Italian-American Bakeries Sell Millions of These Cookies Per Year. How Many Are Actually Homemade?

Visit any Italian-American bakery on the East Coast and you’ll encounter a familiar cast of characters. No, I’m not talking about the white-haired nonnas behind the counter (though you might encounter some of those, too). I’m talking about the cookies.

Among a slew of standard offerings—like cream-stuffed cannoli, flaky sfogliatella, and the cult-favorite Philly Fluff Cake—Italian-American bakeries are perhaps best known for their cookies. There are the tricolor rainbow cookies, dense with almond paste and dyed to mimic the colors of the Italian flag. There are the pignoli cookies, armored with golden toasted pine nuts. And then there’s my personal favorite: the humble Italian butter cookie.

A relative of the Danish butter cookie, the Italian butter cookie comes in many shapes, sizes, and styles. They all start with a simple, buttery dough, just soft enough to be piped into whirls or long cat’s tongues. One might be topped with a single maraschino cherry; another sheathed in miniature chocolate chips. Once baked, the cookies are sandwiched with jam, dipped in chocolate, or adorned in any number of ways. They’re often sold in a variety pack and, despite their stylistic differences, all taste reassuringly similar. Still, everyone has a favorite. Mine is the one that’s completely coated with rainbow sprinkles.

A dunk in rainbow sprinkles turns any cookie into a party.

A stalwart staple of my childhood, a shiny platter of Italian butter cookies materialized at any and every event: holidays, birthday parties, funerals. I never questioned where exactly these cookies came from, and why—no matter which bakery they came from—they almost always looked and tasted the same. But after a little internet sleuthing, I stumbled upon a shocking proposition: Maybe all those cookies came from a few enterprising wholesalers.

Bakers Authority, a wholesale company based in Queens, NY, sells Italian butter cookies by the pallet, listing the shelf life as “6+ months.” The cookies themselves come from Cookies United, a subsidiary of wholesale supplier United Baking Co. The company’s umbrella also includes CakeBites, a brand of pre-packaged snack cakes you might find at the checkout counter at 7-Eleven, and The Cookie Jar, the largest manufacturer of gingerbread house kits in the US.

Cookies United supplies to over one thousand wholesalers, bakeries, and distributors across the country, though most of them are concentrated in the New York area, a representative from the company tells me. In addition to many varieties of butter cookies, the company also sells cannoli shells, anisette biscotti, and bright green pistachio leaf cookies. They sell millions of cookies each year.

According to Cookies United, the cookies are baked on a daily basis at their bakery in Islip, New York. “We have a staff of 100+ bakers, packers, and warehouse employees that work to ensure each cookie is mixed and baked on our 100-foot+ ovens,” a company representative tells me. The cookies are then packaged and moved to one of three warehouses, from which they’re shipped all over the country. You’ll find six-pound packs of Cookies United’s Italian cookies sold from numerous wholesale vendors, including WebFoodStore.com and FoodServiceDirect.com. You can even buy them on Amazon.

Other wholesale cookie operations started as classic brick-and-mortar bakeries. Sicilian baker Salvatore LaRosa immigrated to America in 1901 and started selling cannoli from a pushcart in Manhattan. The operation eventually expanded onto Staten Island with LaRosa’s Pastry Shop, a bakery that’s been in the family ever since.

Over the years, it became more difficult for small bakeries and pastry shops to find quality bakers, the company writes on its website. This led the company to pivot towards wholesale production. In addition to cannoli shells and cream, the bakery sells wholesale biscotti and cookies, including the iconic red cherry butter cookies. Today, according to the LaRosa’s website, nationwide wholesale distribution accounts for a significant portion of the company’s business, while the family continues to operate the retail bakery.

When you consider the scale of most Italian-American bakery operations, it’s no wonder that some outsource the cookie production. Sheer abundance is part of the Italian-American bakery’s institutional DNA: When a customer walks though those glass double-doors, they expect to be dazzled by a display case fully-stocked with cherry-dotted cookies, ladyfinger-collared cakes, and glazed fruit tarts.

Unlike America’s new wave bakeries, where tricked-out croissants bake in small batches and run for upwards of $7 each, Italian-American pastry shops operate en masse. They deal not in single croissants, but hundred-piece platters; most don’t even sell cookies individually, but by the pound. Still, they face the same labor and cost constraints as any small business. Not all Italian-American bakeries have the time or resources to keep up with the necessary volume. That’s where wholesale suppliers come in.

Personally, I have nothing against wholesale cookies. I’ve eaten and enjoyed my fair share over the years and, like certain pre-packaged snacks or childhood cereals, they hit a nostalgia point for me. But they’re entirely different from the cookies made from scratch at bakeries like Veniero’s, Villabate Alba, and Fortunato Brothers. Perhaps seeking to set themselves apart from wholesale-supplied stores, many bakeshops openly advertise the freshness of their products, like Veniero’s, whose website claims, “With a name like Veniero’s, it’s gotta be fresh.”

All the baking at Veniero’s—an East Village institution dating back to 1894—happens in the original basement bake shop, as it has for the past 129 years. “Veniero’s uses all fresh ingredients, no artificial ingredients whatsoever and all handmade, hand cutout cookies and biscotti,” the business writes on its website.

This quality-minded marketing can take many forms. Fortunato Brothers, an Italian bakery that’s been open since 1976 in Williamsburg, NY, recently soared to TikTok stardom, amassing thousands of likes on their videos of bakers stretching sfogliatella or layering rainbow cookies. Among the bakery’s earliest videos is a clip of “cookie day,” where a baker pipes what looks like hundreds of butter-yellow cookies that, once adorned with a chocolate disc, bake en masse in a floor-to-ceiling oven.

The easiest way to find out if a bakery makes its products in-house? Just give them a call. If you can’t find a fresh butter cookie near you, plenty of bakeries—like Villabate Alba and Biscotti Dolci—ship nationwide. But the short ingredient list and one-dough-fits-many-cookies approach also makes them an approachable home baking project.

Though I enjoyed countless variations on this cookie throughout my childhood, I never saw one baked in small batches in a home kitchen, so I set out to develop a recipe that home bakers could easily follow. My recipe for Italian Butter Cookies starts with a simple, buttery cookie dough, tinged with vanilla and almond extracts, then piped through a star tip for the signature swirl. You can commit fully to one type, but I encourage you to channel the more-is-more spirit of the opulent bakery platters and make a selection. Sandwich the cookies with apricot jam, dip them in melted chocolate, or coat in sprinkles. Top with a single maraschino cherry and dust with powdered sugar. Try each variety and see which is your favorite.

Italian Butter Cookies