LAKEWOOD, Wash. — Back in her college days, to help pay tuition, Tacoma native Deborah Tuggle used to bake cookies every Friday for classmates.
Now she's president of Bite Me incorporated, a Lakewood company that employs more than a dozen people making as many as 14-thousand cookies an hour.
“I consider my competitor Nabisco. I just do,” she says. “So we are small, but we are mighty.”
From the very beginning Deb decided she'd never cut corners. Every cookie is made with the finest of natural ingredients.
“Everything is focused on quality quality quality and that is what makes this business so successful,” she says.
Her frosted shortbread cookies are made with real butter and plant based dyes. There are three kinds of ginger in her ginger snaps. And the frozen dough balls her company ships, so you can bake them at home, are made with walnuts and chocolate imported from Belgium.
“Cookies bring love. And a warm cookie is even better, right?” she asks.
Team Evening got to try the Warm Cookie program. We baked the cookies at home and we were mostly speechless. I think we each gave the cookies five rapturous nods.
The results reminded us of the kind of cookies you've purchased from high end grocery stores.
Deb's company has been making a lot of cookies sold under other labels.
But now she wants to try something new.
“ We just decided within the last 12-to-18 months that it is time to pull the curtain back and let people know who we are and the products that we are producing”, she says. “We want people to know that it's us!”
Tuggle isn't taking all the credit for her company's success.
“I am smart enough to hire people smarter than I am and it just comes together and it works,” she says.
Deborah Tuggle believes cookies can change lives. A portion of every sale goes to charity.
“My goal is to impact the community, impact single mothers, women that are ESL,” she says. “What am I going to leave behind as a legacy in this community? That's what's super important.”
Tuggle says she feels lucky she chose to bake cookies for a living. What a way to make the world a better place!
“I make people happy every single day,” she says. “Every day of the year somebody is happy because they're gobbling up one of our products and so I feel blessed every day.”
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