In 2021, Hancock decided to walk away from her professional career.

After a sudden divorce, she wanted to reset — both personally and professionally. Until that point, Hancock had spent her entire career in food and consumer packaged goods (CPG), starting on the retailer side at The Fresh Market and later joining Creative Snacks as its first employee. Over roughly a decade, she helped grow Creative Snacks until it sold to Kind Snacks in 2019, then stayed on to lead part of the sales team and serve on Kind’s executive leadership team as the company itself was acquired by Mars in 2020. 

“What I learned during that time is that I am just not a big company person,” Hancock tells Entrepreneur. “I operate in a more entrepreneurial way.”

So, during her two-year reset period, she consulted for emerging food brands while deciding whether to keep advising companies, join an existing one, or finally build her own. 

Investors she had worked with previously told her they would back her if she started something new, giving her confidence that she had both the track record and support to return as a founder. “I was very fortunate when I left Kind that I had several people reach out to me and say, if you start something new, I would love to be part of it,” she says. 

Finding a gap in the baking aisle

My Better Batch grew out of a need in Hancock’s own life. As a single mother who loves to bake but rarely has time to make cookies from scratch, she found herself looking for a cookie mix that still tasted homemade — something she could feel good serving her family without “mom guilt” and the telltale flavor of processed shortcuts. “I wanted to give people like me a shortcut that they could feel good about,” she says.

When she studied the baking aisle, she saw a few entrenched legacy brands with familiar colors and decades of loyalty, plus pockets of innovation in attribute-specific products like gluten-free or low sugar. What she did not see was a clearly defined premium segment with clean ingredients and a truly homemade taste. Nothing in the baking aisle came close to tasting as good as her made-from-scratch cookie recipes, in her opinion. 

Hancock began to think of the baking category in three buckets: value, attribute-specific and premium. She deliberately set out to own the premium space with non-GMO, pantry-style ingredients and a higher-end but still accessible price point. My Better Batch cookie mixes cost an average of $7.99 on the product website. 

“I felt like there was a lack of premium on the shelf, and so that was the area that I wanted to be and the gap that I wanted to fill,” Hancock says.

Creating a ‘better than homemade’ mix

Hancock created My Better Batch in December 2023 and shipped the first order in April 2024, but the product had been in development in her own kitchen well before that. Working alone at home, she mixed small batches, baked, tasted, and threw away many rounds of cookies while trying to replicate the texture of homemade baking in a simple mix format. 

“It was a lot of trial and error and having people taste and gathering feedback and making sure that when that mix was dumped into the bowl and butter and egg were added, that it still yielded the texture of a homemade cookie,” she says.

Once she had formulas she felt good about, she ran blind taste tests against leading competitors, handing cookies to family, friends, and neighbors without telling them which was which. Her goal was not just to stand alone as a good product, but to win when placed directly next to existing options on the shelf. 

That process produced four core flavors: Chocolate Chunk, Classic Sugar, Double Chocolate Chip, and Celebration (a funfetti-style sprinkle cookie). Hancock deliberately chose flavors that already drive most category sales rather than niche, creative variants.

Scaling and landing big retailers

Getting the recipes manufactured was a harder and slower process than Hancock anticipated. She had to find a co-manufacturer willing to work with a small, unproven brand and then translate one-pound kitchen recipes into 2,000-pound production batches. Many manufacturers had little appetite for early-stage volumes, so she sold them on herself and her track record, using meetings to explain the brand’s potential. 

“What I had to do was really sell them on who I am and what I’ve done in the past,” she explains. Her current partner is larger than most emerging brands could access, but believed in her story.

Early sales came through the My Better Batch website and Amazon, but the real selling point was retail distribution. Thrive Market, Sprouts, and Target were among the earliest adopters of the brand. From there, Hancock layered in a rotation at Costco, placements at Lowes Foods and The Fresh Market and a wave of seasonal distribution at Target with exclusive holiday flavors like Chocolate Peppermint. 

Hancock says she was able to get on Costco and Target shelves in under two years by targeting retailers she had past relationships with from her time at The Fresh Market and Kind. “Grow relationships,” she says of her tactics for growth. “I think in this business it’s very important.”

Hancock also says differentiating her product was key to getting it on grocery store shelves. She made sure to emphasize the selling points of the product, mainly that it was non-GMO certified, a premium product and created by a woman-owned business. “We made sure that we had a proposition to those retailers that was different than what they’ve been shown and different from what they currently have,” she says.

My Better Batch grew from less than 1,000 points of distribution in 2024 to more than 5,000 points of distribution by the end of 2025, an increase of more than 400% in just one year. The business experienced 1,500% revenue growth, driven by distribution gains. 

Brand promise and advice for founders

Hancock’s brand strategy is rooted in a simple promise: My Better Batch must never compromise on quality as it scales. She defines that promise as delivering “better than homemade” cookies — cookies with a homemade taste made from clean, simple non-GMO ingredients. “Something that you could pass off as your own homemade recipe and nobody would know the difference,” she says.

Her primary challenge now is less about product quality and more about visibility: in shelves dominated by legacy brands, the hardest task is getting shoppers to pick up the product the first time, even though she says retention is strong once they try it.

For other founders hoping to follow her path from concept to thousands of retail doors, Hancock’s most concrete advice centers on decisive action and resilience. 

“We’re going to make wrong decisions and mistakes,” Hancock says. “Don’t let the fear of failure prevent you from taking a step forward. Realize that there are a lot of steps forward and there are some steps back, too. You make adjustments, and you keep moving.”

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