent, and Maya’s Cookies was shipping nationwide and hiring staff.
For Madsen, the loan was about more than stainless steel racks and larger mixers. “Being a Black-owned and female-owned business, I’ve had my challenges from the beginning,” she told Accessity. Traditional banks had often seen only risk. A mission-driven microlender saw potential.
Then came 2020. When COVID shut down farmers’ markets, Madsen laid off half her staff and bet everything on e-commerce. She mailed sample boxes to vegan influencers and magazines, hoping for a repost. Then George Floyd was murdered and lists of Black-owned businesses to support ricocheted around social media. Maya’s Cookies kept appearing on those lists.
Online orders exploded—from a few dozen a day to well over a thousand. “We went from 20–50 orders a day, to 100 orders a day, to 2,000 orders a day and that happened overnight,” she recalled.
The Accessity loans and that original $3,000 line of credit had done their quiet work: the company had the production capacity, the website, the shipping relationships to catch a once-in-a-lifetime wave of demand. Today, Maya’s Cookies calls itself America’s No. 1 Black-owned gourmet vegan cookie company, with national media attention and a brick-and-mortar presence in San Diego.
The lesson is written into every tray that slides out of the oven: in an unequal credit system, the smallest loan, made at the right moment, can change the trajectory of a business—and a family.
2. Cookie Society — From NFL Locker Room Tastings to a Multi-Million-Dollar Brand
A thousand miles away, in the suburbs of Dallas, the counter at Cookie Society tells a different story about capital and scale. On a busy evening in Frisco, the shop feels like a cross between a neighborhood bakery and an Instagram set: butter-glossed banana pudding cookies, thick red velvet rounds under glass, a line of teenagers filming taste-test videos on their phones.
Cookie Society started less glamorously, with Marissa Allen baking for her husband’s NFL teammates. With Jeff Allen’s career as a lineman came long flights, hotel kitchens and off-days in New York, where the couple made pilgrimages to famous bakeries. Inspired, Marissa began tinkering with her own recipes back home, emerging from the kitchen with a chocolate chip cookie that eventually evolved into her signature banana pudding cookie and a rotation of more than 70 flavors.
The couple sold hundreds of cookie boxes online before opening their first brick-and-mortar store in Frisco in 2020—days before COVID upended the restaurant industry. Instead of foot traffic, the Allens leaned hard into third-party delivery apps, curbside pickup and nationwide shipping. Their gamble paid off: media coverage from Oprah’s Favorite Things, ESPN and Good Morning America helped drive a reported 200 percent growth in online sales and turned Cookie Society into a multi-million-dollar dessert brand with multiple locations in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.
Their founder page does not linger on bank meetings or loan denials. But the subtext is clear: Black entrepreneurs are often forced to build proof of concept in ways their white counterparts are not—running e-commerce operations out of their homes, bootstrapping early growth from personal savings or, in this case, NFL wages. Only once the numbers are irresistible does capital tend to appear.
Nationwide, Black-owned firms remain a relatively small share of employer businesses—about 3.3 percent in 2022, even as their numbers have grown in recent years. And research by the Federal Reserve shows that when Black-owned firms do apply for bank financing, they are more likely to be denied or only partially approved.
Cookie Society’s success, then, is not just the story of an exceptionally good banana pudding cookie. It is also an example of what happens when a Black-owned bakery manages, through relentless product development and savvy branding, to force its way into a market that has historically been dominated by larger, better-capitalized players—from grocery-store cookies to billion-dollar chains like Crumbl.
3. Not As Famous Cookie Company — A Food Truck, a Mechanical Nightmare, and a BeltLine Bet
In Atlanta, the name of Ashley Carlton’s business is a joke that made itself obsolete. Not As Famous Cookie Company started as a food truck, a way to carry her father’s cookie recipes—developed decades earlier in Los Angeles—into the crowded festival and office-park circuit of metro Atlanta.
“Our freshly baked products are made with only the finest of ingredients: real butter, fine chocolates, select nuts,” Carlton explained in a 2017 interview, sounding equal parts proud daughter and saleswoman. The truck specialized in scratch-made cookies, custom ice cream sandwiches, and deep-dish cookie skillets—desserts designed to be eaten standing up, in parking lots and on sidewalks, with napkins that never quite keep up.
