MidnighTreats sells “monster” sized vegan cookies weighing at least a third of a pound each.
The plant-based food market in 2023 was worth $8.1 billion, according to the Good Food Institute, and emerging franchises are tapping in.
“The majority of our customers aren’t vegan,” said Johnny Nguyen, owner and founder of vegan cookie concept MidnighTreats. “I think where we stand out is the fact that our cookies have the taste and texture of a dairy-filled cookie.”
Nguyen founded the company in 2018 in his mother’s kitchen. He went vegan in 2020 after watching a documentary on the impacts of the farming industry, and the company followed suit. “It felt very hypocritical to be personally vegan and then using hundreds of pounds of butter every week,” he said.
Developing a vegan recipe that tasted like the real thing took eight to 12 months of experimenting, he said. Now, he runs the brand with his wife, Diana.
In 2017, GFI reported the market was worth $3.9 billion. The market worth has more than doubled in seven years, but year-over-year sales declined in 2023.
Johnny Nguyen and his wife, Diana
According to the Plant Based Foods Association, 41 percent of diners order plant-based items at restaurants when visiting weekly in 2023. Research found that over a third of diners would try plant-based items “if the dish was uniquely flavored.”
Virginia-based MidnighTreats serves not only a variety of flavors but several different sizes of its cookies, “monster,” which are a third-pound each, and “munchies,” a more typical cookie size. Flavors include red velvet, oatmeal chocolate, “the Cinna-Roll” and more. Customers can also choose from different flavors of oat milk teas and lattes.
MidnighTreats has four locations in Virginia and Maryland, plus nationwide shipping online. The investment required to open a store ranges from $201,900 to $449,000, according to its franchise disclosure document. Gross sales at its two corporate Virginia locations last year were $268,000 and $321,900. In 2023, the company opened its first franchise location.
Like a lot of plant-based brands, MidnighTreats doesn’t heavily market the veganism in stores.
“You can easily walk in, buy a cookie, walk out and not know” it’s vegan, Nguyen said. The lack of vegan labeling gives customers the chance to try the treats without a bias.
On the other side of the country, Yoga-urt founder Melissa Schulman opened her first store in 2015 with the goal of serving a healthier soft-serve dessert. The name comes from her love of yoga and a play on the word yogurt.
The store started out with regular frozen yogurt and vegan options available.
“I had a lot of vegan friends in the yoga world,” Schulman said. “They were sick of sorbets, and they wanted a regular chocolate or regular vanilla, regular strawberry in ice cream.”
But, after some research and development in its initial years, Yoga-urt created a vegan soft serve “so good that we just decided to go 100 percent vegan as a store.”
Yoga-urt has three stores and its first franchised location opens this month. The initial investment required to open a store is between $291,525 to $419,900, according to last year’s FDD. In 2022, Yoga-urts three corporate stores produced sales ranging from $442,190 to $605,782.
The brand makes its products fresh each day and even squeezes its own almond milk, Schulman said. The franchise’s corporate stores are all certified green by the California Green Business Network for its plant-based food, environmentally friendly paper products and its use for leftover almond pulp from milk for cookies and pie crust.
Soft serve flavors include chocolate and peanut butter swirl, strawberry, lavender and “tantric tart.”
Schulman decided to franchise the concept after determining three corporate stores were the most she could manage on her own.
“It would give other entrepreneurs an opportunity to run some of the stores, to have their own business,” she said. “I’m really enjoying this new role for myself, which is more of a mentor or leader to franchisees.”
Schulman said people’s perception of vegan food is her biggest obstacle.
“It’s just the bias people have in their head,” she said. “If you taste it, you wouldn’t know it was dairy-free.”
At MidnighTreats, Nguyen wants customers to not assume the lack of animal products will make something taste bad, even if they’ve been wronged before.
“If you have, let’s say, a burger and it was a terrible burger, most people don’t say burgers are horrible, all burgers across the world,” he said. “But people will try one plant-based item and it’s terrible, unfortunately, but then they write off the plant-based category in total.”