Four Generations of Bakers| Liddy Romero, Romero Cookies
Romero Cookies
Made in America: Liddy Romero, Romero Cookies
The phoenix on a tin of Romero Cookies is older than the company that prints it. It goes back to 1946, to a bakery in South Texas owned by Liddy Romero’s great grandparents, which burned to the ground and was rebuilt by a family that didn’t see another option. The bird has stayed with the Romeros ever since, and when Liddy started her own company nearly eighty years later, she knew the phoenix needed to be part of it.
Baking runs four generations deep in her family. Her grandparents opened a bakery in Edinburg, Texas, in the 1950s, and it is still open today. Her parents opened theirs in McAllen the year she was born and spent the next forty years selling the family’s cookies across the counter. Liddy grew up in that world, among trays of fresh Mexican and American treats, and the cookies that now carry her name were already fixtures at weddings, quinceañeras, and family gatherings in the Rio Grande Valley long before anyone thought to put them in a box and ship them.
For most of her adult life, though, she worked far from a kitchen. Liddy has lived in Denver for sixteen years, and for most of that time she ran WorkLife Partnership, a national nonprofit she founded to support low income workers and the employers who relied on them. She led it for sixteen years and raised three children along the way.
Then came 2024, a year she describes as the one that knocked her off course and reminded her where she came from. Her website describes it, with some restraint, as a year of change in both her career and her personal life. What she talks about more readily is what she did next. She left the career she had built, put her own money into something new, and in October of that year started Romero Cookies around the recipe her father had used for four decades.
The cookies themselves are simple, which is part of the appeal. Romero cookies features three varieties of cookie. Luna is the traditional Mexican wedding cookie, a buttery shortbread with toasted pecans under a dusting of powdered sugar. Valentina is heart shaped and flavored with cinnamon and pecan. Stella, the nut free option, is a small cinnamon sugar star. In South Texas these cookies are called pan de polvo, a name Liddy has since learned does not travel much beyond the border region. Her father’s recipe uses no more than eight ingredients, and every batch is sugared by hand while the cookies are still warm.
She makes them all herself. Liddy bakes, packs, and ships every order from a commercial kitchen in Denver. She likes to say the business is rooted in Texas and baked in Denver. In practice that means hauling fifty pound bags of flour across a kitchen floor, running small batches through a depositor, and sealing vintage tins by hand before they go into the mail.
None of this came with a manual. Liddy had no background in consumer products when she started and, as she puts it, has done all of it on her own. What she brought from her previous life was a sense of discipline about where to spend effort. Rather than pursue every retailer who showed interest, she narrowed the business to gifting, where a cookie with a family history behind it has a real advantage over the chocolate boxes and snack towers that fill most corporate budgets. Romero Cookies now offers custom logo tins, bulk pricing, and shipping to multiple addresses anywhere in the country. The company is a certified woman owned small business and diverse supplier, and it can turn around large orders quickly.
The gifting focus is not an accident of the market. Liddy spent a long time watching what happens when a company invests in making their employees feel valued. A tin of cookies sent with a note is a modest gesture. But it is one that says someone noticed, and in her hands it also carries a piece of South Texas to a desk far from the Valley.
The response she hears most often is some version of the same sentence. The cookies taste like home. They remind people of their grandmother. For a recipe that spent forty years behind a single counter in McAllen, that reaction is the whole point, and it is the part of the business she seems to take to heart.
Her website lays out the company’s values as if they were a recipe, with gratitude as the base and con ganas, a phrase that means roughly to do something with real heart, folded in. It reads less like branding than like instructions she has written for herself. Talking with her, you get the sense the company is held together by exactly that: a willingness to keep going when the margins are thin and the flour is heavy, because the thing she is carrying forward was never just cookies.
Entrepreneurs like Liddy reflect the values that keep American small businesses moving: resilience, and a deep commitment to the people around them. At the USHBC, we are proud to highlight founders whose work shows how a family recipe can become a business that honors where it came from and helps power America’s economy.
For Liddy, Romero Cookies is more than a product line. It is evidence that what her family built in South Texas can be rebuilt by hand, one tin at a time, and shared with people who have never set foot in the Valley.
Holiday Orders
Romero Cookies has a limited supply of tins for the 2026 holiday season. Orders can be placed now and scheduled for later delivery. Gifts range from $24 to $72, with free ground shipping on orders over $50. Corporate buyers can request a quote or contact Liddy directly through the corporate gifting page.
To learn more, visit:
romerocookies.com
Corporate gifting
Luna Mexican Wedding Cookies tin
Gift Tasting Set
Mix and Match Cookie Bags
Instagram: @romerocookies
LinkedIn: @Liddy Romero
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