Tate’s Goes Vegan: Bakeshop Launches Two Vegan Cookies

Tate’s Bake Shop, the famous Southampton staple of over two decades, dropped a pair of vegan cookies in November, allowing more consumers to indulge in the bake shop’s signature thin and buttery snack.

The vegan cookies come in two recipes, chocolate chip and vanilla maple, and are packed in tan bags — as opposed to the green bags carrying many of the shop’s other products.

For Tate’s executives, the move to producing a vegan product was a natural next step.

“Tate’s understands that consumer needs and wants change over time,” wrote Tate’s chief marketing officer, Lauren Sella, in an email. “More than a decade ago, we successfully launched gluten-free cookies and a plant-based product line was an obvious next step for our business.”

The vegan chocolate chip cookies are produced with plant butter, while the vegan vanilla maple cookies are made with vanilla and maple, according a news release from Tate’s.

“[W]e took our time to make sure we not only got the vegan requirements right — but that we didn’t compromise on the thin, crispy texture and buttery flavor that we are known for,” Sella said.

The cookies are also certified kosher by the Orthodox Union.

Tate’s bags proudly display the brand’s original location, Southampton, as well as the signature of the company’s founder, Kathleen King, who graduated Southampton High School in 1977.

While Tate’s opened in 2000, King was baking her signature chocolate chip cookies long before that — by age 11, King sold cookies out of her father’s North Sea farmstead to purchase school supplies.

Tate’s was King’s second go at opening a bakery. She opened her first, Kathleen’s Bake Shop, at age 20 before shuttering operations due to complications among partners in the business.

Her second bakery, however, now serves as a success story for a Southampton local.

In 2018, Mondelez International, the corporation behind supermarket items including Oreo cookies, Trident gum, Halls cough drops and Cadbury chocolate, acquired Tate’s in a $500 million deal, augmenting the already strong national presence of Tate’s green bags.

But the bake shop’s success was on an upswing before its 2018 sale. From 2014 to 2018, Riverside Company backed Tate’s. The investment firm reported expanding Tate’s availability to 70 percent of all U.S. grocers.

The cookies retail at $5.99 per bag. They’re available at the Tate’s Bake Shop on North Sea Road in Southampton and at some grocery stores, including Whole Foods.

“We hope that Tate’s premium vegan cookies will appeal to the many incorporating plant-based foods into their choices,” Sella wrote in the news release.