How we built a flavor for our followers
A look behind the scenes into one of our favorite flavors of all time: Birthday Cake
Our Birthday Cake cookie dough was one that we made for YOU! In Summer of 2024, y’all voted on which flavor we should produce next, and we made it.
In the cutest little pink bag, dye-free sprinkles from Supernatural and dye-free birthday cake flavoring, the Birthday Cake cookie was born.
Selfishly I hoped that everyone would vote for this flavor because it was just so freaking good during the trials. I stocked up so hopefully I have bags for at least the next few months because we’re officially sold out.
(Although if you email me that you saw this Substack, I may be able to hook you up)
How we launched Birthday Cake:
Asked you all to vote on your favorite flavor. We had 5 flavors to choose from: S’mores, Lemon Strawberry, Brownie, Birthday Cake, and White Chocolate Mac Nut. Over the weeks following, we made a video series explaining that it was our followers decision and name the series Followers Flavors.
After Birthday Cake was voted the winner, we went into finalization of testing.
We wanted a cookie that was similar to the Birthday Cake flavors we know and love, but that also stayed true to what’s important to Hot Take! High quality ingredients and taste.
Sourced our ingredients. We reached out to Supernatural for sprinkles to collab after having conversations with customers about importance of using dye-free sprinkles, then sourced dye-free birthday cake flavoring, sourced the best butter EVER from Rumiano farms (the butter we use for all of our flavors), and source the creamiest Fair Trade white chocolate from Guittard after trying multiple versions of their white chocolate chips.
Finalized our perfect pink cutie bags! Each collab or brand flavor has a different colored bag. We had never stepped out of the blue, red or yellow brand colors, but couldn’t resist doing a pink bag for Birthday Cake. We used shade F6ACCC.
Made the dough. We work really closely with our copacker to make sure everything goes as planned. Sometimes we go down there, sometimes we don’t. Our copacker is really well versed in baking and as long as we have the recipe somewhat down, he gets it so right.
Ship our dough from copacker to our fulfillment centers and get ready to drop!
Shoot content:
DROP!!! After multiple rounds of test shipments going through the system and double checking with our fulfillment centers that everything looks okay, we drop the flavor online. There are so many assets produced for this day–newsletter, instagram, tiktoks, instagram stories, texts, etc. We get so excited/nervous every time!
Ship our flavors out to y’all! And cross our fingers everything goes okay and that everyone loves it as much as we do!!
We will miss Bday Cake so much ah
Any guesses on which flavor is coming out next?
Launching soon…. 🤫