Getting there, she said bluntly, “is never smooth, especially with an unproven concept.” Early on, event organizers overpromised crowds and underdelivered; festival fees ate into profits. Mechanical problems with the truck became a recurring financial emergency, draining cash she might have invested in staff or marketing.
Carlton learned, fast, to be more selective about which festivals she attended and to negotiate better terms. By 2017, catering made up nearly half the business. The long-term goal was always a physical location—something more stable than a truck with a temper.
That opportunity came not from a bank but from a city-backed experiment in commercial real estate. In 2022, Not As Famous was one of six small Black-owned businesses chosen for Atlanta BeltLine’s Westside Trail Market Place, a development of refurbished shipping containers meant to create “more equitable access to affordable commercial space” along the booming trail. The company now has a bricks-and-mortar shop there, with 12 employees. “We’re a gourmet cookie shop that specializes in scratch made cookies, artisan cookie sandwiches, handcrafted shakes and deep-dish cookie skillets,” Carlton said at the time. “We make a better cookie!”
The BeltLine MarketPlace is a reminder that the capital gap isn’t only about loans and interest rates; it is also about who has access to commercial leases in hot neighborhoods, and at what price. For Carlton, the program functioned like a kind of non-traditional bank—providing space, visibility and a chance, finally, to be as famous as her cookies.
4. GoodenSweet Cookies — The Black Belt Baker and the Long Road
In Austin, GoodenSweet Cookies sits just off I-35, across from Capital Plaza, its square cookies stacked neatly in the display case. The shop’s founder, Sean Gooden, is a martial artist—a second-degree black belt in Shaolin-Do Kung Fu and Tai Chi—who calls himself, with some delight, the “Black Belt Baker.”
GoodenSweet is a family story with a fault line running through it. Sean and his older brother, Anthony, were both fighters and bakers, daydreaming about opening a cookie business together. When Anthony died in a sparring accident in 2008, Sean decided to build the company in his honor. “GoodenSweet Cookies is Austin’s own nationally-known handmade gourmet cookie company,” he told Voyage Austin. “Our cookies are made with all-natural ingredients, including real butter, premium chocolate and the freshest nuts and fruits.”
If the cookies are soft, the road has not been. “It has definitely NOT been a smooth road,” Gooden said. The biggest hurdle, he explained, was the absence of a well-worn path: “Very few people have started and run a successful cookie business. It’s a big challenge to carve the path as you also learn it.”
Like many small food businesses, GoodenSweet has faced supply-chain shocks, inflation, staffing shortages and the stiff competition of national brands with marketing budgets that dwarf its own. The company has expanded into airport concessions and local grocery chains. It ships nationwide and, as Gooden noted in 2022, is actively “seeking investors.”
That last phrase is telling. While white-owned companies in similar niches often have access to bank lines of credit or equity investment at earlier stages, Black founders are more likely to rely on personal savings, friends and family, or high-interest credit products. Surveys have found that Black business owners, especially Black women, are discouraged more often when inquiring about loans and receive less information about available products.
Gooden’s search for investors is part of a broader pattern: Black-owned gourmet food brands that have proven their product-market fit but are still looking for the kind of patient capital that would allow them to scale. In the meantime, every square cookie that leaves the GoodenSweet kitchen is an increment of revenue in a slow, muscle-burning climb.
5. Sweet Mae’s Cookie Co. — Heritage, Engineering and a 3,840-Square-Foot Leap
In Cincinnati, the story of Sweet Mae’s Cookie Co. starts five generations back, with a woman named Clara who baked biscuits by feel, never measuring, and a great-granddaughter who grew up watching.
“My name is Tiffany Biddle and I am the CEO and Founder of Sweet Mae’s,” she told Voyage Ohio. “I started my baking journey years ago with my grandma. I grew up in the kitchen watching my grandmother cook and bake.”
Biddle is an aerospace engineer by training, with a master’s degree in electrical engineering, who spent years in program management before turning to cookies. The company is named for her great-grandmother, Fannie Mae, a Southern cook whose recipes migrated from Clara’s kitchen through the family line.
