When It Comes To Wellbeing, Little Rituals Make The Biggest Difference. No One Knows That Better Than Cosmic Dealer Founder Monique Foy

It all started with a mountain of croissants, a retreat, and a tongue scraper. For Monique Foy, an Australian living abroad in Paris, working in a fast-paced environment in a very urban city meant late nights, ultra-processed foods, and few — if any — opportunities to move her body. In fact, Foy recalls one attempt at a pre-work spin class that one gym was trialling. “Myself and the gym cleaning lady were the only ones that came, so they cancelled,” she says.

“No matter how hard you tried, everything was stacked against you. So, I got into this vicious circle of just clinging on to sugar as a life vest to get through the day,” says Foy. “I just sort of fell into a pile of croissants, and couldn’t get out.”

Of course, Foy was acutely aware of what this lifestyle was doing to her health — and of the fact she was painfully addicted to sugar. She could clearly see the impacts it had on her: her energy and hormone levels were all over the place, and her digestion was out of whack. She experienced such intense bloating after meals that she actually went to get a colonoscopy. She developed rosacea.

But it wasn’t until Foy decided to go on an Ayurvedic retreat in Ibiza that things slowly started to change... and she started to wrest back control. In the days after the retreat, when she returned to Paris, Foy felt so good and fulfilled that she found herself smiling on the metro— “which nobody does,” she says with a laugh.

Foy wanted to bottle up that feeling — that energy — and hold on to it. She remembered the small tool she’d been given on the final day of the retreat: a tongue cleaner. A Brazilian woman had placed it in her hands with the message, “if you take one thing away from this, let it be a tongue cleaner. It will change your life.”

And it did. That little tool, which is used to scrape bacteria, food debris, and overnight build-up off the tongue every morning to help the body detoxify, gave Foy a constant, visual reminder of what her sugar addiction was doing to her body and health. (Yes, the colour of that debris can look different based on your diet and health status.)

So, she decided to do something about it — and Cosmic Dealer was born.

Turning an addiction turned into a business that changes lives

Originally, Foy’s business manifesto was to create products that could serve as a gateway to greater wellbeing — for herself and for others. At the heart of the brand is an intense desire to help people find balance in their bodies, hence the name, Cosmic Dealer. “It’s really about trying to bring our food back to cosmic balance and to nature,” Foy says.“We went from a tongue cleaner to chocolate snacks, and it’s been a very winding road."

Initially, when Foy's loved ones heard that she was starting a business that sold tongue cleaners, they were incredulous. “My friends and family went into a complete panic, but it’s all worked out," she says. “I just really embraced the weirdness of it all, and it kind of stood out."

When she first launched her brand (under a different name), it was simply a passion project that she pursued while working a new job at a beauty startup. But after a well-known French skincare brand decided to collaborate with her, things really took off. Foy found herself waking up at 5 a.m. to work through customer service, going to the post office during her lunch break to ship orders, and continuing her work until late in the evening. Six months into the new job, she quit to work on her company full-time. 

By 2021, while trying to quell her sugar addiction, Foy had found a literal sweet spot that satisfied her cravings without the health drawbacks. The first cacao product from Cosmic Dealer—a 100% ceremonial grade cacao tablet made with Ayurvedic spices—was “really hardcore” she says. So, after feedback, she revised the product to a 75% dark chocolate square that integrated nutritious, rich nut butters for a more elevated, interesting flavour profile along with a dose of healthy fats. The squares only contain 1.9 grams of sugar (derived from dates), and are free from artificial sweeteners or additives.

From peanut butter and smoked salt squares, to wild lavender and macadamia, her unique chocolates are rewriting what sweets look, taste, and feel like.

Leaning into rituals

Whether at Cosmic Dealer or in her own daily life, Foy is all about the little changes that stack up over time: ‘What are those tiny things that aren’t too challenging to integrate into your daily routine that might actually lead to a bigger shift, or open a door that then leads to the next door?’ is a question she constantly asks herself and others.

If you want to live well, those small, consistent changes are essential. They also happen to be a key tenant of Ayurveda. “Your health is the sum of your small everyday actions,” Foy says, “not the retreat you take once a year when you're already semi-burnt out." (Of course, she notes the irony considering she began her own journey after one of said retreats.)

In tuning into natural, micro-moments for wellbeing, Cosmic Dealer has created ‘better for you’ options for three things people consume in their everyday lives: chocolate, tea, and coffee. Cutting out ultra-processed ingredients, flavourings, emulsifiers, and excess caffeine does, actually, matter in the long run. “When you look at the adult lifetime, that could actually really make a difference,” Foy says.

Founder’s stack

Foy lives the kind of lifestyle you’d imagine of someone who has built a successful wellbeing-focused brand. In the mornings, she will “wake and scrape,” using her Ayurvedic Copper Tongue Scraper. At breakfast time, she burns some Ayurvedic incense, because, well, “it turns [mornings] from rush to ritual.” Foy doesn’t drink coffee, but she will drink Herbal Koffee, one of Cosmic Dealer’s caffeine-free alternatives. And throughout the day, she will sip on herbal teas as she works.

By mid-morning, she reaches for her first “chakra”—that’s what she calls the nut butter chocolates. “I’m a huge fan of the salty fig,” she says. Second to top on her list? Either the toasted coconut with turmeric spice, raspberry and buckwheat, or wild lavender and macadamia flavours. “I always try and eat macadamias daily as well, and not many other snacks or chocolates out there actually use macadamia.”

Soon, Cosmic Dealer plans to launch two new chocolate flavours, which will include a double layer of two different nut butters. “I’m eating those at the moment. I love them,” she says. (We can attest, they’re absolutely delicious!)

'Find your purpose'

As a woman who has had to break into the largely male-dominated industries of food and chocolate, Foy has faced her fair share of setbacks—people who scoff at what she’s doing, or dismiss her, or tell her she is going about things the wrong way. But instead of letting that slow her down, she has let it fuel her.

And behind all of that is a greater mission — one powered by her own health journey — to help people find wellness in their daily rituals. It’s not about forgoing the small joys, like a chocolate treat, but finding ways to make those moments more meaningful. It’s this ethos that has provided the ignition to help Cosmic Dealer chocolates take off. So, her advice to other founders? “It really does matter if you have a purpose behind [your company], because it is so much hard work that that is really the deep motor that keeps you going.”

If you don’t have that deeper sense of purpose driving everything you do, “I would imagine that it's quite difficult to put that amount of energy and heart and make those sacrifices that you have to make.”

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