The Freemans Journal - Cooperstowns Newspaper Since 1808

Sunday, October 5, 2008

MLB Backing May Boost Business 10 Times, Entrepreneur Pati Drumm Grady Anticipates

By JIM KEVLIN

SPRINGFIELD CENTER

Cookie entrepreneur Pati Drumm Grady was about to depart for the Otesgo County Chamber’s Small Business Banquet on Thursday, Oct. 9, when the phone rang.
It was Brett Schnurr, Major League Baseball’s vice president for marketing.
The MLB, he said, had agreed to license Cooperstown Cookie Company products, meaning the shortbread cookies and smaller “bunts” can be rolled out under the brand – not just the New York Yankees, as allowed under a separate agreement – but of all the MLB individual teams.
Cooperstown Cookie now joins an elite group that includes Bank of America, KMG and Taco Bell.
“It’s just what baseball needs,” Pati said of her product. “It’s from Cooperstown. It’s simple. It’s natural.”
To baseball fans, it’s the secular equivalent of holy water from the Vatican, she said.
It’s a blessing for her, too. She expects MLB licensing to increase her business tenfold.
In particular, she expects a new combination – the Triple Play Pillow Pack, three bunts in a team-branded packet – will really take off.
The decision was made to keep the MLB’s decision quiet, then announce it formally and with fanfare at the National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum’s annual gala Saturday, Oct. 25, at 25 Main St., and that’s in the works.
But if Pati Grady seemed even more effervescent than usual at the Small Business Banquet in The Otesaga ballroom, where she accepted The Breakthrough Award (the Small Business Award went to Gary Laing’s Shipping Room in Oneonta), now you know why.
As it happens, the Cooperstown Cookie Company was rolled out at the HoF annual gala four years ago, so Pati Grady sees a symmetry in this new breakthrough occurring when it has.
It all started by happenstance.
It was after Christmas, early in 2004, and Pati was making a traditional shortbread.
She rolled out the dough and, on a whim, turned over a tall glass and cut out a circle. She then used a crimper to make half-oval markings that looked like the threading on a baseball.
She showed it to her husband, Kevin, who was watching TV in the den. He grabbed a ruler, measured it and said, “You know, this is the size of a regulation baseball.”
Eureka!
Pati bounced the concept off the then-president of the Hall of Fame, Dale Petroskey, and he was enthusiastic. Bill Rigby put her in touch with a tinsmith in the Albany area who developed the right cookie cutter, then one – “the Turbo” – that could cut three cookies at once.
Bruce Guyette helped with packaging. Barbara Shinn, who developed the Hall of Fame’s mail-order business, advised on marketing.
Mike and Carol Manno – he does high-end printing of candy-bar packaging at his Oneonta plant – advised her to go upscale, so the cookies were packaged in tins from Maryland. Hall of Fame research director Tim Wiles came up with the trivia questions included in each package.
Since Cooperstown Cookie is a virtual business – she operates out of the second story of a barn next to her home on Public Landing Road – she needed to depend on technology, and Ron Ranc of ISD in Oneonta, she avows, took care of that.
Researching product development at Cornell’s lab in Geneva, she met Shelly Freyn, who had 15-years experience in commercial baking, with Mrs. Fields among others: “We hit it off from the first conversation.”
Shelly helped move Cooperstown Cookie “out of the kitchen and into Pathfinder Village,” the company’s first bakery.
Since, Cooperstown Cookie has outgrown Pathfinder (although residents still do certain tasks), and moved to Deiorio’s Italian Bakery in Utica, which has a 50-foot-long tunnel oven and pizza-dough freezers that allow orders received before noon to be shipped out by 3 the same afternoon.
Early on, Cooperstown Cookie received bank financing and help from the Otsego County Economic Development Office, but “now we’re ready to make the next leap,” and the founder is seeking investors interested in partaking in the MLB bonanza.
It’s been a roundabout journey for Pati Grady, who was raised on Long Island, came north to SUNY Cortland and then the Cooperstown Graduate Program, where she specialized in folklore.
After a couple of years working for Milo V. Stewart, Sr., then NYSHA vice president for education, she joined the Shaker Museum in Old Chatham as director. Then it was off to San Jose, Costa Rica, on a folklore documentary.
She married a “consultant” who was actually a CIA operative, and spent years in Europe, returning to Cooperstown with her growing children. She and Kevin have five grown children between them.
When Cooperstown Cookie came along, she had been running an executive-search consultancy out of a second-floor office on Pioneer Street, identifying prospects for head-hunters to then pursue. Looking back, though, it’s all been part of a piece, however variegated.
“It builds on my interest in art and culture. It builds on my management experience,” she said. “I’ve always had to take a leadership role.”
“You’re the little engine that could,” chimed in Claudia Kingsley, a friend who had been listening in. “She sets her mind to something and does it.”
“Sometimes,” said Pati, “that gets you in trouble.”

Labels: Cooperstown Cookie, Front Page, MLB