We believe a cookie can change your day
Big Cookies started in 2024 with one conviction: that a truly great cookie is worth waiting for. 2 years later, we're still proving it — 300 cookies at a time.
How it started
Lena Kovač spent 14 years in fine-dining pastry kitchens, watching chefs obsess over every plate that left the pass. When she started baking cookies at home — real cookies, with European butter and single-origin chocolate and a two-day fermentation — her neighbors started knocking on the door. Then their friends. Then a restaurant asked to put them on the menu. Big Cookies was born in a 400-square-foot commercial kitchen in Portland, Oregon in March 2024, with one oven, one mixer, and a waiting list that hit 200 people in the first week.
How it's going
Today we're a team of 8, operating from a 3,000-square-foot bakery in southeast Portland that still smells like brown butter at 4:30 every morning. We ship to all 50 states and Canada, produce 300+ cookies a day, and have never — not once — shipped a cookie we wouldn't eat ourselves. The waiting list is gone, but the obsession isn't.
What we believe
We believe good ingredients aren't a luxury — they're the only way. We believe 48 hours of cold fermentation isn't excessive — it's necessary. We believe a cookie should look like it was made by a human who cared, not a machine that didn't. And we believe that when you open a box of Big Cookies, you should feel something. Preferably hunger, but also: that someone in a kitchen in Portland made this for you, by hand, this morning.
First oven, first line out the door
One borrowed mixer, one commercial lease, and a waitlist that proved Portland wanted the slow version.
The menu got sharper
We trimmed, tested, and kept only the flavors that earned a permanent slot on the bench.
The scale changed, not the method
Bigger room, bigger team, same insistence that every tray still looks like a person touched it last.
Fermentation is not a romantic extra. It is the work.
If the cheaper version changes the taste, it does not belong here.
The tray should still read like a baker made it, not a machine.