Cookies On Demand

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June 9, 2010 by Angela Shupe | 2 Comments

DesMoinesRegister.com:

Lana Lewis makes warm chocolate chip cookies five days a week for her son, Dereck. But this isn’t some Donna Reed style stay-at-home-mom ritual – it’s business.

“Who doesn’t love a warm cookie?” said Dereck, 24. His cookie delivery business, Tank Goodness, cashes in on the warm, fuzzy feeling the fresh, gooey treats create.

An Iowa State business school grad with a natural entrepreneurial spirit, Dereck has dabbled in more than batter. In college, he and his roommate, Justin Botham, hatched plan after plan to make a few bucks. They bought glow sticks in bulk and sold them at a 200 percent markup at VEISHEA. They hunted morel mushrooms and sold them to chefs on the coasts via eBay. They bought a chain saw after a major storm and plastered half of Ames with fliers offering cheap limb removal. They even went in as part owners on the local Dairy Queen.

So when Botham, now a financial planner in Minneapolis, heard that the local cookie-delivery business he patronized when sending thank-yous to clients was looking to sell franchises, he thought of Lewis.

Not quite the product one might instantly associate with a guy who used to guide big game hunts in Alaska and who still sells hunting properties on the side.

“People buy cookies every day,” Lewis, reasoned. “They don’t buy hunting land every day.”

Dereck, a polite guy with no shortage of ideas, knew he could handle marketing and deliveries, but he needed a baker. Someone who could crank dozens of batches out on time, and someone he could trust. So he called his mom, Lana Lewis.

Lewis is an energetic, bubbly woman who had always supported her son’s business schemes. She slowed down as a real estate agent in 2004 and spent her free time mowing, weeding and lounging in the hammock on the family’s acreage, not channeling her inner Paula Dean. Lana had long-since relinquished the kitchen to Dereck’s dad (the family still jokes about how they once tried to feed one of Lana’s turkey casseroles to the dog), but she listened to her son’s pitch. She traveled with him to Minneapolis to check out the main operations. By the end of the car ride back, mother and son were business partners.