Brothers Nuts: Evolve the Way You Snack and Kick the Fake Food to the Curb!!!
For the 269th feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with Brothers Nuts and Co-Founder, Caleb Majors. Our life changed in a way we never wanted to believe. In 2010, our father was diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer, given only weeks to live. There were two ways our family could respond: Give up…or Fight Hard and Pray. Since our father was a chiropractor, we were already eating healthy to most peoples standards, but now he had to take his diet to the next clean level. Our whole family joined in! Our mother, an incredible master in the kitchen, was always making organic meals that tasted great. Now, we needed to go ‘all-out organic’ in everything we ate…including our snacks.
Our Mom went to work in the kitchen and her first effort was a mouth-watering snack… what later would be known as the Crackled Cheezy Almonds. We were amazed that there was no dairy, sugar or gluten to be found. Now, our Dad had a snack that was not only healthy, but bursting with flavor. Once our friends tasted the nuts, they were astonished on how great they tasted and couldn’t believe they were healthy for their bodies.
We immediately knew the world needed a healthy snack that would burst with flavor on every crunch! Brothers Nuts was launched with a mission to help people ‘evolve the way they snack’.
Our fight went on and prayers were answered as our Dad made a full recovery. Unfortunately, our father was attacked by cancer a second-time. This time it came harder and faster than before, and ultimately he went to Heaven. Our family made the choice to turn this setback into a setup for the future of Brothers Nuts.
Today, Brothers Nuts only sells 100% USDA Certified Organic snacks and have added seasonal flavor releases (yes…those are USDA Certified Organic, too!). Our products are now shipped around the world and are fueling the revolution to ‘kick the fake food to the curb!!!’
"Together Talks" feature 269: Brothers Nuts presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
What separates you from your competition? What have been the biggest challenges? Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur? Share a decision that you made that was detrimental? What is your why?
Story of how it was created?
The story of Brothers Nuts goes all the way back to 2010. At the time, my brother Austin and I were six and eight years old. Our dad was diagnosed with stage four multiple myeloma cancer, which had spread throughout his body and into his brain. He had four tumors that were crushing his brainstem, and the doctors gave him seven weeks to live.
When you're that young, you don't really understand what's happening, why it's happening, or what's going on. The only thing you know is that something feels off. Our lives were suddenly different. We were sleeping at our uncles' houses for a few days at a time instead of staying in our own home. We knew something was going on, even if we didn't fully understand it.
That was in 2010, and our dad went from being given seven weeks to live to living another seven years. Throughout his battle with cancer, he underwent difficult treatments, traveled extensively, and spoke publicly to help other people. One of his biggest challenges was food. When he was home, it wasn't an issue because our mom could prepare healthy, delicious meals that were good for him and tasted great. But when he was traveling, whether he was at gas stations, grocery stores, or airports, there weren't many snacks available that were both healthy enough for him and enjoyable to eat.
It was one or the other. For him, it was literally life or death. He had to be careful about what he ate, but he still wanted to enjoy his food.
That's when we started making healthy snacks in the kitchen with our mom. The three of us would make them for our dad and the rest of our family. After our dad passed away in 2017, we started what I like to put in quotation marks as our “business,” because it wasn't really a business at the time. It was more of a hobby, a glorified lemonade stand. We sold to family and friends and participated in local farmers markets and health events.
From 2017 through 2024, that's essentially what Brothers Nuts was. We were still in middle school and high school when we started, and we continued working on it while we finished school and eventually college. Once we graduated, we decided it was time to take the training wheels off and see if we could turn the hobby into a real business. We wanted to go out, make an impact, and change people's lives. That's the background behind why we started in the first place.
Was creating this business always the plan?
hat's actually a great question, and I don't think I've been asked that before. In terms of our aspirations and dreams, yes, we wanted to finish school, go full-time with the business right afterward, and scale it to some pretty crazy numbers.
That was always the dream. But in reality, we didn't know if it was actually going to happen. Were we doing the right things? Were we in the right category? Were we innovative enough? Were we selling well enough? We didn't know.
