We owned a cookie shop called The Charleston Cookie Company, which was located in downtown Charleston for almost a decade. One day we had a customer who came to us and said he was a distributer of Benne Wafers. At the time I didn’t know what a Benne Wafer was and so he brought in some of his product to try and I wasn’t impressed. Afterwards, he asked me if we were capable of making a Benne Wafer that was better than the one he was already selling and I was up for the challenge.

We went to the library and checked out historical cook books of Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA where we learned that Benne Wafers were popular. After about 6 or 8 weeks, we discovered our own particular formula of making Benne Wafers and now we’ve been selling for a little over 30 years. That’s how we got into the tea cookie business. From that method, we added the next cookie, pecan, followed by lemon, and gingersnaps which is based on a Norwegian recipe. That was the Birth of the Cookies.