Sustainability with a Crunch from Hippie Snacks
By Lorrie Baumann
Hippie Snacks is launching into the nationwide American better-for-you snacks market from its foothold on the West Coast with a product line that includes Almond Crisps, Avocado Crisps and Cauliflower Crisps – all intentionally made in a format that suggests conventional tortilla chips for consumers who are looking for more nutrition in their snacks. “Our objective is to be the premier better-for-you snack in North America,” said Founder and President Ian Walker. “The products we’re making are really resonating.”
Walker began by making nut butters that he distributed locally in western Canada and then evolved into snack products from there. “We were early pioneers for organics with nut mixes, trail mixes and organic popcorn,” he said. “We wanted to build a business that was about sustainability and that was a business we could be proud of.”
As the organic market matured, Walker felt like it was time for his company to transform into a company that was less focused on organic foods in general and more on better-for-you snacks, which offered the advantage that his consumers bought and consumed snacks more often than they bought some of the other products he’d been making. “If people like your product, and they’re a regular consumer, they may eat it every day or week. Your passionate followers will buy your products very frequently. I like the nature of that – you can build a relationship,” he said.
Despite the logic of that, Walker wasn’t seeing many snack foods at local natural foods markets. “We saw that as a big, open space,” he said. “We continue to see that.”
The company entered the U.S. market on the West Coast two years ago with Cauliflower Crisps, which looked like tortilla chips but were made out of ground cauliflower rather than ground corn. “You’re making it out of real food, and people really get that,” Walker said. “At the core of it all, our products have to taste good. Too many better-for-you snacks don’t.”
Beyond that, some of those better-for-you snacks just seem weird to shoppers scanning the aisles for their next snack food purchase – a problem with which Walker was familiar from his early days of making snacks, when he felt that his clusters of dehydrated vegetables weren’t being appreciated in the way that their real snack potential deserved. “I just loved the taste of them, but they were really expensive, really hard to make, and they weren’t in a format that people are accustomed to snacking with,” he said. “I feel like, right now, either products are better-for-you-lite, or they are better-for-you, but they’re very unapproachable: really expensive, or not in a format that people are familiar with.”
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When he visited snack aisles in conventional supermarkets to look at what consumers were buying instead, he couldn’t help but notice that tortilla chips, which didn’t meet his standards for a healthy snack, nevertheless had a fan base that his products couldn’t match, even though he felt that the snacks that he’d been making actually tasted better as well as offering better nutrition. He decided that he needed to make a snack that people would understand and appreciate the way that they understood tortilla chips. “It makes it approachable and not too weird,” he said. “We make it in a format that you’re familiar with – you understand chips and crisps.”
Figuring out how to turn cauliflower into a crunchy bite that looked like a tortilla chip took some ingenuity because there was no machinery on the market that had been designed to do that. With some creativity, Walker’s team was able to figure out how to modify standard equipment to grind whole cauliflower, blend it into uniformity and bake it into a crisp. “It’s really pretty simple; grind, mix, bake,” Walker said. “It’s minimally processed so that you taste the real food. That’s really important and consumers want that.”
Avocado Crisps were the next product to be developed after a year of development and testing. Almond Crisps are the newest in the line. Like the others, Almond Crisps are made with real ingredients – the almonds come from California farmers that pass a Hippie Snacks farmer score card that rates them on practices around tillage and irrigation, the sustainability of the farm’s water sources, protection of riparian areas and other items. “Some of these initiatives can have a large overall impact,” Walker said. “Some farmers are better than others.”
Those farmer scores form part of the basis for Hippie Snacks’ own environmental protection scores on the evaluations it performs as part of its B Corporation certification. “For us, this is a core part of what we do as a business,” Walker said. “When we did our footprint analysis, the biggest impact is how the food is grown…. We do farmer score cards and supplier assessments around these areas. It’s not really sexy for consumers. It’s just the right thing to do.”
