Cooee began as a post on Facebook by a single mum with four kids under seven and a discretionary spend of $17.90 a week. It’s now targeting annual sales of $14 million.
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A million Qantas passengers will this year unwrap a biscuit designed to solve one of the food industry’s thorniest problems: catering to multiple dietary requirements – vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free etc.
The cookie is made by a regional start-up, Cooee Native Superfoods, which has grown from nothing in 2023 to supply the likes of Qantas, catering giant Sodexo, and various supermarkets, while branching into pet food and targeting $14 million in revenue by 2027.
Its founder, Tezzi Daniel, is betting that allergen-friendly food is the future of mass catering – and she’s building the business accordingly. It’s a simple idea, born in the kind of circumstances that don’t usually produce national supply deals.
Triplicate
Daniel had tried to hold onto her job as a pharma sales manager after the birth of her triplets in 2012. But the mother of seven [she already had three boys in their early 20s] found herself suddenly single when the triplets were a year old. It all became too much.
She moved back to her mum and dad’s place at Jindera, a village near Albury, pulling shifts at a gym and a café to augment the single mother’s benefit.
In the Christmas of 2019, she made a gluten-free Christmas cake for a celiac relative. It went over well, so she put a picure up on Facebook: “Any of my celiac friends out there want a Chrissy cake, hit me up. 30 bucks.”
A friend’s daughter asked if it was vegan. “No, but give me 48 hours, and I’ll give it a crack.” She took out the eggs and butter, and it tasted even better, she claims.
“A few days later, I woke up to a message on Facebook Messenger from a guy who owned five IGAs in Sydney, and he wanted 500 of them.”
Her eldest son came over to help bake them, six at a time, in her home oven, while another son and his wife did up the nutritional panel. She delivered them to Sydney herself, and on the long drive home, mused on the business possibilities.
“I’m the type of person who needs to research and look up things,” says Daniel. “And I found out that Australia has the highest percentage of food allergies in the world.”
Cakes, though, had a short shelf life. So her mind went to biscuits. “Who doesn’t love a cookie? I started playing around with cookie doughs to see if I could make them plant-based, gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, soy-free, and egg-free.
“One in seven people on your aeroplane or in your dining hall aren’t being catered to with your mainstream product.”
Tezzi Daniel
“I wanted to put them in the mouth of someone that didn’t have any allergies and have them say, ‘Oh my god, these are delicious.’ It took many months, and I’m not too proud to say that I was not well off. I was on a single mother’s pension and had $17.90 left over each week after I knew that tummies were full and the lights were on.
“I used that $17.90 to buy the ingredients to test the cookies.”
She sold some to the local café, then drove down to a Melbourne bulk-wholefoods store to see if she could get her gluten-free flour any cheaper.
She told the guy what she was making, and he asked if she had any samples. She did. “He didn’t even put one in his mouth,” Daniel recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll take ten kilos of each.’”
She drove back to Albury feeling like she’d won Lotto, until she realised that 10kg of each flavour was more than 10,000 cookies. But she ended up selling 96kg over the next five weeks.
“I realised I had a product that consumers wanted, a viable business – then COVID-19 hit.”
Grow without breaking
The wheels fell off for a couple of years, but her new partner encouraged her to keep going and put $80,000 of his savings in.
Daniel registered Cooee Cookies as a company in July 2023. She was the only staff member for the first year, when Cooee turned over $294,000, outsourced baking.
After a year, she employed a woman in Wagga Wagga. “I made a commitment to myself that if the business grew, I was going to employ women in regional areas because I knew how hard it was to get a quality job out there. And some of the hardest working people we have are mothers in regional areas.”
Two months after that first hire, she was meeting with the former regional president of Mars Inc, Hamish Thomson. She’ll never forget his words. “‘Tezzi,’ he said, ‘You need to set this business up like it’s a $50 million business, because it will be. It’ll allow you to grow with speed, and it’ll allow you to grow without breaking.’”
Her son Rhyl started as her full-time chief operating officer two months later, in November 2024. “We made a glass-of-wine handshake that we were just going to hustle. Every day, we were going to send out a minimum five LinkedIn emails to procurement managers around the country.”
It took a few months before he hit up Qantas. Within a week, they were sitting at Qantas head office. “We said we’re not a cottage-industry business,” remembers Tezzi. “We want to be a big business because we can’t have an impact on country and on mob unless we are a big business.”
They landed the national carrier and expect to have a million cookies flying with Qantas this year. In July 2025, Cooee raised $1.5 million to handle the growth, to bring out a dog food, and to employ a professional leadership team.
The same week that Rhyl had messaged Qantas, he’d also sent one to the French giant Sodexo, which caters to a lot of mining camps and institutions. Like Qantas, it has large captive audiences for whom allergies and food preferences are problems.
Figures show one in seven Australians has either an allergy or an ethical food preference, says Daniel. “So that’s one in seven people on your aeroplane or in your dining hall that aren’t being catered to with your mainstream product, whereas you can put our product in front of someone who’s vegan, vegetarian, halal, kosher, nut anaphylactic, dairy allergic.”
Sodexo’s opening order was nine pallets.
Mob business
There were more boxes to tick. “I added the native foods into the cookies to pay tribute to my heritage and my grandmother, Evelyn Milson, who was a Wiradjuri woman.
“And I realised my kids are growing up, they don’t know what a bloody wattle seed is, and less than 2% of the retail products with a native food in it is owned by a mob [indigenous] business.
“And less than 5% of the natives grown are grown by Indigenous mob. It’s our food. Like our ancestors grew it for tens and tens of thousands of years, and the reason why they were so healthy is that if you look at native foods here in Australia, we’ve got the best superfoods in the world.”
In November 2025, Daniel borrowed from NAB to buy the major supplier of native foods to the Australian food service industry, Adelaide-based Creative Native. “So it’s now Indigenous-owned.”
Cooee has 20 staff, full-time and casual, spread around the country. All their products are co-manufactured in Melbourne and Adelaide.
Their new dog food, Bunji, is in 200 Bunnings and some IGAs.
Daniel is anticipating Cooee’s revenue to nudge $3 million this financial year. “We’ve set a target for $5 million next year and $14 million for 2027.”
Why does she think she’s found this niche, when she was a long way behind the early movers with allergen-free vegan products?
“Because it tastes good, for starters. But I think it’s because I’ve got a really strong team around me. We all hustle. We just keep going. The result for me is not to have a $50 million business and die rich. I’ve got eight children, seven of my own and a stepdaughter. I’ve got eight grandchildren. It’s about leaving them a legacy and having an impact on country.
“My goal is to change the 5% of [Indigenous] growers to 30% in three years. If I can do that, then grow it from there, then we’re having a real impact on the community because mob businesses help mob.
“We’re getting young people employed, we’re getting them inspired. So it’s about having impact, and that’s the driving force of everyone who works for me. They know that’s what we’re about, and I’m just really lucky they are so strongly aligned.”