We were still going to school. Austin was planning to pursue investment banking and finance, while I was planning to go into sales and business development. Those were the paths we expected to take when we were in college.
Then, about halfway through my college career, roughly a year and a half before I graduated, we got our first retail store. That was a turning point because it gave us a chance to prove the concept. We could finally see whether people would walk into a grocery store, find our product on a random retail shelf, and actually buy it.
The answer was yes. That gave us the confidence to lean into the business and decide that, once we finished school, we would give it a real shot.
What separates you from your competition?
The biggest differentiator for our product, and where we bring innovation to the category, is our sprouting process.
In the nut and seed category, there are only two or three other players that actually sprout their nuts. That's where we stand out. Our process creates a product that is easier to digest and break down, may support better nutrient absorption, and is crunchier than a regular almond.
Once you've tried a sprouted almond, it's hard to go back to a regular raw almond. That's where our innovation comes in, not just from a health perspective but also in terms of taste. There really aren't many other companies doing what we're doing in this category.
What have been the biggest challenges?
You're always dealing with challenges as an entrepreneur. You're putting out fires every day, every week, and every month, depending on what's happening in the business. It can feel like you're putting out a fire almost every single day.
What's interesting is that the challenges often stay the same as you grow; the dollar amounts just get bigger. Instead of dealing with a $1,000 problem, you're dealing with a $10,000 problem. Then it's $100,000, and eventually a million dollars. It's often the same challenge with another zero, two zeros, or three zeros added to it.
One of the biggest challenges for us has been on the supply chain and inventory management side.
When we first started, we worried about how quickly we would be able to sell our inventory. Even though our products had a long shelf life, we were nervous about ordering small batches. We'd get 250 bags and think, “Oh man, we're never going to sell all of this. It's going to expire in 12 months. Are we really going to be able to move this inventory?”
That was the kind of concern you have when you're just starting out. Today, 250 bags would be a rounding error for us. Our challenge has shifted from worrying about whether we can sell the product to figuring out how to keep up with demand.
Forecasting is probably one of the hardest parts, especially as we scale. We're expecting to increase our number of distribution points by about 1,000% this year. That's an incredible problem to have, but it also means we have to make sure we can keep our products on the shelves.
We can't afford to leave shelves empty, and we have to demonstrate strong sales velocity once we get into a retailer. Keeping enough inventory available while accurately forecasting demand is a major challenge when you're scaling an emerging consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand.
Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
We've grown significantly, but we've been entirely bootstrapped. We haven't taken on outside funding at all. When you're bootstrapped, your ability to grow is tied to the profits you generate. If your profit margin is 10%, that limits how much you can reinvest in growth compared with a business that has outside capital available.
Because of that, we've grown gradually over the years, with annual growth rates of around 20%, 20%, and 40% at different points. We've also brought on new manufacturing partners to improve our profit margins and increase our capacity. That has helped us scale and keep up with demand as we add new distribution points.
Looking ahead, we have some major milestones in front of us. At the beginning of 2026, we had approximately 400 distribution points. By the end of this year, we expect to be closer to 2,000. We also have another 2,000 distribution points in the pipeline for next year. By 2027, we believe we'll be approaching 5,000 distribution points. That means going from roughly 400 to 5,000 in about 18 months.
What's driving that growth and helping us add new retailers? Approximately 95% of our distribution is in the grocery channel. We're also looking at a potential club opportunity over the next quarter, although we'll have to wait and see how that develops.
Another important factor has been how we've evolved our product offering to reach more consumers.
When we first started, our products were entirely USDA Certified Organic because that's what we were making for our dad in our kitchen about 10 years ago. That organic line is still our core offering, and it deserves to be in natural and organic retailers such as Whole Foods, Sprouts, Erewhon, Fresh Thyme, and Mom's Organic Market. Consumers shopping at those stores are often specifically looking for organic products, and our line is a great fit for them.
