Grandy Oats |
On my way to Burning Man last year, I stopped at a Wild Oats just outside of Reno for the week’s provisions. I was downright nervous, going to the infamous, psychedelic arts festival, so imagine my delight when I discovered, in the cereal aisle, “Mainely Maple” granola made by Grandy Oats of Brownfield, Maine. Ahhhhhhhhh.
Every morning I spent at Burning Man, surrounded by desert dust, eardrum-splitting music, and naked weirdos of every imaginable ilk, I felt deeply comforted being fed by the guys who sign their names by hand, “Nat and Aaron,” on the back of every package. Their cheery, farmy logo was a beacon of peace in the swirling vortex of West Coast bacchanalia. Thus began my fascination with the Grandy Oats guys.
Their product is refreshingly simple: just oats, some nuts, seeds, maple syrup, salt, and vanilla.
All organic. Instead of the typical honey-crusted rocks, Grandy’s granola runs quite freely and makes friends easily with whatever milk it’s soaking in.
Aaron Anker has been slinging oat for six years now. He’s the business brains behind spreading Grandy’s to Nevada and since he partnered with his buddy Nat Peirce, (who had purchased the company three years earlier and handles the production end of things) Grandy Oats has morphed from a feel-good cottage industry into a national concern, expanding ten times in size. From their converted barn in Brownfield, they pump out almost ten thousand pounds of granola every week. That’s a ton a day. Not bad for a couple of guys who sign their names like seventh-graders.
Sporting a North Face jacket, Aaron’s more the outdoorsy, eco-friendly type — not the almond-inspecting, dread-locked hippie I expected. Both he and Nat studied hotel and restaurant management at the University of New Hampshire, where they met.
But what these guys do, which is downright hippie, is foster relationships: “fifty percent of our business is selling directly to the stores, and other outlets like Coffee By Design, Bintliff's — and I’ve just dropped off our first order to Eggspectations.” Aaron is genuinely excited. “Lois’s Natural Foods, Royal River . . . that’s our core.”
And they’re willing to invest in these businesses, seeing them as partners: “at Rising Tide in Damariscotta, we put a entire bin system in the store. They were bagging all the food and using so much plastic.” Ahhh, I knew these guys were good. "It cost us about a thousand dollars, but sales are like, three times what they used to be.”
Everyone wins: “the customers love it because they don’t have to buy a prescribed amount. Rising Tide loves it because they don’t have to waste all that plastic and their sales are up, and for us, the sales are up.”
