Why We Started

By Bryan Brodsky, THE BEST COOKIE PS

People ask me how THE BEST COOKIE PS got started. The answer is pretty simple: I was baking cookies for everyone I knew, and they kept telling me the cookies were the best they'd ever had.

That part's easy to tell.

The part people don't always know is what actually pushed us to make it a business.

It started with Paola

Paola is our dog. At the start of 2020, she got sick. Nothing catastrophic — but vet bills don't care about your budget. They show up when they show up, and they cost what they cost.

My wife Yesenia and I were looking at an unplanned expense and thinking about how to handle it. I had been baking for our friends, our family, our coworkers for months at that point. Every time I gave someone a cookie, the reaction was the same. These are the best cookies. Over and over.

It hit us both at the same time: the cookies are the business.

People kept calling them the best. So we named it that. THE BEST COOKIE PS. No overthinking, no market research. Just the name that everyone kept using.

What we were working with

I wasn't coming from the food business at that point. I was doing IT consulting, also working as a server at Miro's Restaurant in Palm Springs. We had no commercial kitchen, no equipment beyond what was in our home kitchen, no existing customer base.

What we had was a recipe that people loved and zero hesitation about giving cookies away.

I started doing what felt natural: making batches, boxing them up in the kraft-brown packaging we designed, and driving them around. I gave cookies to everyone I encountered. People on the street downtown. Local businesses. Anyone who would take them.

Not as a promotion strategy. Just because that's how you get people to try something — you put it in their hands.

The name earned itself

We named it THE BEST COOKIE PS on the strength of what people kept saying. That's a lot of pressure to live up to.

Every time I put a box of cookies in someone's hands, I wanted them to open it and immediately understand why we called it that. Not because we said so. Because they tasted it and knew.

Simple ingredients. Real butter. No shortcuts. Every batch made by hand, in the same kitchen where the whole thing started.

That's what the name means. Not a marketing decision — a promise we made to ourselves on day one.