Organic snacks startup Kracklin’ Kamut has now moved into a new facility in Montana to keep up with the demand from its customers.
“In our old facility, we manufactured around 100,000 units per month, but we didn’t have any room to store them,” said Thomas Dilworth, general manager at Big Sandy Organics, parent company of Kracklin’ Kamut.
"We have increased our production [and] can now put out 500,000 of the regular size units per month,” he added.
“I went to NACS show last year and found that healthy snacks is the largest growing segment in grocery retail, but there’s not a lot of organic healthy snacks in the convenience channel. We decided we should target c-stores because we [would] face less competition there.”
The kamut snacks are currently available in about 50 c-store locations in Montana, and the company has plans to expand its distribution to other regions, including Utah, Washington, Oregon and California, as well as on Amazon later this month.
Packaging redesign
Dilworth said the kamut snacks compete in the premium snacks category as the grain has been linked to healing properties, such as anti-inflammatory benefits and diabetes prevention.
However, Kraclin’ Kamut’s original packaging did not deliver the same premium quality, he said. Since August, the company has ditched its China-made packaging and moved to a more stylish US-made blue and white pack.
“There’s no price change, but we changed the product’s net weight from 1.5 ounces to 1.4 ounces,” said Dilworth.
Amazon and major grocery chains
The organic trend has taken the snack food industry by storm.
Bare Snacks, for example, launched a line of organic coconut chips last year; Snyder’s-Lance also added new varieties of organic pretzel crisps earlier in 2017, BakeryandSnacks reported.
Even more recently, PepsiCo developed an organic range of Frito-Lay products - hopung to overturn the unhealthy image of products such as Tostitos and Doritos - and have its products listed in Whole Foods.
“The organic trend is not going away,” said Dilworth.
“The price point of our organic product is [the same] as non-organic snacks, like Snickers bar,” he added.
Kracklin’ Kamut is currently developing new flavors that will be launched in March 2018. When it reaches four flavors, the brand will have the opportunity to be listed in Target and Kroger.
In 2016, Kracklin’ Kamut’s reported sales reached $49,000.
“Next year, we can easily reach $230,000 without really working to achieve that,” said Dilworth.