YouSaid · the spoken record

Val Griffith

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59
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2025-12-29
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2025-12-29
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  1. “Would tell you 98% hard work and 2% luck. I mean, seriously, and you use the word grind, which is what it is. It is a grind. It is relentless amount of hard work. And not to say it's not fun and all of that, but it is a lot of hard work.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “But I would just say, like, yes, I think that part of what I bring to the business is this kind of unlimited jet fuel, right? Sometimes there's a cost to that. And my mom's an amazing counter to that too. But what my mom has brought is she's a visionary of the business and has been from the beginning. She has an ability to see long-term consumer trends coming before they're here. And so I really think it's been that combination of jet fuel meets visionary that has been part of why we've been successful.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Yeah. And, you know, people say to us all the time, oh my gosh, you know, it's like an overnight success. And I always will remember this interview that I saw with Daniel, the founder of Kind. And he said exactly the same thing. People would go to him and be like, overnight success. And he's like, it took a decade to get here. It took a decade. You know, this didn't come overnight. It's been, we have had our fair share of up and downs. But yeah, so I think of it as a healthy decade.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “So I'm a believer that, like, I think it would be very difficult to be profitable from the start. I think you just, you know, at a certain point, it is important to know that you can get there. And I mean, for us, it was a game changer. It means that now we have the funds to be able to invest more heavily in marketing. It means that we can invest in our philanthropic program, which has been something that my mom and I had wanted to start from the very beginning. And it took us 10 years to get there. So it's certainly, it's definitely a little more relaxing to be profitable.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “Oh, it's a game changer for us. That being said, I do think that there's a balance between growth and profitability. And I think the pendulum used to be too far one way, right? Which was grow it at all costs. But then it swung the other way. And then what happens is you can't, it's too hard for a Challenger brand to break through because it is expensive to go into CPG, of to fund inventory. You have to, you know, you're doing something different.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Yeah, and but they have been great advocates for the brand David, for us, was, as I said, he has been a believer because he believed in us in a time when he could see, he could see that we had built this brand that people loved and we had products that people loved. And I convinced him that all we needed was a little time to get our finances to match the brand.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Then we would be there, or we would be on the other side. And I have to say, like, when I raised that money, that was not a syndicated fund. That was individually from each celebrity investor. 65 individual celebrity investors one at a time, multiple calls with each. I mean, you know, and”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yes. And at that time, I was also working to raise money. But when I tell you working to raise money, I mean, I talk to hundreds of people. No one was deploying capital, you know? And so I had to find a solution. And we ended up finding an amazing partnership. And it was a really important piece of like kind of the next chapter of our story. And we partnered with David Grutman, who had been friend of mine from my Miami days who had gone off. And while we were building Skinny Dipped, he had built a really well-known and successful hospitality business in Miami. And we raised around from all of these celebrity investors that genuinely loved the brand. I think I just had this like feeling deep down that this was it. If we could overcome this obstacle,”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “And the one thing that we tried to protect was the team. So we knew that. We had worked really hard to build an amazing team. And I think we felt like if there's one thing we are going to protect, let's try to keep our team intact so that we can go do the work that needs to be done to get our gross margins where they need to be. We did that. And we did that over the next year and a half.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “He made a personal investment Help to support the brand, but like we when I tell you ruthless cutting, we cut every single thing that we cut to bone essentially is the way I think about it. Everything I mean, we starting from top to bottom, even in our trade spending, we cut every bit of trade that we feel like wouldn't put us in jeopardy of losing an account. We cut every single bit of marketing that was costing us anything. I mean, we had no money, zero money.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “She said, I have never met an entrepreneur who was ultimately successful that did not hit rock bottom. And this is your rock bottom. And you're right, we had a brand, a lot of things were working for us. You know, we had retailers picking us up. We knew that we had, our consumers loved us. We had all of these things from the outside that looked great, but we had a sinking ship behind the scenes with our financial situation. And so we had two options. It was either like when people say a soft landing. It's like the worst words. It was either find a soft landing or get your finances to match what you have built. From the outside looking in. And that is what we decided to do.