How the food is grown accounts for about 55 percent of Hippie Snacks’ environmental impact score. Packaging accounts for another 2 percent; transportation of the ingredients to the plant in western Canada and of the snacks to market accounts for another share of the impact. The company’s sustainability is also measured in terms of its own manufacturing practices and how it treats its employees. Hippie Snacks employees get a monthly bonus if they eat organic food at home, for instance. “If they bike to work, they get a $125 a month bonus,” Walker said. “If they take the bus to work, they get a $75 a month bonus.”
Walker doesn’t usually talk too much about the company’s sustainability initiatives – he’d prefer to sell his products on the merits of their taste, their minimal processing and their affordable price. But, though he doesn’t talk about it often, sustainability is a core value for the company, Walker said. “It’s what we do. It’ll resonate with some people, or it may not, but it’s still the right thing to do,” he said. “We’re a completely non-GMO company. We avoid any ‘dirty dozen’ ingredients. About half our portfolio is organic and about half is natural and non-GMO…. We want to have it so that most people can eat these snacks. Sometimes this results in some tough conversations around sourcing with almonds for example. I know that I can get them from a clean-source farm, and we can make a product that I can feel good about. If we’re going to win over the masses, our products need to be at the right price point and not too weird that people don’t get it.”
Shelf-Stable Creamy, Crispy Snack Bars
By Lorrie Baumann
Super Pop Snacks is a brand of snack bars based on nut butters. They’re gluten free, non-GMO and contain no refined sugars along with 10 grams of plant-based protein per bar. “It’s creamy and crunchy, not packed with protein powders. We’re making this snacks to help feed a healthier family and future,” said Melissa Wessely, Founder of Super Pop Snacks.
Wessely founded her company in 2016, while she was working full-time and wanted a convenient snack for her six-year-old daughter. At the time, she was doing some of her family’s grocery shopping at a small health food store next to where she was working, but she wasn’t finding snacks there that offered the taste that her daughter demanded along with the nutrition that she required. She decided to try making her own in her apartment kitchen. “I came across crispy quinoa at Whole Foods and thought I could do something with that,” she said. “I was trying to get my daughter to eat something nutritious, and my neighbors were having the same trouble. So I started making the snack bars for our family and the neighbors.”
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She took the bars around to her health food store and then to another, and they started selling. When she’d outstripped the capacity of her home kitchen, she found a bakery where she could make her bars after hours and then took them to southern California farmers markets. “My husband helped us at the farmers market, my daughter too,” she said. “We did that every Saturday – it was a family event.”
Sales of the bars have since outstripped Wessely’s ability to make the bars on her own, so she found a co-packer to make the bars to her recipe. Her husband, who has a background in graphic design, offered his services to build her a website, and the company launched on Amazon a couple of years ago. The bars have now been offered for sale in more than 300 locations, including juice bars, hotels and coffee shops. The bars are labeled for individual sale at $3.29 to $3.49. Online, Super Pop Snacks offers a box of 12 bars for $34.99.
“I grew up as an athlete, running cross-country and track. I always ate healthy. Using that background as an athlete and my operations background and knowing how to sell works great for starting a business and becoming a woman entrepreneur,” she said. “I have a natural entrepreneurial spirit. I always wanted to do something that was mine and provided a product or service that can help people.”
Ethel’s Baking Company: Gluten Free and Decadently Delicious Dessert Bars
By Lorrie Baumann
Even an accomplished baker has days when the only feasible option for a fresh-baked treat is a quick stop at the market. A baker with a family member who has celiac disease doesn’t always have that option, according to Jill Bommarito, who comes from a family with a 40-year long history of celiac disease, an autoimmune disease in which the body responds to gluten by damaging the digestive system.
