Article 5 of 6     Next >     
Jump on every sales opportunity
by Katherine Martin, associate editor

What do you do when a North Atlantic Beluga whale finds itself in the fresh water Delaware River? If you're Stephen Simon, you start selling Beluga whale cookies.

"It was my brother Paul who came up with the idea. We were aware that there was a whale in the river, and he said we should make a whale cookie, but I didn't think it was going to stick around," says Stephen Simon, owner of the full-line retail bakery, JB Bakery in Burlington City, N.J.

However, the whale did stick around and drew a lot of media attention. On Thursday, April 14, Simon arrived for work at 5 a.m. and noticed all the media vans in the area. He knew then that his brother was right, and he needed to capitalize on the whale in the river. With a pair of pliers, he turned a large pumpkin cookie cutter into a whale. By 7 a.m., he had the cookies on display.

With all the tourists coming to view the whale, Simon put up signs with balloons outside his bakery advertising the whale cookies. The cookies were decorated with vanilla icing lightly tinted blue and a chocolate fudge icing eye and smiling mouth. The next day, the local newspaper ran a picture of the bakery on the front page, and several TV stations interviewed him. The cookies were a hit and, the customers haven't stopped coming, Simon says.

On Saturday, the mayor of the town asked Simon to set up a booth by the river to sell the cookies and hand out promotional brochures about the town to all of the tourists. He sold more than 400 cookies at the riverside boot. By Sunday, customers were lined up out the door of the bakery for the cookies, he says. By the end of the day Sunday, the bakery had sold about 500lbs. worh of cookies.

To date, the bakery has sold almost 5,000 of the $2 cookies. The cookies are larger than the bakery's usual $1.35 sugar cookies and were priced according to the price per pound of JB Bakery's sugar cookies.

While the whale is still in the river, as of press time, the media hoopla has died down. The same can not be said for the whale cookie mania that JB Bkaery is experiencing.

"Even now, people are coming in and asking for whale cookies, even though I don't think they are relating it to the whale anymore." Simon says. "They just want the cookie." So much so, that the blue-tinted Beluga whale cookie will now be a staple in the bakery cases at JB Bakery.