At Best Regards, our story begins rather modestly: my wife Cherrie, a psychologist wanted a change of pace and decided to start a corporate gift basket business over 15 years ago. Cherrie dreamed of building a business that focused on outrageous customer service, and long term business relationships. Over the years we built a large client list that looked forward to getting and sending gifts that included the best gourmet foods that we could find. All was going well, and we were on track to double our sales, when 9-11 hit. As everyone knows, if you were lucky enough to not lose anyone, you still had to whole new market to deal with. We found that several manufacturers that we had depended on for years, started to change the way they conducted business in response to the recession of

post 9-11. One manufacturer, for example changed their cookie recipe to use margarine instead of butter, and cheapened other ingredients as well. We told the owner that they could increase their price as much as they needed, but DON'T compromise the quality.

To make a long story short, they didn't listen, and continued down their path to mediocrity. While everyone else was cutting back, and canceling plans, we decided to move and start our own bakery. We have never intended on selling anything wholesale, just bake cookies that we would include in our gift baskets, as exclusives. We obsessively worked new cookies, one recipe at a time, searching out the best ingredients we can find without regard to costs. We figured that if we can't make the best cookie in the world, we could just buy it from someone else. Over the last 6 years we have developed 7 different cookies, that we have been told are unbelievable. Our philosophy is simple, to create products that are better than anything we have ever tasted.

Then, about 3 years ago, my wife Cherrie, in her infinite wisdom challenged me, "If you are so smart, why don't you make a chocolate that we can both like?" You see, she loved milk chocolate, hated the aftertaste of dark chocolate. I was the opposite, hated milk chocolate as too sweet, and tolerated the aftertaste of good dark chocolate to get the flavor that I loved. It took us several months of research, but we finally created our own custom blend of chocolate that has the flavor profile of the best dark chocolate, but without the aftertaste. Thus, Craves® were born.
Apparently, we were on to something.  The next several years, we were approached by numerous retailers asking if they could buy our cookies and chocolates wholesale. We always turned their kind offers down, thinking that is not for us. Finally, during the holiday season of 2005, several factors came together to convince us to at least consider the prospect of wholesale.  In January of 2006, we approached Dean & Deluca, one of the best specialty food retailers in the country to get feedback on our products. We had expected them to tell us that they are nice, and if we changed a few things, they might be interested in one of the cookies. Well, to our shock, they said that they would take it all, and placed an order for all of the Kansas City Cookies® and Craves® Chocolates.
So here we are. Make no mistake, there have been many years of sacrifice, experiments, research and tastings.
We wish you many happy cookie and chocolate moments.

~Robert & Cherrie Duensing