Cookie Cart has come a long way since the late Sister Jean Thuerauf started baking cookies with teens out of her Minneapolis kitchen in 1988.

After the recent opening of a St. Paul outpost, we chatted with executive director Matt Halley, 51, about the nonprofit bakery and urban youth program (two locations, 946 Payne Ave., St. Paul, and 1119 W. Broadway Ave., Minneapolis; 612-521-0855; cookiecart.org).

What’s your first food memory? My family was very casual in our eating and in our family holiday celebrations. For Thanksgiving as a kid, because my mom didn’t want to spend all day cooking a meal and wanted to spend time with the family, it was the day we ordered a pizza. We did that for a period of time when I was a kid. That was our family tradition — pizza on Thanksgiving.

What did you want to be when you grew up? I have a master’s in social work from Augsburg University. I’m a social worker by training.

How did you get involved in Cookie Cart? I was working with homeless teenagers in downtown Minneapolis. I got a call from a recruiter when the previous Cookie Cart executive director left the organization. I wasn’t looking for another job at the time. But through the interview process, I fell in love with the organization and its youth development mission and thought it was definitely a place I wanted to be. I started in 2008.

How has Cookie Cart evolved since it started? The organization has gone from small grass-roots to a fully medium-size nonprofit organization that I think is well known for having a unique and effective youth program model for teaching young people life and employment skills. What hasn’t changed over time is the bakery as the center of the program. Cookie Cart has always used the bakery as a place where young people can connect with positive adults and learn a set of skills. Over the years, we have added to the program by offering formal classroom training so you can have a lesson about leadership in the classroom and then you can go practice that leadership lesson in the bakery.

What’s your favorite dish on the menu right now? The chocolate-chip cookie is spectacular. It was actually developed by a former youth employee who went to college to become a professional baker. She came back and reformulated our chocolate-chip cookie. It’s all butter. It’s a perfect cookie.

If you had to eat or drink only five things for the rest of your life, what would they be? All things potatoes, in any possible form, would have to be at the top of my list. I love a really good baked macaroni and cheese — nothing better in my mind than homemade mac and cheese. I like to start my day with coffee and that would be pretty hard to give up. I have to recognize my family heritage and always have pizza. I’m a vegetarian, and I think a good authentic Mexican quesadilla from a St. Paul restaurant would be right up there, too.

What’s next? We’re gradually ramping up. As we start selling cookies out of the east metro from our new St. Paul location, we want to bring in more youths to keep pace with that. We have 15 youth employees right now. We’re targeting to have a 50 by the end of 2018. In 2019, our goal is to have a total of 100 youth employees.

While we have a partnership with Johnson Senior High School and we have students from Como Park Senior High School, we don’t have any geographic restrictions for where our students are from. Anybody 15 to 17 years old can come to Cookie Cart and apply for a job.

We’ve also been focused on growth and expansion to other communities and how to be better at marketing. It’s particularly fun to think about that, because there are so many youth opportunities to be involved in besides just the production part as we grow the business.