It only takes four ingredients to make best-selling granola. But a good product is not enough to build a business.
In the case of Kelly’s Four Plus, a Norwalk-based company that hand crafts between 2,000-2,500 pounds of granola in six different flavors by hand every week, family is the key to success.
The business started while brothers Nate and Will Kelly were trying to make the Olympic rowing team and working with the Norwalk Maritime Rowing Club.
“We were trying to think about our diet,”recalled Nate Kelly, a cofounder of the company and the current chief revenue officer. “My mom was making this granola at home for my dad who was on the South Beach Diet and had been eating a competitor’s granola and just didn’t like it anymore after they changed the recipe. So, my mom said, ‘Hey, I can make granola!’ and she came up with what is essentially our current nutty blend of granola. Our dad was eating a ton of it, he got us hooked on it, and we started to see how it was benefiting our training program.”The brothers were working as assistant coaches for the New Canaan crew team during their training and started offering their mom’s granola to the students as a treat.
“They liked it, they started buying it from us, and then it turned into a group of kids buying five, six, eight, 10 bags every single day,”Kelly said. “So, we finally asked them, ‘Hey you can’t be consuming all this granola yourselves?’ And they said, ‘Oh no, we’re buying it from you guys for five bucks and selling it to our friends at school for six.’ We quickly realized there’s a business here and a desire for good quality granola outside the boathouse.”Cordy Gould Kelly, a co-founder and the originator of the family’s current granola recipe, soon found herself ramping up production beyond what her home kitchen in New Canaan could handle. She said she never expected to launch a business after spending years in finance but found herself joining her sons and husband John Kelly as partners in the venture.
In short order, she found herself making bigger and bigger batches, selling at first at farmers markets and some local grocery stores, while her sons worked to turn the business into a brand sold in 500 locations across the country and via e-commerce.
“I don’t know how many times I have seen a New York Times article that says that the granola bar you’re eating for breakfast is actually more like a candy bar,”Nate Kelly said. “But actually, you’re just not getting the right kind of granola.”Rolled buckeye oats, non-GMO expeller pressed canola oil, honey, and maple syrup are the “Four”in the brand name, and the only ingredients in their Honey Maple Flavor, while their Nutty, Chocolate Cherry, Vanilla Almond, Apple Cinnamon, and Cranberry Nut flavors also contain the “plus.”Nate and Cordy Kelly remain not only involved in the business, but also production, often putting in long days baking the granola and hand mixing the ingredients on top of running the business.
“Eventually the smell stops making you hungry,” joked Cordy.
Nate said that the company has plans to scale up production and reach even more markets, but in the meantime getting down to the roots and hand tossing granola is valuable, as well as necessary. The small team extends beyond the family and his brother Will is no longer involved with daily operations, but those connections remain at the core of the company’s operations.
“You see these horror stories sometimes on TV shows of everybody at each other’s throats,” Nate said of what people expect when he mentions working in a family business. “It couldn’t be more of the exact opposite with us. I always look at this as I’m sharing all of the successes with my family, most directly with my mom. And there are times where we need to figure out how we get over a hurdle. But we can put our heads together. All four of us partners, my father John, my mother Cordy, myself and Will, we all bring a lot of different types of experience and strengths to the table. Between the four of us, we’re able to tackle any of these issues that come to us.”
