This New Zealand woman’s home snack business could hit $10M this year; even Gwyneth Paltrow is a fan

Rebecca Brady, who made the first batch of her seed cracker in 2017 and hoped to sell just one box in that farmer's market, made over $5 million in revenue in 2023. The New Zealand native, a mother of three, has grown Top Seedz from a small $400-a-month commissary space into a popular brand that’s sold in more than 4,000 stores across the country, via CNBC Make It. The company recruits mostly women who are refugees from roughly 20 different countries. It is looking to make $10 million in revenue this year, per Brady.

"I’m not a refugee but I was a new person here to Buffalo ... [and] I do appreciate how hard it is coming to a new place and not being able to find work," she says.

Brady, who moved to Japan with her husband and kids, failed to obtain a work visa in the foreign country and instead focused on raising her kids while her husband worked in an aerospace company Moog. After moving back to the US in 2015, she got her work visa but failed to get a job. It was around the same time that he started playing tennis where she used to take her homemade snacks. She soon noticed how much other players, loved her crackers and decided to do market research.

"I was like, ‘Maybe I’ll give this a try.’ It was just from people’s reactions to [the crackers] and them getting disappointed when I’d turn up to [tennis] practice without them," she said.

At the time, she invested around $5,000 from her family’s savings upfront. Her lack of business exposure made her take a conservative approach when it came to spending. This included saying no to ideas that she wasn't sure about.

After this, she focused her time on building an immigrant workforce. It was only in 2022 that her sales catapulted. This was when actress and lifestyle influencer Gwyneth Paltrow spoke about her love for the company’s snacks on her social media handle.

"It just becomes more and more real that someone like Gwyneth Paltrow is buying [our products] and that she’s sharing it with her millions of followers," says Brady. "We were kind of screaming."

As per reports, the US seed cracker market is projected to exceed $2 billion in the coming decade and brands like Back to Nature and Crunchmaster are looking to cement their positions in this industry. However, Brady is confident that she will be able to carve her way in. The company is growing and Brady is looking to move her work into a 35,000-square-foot facility in downtown Buffalo, which will turn out 16,000 boxes of crackers in just four hours, as per Brady.

She also hoped to expand her business and create more SKUs. "My mother’s going to kill me if I don’t get us into New Zealand," she says. "She’s done the marketing for the whole country," she joked.