First Posted: 12/7/2014

A new business start-up is baking inside Paul and Shari Kantor’s Kingston kitchen, called Mine! Get your own! Cookie Butter.

Thick and creamy, cookie butter is a dessert spread or dip made from ground-up cookies.

Cookie butter first made an appearance in the market about a decade ago. In 2007 several Belgian companies developed a cookie paste made from the popular Speculoos cookies. Today, Lotus Bakeries and Trader Joe’s each sell their own brand of cookie butter.

After tasting a name-brand cookie butter, Shari used her artist instinct to create her own chocolate cookie butter from scratch. Paul was so impressed with the result that he took some to work with him. His co-workers loved it.

“You will forget all about cookie dough when you taste cookie butter,” Shari said.

A few days later they found themselves teasingly fighting over the last little bit.

“She said to me, ‘Mine! Get your own’,” Paul said.

The business name and idea were born.

In early fall, their home kitchen took on the role of a “test kitchen” where Shari’s homemade cookies were pulverized and combined with canola oil, “special spices” and sugar to create different flavors of cookie butter.

They developed four flavors: sugar, mocha chocolate, chocolate sugar and gingerbread.

Shari continued to experiment with her cookie butter to create a variety of recipes to use them in, which include bread, pancakes, apple crisp, a chocolate pie, hot chocolate and much more.

On Oct. 18, the duo applied for their Limited Liability license with help from the Wilkes University Small Business Development Center in Wilkes-Barre.

“We attended their entrepreneur class,” Paul said.

“They are a great resource,” Shari said. “There was a lot about starting up a business we did not know.”

Now they are working to get funding through kickstarter.com, a crowd funding website, to cover the costs of the required federal and local licensing before they can seek out commercial kitchen space and shelf space in local grocery stores.

Crowd funding is a method of acquiring funding through small monetary donations from a group of people.

Paul said they have a deadline of Dec. 21 to raise $5,000 on kickstarter.com.

“We are about 6 percent there,” he said. “We have raised $330 so far.”

Paul’s skills from his career in retail sales already has them scoping out potential stores to carry their product once licenses and permits are received.