We Gave Away 50 Free Cookies in Melbourne Before We’d Sold a Single One
11 October 2026
Before we’d sold a single cookie, we handed 50 to strangers in Melbourne and asked for a score out of 10.
It’s the end of July. We’ve got a recipe we love, a launch coming up, and one fairly big problem: we have never sold a cookie. Not one.
Friends and family had tried them, sure. But friends and family are never going to tell you your cookie is average. So before we asked anyone in Melbourne to pay for one, we figured Melbourne should get to try one for free and tell us what they really thought.
One sign, 50 cookies
The plan wasn’t complicated. We designed a sign that said FREE COOKIE, got it printed, baked 50 cookies, packed them into a bag and headed into the city.
Turns out walking around Melbourne with a big FREE COOKIE sign gets you some looks. A few people were sure there was a catch. There wasn’t. Take a cookie, eat it, tell us what you think, give it a score out of 10.
What Melbourne said
The one we still talk about is a man who told us he was a food connoisseur. We had no way of checking that and we never will. What we can tell you is that he took a bite, called it a “magnificent cookie”, and then sang us a song to show how much he meant it.
Other reviews were shorter. “Chocolate chips really nice.” “Crunchy, perfect.”
We got plenty of 10s, including a whole group of school students, and school students are not known for being polite about food they don’t like. Then someone gave us an 88 out of 10. We haven’t checked the maths on that one, but we’re keeping it.
The honest ones
Not everyone was sold. One guy told us he’s “not a cookie guy”. Fair enough, that’s a hard one to win. Someone else said it was “a little too rich”, and that was the comment we kept coming back to on the way home.
That’s sort of the point though. If we only wanted compliments we could have stayed in the kitchen.
Why we’d do it again
Fifty cookies isn’t exactly a scientific study. But watching strangers take a first bite told us more than weeks of guessing at home ever did. By the time the bag was empty we knew people who had never heard of Sunday Oven liked what we were baking, and a few weeks later we opened our first drop.
If you were one of the 50, thank you. You tried us before there was anything to buy.
The cookies aren ’t free anymore, sorry. But you can build your own box from our core four, baked in small batches and delivered around Melbourne.