Elisabeth and Gina are a mother-daughter duo on a mission to create the perfect pretzel stick. Made with the highest-quality wheat and barley, their braided design creates a buttery, crunchy, and vegan snacking experience. Available in bold flavors like French Dijon and Maui Monk, the team hand-selects their seasonings — prioritizing whole ingredients like garlic, onion, and salt imported from Italy.
Recently, we caught up with Gina to learn more about their journey and hear her advice for fellow entrepreneurs.
1. Why did you start Stellar Snacks?
After moving to the U.S. from France in the 90s, my mom, a brilliant entrepreneur and passionate foodie, started her first business selling premium nuts and trail mixes to airlines. In 2019, she needed to source pretzels, and when looking for a high-quality, innovative pretzel manufacturer, she couldn’t find the right one anywhere — let alone any manufacturer on the West Coast. At the time, I was studying marketing and branding at Loyola Marymount University, spending much of my free time (and college budget) in the snack aisle of Bristol Farms Westchester. So, my mom and I came together, spent days and nights researching, recruited top talent, and finally, decided to take the leap of faith ourselves.
We knew this story of a family-owned, woman-run pretzel factory was truly one-of-a-kind, so we decided to launch our own namesake Stellar brand to epitomize our story, hard work, and uniqueness. Stellar Pretzel Braids are vegan, non-GMO, kosher, and free of artificial flavors and top allergens like peanuts and soy. To top it off, we partner with emerging artists to feature their artwork on our bags, bringing them exposure and truly capturing the artisanal nature of our snacks.
2. What obstacles did you face along the way?
Naturally, launching a new business in 2019 brought challenges when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Our primary customers in the airline industry had their planes grounded overnight, grocery stores fought inventory battles, and American families across the country struggled with the loss of jobs and food insecurity. This time was a make-or-break era for Stellar Snacks, and looking back, we are so proud of the resilience that our whole team showed.
As an essential business, our doors remained open for work (at safe distances) and we retained our entire staff as we focused our efforts on producing snacks for those in need, including K-12 school programs, food banks, hospitals, and shelters. Eventually, we emerged into the “new normal” with a strong ethos of social impact, ready to deploy our beloved brand.
3. What lessons do you have for other entrepreneurs?
For me personally, I learn the most from my mother Elisabeth. She is a fiercely kindhearted leader with wit and entrepreneurial spirit beyond words. She raised me in her first 30,000 square-foot snack factory where she co-packed an assortment of natural and better-for-you brands. It was there that I learned the largest lessons of my life — from treating your employees like a family to never shying away from risk, fear, or challenges life throws your way.
She is famous for not taking “no” for an answer, and instead responds with “there’s a first for everything!” As for my mom, she greatly admires Joan of Arc and Oprah Winfrey, both for being strong women who are celebrated for defying expectations and executing their wildest dreams. Most of all, she commends them for making space and creating legacies for future generations of women to follow.
4. What’s on the horizon for Stellar Snacks?
Before we look to the horizon, we’d love to first look up and announce some amazing recent news — our Maui Monk Stellar Pretzels are now served as the primary snack onboard Southwest Airlines. This has been a tremendous opportunity and it is heartwarming to come full circle and provide an elevated snack option to the aviation industry, where my mom got her start.
Looking ahead, we will be launching a gluten-free line called Stellar Pretzel Thins. These pretzels will not only be free from gluten, but also grain-free and full of superfood ingredients like chia seed flour, hemp protein, Omega-3, and vitamin D. They will also be baked with avocado oil for heart health and feel-good snacking.
5. How do you keep work/life balance? What drives/inspires you?
To be completely honest, we’re still working on the work/life balance aspect. We are ferociously proud of our team, our mission, and our day-to-day operations, so work genuinely feels like fun to us. We seek peace and calm by taking our dogs on a walk to the lake near the factory, and we lean on each other for moral support and recharge from our mother-daughter bond. We share the perspective that our drive comes from our people, including our employees (we call them family), customers, vendors, retail partners, and even the communities around our bakeries. We want to achieve our ambitious goals for them, to be a model of a business that truly cares and shows the world what happens when determined women respond to comments like, “You’re crazy, you’ll never make it against the big guys” with, “Watch me.”
Just as importantly, our product itself gives immense fuel to our passion. We are authentic believers in the benefits of our offerings, and we look at it this way: Pretzels have been around for hundreds of years, yet in all that time, they haven't improved much. The big corporations who own multitudes of brands consider pretzels an outdated snack and an afterthought. As a result, pretzels have broadly been left behind to get stale, boring, bland, neglected, and often at the bottom of the shelf. We are driven to reimagine the pretzel category as a whole and breathe new life into the snack aisle. We bake artisanal pretzels (in-house) with seasonings inspired by our favorite culinary flavors, paired with art-filled packaging, and of course, lots of love.
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- Meet the Founder Snacks Vegan