Exclusive: Radi to Run Sweet Loren’s as President, Will Grow Beyond Cookie Dough
Long-time CPG executive Doug Radi is headed to allergen-friendly cookie company Sweet Loren’s to serve as its president, a newly created role in which he will oversee all departments and report directly to founder and CEO Loren Brill.
Under the new management structure, Brill will devote her time to brand building and the company’s innovation pipeline. In addition to Radi, the company has also brought on Robyn DeFina as its new SVP of marketing, starting later this month.
“We’ve spent the last one to two years really working on an aggressive growth plan,” Brill said. “I really needed someone…who [can] help partner with me and be like, ‘I can run the day to day. I’m a great operator of hitting our goals on a daily basis.’”
Brill described Radi as the company’s “operator” while she will serve as company’s “visionary.” All departments will report to Radi who will then work with Brill to align these tactics with a larger company strategy.
Now profitable, Sweet Loren’s has a 40% ACV in MULO, Radi said, with over $30 million in retail sales. As a whole, the refrigerated cookie dough category is worth $600 million, he added, and in some retailers Sweet Loren’s has 10-15% of the category sales.
The company’s next priority is to draw in new shoppers who have left the set due to a lack of better-for-you options. Club, mass, online and foodservice are also channels where the brand can expand into, or go deeper with, Radi said.
Though Sweet Loren’s emphasizes its natural ingredient profile, Brill said its greatest success has been in conventional and mass retailers, where there’s a most established refrigerated cookie dough set. Drawing attention in natural retailers has been harder as there are often only two choices: themselves and General Mills’ owned Immaculate Baking Company.
“Our growth has been very organic [via] word of mouth,” Brill said. “Now that we have the distribution, and a very proven concept, I think it’s time to build a brand name and grow our brand awareness from sub 5% to double, triple that…There are millions of people out there ….that don’t even know an option like us exists.”
The chilled cookie dough set has risen in popularity, but most emerging players are focused on D2C. Deux now offers a functional-food-enhanced vegan cookie dough, for example, while Bro Dough sells protein-enhanced, plant-based cookie dough and Doughp sells pints of dough. Within the take-and-bake set, bakery brands such as Levain and Milk Bar have launched frozen and shelf-stable options, respectively, that require no cooking at all.
Sweet Loren’s currently produces a line of edible cookie dough and take-and-bake cookies, which recently launched in a low-sugar variety, as well as ready-to-eat cookie dough. Moving forward, Brill and Radi noted that innovation, including potential shelf-stable products, will be key.
Radi’s hiring by Sweet Loren’s comes less than one year after he joined Rudi’s Bakery as CEO, returning to a company he had previously worked at for seven years, ultimately rising to the role of general manager. Radi said he is proud of the work that team has done in turning around the business following the 2020 acquisition by Mayfair Equity Partners.
“I think the newer model is going to be that businesses have to be healthy and growing and have margin…I’ve never had a chance to work in that environment, it’s always generally been private equity backed. So I see the real value in building the right way from the beginning,” Radi said. “The most important thing here [was] when life [came] calling with an opportunity that was amazing, it just was in my heart to follow this passion.”