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “There was a moment where we hit absolute rock bottom. It was in November of 2022. I think it was the first time in the history of the brand when I remember I was in New York trying to raise money and I just absolutely lost it just sobbing in my teeny tiny shoebox hotel room. My husband got on the plane and flew out to come support me and I just thought I don't know what to do now. Like this is Are in a hard place. It was the first time I had ever had that feeling. And then somebody said to me, she said,”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Well, and I mean, listen, we didn't have a leaky bucket. We had a bucket with big holes in it. We had to figure out, you know, a ship was going down and we had to figure out what to do and we had to do it quickly. And it came from the supply chain and finding domestic sources for things that were coming internationally that were just as delicious. It came from picking up every single one of our warehouses, like essentially where we are warehousing product, finding more efficient places in the country to put it. It was working with all our retailers and moving them from delivered to FOB. There was a time when, I mean, when I tell you we did not have money in 2022, I asked our entire leadership team to put their salaries on hold just so that we could try to make payroll for the rest of the company.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “No, we weren't underpricing. We just were focused on growth. We were focused on brand. And we really had not put our focus on, you know, what are our gross margins? Are they sustainable? Are they healthy? And we had gross margins in the teens. We hadn't focused on it. We didn't have the expertise or the know-how. And it wasn't until the end of 2022 when... Essentially, the funding dried up, right? Like we were going to raise another round of funding. It wasn't available. And everyone told us, you are never going to be able to take a business that has gross margins in the teens and make it profitable.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “You know, I had no idea what cogs were. I didn't even know what gross margin was. So at a certain point, you know, the business had seen a tremendous amount of growth, right? We're available and probably at the time.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Exactly. No one had even asked about our margins or profitability, forget about it. No one was considering that. And then, you know, you have to remember that we didn't even have a finance background. I mean, originally we were doing our finance on like, you know, sticky notes.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “So we have quite a colorful gross margin history, which is that Our brand was born in this time when everything was about growth, right?”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “Yeah, I mean, that was really a springboard for us in so many ways. It had forced us to kind of this accelerated, you know, not just growth, but like growing up period. And we had proven that we could, you know, that the mass market loved our product.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Lot for, and to be honest, I'm sure we did pay for it, but because we had no idea what was going on financially in our business, we weren't tracking deductions at the time or all of this. We were just surviving. The men were messy. We were just like, this is an opportunity. How do we make sure that we just absolutely, we do everything we can to be successful in Target?”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “And so we had heard someone say to us, you should at least try to get an end cap. That way you'll get more visibility when you launch. So we went back to Tanya and we essentially said, is there any way, anything that we can do to get an end cap? You know, and she said, do you have any other flavors that could be exclusive to Target? And we said, we literally just developed a peanut butter almond. Peanut butter is like a double coated, double coated in dark chocolate, coated in peanut butter. We can give you that if you will give us an end cap. And she agreed. And I think that the end cap really helped us initially.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “We were aware that it was a big risk. So we had been told by so many people, you should just say no to them. Like you're exactly what you're saying, you're going to fail. You have exactly zero percent brand awareness. And there's no way you can be successful at this. And obviously, you know, the usual way of entering a retailer-like Target, right, is that you have these segment of test stores where you go to see if the product will turn and sell. And we were going from zero to 60”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I reached out to somebody where I got connected to somebody who had been kind of in the nut world and he's like, I think I may be able to pull in get a favor here and get you a truckload. He came through, we got a truckload, and we were in fact able to produce for Target, but just barely, honestly, just barely.