Take a boisterous South Jersey family, trays of cookies, and the warm-weather pageantry of Ocean City, and you have the newest Food Network reality series.
Tough Cookies, a summertime skein premiering at 10 p.m. July 11, stars sisters Susan Adair and Linda Brand as they run Crazy Susan's Cookie Co., which Adair founded in 2006 on a whim.
Based on the promos, the show is less Food than Network. "We have a big Italian family," says Adair. "We're fortunate, [mostly] in our 50s, that our parents [father Vince, who goes by Jim, and mother Carmie] are still with us. We keep very close to our family. There's never been any bad blood, ever. When things go right, we're happy. When things don't, we get through it as a family. Nothing's ever swept under the rug."
Central to the narrative is the bickering between Adair, the creative one who devises new flavors, and Brand, the first-born pragmatist from Gloucester Township who handles the books. When asked if she can bake, she immediately shoots back, "That's a definite no."
Three other siblings - Phyllis, Vince (who goes by Jamie), and Johnny - and 30 first cousins, plus nieces and nephews, round out the crew. In the first episode, the family plans an 88th birthday party for Jim and decides to create a banana-split cookie in his honor.
The story of Adair's rise in the food business is a common one: She was the hit of the party with her friend's chocolate-chip cookie recipe. "Before you knew it, I was getting, 'Could you send cookies to my clients?' I was baking them in my kitchen, 20 at a time," she said.
Even with two shops - one on the Boardwalk near 10th Street, the other on West Avenue near 14th - Crazy Susan's is still a side business for Adair, a legal secretary who lives in West Berlin.
Adair got to the Shore by way of a chance meeting. A lawyer friend suggested Ocean City as a location. Soon after, her friend Joy died of cancer. While mourning, Adair says, she ran into a friend of Joy's, "a man I wouldn't have met in a million years. I brought cookies over and told him my story" about her dream to open a shop. "He said, 'I just bought a building in Ocean City.' I went down and I signed the lease. Then I told my husband and my family. When I tell you, I jumped in without thinking about it." She started out with a folding table and two cases.
"A lot of my family helps run the business," Adair says. "I'm there at night, and whoever is running the store runs the store. ... It's easy when I have a family I could count on. I didn't have to quit" the day job.
She oversees the varieties, from standards such as the chocolate chip to her "Crazy Turtle," which is a cashew chocolate-chip cookie topped with caramel and milk chocolate.
While Adair followed a well-worn entrepreneurial path, her brush with national fame can be attributed to a more modern technique: Google. "I received a phone call from a production company last August," said Brand, of Sharp Entertainment. "He was was telling me about the shows they've done, and how he happened to Google 'cookies, family owned, crazy.' " In turn, Adair Googled "Sharp" and realized that the company, whose credits include Man v. Food and Food Wars, was legitimate.
They shot a seven-minute pilot, and Food Network bit.
Production is wrapping on eight half-hour episodes. "Most of our customers know what's going on, and they're fine," says Adair. "Our place is almost like a Cheers. People don't buy cookies and leave. I know about their whole life story. That's the kind of business it is."