[W]hen Rhino Foods started selling cookie dough to Ben & Jerry’s in 1991, few people expected the off-the-wall ingredient to have staying power.
“Everyone told me, ‘Don’t expand, because it’s never going to be that big a deal,’ ” said Ted Castle, who started Rhino Foods out of his wife Anne’s ice cream store in the 1980s in Burlington.
But it was a big deal. The public embraced previously unthinkable flavors and combinations emerging from the Waterbury-based Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company, and cookie dough fit right into the mix. Nowadays, ready-to-eat cookie dough is a staple at grocery stores or cafes that serve up the dessert without the ice cream. Last summer, a food writer in Washington, D.C., pondered whether cookie dough had become the new cupcake. Washingtonian magazine recently deconstructed the cookie dough trend with the theory that eating cookie dough satisfies a need for mild rebellion among the goody two-shoes in the nation’s capital.
“Nothing says low-stakes rebel like ‘I eat raw cookie dough,’” said author Jessica Sidman.
Rhino Foods has been making cookie dough for so long now that any excitement at headquarters about the product is greatly outweighed by a perfectionism aimed at keeping the manufacturing floor in compliance with federal health regulations. After nearly 30 years at the helm of the company, Castle is most animated when he talks about Rhino’s status as a certified B Corp, a company that aims to bring about positive change. Rhino practices open book management and participates in an employee exchange among local manufacturers aimed at helping workers stay employed through seasonal fluctuations.
The company in March started a foundation aimed at promoting workplace practices that help employees succeed. One of Castle’s proudest accomplishments is the creation of Income Advance, a program that allows workers to borrow up to $1,000 with no questions asked, and repay it through a regular $50 paycheck deduction. North Country Federal Credit Union is the lender; Castle said it has loaned $360,000 to Rhino employees in the 10 years of the program with a repayment rate of 96 percent.
Castle, a native of Rochester, N.Y., graduated from the University of Vermont as a hockey player and environmental studies major and joined his wife’s ice cream store when his bid for the head hockey coach job at UVM didn’t work out.
That was the early 1980s, and the store was selling desserts to local retail and wholesale customers. Castle used to buy cookies from the bakery next door, make them into ice cream sandwiches, and load them into the cooler at Kerry’s Qwik Stop for sale.
The business grew with the addition of a cheesecake company in 1985, and in 1989, the couple decided to start selling cookie dough to Ben & Jerry’s for ice cream.
This had never been done before, Castle said. That means it took the pair a while to figure out how to get a safe cookie dough into the ice cream. The cookie dough sampled in home kitchens has raw eggs in it; the cookie dough sold to consumers had to use pasteurized eggs. Ben and Jerry’s researchers helped with logistical details.
Nobody had tried to package a soft product like cookie dough with ice cream, he said.
“Ice cream manufacturers used to be good at really soft fruit, or a really hard particle like a chocolate chip,” Castle said of the feeder used to mix the end product. “When this thing runs with gooey, chewy cookie dough, it clogs it up, and it doesn’t distribute well in the pint.”
After the two companies figured out the mixture in 1991, the product took off and Rhino Foods grew from 20 to 40 people. Rhino now runs its Burlington factory 24 hours a day, five days a week and has 200 employees. Of the 21 million gallons of ice cream produced annually for U.S. consumption by Ben & Jerry’s, 14% or 2.9 million gallons of it has cookie dough in it, according to the ice cream company, which still buys all of the chocolate chip dough it uses from Rhino.
“Very fortunately for us, it turned into a phenomenon,” Castle said. “For Ben & Jerry’s, it really helped grow their company. It helped them with national distribution. One out of four points of Ben and Jerry’s for a year was cookie dough ice cream. They were the only ones in the world that had it.”
These days, Rhino reports a 60% share of the ready-to-eat cookie dough market, making several flavors. Rhino still operates primarily in the U.S., with a co-packer in Scotland that sells cookie dough for the European market. Castle declined to reveal revenues for the privately held company, but said Rhino ships five or six truckloads a day to its 40,000-square-foot Williston warehouse. Some days, the factory turns out well over 100,000 pounds of cookie dough.
Cookie dough has shown remarkable resilience in a market where consumer food preference leaps from one trend to another, often with a focus on lowering sugar consumption. Castle said he doesn’t hear much criticism of cookie dough’s nutritional properties.
“Everything in moderation,” he said. “You should be doing what fits your lifestyle.”
He added that the company tries to buy ingredients from Vermont, but rarely succeeds.
“If there was an egg producer who could make a tractor trailer load of eggs from Vermont, we’d be buying from them,” he said.
Like many entrepreneurs, Castle attributes much of the company’s success to luck and timing. He believes growth is easier for a company that sells to other businesses, like Rhino, than for one selling to consumers. Small Vermont food producers run into a thicket of marketing, distribution and workflow obstacles when they try to scale up. Rhino sidestepped them by selling ingredients through private labels, through co-packing, and for national brands.
“We never had to be strong at consumer-facing marketing,” Castle said. They tried a few direct-to-consumer products, but almost none of them took off. They do continue to sell the ice cream sandwich, an artifact from the company’s earliest days.
Rhino last year renovated its Burlington headquarters, moving its office staff into a neighboring Burton snowboards building during the construction work. In its newly renovated space, corporate offices share a wall with the production facility.
Castle is deeply focused on quality of life for Rhino’s workers, 37% of whom are refugees. The newly formed foundation works with FSG, a mission-driven global consulting firm whose clients include McKinsey and Co., the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Unilever, the U.S. Department of Education and the World Bank.
The income advance program exemplifies Castle’s goals for Rhino by providing stability and preventing disruptive life events that spiral into larger problems, he said. He said 40 Vermont companies use the program; now he’s focused on promoting it nationally.
“We have great employees who are missing work because the car broke down or the water heater broke,” he said. “We look at these problems and try to put a business solution to it.”