MidnighTreats sells “monster-sized” vegan cookies that weigh at least a third of a pound each.
According to the Good Food Institute, the plant-based food market will be worth $8.1 billion by 2023, and emerging franchises are getting in on the act.
“The majority of our customers are not vegan,” says Johnny Nguyen, owner and founder of vegan cookie concept MidnighTreats. “I think what sets us apart is that our cookies have the taste and texture of a dairy-filled cookie.”
Nguyen founded the company in his mother’s kitchen in 2018. After watching a documentary about the impact of farming in 2020, he became vegan, and the company followed suit. “It seemed very hypocritical to me to personally be vegan and then use hundreds of pounds of butter every week,” he said.
Developing a vegan recipe that tastes like the original took eight to twelve months of experimentation, he says. Today he runs the brand together with his wife Diana.
In 2017, GFI reported that the market was worth $3.9 billion. The market value has more than doubled in seven years, but revenues declined year-on-year in 2023.
Johnny Nguyen and his wife Diana
According to the Plant Based Foods Association, 41 percent of restaurant goers will order plant-based food during their weekly visit by 2023. Research has shown that over a third of diners would try plant-based food “if the dish had a unique flavor.”
In addition to offering a variety of flavors, Virginia-based MidnighTreats also offers several different sizes of its cookies: “Monsters,” which weigh a third of a 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 several flavors of oat milk teas and lattes.
MidnighTreats has four locations in Virginia and Maryland and offers nationwide online shipping. The investment required to open a store ranges from $201,900 to $449,000, according to the franchise disclosure document. Gross sales at the company’s two Virginia locations last year were $268,000 and $321,900, respectively. In 2023, the company opened its first franchise location.
Like many other plant-based brands, MidnighTreats does not advertise veganism heavily in stores.
“You can just walk in, buy a cookie, walk out and not know” that it’s vegan, Nguyen said. The lack of vegan labeling gives customers the opportunity to try the treats without preconceptions.
Across the country, Yoga-urt founder Melissa Schulman opened her first store in 2015 with the goal of offering a healthier soft serve dessert. The name derives from her love of yoga and is a play on the word yogurt.
The store started by offering regular frozen yogurt and vegan options.
“I had a lot of vegan friends in the yoga world,” Schulman said. “They were tired of sorbets and wanted regular chocolate or vanilla ice cream or regular strawberry ice cream.”
But after some research and development in the first few years, Yoga-urt created a vegan soft serve ice cream that “was so good that we just decided to go 100 percent vegan as a business.”
Yoga-urt has three stores and its first franchise location will open this month. The initial investment required to open a store ranges from $291,525 to $419,900, according to last year’s FDD. In 2022, Yoga-urt’s three corporate stores generated sales ranging from $442,190 to $605,782.
The brand makes its products fresh daily and even presses its own almond milk, Schulman said. The franchise’s locations are all certified green by the California Green Business Network for their plant-based foods, eco-friendly paper products and use of leftover almond paste from milk for cookies and pie crusts.
Soft serve flavors include chocolate and peanut butter, strawberry, lavender and tantric cake.
Schulman decided to pursue a franchise concept after concluding that three corporate stores were the most she could operate on her own.
“It would give other entrepreneurs the opportunity to run some of the stores and have their own business,” she said. “I’m really enjoying this new role, which is more of a mentor or leader for franchisees.”
Schulman said people’s perception of vegan diets is her biggest obstacle.
“It’s just the preconceptions that people have in their heads,” she said. “When you try it, you don’t realize it’s dairy-free.”
At MidnighTreats, Nguyen wants customers not to assume that the lack of animal products means something tastes bad — even if they’ve experienced that before.
“For example, if you eat a burger and it’s a terrible burger, most people don’t say burgers are terrible, all burgers around the world are,” he said. “But people try a plant-based product and it’s unfortunately terrible, but then they write off the plant-based category altogether.”
