At first glance, Mental Bakedown looks like a cookie business. But for founder Jamie Park, a Marquette High School senior, it’s something more: a way to show up for people navigating eating disorders.
Mental Bakedown started two years ago, the summer before Park’s sophomore year. It started as a way to support a loved one who was struggling with an eating disorder.
“The thing about eating disorders is that they’re very hard to treat, because a lot of the time, the person who has it doesn’t want to be [treated]. So it’s kind of complicated that way. One of the best things I think you can do is that you just need to show support,” Park said.
Using her love for baking, Park decided to donate money earned from selling cookies to the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA); so far, she’s raised $3,000. Park said that she plans on donating the money at the end of her senior year.
Over the years, Park has developed an efficient system to balance school and running a full-fledged bakery business. At first, Park would squeeze in some late-night baking before school and rush orders out the next day, a rhythm she now calls unsustainable.
Inspired by advice from other cookie business owners, she set firm boundaries – no weekday baking during the school week – and reorganized her schedule so she bakes only a few days a week and handles all deliveries and shipping on Mondays.
From her home kitchen, Park coordinates a tight and efficient system: most orders are picked up from her residence in Chesterfield, she makes short-radius deliveries when she can, and she ships cookies to customers across Missouri, all on top of a full high school course load.
In her kitchen, Park is a one-girl team, spending her evenings testing recipes, filling orders, packaging and filming videos for her social media.
Behind the counter, her cabinets are adorned with colorful sticky notes, scrawled with various cookie recipes. This is where Park workshops her newest recipes, tweaking the ratios of various ingredients until it’s just right. “It’s like a science experiment,” she said. “It helps to have those base ratios, because then it’ll come out tasting good, but not great. So then you have little things to change.”
It took a year of recipe testing to create her iconic brown butter cookie recipe, which now serves as a base for all other cookie flavors.
Currently, Park offers five different flavors: s’mores, brown butter, stuffed Oreo, Death by Chocolate, and chocolate s’mores. A single cookie is $5, and a box of 4 costs $20.
For Park, the sign of a good cookie can be summed up in 3 words: large, chewy, and decadent.
“The viral thin cookies [bakery] that opened in New York freaked me out, because I don’t like thin cookies,” Park said with a laugh.
For chocolate lovers, go for the Death by Chocolate: a fudgy chocolate dough stuffed with an Oreo, and topped with a homemade brownie.
Feeling fancy? Order a brown butter cookie stuffed with an Oreo, topped with a healthy amount of chocolate chips.
The S’mores cookie is a personal favorite: brown butter cookie dough with graham cracker bits, filled with a gooey marshmallow center, topped with another toasted marshmallow.
The cookies, while rich and decadent, are not intended to be an everyday snack. It’s a treat, something that people shouldn’t beat themselves up over, Park explains.
“Food is not something that should be viewed in a scary [or negative] light. It’s not something that you can only grant yourself certain times. It’s something that is positive and uplifting in the sense of [convenience],” Park said. “And I think that’s [the feeling I want my cookies to bring. When [the customers] see it, they’re like, ‘Oh, these cookies, they’re for a good cause’. They’re something more than calories, sugar, or fat.”
Order cookies from Jamie Park at Mental Bakedown’s website, and follow on Instagram and Tiktok for more updates.