Made By Marge
By the time she graduated from Stanford, Fort Worth native Margaret Peus thought she had her future mapped out. She’d studied biology, flirted with medical school, and landed a job in life sciences consulting. It was steady work, with long days at home, video calls, and quiet hours at her laptop. Yet somewhere in between projects and deadlines, Peus found herself in the kitchen, running what amounted to edible science experiments: A/B testing chocolate chip cookies.
“I really did treat it like lab work,” she says during a phone interview. “One batch would be too thin. Another too chewy. A tweak here, a change there.” Her friends became taste testers, and the praise came quickly and then consistently. “This is the best chocolate chip cookie I’ve ever had, they told me.”
Made By Marge
That was the breakthrough. That was the recipe.
Today, Peus is the founder of Made By Marge, a frozen, ready-to-bake cookie dough business that’s quietly taking over the DFW area. She sells at farmers' markets, handles porch pickups, and ships orders through her website. Most recently, she landed in two Dallas Foxtrot locations, a milestone that made her realize her side hustle might just have legs.
It’s still technically a side hustle. Her nine-to-five is with a women’s health supplement company called Needed, but the frozen cookie dough has grown into something bigger than a pandemic-era project.
“Honestly, running this has been like running a logistics company,” Peus says. “Finding commercial kitchens, figuring out shelf-life testing, hauling freezers to farmers' markets. It’s a lot more than just making cookie dough.”
The secret, she says, is simple: ingredients you can pronounce and a recipe your grandmother would recognize. Organic flour, pasture-raised eggs, grass-fed butter, and baking soda as the only preservative.
“I bake with the kind of ingredients I’d want at home,” she says.
There are three versions of her dough: the original, a “healthier” line with the higher-quality eggs and butter, and a gluten-free option that’s surprisingly indistinguishable from the standard recipe.
“A lot of gluten-free cookies out there don’t taste good,” Peus says. “Mine, well, people are shocked when they realize they can’t tell the difference.”
Her cookie obsession started in college, during a stint at Stanford. Peus, who has Cowtown roots, lived with a roommate from Palo Alto whose family became her second home.
“We’d go to her house for dinner, and there were always chocolate chip cookies,” she says. “That’s where it started. There’s something about a cookie that makes everyone feel at home.”
Made By Marge
Back in North Texas, Peus runs her business with family help. Her sister handles Fort Worth fulfillment, experimenting with Tuesday pickup windows to stoke demand. Another sister sparked the idea to pivot from baked cookies to frozen dough. And her husband has endured freezer after freezer shoved into their apartment.
Her customers keep fueling the work. At markets, on Instagram, and through word-of-mouth, Peus hears the line she’s come to expect: “These are the best cookies I’ve ever had.” She admits, half-joking, that if she doesn’t hear that exact phrase, she starts to worry that something went wrong with the batch.
And even though Made By Marge is only a side hustle, Peus seems content to grow at her own pace, one freezer, one farmers’ market at a time. For her, the real joy isn’t just the cookies, it’s the community.
“I’ve met so many people I never would have otherwise,” she says. “Other vendors, customers, families at the market. That’s been the biggest gift.”
And then she jokes. Why cookies? Why dough? Why the long hours, the delivery stress, the endless logistics?
“Because cookies are delicious,” she says.
