Joseph Semprevivo This Class of '97 graduate is all smiles as cookies roll of the conveyor belt (pictures below) at his manufacturing plant in Deming, N.M.

The boy within him takes over when Joseph Semprevivo tells the story of Joseph’s Lite Cookies. The 12-year-old entrepreneur emerges, eager to share his sugar-free treats with other diabetics, and it’s easy to see how the kid from Deming, N.M., managed to turn his passion into a sweet success.

“At the age of 9, I was diagnosed with diabetes,” Semprevivo tells Mary Jo Billiot’s accounting class at New Mexico State University. “My parents had an ice cream shop, so every day after school I was making ice cream. You can imagine the challenge that was.”

Challenges, the class soon learns, have never stopped Semprevivo.

The NMSU graduate is 32 now, president and chief executive officer of the cookie company he and his parents founded in 1986. He can give the students tips on the etiquette of exchanging business cards in Japan and talk about “the three Ps – performance, productivity and profitability” – but the story of Joseph’s Lite Cookies is very much the story of a boy.

When he was 12, and tired of making ice cream only for others to enjoy, Joseph announced to his parents that he was going to make a sugar-free version.

“It was strawberry and it tasted great – until it was frozen,” he recalls. “It turned out like a block of ice.”

His father tinkered with the ingredients until he solved that problem. And he drove the boy from store to store in New Mexico to sell his new product.

It had Joseph’s picture on the label, and a personal message: “At 12 years old, I created this delicious, sugar-free ice cream for all diabetics and health-conscious consumers.” How could a store manager resist when the young salesman came calling?

It was a busy routine for a school boy, but “I really enjoyed making this ice cream and sharing it,” Semprevivo says.

Then one day, when Joseph was about 15, he put up a thousand pints of ice cream. Overnight the electricity went out and the ice cream melted and refroze, crystallizing in the process.

“We had to throw it away,” he says. “A day later I put up a thousand more pints and the system went down again that night. So I got out of the ice cream business and into cookies.”

The first sugar-free cookies his mother made brought tears to the young diabetic’s eyes, they were so good. And they didn’t need a freezer.

So began Joseph’s Lite Cookies. The enterprise grew gradually but steadily, one store at a time in the beginning. Selling to mom-and-pop stores in the area was not difficult, but getting into the major supermarket chains took years of effort and countless sales calls.

“Initially the cookies went to almost 200 stores in New Mexico and El Paso,” Semprevivo says. “Now we have almost 100,000 stores in 28 countries. We produce more than two million cookies a day at our Deming plant and this August we will go to 8.9 million a day. My cookie is the number one selling sugar-free cookie in the United States.”

The company now produces nine flavors of sugar-free cookies, sugar-free brownies and cakes, three flavors of fat-free cookies and a sugar-free maple syrup as well as sugar-free peanut butter, chocolate chips and a sweetener that’s available only through Joseph’s Lite Cookies.

Although originally created for diabetics, the cookies are now popular with all cookie eaters. Semprevivo says celebrities are some of his cookies’ biggest fans, and he can rattle off a long list of TV shows on which the stars have been seen eating Joseph’s Lite Cookies – “Friends,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Will and Grace” and “Seinfeld” among them.

The company’s booming business means its 48,000-square-foot Deming plant is about to undergo a $3 million expansion. The company will add about 25 employees at the manufacturing plant and another five at its administrative headquarters in Sebastian, Fla., bringing the total work force to 68.

Persistence and the personal touch were the keys to success for the 12-year-old entrepreneur with his picture on his ice cream label, and they are a big part of the Joseph’s Lite Cookies culture today. Semprevivo believes in empowering and rewarding his employees, whom he refers to as team members.

“I tell my teammates as long as I have a company you have a job,” he says. “It’s lifetime employment, but you have to be committed to your job.”

To assure quality, five team members have the authority to shut down the manufacturing plant, he says. “If one of the five says ‘I don’t like this product,’ it gets tossed.”

Semprevivo has had offers to buy his company but he has turned them down.

“What they do is buy your company, shut it down and move to another country,” he says, adding that he is “100 percent opposed to outsourcing U.S. jobs. If you don’t have a job in the United States, how can you buy those cheap products?”

Semprevivo, who graduated in 1997 with a business administration degree, returns to his alma mater periodically as a member of the NMSU Business Advisory Council, which helps the College of Business Administration and Economics develop its programs and objectives. When he does, he brings a message for students:

“As a New Mexico State student, you might think, ‘How can we compete with graduates of more prestigious programs?’ Let me tell you, you can compete with graduates from any university in the country, Harvard or whatever. You can go toe-to-toe.”

Semprevivo appears on the QVC television shopping channel at least once a month and is working on a one-hour Joseph’s show that will feature all of his products to more than 80 million consumers.