But we started asking ourselves a bigger question: How many more people could we serve if we found a way to reach consumers beyond the natural and organic channel?
The Whole Foods consumer is different from the Walmart or Target consumer. We wanted to figure out how to tailor our products to reach those shoppers without changing our values, compromising our quality, or abandoning the things that make our products special. We still wanted to maintain our sprouting process and offer products that are gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, and made without seed oils, with clean, simple ingredients and plenty of flavor.
We began looking at whether we could adapt our product offering to reach consumers shopping at Walmart, Target, Aldi, Kroger, Albertsons, and other mainstream retailers.
One option was to move away from making every product USDA Certified Organic and instead offer a non-GMO-verified line. That single difference allowed us to lower the price by a couple of dollars while keeping the products sprouted, free of seed oils, and made with simple ingredients. We could still deliver the health benefits and flavor people expect from us.
That's one of the new offerings we've developed to help us reach more customers. Our organic products remain available for the natural and organic channel, while the non-GMO-verified line allows us to reach a broader range of shoppers. We're not changing the fundamentals of our products; we're making them accessible to more people.
What went into that consideration and was there any negative feedback?
We definitely had to weigh the decision carefully, but we haven't received negative feedback. The reason is that we're not getting rid of our organic products. If we had announced that we were discontinuing our organic line and replacing it with a non-GMO-verified product, I think we would have received a lot of negative feedback. Consumers who support us because of our organic ingredients might have felt that we were moving backward or lowering our standards.
Instead, we're doing the opposite. We're keeping both product lines.
Our vision for the next five to 10 years is to help consumers gradually move toward healthier options. Take Walmart, for example. A retailer like Walmart might not bring in our organic product right away, but it may be willing to carry our non-GMO-verified product because it costs about $3 less.
That's a starting point. We can help a consumer move away from snacks made with artificial dyes, artificial flavors, and other ingredients they may want to avoid and introduce them to our non-GMO-verified, seed-oil-free, gluten-free, sprouted products with great flavor.
Then, perhaps a year or two later, we can help that consumer transition to our fully organic line. Our goal is to meet people where they are and help them take the next step toward healthier choices.
It's difficult to expect someone to go straight from buying a $1 jar of peanuts to purchasing a premium organic product. That's a big change in both price and purchasing habits. But if we can move them a little closer, then another step closer, we can eventually help them get to the finish line with our fully organic product. That's the vision behind offering both lines.
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business?
One of the biggest things for us was getting that first retail opportunity. Fresh Thyme Market, a Midwest-based grocery chain with around 70 locations in the natural channel at the time, gave us our first shot. I give them a lot of credit because they were the ones who gave us our first opportunity and helped us get started in retail, including placing us in a couple of local stores in Illinois, where we're based in the Chicagoland area.
When you're launching a CPG company for the first time, you think that getting on a retail shelf means you've made it. I know that's what I thought. You get your product on the shelf and think, “That's it. I'm good.”
It's the complete opposite. Getting on the shelf is just the beginning. As everyone in the industry says, that's the easy part. The real challenge is generating sales velocity and getting the product to move off the shelf. Ultimately, it comes down to sell-through and units sold per store per week.
We didn't understand that when we first started. Once we got into a couple of Fresh Thyme stores, we began talking to the buyer and asking how we were doing. Were we performing well or poorly? Where did we stand within the category?
Over time, we expanded from three stores to all 70 Fresh Thyme locations in about 12 months. We started thinking that maybe we had something special. If we weren't selling well, the buying team probably wouldn't have expanded us to all those stores.
As we learned more about the retail process and how store-level data worked, we discovered that we were performing extremely well. We were one of the top two brands in the category, competing against established brands that had been in the market for more than 50 years.
That was another moment when we thought, “Okay, maybe we really do have something here.”
By the time my brother and I finished college, we already had some momentum. The business had started gaining traction about a year before we graduated, and we had enough evidence to believe that we could build something meaningful.
