A Royal Treat: Luke Parks, Zachary High Senior and Entrepreneur
With help from LSU AgCenter, teen sells cookies suited for ‘royalty’
Now a junior at Zachary High School, Luke’s longtime goal is becoming a reality with help from the LSU AgCenter Food Innovation Institute (FOODii).
Parks and his family created Royal Treats — frozen, ready-to-bake desserts developed from their secret family recipes. Their first store-ready treat is a Southern tea cake — a buttery, subtly sweet cookie with a hint of vanilla flavor.
Zachary teen collaborates with LSU’s FOODii to launch ready-to-bake dessert business
Zachary High School student Luke Parks has launched Royal Treats, a business that sells frozen, ready-to-bake desserts, according to the LSU AgCenter Food Innovation Institute, a food business incubator known as FOODii.
Royal Treats uses the Parks family’s secret recipes, passed down through generations. The first store-ready treat is a Southern tea cake, which Parks says is “a classic, old-fashioned recipe” that’s ready to “pop in the oven.”
Zachary teen’s baked goods sold in stores
When Zachary High Junior Luke Parks was in 4th grade, an entrepreneur came to speak to his class. The students were challenged to come up with a business model and present it to the class. Luke thought for a while, and decided he would propose opening a bakery. There was one problem: He was 9 and his parents both worked full time jobs.
Still, Luke was persistent, and his parents supported his enthusiasm. They came up with a compromise. They would do some beta testing with friends and family and see how their tea cake style cookies were received. Everyone agreed: They were delicious. The family then decided to scale up their enterprise and started selling boxes of their cookies every other week at church. They could barely keep up with demand.