Meet GES Delegate: Mitzi Toro
Name: Mitzi Toro
Twitter: @mauicookielady
Country of Origin: USA
Organization Name: The Maui Cookie Lady
Organization Website: www.TheMauiCookiealady.com
Organization Description: The Maui Cookie Lady (MCL) creates distinctive, gourmet cookies featuring the tropical flavors of Hawaii. Started as a fundraiser at a local farmers market, the cookies are now featured at top hotels, Costco roadshow, and other quality markets. Flavors include Kona Coffee Espresso, Vanilla Slurry, Mango, Pineapple Lychee, Nutella Dark Chocolate Truffle, and the Original Triple Chunker. MCL aspires to be the first cookie company from Maui to achieve international distinction, and is building distribution channels to achieve that dream.
Inspiration: A long time cookie enthusiast, founder Mitzi Toro has also been a long time dedicated school counselor. Mitzi’s passion has been split between helping the at-risk youth of her community for over 10 years, winning the State of Hawaii’s Counselor of the Year, and baking as a side passion and hobby. In 2012, her father became terminally ill and, as a way to celebrate his life, she raised funds to thank the nurses who took care of him when he passed away. She did this for a few months at a Maui farmers market, and then was encouraged to turn it into a regular business by customers who didn’t want her to stop. She started the company, built her own commercial kitchen, and the cookies garnered fans from as far away as UK, Japan, and UAE. Mitzi just resigned her job as a high school counselor and is now developing the company full time.
Next Steps: We’ve just completed product and company branding and graduated from a food business accelerator, refining my business plan. We also have potential contract opportunities that our company needs to grow to be able to accept. Next steps include building these national distribution channels and increasing production capacity. We are also expanding the product line to include “cookie butters” featuring our popular tropical cookie flavors (a major product line extension into fast-growing innovative niche). This will require developing both business and production teams, expanding my production facilities, and finding investors with a sweet tooth.
Biggest Obstacle: Maui lacks an established food manufacturing industry, so to meet growing demand we had to build and permit a dedicated cookie-making commercial kitchen. But with large volume leads pending, and demand already outstripping production capacity, finding suitable production facilities is now our chief obstacle. This will require a financial outlay that cannot be generated fast enough from growing revenues, so we are seeking investment that will allow us to scale to the next level. Clearly satisfying the appetite for gourmet cookies with the unique flavors of Hawaii is a recipe for success.
