Cherry Boomchunkas are my first food product. It all began 22 years ago in a search for expanding my business. I had been selling Cherry Republic t-shirts, but was frustrated because tees were only purchased in the summer—I was looking for something to sell year round.. People eat food year round. I decided on a cookie using our local fruit and taking advantage of a newer invention—dried cherries. I wanted a fun cookie with a fun name. That was the easy part—in a flash Cherry Boomchunkas with oats, cherries and white chocolate were invented. Here is me with a few of my staff in my first kitchen.
Then the hard part came—selling them. To make any money I needed to sell thousands of them every week. What a struggle it was to bake, package, market and distribute to local stores… Oh, I wanted to give up many times. It was an exhausting start. But people loved the cookie.
Here is an article of me in the Chicago Tribune in 1998 with my cookie.
Here is a photo of my nieces holding Boomchunkas that was used in my first catalog.
Here is my first drawing of the cookie.
Here is the drum we bang every time we sell a cookie in the Glen Arbor Café.
And here are the new cookies. More moist. More cherry. More chocolate. More better.
And lastly, here is a fun video we created of the first new cookies coming out of the oven!
