More Granola is a gourmet granola brand setting out to make healthy eating more indulgent, while also stimulating creativity in consumers. We make granola snacks in a line of dessert inspired flavours, including Pecan Pie, Hot Chocolate, Nutty Crumble and Salted Caramel. Our signature ‘snackable chunks’ are an innovation in the granola world by bridging the gap between looser style granola cereal and chewy granola bars.
Congratulations for winning the Innovating for sustainability prize as part of the Xero Beautiful Business Fund! What does this mean for you and More Granola?
Winning the Innovating for sustainability prize enables us to take an exciting step towards our sustainability goals. We’re looking at our ingredient sourcing and, with the help of the Xero Beautiful Business Fund, making changes based on the sustainability of those ingredients in the long run. Our goal is to prioritize sourcing locally; reducing our dependence on water intensive crops, supporting local Canadian farmers, and reducing CO2 emissions from transportation.
How did More Granola come to be and how has it grown over the years?
The idea for More Granola was born out of a personal need. As a consumer, I used to buy boxes of granola only to pick out all the little chunks to snack on. I could never understand why those pieces were so rare, when they were so clearly the best part of the box! To me, the void was clear: granola snacks are limited to chewy, single serve balls and bars, and granola cereal is too messy to eat without a spoon.
My entrepreneurial career began during the pandemic. I used to work in Wealth Management, but ultimately knew that wasn’t where my passion lay. I decided to go back to school and was completing my MBA at an entrepreneurship focused school in Madrid, Spain when the pandemic hit. I flew home March 2020 and knew it was the perfect time to launch the business of my dreams and spread joy through food.
Now, almost 3 years later we’re in over 260 retails Canada-wide and have sold thousands of bags online via our Shopify store. I graduated from baking the product myself, to scaling up our production in 2022, and now, we’re available in Sobeys, Whole Foods, and Healthy Planet stores across Ontario.
Having started a company from the ground up, based on a gap in the market – how did sustainability fold into your business plans and what advice would you give other business owners that also want to be sustainability focused?
In the beginning, I found it hard to prioritize my sustainability goals as a small business. I wanted to do everything from day one, but I would have priced myself out of the category. My advice to others starting out is to pick one thing and build as you grow.
Running a retail business, you have to think about everything from your supply chain through to accounting and customer experience – what technology tools do you leverage and do you have any recommendations for others to consider?
Shopify was an easy way to create our website and launch our business. It’s accessible, and very user friendly. We use Later to plan our social media posts; it streamlines the work so that we can efficiently prepare posts and stories and preschedule them to publish. Lastly (of course) we love using Xero for our accounting needs. It is intuitive, simple to use, and easy to customize to our reporting needs. It saves me tons of time each month and gives me confidence in preparing our books myself.
Why are programs like the Xero Beautiful Business Fund so important for the small business community?
Starting a small business is a hard journey. You hear ‘no’ a lot, face tons of obstacles, and some days, feel like everything that could go wrong does. Programs like the Xero Beautiful Business Fund give small business owners hope, and the motivation to keep going. They provide the support and backing for businesses to chase their dreams and tackle projects that they might not otherwise.
