This week, we are focusing on Gatherer’s Granola – a local business located in Schenectady, NY.
Gatherer’s began as a family recipe that the owner, Sandro Gerbini’s mom developed. Sandro’s mom would send him care packages in college, and everyone loved the granola that she included. One day in 2010, owner and founder, Sandro Gerbini introduced the granola at the Delmar Farmers Market. It was purely on a whim, but it ended up catching on. Soon, he had a customer base that expected Sandro to continue baking for them. He was baking at night, using the kitchen at a local cafe where he was the manager during the day. At the same time, he was developing another web-based start-up company.
The farmers market customers demanded more granola with every passing week, and some began to ask the obvious question, “why don’t you sell this anywhere else?”
It was an interesting notion, though Sandro had no ambitions of baking granola for a living. Nevertheless, he decided to spend an afternoon trying his hand at wholesaling to local stores. By the end of that day, his granola was available on shelves at five local retailers.
Two months later he decided to drop everything and pursue the granola idea.