When our kids were small, there had to be some candies in the house. As parents, we have successfully avoided candies and lollipop, but there was no way to avoid chocolate and cookies. Especially cookies. To our kids’ question: „What do we have for munching?“, the answer „Nothing“ wasn’t acceptable.
We were striving to avoid white sugar in the sweetes they were eating. With chocolate there was no porblem, we easily managed to find tasty chocolates without sugar. But, with cookies, that was complicated. Neither our kids, nor we liked to eat sugar free cookies for a simple reason, they weren’t tasty. We couldn’t even bake them at home because we couldn’t procure quality sugar replacement. We wanted to give our kids (and to ourselves) healthier variant of enjoyment in munching sweets, but we couldn’t. But, there was an idea.
When we have established our company in 1997., only thing we had was the wish and desire to produce premium, top quality cookie without white sugar. We knew nothing about manufacturing; until I was dealing with accounting and finance, while wife Dorijana was an elementary school teacher.
DRAŽEN HORVAT WITH WIFE DORIJANA
With the help of „FFF“ (Family, Friends and Fools) and bank loans we managed to finance rearranging ground floor of Dorijana’s parents’ house into small production line and to procure high-quality equipment for small production, including a decent rotary oven.
But, when the equipment arrived, no one knew how to use it to make a product.
What we knew were the ingredients that we’ve wanted to use in our cookies: high quality domestic flours, including whole wheat flour, raw cane sugar, dark chocolate chips, honey, coconut, quality vegetable fats and butter. The very first attempts were a real disaster; the dough was very dense and too compact, it wasn’t nicely baked and because of its compactness it couldn’t go through small machine for modelling dough into cookies.
But even though much water has passed in nearby river Mirna before we have succeeded to give our cookies the right color and crunchyness, even the initial products were well accepted by the neighbors and all invited and uninvited tasters; they were melting in their mouths, they had a fantastic smell and they didn’t have that odd flavour of artificial ingredients. In the meantime, we have managed to provide even more quality ingredients and we have also started making sugar free biscuits. Again, we strived to make products which are tasty and delicious, to make a something that would be enjoyed by both us and our costumers, and that’s something we are still trying to do.
Unlike industrial products, we make our cookies using fresh, „live“ dough. Time from mixing the ingredients into dough to the finished cookies should not take more than 45-50 minutes. We cannot store our today’s dough and use it tomorrow because it becomes tough and dense. That’s why our cookies are so crunchy without any artificial additives.
In the same place, in the house built 1922, we bake cookies to date.
We have made a little expansion, but we still make them in the same place in the same way; we squirt fresh dough made of natural ingredients on the trays and them bake them so the everything around the house smells deliciously and neighbors know exactly what product we are making that day. We still pack biscuits in the paper packaging. We are proud that, among all sugar free cookies in Croatia, our cookies are the most sold. We have fullfilled our wish from the beginning to make high-quality, tasty products which are good for health, too.