Late July Snacks

“We signed up Whole Foods nationally. We got two big distributors.”

“Gary Hirshberg was a great mentor to us, and he helped us structure a deal that still effectively gave us control of the board, which allowed us to really still control our destiny. And at this point, we were profitable, you know, so, like, we were a good addi…”

“I mean, we only ever had about 27 people.”

“Whole Foods decided, they said that they would give us a chance, but they launched us at the exact same time as Kettle decided to get into the tortilla chip business with a brand called Tia's. So Whole Foods launched us at the same time, but they gave Tia's al…”

“They should have been like three times as expensive as what we were charging for them.”

“And I went to the cracker section, and it was like, you almost had to, like, take a time machine into the section of the store. And I thought, that's a huge category in the conventional world. And, you know, nobody really seems to care about it in the natural …”

“You go through probably 10 to one bags of potato chips to boxes of crackers.”

“And I think when you sign up to be an entrepreneur, you sign up. You don't necessarily get to bring those other people along with you, and that includes your family and friends or any early angel investors you have. You know, you have to be realistic about, ev…”

“So we had this large equipment loan, and at the time, you know, interest rates were so low that most banks were, like, kind of upside down in some of these, and we had a death of a member clause in our loan agreement, and we were an LLC, and my dad was a membe…”

“And I always feel like there's two ways to be successful. You can be a big part of a small category, or you have to be a smaller part of an enormous category.”

“The only way to help the organic food movement grow was to make delicious tasting products that people would like back into finding out about how They were made.”

“And, you know, what was so hard, though, is even though this great organic product Laws had passed. There was still no suppliers. So, I mean, there was maybe one supplier of flour, one supplier of cheese, one supplier. I mean, it was very hard.”

“What I now realize in hindsight is whenever you take a strategic investment, whether or not you intend to sell them the business, you should expect that to be the outcome. And the earlier you can know that when you're negotiating, probably the better.”

“And, I mean, I tell everyone I talk to, like, if you get debt, get key man insurance.”

“No, it's very hard. It's a completely different part of the store. Sometimes it's different buyers. I mean, and usually it's very difficult for a brand to go into two different categories like that.”

“We realized that the cookies were never going to be a profitable part of our business. It was two million dollars of our sales, but the right thing to do was to discontinue them.”

“We did have a clause in our agreement that allowed us to buy it back in the event that Snyder's sold. But apparently they didn't sell. They merged.”