Sugar Bliss didn’t start as a master plan to become a national brand. It started as a single brick-and-mortar bakery in Chicago, built by a former finance professional who hadn’t grown up baking. Eighteen years later, CEO and Founder Teresa Ging has taken Sugar Bliss from cupcakes in a retail shop to a premium cookie line to a partnership with the Chicago Bears — all while protecting the soul of a brand built on joy, generosity, and really good butter.
Along the way, she’s navigated the tensions a lot of artisan founders are facing now: how to bring “corporate” discipline into a passion project without losing heart, when to invest in automation versus handcraft, how to hold the line on recipe integrity and sustainable packaging when costs keep climbing, and how to treat CPG not just as a revenue stream but as a marketing engine for higher-margin channels.
In this conversation from EATS, Teresa talks candidly about the math behind a $4.49 cookie, why culture and delegation are the only way she can work on the business instead of in it, how AI and automation are changing the game for small producers, and why networking and mentorship are superpowers for the next generation of artisan founders.
Q. You’ve seen every side of the business — retail, wholesale, and CPG. Can you talk about what it takes to grow creatively and sustainably in today’s food landscape?
Teresa Ging: I started Sugar Bliss 18 years ago as a retail bakery, primarily cupcakes and along the way, added product lines like cake pops, macarons, cookies, and brownies.
Then COVID hit. We lost all of our corporate catering business and ended up taking our bakery cookies and making them shelf stable for retailers. That really catapulted the growth of our company. It was just going to be a brick-and-mortar story. But once CPG opened the doors, we started pitching our cookies for other opportunities like foodservice. Now we’re at the Chicago Bears — we sell a bear claw cookie, blue and orange macarons and cake pops, and a variety of baked goods in an orange and blue theme.
For sustainability, that was an important differentiator when we launched in retail. All of our cookies are packaged in sustainable packaging. We also have a powerful social mission, a portion of our proceeds support women and minority entrepreneurs and we have a Sugar Bliss scholarship to expand more businesses to get certified.
Q. After 18 years in business, what’s something you do today that your early self would’ve considered “too corporate,” and what made it worth it?
TG: I’m glad that I had corporate experience, because it gave me structure.
A lot of people ask, “Would you have started Sugar Bliss right out of college?” And I never baked in college. These are not my grandmother’s recipes; they’re recipes I developed after pastry school. Coming from an Asian family, we didn’t have a lot of baked goods at home.
A lot of businesses are purely passion projects and don’t really understand their costs. Because I was in finance for six years, I know my numbers. I’ve been able to take the passion and layer it with that financial discipline so we can actually be profitable.
Q. Smaller brands often struggle to scale without adding complexity. What systems or mindsets have helped you simplify as you grew?
TG: A lot of businesses have a product and say, “It costs me $4.99 to make, I’ll sell it for $9.99, that’s a 50% margin.” But they’re only looking at ingredients and packaging, and forgetting labor, their time, credit card fees, transportation/freight, and all the other costs of making the product. If you don’t know those costs, you’re probably not charging enough.
Over the years we’ve had to increase prices slowly to keep up with commodities and labor. When I started, minimum wage in Chicago was $7.75; now it’s $16.60. That’s more than doubled in my 18 years. You have to build that into your pricing.
Q. How are you holding that line throughout the culture at your company?
TG: Culture and people are everything. You hit a point where you have to work on your business versus in your business. If I were still in the kitchen every day, I wouldn’t be here at EATS demoing and meeting new customers — and a lot of our growth comes from me being out networking.
My pastry chef has been with me for eight years. She’s not just a pastry chef; she’s an integral part of the business. She can be there when the store manager isn’t, she comes to trade shows, she helps with co-man development. You need great people and you need to develop them so they want to stay.
Hiring is expensive. A revolving door is exhausting. So you have to have a great culture at the very beginning to have a successful business.
Q. Starting out, was there anything that you struggled to delegate or let someone else handle?
TG: When I first opened the store, I literally worked every day we were open — seven days a week. I was doing everything: baking, running the register, managing orders. I didn’t take a break for three months, and I’m actually glad I did it because I got to see the ins and outs of everything. A lot of times when you start a business, you think, “I’m starting a business, I have employees, now I can do less.” No, no. You need to make sure you know everything.
When COVID happened, it went right back to just Teresa — the owner, the baker, the cashier, everything. If I had only been the owner and didn’t know those parts of the business, we wouldn’t have made it. So I think if you don’t personally know how to do everything, you need really good people who do, so that if someone leaves you’re not stuck.
For me, delegating is key and learning to step back, building systems, hiring good people, and creating a strong culture so you can work on your business instead of in your business. That’s what lets me be out at conferences now, getting new business and opening new doors for Sugar Bliss.
Q. You’ve watched technology transform the food industry. What’s one innovation that’s genuinely changed how small producers compete?
TG: Every time I go to shows like this, I’m amazed by how much more is possible now for small producers.
We’re looking at automating some of our cake pop production. It’s not cheap — we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars — but if a major retailer comes and says, “I need 500,000 cake pops,” you either need an army of people or you need a machine. Automation is what allows a small business to actually take on those kinds of opportunities.
