Popular SLO County cookie company expands with a new downtown bake shop
Popular bakery Red Moose Cookie Company has expanded to a new retail location in downtown Cambria after nearly 20 years in business.
The business recently held a balloon-filled grand opening at 784 Main St., Suite A, in Cambria’s West Village, long known for restaurants and gift shops. The bakery’s original location at 253I1 Village Lane will remain open as a production site.
Coast Union High School graduate Caren Fallows started Red Moose Cookie Company in Washington state in 2003. Then Darrell Wall convinced her to partner with him and move the business to Cambria in 2009.
Wall inherited the bakery after Fallows died in 2015. He sold Red Moose to Tyler Nichol and her family last year.
While on vacation in San Luis Obispo County from Riverside in late 2020, Tyler Nichol stopped by her favorite Cambria cookie shop and spotted a for-sale sign on the desk.
She became determined to buy Red Moose with the help of her parents, Monica and George Nichol.
After training with Wall, the Nichols closed escrow on the bake shop by Nov. 13.
Wall, who’s retired and enjoying “fishing in Oregon, going artifacting,” said he’s thrilled for the family.
“I was so excited for them, I woke up early this morning,” the five-decade Cambria resident said with a laugh, recalling the early-morning routines he once observed as a baker.
Red Moose Cookie Company opens new location
Wall gathered with the Nichol family on Aug. 19 as the doors of Red Moose’s downtown location opened for business and a line of hungry people surged inside.
Those cookie-craving fans included Ventura resident Anna and Gary McCubbin, who were celebrating Anna’s birthday. They built their getaway around the Red Moose opening — even though they’d never actually tasted the company’s cookies before.
“I’m a birthday person, but not a cake person,” Anna McCubbin explained.
While on vacation in Cambria last year, the McCubbins went to Boni’s Tacos food truck. “We saw a sign for Red Moose Cookie Company and I told my husband, ‘Cookies! I want cookies. Now we need cookies,’ ” Anna McCubbin said.
By the time they found Red Moose on Village Lane, where it occupies two suites in the town’s semi-industrial area, the shop had closed because it had sold out of fresh-baked products for the day.
Grinning, Gary McCubbin said that his wife was so bitterly disappointed that day that she actually cried —a comment she scoffed at, but didn’t deny.
By the time the couple finished their shopping at Red Moose on Aug. 19, they were loaded up with bags of cookies and a logo T-shirt.
What’s next for Cambria business?
The Nichol family say they plan to keep the hard-to-find Village Lane location, which Wall once called “the worst location in town” for a retail business, as their baking kitchen commissary.
That will give the Nichols more elbow room for creating new recipes and baking them, then selling those goodies to customers at their more visible shop in the town’s West Village area.
Tyler and Monica Nichol said that they’ve already added some new products, such as trail mix cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies and and Moose Madness sugar cookies with M&Ms candies.
There’s also Red Moose’s Nutty Buddy, which features a caramel base drizzled with two kinds of chocolate and studded with nuts. It’s a riff on the bakery’s popular Naughty Rod, which has all those elements wrapped around a thick pretzel rod.
Red Moose’s most popular offerings include Cinnful cookies — oatmeal cookies with walnuts, toffee chips and cinnamon — as well as Root Beer Float cookies and thick, fudgy brownies that came in caramel walnut and seasonal peppermint patty varieties.
The Nichols recently added a chocolate fudge brownie with no nuts to the menu.
As Red Moose’s website says, their passion is “baking people happy with love and butter!”
Red Moose Cookie Company is open 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday at 784 Main St., Suite A, in Cambria.
To order cookies, call 805-900-5140. For more information, visit redmoosecookiecompany.com.
This story was originally published August 23, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
