Small Biz 518 – Gatherer’s Granola

January 22, 2019

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.

In early summer of 2012, Gatherer’s moved into its own facility in Schenectady, New York. The new space allowed a customized baking process and dramatically increased capacity. It became clear that success would be defined by how many people could find Gatherer’s in their local supermarket. Thus began the mission to put Gatherer’s in every grocery store across the country. From their humble beginnings selling directly to customers at farmers markets, Gatherer’s products rapidly gained national distribution.

Watch the video below, as Sandro Gerbini talks about the company.

Sandro Gerbini explains, “What makes our product unique, is that it’s all made from the same baking techniques that my mom used when she was making it for me as a care package. We’re making it as if we are making it for people we love, and I think you can taste that when you try our product.”

For more information about the product, visit here.