Food for thought
The stop-bad-snacks campaign to help kids eat healthy foods has an unofficial Web site, thanks to the entrepreneurial instinct of Katherine Weiss. Weiss is a Lakeside Middle School teacher who runs HealthySnackStore.com. She launched the site in 2004 as a way to sell healthy options for parents concerned that their kids were not eating good snacks.
It offers only all-natural or organic items made by companies either nearby or within easy reach. The products range from Lesser Evil Kettle Corn to Whale Tails Tortilla Chips. The most popular fare are cookies, trail mix, dried fruit, cereal, seeds, nuts, chips and popcorn.
The business is both retail and wholesale, with products either shipped directly from her Spokane warehouse or drop-shipped from the original location.
The cost of success is an increasingly busy life for Weiss, 39. In addition to her fulltime teaching job, Weiss spends about 30 hours per week on the Web site.
Her interest in healthy snacks started in 2003, when she was teaching a health class. “My initial reason was simply to work with schools and to bring better snack offerings to kids,” Weiss said.
Since starting the site in 2004, the Spokane resident said she has been contacted by the Golden Globes and continues to hope for the day when she can add a brick-and-mortar store for her business, instead of just a Web site.
For nearly 10 years Weiss has researched the availability of nutritious snack foods that “didn’t taste like cardboard.” Her early quest provided samples that she shared with her classes, but Weiss could not find the sampled products in area stores. Plus, she didn’t see any natural-food snack stores opening in Spokane.
Despite limited advertising, HealthySnackStore keeps gaining customers. April this year was her highest-ever sales period, racking up $13,000 in sales. Her best year to date was 2007, with $80,000 sold. This year that figure is already $48,000, Weiss said.
Weiss doesn’t draw a salary from the business. Instead, she puts her profits back into the operation. She’s mostly using that money to plan to build a storefront and warehouse for her business.
The healthy food effort has gained Weiss some national notice. The Golden Globe Awards contacted her earlier this year, wanting her to prepare a booth and provide snacks at its annual film and TV awards event.
“I thought it would be fabulous and what great advertising. But I couldn’t go to that and manage the aftereffects.”
Too much publicity, she fears, would overwhelm her ability to manage demand. “I’m still running the business out my home.” Her husband, Randy Weiss, helps out, especially when they need to ship wholesale orders.
The orders come from all over. The farthest she’s shipped products to is the Virgin Islands. She’s also seeing an increase in orders from companies eager to add healthy items to their meetings or special-events menus.
One example is the Walt Disney Co., which has placed orders for fruit snacks, trail mixes, sunflower seeds and Clodhoppers – vanilla Grahams.
Weiss is also involved in sharing healthy snacks with overseas military units. Through Operation Gratitude, a California-based nonprofit, Weiss donates cases of sunflower seeds to U.S. forces.
Weiss said there are plenty of sites that sell supplements or food items. But not many do what she does, focus exclusively on good food options. “It’s amazing how many people come to us by word of mouth and other people’s references. That’s more important than advertising.”