Cookie Business Scoops Success at Homeward Bound

The  Catering and Culinary Academy team has a lot on its plate, so to speak, with training culinary students, preparing food for catering events and feeding the residents at programs. What you might not know is that the crew also makes cookies — lots of them.

This delicious project started with Kim Kaselionis, the founder and chief executive of Novato-based Circle Bank, who proposed that the Fresh Starts culinary team produce cookie dough to be baked on-site for bank customers in Circle Bank’s branches. As the bank has grown and prospered, so has the cookie business. The six branches from Santa Rosa to San Francisco now order about 10,000 cookies a month – yes, 10,000!

“We want the ambience of every Circle Bank branch to be warm, colorful, modern and inviting, not institutional,” says Kaselionis.  "The cookies are a way to communicate that. We bake them daily and they're always available in our Customer Cafés.  We like to make our customers feel at home.”

What happens in our training kitchen begins with the chief baker, Alexa, who mixes the dough. She started last week with 15 batches of chocolate-chip dough, which translated to 4,567 cookies when laid out neatly on the flat trays. The process of getting the product from dough to delivery packages expands to include two or three other people – last week Lynette, Kevin and Rebecca – who either scoop the dough into 1-ounce cookies ready for baking or operate the cookie-depositor to turn out the bite-size shapes.

Chocolate chip has the most fans by far, while the oatmeal raisin recipe places second on the list of favorites. Since the raisins do not work well with the machine, these still are hand-scooped for packaging. The tasty peanut butter variety comes last among customer requests, with branches sometimes ordering just a dozen or two in their monthly delivery.

And do the customers sometimes consume a little bit more than expected when they smell those just-baked treats? “All the time,” says Lynette, a regular member of the cookie team. “It goes up and down by the month, but more likely up than down. They call us when they run out.”

The kitchen offered relative calm this week with the usual culinary class out for summer break, so cookie production had a little extra room. The team even had space to ponder the idea of expanding cookie production to other clients who can’t resist a freshly baked cookie.

"We could definitely make more," Alexa says. The cookie business is one of several social enterprise projects operated by Homeward Bound, which bring in revenue to support its programs while offering employment and training opportunities for culinary students and residents.

While crowds in the kitchen may be an occasional challenge, the top-notch equipment eases the production tasks. The kitchen team always is scouting out ways to improve production and has begun looking for a Swiss dough sheeter, which would enable the kitchen to make some popular items like pizza and focaccia more efficiently while opening the door to include croissants, handmade pastas or myriad other things in its repertoire.

Walking down Grant Avenue in Novato or Fifth Avenue in San Rafael this week? Stop into Circle Bank to say hello and see what's baking — more than likely you'll be offered a delicious taste of fresh cookies.