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Look on her face, and she just said there's nothing we can do. They're ranted. Immediately, I started calling the supplier. I was like, we need a new shipment. They're like the earliest we can get it to you is, you know, whatever it was, 10 days, a week and a half. We would have missed our window. I called everyone I could think of to say, you know, what other suppliers are there? begged anything we could do. And honestly, we just kept hitting roadblock after roadblock. We got to the point where we started to do the math on going, we're just going to have to go buy these from the grocery store. We're going to have to create an army of friends and family who all go to the grocery store and just essentially deplete the bulk bins. And how many can we get? How many can we get from Costco? Whatever we had to do. And it was, and so eventually.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “We landed, and mom just kept calling my phone over and over again. And I pick up and I was like, what's going on? And she's like, we have a crisis, an absolute crisis. And she explained what was going on. I got off the plane, went to the same podium, you know, when you step off boarding and deplaning. And I just said, is this plane going back to Seattle? And they said, yep. And he said, how do I get on it? I don't care where I have to settle, sit in the bathroom. I just need to go back. And they were very nice. I got loaded back onto the plane, flew back, went straight to our manufacturer, which actually kind of close to the airport. I will never forget the image of my mom sitting there. I walk into this kind of dark conference room and she's sitting at the table with like hundreds of nuts that she's bitten in half and just pale.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “1,800 stores Yeah, and so I'm pretty sure I was like, you know, immediately clammy, sweating. It was a mix of, you know, fear and excitement all at once. And we really couldn't believe it, right? Because in our minds, we'd set the high bar at 100 stores or 150 test stores. And we didn't even have a distributor.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “And so he gave us a call and he said, okay, she wants to have another meeting. So we flew back to Minneapolis. We sat in front of this buyer. And her name was Tanya. And she gave us, thank you, Tanya, because she really gave us a chance. She looked at us and she said, I absolutely love your product. And she said, do you have any supply chain issues? And I just looked her dead in the eye and said, nope. And meanwhile, we were still in the coop producing very, very small batches. And she said, okay then, well, I'm going to bring all of your flavors in chain wide in three months. So 18”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Nope, we actually got introduced to a broker who was from one of our kind of early mentors, we got this introduction to a broker who specialized in target. So even though it felt early in many ways, this broker at the time loved our product and he felt like we should present it to the target buyer to see what they thought. So we did. We flew out, you know, this was in the day of where you got to go sit with your buyers in person, right? So we flew out to Minneapolis and we sat with this buyer and we sampled our product and we talked about our brand. We shared our story. And then we went away. We went back home. And the broker who was helping us at the time said, you know, listen, I think I feel good about this.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “So we were very focused on those three for the first few years. And after we'd spent, call it a year, year and a half maybe selling in kind of all these regional stores and smaller places, we caught the attention of Target.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “If memory serves, I think you put 150, 160,000 dollars into the business. And that really kind of like started to make things feel real. One of the earliest things he said to us is he said what makes a brand successful is comes down to three things. product, people, and package. And he's like, you have the product, you have the people. And this is a real founder-led brand. Let's work on the package.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “At that time, we were raising, you know, we were going to set out to raise this friends and family round. We had brought a little bit of money in. And actually, one of our very first investors was Bill Nye. Thank you, Bill Nye. You gave us some seed money despite his financial advisor. I think at the time telling him it was a terrible idea. And so we'd raised, I don't know, I want to say maybe $65,000. And it was big for us, you know, it meant that we could continue to make product and sell product. And Rohan came in on that very first seed run.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Confidence, I was like, we're going to build a big brand. We're going to disrupt the industry. I had no idea who this was. I just thought this was like a random person who I could get feedback from because we were passing these out to anyone we really could. And he was like, you know, what are you doing about money? I was like, oh, we're going to raise a friends and family round. We're going to raise $100,000. And he said. I think you're gonna need a lot more money than that. And so he ended up giving me his contact. I still had no idea who he was. I went back and researched it. And at the time, you know, he was a huge part of vitamin water, pop chips. And so that led to a kind of early, a very early mentorship with Rohan.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “This was a complete chance moment. Right after I'd moved to Seattle to do this full time, I would still go back to New York every once in a while. I had friends there. Still where a lot of my social life was. And so one night I was just out at a bar and I got to talking to this guy. He was asking, you know, what I was interested in and everything. And I said, oh, I've started, I'm starting this business. We're going to be the next pop chips. Oh, by the way, do you want me, do you want to try my nuts? And he was like, absolutely. So I give him this, you know, probably half melted bag of, you know, our dipped almonds. And he said, wow, this is a really good product. This is a really amazing product development. What's your plan? You know, and I was like, so, you know, I had so much.