Crumbl and Traeger are actually tech companies: Some of Utah's most successful consumer-based businesses have turned into tech companies--with great results.

• Author: Beers, Heather

YOU'RE SCROLLING ON INSTAGRAM. Dance reels, pasta close-ups, tropical getaways you're not on--it all flips by in nanoseconds until everything comes to a screeching halt. What is this decadence, this temptation? You can't help but think, "Why am I pausing to watch ... a cookie?"

If you know, you know. Those maddeningly seductive posts from Crumbl Cookies are pure culinary evil. Crumbl has turned something we could all technically bake in our kitchen into something we can't resist grabbing before the next get-together.

The company even had the audacity to turn online ordering into a must-have experience. Think of the anticipation of the weekly cookie flavor reveal and the UX that tells us when our very own cookies will be toasty-melty and ready for pick-up at the store.

Crumbl has grown from its flagship store in Logan, Utah, to more than 420 stores in over 40 states in just five years--and the company credits its success to being more than a bakery.

"Right from the very beginning, we realized Crumbl needed to be a technology company and not just a cookie company," says Jason McGowan, Crumbl co-founder and CEO. "We decided we were going to make technology a part of everything."

Crumbl and like-minded companies like Traeger Pellet Grills are onto something: consumer goods that are elevated, orchestrated, and optimized by tech. They're nontech companies behaving an awful lot like tech companies, and they're developing recipes worth repeating.

For McGowan and his co-founders, tech was so important to Crumbl's early development that their first corporate hire was Bryce Redd as CTO, formerly a Facebook software engineer. His first task was to build a loyalty program, and his to-do list quickly grew from there.

"Usually in bigger brand, multimillion-dollar companies, they have the ability to have these loyalty programs," McGowan says, who started his career in tech. "When you go from one store, you can redeem the points in another store. Technology doesn't have that solved for smaller businesses, so when we got going, we decided we really needed to do this."

The Crumbl team wanted to provide a loyalty point system that customers could accrue through orders on their mobile phones, desktops, and Crumbl POS systems. "In order for that to happen, we felt like we had to make the whole system ourselves--which is really crazy," McGowan says. "If you ask anyone, they say, 'You're going to build your own POS system, your own ticketing system, and your own mobile app?'"

But by doing just that, it allowed the Crumbl team to leverage their POS to be unique, McGowan says.

"When you tap on the cookies, they magically go into the box...