Organization Description. The Maui Cookie Lady (MCL) creates distinctive, gourmet cookies featuring the tropical flavors of Hawaii. Started as a fundraiser at a Maui farmers market, the cookies are now featured at top hotels and quality markets. Flavors include Kona Coffee Espresso, Vanilla Slurry, Mango, Pineapple Lychee, Nutella Dark Chocolate Truffle, and the Original Triple Chunker. MCL aspires to be the first cookie company from Maui to achieve international distinction, and is building distribution channels to achieve that dream. Inspiration. A long time cookie enthusiast, founder Mitzi Toro began baking cookies to raise funds to thank the nurses who took care of her terminally ill father. She did this for a few weeks at a Maui farmers market, and then was encouraged to turn it into a regular business by customers who didn’t want her to stop. She started the company, built her own commercial kitchen, and the cookies garnered fans from as far away as UK, Japan, and Dubai. Mitzi just resigned her job as a high school counselor and is now developing the company full time. Next Steps. We’ve just completed product company branding and graduated from a food business accelerator, refining my business plan. We also have potential contract opportunities in the NHL that our company needs to grow to be able to accept. Next steps include building these national distribution channels and increasing production capacity. We are also expanding the product line to include “cookie butters” featuring our popular tropical cookie flavors (a major product line extension into fast-growing innovative niche). This will require developing both business and production teams, expanding my production facilities, and finding investors with a sweet tooth Biggest Obstacle. Maui lacks an established food manufacturing industry, so to meet growing demand we had to build and permit a dedicated cookie-making commercial kitchen. But with large volume leads pending, and demand already outstripping production capacity, finding suitable production facilities is now our chief obstacle. This will require a financial outlay that cannot be generated fast enough from growing revenues, so we are seeking investment that will allow us to scale to the next level. Clearly satisfying the appetite for gourmet cookies with the unique flavors of Hawaii is a recipe for success.
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Business Description
We make delicious cookies using local ingredients grown on our island such as fruits, coffee, island salt and sugar. We sell currently at high end hotels, markets, local airport and our local brewery and opened up our shipping on a 3rd party website called Etsy six months ago. We were selling in our Maui Costco for over a year but due to increased demand and limited facilities we had to self select out. The sales were so high they offered us all 7 Costco Roadshows in Hawaii. We have a large pending contract with the NHL Florida Panthers projected start date is October 2016 and we are also pitching to Neiman Marcus in Honolulu for an October 2016 start. We need funding to expand our kitchen an upgrade our packaging.
What is the purpose of this loan?
• Expand our current kitchen to double the space • Buy more equipment • Purchase custom packaging to get us ready to enter the high end gift giving market, amenity market and Omiyage Japanese gift giving culture • Infrastructure and build out costs for our 1st mainland venue at the NHL Panthers Stadium • Continue the R& D on our new food innovation of Cookie Butters. We will be the 1st Cookie Butters from Hawaii and only Cookie Butter with a tropical flavor