David Liederman ’75 Dies, Leaving a Sweet Legacy as David’s Cookies Founder

David Liederman ’75, who founded the retail chain David’s Cookies and is credited with reinventing the chocolate chip cookie to great acclaim, died on July 4 in Mount Kisco, N.Y. He was 75.

His wife, Susan Liederman, told the New York Times that the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a heart attack. A resident of nearby Katonah, N.Y., he was also being treated for myelofibrosis, a rare type of blood cancer.

When Liederman started the business that became David’s Cookies with a single store called David’s Cookie Kitchen in Manhattan in 1979, he rolled out a refreshingly new version of an old favorite that skeptics might have thought needed no improvement: the chocolate chip cookie. His recipe used real butter and fresh nuts and, pivotally, instead of using the industry standard Toll House chocolate chips, he layered in hand-chopped and irregularly sized pieces of dark chocolate made by the Swiss brand Lindt and dubbed his creation “chocolate chunk cookies.” The high-quality confections were a hit, David’s Cookies grew to more than 100 stores worldwide, and his culinary style “chocolate chunk” cookies has been adopted throughout the baking industry.

Liederman’s passion for the food industry began when he was an undergraduate and intermingled with his legal studies. According to the Times, he honed his culinary skills by studying with chefs in France before doing so became a common practice for chefs around the world. While studying at Brooklyn Law School and clerking for Judge Maxine Duberstein of the New York State Supreme Court, he began taking classes at night in the culinary program at New York Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology) in Downtown Brooklyn. After earning his law degree, passing the bar, and working several months for a law firm, he decided to take a job at Troisgros, a Michelin three-star restaurant in France, near Lyons, where he worked his way up to line cook.

Liederman had an entrepreneurial bent. Before focusing on cookies, he and a partner manufactured a high-quality sauce to replace bouillon cubes, but he saw more potential in the cookie market, which was heating up at the time. His legal background helped him grow David’s Cookies, which he sold to Fairfield Gourmet Foods Corp. in New Jersey in 1995. It is still operating.

While operating David’s Cookies, Liederman also opened several restaurants in New York City including the nouvelle cuisine restaurant Manhattan Market, which featured fresh, quality ingredients that foreshadowed the farm-to-table movement. In his spare time, he wrote several books, including Cooking the Nouvelle Cuisine in America (1979) with Michele Urvater; a business advice book titled Running Through Walls: A Streetsmart Guide for the Aggressive Entrepreneur (1989); and a cookbook with freelance writer Joan Schwartz titled David’s Delicious Weight-Loss Program (1991), a how-to book that detailed the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet that allowed him to lose 100 pounds.

Liederman was one of six alumni whose stories of how they shook up the New York City culinary scene as food entrepreneurs were featured in Brooklyn Law Notes in 2009. (See page 11)