The dough to grow: With business booming, Blondie’s Cookies expanding in Greentown | News

The company recently purchased the building at the northwest corner of Indiana 22 and Meridian Street that used to be Schlemmer’s Fire & Outdoor. The facility nearly doubles the company’s footprint in Greentown.

“Unfortunately, what we have at our current factory facility has been the nuts and bolts of what we’ve done from the very beginning, so it’s never been a good-looking facility,” Coffman said. “The new building allows us to basically put our best visual foot forward, which is important to us at this point.”

But the building provides more than just a facelift. It will soon house not only the corporate headquarters, but a test kitchen, event space and retail store as part of a push to expand their offerings in Greentown.

Coffman said the test kitchen will be large, high-end space, and they plan to begin using it to make videos that will be posted to different online platforms. The event space will allow them to offer classes or other special events.

Eventually, the front of the building will become a full retail store, similar to the ones they have inside their seven mall locations around Indiana, where people can come in and buy cookies and other goods.

“This will help us present our product in a little more upscale, gourmet environment,” Coffman said.

With the new building in place, the current facility will be used solely for production and will serve as the company’s cookie factory, where they also make icing and pre-mixed ingredients for the retail stores. Coffman said they also plan to add three walk-in coolers that will do away with the need to rent additional space.

The new facility comes as the company has grown exponentially since Coffman appeared on the hit ABC show “Shark Tank” in 2012 to strike a deal with one of the show’s mega investors.

Coffman didn’t get any bites on the episode, but the exposure led to a big boom in their mail-order business, she said.

The company now ships products across the U.S. with the most orders coming from Indiana Florida, New York, North Carolina, California and Texas. That mail-order business is now set to operate from the new facility.

“We’ve been trying to accommodate that growth for a very long time without going outside our current footprint,” Coffman said. “This will allow us to have more space to do that.”

In the past few years, Coffman has continued to expand the company into different markets and venues. She said they now have a fundraising division that sells to groups looking to raise money. Big orders have also come from corporate clients who put the cookies in gift bags or hand out at conferences.

In 2020, they launched a new wholesale division in which they package their goods for sale in mom-and-pop-style coffee shops and restaurants.

And last year, the company partnered up with DoorDash and Grubhub to deliver cookies on demand. Coffman said that’s led to a double-digit uptick in sales at their retail locations.

“Surprisingly, that’s been a really big market for us,” she said. “We didn’t think that was going to be the case. But with the younger generation, and the older generation who can’t get out to a shopping mall, it’s popular. It’s been quite amazing to see.”

Coffman said they also have plans in place to begin franchising retail locations for Blondie’s Cookies. She said the seven stores the company operates are the most difficult part of the business, since it requires training employees and operating a shop remotely from Greentown.

She said by franchising, they aim to expand their retail footprint but avoid the difficult logistics of traveling and managing a store from Greentown.

“We know our brand is so strong at this point, and our systems and techniques are so accurate, that we can train someone to have their own skin in the game and make a living doing what we do in their own city without adding the extra logistically burden,” Coffman said.

The new Greentown expansion is now the most recent development in the company, which Coffman founded in 1984 while studying business at Indiana State University. The next year, she opened three retail locations, the first of which was in Kokomo.

Coffman moved the company headquarters to Greentown in 1992. Now, she said, she’s glad she can continue to expand in town and also offer local customers a more interactive, brick-and-mortar experience.

“We want to be a positive addition to Greentown and a reason for people to stop and enjoy a hometown experience with a family-owned company that’s been doing what we’re doing for 38 years,” she said.