More kids have allergies. This Raleigh startup wants to make them better snacks.
Brooke Navarro knows how easily a food allergy can change someone’s life.
One almost killed her mother, a school cafeteria worker.
While working in the school’s kitchen, she unknowingly came into contact with the remnants of a batch of peanut butter cookies. It sent her into an anaphylactic shock that four EpiPens couldn’t tame.
By the time Navarro reached her at the hospital, doctors had intubated her mother and she was in a coma.
“Thank God she woke up” 48 hours later, Navarro said. “So when people say, they’re just food allergies, I am like, ‘No, my mom literally just about died.’”
It affects Navarro, too. Like her mother, she has severe allergies.
So, too, does her 2-year-old daughter, whose diagnosis prompted her to quit her job in investment banking.
Earlier this year, she and her husband, Matthew, both quit their finance jobs in New York City to launch Without a Trace Foods, a startup manufacturing allergy-free snacks.
Getting space in New York seemed impossible, so the couple decided to pack their bags and leave.
Matthew, who got his MBA and law degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, had always wanted to return to North Carolina, so the couple picked Raleigh to start the company.
Two weeks after they left New York, the city was shut down by COVID-19.
The Navarros had been plotting this for a while, though. The couple worked for two years with a food scientist and a chef to come up with recipes for cookies, granola bars and power bites that are not just safe but taste good.
“A lot of the foods that are are free from (allergies), you know, they taste like they’re free from something,” she said. “We didn’t want that to happen.”
That meant testing out prototype after prototype of the company’s potential offerings, until finding just the right chewiness for the cookie, the right flavor of strawberry for the granola bar or a recipe that was simply shelf stable.
Free of the Big 8
The company is serious about its name, too.
Often, Navarro said, she would pick up food that claimed to be free of nuts, only to read in the fine print it “may contain traces of nuts.”
Navarro meticulously audits their supply chain for any potential exposure to allergens, and makes the production facility as much of a bubble as possible. On a tour, this reporter sported a hair net, booties and was barred from bringing in any outside foods or drinks.
The snacks are free of the eight most common food allergies: peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat, soybean, shellfish and fish — as well as sesame seed and gluten.
Between her and her daughter, the Navarros are allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, eggs and sesame.
“We wanted to create, not just a product, but a trusted brand for families who are navigating food allergies,” Navarro said.
Allergies are becoming more common
That’s a growing number as well, with more people reporting food allergies than ever.
Hospital admissions for severe allergic reactions, or anaphylaxis, are up in the U.S., Australia and Europe, according to a review in the The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology.
In the U.S., hospital visits because of allergies soared by three times from 1993 to 2006, another study found.
“I was just one of two kids in my elementary school of 800 kids that had a food allergy,” Navarro said. That made her feel isolated often, as every time snacks were doled out to the classroom, she was labeled “the allergic kid.”
“Now, it’s really one in every 13 kids have a food allergy,” she added.
That is slowly changing mindsets about the foods people buy and share.
For many families, even if just one person in the household has allergies, that means the whole household is changing its diet.
“My husband and my son do not have food allergies,” she said. “But now it’s all four of us that have to shop in an allergen-friendly way.”
A family operation
Only a few months removed from launch, Without a Trace is still a small operation.
In October, the company raised nearly $200,000 in convertible notes to get the business started.
But the team is just the Navarros at this point, with the couple making and shipping the snacks from their kitchen facility in a shopping center off Rock Quarry Road.
Navarro jokes that even though she left the intense world of investment banking, she still works similar hours because of how many roles entrepreneurs end up taking on.
Like many young brands, the company has been focused on direct-to-consumer sales rather than getting into retail stores, though that could happen in the future.
The company already has customers as far away as Hawaii, and it is using most of its advertising bandwidth to raise awareness in allergy-focused social media groups and with social media influencers.
“It’s really about continuing to spread the message about the idea that allergen friendly foods, don’t have to compromise taste,” Navarro said.
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published December 22, 2020 at 8:00 AM.
