ota.bars

Many of you know about the granola bar business I started in spring of 2009.  Before getting into the details, the business is sadly on hold for the time being.  I am hoping to re-open it at some point in the future but since our move to Colorado I have had to close up shop!

I have always loved granola bars.  However, I grew tired of the bars that fill the grocery store aisles.  Their [way too long] ingredient lists and lack of real nutrition had me annoyed.  I have tried a lot of the healthier food bars out there [Clifbar, Larabar, Kashi, etc] but still felt something was seriously lacking.

Check out this ingredient list for your basic grocery store granola bar…yak!

Even Kashi + Clif have ingredient lists a mile long.  I needed something REAL, not 30+ processed ingredients.

I knew I could make something tastier and I wanted a bar filled with oats!  Last winter [‘09] I started playing in the kitchen.  About 1 month later I finally had it, although they were still nameless at the time   I wanted the recipe to be ready for a ski/snowboard trip my husband, myself and a bunch of our friends were going on.  We were all meeting in Utah, and staying in a house together, so I wanted to be able to make the bars for everyone while we were there.

My first variety ended up being the best seller.  It was called cinna-fuse and consisted mainly of oats, almonds, walnuts, apricots, apples and lots of cinnamon.

First photo taken of the bars.  I didn’t start using Chris’s DigiSLR until recently

Everyone seemed to really enjoy the bars and they made perfect mountain snacks.  When we got home, I continued working on them, adding different things in each time.  I brought them into work a few times and shipped them to some family and friends just for something fun.  I was never thinking that it would become anything serious.

My family wanted to know when their next shipment would be, and my friend Laura [in Colorado] was instantly hooked.  She passed them out to some friends at work and called me to tell me they were asking how they could get more and am I going to sell them?  SELL them??  Laura pretty much convinced me that they were good enough to sell…and that I should look into starting a business.

Me?  Start a business?  An architecture major?  Hilarious.

I continued to make the bars [early spring now] and started to look into how to open up a business.  CraZy.  I was also studying to take my LEED AP test and training for my first half marathon and working a full-time architecture job.  My life was non.stop.busy.  I was getting about 5hrs [max] of sleep a night.

Wow, was it a TON of work to open a business.  This was mostly due to the fact that it had to do with food.  Obviously there are some pretty big concerns when people are making and selling food and trying to do it out of their home.  The first thing was that I couldn’t do it at our apartment because we had a dog [only 1 dog at that point].

I thought it was all over.  WHERE was I going to make the bars?  At Eric’s house of course.  Eric wins the “nicest guy EVER” award for letting me do this.  It was so so so amazingly kind of him to do.  He lived only a mile down the road which was extremely convenient and he even let me have a WHOLE cupboard to store my ingredients in.  Eric worked out of town most of the week, which made it easier.  But, even if he was in town, he let me come over and set off a bomb in his kitchen anytime! Eric, you rock!

There were SO many places I had to call to get things finalized…from city offices, to state offices, the health department, and more.  It was my least favorite part by a mile.  Especially because every time you called you got a slightly different story.  I had many hang-ups along the way.  There were points where I really thought it just wasn’t going to happen.  It was stressful to say the least.  Chris kept me optimistic and really was the only reason I stayed sane during this whole process.  He pushed me through the ups + downs, until I eventually had my own business!!

I decided on the name ota.bars

My good friend Joe [we were both in architecture at Ohio State + I met Chris through him], helped me brainstorm name ideas.  Oh gosh were there some funny ones.  I wrote down a lot of words that had to do with the bars and peoples’ names in my family.  I tried merging names, letters, words, etc. together.  Finally, I think Joe said “try to use Dakota’s name.”  Genius!  Dak-OTA….OTA is also OAT scrambled and the bars mainly consisted of oats.  Perfect!  I wanted something short and catchy that would roll easily off the tongue.

I stuck with these 3 colors for all marketing purposes.  I liked that the colors were bold and fun.  I replaced the “O” with a photo I took of oats to really make the label stand out.  It was simple, and quick.  I had to get things rolling and didn’t have a lot of time to work on labels!

I wanted to get some good photos to use for marketing and on the blog and whatnot.  I attempted to learn how to use the digiSLR camera.  This was my first time every using it.  The direct outdoor sunlight was a bit intense!

I was stumped on a slogan.  At first the slogan was “real.simple.food.” [until sometime late July]  I liked that a lot, but everyone said it sounded familiar, and I finally figured out why.  I think it was because of the Real Simple magazine.  I brainstormed a few other ideas and posted a survey on my old ota.bar blog.  The other choice was “eat.real.food.”  I also liked that and it was almost a dead-on tie between them.  A few people thought “eat.real.food.” was a little too in your face, and sort of abrasive, but I liked it!  Then out of nowhere, it hit me…

know.your.food.

It encompassed everything I wanted.

Chris started a website for me [pretty early on], but we never got it up and running.  The business was keeping me plenty busy, just with orders by word of mouth.  I had orders coming from work, back in Ohio, friends + fam in Colorado, etc.  It was crazy.  In the very beginning of June, I also started to sell at a local famers market in Charlotte.  Also, I spent many hours, researching and refining the recipe to find the highest quality and least processed/refined ingredients I could.  Two things I changed were making dairy free, by subbing out the butter for extra virgin coconut oil, and using sucanat instead of brown sugar, which is much less refined and more natural.  By doing this research and changing some of ingredients the bars’ taste also improved and people were happier knowing the product was as minimally processed as possible.

