Meet Ross Canter of Cookie Good in Santa Monica

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ross Canter.

Ross, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I’ve always loved food. I grew up going to my grandpa’s deli every Sunday (he was one of the Canter brothers at the original Canter’s Deli location in Boyle Heights). I spent most of my time at the bakery and candy counters – I still get a lot of inspiration from those weekend visits. In high school, my friend Donna’s mom was famous for her brownies (they were really, REALLY good). I wasn’t typically one to challenge a middle-aged woman, but for some unknown reason I set out to best her brownies, testing and tweaking until I came up with what I considered the perfect balance of fudgy and cakey. What’s more, I soon realized that brownies did not need to be limited to either chocolate or walnut – they could have Butterfingers or coconut or cheesecake in them. Two years later (while working internships in the movie business), I started my first “company”, Brownie Points (I was 19 at the time and admit it might not have been the most original of names). Every day, I’d challenged myself to create six different flavors as I took my oversized basket of brownies through a Century City high rise until I sold out.

I spent the next 20 years working my way from film executive to producer to writer – baking on weekends and holidays and for bake sales at my kids’ schools (where my weird competitive streak pushed me to create cookies that outsold all of the others). When the Hollywood writer’s strike stretched into 2008, my wife suggested we go into the cookie business. I realize you don’t know Melanie but trust me, those are words she never, EVER thought she’d say (I am not the neatest baker and the thought of transforming our home kitchen into my workspace still gives her shudders – but desperate times…). We emailed 100 friends and family to let them know that Cookie Good was now open for business. We got our first order three minutes later. We had no idea what we were doing but with one mixer, one oven, and a home printer that worked most of the time, we baked, we hand-delivered, and we figured out how to ship across the country.

Our orders grew from friends and family to friends of friends and then friends of friends of friends, etc. and it was time to find a commercial kitchen. We rented space four mornings a week for five hours a day and learned how to use all of the big-boy equipment (ovens that could bake 200 cookies at a time, a Hobart mixer that yielded an 8-batch of dough). We hired our first staff member, then hired two more. After about a year baking part-time, we knew that there was a lot more we could do if we weren’t limited to 20 hours a week and started looking for our own kitchen. We found space in Santa Monica and opened our doors for business 20 months later (this is not a typo – building a retail bakery can be a long, expensive, very frustrating experience…but in the end, it is totally worth it). We love having our shop – we love being able to meet our customers and see their faces as they taste the cookies for the first time… or the 100th.

Has it been a smooth road?
I’m not sure any road worth taking is ever smooth – but I will say, all of the bumps/struggles have definitely made us better. We had no professional baking experience, no bakery/retail experience so we definitely had a lot to learn. Fortunately, we started very small and very slowly so our initial mistakes were made on a small scale (packaging, shipping, menu, etc). This wasn’t done by design but because we were too afraid to pull the trigger on big moves. The good news was that by the time we finally went ‘big’, we’d worked out a lot of the kinks.

One other thing that I struggle with is being strategic and focused on growth. This was hard for me as a film producer and writer and it seems to have followed me into the cookie world. I’m about the work, about producing the best product I can with the hope that “if you bake it, they will come”. This is only partially true. We have to push ourselves every day to try to be smart and to make decisions that will help our business grow.

So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Cookie Good story. Tell us more about the business.
We make cookies and brownies/bars based on our favorite desserts, candy bars, ice cream flavors, breakfast cereals, and just things that make us feel Cookie Good. People will come into the shop and see things like our Cheetos Cookie or our Caramel-Pretzel-Chocolate Chunk Cookie and wonder who’s the stoner in the kitchen. For the record, I am not a stoner (no judgment on real stoners) but I do tell people that I have the palate of a 6-year-old. I think a defining moment for me as an adult was realizing that I could go to the market and buy Cap’n Crunch cereal whenever I wanted. There was utter joy at that moment. That’s what I want people to feel when they try our cookies. Freedom, nostalgia, happiness in its simplest form.

As much as I love each and every cookie and bar we make, I am possibly most proud of our Cookie Corn (super plump air-popped corn covered in a cookie-specific caramel and topped with cookie crumbs). It is the perfect hybrid of two of my favorite things: cookies & popcorn. It is unique to Cookie Good. Creating something that doesn’t exist anywhere else makes me really happy.

Contact Info:

• Address: 2448 Wilshire Blvd.
  Santa Monica, 90403
• Website: cookiegood.com
• Phone: 424.280.4100
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: cookiegoodla
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/cookiegoodLA/
• Twitter: twitter.com/cookiegoodla
• Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/cookie-good-santa-monica

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