‘Fake It Till You Bake It’: TikTok’s Dana Hasson Launches Baking Mix Brand Centered Around Convenience, Customizability

Content creator-fronted brands have cropped up at an accelerated pace in the crowded spirits and coffee categories in recent years, but fruitful opportunities still lie in other spaces, including the baking mix aisle.

Against that backdrop, social media content creator Dana Hasson has launched Homemade ish, a premium baking mix crafted for consumer convenience and customizability that operates under the tagline, “Fake it till you bake it.”

The New York-based brand debuted today with its inaugural Cookie Starter Kit, featuring a sugar cookie base made with clean ingredients like regeneratively farmed wheat and pure ground Madagascar vanilla – as well as edible glitter. The brand believes its versatile base opens up a myriad of cookie possibilities, whether it be classic chocolate chip, snickerdoodles or iced sugar cookies.

“I want people to be able to experiment. I don’t want to give them the final product, which is how Homemade ish fell into place,” said Hasson. “[Consumers] still have the creative ability to make whatever cookie they want, but with minimal measuring.”

Homemade ish’s Cookie Starter Mix is currently available direct-to-consumer via the brand’s website for $17 per kit and $45 per 3-pack. Each kit, packaged in a vintage-inspired round box, includes one pouch of sugar cookie base, one pouch of brown sugar and one pouch of edible glitter.

According to Hasson, the decision to launch DTC was driven by the importance of consumer feedback, something that’s more challenging to navigate right away in brick-and-mortar retail.

The recipe development process for Homemade ish took approximately four months, followed by “a few more months” of testing and perfecting, according to Hasson. Research and development focused not only on flavor but also on shape/thickness, as the brand seeks to provide results that users will want to share on their own social media.

The result? A baking mix that produces a cookie with a texture that is a “happy medium” between really thin and really thick.

For Hasson’s audience of over 3 million followers across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, it’s likely no surprise that she decided to turn her passion for baking into a business. The content creator – who moved from Israel to the U.S. when she was 13 – produces easy-to-follow “glammed” (read: glittery) recipe videos in her New York City apartment.

The growth potential of the baking mix category is clear. According to Circana, dollar sales in the overall segment grew 1.5% year-over-year to $1.86 billion in the 52-week period ended Sept. 8. Meanwhile, the cookie and cookie bar mix segment saw sales slip 5.1% to $171 million.

Homemade ish has been self-funded by Hasson so far, who told Nosh that many industry folks advised her that “once you give your idea away on paper, you give away a lot of equity.” Homemade ish already has a support system in place for when it eventually scales to 100,000+ units, said Hasson, highlighting a partnership with a 3PL and a co-packer.

“I needed to start with the idea that I’m going to scale in the future. That was important. I wanted my apartment to be my apartment and not another studio,” said Hasson.

Within the next six to 12 months, Homemade ish hopes to launch additional baking mix SKUs – Hasson said the recipes have already been developed – and establish a distribution footprint with retailers in the natural and mass channels, such as Whole Foods Market and Target.

To generate brand awareness and consumer demand prior to a brick-and-mortar launch, Hasson will leverage her social platforms “as much as she can” to capture the day-to-day of building a CPG food brand. Transparency is key, said the content creator, and she wants followers to feel that they are part of building Homemade ish.

“By the time people see and taste us, I think [in-store purchase] is going to be a no-brainer. A lot of [legacy value] brands still have the artificial element to them. You’re also getting the final products with them, but with us, you’re still getting to experiment. It’s like night and day,” said Hasson.