NZMac.com - Supporting the New Zealand Mac community - Cookie Time

Cookie Time - Apples and Cookies

Written by Belinda Carter

Monday, 06 May 2002

NZ Macguide Issue 9

Founders Michael and Guy Mayell outside their Templeton factory. You won't find them here though; like the distributors they work from home.

Necessity is the mother of invention, as the old saying goes, and that could well apply to Cookie Time's foundation. Faced with reduced funds and fresh back from a trip to the US, 21-year-old Michael Mayell found a suburban bakery which let him experiment with ingredients and baking temperatures after hours. An ice-cream scoop, used to drop the dough onto baking trays, determined the large size and the flavour was chosen because chocolate chip cookies were the most popular Stateside.

Having got the mixture just right by February 1983, Michael set about converting New Zealand biscuit eaters into cookie munchers, helped along the way with large glass jars in shops and keen young distributors selling bucketfuls of cookies just before Christmas.

Further information

www.cookietime.co.nz - home of the Cookie Muncher and the world's biggest cookie

www.kyocera-wireless.com - more about the handheld devices

www.itlink.co.nz - writes programmes for mobile devices

www.centrinity.com - find out more about First Class collaborative software

Cookie Time's definition

Cookie Time's definition: "A biscuit is mass produced, uniform, and pressed out of a mould. Cookies have a handmade nature and ours have large chunks of chocolate. There's more randomness and personality in a cookie!"

"The cookie uses real chocolate, real eggs and real butter ÷ the things you find in your kitchen at home," says Michael Mayell. "That's why it needs to be eaten fresh." The recipe, he admits to being based on a Toll House cookie recipe (this is the Edmond's cookbook equivalent in the US).

Twenty years on and Michael has a factory of his own, an enthusiastic team of franchised distributors and a multimillion dollar business selling cookies to New Zealanders. The product line is more diverse - you can buy bars and yoghurt-dipped apricot cookies as well as the original, individually wrapped chocolate chip cookies.

On that packaging - as well as climbing over the factory wall - is the Cookie Muncher, Cookie Time's logo. This is a small, red, huggable monster with a rainbow navel. The tummy button, inspired by the original striped Apple logo, is a clue to the platform preference of Cookie Time's founders. Apart from the odd PC for the accounts department before they were converted, the company has always been very much an Apple company.

"As a brand, Apple displayed similar values and attitudes to us, " Michael says. "They were - and still are - innovators, savvy and smart. They were the small players up against the well-established might of much larger players - like us: a small, innovative cookie company up against large biscuit manufacturers here."

Longevity
Cookie Time ran for years on a motley collection of Mac Pluses, Umax clones and IIfxs. "They just last," Cookie Time's twenty-something Information Systems Manager Chris White brings me up-to-date. However in 1999 they did get with it and bought 35 Rev A iMacs, recorded in the papers at the time as New Zealand's largest single order of iMacs, and supplied them to distributors at a conference in Queenstown. They were taught how to use the operating system, some basic applications and how to communicate using First Class software.

"The tasks we do on the iMacs is not complicated. A bit of web browsing, using ClarisWorks spreadsheets, accessing the FileMaker Pro and 4D databases and of course plenty of emailing with First Class. Currently, we are not looking to upgrade the iMacs to Mac OS X due to the lack of benefits given the downsides of the relatively high cost of the software and the lack of performance on an older iMac. So, for the time being, Mac OS 8.6 is the standard but it will be slowly phased out as we upgrade the hardware."

The company has standardised on using ClarisWorks internally because most users do not need the power of Microsoft Office. (For those who need to read Microsoft Word files, the company uses Panergy Software's icWord from.)

Apart from ten per cent of the iMacs suffering an analogue board failure (a known issue with iMacs prior to the revision D model) they have required little maintenance and have caused remarkably few difficulties for their minder. This keeps him happy and frees him up for interesting development work, such as the creation of a FileMaker Pro-based stock control system.

Communications Manager Jonathan Collins praises First Class software. "We couldn't run the business in the same way without it." It is invaluable for marketing, feedback and chatting as well as access to forms in pdf format or shop-ready artwork to print out. Certainly it's a lot cheaper and more efficient than phone and fax.

Chris describes the intranet as like having a year round conference and it has enabled one of the two annual conferences to be dropped.

iMac

Cookie RAID
The crucial part communications plays in a decentralised company such as Cookie Time was brought home when the First Class server's hard disc failed twice in quick succession in 2000. Nowadays, a Maxtronics Arena RAID-5 device, hooked up to the server in a windowless safe room, gives peace of mind. It looks like a tower PC but holds four hard discs (three actively used and one spare), redundant power supplies and redundant fans. If one of the three active discs fails, the system will automatically rebuilds the missing hard disc onto the spare drive with no down time.

Just as First Class software and iMacs have improved Cookie Time's way of doing business in recent years, the planned move to equip distributors with handheld devices is expected to have a similar impact on the way the company does business in the future. Kyocera is the chosen brand, a smart phone running Palm 4.1.

First Class

These devices, which normally retail around $1500 each, will enable staff in the field to give the retailers real-time feedback on how well their cookie display is doing and to print out invoices on the spot, thanks to some small HP printers and specially-writ ten FileMaker-based applications that make it easy to store, access and administer data from just about anywhere. Without the need to re-enter data back home later the device is expected to shave 30-60 minutes a day off any paperwork, if the current trials are anything to go by.

Invoicing software 'Saleslink' has been written by Christchurch company, ITLink but unfortunately the server version only runs on Windows XP so a PC server will be joining the growing collection of vital computer equipment in the safe.

As Cookie Time enters its 21st year, no new products are planned but the company expects great things will follow the introduction of the new handhelds, which it expects to happen some time over the winter months.

© Parkside Media 2003
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