How My Better Batch cookie mix is stirring up the baking aisle

One appeal of baking mixes is that they’re faster than baking from scratch, but when it comes to My Better Batch, which launched in 2024, it was the company itself that got cooking quickly.

The cookie mix’s retail distribution rose from just 79 store locations in Q2 of 2025 to 3,544 in Q2 of 2026, a year over year increase of 4,386%, according to store counts provided by My Better Batch. Recent retail additions include Kroger, Albertsons, H-E-B, Giant Food, and Hy-Vee, while earlier placements include Target, Thrive Market, and The Fresh Market.

Lindsay Hancock, My Better Batch’s founder and CEO, is no stranger to grocery aisles or CPG brands. She started her career at The Fresh Market before moving to Creative Snacks Co., where she spent more than 11 years in multiple roles as the company was acquired by Kind and, later, became part of Mars after the corporation acquired Kind North America.

“I’ve been in food my entire career,” Hancock told Retail Brew. “I’ve never been in the baking aisle, and so this was a new area for me.”

When Hancock, who grew up making cookies from scratch with her mother and grandmother, made a study of the baking aisle, “one of the things that I noticed is that there really has been very little innovation in that aisle over time,” she said.

Batter’s up: Hancock said she began to see cookie mixes as being divided into three categories, and the one she noticed the most innovation in was what she called “attribute-specific,” those that accommodate dietary restrictions and preferences, including being gluten-free, paleo, or low-sugar. Less innovative in her opinion were what she called the “value” brands, mainstays including Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, and Pillsbury. It was the third category, which she identified as “premium,” where she saw what she called a “speed-to-shelf” opportunity.

Along with being priced at a premium, My Better Batch defines premium as only having ingredients that Hancock once stirred into the mixing bowl in her childhood home’s kitchen.

“I describe our product as ‘clean,’ so no artificial flavors, no artificial colors, no fillers or preservatives,” she said. “These are ingredients that you’d find in your own kitchen pantry.”

Compared to My Better Batch’s six-ingredient sugar cookie mix—wheat flour, sugar, natural vanilla flavor, sodium bicarbonate (aka baking soda), salt, and cornstarch—Betty Crocker’s version includes additional ingredients like palm oil and sodium aluminum phosphate.

Shelf portrait: While elements of the brand—bootstrapped, solo founder, challenger positioning—sound very DTC, Hancock said DTC represents a “very small” proportion of sales, which she attributed to her background in retail and retail brands.

“We had an understanding of how CPG works and operates, which is a little different than a lot of starting small brands,” she said. “I went with what I knew, which was scaling and growing very quickly, and really focusing on retail.”

Some DTC brands, including Blueland and Daily Harvest, have had to rethink packaging as they expanded into retail. But for My Better Batch, Hancock said she was thinking about how the brand would stake its claim on shelves from the start.

While popular cookie mix brands like Pillsbury and Betty Crocker often use flexible plastic pouch packaging, Hancock opted for a cardboard box, which can stand upright and create a more substantial shelf presence.

“The packaging format actually plays a really important role,” she said. Designed by the agency Buttermilk Creative, the boxes include a photo of half a cookie in their upper right and left corners. That means that when boxes are side-by-side on shelves, they form whole cookies with their neighbor, albeit with the two halves often being different varieties, such as a double chocolate chip merged with a sugar cookie.

“One looks nice on the shelf, but when you do line them up, they have a much stronger presence and kind of create more of a billboard,” she said.

“Billboarding” is in fact a term (brand blocking is another) for when design elements link adjacent packages.

“Product packaging, when arranged together, forms a larger, cohesive image across the shelf,” explains an article from the Ivey Business School at Canada’s Western University that summarizes an academic paper. “Billboarding not only draws attention, but also elevates these product displays into unexpected works of art [and] that sense of surprise creates a positive emotional response, driving stronger engagement, choice, and purchase intention.”

For My Better Batch, the packaging is just one way an upstart with less shelf space than legacy brands is making the most of it.

“I knew that our real estate was going to be very small in comparison with the competition,” Hancock said. “So I wanted to make sure that every opportunity we had, we were able to stand out.”