Charlotte Tailgate Market – I absolutely loved and adored everything about this fabulous market.  It was small and super local and run by an amazing woman, Lynn Caldwell.  There were between 15-25 vendors each week.  You could find anything from jewelry, to local organic beef + chicken, ostrich, duck eggs, the most amazing greens you could imagine, handmade soaps, rainwater harvesting barrels, etc, etc.  I miss it so so much!

The first market day, I prepared 60 bars, in 4 different varieties.  I also tried selling small bags of “ota.granola,” which didn’t sell as well.  There is something about loose granola in a bag, that people think is different that granola in bar form.  People didn’t think it should cost as much.  Oh well!

The market was on Saturdays from 9am-1pm.  I sold out of 60 bars in 3hrs

First day photos:  I needed a huge cooler to keep all of the bars in with the intense Charlotte heat!

That day I had: cinna-fuse, cherry almond, pnat banana [named after my bro in law + sis in law, pat and natalie], and cran-mango cash

I had a lot of awesome friends come out to support me!  Chris helped me package and label the bars til’ all hours of the night, before market days.  He came to them with me too!

The 2nd market day, I made 130 bars.  I sold out….seriously!!  I was completely shocked.

My set-up got a little more professional each week.

For the rest of the summer I was selling between 70-125 bars on market days and taking a few orders on those days too.  I wasn’t trying to advertise orders too much because I was too busy!  Besides making bars for market days I tried to keep my orders between 5-8 for the week.  It was completely exhausting.  The recipe is a bit intensive…quite a bit of cleanup and then a lot of time to cut + package the bars and then get them ready to ship.  My bars have been as far as Hawaii [although they got covered in ants], Spokane [Washington], New Orleans, Colorado, Ohio, NYC, Chicago, and a few other cities and states.

A few weeks into the market, I was approached by the co-owner of Common Market.  CM is a deli/wine/beer/sandwich shop right next to where the market took place.  They have THE best beer selection in Charlotte and deliciously addicting sandwiches [super healthy too!!].  They wanted ota.bars on their shelf!  Shortly, there they were, in a STORE!  [mid July]

Glass jars to the right of the bananas   I kept them stocked with the 3 best sellers and would replenish them weekly.  People at the market would see me selling them and say they had tried them before from Common Market.  I ran into a few people and somehow got on the topic of local things in Charlotte…then the market…and they somehow had heard of ota.bars.  This was all surreal to me.

One of my dear co-workers [at Perkins+Will] Anna, bought my bars weekly.  She was addicted to them, for real.  She would hand them out to other people at work and then that got me even more orders.  She rocked!  My friends at work were totally into my new business and reaped the benefits of getting to be my ota.bar taste testers.  I would leave samples on their desks before they got there in the morning and ask for reviews.

I had so many awesome supportive friends and of course my family back home in Ohio!  My sister-in-law, Natalie, was a HUGE fan.  She holds the world record for ota.bars consumed in 1 day.  I’m pretty sure she said she ate 7 or 8, haha.  LOVE her!!

Ota.bars even made it to a wedding!  Heather [one of my best grad school friends] wanted to use ota.bars in her hotel guest gift bags.  Awesome!!

I renamed the “triple berry almond” bar for her wedding

double packs!

Things were going really really well, but I was having a hard time too.  I couldn’t really expand any further with my current 8-5 job.  There was no way I could open an online store and fulfill more orders.  I was tired and stressed a lot because I basically had 2 full time jobs.  Something needed to change!

Mid-July we also made our decision to finally move to Colorado.  This had been a long time coming and I knew the end was in sight for ota.bars   I wasn’t sure if I would be able to keep the business going or not, but I knew I had to officially close it down for now.

The last few weeks we were in Charlotte went really well.  Everyone tried to get in their last orders and I had my last market day where I sold out of the 80 bars I came with.  It was such an amazing experience selling at the market.  I met so many wonderful people there.  It was something I will never forget and was completely worth allllllllll the hours that I put into it each week.

Since moving to Colorado, the ota.bar business hasn’t made much headway.  My husband and I are both without jobs and living with family.  There are also 3 dogs in the house…so there is NO way I can make them here, haha.  I think if I want to start back up I might have to rent a commercial kitchen space, which will cost quite a bit of money.  One of us needs a full time job before I can start figuring how to start up the granola business again.

I have had a lot of new ideas and hope at some point I get to put them into action!  All I can say for now is that, I can’t believe I opened a business and it actually was doing well!

As a fifth grader, I remember responding to a “what do you want to be when you grow up” question.  My answer was “Teacher and part-time Baker.”  While I am not a teacher right now, this is not far off because one day I would really love to teach Architecture at a university.  Who says they want to be a part-time baker when they are 10?? haha, ME!

So, that is my ota.bar story!  Let me know if you have any questions.  Hope you enjoyed my crazy journey to becomming a granola bar baker!

~Ashley

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general ota.bar ingredients:  organic rolled oats, organic honey, sucanat, extra virgin coconut oil, various nut butters, brown rice syrup, various unsalted nuts, unsulphured dried fruit, wheat germ, organic pepitas organic vanilla, organic cinnamon, sea salt

dairy free, soy free, no artificial flavors or colorings, no preservatives