Meet the founder who started over at 50 and worked 20-hour days to build a multimillion dollar cookie dough empire—and still won’t take a day off

At 50, most people are thinking about winding down; Kathryn Bricken decided to start again. The Miami-born founder turned a side project—balling cookie dough with an ice-cream scoop in her garage—into Doughlicious, a multi-million-dollar sweet-treat brand that produces more than a million cookie dough and gelato bites every single week. Her route there was anything but straightforward. Bricken says she was “food-obsessed” long before Doughlicious—cooking with her mum, working the tills at Publix—but spent her early career in corporate America; first as a Legislative Correspondent in Capitol Hill, then in health care policy work with a senator before becoming a lobbyist at the Health Insurance Association of America. Her taste of entrepreneurship came after falling pregnant with twins, followed by another baby soon after. With three children under 3, Bricken decided she needed a job she could manage while they slept. “Which is how I began making decorative cakes and cookies,” she tells Fortune . “They had to be beautiful but also taste amazing and, of course, be better-for-you.” “It wasn’t easy. I remember starting catering jobs, making cookies and not going to bed until 4 a.m., only to be up again at 7 a.m. to be a mom.” When the family relocated to London in 2008, Bricken suddenly realized that Brits had biscuits—not the soft, gooey American-style cookies and cookie dough she grew up with. Without even planning it, she had serendipitously found a gap in the market of her new home. Bricken did everything herself in the early days. “I’ve worked 20-hour days to make it all happen as we scaled,” she says. Gripping mixing bowls so relentlessly that she destroyed the cartilage in her thumb joint entirely, eventually requiring surgery and a full replacement. Then, in June 2019, she found a lump. Stage 1 breast cancer. A lumpectomy followed, then rounds of radiation—all while continuing to run the company. “Having a focus such as Doughlicious was a blessing,” she adds. “I…