You can’t complain when you have a cookie in your mouth.

That’s one of the reasons why Josh Smith bakes and shares cookies with his coworkers at the University of Iowa, and has for many years. 

Smith, who in August celebrated 25 years working in custodial services, has been baking cookies in his home for a long time. He can’t remember exactly when it started, but he says he would bake cookies for his Hawkeye football tailgate and bring the leftovers to work the next Monday.

And then people started asking for them.

“Now when I show up to something, people always ask, ‘Where are the cookies?’” Smith says. “People are pretty happy to have something to snack on, a little sugar to help them go clean. I’ve never had a complaint yet — about the cookies, anyway.”

Once a week, he bakes 12 dozen at a time using a commercial mixer and commercial oven in his home kitchen. 

As a custodial training specialist and assistant manager, Smith trains every full-time and temporary custodian hired in Facilities Management. He says he’s a lifelong Hawkeye — growing up in southeast Iowa and attending Central Lee High School, whose mascot also is the hawk. 

“I came up here to go to school, and that did not pan out, so I started working at the university instead,” Smith says. He was first hired as a temporary custodian, was promoted to full-time, then over the years worked in various other custodial roles until being promoted to his current position in 2018.

Chocolate chip is his go-to cookie, but Smith also has recipes for gingerbread oatmeal with icing, no-bake chocolate oat, snickerdoodle, monster, and peanut butter.

He has a couple of tricks to getting the perfect cookie — “The more ingredients you can mix together at once, the better they turn out” — and he likes to refrigerate the dough overnight.

Smith typically doesn’t turn down requests for his cookies. He bakes for family celebrations and once contributed 60 dozen for a fundraiser. That job took him about 10 hours.

“I can turn out quite a few if I need to,” he says.

Mostly, he bakes because he enjoys it, and he likes spreading goodwill.

“There’s a lot of reward in it,” Smith says. “It just feels good to be able to give people a little joy. I can turn a stranger into a friend real quick-like.”