Bommarito doesn’t have celiac disease herself, but she does follow a gluten-free diet that many others in her family require, and over the years, she’d become a proficient home baker. “I couldn’t walk into a bakery and find something that was of a quality level that I could make at home,” she said. “You could do that with cheese, in every department except bakery…. You can find the meats and the amazing yogurts and the Italian aged vinegars. You just can’t find that in bakery – ridiculous flavor that you can put on a plate and no one would know you didn’t bake it yourself…. I like to bake, but I don’t want to bake every single thing in my life forever.”
That quality concern is even more serious for someone whose health depends on avoiding gluten, since local bakeries often don’t have the ability to offer products that are made in a dedicated gluten free facility that can guarantee that there’s no cross-contamination by gluten, Bommarito added. She responded to the conundrum by founding Ethel’s Baking Co., the company she named after the grandmother who taught her to bake and who also gave her the confidence to know she could do whatever she wanted if she really set her mind to it.
The company was born out of a holiday party she hosted for her entire family. At the time, she was pursuing a thriving career in residential real estate, so her time for baking was limited, but for her party, she baked her Pecan Dandy dessert bars so her family members who couldn’t tolerate gluten would have a dessert they could enjoy. “I had a holiday party for my whole family, who liked to gripe about gluten-free food,” she said. “But the conventional eaters were gorging on the Pecan Dandies.”
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That observation brought to the surface a feeling she’d been having for some time – that even though she’d just come off a record year in real estate sales, that wasn’t what she was really supposed to be doing. “I felt deep down that I was supposed to be doing something that brought joy to people. I knew it was going to be food,” she said.
She started Ethel’s Baking Co. in a church kitchen in Detroit, Michigan, and started selling her gluten-free baked goods at farmers markets and then at Detroit’s Eastern Market. From there, she expanded to the rest of the Midwest through Whole Foods. In those early days, her product range included cupcakes and cookies as well as the dessert bars that included the original Pecan Dandy, but over time, she refined that down to the dessert bars, although she recently added small batches of chocolate chip cookies back in. The line of dessert bars now includes Cinnamon Crumble, which tastes and smells like an old-fashioned cinnamon roll; Raspberry Crumble, which has a shortbread crust and tastes like a fresh raspberry pastry; Blondie, which has the indulgence of a brownie along with buttery flavor and chocolate chips; Turtle Dandy, which offers crushed pecans and chocolate layered over toasted pecans and caramel and a shortbread crust; and Brownie, a fudgy treat made with butter and premium chocolate, along with the original Pecan Dandy, which is reminiscent of a pecan pie, with handmade caramel and whole pecans over a buttery shortbread crust. Raspberry Crumble is the newest of the flavors, while the original Pecan Dandy is still a best seller, along with Turtle Dandy and Brownie. They’re all gluten free, and they’re handmade in small batches with each layer baked separately. Ingredient lists are transparent and clean, so that those who have food sensitivities can be sure that the treats are safe for them to consume. “We won’t compromise on the flavor to try and hit a price target,” Bommarito said. “Now more than ever we’re looking for solutions for how to take care of our family.”
Bommarito says she didn’t start her gluten-free bakery because she thought it was a great way to make money, so she’s particularly grateful for the insights she’s gained from her advisory board and from 10,000 Small Businesses Detroit, a Goldman Sachs educational program that provides participants with practical skills to grow their businesses. That support has helped her provide medical benefits for her business’ 18 employees and move her business into a new 20,000 square-foot facility in metro Detroit that will allow her to scale up her business to meet a growing demand. She says the hardest part of all that has been learning to focus every single day on her financials and to figure out how to increase efficiencies and decrease costs while maintaining product quality. “I work every day to stay focused on what our mission is and not anyone else’s…. I learned that regardless of the passion and how great the product is, financials are the backbone of your company,” she said. “I haven’t looked back for one second – this is where I belong.”
A three-pack of Ethel’s Baking Co. Dessert Bars packaged in a plastic cup retails for $9.99, while a single-serve package retails for $2.99. Ethel’s Baking Co. products are distributed nationally by KeHE and UNFI, along with Lipari in the Midwest.