And it’s not just the physical equipment. There are software tools around supply chain, and now AI is everywhere. Even simple things like writing emails faster or streamlining parts of your workflow — that frees you up to focus on innovation.
I still think a lot of bakeries are very handmade, and some things should stay that way. But even with decorated cookies, there are machines that can do parts of the decorating. If you want to scale, you really do have to use technology and machinery in smart ways.
Q. As AI and robotics enter food production, where do you think the “human touch” still matters most?
TG: On the front-of-house side, I don’t see us replacing people with robots. That customer service element is part of the experience.
In the back of house, there are still levels of customization you can’t automate. Some royal icing cookies are so intricate that a machine can’t do them. You can absolutely use automation to die-cut cookies, add a layer of icing, maybe add a basic design — and then a person takes it to the next level.
So I see it as a combination. Automation for the repetitive base work, and humans for the premium, intricate, special touches.
Yes, at a fast casual place you expect touch screens. But when you walk into a high-end bakery, you want someone to greet you, talk to you, help you decide. A vending machine or a robot doesn’t give you that happy feeling.
Q. You’ve built a loyal following while expanding into foodservice. How do you keep brand authenticity when scaling channels?
TG: We’re not a commodity cookie. Our MSRP is $4.49 — that’s high. But we’ve tasted a lot of cookies from national brands and everything in between, and we know where we sit.
When we first got into CPG, I had to learn a lot about how retailers and pricing breakdown. There’s the co-man who needs to make money, the distributor who needs to make money, the retailer, and then the founder gets this little penny at the end.
Of course I’d love more pennies, but that usually means cutting down the quality of the cookie. We did small things — like reducing the chocolate content from around 24% to 16% — but there were lines I wouldn’t cross.
Our butter-to-palm-oil ratio is a good example. I believe we’re around 80% butter, 20% palm oil. Yes, we could cut costs by shifting more to palm oil, but then you lose flavor. That’s not who we are.
So I’ve had to accept that we’re a premium cookie. Not every retailer is the right fit. There are alternative markets — like foodservice or stadiums — that understand our value proposition better. We also use sustainable packaging and we give back, which adds cost too.
Keeping the brand authentic as we scale has meant staying premium and making sure every channel reflects that, instead of chasing growth that would force us to become a value brand.
Q. We’re seeing a wave of CPG founders stepping into national retail. What’s one lesson you’d share about negotiating growth on your own terms?
TG: I’ve learned a lot about retailers and grocers and entering them is expensive, slow moving, and ROI could be 9 months to a year. We even hired a broker to help represent the brand for the retailers. There are so many places a packaged product can live that aren’t traditional retail shelves.
I used to cover retail grocery stocks in finance, and I remember seeing slotting fees “1-2% of revenue” on an annual report. I didn’t realize one day someone would say, “You have to pay that.”
To take a brand national and keep expanding, there’s a lot of cost: slotting, free fills, temporary price reductions (TPRs), and advertising expectations. Everyone wants to make their margin, and the brand ends up making only pennies and the least amount of margin.
My advice is: start high on pricing, because you’re going to keep giving pennies away. If you start too low, you’ll end up with nothing left for yourself.
For us, I look at CPG almost as a marketing arm more than a money-maker. It takes a long time to become truly profitable on those shelves. But we wouldn’t have gotten some of our foodservice opportunities without being in CPG, so there’s value in it. Right now I’m still in retailers, but I’m very focused on foodservice, where margins are higher and the trajectory is better.
Q. Consumers expect transparency on everything from ingredients to packaging. How are you balancing sustainability expectations with business realities?
TG: It’s definitely a balancing act. We use sustainable film for our packaging, and that’s not cheap.
We were supposed to launch with a retailer in January, and both of the packaging companies we were working with didn’t have the packaging available. One discontinued the sustainable film, and the other didn’t have it available. I had to go back to the retailer and say, “We can’t launch yet.”
I could have just ordered regular film — that’s easy. But our cookie has a three-fold story: the premium product itself, sustainable packaging, and social mission. That’s part of our marketing and our values.
Sustainable film can be three times more expensive — eight to eleven cents per unit versus three to five cents for regular film. But that’s a choice we’ve made. We also switched from recyclable film to sustainable film because we realized most people weren’t washing and recycling it properly, and the sustainable film actually ran faster on our lines.
Our co-man has asked, “Can you switch to regular film?” and my answer is no. You really have to know what’s non-negotiable in your brand. For us, ingredients and sustainability are core to who we are, so we hold that line even when it’s harder.
Q. If you were advising the next generation of artisan food entrepreneurs, what’s the one skill or mindset they’ll need to thrive in the next decade?
TG: Networking.
I’m part of so many industry groups — Naturally Chicago, Chicago Innovation — and I sit on different boards. Early on I did a lot of networking, then I took a break, and when I realized I wanted to grow the business again, I knew I had to get back out there.
Networking, joining industry groups, and finding mentors are huge. Every connection teaches you something.
Just yesterday I talked to someone who helps companies with manufacturing. In 30 minutes, he gave me a different way to think about our strategy: I could manufacture some products myself — cookies, brownies, cake pops, custom cookies — or find multiple co-mans for different pieces and focus on the specialty items. That one conversation gave me clarity.
So join the right groups, talk to people, and find mentors.
