Why Our Chocolate Chip Cookies Cost More Than Grocery Store Cookies (And Why That Matters)

Chocolate Chip cookie ingredients

Let's talk about something nobody wants to talk about: price.

You walk into a grocery store and see a dozen chocolate chip cookies for $3.99. Then you walk into The Lakehouse Bakery and see a dozen chocolate chip cookies for $36. Same cookies, right?

Not even close.

The Real Cost of Real Ingredients

Here's what went into the cookies you just bought from us:

Butter, not margarine. We use real butter from actual cows. It costs 4x what margarine costs. Margarine is shelf-stable because it's engineered not to break down. Butter is cream that's been churned. Your cookies taste like what you put in them.

Real chocolate chips. Let's talk about the elephant in the room: chocolate. Commodity chocolate prices increased over 300% in 2024 and they haven't come back down. No, that's not a typo—it's real. A 50-pound bag of cocoa powder this time last year was just over $100. Now it's $450. We could switch to chocolate-flavored chips (yes, that's a real thing—they're made with palm oil and cocoa powder instead of real chocolate). We don't. We use real Belgian chocolate chips made with actual cocoa butter. Your cookies taste like chocolate because there's actual chocolate in them.

King Arthur flour, unbleached and unbromated. We intentionally use King Arthur flour for its quality. Unbleached means the flour hasn't been chemically whitened with chlorine gas or benzoyl peroxide. Unbromated means no potassium bromate—a dough conditioner banned in many countries but still legal here. It costs more. It bakes better.

Michigan beet sugar. Period. We only use local Michigan beet sugar. Or local Michaigan honey. Never cane sugar. Never high fructose corn syrup. Never mystery sweeteners. Just pure beet sugar grown in Michigan.

The Hidden Costs You Don't See

But ingredients are only part of it. Here's what else you're paying for when you buy scratch-made cookies:

People. Other bakeries have cookie depositor machines that pump out uniform cookies like a factory line. We have Jess and Courtney. Every cookie is mixed by hand, portioned by hand, baked in small batches, and cooled on racks. People cost money.

Packaging. Those kraft paper bags you carry out? They're 100% recycled paper with twisted paper handles. They cost more than the plastic T-shirt bags. We chose paper because it matters.

Time. Baking is chemistry and everything we do is a process. Real butter needs to cream properly. Real dough needs to rest. Real cookies need to cool before you bag them. We've perfected that process and it takes time to get it right every time. You can't rush chemistry. This is why we have people, not machines.

Small batch. We make 4-5 dozen cookies at a time, not 4,000. Small batches mean higher ingredient costs per unit, more labor per unit, more energy per unit. But they also mean we can taste every batch before it leaves the building. Size. Our large cookies are 3.75 ounces. Grocery store bakery cookies? 1-1.4 ounces. You're getting almost 3 times the cookie. So that $36 per dozen suddenly looks a lot different when you realize you're getting the equivalent of almost 3 dozen grocery store cookies in actual weight.

What You're NOT Paying For

Here's what's NOT in our cookies:

• Preservatives to keep them shelf-stable for 3 weeks

• Dough conditioners to make mixing by a giant machine faster

• Artificial flavors like fake vanilla

• Industrial shortcuts that sacrifice quality for speed

• A corporate profit margin going to shareholders in another state
  

The Grocery Store Cookie Math

That $3.99 dozen from the grocery store? Let's break it down:

• Made in a factory 800 miles away and trucked to the store who knows how long ago

• Ingredients purchased in rail car quantities at commodity prices

• Mixed by machines, baked on conveyor belts, packaged by robots

• Distributed to 500 stores at once

• Sits on a shelf for up to 2 weeks before you buy it

• Contains 23 ingredients, 17 of which you can't pronounce

It's not a cookie. It's an industrial food product that happens to be cookie-shaped.

Like You, We Care

You don't have to buy from us. You can buy from the grocery store and save $8. Nobody's judging.

But like you, we care about:

• Real ingredients you can pronounce

• Supporting a small business in your community

• Knowing exactly where your food comes from

• Tasting real ingredients, not laboratory approximations of ingredients

So yeah, it costs a bit more. It should cost more.

Because making real food, the right way, with real ingredients, in small batches, by actual people, in your town—that matters.

And that's exactly the point.

Real ingredients. Real people. No shortcuts. That's not negotiable.