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “At this point, Chrissy was our co founder, was leading the charge there every morning. She would take off at pretty much the crack of dawn with a backpack full of samples. And she would go sit in a Whole Foods, you know, where oftentimes they would tell you a manager's not available and she would just wait. I mean, we're talking one Whole Foods at a time, one mom and pop at a time, you know, actually Google, the Google campus in Seattle was probably one of our first big accounts and Chrissy snuck into their cafeteria, found the chef, and convinced him to bring the product in and offer it to their employees.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Yeah, I mean, first of all, we believed that demoing was really important because it was food. We wanted people to try the food. So, you know, we would go in. It would either be four of us or two of us. And we would demo five or six, sometimes seven nights a week, sometimes double demos. And in a single demo, we could easily sell, you know, 40 bags, 50 bags. You were seeing these store managers go, wow, like, you know, you sold through four or five boxes in a few hours. And then we would start to get, you know, slightly bigger purchase orders, you know, instead of buying two boxes. They would want 10 and we eventually put our, you know, our small flimsy boxes into, quote, mastercases that we started delivering bigger cases to the store. So it was very organic in that way.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “And then we'd sell through them, and then the next time we went to Spokane, you know, we would rent a sprinter van and we'd fill it and eventually we were driving 25 foot box trucks there and back.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Yeah, I mean, when we started going to Spokane, we were going with a regular car size, you know, a few cases of nuts in the back and we would take those. We would pack them all up, bring them back to Seattle, and we would essentially sell door to door. We would pack them into, you know, these were grab and go single servings that we would put in a box of 10. We would go march into a mom and pop corner grocery store and wait for the manager and give them a sample, have them try it, and hopefully sell them in to sit near the cash register. And I mean, when I tell you like we would only take cash or check, we had no other way to take payment. And then we would go and we would demo them. We would ask this manager, can we just, you know, can we come demo them? And we would come demo for four hours, five hours, six hours, however long they would let us demo for.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “I mean, originally when we were making them on the dining room table, we would pack them into little clear baggies and put a label on them that at the time said skinny nuts with a Z. And it was those that we handed out to friends, family, and like, honestly, anyone that we would meet to just get like feedback, right? And it was very positive. At that time, I don't think we took those to retailers. This was like During this time it was kind of the beginning of disruptive brands and challenger brands. So I had spent a lot of time reading about Lara Bar's story, pop chips, some of these, you know, Challenger brands. And so We knew a piece of it, obviously, a very important piece, was the product, but we were also aware that the brand was equally important. And so we wanted to put them in a package. We wanted to have a look and feel.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Work through the night on the line with all these different kinds of people, and we would hear their stories and we would see what Manufacturing is hard work”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Yeah, so we wanted to put them in essentially kind of like a single serving, right? Because part of the idea was this grab and go on the go. So I eventually reached out to someone in Spokane, Washington who was a co-packer. And I think we convinced him to give us a chance. So, I mean, he was bringing truckloads of nuts in. pretty decent scale. And, you know, here we were with. We wanted to show up with 250 pounds of almonds and pack them out or 500 pounds. And we convinced him to let us drive a truck to Spokane, work on the line, and pack them into packages through the night when he was the quietest. So it was the night shift. And he employed a lot of ex-cons and people that had had a really hard time in life. And it was a pretty eye-opening experience because we would go and we would.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “So kind of right after my mom and I come up with this idea and these kind of first samples, Lizzie joined us. Lizzie is my oldest dearest childhood friend we met in preschool. We grew up together. She's the one that I would build treehouses with when we were young. And so Lizzie was just really excited about the idea. So she jumped on board and then shortly after, Chrissy, who had become kind of my soul sister when I was living in New York, Chrissy's fiery, she's like a kind of a race horse. She was really excited about it and she wanted to do sales and she joined us. So Chrissy moved from New York to Seattle, moved into the house with the parents, myself, her dog. And Lizzie lived about two blocks away.