We recently connected with Kristen Coy & Theadora Bulajic and have shared our conversation below.

Kristen Coy & Theadora Bulajic, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

We didn’t set out to start a business. My co-founder Teddy and I have always shared a deep intentionality around food, not just eating well, but eating with purpose. For us, food is about origin, memory, and connection. It’s the meal that reminds you of a place, the ingredient that tells a story, the gesture of making something thoughtful for the people you love. It’s a love language for both of us, and creating with intention has always sat at the center of our Venn diagram.

We’d been hosting an annual dinner party together, and one year we started thinking about how to make the invitation experience itself feel more special. We wanted to bring back that sense of depth and occasion that’s largely disappeared in the age of digital invitations. So we created a box of seasonal, custom cookies designed to complement the menu we’d planned. Each cookie tied back to the theme of the evening. Our guests loved them. Then they started asking to order more. And before we knew it, we had our food handlers licenses and our first client, a Michelin-starred restaurant group. That moment handed us our North Star.

From there, we grew into a B2B luxury cookie company creating bespoke cookies for brands and events across New York. The growth was fast and entirely organic, and it all stayed rooted in that same founding principle: intention. What makes Wild Caught unique is that we are not building a product around replacement ingredients or wellness claims. We are building something with lineage, transparency, and storytelling, connecting our customers to the origins of what they’re eating and working with ingredients that elevate the product in a meaningful way. That has always been the heart of it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

At the core of everything we do is a single word: provenance. It’s a term borrowed from the art world, where it’s used to trace the origin and ownership of a work of art. It’s also where the concept of transparency as a marker of value first clicked for us. Kristen discovered this firsthand while starting her career at Christie’s Auction House, and it became a guiding principle for how we both move through the world. When you know where something comes from, when you can trace the hands that made it and the story behind it, trust follows naturally. That belief sits at the foundation of Wild Caught.

We are a luxury cookie company, but what we actually do is use ingredients as a medium for storytelling. We source specialized, seasonal ingredients that reflect what’s coming from the land at a given moment, and we use them to create products that carry meaning. Sometimes that meaning is tied to heritage. Sometimes it’s tied to a season, a place, or a feeling. And in our B2B work, which is a significant part of our business, we take that same approach and apply it to other brands. We listen to a brand director’s vision or an event programmer’s story and develop bespoke cookies that are emblematic of what they’re building. That process requires deep listening and intentionality, and it’s far more compelling to us than simply producing flavors based on what’s trending.

We believe that true luxury is not about labels or price points. It’s about rarity that comes from care. It’s the sweater where you learn about the alpaca it came from and the family that raised the animal, and suddenly the price tag makes complete sense because the value is self-evident. That texture of sourcing, craft, and story is what we find most special in life, and Wild Caught is the company we built around it. It’s founded on the principles that guide how we live, what we eat, and what we choose to surround ourselves with. We both always wanted to build something of our own, and this is it.

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

We completely self-manufacture our cookies, and we have strong opinions about why. In the CPG and food production world, co-manufacturing is often presented as the logical next step for scaling a brand. We were advised early on to explore that route, and we did our due diligence. But it never sat right with us, and for good reason.
At the core of Wild Caught is a commitment to the exact ingredients we use. We work with salt harvested from Nantucket Harbor, hand-milled flour from the Finger Lakes, and other specialized ingredients sourced with intention and care. A co-manufacturer is always going to want to replace those ingredients for regularity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness – and that completely disrupts the ethos and value of what we create. If we compromise on sourcing, we lose provenance, and provenance is the foundation of our brand.

Production is, without question, our biggest challenge. Our cookies behave differently based on the hydration of the flour, the season, the butter fat content, even the salinity of a particular batch of salt. We are constantly adjusting. Quality control requires someone deeply locked into the process at every stage, and the concept of handing that over never had much appeal. If there is one piece of advice we would offer a fellow founder, it is this: if someone is pushing you in a direction that doesn’t feel right, listen to that instinct.

As we continue to grow, manufacturing will remain in-house. We produce small batches with flavors that are often limited edition and not available year round. We are working through the challenge of scaling something inherently bespoke, and we have come to understand that more volume does not necessarily mean better. Choosing to do something slowly and properly is the right approach for Wild Caught, and we have not regretted that decision for a second.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

We are naturally social people, and we feel comfortable talking about our business in all sorts of different contexts. Much of our business has come to us organically through the spaces we’ve been in and the conversations we’ve had. We are also natural gift givers. Whenever we have meetings, we bring cookies with us, and sharing our product has become a genuine source of connection and new business.

At our core, we are connectors. We love building relationships, and that has always been central to how we operate. We lean into every thread that comes up and always follow through. We put ourselves in spaces where our product makes sense and where the clientele will appreciate the stories of provenance and the nuances that make our cookies special. By fostering our product in the right environments, we’ve seen a natural flywheel effect.

Opportunity is everywhere. Tap into the people you know, show up intentionally, come correct, and have a great product. It should sell itself from there. All you have to do is consistently follow through and deliver.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://wildcaughtcookies.com/
• Instagram: @wildcaughtcookies
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wild-caught-cookies/
• Other: Spotify: Wild Caught Curated