With Sweet Troo-Vi, Minnesota power couple give back one cookie at a time

The road to Sweet Troo-Vi, a line of plant-based cookies from Rebekkah Brunson and Bobbi Jo Lamar Brunson, is paved with Liege waffles.

The sweet style of Belgian waffles caught Rebekkah's attention when she was playing professional basketball overseas. "Being in a new place you're looking for something that's going to bring you a little bit of comfort," she says. "So I found the waffles. And it really was the seed to what we're doing now."

A "mad-scientist" perfectionist, she mastered the recipe and vowed to one day bring the waffles home. Fast-forward nearly two decades, home is the Twin Cities, a place to which both Bobbi and Rebekkah, now an assistant coach for the Lynx, are fiercely loyal.

True to her word, the couple launched a well-received waffle food truck in late 2018; as they began to hit their stride, the pandemic hit.

"We were like, now what?" says Bobbi. "Rebekkah said, 'I think this is a really good time to focus on being plant-based,' and we were having a harder time visualizing how we could scale up our waffles. And cookies seemed to be a perfect solution."

The signature flavors of the pair's popular waffles migrated to cookie form — the sugar-cookie based Wookie Cookie, a rich cocoa Black Magic Cookie, S'more Love Cookie and the Duchess, with chocolate chips, walnuts, caramel and cookie butter. The cookies, which they hope catch on nationally, are plant-based, preservative-free and made to share. (Order or locate stores at sweettrooviwaffle.com; a four-pack is $20.)

"They each have remnants of a Liege waffle, but with cookies we could be plant-based because that's how we live our lives, so we can be a little more true in that sense," Rebekkah says. "And we have a cookie we can stand behind."

The name Sweet Troo-Vi — from the French word trouvaille, pronounced true-vye — was rolled out with the cookies. "It was presented as 'to stumble upon a hidden gem,' and it just hit for us," Bobbi says. "Troo goes with who we are and what we want our consumers to feel — being true to who they are, spreading true love, being truly kind."

It's also their way of giving back to the community that embraced them, through donations and prioritizing working with minority, LGBTQ+ and women-owned businesses.

"We wanted to do really big things within the community, and we settled on food because in our family, we love you via food," Bobbi says. Rebekkah agrees: "Food is definitely my love language."