We decided to go for it. If we were going to take a shot and accept the risk of starting a business, we wanted to do it then, when we were 21, rather than wait until we were 35.
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
I would say that starting a business is harder than you expect. That's really what it comes down to.
I sometimes look back at the goals I wrote down in 2021 or 2022 and the numbers I thought we would reach. We didn't come close to some of those targets when I originally expected to. I thought we would definitely hit certain revenue or distribution numbers, but in some cases, it took another two years before we reached them.
One of the biggest lessons for any entrepreneur, especially in the CPG space, is understanding that growth takes time.
There's a great quote often attributed to Warren Buffett that goes something like this: You overestimate what you can accomplish in a year and underestimate what you can accomplish in 10 years.
That's so true. If you had asked me three or four years ago where we would be today, I would have been surprised by how far we had come. We've exceeded some of the numbers I thought we would reach five years into the future, even though we didn't come close to some of the goals I had set for the year in which I wrote them down.
It's a reminder that building a business is a long-term process. You may not reach every milestone as quickly as you expect, but over time, you can accomplish far more than you initially imagined.
For anyone starting a business for the first time, I think it's important to recognize that balance. Don't underestimate what you can build over the long term, but don't assume that everything will happen as quickly as you hope.
Share a decision that you made that was detrimental?
Fortunately, this happened on a very small scale, which I'm glad about because we learned from the experience.
It involved a local, independent store in the Chicagoland area. The store made its purchasing decisions with its grocery manager, or whoever was responsible for that category at the time. We offered two product sizes: two-ounce bags and six-ounce bags. We presented both options and let the store decide which one it wanted to carry.
The buyer wanted to start with the six-ounce size, which was the larger option and had a higher price point. My brother Austin and I disagreed with that decision. I'll blame him for what happened, and he'll blame me, but the truth is that we made the decision together.
We thought the store should start with the two-ounce bag because the lower price point would make it easier for consumers to try the product. Once customers had tried it and liked it, the store could introduce the larger six-ounce size.
We decided to share that recommendation with the buyer, but she didn't respond well to it. We weren't trying to tell her what to do, but she interpreted our suggestion as us giving her options and then telling her which one she should choose.
She ultimately decided to pass on the product.
Luckily, it was just one independent store rather than a large chain. We're actually in that store today, so things eventually worked out, but it was an important lesson for us.
The situation showed us how delicate the relationship with a retail buyer can be. Whether you're working with one store, a chain of 100 stores, or a chain of 1,000 stores, you have to be careful about how you communicate your recommendations.
You don't want to tell a buyer or category manager what to do. At the same time, there are situations where you have experience or category knowledge that can help inform their decisions. Sometimes a retailer will try something new, expecting it to work, only to discover that it doesn't. You hear those stories all the time.
It's a fine line between sharing your expertise and making a buyer feel as though you're telling them how to do their job. You can offer your thoughts and explain why you believe a particular approach makes sense, but ultimately, the decision belongs to the retailer.
Sometimes, the partnership might not be the right fit at that particular moment. You have to understand the buying team, respect its decision-making process, and be thoughtful about how you communicate.
That was one of the negative experiences we had a couple of years ago, and it taught us to be much more cautious about how we approach those conversations.
What is your why?
The way I describe our “why” now is that we started this business for our dad in our kitchen, and we're continuing to carry on his legacy while building our own.
Our dad spent his life helping people. He was a chiropractor who spoke on stages and worked with other cancer patients, helping some of them go from being given just weeks to live to surviving for years. He was able to make a real difference in people's lives, and that was his mission.
Our mission is a little different, but it comes from the same core idea: helping other people.
As we say, we want to “kick the fake food to the curb” and evolve the way people snack. That's really what we're trying to accomplish.
How can we help someone move away from the artificially dyed, artificially flavored snacks with 25 grams of sugar per serving that they're eating today and introduce them to something better?
