#WHATS NEXT FOR BAKERY STORY 2 FULL#

In addition to an online cookie order option, the co-owners now have four shops in New York City and one in the Hamptons. “I think that’s when we started realizing that people are recognizing the cookies and thinking of them as maybe the standard by which other cookies are being compared,” McDonald says. In 1997, The New York Times wrote that the women “produce what may possibly be the largest, most divine chocolate chip cookies in Manhattan.” But McDonald says it wasn’t until they appeared on “Throwdown with Bobby Flay” more than a decade later, in 2008, and beat the celebrity chef in a chocolate chip cookie contest that they felt like their cookies had really taken off. I think that being athletes and competing made a huge difference in our mental outlook-and gave us really great endurance.” “And I can't tell you how many times I said that to myself in races, too. “You're 14 hours a day, 15 hours a day, and I'd say, ‘Just put your head down and keep going,’” says McDonald. They say that success was the goal, and giving up wasn’t an option. Gaining notoriety in New York City’s food scene is a challenge, but McDonald and Weekes dove in head-on, applying that same drive and perseverance that they had been implementing in their races. The cookies actually weren’t part of the bakery’s original menu, but McDonald and Weekes started selling them pretty soon after they opened, and then developed three more flavors: oatmeal raisin, dark chocolate chocolate chip, and dark chocolate peanut butter chip. “Clearly, we both like to bake, cook, and, of course, eat!”Īfter a strong first six months or so, they decided to expand, opening a retail bakery on the Upper West Side in December 1995. “It was completely coincidental,” she says. Weekes insists that the cookies didn’t factor into this decision. The two friends eventually narrowed in on a business concept: wholesale bread baking. (During races, they’d usually opt for energy chews instead, because it’s “too hard to eat ‘real’ food when you are racing,” Weekes explains.) The two friends spent years fueling their training sessions with cookies and enjoying them after races. “We'd spend the time talking a lot about what we wanted to do with our lives,” says Weekes, “and we discovered that we both wanted to ultimately have our own businesses.”īeing athletes and competing made a huge difference in our mental outlook-and gave us really great endurance. It was during their long Saturday bike rides that they discussed the idea of teaming up to scratch their entrepreneurial itches, too.

#WHATS NEXT FOR BAKERY STORY 2 FULL#

They loved it.Ī few years of triathlons later, they upgraded to the Ironman-2.4 miles of swimming and 112 miles of biking, followed by a full marathon (26.2 miles)-a massive undertaking for which people spend double-digit hours training every week. The pair decided to go for it, training together for a Connecticut sprint triathlon (a half-mile of swimming 12.4 miles of biking and 3.1 miles of running). “And all of the men were doing these triathlons, which were kind of a new thing back then, and they were really encouraging us to go ahead and do one.” “There were only four women and, I don't know, 10 or 15 men,” says Weekes. Pam Weekes (left) and Connie McDonald (right) take a bit of their dark chocolate cookies.

Whats next for bakery story 2