There are worse business plans than “let’s bake cookies and see what happens.” In fact, if you ask Dustin Hoffman and Geno Zack, it’s a solid one—especially if your definition of success includes butter, community, and the irrefutable truth that nobody is ever mad at a cookie.
Beekman Bakes didn’t begin with a grand opening or a five-year plan. It started the way most good things do: in a kitchen, a little casually, a little generously. Dustin and Geno baked because they loved it. Then they gave the cookies away—to neighbors, to friends, to anyone within polite receiving distance.
Somewhere between the second batch and the inevitable “you should sell these,” Geno floated the idea: What about a market?
And just like that, a hobby found its audience.
They started close to home in Key West, at an artisan market and the Key West Farmers Market, where the air is warm, the pace is unhurried, and people are particularly receptive to a well-made cookie.
“We loved the community of the market and meeting the people,” they say. It’s easy to see why. Farmers markets are, at their best, a kind of open-air stage for small joys—and cookies tend to steal the show.
Now in their fourth market season and newly rooted in Sarasota, Beekman Bakes has settled into a rhythm that feels equal parts disciplined and delightfully loose. They attend a handful of local markets, setting up shop for a steady stream of regulars, curious newcomers, and the occasional person who claims they’re “just looking.” (They are not just looking.)
The menu is focused, almost stubbornly so. No cakes. No muffins. No mission creep. Just handcrafted, small-batch cookies in both gourmet and classic flavors, alongside a quietly excellent shortbread that edges into more unexpected territory—lemon and lavender, rosemary, the kind of flavors that feel like they belong on a porch somewhere with a breeze.
There’s intention behind it all. They mill their own flour. They use ingredients that sound like they matter—Madagascar vanilla, thoughtfully sourced nuts, butter in unapologetic quantities. “We do what we do and do it fantastically,” they say, and it doesn’t read as bravado so much as clarity.
Beekman Bakes has grown, but in a way that still feels personal. There are curated platters and gift packs—six or 12 cookies, depending on your level of restraint—and regular drop-offs for offices, job sites, anywhere a mid-afternoon reset might be required. (Construction crews, it turns out, are excellent judges of cookies.)
Still, the heart of it remains the same: two people, outside, behind a table, handing something small and good to someone who didn’t know they needed it until that moment.
Ask them the most important ingredient, and they don’t hesitate: “All the butter and all the love.”
Which, as it turns out, is also a pretty good business plan. And maybe, if we’re being honest, exactly what the world could use a little more of—just a bit of cookie magic, passed hand to hand.
