How many calories are in your cookie?

Last week, we were worked with a lab to figure the exact calorie count and nutritional value for the cookie that we are planning on launching with first. I have to admit, it was pretty fascinating, and it almost made me want to go back to school for chemistry or food science. What's interesting is that the FDA says that small businesses are exempted from labeling their food products with nutritional info as long as a company makes less than 100,000 units or has less than 100 employees. So, technically we fall into this category, but we decided that it would be smarter to include the nutritional information, since our company focuses on healthy baked goods. I mean, how can you really tell if something is healthy, if you don't know the calorie count, amount of sugar or fat in the product? That would be just plain sketchy.

So when I called the FDA, they noted that we should provide information about our cookie to a lab that uses FDA approved techniques to analyze the nutritional information for food products. There are two ways that a lab can come up with this information: 1) take an actual sample of the food product and subject it to various kinds of lab testing (i.e. running it through the calorimeter, etc.) 2) using the recipe for the product to calculate nutritional values through a complex database system of ingredients and formulas. Both techniques are used within the food industry and the latter is actually used in most cases, because it is as accurate as lab testing, but much more cost efficient. Knowing this, we went ahead and had the lab come up with the nutritional details using the database technique.

It looks like the verdict is in- our cookie is only 24 calories per piece. We are planning on selling our product in two sizes- a bag of 5 and a bag of 10, with a serving size being 5 pieces. So one serving size is only 120 calories. We also discovered that our cookies are fairly low in sugar and a pretty good source of iron and fiber. So no feeling guilty about eating our cookies!