When she founded her company, Purely Elizabeth, elizabeth Stein had bigger dreams than just starting a natural food brand. I had a vision to create a company that was really this lifestyle brand. Beginning in Elizabeth's kitchen in 2009, Purely Elizabeth's products are now stocked in 30,000 grocery stores all over the country.
The company makes a variety of granolas, cereals, and oatmeal using ingredients like chia seeds, quinoa, and coconut sugar. Despite being one of the best selling granola brands on the market, Purely Elizabeth's founder knew very little about packaged goods when she started out. I came into the industry not knowing anything and really just focused on stepping out of my comfort zone, feeling the fear and doing it anyway, and having a growth mindset to just say, I'm just going to figure it out.
There are three numbers to pay attention to in Elizabeth's story. $5,000: the personal savings that she spent on Purely Elizabeth's first inventory. $50 million: the investment funds that purely Elizabeth received in 2022.
And $147 million: the sales that the company brought in for 2024. Here's how Elizabeth Stein took a granola recipe and turned it into a multi-million dollar business. Before starting in the natural foods business, Elizabeth worked in sales and marketing in New York.
In 2008, she left her job for a new career: nutrition counseling. I started to do many marathons, triathlons and really fell in love with this idea of health and wellness and really stepping out of your comfort zone. After completing a nutrition coaching certification program, she started working with clients one-on-one.
But she found it difficult to point her clients toward healthy, prepackaged foods. I saw that there were so many unhealthy gluten free products on the market. They were loaded with refined flours and sugars, and I'm someone who has a sweet tooth, as did so many of my clients, and I really struggled to find something for them to buy on the grocery store shelves.
Elizabeth decided to promote her nutrition counseling business at a local race. So the night before the race, on a total whim, I decided to bake up a batch of blueberry muffins. And so I went to that race the next day, and person after person kept asking where they could find these delicious muffins outside of the race.
I had very few people want to sign up for my nutrition practice. In 2009, Elizabeth returned to the race with a new plan. I figured, you know what?
I have a captive audience. I will put together some muffin mixes and a pancake mix to sell, and this will be my side hustle, and we'll see what happens. I got very scrappy and put together mixes.
I built my own website and went to the race and sold out at the race. Within a few weeks, Elizabeth received $10,000 in orders for her pancake and muffin mixes. I really felt like there was this white space opportunity for a product that didn't have a trade off between culinary taste and nutrient rich ingredients.
And so we were really at the forefront of bringing these unknown superfood ingredients to the market. So focused on using coconut sugar as a sweetener, using flax seed, hemp seed, chia seed, nutrient rich flours like millet flour and almond flour. The name of Elizabeth's new company was inspired by another natural food company, Justin's.
Justin from Justin's Nut Butter was a huge brand in the natural food space. I felt like I really connected to the company and had that personal connection, and so I knew I wanted to have my name in the name of the brand. And adding "Purely" at the beginning was just the perfect way to explain the products and the company.
Before she could start fulfilling orders, she needed product. I initially invested $5,000 into the company from my savings that was put into building our inventory for that very first production. At the time, I was selling direct to these stores in New York and Philadelphia out of my Upper West Side apartment and shipping them out of there.
Elizabeth also found a commercial kitchen in which to make her mixes. In its first year, Purely Elizabeth brought in $30,000 in sales. Elizabeth eventually got her products into local Whole Foods stores with the help of a motivated sales person.
My mom, I will say, was the best salesperson. She single handedly got us into about 40 stores in the Whole Foods Mid-Atlantic region by calling up each of the buyers on the phone and explaining this amazing, unique product. And that was how we got into Whole Foods initially.
In 2011, Elizabeth hit upon a product idea that would change everything for her company. So I had this idea to whip up a batch of granola, and my mom was in town visiting, and she was a huge granola connoisseur. She knew all the products on the market, and she tasted it and said, like, this is the best granola I've ever had.
This should be your next product. And as a good daughter, I listened to what she said and I actually never changed the recipe from that first day. Purely Elizabeth's granola marked a turning point in the company's fortunes.
It became very clear very quickly that the granola was far more delicious than the muffin mixes were. The reaction to mixes was like, I don't cook, I don't bake, I store my sneakers in the oven. People really consumed the granola with much more frequency, and we quickly really pivoted into focusing just on the granola and discontinuing the muffin and pancake mixes.
The big moment came in 2013 while Elizabeth was literally underground. I remember I was on the subway in New York City and I got an email from Whole Foods Global and the email said, we are pushing you out nationally, and basically we are losing sales by not having you in all of the regions. And I remember just starting to hysterical cry on the subway, having this feeling, this gut feeling that this was about to fully change the trajectory of the business.
Other big retailers followed suit and Purely Elizabeth. Sales skyrocketed from $690,000 in 2012 to $2. 3 million in 2013.
The rapid growth was significant for a company that didn't take any outside investment until 2017. I really decided to wait as long as possible to take outside investment so that I could continue to own majority of the ownership of the company. In the early days, we were a very lean team and really wanted to find partners who were not just bringing money, but really bringing operational expertise as well.
In 2017, Purely Elizabeth received $3 million in funding from 301 Inc. , the venture capital arm of food giant General Mills. Then in 2022, Elizabeth's company found its biggest funder.
We took outside investment of $50 million from a private equity group, SEMCAP. That money from SEMCAP, which invests in AI, health care, food and nutrition, allowed Purely Elizabeth to scale up its operations. The $50 million investment really allowed us to not be quite as scrappy as a team.
We were able to really help set up the infrastructure of the company, focus on innovation as well as marketing. 2024 was Purely Elizabeth's highest sales year to date, reflecting over a decade of consistent growth. In 2009, we did $30,000 in sales, and in 2024, we finished the year at $147 million in sales.
That year also saw some new products from Purely Elizabeth, most notably its new cookie granola line. This is by far one of my favorite products. I will say that I do have a personal favorite product of ours, and that is actually our new peanut butter cookie granola.
It actually tastes like a peanut butter cookie and is just perfection to me. Elizabeth is still the company's majority shareholder, and she says she plans to keep growing it for the long haul. This is my baby and I want to stay CEO of Purely Elizabeth and continuing to build this platform and build this lifestyle brand and continue to see where the brand can go.
