A line of people snaked around the sidewalk on The Street at Chestnut Hill Saturday morning, all waiting for their turn to enter a tiny storefront next to Star Market with the silhouette of a bitten cookie on its glass door.
Every weekend for the past two months, a crowd has gathered to taste The Half Cookie, a small cookie and coffee shop in Chestnut Hill. Since its opening last June, the store has quickly racked up social media fame, garnering viral reviews on TikTok—some with as many as 50,000 likes.
According to Danielle Velez, the store’s owner, online publicity has been instrumental to The Half Cookie’s success.
“It’s really cool, just to see what self-generated social media can do for a company, because we’ve never paid for marketing or anything,” Velez said. “So as a small business, it’s such a game changer for us and our team.”
Velez started The Half Cookie in 2021 through a series of pop-ups in the Seaport area and online orders after cookie-brainstorming sessions in her kitchen.
“This is something that I started from my kitchen,” Velez said.
Velez explained that the pop-ups gained considerable social media support in the beginning, but it was nothing compared to the extent of the store’s current social media buzz.
“We’ve always had a pretty strong social media presence,” Velez said. “It’s been crazy. I thought that we had experienced viral moments before, but it was nothing to this caliber.”
The Half Cookie made the switch from pop-ups to retail in 2024 through the Seaport’s incubator shops—spaces for businesses to experience retail for three months—before moving to The Street. The store’s Chestnut Hill location was originally supposed to last for only 10 months, but The Half Cookie recently extended its lease for another year and a half, according to Velez.
“For us, as a small business, it’s a really nice way to kind of dip our toe into a retail space because we’ve started from the ground up,” Velez said. “We don’t have any investors or anything like that. So we obviously want to take risks, but we don’t have any money to build off of except what we’re generating on our own.”
The Half Cookie’s background in pop-ups inspires the slogan on its website, proclaiming that “The Half Cookie is more than just a cookie. It’s a Boston experience.”
“I feel like our business grew from the relationships with other small businesses and entrepreneurs that I’ve met,” Velez said. “People in Boston, I feel like this area, they really do try to support local businesses.”
Velez said she also received lots of support from local, women-owned businesses.
“I’ve met so many other wonderful female entrepreneurs that we’ve learned from each other, and I feel like we kind of created this small-business community,” Velez said.
Employee Matt Kern said he is proud to be part of a female-owned business.
“I think knowing that it is a woman-led business makes me feel like I’m really part of something special,” Kern said.
While “The Half Cookie” wasn’t Velez’s first choice for the name of her cookie store, it felt relevant to the cookies’ place in her life at the time.
“When I went to get a website domain, one of the … names that I had was already taken,” Velez said. “When I first got started, I had just had my first daughter, Audrey … She would fall asleep on me, so I would be stuck there for hours, and I made like a huge cookie. So we would joke that I would eat half in the morning and then half in the afternoon.”
The name speaks to the size of the cookie and its impact: a sweet treat that motivates you through an entire day. Additionally, the name “The Half Cookie” left room for Velez and her husband, who was very active in the store’s evolution, to explore other treats within the store.
“We always knew that we wanted to do more than just cookies—like we love coffee,” Velez said. “The Half Cookie is kind of meant to be like, whatever that other half is that we want to grow into … Right now, coffee has been a really big part of our business as we expand.”
While customers mostly come to The Half Cookie for their cookies, Madison McCall, MCAS ’27, Sydney Orland, MCAS ’27, and Abigail Shalgian, CSON ’27, said they come for the coffee.
“The cookies are really good, but I think we mostly come for the coffee,” McCall said. “I like getting to switch it up with inventive flavors.”
The Half Cookie has a consistent cookie menu of five base flavors and five seasonal flavors, which change monthly. This variation in cookie flavors is a model other trendy cookie shops use, like popular cookie chain Crumbl Cookies, which switches its flavors weekly.
The Half Cookie’s current base flavors are brookie, sea salt nutella, salted Twix, chocolate chip, and Funfetti, while its seasonal flavors are mini Cadbury, peanut butter, Butterfinger, Dubai chocolate, and Lucky Charms, according to Kern.
“So we try to have [our flavors] be around any holidays that are coming up or seasonal flavors that are really popular,” Velez said.
Customers enjoy seasonal flavors so much that The Half Cookie decided to have “flavor battle” polls on Instagram to decide which flavors to release from “the vault.”
“We always try to get feedback from people,” Velez said.
With a line forming every weekend, customers usually wait 30 minutes to an hour to get into the store, starting from when it opens at 10 a.m. until around 4 p.m., according to Velez.
So while McCall, Orland, and Shalgian waited in a long line one Sunday, Velez rewarded the customers’ endurance with a cookie appetizer.
“They’re so nice,” Shalgian said. “ We [were] in line on Sunday—and a really long line—and they brought out free mini cookies for everyone that was waiting.”
According to Kern, though the store closes at 7 p.m., The Half Cookie sells out of all their cookies at around 5 p.m. every day. Velez stressed that she only has a team of four employees, most of whom have full-time jobs. The rise in Half Cookie fame happened so fast that it was hard for her and her team to keep up.
“From January to February, we doubled our sales, and then we doubled it again from February to March,” Velez said. “So right now, we’re operating with the same team, but doing like, four times the amount of everything. … We never expected to do this kind of volume.”
Employees prep 500 to 1,000 cookies each day, and the process behind each cookie is intricate and requires multiple steps.
The dough sits for 24 hours in order to chill and marinate in its flavor in The Half Cookie’s production kitchen in Winthrop before being transported at 5 a.m. from Winthrop to Chestnut Hill by either Velez or her husband. The Half Cookie’s store on The Street is only 400 square feet, including the bathroom. It contains no kitchen, just a walk-in fridge to store the dough.
“So really, we’re operating out of, like, a 200-square-foot space, which is just a lot [to manage], which I think explains the lines on the weekend,” Velez said.
Velez hopes to expand her team, especially since she plans to open another store in Winthrop and hopes to set up an online delivery service for her store.
“We’re just kind of waiting to have the bandwidth to be able to roll that out,” Velez said. “We just need more hands on deck.”
Despite the hectic nature of running a buzzing small business, Velez said she is not willing to sacrifice The Half Cookie’s quality, a trait that makes its cookies stand out from competitors.
“One thing that [makes our cookies] really stand out is the quality of ingredients that we use, which is extremely hard nowadays with the prices of everything,” Velez said. “We just refuse to compromise on that.”
And for The Half Cookie’s employees, baking is a labor of love.
“Because we’re a small batch institution, we try to bake with the highest quality ingredients, and we put our heart and soul into it,” Kern said.
Velez said she is surprised and appreciative of The Half Cookie’s overwhelming success.
“This has all been very surreal to be honest,” Velez said. “I’m grateful to everybody. And, yeah, it’s just really exciting to see people care about your business. It feels really surreal. It’s like, the only word for it.”
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