Why We Started WildBoard

The grocery store makes no sense to me, and I say that with love.

Walk through almost any aisle and the store assumes you are a grown-up with an actual palate. You are buying artisanal pickles and globally inspired condiments. You have opinions about olive oil. Somebody convinced you that dates are basically candy now, and you were into it. Your taste has evolved, the store knows it, and it stocks accordingly.

Then you turn into the trail mix aisle, and it is like walking through a door into 1994. Your only real choices are nuts with candy dumped in, or plain, dusty birdseed. There is no version for the person you have become everywhere else in the store. I stood in that aisle for years, turning bags over, reading the back, and putting them down. I am Amy, I am building this snack brand with my wife Jenny, and that aisle is the reason we exist.

The board came before the brand

Long before there was a company, there was a board on our kitchen counter. Not a recipe, not a plan, just the thing that happens when Jenny and I are in the same room and the day is winding down. Sometimes people were coming over. Often it was only the two of us. The board was the pause before everything else started, the little signal that the hard part of the day was behind us and the good part was beginning.

I proposed to Jenny on a quiet Sunday in Maine. Eleven days later, on Thanksgiving, surrounded by all of our kids and our family, she proposed back, and the whole house became the celebration. Somewhere in those eleven days it became clear that the thing we had been making in our kitchen for years, the savory clusters that came out when the oven was on and the counter was full, was the thing the trail mix aisle was missing. Not a snack exactly. A board, in a bag.

Fifteen years of watching the aisle get it wrong

I spent fifteen years inside the food industry, at Hu, at Levain, at KeHE, learning how margins work and how products get built and why most of them fail. All that time, I kept coming back to the same quiet observation. The trail mix aisle was having a conversation with the wrong person. On one end it was kid-coded, sweet and sticky and built for a lunchbox. On the other end it was wellness-anxious, clinical, talking to someone who treats eating as a problem to solve. In between was an adult with a real palate, standing there with nothing made for her. She kept getting skipped. I kept noticing her, because she was me.

What we actually built

So we built WildBoard. We took the premium nuts, seeds, and crunchy roasted chickpeas we love, and we baked the flavors of global appetizer traditions right into savory trail mix clusters. Spanish Tapas at your desk. Italian Aperitivo between meetings. Mediterranean Mezze on your commute. Three flavors, each carrying a whole tradition in a 3.5 ounce bag, each with 15 grams of protein and 12 grams of fiber from real food, all vegan and gluten-free because that is simply what happens when you make something from real ingredients with real intention.

We are not here to sell you candy in disguise or a supplement pretending to be a snack. We are here for the adult snacker the aisle forgot. The board comes with you now, which was always the point.

If any of this sounds like you, come meet the board in a bag. You have shown up for all of our first moments, and we want you at this one.

Keep reading: Show Up: The Ethos Behind WildBoard, Aperitivo Hour, in a Bag: The Story Behind Our Three Flavors, and The Appetizer Board, Unbundled.

From our board to yours, Amy.