We were lucky to catch up with Eden Hertzog recently and have shared our conversation below.

Eden, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.

I left home at age seventeen, and to support myself through high school, I got a job baking at a vegan café called Imagine, in the basement of the Darling Building at the corner of Spadina and Adelaide. I worked after school from 6-10 every night, baking up vegan creations that my boss gave me creative license to do. It was a deeply creative time for me, and I experimented daily, coming up with a repertoire of original creations that were selling out everyday.

When school was finished and my friends were preparing to go to school or travel for a year, I needed a second job and decided that I didn’t want to work for anyone else and my best bet was to see if I could sell my baked goods as a way to make more money.
I designed a sample box with a few of my baked goods in it, made up a business name (it was Eden’s Edibles – that name would sell a much different product now), and asked my dad to drive me around the city for the day and drop the boxes off. The client I wanted most was The Big Carrot, being the oldest and most established health food store in the city. I cold-called them, talked to the Deli Manager (Len, bless his heart), and dropped off some samples.
After taking boxes to ten cafes and stores that day, I got home and puttered around my room. The phone rang, I looked at the call display, it read The Big Carrot. My heart was beating so fast. I picked up the phone, it was Len – he said “these are the best vegan desserts I’ve ever had in my life, we want to bring them in immediately!” I took some kind of order over the phone I’m sure, although I don’t remember. As soon as I hung up, I jumped for joy and started screaming.
I was nineteen years old, and had no idea I was launching myself into a business I would own for twenty-seven years and counting.

Eden, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up in downtown Toronto, in an old Victorian home in the heart of Kensington Market/Chinatown. My mom was a single parent, and to support our family she turned our home into a Bed and Breakfast with five rooms that were more or less full every night. My childhood was spent with strangers from all over the world, along with my sister, my mom, and a bulldog named Blossom Dearie. My grandmother also grew up in the same neighbourhood, on Brunswick Avenue, close to the family textile store on College St., back when this area was home to Jewish settlers. My grandma, one of eight girls, was the one to take over the family business (she is 105 and still has fabric for sale if you want some).
When life faced me with a challenge of how to support myself at a young age, I didn’t think twice about starting my own small business. It’s what I knew, having been raised by two strong women with Chutzpah and business acumen.

When I started the company, I had about fifty products I could make. It was all over the place. Over time, I felt a pull to streamline and make one thing well, and be known for that one thing. Cookies. That’s what New Moon does really well and what people know us for. We’ve become a staple in hundreds of homes, as people know us as “the good cookie”.

I’ve taken the approach of staying grassroots, and not going for “big business” as the way and the path. I wanted to be home with my kids, create my own hours, have peace of mind, and also have the resources to study and experience my passions. I’ve created a business that offers me this.
Around the time that I started the company, my older brother died in a fatal accident. It forged a path of inquiry and healing for me, and while building my company I also began studying and practicing healing modalities. I have continued that study and work, and will be completing a 4-year training next year to be a Core Energetics practitioner, ready to offer this offer career into the world, of supporting people heal at really deep levels.
I saw a quote recently that I loved, and it was basically that you can have it all but you need to decide what your all is. For me, my all is having a balanced life, operating an ethical and fun business, being with my kids as much as possible, and prioritizing pleasure and experience.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

I took on a distributor when I was starting out. It was small scale, but he was a big client and I was running a really small business at the time. One thing I’ve learned after all these years is that no one – NO ONE – can give you the golden answer. It can seem like it when a good opportunity comes, but ultimately, no one can save you from your own business. This guy, he was pretty smooth – a good salesman. He ordered a lot, sold a lot, but I started to notice I was chasing him for money. The balance was growing. He wasn’t paying. I was scared. It was almost Christmas and he owed me over four thousand dollars, which was a lot for me then (it’s a a lot now) and I needed it to pay my bills.

He started to ghost me. I got in the car with my friend and business consultant Sheldon, and we drove up to this guy’s house on a Friday night in December. It was snowing, and he lived alnost two hours from the city. I had his address because it was his business address too.
Got to his house, Sheldon and I walked up to his door and rang the bell. Sheldon stood next to me like a bodyguard.
He answered the door, I looked at him and said, “give me my money Andrew”. He had people over, I saw a huge roast beef on the table, which was the most ironic symbol – the vegan cookie lady demanding her money from a con artist in the middle of carving roast beef.
He patronized me and wrote me a cheque for the full amount, I thought it was a victory but the next day when I went to cash it, he’d already put a stop payment on it. He filed for bankruptcy a couple of weeks later.
I had never been so stressed, somehow I paid my bills and got through it, but it was definitely the most challenging/scariest time.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

We manufacture all of our own products, always have and (most likely) always will. The product is always the heart of the business, not the marketing or the brand, but the quality of what you offer. I dove into manufacturing with no training or experience, and have learned along the way. I started the business with a really old gas convection oven that I installed into my rented home without my landlord knowing. Yes I was a badass. Everything was mixed and scooped by hand, and I could control the quality because I literally had my hands in it and could feel and see everything I made.
Enter business growth, my first employees, and a mixer – everything had to be scaled up and translated. So much trial and error, so many bad batches, so much patience. Scaling up is the biggest challenge, and I had to do it and maintain the level of taste and quality all of my customers were used to.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.newmooncookies.com
• Instagram: @newmooncookies (also my personal one @edenarabella)
• Facebook: facebook.com/newmooncookies