August 29, 2024

I think my favorite story from Morgan Potts and her whiskey-baked granola company (Granarly) is the one about how she got the brand into Whole Foods…

Rather than the normal path (e.g., stalk the buyer), she drove out to The Domain location here in Austin, walked in with an armful of product, and literally started putting it on a shelf.

When the manager asked what in the world she was doing, she smiled disarmingly and said, “I want my products here one day. I'm just seeing what it looks like.”

The rest, as they say, is history.

It was four more years before the connections she made that day landed her on the shelf for real. 

But that kind of boldness runs through her entire story, and it’s taken her from a fledgling startup with a few local partners and a truck named Oatis, to nationwide rollouts with Target, Sprouts, and more.

Pronounced “gra-gnarly,” the idea came to her in a dream in college, the night before a big snowboarding trip.

“On the mountain we take fireball shots and we eat cliff bars,” she told me. “I was like, Why can’t those two be together?”

At the time, she was a graduating senior at Louisiana Tech, headed for the veterinary medicine program at St. George’s. She’d never owned a business; Never even made a batch of granola.

But she’d always had entrepreneurial ideas, and this one appeared to her fully-formed, with a recipe, brand name, mission, and everything.

She started testing batches that very day.

“There’s no alcohol,” she told me in our call. “The whiskey bakes out. It just makes it taste really good.”

Feedback was enthusiastic, and after months of informal testing, advice from mentors, and a heart-to-heart with her dad, she passed on vet school, taking a leap of faith to pursue Granarly full-time.

Faith was involved again in 2017, when she relocated the brand to Austin.

Production had outgrown the kitchen of her rented house, and she knew that to take things to the next level, the company needed to live “somewhere gnarly.”

Austin made sense logistically. The culture here seemed right, and her manufacturer was in nearby Louisiana. But San Diego and Hawaii were also contenders, and she was looking for a nudge in one direction or another.

“I was praying one day,” she told me, “and I was like, Okay, if I’m meant to be in Austin, there will be some door open.’”

That’s when she came across Trucklandia, an annual showdown between dozens of the city’s food trucks.

She applied (despite not even having a truck), and got the very last spot. Then, in a matter of weeks, she bought and furnished a 1968 Scotsman camper, named it Oatis, crafted a menu, and brought her show to Austin, opening on the very first day of the competition.

For the next few years, Granarly operated largely out of that truck, serving up Açaí bowls, taco toast, and sprinkle-sized packets of her OG and Mardi Pardi blends (two fan-favorites to this day).

Sometimes they had a fixed address, other times, they drifted, using Oatis for farmers’ markets and pop-ups. Along the way, Morgan picked up some small partnerships with local chains, like Blue Royal Grocery, and Summermoon.

But they were struggling to get traction, and it wasn’t clear that the restaurant path would ever scale to match her vision for the brand.

At the same time, regulars at the food truck kept raving about the stand-alone granola packets. She  began to wonder if retail was the way to go.

The tipping point came during covid. They were shut down, Oatis was broken into, and her special refrigerator was stolen.

“I was like, ‘You know what – I think it’s time,’” she told me.

She sold the truck, undertook a full rebrand, and got to work finding Granarly’s next big distribution channel. 

Like most companies during the pandemic, she experimented with a lot: Gift packs, subscription boxes, partnerships with other CPG brands, and more.

The first big retail win came in September of 2021, when they launched with Central Market in five locations. Then, in May of 2022 (years after that first encounter at The Domain), Granarly got into Whole Foods Local.

Things were looking up. But she wasn’t paying herself out of the company, and had even taken on several side-jobs to bankroll her living expenses and the business expansion. Balancing it all was overwhelming.

That’s when she once again took a leap that would end up changing everything.

On the morning of her twenty-ninth birthday, she decided to go all-in for one more year on the business.

If she got to thirty and it wasn’t working, she thought, she could go get a “real” job then. “But in my twenty-ninth year, I’m just gonna go full-send.”

Leaving her jobs, she spent the summer with her parents in rural Georgia. Far from the distractions of the city, she lived lean and tried to remain optimistic, though still facing a ton of uncertainty about the future of the business.

“It’s not like I come from a lot of money or have a lot in my savings account at this point,” she told me. “But I actually really needed that reset in every area of my life.”

Then, on the drive back down to Texas, Target called.

“I thought it was a joke,” she told me. “They emailed me through my contact form. It wasn’t like some formal thing.”

But it was real. They’d spotted her on the shelf (in Whole Foods, of all places), loved the brand, and wanted to bring her in… Nationwide.

Now, rookies will hear that story and think that going from ten stores to five-hundred plus is a dream come true. And sure, in some ways it is. But veteran CPG founders know that a leap like that can also be the hug of death for a brand.

“It really made me grow up the company,” Morgan told me.

That meant raising a half-million dollar seed round, getting an office, hiring a teammate, and finding new manufacturers to handle the scale.

It also meant thinking about how to compete against bigger brands with more name recognition.

“When you go to the aisle, it’s KIND, Bear Naked, Purely Elizabeth, Good & Gather, and probably one other – and then Granarly,” Morgan said.

In Target, they do on-shelf promo, which helps drive velocity.

She also redesigned their homepage to prioritize retail sales out of the gate, and has leaned into content via Instagram and a brand new podcast as a way to connect with people before they shop.

But her secret weapon for retail in general has been in-store demos.

“Our Whole Foods sales have doubled since last year because we demo consistently,” she told me.

Just a year after launching in Target, Granarly landed a spot in Sprouts’ Forager Program – which offers emerging brands a ninety-day test run on their Innovation Sets nationwide.

It’s a brilliant tactic for Sprouts.

Customers get a constant rotation of cool new stuff to try. And with terms that are especially favorable to growing brands (like marketing support and no free-fills), Sprouts is moving up the list of dream partners for up and coming founders.

“It's just so funny,” Morgan said. “I remember being in Sprouts back in the day, [and thinking], we'll never be in here.” Forager changed that.

To make the most of the opportunity, she hit the road for a demo marathon, visiting seventeen different Sprouts markets across three states in about three weeks.

People along the way were surprised to find the founder of the brand dishing out samples. But her response: “Well… why wouldn’t I be?!”

In her mind, it’s a great opportunity to not only meet customers and get them stoked on Granarly, but also get to know store staff, see how people interact with her products on the shelf, and spy on what else is in their carts.

In my view, it’s all part of that same bias for action that makes her such a natural founder – the one that drove her to start a business based on a dream, or enter a food truck competition without a food truck.

“I think what’s gotten me here today is I’m a yes girl,” she told me in our interview. A lot of people get hung up trying to create the picture-perfect business plan before ever taking any action, she said.

“But nine out of ten times you’re gonna learn more by doing.”