Philly apparently didn’t get a rise out of Taylor Chip.
The Lancaster County cookie and ice cream company abruptly shuttered its stores in Center City and Fishtown in the last week with no notice. They had been open for less than a year and a half.
In an email late Tuesday, a Taylor Chip representative said the company planned to file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, which would enable it to continue operating while restructuring its financial obligations. In addition to the two Philadelphia locations, a store in Lancaster was also closed, leaving the eight-year-old company with four locations, all in Central Pennsylvania, and an e-commerce business.
The company said it had signed Philadelphia leases in late 2022 expecting a timeline and costs similar to past openings, which typically took about three months. Instead, permit delays turned what was planned as a six-month rollout into nearly two years. “Without investors, the company relied on creative financing to continue moving forward,” it said. The Philadelphia stores performed well but could not generate enough profit to offset the debt created during the delays, it said.
Taylor Chip, which launched in 2018 as a home-baking project by husband-and-wife Doug and Sara Taylor, joined a burgeoning trend of high-priced cookie shops in Philadelphia in fall 2024. The owners prided themselves on the shop’s vast cookie selection: 24 to 30 varieties available at all times. Their enormous treats, weighing more than 5 ounces and priced at $5.25 apiece, touted local ingredients and house-made inclusions.
Heavy social media marketing accompanied the September 2024 debut of a Taylor Chip beneath a nail salon at 1807 Chestnut St. in Rittenhouse, as well as the opening in a storefront at 1828 Frankford Ave., near Berks Street. Fishtowners, in particular, were irked over a lower-tech promotion that festooned parked cars with fliers made to look like tickets.
The Fishtown and Rittenhouse stores were the sixth and seventh locations for the budding business, but Doug Taylor told The Inquirer for a 2025 story on the big cookie trend that the company’s goal was to open 40,000 stores in 100 countries.
Around the time of the Philadelphia openings, Taylor Chip was pursuing plans for a multimillion-dollar production facility in Lancaster County. That project fell through last year.
Taylor Chip has been adept at securing grants, including a $470,076 Pennsylvania Dairy Investment Program grant in 2019 (later extended) to support dairy-based processing, and a $510,971 Resilient Food Systems Infrastructure grant announced in 2025 to launch ice-cream production and expand processing to new markets with Pennsylvania dairy farms.
Lately, the company has been touting its new seed oil-free protein cookie and the success of live sales on TikTok.
In December, Doug Taylor told Bloomberg News that even on a slow day, Taylor Chip can generate as much in sales in a few hours livestreaming on TikTok as the company does during a full day at one of its stores.
Taylor also said the company had hired a full-time livestream host and was building a facility in Pennsylvania with two live video studios.
This article has been updated with a company statement about the reason for the closing.
Leave a Reply