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “So this was like a serious kind of makeshift first facility where we partnered with this person to start to create a quote commercial version of our recipe.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “Well, it was a longer journey than that. So we started making very small batches with him, you know, ten pounds, twenty pounds, thirty pounds. And then, you know, we would sit at a coffee shop with him and we would kind of brainstorm about how could we get to 100 pounds, 200 pounds. And I think at the time we were trying to make a roadmap, a plan that got us to about a thousand pounds, maybe 2,000 pounds of product. Originally when we met him, he was working out of his, you know, he was making this in his garage essentially. And then he leased a very small facility to essentially start producing for us. And when I say small, this was a converted chicken coop. We bought an oven off of eBay, one single oven that sat on the floor. We washed all of our dishes outside on the loading dock on the hood of our car. With hose water.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “I started to get on blogs, like Reddit blogs, and I started to dig deep looking to see if anyone was putting this thin coat of chocolate on, you know, on fruit, on anything, any sort of center. And I eventually found I was on this kind of like esoteric chocolate blog. And I eventually found this chocolatier who was writing these, commenting about how he was thinly coating, I think maybe at the time it was freeze-dried fruits. And so I figured out a screen name, found his name from his screen name, reverse looked his name up to find his phone number, and then called him at his house. And essentially just asked him, can you make this for us? And he said, yeah, I think I can. And that was really kind of the first step. We formed a relationship with him. And it was there, it was in that relationship that we commercialized our recipe.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “There's a photo of us passed out sleeping in the sun on this loading dock after four day. We were so exhausted and we had one cooler full of chocolate almonds. So that was also not the answer. And we knew that.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “So there's one more step before we got to what worked, which was that we thought maybe it could go through a process called enrobing where the nuts lay down and they go through a waterfall of chocolate. We found someone in Oregon, a family operation. We called them up and asked them if we could essentially come and trial making our product in their facility. And they were really kind and they said, yes, sure, come down. We went down there and we spent We'd brought like 10 maybe 15 pounds of almonds and we spent four days on this line individually placing nuts on a conveyor belt letting them go through this waterfall of chocolate and then hand sprinkling them with things like espresso powder sea salt taking them off and bagging them up”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “So we brought my dad into the conversation because he has an engineering kind of mind. And one of the ideas was, well, maybe we should spray them. So we went to Home Depot. We bought a paint sprayer. We filled the paint sprayer with chocolate. And the chocolate would start to harden. So you couldn't actually get it to work. So we had to. MacGyver, some heat guns next to the paint sprayer to try to keep the chocolate warm while we sprayed these sheet pans of almonds and let me just tell you it was a complete failure. We just had like it just chocolate just atomized into the air. There was none on the almonds.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “I mean, literally, when we were making these first iterations, we were making in the home kitchen, we were dipping them one by one on a fork, we're setting them on parchment paper. And so part of the next step was how do we make more of them”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “And I think we felt like especially how we wanted to snack. Like a lot of women snack, you eat a little bit, you know, you eat a few pieces, you close up the bag, you eat a few more pieces. It was this idea of can we get something that is good for your body but tastes as good or as close to as good as a chocolate chip cookie and then put it in a fun format.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “A little bit like a deconstructed nut and fruit bar, but in a more Snackable, fun way to eat it in pieces. And so when we got back from that road trip, that's really where we started experimenting in the home kitchen.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “Yeah, so we were taking my younger sister, Emma, up to her first day of college at University of British Columbia, where I went. And it really came out of this, we were just having conversation, we were snacking like you do on a road trip. My mom had, you know, good roasted almonds with her because she was very healthy eater. And I had brought a quote naughty snack. I think I had a peanut butter cup with me. And I knew that that wasn't healthy or something that you would eat regularly, but it was delicious. It really kind of just got us thinking maybe there's this intersection between whole foods and deliciousness that we can strike. And we really started talking about how chocolate almonds in particular had been this, they were this dated boring product that were sitting in bulk bins. And could we reinvent it to become a snack? And kind of like we thought about it.”

    2025-12-29 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · SkinnyDipped: Breezy and Val Griffith. The Flourishing Snack Company That Almost Failed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT