Why One Mission-Driven Food Business Is Forgoing Big Grocery

Mark and Megan Overbay have been in the food business since 2010, building a thoughtful nut butter brand out of North Carolina — Big Spoon Roasters. They’re in over 4,000 stores across the US. And they’ve bootstrapped it all the way.

But this January, they’ve decided to part ways with one of their biggest accounts, Whole Foods. Mark wrote a blog, detailing how the two of them mulled over the decision, but ultimately came to the realization that the food business had changed since they started 15 years ago — and big grocery was just not their arena anymore. So they’re pulling out of UNFI which distributes to Whole Foods and other national grocery retails.

“For one, I’d love it if we don’t use the word, CPG, for food,” Mark says. CPG, short for consumer packaged goods, has come to be the industry catch-all for anything that’s sold on grocery store shelves and is in any kind of packaging (thus, barring produce). “It’s like defining food as a unit of commerce and not defining it as something that gives you life and pleasure and connects you to other people and to traditions.”

Mark and Megan started the business selling their nut butter creations at a bike race in 2011 when Megan was looking for a nutrient-dense energy bar that could keep her going while exercising. Once they their friends had tried them, and given their approval, the duo took them to local farmers markets; they routinely sold out, Mark says. Slowly they built up production — all while Megan kept her day job, and Mark ultimately quit his at Counter Culture Coffee to focus on building their craft food company.

Their big break came when a Bon Appetit editor discovered their treats at the farmers market and wrote about them on a blog. That was followed by another feature in the print edition of the magazine, where Mark’s Peanut Pecan Butter was named as one of the best food items of the year.

“I was at a friend’s house when I found out, and had to ask if I could politely use his computer to check my emails. We were getting requests from all over the country, asking for pallets, boxes of it.”

The Bon Appetit feature launched Big Spoon Roasters, one could say.

They started selling with Whole Foods, locally in Durham, North Carolina. “I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing Big Spoon Roasters jars on the shelves of the local Whole Foods Market for the first time,” Mark says. And then they grew into neighboring Whole Foods locations — Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Asheville. But he was still filling each jar by hand with a spoon and making all the deliveries himself while doing demos and sample tastings for customers on evenings and weekends, he recalls.

As they went national, they had to work with a national distributor such as UNFI. And that’s where things got complicated. With each new store expansions, companies are expected to send free product (or “free fills” as they’re called), and partake in promotions. Each shipment would be received by UNFI before being delivered to a grocery store – and UNFI had the power to make deductions if something didn’t meet their requirements. Mark explains that they would often keep meticulous records of each shipment (even taking photos of pallets before they went out) and yet, they’d still face fines — which then he and his team disputed. They won each one of those disputes, he says, but after years of grinding away, it’s all become too time-consuming and tiring for the mission-driven business.

“Once we reached multi-region, or global, distribution, we quickly realized that the large-scale national grocery system is not designed to celebrate or nurture the maker,” he says. “Rather the system moves producers into a position of higher volumes and lower margins.”

For the Overbays, this company was not just about profits and national expansion. They wanted to bring a clean, thoughtfully-sourced product to consumers. Mark had spent time in Zimbabwe as a Peace Corps volunteer where he saw peanut butter being made by hand, and enjoyed cooking. Megan had been an avid baker. Neither one, though, had plans to start a food company.

Yet, friends encouraged them to think about a food business given both their passions for cooking and baking, respectively.

“One day I was sanding a piece of wood in our backyard. It was fall of 2010. And we had had all these discussions about how could we start a food business that reflected our values and that allowed us to work with farmers,” Mark recalls.

“And it just flew into my mind that no one was making small batch, fresh roasted nut butter, anywhere close to the quality that I experienced making peanut butter myself. And not because I was a genius, but just because I had fresh peanuts and I had the care to make something taste good. And I actually tasted it as I was making it and then tasted it some more when I added a little salt and added a little honey until I got it just right.”

“It just seemed that even though we were in the midst of this sort of renaissance of American craft food, with breweries and bakeries and fermented things and farmer’s markets were exploding with all these small businesses, nut butters in 2010 were not part of that,” he recalls.

Thus, they’ve worked over the years to be mindful of their sourcing: using Jacobsen Sea Salt from Oregon, almonds from bee-friendly certified growers in California, organic pecan farmers in Texans, and sorghum farmers in Tennessee, for example.

But their efforts didn’t stop at the supply chain. Mark had been interested in sustainability and he sought to infuse it into their startup. “We have a zero waste goal every day and we come really close to hitting it most days. Most of the waste that we produce comes from incoming packaging, like the bags that our almonds come in, the bags that our peanuts come in,” he explains.

“We try to get things that are recyclable when we can, but our actual production process is zero waste. Any spillover from any of our batches, which are tiny, by the way, we still make batches of about 120, 130 jars, that goes into a set of what we call community blend jars, which we donate to hunger relief organizations. And then the process itself has no waste.”

It doesn’t end there. They think about the cleaning chemicals they use (non-toxic and cruelty-free). Their packaging is glass and steel coupled with uncoated paper labels with non-toxic based inks. The packaging is done in a solar powered facility, that routinely produces more energy than they need with the surplus going back into the grid. They train their team on water management to not waste water. And even offer a reimbursement for local CSA farm box subscriptions so their staff can eat fresh local produce at home.

“Our goal was to make something great, not make something big,” Mark says. “That’s also why we bootstrapped this. We haven’t taken any kind of outside money and that’s very intentional because we want to maintain the values behind the business and never compromise those, never compromise on quality.”

All of this also explains their desire to return to their roots — honing in on the hundreds of independent grocers and specialty stores that carry their products rather than big grocery. This could be Bi-Rite in the Bay Area, Central Market in Texas, or the mom-and-pop stores with just one location. But is that enough business to build a sizable company? Mark acknowledges that this will be the first year that Big Spoon Roasters may not see continued growth and they’ll need to do some restructuring. But he’s comfortable with that.

“It’s possible to have an incredible food business that I think could set new standards in terms of quality, integrity, sustainability, which are what we try to do and not sell to big grocery distribution. There’s so much pressure, I think, in conversation with the outside world as a business owner about growth. Growth is great and should be celebrated. But we’ve always wanted to measure that growth and success on our own terms — through the relationships that we build, through building a positive work space, work environment for our team, growing their wages, contributing to the communities that we touch in a bigger way.”

Since making the announcement, he says, small, local retailers have been reaching out, encouraged by their decision. It also frees up more time for product innovation and storytelling — two things he enjoys doing. For instance, this January, they launched a new flavor: The Linzer Cookie Cashew and Almond Butter. Made with raspberries and lemon oil, it’s the nut butter version of the Austrian classic, a Linzer Torte, or similarly the UK’s Jammie Dodger biscuit.

Experimenting with new flavors, telling their stories and connecting with community even more – that is what the Overbays hope to do on this new chapter of Big Spoon Roasters.