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.”