Tiffany Lewis, who spent her summers growing up in Coronado, discovered the power of a cookie in the middle of a frozen Ohio winter.
A cookie is all things warm—nostalgia, familiarity and joy.
It encapsulates all of the feelings Lewis longed for after moving to a new state during the peak of winter for a corporate marketing job at Chase Bank without knowing a single soul.
To not yield to the cold and loneliness, Lewis, who years later founded “Cookies With Tiffany” in Seattle, quickly realized that she needed to create community.
So, she turned to something she loved doing—baking.
A cookie for a handshake
The idea was a cookie for a handshake.
Every time Lewis baked, she brought cookies to work, and sent out an email to her team to grab one at her desk.
That is how I developed and started my entire community, simply through sharing something homemade and delicious.”
-Tiffany Lewis.
“That is how I developed and started my entire community, simply through sharing something homemade and delicious,” Lewis said. “That cookie broke down borders and barriers.”
From banking to culinary training
Two years later in 2010, Lewis left the banking world on the verge of a promotion, and moved back to California (where she originally went to college at Chapman University) to go to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena.
“[Baking] wasn’t every week, but it was often enough to remember it and to really pinpoint that as what made me realize the power of food and how I wanted to make a career out of it,” Lewis said.
Lewis launched “Cookies With Tiffany” in 2021 after 11 years of experience in the culinary industry. And in just a short time, Lewis has secured a Major League Baseball team as one her growing list of clients.
She worked on celebrity chef Curtis Stone’s culinary team, freelanced for other celebrity chefs like Giada De Laurentiis, worked for the Food Network, taught cooking classes at Sur La Table and started “The Table Together.”
Her professional training in the culinary industry, plus years of experience in the marketing world, gave her the dynamic experience necessary to start a business straight from the heart.
“Cookies With Tiffany” aims to create an emotional connection between the nostalgia of a cookie and the ones receiving it through every small, scratch-made detail, Lewis said, adding she developed all of her own cookie recipes.
Coronado as a place of nostalgia
Through all of Lewis’s career switches and moves, she said Coronado has remained a constant.
It is a place she claims is nostalgic, since she grew up spending her summers on the island.
Her parents have a place in Coronado, so Lewis would visit in the summers and she would visit on long weekends throughout her college years and time working in the culinary industry.
In June, the family celebrated the 51st wedding anniversary of her parents in Coronado.
Coronado is that safe space that is just so familiar and so wonderful in so many ways.”
-Tiffany Lewis.
“I’ve moved around quite a bit,” Lewis said. “It doesn’t matter where I am in the world, where I am in the country, Coronado is that safe space that is just so familiar and so wonderful in so many ways.”
She considers Coronado her second home and remembers taking swimming classes at the public pool, tennis lessons at The Shores, riding bikes to Imperial Beach and spending every Sunday in Spreckels Park for the Concert in the Park.
Family integral to the company’s success
Lewis also said her family is an integral part of her journey with “Cookies With Tiffany.”
She started developing recipes during the pandemic in her parents’ house, enlisting them as taste-testers and using their Kitchenaid.
“They are such an important part of the brand because they’ve been there from the very get-go and the ideation of it,” Lewis said. “They were the ones that…believed in me and didn’t pressure me to follow maybe a traditional role of corporate America.”
To this day, Lewis’s dad, Tom, has a desk in their office in the production kitchen in Seattle.
He stamps bags, cuts ribbons for packaging and helps with deliveries to one of her top clients: the Seattle Mariners.
Lewis said such intricate attention to detail is what sets the company apart.
“Everything we do and everything my team does is just top of the line because we really want our customers to have a great experience,” Lewis said. “We obsess over our customers, we obsess over our cookies, and we obsess over the whole experience.”
“Every day is a good day for a cookie”
The company’s motto is: “Every day is a good day for a cookie.”
While that line rings true universally, these cookies are not your universal, run-of-the mill recipes, she said.
Every egg is hand cracked, every batch handmade, all dough scratch-made daily, she said.
The packaging is pristine, personalized to each customer’s needs, with the option to choose a ribbon color that is individually cut by Lewis’s dad.
Lewis said that if customers provide her with any marketing material, she will include it in the packaging as well and there is also an option to include a personalized note.
Lewis behind every penny
Lewis doesn’t have investors.
She was behind every penny from the beginning, recalling how she saved up for her first big purchase to drive the company and got an oven.
“It would have been really easy if someone gave me a couple hundred thousand, but I had to work for everything, and I think that’s what also made us so successful,” Lewis said. “I believe so much in what we’re doing.”
Another integral part of Lewis’s journey was the help of Voula’s Offshore Cafe, a family diner in Seattle started in 1984 that was featured on “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” in 2007.
Lewis used their kitchen after hours when she was starting out, and now has a production space above the diner.
Voula’s Offshore Cafe
Sikey Vlahos, co-owner of Voula’s with his brother Niko, remembers the day that Lewis could barely sit up at the bar stool, since her family has frequented the diner for years.
“We’ve known the family for a very, very long time,” Vlahos said. “They’ve become part of our family.”
Vlahos has seen the growth of the company from the beginning.
He said he remembers helping Lewis’s dad assemble a shelving unit to store all of her new containers and utensils.
She really knows what she’s doing…I just take my hat off to her persistence.”
-Sikey Vlahos on Tiffany Lewis.
“She really knows what she’s doing. I mean, I really admire how quickly everything has grown. I look back at where she started, and it was just a 12-foot stainless steel counter downstairs in our kitchen,” Vlahos said. “Today she has gosh, I couldn’t tell you how many linear feet of counter space.. upstairs. I just take my hat off to her persistence.”
And, Lewis said she is looking to expand further, with her eyes set on adding another location in California.
To order custom cookies, visit https://www.cookieswithtiffany.com/
