KEY POINTS:
Cookie Time general manager Lincoln Booth thought his marketing dreams had come true when he signed six-time Emmy award winner and expat Kiwi Phil Keoghan to launch a new product in the United States.
Keoghan, host of reality show The Amazing Race, will cycle across the US in March-April to promote the show and raise money for multiple sclerosis through his own brand and company, No Opportunity Wasted (NOW).
Broadcaster CBS is sponsoring and covering the ride, and Keoghan will have a guest spot on popular US talk show Late Show with David Letterman.
Despite the recession, Booth reckons the exposure will see the company's One Square Meal (OSM) - two apricot and manuka honey cereal bars in one pack - rack up sales of $15 million to $20 million in its first year in the US.
"There are hundreds if not thousands of granola bars there, and ... Phil will help cut through the clutter," Booth says.
"A lot of his vision for his own brand is what OSM stands for, so it's a marriage made in heaven."
Keoghan, a household name in the US, is managed by IMG, the world's largest brand marketing group.
Through its new US subsidiary, OSM US, Cookie Time signed a co-branding agreement with Keoghan's NOW on Christmas Eve to supply 1000 General Nutrition Centre (GNC) stores. Despite taking on an extra 27 staff and adding an extra shift, Cookie Time hasn't yet boosted its capacity to cover all 6500 GNC stores.
Via Keoghan's relationship as an ambassador for Air New Zealand, the company has also scored competitive air freight rates to the US, and Booth says Mainfreight has also offered "a good deal" to freight orders to Auckland and from its global logistics centre in Los Angeles to the GNC distribution centre.
Keoghan has been eating OSMs for three years or so. He came across them while browsing for a snack in a Mission Bay shop, and reckons once Americans get their heads around the concept (the bars are high in calories but, as he points out, that's because they provide all the energy, protein, carbohydrates, fats, fibre, 10 key vitamins and six key minerals required for a balanced meal), the product will fly there.
One challenge on The Amazing Race is getting regular good food, he says. Many contestants and crew get food poisoning because "in a moment of desperation they'll eat something they maybe shouldn't". He also doles out the bars to members of the cycling team he and his wife sponsor through NOW, after trips to New Zealand to visit his parents who live just down the road from the Cookie Time factory.
Launching the product in the midst of a recession is a bold move, agrees Booth, but the company "always sees opportunity in a crisis". Sales for OSM are up 31 per cent on last year, he says.
The deal will be a turning point in the 26-year-old company's history, says Booth, who came on board four years ago. Eventually Cookie Time aims to become a brand and ideas company, he says, expanding into other products through OSM in the US, and perhaps Asia and Britain. It has licensing plans for other countries and Booth says the business model could easily be replicated offshore.
The company has three staff dedicated to innovation and Booth estimates it spent about $1 million on R&D in the past five years. New products include the omega 3-rich Smart Cookie, aimed at school tuck shops; a tasty gluten-free cookie; and the Massey Food Award-winning OSM.
Cookie Time founder Michael Mayell, then 21, mixed up his first batch of cookies from his one-bedroom Christchurch flat and convinced dairies to sell them from the large glass jars he'd had made.
With no money to buy machinery, Mayell used a bacon slicer to cut chocolate into chunks and an ice cream scoop to put the dough on baking trays. The resulting oversized cookies with their large chunks of chocolate proved so popular that they've endured, although preparation methods have since changed.
Mayell's brother Guy later came on board, and in 1996 the company won the Guinness World Record for baking the largest cookie, an enormous 487.15sq m, 2.5cm-thick whopper which used 13 tonnes of ingredients - a record which stood until last year.
The business has "matured" since the early days, says Booth. For example, it no longer holds marketing meetings in spa pools (all documents were laminated). However, ties are banned and any supplier who enters the building wearing one is promptly asked to remove it.
The company focuses on what it does well, says Booth. In the early days Mayell branched out into candy floss, muffins and chocolate fish, but soon realised the company had spread itself too thin and stopped to re-focus on cookies.
Commodity prices have been "horrendous" in the past 12 months, and to cope, the company has tried to sharpen up. Booth won't talk about automation, saying it's a sensitive issue for staff, but he admits automation and innovation have been "critical" to cost savings in the past three years.
However, the company doesn't skimp on rewarding its staff. "Extraordinary" staff get a $250 voucher to do something they wouldn't necessarily spend money on, such as skydiving. And the company owns a plot of land on which it allows staff to grow vegetables, providing free seeds, water and fertiliser.
The company is also closely involved with education. Guy set up the Cookie Time Charitable Trust, which raises money and awareness for dyslexia, and the company introduced the 9-Day Fundraising Programme, a product-based method of fundraising for schools.
