Page 14 - Valley Table - June-August 2024

oneofthe coolest things about
Halfsies, an inventive mail- order cookie company based in Marlboro, is that locals are more than welcome to skip the shipping charges and pick up their order at owner Dave Maffei’s house.
“I’m happy to leave the [cookies] on my front porch
on the second rocking chair,” says Maffei. He operates the five-year-old company from
a commercial kitchen in
the basement of the home
he shares with his wife and business partner, Heather,
the beauty director at Real Simple and Health magazines, their two kids, ages two and four, and a Great Dane named Chunk. “The only problem we ever had happened early on when someone from the postal service grabbed a cookie package by accident!”
It’s the kind of customer service that has made Halfsies stand out since day one.
The couple’s journey into commercial cookie baking began in 2018, when Maffei bought a mixer and started experimenting with cookie recipes, determined to master a crisp on the outside/soft on the inside texture.
The former educator—who most recently served as an assistant principal at Ketcham High School in Wappingers Falls—would bring his treats to work and, inevitably, everyone who tasted them loved them. Later that year, Maffei brought three dozen freshly baked cookies to a family Easter celebration—and that’s when the couple experienced an “aha” moment. “My mother- in-law cut them in half—she said they were too big—and
I watched as people were going down the dessert line
and taking half of each,” says Maffei. Within a year, the couple named the company Halfsies and filed an LLC. In June 2020, Maffei quit his
job and went all in on baking cookies featuring such flavors as Nutella Knockout, You Want a Reese’s Piece of Me, Churro, and Campfire Banana Boat,
a concoction made with a base of bananas stuffed with a chocolate marshmallow cup.
Thanks to what he calls a “wild” social media push that included mouth-watering videos (Halfsies now has over 63,000 Instagram followers and is super active on TikTok),
over 350 delicious flavors, and mentorship from neighbor Sara Higgins—known for
her Raspberry Fields Farm granola (“she was instrumental in helping us set up our commercial kitchen,” he says)—Maffei eventually baked 150 packs a day (each pack contains a dozen halves). He sold out in minutes and now ships to all 50 states, Guam, and military addresses far and wide; at press time, Halfsies has sold over 100,000 orders. (And, when TV personality Bethenny Frankel called Halfsies the “best home-baked cookie she ever ate” in a
TikTok video late last year, it only added to the buzz.)
These days, you can still
find Maffei and the couple’s one full-time employee busily baking in the basement and vacuum-sealing each pack
to ensure they stay fresh and intact, no matter how far away they’re shipped. And Maffei is constantly innovating. “If I see an ice cream flavor that sounds good, I think about whether we take those same flavor notes and put them into a cookie,” says Maffei. “Even though we already have so many favorites I’m always thinking of new ones our customers will love.”
12 TheValleyTable | June–August2024
PHOTO COURTESY OF HALFSIES COOKIE CO.