Sweet Mae’s specializes in stuffed cookies with “a thick Southern accent”—brown-butter dough wrapped around fillings like Nutella, cookie butter and cream cheese, in flavors inspired by Southern desserts and Biddle’s own childhood. She started the business at home in 2020, baking through the pandemic as online orders took off. As demand grew, she moved into Findlay Kitchen, a shared commercial facility linked to Cincinnati’s historic Findlay Market.
Like many Black entrepreneurs, Biddle’s path to expansion has relied on a patchwork of resources: shared-use kitchens, technical assistance, and, crucially, grants. A regional nonprofit, Main Street Ventures, awarded Sweet Mae’s a grant that—according to a case study used by the company’s brand strategist—helped fund its next phase of growth and regional expansion.
In 2023, just three years after launching the business, Biddle bought a 3,840-square-foot building at 917 State Avenue for $415,000—a former commissary for the local pie shop O Pie O. She plans to turn it into a manufacturing facility and open a stall at Findlay Market. Sweet Mae’s cookies, once shipped from her home oven, are now sold in more than 150 Target stores across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.
“Ultimately, my goal is to be an extension of my family’s legacy, make the best cookies, put smiles on people’s faces and make people’s bellies happy,” she said.
That legacy now includes a building deed in West Price Hill—a tangible, appreciating asset in a city where Black families have often been excluded from property ownership. The leap from renter to owner, from shared kitchen tenant to landlord, is as much about balance sheets as it is about baking.
The Cookie Economy, and the Cost of Capital
Cookies are rarely treated as serious business. Yet the numbers suggest otherwise. Analysts estimate that the United States cookie market is worth more than $4 billion and still growing, while the broader global cookie industry approaches $40 billion. Within that market, “gourmet” cookies—oversized, heavily flavored, built for social media as much as for taste—have become a lucrative niche, spawning chains like Crumbl and an ecosystem of smaller artisans.
Black-owned cookie shops operate inside that economy but also within another set of numbers. Black business owners now run an estimated 3.5 million businesses in the U.S., employing more than 1.2 million people. At the same time, research consistently shows that Black-owned firms are more likely to be denied credit, less likely to have existing bank relationships, and more likely to report unmet financing needs.
Those statistics are the subtext of almost every quote from the bakers in this story: the credit card that substitutes for a startup loan; the microlender that steps in where a bank does not; the expansion funded by grants rather than lines of credit; the entrepreneur still “seeking investors” long after proving demand.
In Oprah Daily’s 2024 guide to supporting Black-owned businesses, the editors put it plainly: Black-owned companies “have historically had a harder time accessing loans and capital” and were disproportionately hit by COVID-19’s economic shock.
Cookies, in this context, are more than treats. They are one of the few consumer products that can be launched relatively cheaply from a home kitchen and scaled, with the right mix of talent and luck, into a regional or even national brand. The initial cost of entry is low enough to make the risk imaginable—especially for entrepreneurs who cannot count on traditional lenders.
Beyond the Glass Case
By late afternoon in San Diego, the line at Maya’s Cookies has thinned. Inside, the staff wipe down counters and slide new trays into the display. Somewhere in Cincinnati, a Target shopper drops a box of Sweet Mae’s stuffed cookies into a red cart. In Dallas, a Cookie Society food truck is setting up outside a corporate campus; in Atlanta, a group of BeltLine joggers argue over which Not As Famous cookie to split; in Austin, a traveler grabs a GoodenSweet cookie at the airport before her flight boards.
Most of these customers will think, briefly, about flavors and price and maybe about whether the cookie is “worth it.” Few will think about the spreadsheet lines that hover behind each purchase: the monthly payment on a microloan; the grant report due next quarter; the interest accumulating on that old high-APR credit card; the time it takes to assemble yet another loan application in a system where denials are more common than approvals.
But those back-office realities shape who gets to be behind the counter at all.
The five businesses in this story are notable not just because their cookies are, by most accounts, very good, but because their owners have managed to navigate an obstacle course that was not built with them in mind. They have turned family stories into brands, credit cards into factories, shipping containers into storefronts.
If the United States ever decides to take seriously the idea of equitable access to capital, the path these bakers have carved could look less like an anomaly and more like a template. Until then, every Black-owned cookie shop that opens its doors is both a small triumph and a subtle critique—a reminder, sweet and insistent, of what it still costs to build something from sugar when your community has been starved of capital for generations.