What Happened To Liz Lovely Cookies After Shark Tank?
Liz Lovely appeared to have it all. But even the companies with so much potential still have to wow the investors on ABC's "Shark Tank," and that's not always an easy task. In 2012, vegan and gluten-free cookie brand Liz Lovely appeared on the show, where Vermont-based owners and husband-wife duo Liz Scott and Dan Holtz made their best attempt to sell their company's vision to one of the investors. At first, Mark Cuban was interested, but Scott and Holtz needed a moment to talk amongst themselves and decide whether to make a deal. When the couple returned to the sharks with a proposal for Cuban, he declined, and the two left without a deal.
Still, the Liz Lovely product filled a niche in a way that other cookies couldn't; it addressed dietary restrictions without sacrificing flavor. However, Scott later told Burlington Free Press in 2018 that, "sometimes a good product just isn't enough." So what happened to Liz Lovely cookies?
Liz Lovely cookies went dark without notice
After appearing on "Shark Tank," the Liz Lovely brand continued to gain traction, despite not getting a deal — but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. As the company's demand increased, the equipment and facilities they had did not, which led Liz Lovely to have a difficult time meeting that demand. Shark Tank Success revealed that owners Liz Scott and Dan Holtz tried unsuccessfully to launch a Kickstarter campaign for new equipment.
"We had Wegmans and some of the Whole Foods," Scott told Burlington Free Press about one year after Liz Lovely's demise. "We had Safeway. The challenge was we couldn't reliably make the product ourselves and grow. We had only the equipment we had." In the meantime, Scott and Holtz ended their marriage, which only compounded the issues within the company (per Burlington Free Press).
Eventually, Liz Lovely partnered with a bakery that could help the brand keep up with demand, but production halted in 2017 when Scott claimed in a letter to her buyers that the bakery wasn't producing the cookies up to her standards, according to Shark Tank Blog. She stopped delivering to the buyers, saying production would eventually resume, but the business ultimately went dark. Later that year, Liz Lovely ceased to exist without ever informing any of its buyers that was ending operations.
Liz Scott eventually filed for bankruptcy
Between owners Liz Scott and Dan Holtz ending their marriage, the inability to meet the demand for Liz Lovely cookies, and supposed quality issues under a new producer, Scott's business couldn't support the overhead required to run it. "It was brutal on so many levels," she said in her Burlington Free Press interview. Scott disappeared silently. It wasn't until 2018, more than a year after production stopped, that she discussed how hard it was to let go of what she had built. "The company was everything to me," Scott said. "I wanted that company to survive."
Ultimately, Scott closed the company without paying off a number of debts, which led her to eventually file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, having owed more than $600,000 (per Shark Tank Blog). She now lives in Indiana, and she said in 2018 that she had still considered the idea of restarting the business, but didn't entertain the idea any further. Her ex-husband Holtz remained in Vermont, and both have remarried and started new lives.