When Zachary Ranen initially informed his parents that he was leaving his lucrative job in the financial world to start an online cookie company, he admits they were, to say the least, “skeptical.”
After all, Ranen — a graduate of Gilman School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania — worked all his life to get to his position with the global private equity firm Warburg Pincus in New York.
Why in the world would he want to leave his dream job to sell cookies?
But as Northwest Baltimore residents Jennifer and Dr. Neal Ranen came to understand, their son wasn’t nearly as passionate about finance as he was about dessert.
Besides, RAIZE cookies aren’t just any old cookies. They were both healthy and delicious.
It didn’t take long until the Ranen family was fully onboard with the venture, which officially launched in January.
The whole cookie megillah started several years ago when Zachary Ranen became increasingly health conscious in his daily life.
“I started diving into articles, lectures, scientific reviews, really anything I could get my hands on to learn more about how to change my diet,” said Ranen, 26, who lives in New York City’s East Village. “I wanted to look better and lose fat — and to generally maximize my overall health goals of feeling better, having more energy, living longer and lowering inflammation.”
There was just one problem: Everything Ranen read told him to eat less sugar and fewer refined, high-glycemic carbohydrates like breads, pasta and flour.
“That meant dessert was off-limits,” he said. “And no day is complete without dessert!”
Ranen tried to stick to his low-carb, low-sugar diet. Although he saw positive results, he soon realized that a dessert-free life just wasn’t for him.
So he began a search for healthy dessert options.
“I scoured everything I could find, but nothing really fit the bill,” said Ranen. “That’s when I decided to embark on this journey of creating the product myself. I figured if I was having this problem, other people were probably having this problem, too.
“And if I could create a product that was low-sugar, low-carb, gluten-free, keto-friendly, diabetic-friendly, kosher — all of these things — we could make a lot of people really happy and create a really great business that I am really passionate about,” he said.
Soon, Ranen connected with Jeff Yoskowitz, a pastry chef and educator with more than three decades of experience in the culinary field. A former program director at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan, Yoskowitz joined Ranen in the business last summer as kitchen head and chief product officer.
Since then, Ranen and Yoskowitz have been furiously working on creating tasty and innovative cookie recipes. So far, the online business carries three types of cookies and three types of cookie sandwiches.
“All of our cookies are zero grams of added sugar, one gram of net carbs and 130 to 140 calories,” Ranen said. “RAIZE cookies are sweetened with stevia extract, monk fruit extract and erythritol instead of sugar, and ingredients include almond, hazelnut and coconut flours instead of refined grains.” Ranen noted that additional flavors are currently in the works.
For information about RAIZE, visit eatraize.com.
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