N.O.-Based Snacks Startup Bets on South American ‘Superfood’

So who will be the next local entrepreneur to turn a big idea into a big business success? One candidate is Aaron Gailmor, who launched a healthy snacks company called Brass Roots here in 2019. 

The idea for the healthy food venture began a few years earlier when Gailmor, a Vermont native, encountered sacha inchi seeds for the first time in the bulk foods aisle of a California grocery store. 

Intrigued by the possibilities of the ingredient, Gailmor brought some seeds home to New Orleans and began experimenting in the kitchen of his downtown apartment. His first goal was to see if he could blend them into a nut butter.

“I remember putting them in a food processor and for the first minute nothing really happened,” he said. “And then over the next two to three minutes the seeds eventually turned into this beautiful, golden brown, amazingly tasty sacha inchi butter that smelled very similar to peanut butter. And I was fascinated, thinking, ‘What can’t I do with this?’ You can make snack bars with it, you could make just about anything, right? And that’s when I realized there might be a platform to make a snack brand all around the sacha inchi seed.”

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