We cookie dough lovers know the dilemma: you make it at home, and it’s not safe to eat. You buy a pint of cookie dough ice cream, and there’s all that ice cream in the way. To help keep the ‘piece,’ we’ve expanded our expertise and our production capabilities to put your favorite cookie dough in a pouch.
We know not everyone is lucky enough to have a job description that includes snacking on cookie dough with your morning coffee. Here at Rhino Foods, we are all about inclusion, and we think it’s time to share the joy. In 2017, we began to see pints of edible dough attracting a lot of attention. We knew it was time to bring our expertise to the table. We teamed up with our friends at Ben & Jerry’s and put our heads together to deliver you the best cookie dough snacking experience.
Snackable cookie dough at your fingertips may seem simple, but we have a lot to consider in order to deliver absolute satisfaction: flavor, texture, consistency and most importantly, safety. All must be spot on. With an impressive background and nearly 20 years of experience in planning, R&D and quality assurance, our Director of Technical Services, Don Holly, is an expert at bringing new products to market. He explains “What do we bring to the table when it comes to pouching this type of product? We’ve been making cookie dough every day, for 29 years. But the concept of consumer packaging was brand new. Not just from an equipment standpoint, but all the other details associated with stocking methods, manufacturing methods, and so on. What we bring to the table is hygiene, manufacturing methods and thousands of hours of practice to safely and deliciously introduce this kind of a ready-to-eat product to market.”
According to Don, the big heroes of this story are members of the sanitation team that pulled together to figure out how to clean a very complex, million-dollar machine. Essentially, this machine needs to be clean enough that someone would be able to eat off of it. In order to make that happen, this team has to disassemble and reassemble 100 pieces, every day. Every piece is removed, cleaned independently, dried and put back together. It is a chore done with extraordinary discipline. A chore that delivers all the joy of cookie dough, without any of the concerns.
Thought we’d stop at chocolate chip cookie dough? Oh, no. We’re playing around with all kinds of recipes for the next tasty edible dough snack. Each one we test becomes our team’s new favorite. Beyond ready-to-eat doughs, we’re experimenting with other concepts with customers, but we’ll keep those secret for now . . .
Rhino Foods’ Owner and Founder Ted Castle remarks, “Most people can’t think of a flavor innovation in the last 25 years that has been as dramatic as cookie dough ice cream. I received a lot of warnings when we first started. Everybody said, “Hey, don’t grow your business. Cookie dough’s like a hula hoop. It’ll be gone.”
Well, that was almost 30 years ago and here we are. We all scream for what’s in the ice cream. Now there’s no need to fight over those chewy, gooey, cookie dough chunks.