Cosmic Edibles Gives Backstory on Champion Cookie Dough
June 2, 2022
At this year's inaugural Emerald Cup Awards Show in Hollywood, much of the acclaim would go to places like Mendocino, Santa Barbara, Sacramento and Oakland. Cosmic Edibles, however, wasn't going to let Los Angeles end the night without a win.
We raved about Cosmic's Cookie Dough last November when we featured it in our Thanksgiving Edible Guide. We even used it for the featured photo to denote our complete faith ahead of Turkey Day.
At the time we noted:
Few edibles rocked our world in recent months the way Cosmic's Cookie Dough did. In a world of gummies and chocolate bars battling for temporary supremacy, cookie dough is a dominant timeless force. Since it's vegan you don't even need to cook it, you can just dive right in the way God intended before food poisoning was invented. This might not be the best for sharing though? one over-eager relative can scarf down a tin of it pretty quick.?
The Emerald Cup's esteemed judging panel agreed with our take. Cosmic's Cookie Dough took home the Emerald Cup for being the top edible of 2022.
We caught up with Cosmic's founder Kevin Harris to hear the unlikely tale of how the cookie dough finally made it to shelves five years removed from when the company was founded during the Proposition 215 era. They would eventually score their recreational permits in Los Angeles transitioning over during Phase 2 of L.A.'s licensing.?
But like so many of the greats in the cannabis industry, it started with someone taking care of their mom. Harris explained how the first batches of cookie dough came to be.
[It was] probably eight or nine years now when my mother was battling breast cancer. She was quite conservative and I convinced her [to try medical cannabis], Harris told L.A. Weekly. She kind of feeling like she was on her deathbed and I convinced her to try cannabis in between her chemotherapy sessions. So she agreed. At that point, I guess her mentality was that she didn't have anything to lose.
After she loved some gummies he grabbed her from the dispensary, he knew he could do better. Harris had his grandmother's old cookie recipe to start from. He knew his mother loved them but they wouldn't be healthy enough to consume all the time. He decided to make the old family recipe vegan.
Harris said he first made it better by removing the dairy, all the eggs and almost half the sugar. From there it was about increasing the quality of all the other products to make something he felt like she could dose every day.
She could take a cookie or two every day and it wouldn't be bad for her because we reduced down the sugar to a level that she wasn't really ingesting a lot by taking them every day, Harris said before noting they were a hit.
For a moment there, the dough he used to make the cookies was an afterthought. He was just happy to help his mom live a better quality of life. She ended up beating cancer.
She survived it and then kind of encouraged me to do it and that's when I started making them, Harris said. Eventually, he'd leave a 25-year career in television behind to focus on the company. We were selling in a few shops to begin with. And then got our two licenses and kind of expanded from there.
While a lot bigger these days, the company is still only four employees. Everyone does everything. It's not uncommon to find the owner out on deliveries Harris told us with a laugh.
But why did it take five years for the now award-winning cookie dough to get to shelves? At one point the plan was to base everything on the cookie dough and not the cookies they first dropped with.
When we were incorporated in California we were called Rocket Dough, Harris said.
But the naysayers pushed him away from the idea. Now a year after getting it on shelves across the state, in a lot of people's eyes, he's the world champ.??
The biggest recent change for Cosmic lately has been the hash collaborations with Kalya. They were about to get approximately 80% of the hash decarboxylated themselves. If you don't do that it won't get you high when you eat it. The team at Kalya dialed in the tech to get about 99% of the material decarboxylated and they went on to win the cup together.
Cosmic Edibles Cookie Dough is currently available at about 40 shops throughout California. They just linked up with 454 to do the distribution for them in the northern half of the state so expect the number of shops where you can get the cookie dough to jump quick.
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