Whisked is a DMV based bakery that makes cookies and pies of all flavors and varieties. Started in 2011 by Jenna Huntsberger, Whisked now makes about 60,000 cookies a week, and has a thriving wholesale and mail order business. They are in a number of Whole Foods and specialty grocery stores around the Northeast Corridor, and just recently launched a shelf stable vegan cookie that has been extremely well received.

Jenna is one of those founders who so clearly has a passion for the product and the customer, and 13 years later is still going out on the weekends to sample so she can meet customers. She runs a tight ship and leans into complexity, setting up her own Direct Store Delivery (DSD) program and being willing to scale patiently and sustainably. We had the chance to chat with Jenna to hear more about how she got started, some of the challenges she has faced, and the future of the business.

If you want to snag some of their fantastic cookies (vegan oatmeal chocolate chip are my favorites) you can do so here!

Photo courtesy of Whisked

Tell Us About How Whisked Started:

I started as a food blogger! I was working at a nonprofit in DC and felt a bit stuck. For fun, I decided to start a food blog called Modern Domestic. I wrote a lot about baking and pastry specifically. There was a small group of food bloggers at the time that would meet once a month to talk about food and writing. Eventually, PR teams got wind of our meet ups and they started sending chefs to get to know us so we would potentially write about them. I got to know these pastry chefs and loved what they were doing. I wanted to transition into actually baking and met a woman running a small farmers market bakery called Treet. I ended up quitting my nonprofit job to work at Treet as a baker.

I eventually had the opportunity to come and launch Whisked at the 14th and U Street Farmers Market. I took the chance to start my own stand. At first, I was making a ton of different things – cupcakes, cookies, pies, and loaf cakes. We started selling the six packs because at the time, we were lugging this big plexiglass case to the market to display the individual cookies. I was tired of carrying that display around, and thought we could sell more cookies if we packaged them in bags of six. It was incredibly successful. We were still selling some individual cookies but the six-packs were wildly popular. During that first season at the market, we figured out what sold well - cookies and 6 inch pies - and really focused on that. The next year we expanded to multiple Farmers Markets and have more or less been growing ever since. The six-cookie pack is still so critical to our success and pretty much looks the exact same as it did when we started.

I would love to hear about the jump into wholesale, how did that come about?

We started doing wholesale in 2012 to a couple of DC specialty stores. I would meet people at the Farmer’s Market who would ask me if I was doing wholesale (including the team at Each Peach Market!), which is how we found those clients. We did a bit of wholesale our second year, but mostly stuck to Farmer’s Markets for our first couple of years. Capacity and kitchen space was a big issue for us. In 2013 we were working out of Union Kitchen, a shared kitchen space with no heat or air conditioning, and we were maxed out on capacity. But in 2015 we moved into a bigger space that would allow us to scale and literally bake enough cookies to take on more wholesale clients. Now, we work with more than 100 specialty grocery stores and have grown that business organically, store by store. As we picked up stores, we  gradually expand our direct store delivery program. Now, we have a truck route that goes all the way down to Virginia Beach and up to Philadelphia and Princeton, New Jersey.  A big step for us was in 2015, when we started selling to Whole Foods. There was a local forager (buyer) who thought our cookies would be a fit and brought us into the P Street Whole Foods. Since then, we have grown in Whole Foods store by store and are now in most of the Whole Foods in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Why the Focus on DC?

So much of our brand recognition has been working farmers markets for years and years and years and building relationships with stores for the long term. We have such a strong base of support here that we aren’t as focused on replicating this across the country (at least not yet!)

How did you expand your manufacturing? The jump into Whole Foods must have been significant.

Capacity was always a struggle. Up until 2020 we were working wherever we could find space and were growing so rapidly that we had trouble scaling. We operated out of a number of community kitchens that are really designed to help small footprint food startups make their product in an industrial kitchen. However, the demand was so significant that we knew we needed our own space. We had to be patient, and waited longer than others would have to make sure we had the demand to support our own space.  But after years of working in shared kitchens, we finally built our own kitchen in 2020. We used traditional bank loans and a small fundraising round that we put together with individual investors and a firm called DC Community Ventures. Today, we produce about 60,000 cookies a week in our production space in Maryland. Everything including our pies, is made there.

Photo Courtesy of Whisked

I would love to hear about your expansion into vegan cookies, which seems unique:

We started selling Vegan cookies simply because our customers were asking for them. Out first Vegan product was the Oatmeal Chocolate Chip. It was a nice complement to our conventional cookies and provided an option for people that don’t want or can’t eat eggs and dairy. From a strategy perspective, it’s really helpful to go into a store that has its own bakery or already sells their own conventional cookies and have a Vegan product that complements their in-house bakery. We can offer unique Vegan flavors – like our Lemon Poppy Seed, or Pumpkin Snickerdoodle – that they would never make themselves. It really can help us get shelf space in a crowded category.

Talk to me about how you create new flavors, it sounds so fun!

We spend a fair amount of time looking at marketplace trends to see what is happening in other categories (ice cream/protein bars, etc.). We are SQF certified so we have to be thoughtful about ensuring that we have the right supplier for new ingredients. In all honesty, I’ll start the product creation process by making different batches at home and seeing if I like them. If we like the small batch, then we’ll do a larger batch in the production kitchen. Because of our depositor, we have to make a minimum of 40 Ibs of dough to run a production trial, so I always try to do as much testing as I can in my home kitchen.

Favorite Flavor?

I love all of them! I wouldn’t sell something I don’t love. But, if I had to pick one it would be the Vegan Oatmeal Chocolate Chip cookie.  It was the first Vegan flavor we ever sold and I’m immensely proud of it. I always meet people that have no idea it’s Vegan and it tastes amazing. (As an aside, the author can vouch for this being true).

Photo Courtesy of Whisked

Tell me about the new crispy cookies you just launched!

We’d heard from buyers for a while that they wanted us to offer a shelf-stable option. We surveyed the marketplace and found that there weren’t a lot of options for crispy Vegan cookies – all the cookies on the market are Vegan and gluten-free, or allergen-free. So, we thought we could fill a niche. We also wanted to offer customers a cookie that’s more portable and portion-controlled than our six-packs.  It was an incredibly challenging product to develop - we spent a year working on the recipe, and months making sure we had our packaging lined up. But we think the end results is worth it – our Vegan crispy cookies are portable, snackable, gorgeous, and (most importantly) very delicious. We’re incredibly proud of them.