I’m always on the hunt for a good gluten-free bakery, so I was excited when Good Hope Bakery asked if we wanted to sample their goodies. Um, yes, please!
I’m a sucker for gluten-free cookies, but I’m also a tough critic. How will Good Hope Bakery stack up?
Note: Good Hope Bakery gave us these cookies, but the following review reflects my genuine experience and is not sponsored.
Good Hope Bakery First Impressions
First impressions are everything! Here’s what we thought about Good Hope Bakery.
Packaging
Good Hope Bakery’s packaging is adorable. It’s simple and cute, and these treats would make a great addition to a gluten-free gift basket.
I just wish the ingredients were somewhere on the packaging. You can easily find the ingredients online, which is nice, but it would be best to see the ingredients right on the item itself. As a celiac, the first thing I do is head to the ingredient label to verify that I can eat the product.
Perhaps Good Hope Bakery feels like we wouldn’t order these gluten-free cookies without knowing the ingredients, which is fair to a point, but what if I want to give them to a friend? No gluten-free person loves the “Can I actually eat this?!” panic when we see items without ingredients.
Because I’d already done a deep dive online, I knew about the ingredients and that Good Hope Bakery only uses certified gluten-free oat flour. And I like that the label highlights a big selling point: That these cookies are made in a dedicated gluten-free facility.
One odd thing I noticed is that not all the cookies had the same logos. I wasn’t sure if there was something different about the cookie that had a different logo, but then I saw that the website has both logos as well. I think I caught them in the middle of a rebranding. No biggie!
Cookies
The cookies are huge! š Do you remember Costco cookies? They remind me of those, only thinner.
The chocolate chip cookie looked pretty sad, though. It had two visible chocolate chips, and I was hard-pressed to find additional chocolate chips in the rest of that cookie. Look at the pic with the cross-section down below. There’s nothing there! If I had purchased that cookie, I would’ve been really bummed.
The S’mores cookie had a very generous amount of add-ins, so the chocolate chip had to be a fluke, right?
Website
I hadn’t heard of Good Hope Bakery before they reached out. They are a dedicated gluten-free bakery (love that!) in Springville, UT, but they ship all over the United States using priority mail.
At first, their website threw me a bit with what appeared to be a customer testimonial, but it’s just the company’s tagline or an attempt at social proof:
“The Best Gluten-Free Treats You’ve Ever Had”
-100’s of Our Customers
Good Hope Bakery has a lot of positive reviews online (more on that later), so I think it would be more powerful for them to either stick with a tagline or use a real testimonial.
I only bring this up because I immediately thought, “Oh, this gluten-free bakery must be new and doesn’t have a lot of support yet, so that’s why they did this.” Nope. I was wrong.
But when I saw this testimonial, I realized they were using them more as a marketing tactic:
“You can’t even tell they’re gluten free”
-Literally Everyone That’s Ever Tried Them
Taste Test
So, how did we like these gluten-free desserts from Good Hope Bakery? They were kind of a winner. Hear me out. I’ll organize the reviews from most favorite to least favorite.
Snickerdoodle Cookie Review
This gluten-free snickerdoodle cookie was the group’s favorite! What’s funny to me is that I’m not a snickerdoodle fan, but Good Hope Bakery’s snickerdoodle cookie was GOOOOD. Snickerdoodle cookies often taste flat and uninspired, but Good Hope’s was buttery and had a nice balanced flavor with strong notes of cinnamon and vanilla.
Also, you can tell that oat flour is used, but it’s not overpowering at all. (That’s true for all of these cookies.)
I would definitely buy their snickerdoodle cookie in the future!
Sāmores Cookie Review
The gluten-free s’mores cookie had large and generous chunks of sticky marshmallow and crisp chocolate. The flavor was very light, though. It’s not a bad cookie, it just didn’t have a lot of flavor, even with those large chocolate chunks. In fact, the chocolate is so light that I thought at first it must have been dairy-free chocolate because it just didn’t stand out as rich. The texture was great, but the flavor needed a stronger punch.
If I were at a dessert table that someone put together, I would eat the s’mores gluten-free cookie, but I wouldn’t buy it.
Chocolate Chip Cookie Review
The gluten-free chocolate chip cookie was meh, but I think that’s just because it had very few chocolate chips in it. (I’m talking like 3, maybe 4 chips max.) The cookie had a nice chewy texture and tasted like a regular basic chocolate chip cookie base.
