Dana's Bakery: Colorful and delicious macarons and cookies | The Snack
NEW YORK (FOX 5 NY) - Dana Pollack is the founder and CEO of Dana's Bakery. She shared her story with FOX 5 NY's Kerry Drew.
I love being in an industry that makes people happy. It's not a dessert, it's really an experience.
I used to be the photo editor of Muscle & Fitness magazine. I quit my job, went to culinary school and opened up the bakery because I love dessert, obviously.
I fell in love with French macarons, but at the time they didn't make them in really fun and exciting flavors. I didn't understand why people weren't making them in flavors that I personally like to eat every day, so that's how the concept was born.
Red velvet for me was a big one. Birthday cake. I eat it all the time, not just on my birthday. Every macaron is different. We try to infuse the flavor in both the shell and filling.
We make over 5,000 macarons. We do over 3,000 cookies. I've always loved black and white cookies but I knew in true Dana's Bakery fashion that I could never do anything that was basic. I said, "If I'm going to make a black and white cookie, it has to be bright and it has to break the mold."
So we made it rainbow and it took the team and I two years, really, to develop the recipe. From the front, it looks like a classic black and white but you break it open and you are just wowed with all of the different colors.
We opened up a location inside Dylan's Candy Bar. And in doing that, I did an Instagram contest and I had people create a dessert for us.
And somebody said, "Bake a macaron inside a cookie" and our minds basically exploded and that's when the Mookie was born. It is a macaron baked inside a cookie. And they're amazing and very Instagrammable.
Social media has been really important to us. To really spread the word about Dana's Bakery, test products, reach people, interact with our customers, and engage with people.
It's really wild to think about when we started, which was a one-person operation, me, to now we are over 40 employees.
You just have to believe in yourself, even if no one else does. You just have to give it a go.