Did you know Vermont has the largest cookie cutter company in the country? Neither did we.
ESSEX ― When Paulina Thompson decided in 2020, at the height of the pandemic, to start a cookie-making business out of her home in Essex she didn't have any experience as a baker, but she did have two young daughters who liked to eat decorated cookies with icing.
"They would want cookies from the store," Thompson said. "They were pretty, but didn't taste good. I decided to teach myself how to do it. I just watched a bunch of videos online and tried many times. I made a lot of ugly cookies, but I finally got to where I think they taste good and they're also pretty."
Lots of Vermonters agree. Thompson now makes about 5,000 cookies a year for her business, Paulina's Sweets, mostly tied to the holiday season, including Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter, which she launched on Facebook. She also teaches classes on cookie-making at businesses and homes around Chittenden County. And she has become an ambassador for Ann Clark Cookie Cutters in Rutland.
"It's the largest cookie cutter maker in the country, in Vermont," Thompson said. "I didn't know that. I've driven by Rutland many times and I didn't know. I like telling people when they go to my classes that these people (who make the cookie cutters) are local."
A bonanza of Ann Clark cookie cutters at an antique store in Shelburne
When she first started, Thompson didn't have a lot of money to invest in her business, so she advertised on Front Porch Forum looking for cookie cutters. The owner of an antique business in Shelburne replied that she had a bunch of cutters she would part with for a good price. This was Thompson's introduction to Ann Clark Cookie Cutters.
"I remember I messaged them and told them I had bought their cutters from an antique store in Shelburne," Thompson said.
Ben Clark, chief executive officer of Ann Clark Cookie Cutters and Ann Clark's son, said most people don't know about the company, or that it's the largest manufacturer of cookie cutters in the United States.
Ann Clark was an artist and her husband, John, was a construction consultant. The couple moved from Washington, D.C. to Rutland to raise their children in Vermont. John Clark had attended summer camp in Vermont as a child and the couple were drawn back by the lifestyle and bucolic scenery.
When construction came to a standstill in Vermont in the 1980s, Ben Clark said, his parents started to talk about how to mass-produce his mom's art. They thought of cutting boards, Christmas ornaments and cookie cutters. Starting with a "country-looking" pig Ann Clark had drawn, they found companies to make the products and took them to a wholesale show in Philadelphia.
The cookie cutters were the star of the show. Soon they added cow and sheep cookie cutters. The other products fell by the wayside, and the Clarks started selling their cookie cutters to gift shops around the country.
Let's move to Vermont and make cookie cutters with my mom
In the late 1990s, Ben Clark and his wife were living in Annapolis, Maryland. Clark was a mechanical engineer working at Black+Decker.
"It was fun," Clark said. "Power tools are really cool. We loved Annapolis and sailed all the time. But once you have kids, the whole game changes."
Ben Clark and his wife wanted to move to Vermont, where he had grown up, to raise their children. The choice of a job was obvious.
"I started with the company in 1998 and moved back in 1999," Ben Clark said. "The first year I worked at home from Annapolis to make sure it would work out before my wife quit her job."
Clark said his parents had "a cool hobby business," but he had bigger ambitions.
"I recognized this is a marketing game," Ben Clark said. "I also realized the supplier we had (for cookie cutters) was going to drop the ball. We figured out how to make cookie cutters. We hand built a machine out of plywood. We made another one and kept advancing."
Ann Clark Cookie Cutters makes the move into kitchen stores
Over time, the company started ordering fewer and fewer of its cookie cutters from its supplier in Pennsylvania, Creative Products. With production in-house, Clark started making custom cookie cutters for companies like Disney, Michelin, Under Armour, McDonald's and a bunch of colleges. Disney wanted a Mickey Mouse cookie. Michelin wanted the Michelin Man. Others wanted their logos.
"We were slowly growing," Clark said. "The whole time we were bootstrapping. We didn't want to get investors. Then you don't own the company any more. We hit the point when we went to Creative Products and said, 'Hey, if you're ever sick of this, let me know. I'll buy your business.'"
A couple of years later, the owner of Creative Products said she was sick of it. Clark bought the company.
"Their business was in the kitchen stores we had never gone after," Clark said. "We had been trying to convince gift stores that cookie cutters were great gifts. When we started selling to kitchen stores everybody knew why you needed them."
Ann Clark Cookie Cutters printed a catalog, but never mailed it because the company was growing too fast. Ben Clark turned to China for cookie cutters. But not for long.
"We had enough volume to justify the (cookie cutter) machine I'd been dreaming about," Ben Clark said. "We hired an engineer and built five. Now we could make cookie cutters at the same cost as buying from China."
Lean manufacturing leads the way to efficient growth with little inventory
Clark had attended lean manufacturing classes at the Vermont Manufacturing Extension Center in Randolph, and now applied its principles of efficiency and cutting waste to his cookie cutter manufacturing process, especially in the design of his custom machines built in-house. He realized the trick was not to build up inventory, but to make as few cutters as possible, combined with really fast shipping, in one or two days.
"We started living and breathing lean in everything we do, down to if you go to the storage closet for pens there's a trip card for when to order more," Clark said. "Reduce inventory, turn over quickly."
For custom cookie cutter work, a die must be made for the machine. Clark and his team figured out a way to make those dies in one or two days instead of six weeks. Workers can change shapes on the cookie cutter machine in nine minutes, cycling through 25 to 50 different dies in a day.
Ann Clark Cookie Cutters' number 1 cutter is the venerable gingerbread man. But even the G-man is only produced in runs of 500 at a time, maybe four times a week − not 40,000 in inventory. Today the company has 35 employees and is "north of $10 million" in annual revenue, according to Ben Clark.
"Now we have a situation where we're cost-competitive, we carry very little inventory and we can turn over a shape quickly, so we ship quickly," Ben Clark said. "Let marketing do the work. Spend a lot of time and energy to get people to like our cookie cutters."
Metal cutters from Ann Clark Cookie Cutters are a hit with Paulina
That doesn't appear too difficult. Paulina Thompson said she has some 800 cookie cutters, some of them plastic, but the metal Ann Clark cookie cutters are her favorite.
"I personally like them better than other kinds of cutters because the cut is very clean because it's metal," Thompson said. "They are so good at making the shape. They know what they're doing."
Ann Clark Cookie Cutters has some 3,500 shapes total, but about 800 shapes are active at any given time. The company sells on Amazon as well as direct and wholesale, not only cookie cutters but also icing and food coloring, as well as pancake and waffle mixes.
Soon Ben Clark plans to launch a cake and icing mix of "uncompromising quality."
"I want a phenomenal cake," he said. "It comes down to ingredients. You can't just add water. It's going to be more complicated. We spent hours to make it simple and straightforward. You're going to love it."
Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosi@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.
This article originally appeared on Burlington Free Press: Ann Clark Cookie Cutters in Rutland is the biggest in the country