If I were in the bakery picking out the cookies and could see that they had more chocolate chips, I would give them another chance.
Brownie (Dairy Free) Review
Here’s where things went south. The gluten-free, dairy-free brownie is slightly sour and way too salty. If I closed my eyes and someone fed me this, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that it was actually a brownie. Three people tasted the brownie, and no one liked it. It wasn’t “spit out and rinse your mouth bad,” but I wouldn’t exactly call it good either.
Megs, a trained pastry chef, tried this brownie, and she thinks that it is likely made with low-quality cocoa powder and too much baking powder.
On the plus side, the brownie has chocolate chips mixed in, which gives it a nice texture.
Ingredients
What I like about the ingredients is that they are simple and not full of fillers or things you can’t pronounce.
And while I’m happy that Good Hope Bakery offers a dairy-free option for those who need it, I like that this is not a solely dairy-free, gluten-free bakery. There are so many gluten-free treats that are free from all the top allergens, and sometimes that bums me out. Butter is a gift from the heavens, and it really elevates a lot of desserts.
Here are the ingredients for the individual treats we taste-tested so you can see for yourself how clean they are.
Snickerdoodle
Ingredients: Certified Gluten Free Oat Flour, Granulated Sugar, Unsalted Butter, Eggs, Water, Vanilla Extract, Cream of Tartar, Baking Soda, Cinnamon, Salt. Contains: Milk, Eggs
Sāmores
Ingredients: Certified Gluten Free Oat Flour, Chocolate Chips, Unsalted Butter, Granulated Sugar, Brown Sugar, Candies, Marshmallows, Eggs, Brown Sugar, Honey, Water, Vanilla Extract, Baking Soda, Salt, Baking Powder. Contains: Milk, Eggs
Chocolate Chip
Ingredients: Certified Gluten Free Oat Flour, Chocolate Chips, Unsalted Butter, Granulated Sugar, Brown Sugar, Eggs, Molasses, Water, Vanilla Extract, Salt, Baking Soda. Contains: Milk, Eggs, Soy Lecithin (Chocolate Chips).
Brownie (Dairy Free)
Ingredients: Granulated Sugar, Certified Gluten Free Oat Flour, Dairy Free Chocolate Chips, Eggs, Canola Oil, Cocoa, Water, Vanilla Extract, Salt, Baking Power. Contains: Eggs
Cross-Contact
Because this is a dedicated gluten-free bakery, cross-contact is not an issue. Good Hope Bakery uses only certified gluten-free oat flour as well.
Side note: Oats often make me feel sick, even when they are certified GF. I didn’t have a problem with the oats in these cookies.
Price
Currently, everything at Good Hope Bakery costs $3.25 per item, except the dairy-free brownie, which is $4.00.
If you want to save a little money, buy the 5-pack or 10-pack, which reduces the price per item between 25 and 50 cents, depending on what you buy.
In terms of value, the prices are very fair for a gluten-free bakery.
Menu Variety
Good Hope Bakery currently sells only six items:
- Chocolate chip cookies
- S’mores cookies
- Snickerdoodle cookies
- Sugar cookies
- Brownie (dairy free)
- Dark chocolate oatmeal cookies.
You can also get a variety pack (that’s what they sent me) with:
- 1 Chocolate chip cookie
- 1 S’mores cookie
- 1 Snickerdoodle cookie
- 1 Brownie (dairy free)
Based on their social media, Good Hope Bakery also makes seasonal items. I’m dying to try their soft-baked molasses cookie!
Reviews
Overall, we’re just a small group of people and don’t represent every food opinion out there, so we looked at the online reviews. Good Hope Bakery has 4.9 stars on Google Reviews out of 139 reviews at the time of this publication. The people have spoken and seem to really like Good Hope Gluten-Free Bakery!
Good Hope Gluten-Free Bakery: Grub It or Snub It?
Grub it!Ā While not every item was a slam-dunk winner, Good Hope Bakery has a lot of pros to consider:
- Their snickerdoodle cookie was the best one I’ve ever tasted.
- Their ingredients are clean.
- The cookies are large.
- The packaging is adorable.
If you have an opportunity, try Good Hope Bakery and let us know what you think!
Go get your grub on!
