Chiefs fans in Dallas will find former player Jeff Allen is a Texas cookie king
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Former Chiefs guard Jeff Allen founded Cookie Society with his wife in 2020.
- Cookie Society sold over 1.5 million cookies in 2023 and gained national exposure.
- Chain distributes quarter-pound gourmet cookies locally and ships nationwide.
Kansas City Chiefs fans who travel to Dallas for the team’s Thanksgiving Day game against the Cowboys will discover that one former Chiefs player and his wife have built a very sweet life for themselves in Texas.
In fact, former guard Jeff Allen, who wore No. 71, has a new nickname.
“Sugar Daddy.”
In 2020 after he retired, Allen and his wife, Texas native Marissa Allen, a former Illini soccer player, founded Cookie Society, which they’ve grown into a popular chain of gourmet cookie shops in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Their cookies are huge quarter-pounders. Soft, chewy centers. Crispy edges.
“Flat-out best cookies in Texas,” Allen calls them.
Their chocolate chunk, salted caramel, peppermint hot chocolate and banana pudding cookies made Oprah’s holiday list of favorite things early on in their venture.
The sweet potato butter cake cookie is a November-only special.
This week Chiefs fanatic Eric Stonestreet gave the cookies a shout-out in an Instagram Story, encouraging fellow fans to visit the shops while they’re in Dallas.
Drafted in 2012, Allen played with the Chiefs until 2015 when he signed with Houston as a free agent, then returned briefly to Kansas City before retiring.
He made national headlines in January 2019 when his car got stuck in the snow on his way to GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium for a playoff game against the Colts. After a Good Samaritan rescued him, Allen asked social media to help identify the man, whom Allen then rewarded with AFC Championship Game tickets.
He still follows the Chiefs on his X account, where he calls himself “the cookie expert.”
Last week Cookie Society posted videos showing Allen working in the bakery under the caption, “I used to be one hell of an athlete.”
“Before our co-founder Jeff Allen was moving cookies, he was out there moving people in the NFL!” said the chatter on the first video. “No cookies were harmed in the making of this video actually, nothing was accomplished at all. He just really misses football and wanted to get in on this trend!”
In one video he’s “blocking” an industrial-sized stand mixer.
Allen’s former Chiefs teammates were some of the first fans of Marissa’s baking talents.
She sent cookies to her husband at training camp in St. Joseph — he has said the cookies got him through years of training camp — where he shared them with his teammates.
One year a teammate asked to buy cookies from her.
She was writing a food blog as a stay-at-home mom and hadn’t thought of selling cookies. But Allen’s injuries got him thinking about his post-NFL future. So they started baking small batches in rented commercial kitchens. Allen hit up his teammates for orders.
Making Oprah’s famous list of recommended holiday gifts right after they opened their first storefront boosted their fledgling business into the stratosphere; hundreds of orders poured in hourly.
Today they have a production center, warehouse, headquarters and food truck and are expanding beyond five locations in the Dallas-Fort worth area.
Last year the couple told a TV station they sold more than 1.5 million cookies in 2023.
They named the business Cookie Society to emphasize the communal power of food.
“It’s like sports, right,” Allen told WFAA in Dallas. “Food is something that brings people together.”
Over the last few days he’s been thinking about his life’s journey, from the NFL to entrepreneurship, and sharing his ruminations with his social media followers.
He is thankful.
And Chiefs fans can be grateful, too.
Cookie Society ships its cookies nationwide.
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