This shop makes the best chocolate chip cookie in SC, Yelp says. Here’s their secret

Ken Pitcher eats one to two chocolate chip cookies every day, which is saying a lot since he’s been making them for more than 40 years.

They’re either that good or he just likes chocolate chip cookies.

The users of Yelp say it’s the former. In recognition of National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day Aug. 4, Yelp made a list of the best cookies in every state. Pitcher’s The Chocolate Shoppe in Greenville was named the best chocolate chip cookie in South Carolina.

Pitcher and his wife, Pat, bought the store from some bakers 42 years ago when it was located in a kiosk in McAlister Square Mall, which at the time was South Carolina’s first enclosed mall and largest shopping center.

But the kiosk burned down a year or so later, and the Pitchers moved the business to Lake Forest Shopping Center across Pleasantburg Drive from the side entrance to Bob Jones University.

It’s been there ever since, through the good days and bad for the strip shopping center.

The Chocolate Shoppe never faltered, even during COVID, Pitcher said. It didn’t hurt that it was located beside the now-closed but popular longtime dance studio run by Marjorie Palmer, a well-known dancer who taught all over the country. Or Bob Jones.

Pitcher said the business has grown from a simple walk-in store to one that regularly ships hundreds of dozens of cookies across the nation. It’s commonplace for the business to receive an order for National Nurses Week to be shipped to hospitals from California to New York. Or for manufacturers representatives to order dozens as a way to get in the door of businesses they hope to sell to.

They work with caterers for business events, weddings, showers, you name it. Any place someone just wants a good cookie. They now have a dozen or so varieties including the Chipwich — two chocolate ship cookies with vanilla or chocolate incing in between.

They also sell various candies and gift items.

Pitcher said what makes the cookies so tasty is they’re chewy, have high-quality ingredients (especially the chips), they’re made from scratch, and there’s “a lot of love in every batch.”

The Pitchers’ now-grown children have worked in the store and return during holidays when it gets busy to help out the eight regular employees. A granddaughter wants to one day take over the business. She just graduated from high school and is on her way to Johnson and Wales University, which specializes in food services.

Pitcher said regular customers helped the business through COVID, sometimes adding to their tabs as a thank you.

He said one of his most important business practices is good service.

“You just don’t get it like you used to,” he said.

Their website is the quaint makingtheworldsweeter.com.

He greets many people by name. Old-fashioned business. They’re not even on Facebook or any social media. Yet. Their daughter is working on that.

“People enjoy coming in and being greeted by name,” Pitcher’s daughter Tiffany Sherbert said. “It’s not scripted.”

And it doesn’t hurt that everyone who walks in gets a free cookie.