We believe that most people aren't going to sacrifice the foods they enjoy just because something else is healthier. I often say that 99% of Americans, or 99% of people around the world, aren't going to choose a product simply because it's healthy. They want to enjoy what they're eating. If it doesn't taste good, they aren't going to keep buying it just because it's good for them.
That's why we have to bridge that gap.
We hear it all the time when people try our products. They'll say, “This is actually healthy for me?” We tell them to look at the ingredients. There are only three ingredients, and they're probably already in their kitchen. They're simple ingredients that people recognize and understand.
When people realize that something can be made with simple ingredients and still taste amazing, it creates a light-bulb moment. They can't believe that something so tasty can also be good for them.
That's our mission: to help people move away from the sugary snacks they're used to, whether it's Twinkies, Ho-Hos, donuts, or other similar products, and toward better alternatives without feeling as though they have to compromise on taste.
We want to make that transition as easy as possible. If we can give people a snack they genuinely enjoy while helping them make a healthier choice, then we're accomplishing what we set out to do.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
I can think of a few stories from when we were younger, even though they might seem like small moments.
At one local event, we had a customer who loved our product so much that he kept swearing because he couldn't believe how healthy it was. He was completely blown away. It was a small moment, but I remember thinking, “That's awesome.”
I was probably 16 or 17 at the time, and my brother and I were just laughing about it. Our mom was there, too. The customer was visiting the United States from another country, and he kept swearing over and over because he couldn't believe that something so healthy could taste so good.
That memory has always stuck with me because it showed us the reaction people could have when they tried our products for the first time.
More recently, we had another exciting moment at the New Products Conference, which this year was hosted by Kroger and Hy-Vee. Hundreds of brands applied, and I believe around 80 or 90 emerging brands participated.
The competition gave brands an opportunity to showcase their products and potentially earn launch opportunities with the retailers. Three brands were selected for launch opportunities with Hy-Vee, three were selected for Kroger, and one brand was ultimately chosen as the grand-prize winner to launch with both Kroger and Hy-Vee.
We went into it without knowing what to expect. We decided to put our best product forward and see what we could accomplish over the next two days.
On the third day, we found out that we had won first place and been selected for launches with both Kroger and Hy-Vee.
That happened within the past couple of months, and it was an incredible feeling. Moments like that bring a smile to your face and make you think, “All right, we've got something here. We're doing the right things. Let's keep going.”
Those are the moments that remind us why we're doing this and give us the motivation to keep pushing forward.
Coming up?
We're preparing for a couple of national launches toward the end of 2026, followed by additional national rollouts in 2027.
Those launches will put our products in thousands of stores around the country, so we're excited about what's ahead.
Piece of Advice
My advice applies to entrepreneurs at any stage of their journey, whether they're just starting out, generating $1 million or $10 million in revenue, or even running a business doing $100 million or more.
There's a big difference between working in your business and working on your business.
Working in your business means handling the day-to-day responsibilities: answering emails, fulfilling orders, creating invoices, and doing all the things necessary to keep operations running. If you're generating $100 a day and spend all your time working in the business, those activities might keep you at $100 a day, but they don't necessarily help you grow beyond that.
Working on your business is what takes you from $100 to $150, then $200, and beyond. That could mean developing an innovative marketing campaign, focusing on sales, attending a trade show, building new partnerships, or identifying opportunities to expand your distribution. These are the activities that can create new growth.
Instead of spending all your time working in the business, you have to make time to work on it. That's what will help fuel growth and allow you to scale.
It's something I would encourage everyone listening or reading to think about. When my brother and I started, we thought we were working incredibly hard, and we were. But we were spending almost all our time working in the business rather than on it.
As a result, we weren't growing much. We were relatively flat month over month and year over year. Eventually, we started asking ourselves a different question: “This is great, but what can we actually do to grow?”
That's when we began shifting our focus toward working on the business instead of just working in it. Making that change helped fuel our growth and move us forward.
Promo Code
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Community Callout
Wayne Bennett - ECRM
He's been helpful on the connection side.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank Brothers Nuts and Co-Founder, Caleb Majors, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!
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