The cookie is crumbling just the right way for Warren County native Rick Dunlap.
His tasty -- and unusual -- combination of moonshine and cookies is captivating taste buds around the region. He opened his first retail location of Moonshine Mountain Cookie Company in Knoxville on Monday after developing a fanatical following with Internet sales over the past year.
“During the Christmas rush we were selling 500 dozen a day,” said Dunlap, who grew up in the Midway-Rock Island area and graduated in 1979 from Warren County High School. “That was Christmas and we’ve settled down a little since then, but business has been more than brisk at our new store. There were lines our first two days.”
Dunlap says when people hear about the moonshine cookies, they have two questions.
“This first thing they ask is does this really have moonshine in it?” said Dunlap. “The second thing they ask is can you get drunk off this. It does really have moonshine and no you can’t get drunk. It’s safe for consumption for any age. It has less alcohol content to it than vanilla. People don’t really know vanilla is about 20 percent alcohol.”
The idea for making cookies dates all the way back to Dunlap’s college days at UT when he was a roommate with football player Mike Maddux. Dunlap said Maddux’s girlfriend at the time and now wife, Robin, was a flight attendant for Delta and the three were always experimenting with different cookie recipes.
After college, Dunlap spent 30 years as a purchasing manager or LG Electronics before retiring from that job. At 54, he says he is too young to stop working so he decided to revisit the cookie idea.
“I called my college roommate and told him we should take this to the next level,” said Dunlap. “We’ve been doing e-commerce since last January and we just opened the storefront in Knoxville this week. If we open a second location, it will be in the Gatlinburg/ Pigeon Forge area.”
Dunlap says cookie dough is made at two commercial kitchens and the cookies are baked at one of those locations. He said with the ovens they have in place, Moonshine Mountain Cookie Company can produce 72 dozen cookies every 8 to 10 minutes.
They have a total of 25 different cookie flavors, although they only bake six different flavors at one time.
“We are getting a lot of business out of McMinnville,” said Dunlap. “That is one of the spots where we offer free delivery. We take the dough to my sister and she bakes it and delivers the cookies.”
Dunlap says he makes trips to Warren County every few weeks and both his sisters, Gail Keel and Sharon Bennett, live here.
Also of note, Moonshine Mountain Cookie Company is a finalist for the TV show “Shark Tank.” The top-rated ABC show allows start-up companies to pitch their idea in front of investors in hopes of landing financial backing.
Dunlap said they submitted a video to ABC and completed a 30-page background check. He said the show receives about 40,000 applicants a year and his business has been included in a group of about 500 finalists. He said from those finalists, 180 are selected to appear on the TV show.
“We should hear something one way or the other by June,” said Dunlap.