Juan Morel is already a successful professional bodybuilder. He’s a former New York Pro champion, has seven pro wins overall to his credit, and he has finished as high as 10th in the Mr. Olympia. Nowadays, he is most associated for My Cookie Dealer, the business that he and his wife started that has seen great success in recent years. He told Dennis James on this week’s episode of “The Menace Podcast” the story on how this venture became so popular in a short amount of time.
“I made a post about my wife making me these cookies. I was being honest and I said that these are the best cookies ever,” Morel said. “People just started DMing, DMing, comments went crazy on the post. They loved it. So I told her ‘now you gotta make these for me every Sunday.’ I started posting them every Sunday, and people said ‘you should start selling them.’”
Thanks to his wife’s baking skills, and Morel saving income throughout his competitive career, they decided to create a business, and they didn’t even need to get a loan to make it happen. They partnered with a baker in their neighborhood of Long Island, New York to produce the cookies en masse. Morel talked about the first time they sold the cookies after a bodybuilding show.
“After a show where she was doing make-up, she would make a post about being in the parking lot, I would also make a post. She would go out in the parking lot. Cookies would be gone in a few minutes,” he said proudly. “It was out of the trunk like a deal just went down. That’s how the name My Cookie Dealer came about.”
The rest as they say is history. Many bodybuilding and fitness champions have tasted and posted about Morel’s cookies ever since, and they were even promoted as a sponsor at this year’s Olympia. James asked Morel about the potential of returning to the stage now that My Cookie Dealer is going so well.
“I can’t decide,” he admitted. “The business is growing at a very rapid rate. We have a lot of crazy stuff coming in. I can’t talk about it. There’s a lot of stuff in the works, and we’re growing beyond what I thought. If I can get to a point next year that I could be able to run the business without being so involved, I will always be involved without committing so many hours, then maybe I’ll get back onstage.”
The two men also discuss Morel’s past success onstage, the macros of the cookies, his wife, and much more. Catch the full episode of TMP over at the Muscle & Fitness YouTube channel. While you’re there, subscribe and turn on notifications so you see every episode when they air every Sunday at 3 p.m. Eastern time.
