Montclair Baker Is Taking Cookies to the Next Level with Fresh-Milled Grains

Karen Merz believes a warm cookie can teach kids where their food comes from.

In a rented Jersey City kitchen, the Montclair mom puts that idea into practice, preparing orders for Next Level Grains, the small e-commerce bakery she runs alongside her career in marketing. Through fresh-milled cookies and baking kits, Merz hopes to introduce New Jersey families to grains in their whole form.

Growing up in Byram Township, Merz remembers fresh food being part of everyday life. “Instead of ShopRite, we would just go down to the farm stand on the corner and get the tomatoes and the corn,” Merz says. “But like every other American family, we grew up on Wonder Bread. I remember asking, ‘Isn’t wheat bread better, Mom?’”

That question resurfaced years later when Merz had a son of her own.

“My son, who’s 21 now, always wanted sweets,” Merz says. “We were getting these muffins from a certain bakery, and then that bakery went out of business, so I started making my own.”

In 2020, Merz began experimenting in the kitchen, looking for alternatives to conventional flour. That curiosity eventually led her to fresh-milled flour. Merz ground whole grains, like einkorn and kamut, sourced from Marksboro Mill in Frelinghuysen, into flour for cookies and scones.

“Fresh grain is kind of like fresh fruit,” Merz says. “I was very surprised at how good everything tasted. The grain helped change the flavor profile in a way that people would say brown butter does, or all the other ingredients that you can sub out.”

This summer, Merz launched the Next Level Grains website. The current lineup includes the chocolate chip Kamookie, chip-less Unikorn, and Whole Oat Cookie. Orders placed by Tuesday evening ship to the tri-state area on Wednesday, and local delivery is available in Montclair, Verona, Cedar Grove and Glen Ridge.

“I’ve been focused on young parents and their kids,” she says. Her baking kits include whole grains for families to mill and bake with at home. She has also written a children’s book to accompany the kits about a young girl who asks her farmer grandfather a seemingly simple question: Can she grow cookies?

Her question opens the door to understanding what has to grow before a cookie can ever make its way into the oven. And if a warm cookie can teach kids a little about where their food comes from, that’s a sweet place to start.