How Oat Haus is finding success, with its granola butter now on Costco shelves
Ali Bonar and her colleagues at Oat Haus used to buy the ingredients for their granola butters at Costco. Now, they are selling their products at Costco.
The food manufacturer debuted its cookie dough granola butter (yes, the butter is made from granola) in an extra-large 27-oz. jar at more than 100 Costco stores in Midwestern states, including Ohio, last week.
"Costco is pretty savage," Bonar told the Cleveland Business Journal. "It's very make-or-break. They'll test you for 12 weeks — they call it a 'rotation' — and especially the first few weeks are the most important. So if we do well in this Midwest region, then they'll start to expand us to other regions."
The Oat Haus entrepreneurs — comprising Bonar, her husband, Eric Katz, and Eric's childhood friend, Ari Schraer — doubled their output to make enough product for the Costco stores.
"We started running a night shift, and Ari started managing that," Bonar said.
"We still make everything from scratch," including toasting and grinding the granola used to make butters in several flavors, such as brownie batter, cinnamon roll and wild berry, she said. "We also fulfill ... all of our e-commerce online orders in-house."
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The brand was born in 2018 out of Bonar's nutrition study at the University of California at Berkley and her eating disorders. While recovering, she added nut butters to her diet but found them hard to digest, so she started experimenting with oats.
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