I'll be honest with you. The first batch was terrible.
Not terrible in the way that most first batches are terrible: a little flat, a little over-baked, something fixable. Terrible in the way where you eat the cookie, wait for the texture to reveal itself, and instead just get a kind of earnest sadness in your mouth. We had the function right. We had the ingredients. We did not have a great tasting cookie.
So I started over.
And then I started over again.
18 months and more batches than I'm willing to admit later, we have three cookies I'm genuinely proud of. But let me back up.
Where this started
I grew up in a house where cookies were their own love language. My mom was obsessed. She'd pull apart every bite trying to understand what made it work, what could be better, what the texture was doing wrong. That obsession with getting it exactly right is something that never left me.
For years I carried this idea around: what if you could make a cookie that tasted like the real thing, soft and chewy and genuinely craveable, but actually did something for you?
The functional food category was exploding, but almost everything in it had the same problem: it tasted like a compromise. Protein bars tasted like chalk. Sleep gummies tasted like medicine. Nootropic supplements tasted like nothing, because you were supposed to swallow them. Nobody was starting with flavor and building function in. They were starting with function and hoping you'd forgive the flavor.
That felt like the gap. And it felt like something I was uniquely positioned to close.
I called Kim.
Building it from scratch
Kim Anderson has been my best friend since we met at Stanford. She's also one of the sharpest brand builders I know, with experience across Rent the Runway, Harper Wilde and Cann Social Tonics. She knows how to build something people actually want to be part of.
We'd talked for years about building something together. Fields Good was the first idea that felt obvious. Not easy. Obvious. As in: why doesn't this exist yet?
Kim started building the brand. I disappeared into the kitchen.
The brief I gave myself was simple: every cookie had to pass two tests. First, it had to taste like something you'd actually want to eat, not something you'd eat because it was good for you. Second, the functional ingredients had to be at clinically meaningful doses. Not trace amounts added so a brand could put a word on the label. Real doses that actually do something.
That second constraint is what made the first 18 months so hard.
The problem with most 'functional' foods
Here's something the functional food industry doesn't advertise: most products are wildly underdosed. Brands sometimes put as little as 50mg of ashwagandha in a product and calls it a stress-support formula, when the clinical studies showing benefits used 300 to 600mg. The ingredient is real. The dose is theater.
We weren't willing to do that.
For the Focus cookie, we wanted 250mg of Cognizin® Citicoline, which is the dose used in clinical studies on focus and mental clarity. We wanted 3g of creatine, the recommended daily dose for cognitive benefits. For the Protein cookie, we wanted 10g of protein from a blend we formulated ourselves, because every protein blend we tried was either underdosed, chalky, or both. For the Sleep cookie, we wanted 250mg of L-theanine to actually support rest. Not a sleepy-time vibe. Actual, functional support.
Getting all of that into a cookie that tasted incredible took a long time. There were batches that were too dense. Batches where the protein killed the texture. Batches where the functional ingredients showed up in the flavor in ways we couldn't engineer around. Batches that were perfectly fine, and that we threw out because fine wasn't the standard.
What we landed on
Three cookies. Each one built around a specific need: focus and cognitive performance, protein and sustained energy, rest and recovery. Each one made with recognizable ingredients and functional additions at doses that actually matter. Each one soft-baked, chewy, and genuinely good.
The Focus cookie is mocha chocolate with espresso and sea salt. The Protein cookie is a classic peanut butter with our proprietary protein blend. The Sleep cookie is an oatmeal raisin with cinnamon, nutmeg, honey, and a relaxing sleep stack.
They taste like cookies. They do something for you. That's it. That's the whole brand.
We launched Fields Good in May 2026. It took us eighteen months to get here and I'd do every single one of them again.
Have a cookie & stay sweet.
Ashley Fields
Co-founder, Fields Good
