From our family's pantry to 4,000+ stores nationwide — in under two years.
When Kelly was pregnant with our son, Archer, we started paying closer attention to what we were eating. We ate organic and relatively healthy but we really dialed it up after we discovered how bad seed oils are. We didn't want that in our house.
We wanted snacks made from foods we knew. That phrase stuck.
We didn't hire an agency. We didn't spend months on packaging. We didn't wait until everything was perfect before showing anyone.
We spent 250,000 credit card points on a flight/hotel, $50 on ingredients, and one night in our own kitchen — popping corn in grass-fed ghee, bag by bag, ahead of a meeting we'd only just landed.
“Some founders spend months and $50,000 perfecting everything before they show their product to a single person. We spent $50 and one night.”
We believed the product could speak for itself. If the taste and the ingredients were right, the concept alone would prove it, no deck, no design system, no six-figure launch budget required.
We call it Minimal Viable Popcorn. It's still how we build everything at Gheelish.
We cold emailed Sprouts, got a meeting with their Foraging team and walked into the meeting with popcorn we made the night before.
They ran a 90-day test, it worked and Gheelish became one of a handful of popcorn brands carried at Sprouts nationwide.
Here's the detail that still surprises people: the very first bag of Gheelish ever sold wasn't at a farmers market, a local shop, or on Amazon. It was at Sprouts, full stop. Most food brands spend years working toward national retail. We started there seven months after that first meeting.
Two years later, Gheelish is one of the fastest-growing popcorn brands in the country — in more than 4,000 stores nationwide.
We've grown from popcorn into tortilla chips, with protein cookies coming soon.
Every product still carries the standard we started with: organic, grass-fed, gluten-free, and seed-oil-free — made from ingredients you could actually find in a real kitchen.
Darin and Kelly Alpert started Gheelish at their kitchen counter and now run it full-time. Darin leads the brand's growth and go-to-market strategy. Kelly's read on what real families actually want to feed their kids still shapes every product decision Gheelish makes.
Nick Bilotti has spent two decades building and scaling consumer businesses from every angle - operations, supply chain, finance, accounting, and most everything in between. At Gheelish, Nick helps turn big ideas into businesses that actually work. Darin calls him a brother, and somewhere along the way, the line between business partner and family got pretty blurry.
Health Influencer
Cofounder, Sweetgreen
Founder, Dreamten
Gheelish started with popcorn because it's one of the most-snacked food in America, and it had no business being made with seed oils. It won't stop there. We're building Gheelish as a home for the rest of the pantry wherever industrial ingredients still dominate and a real alternative doesn't exist yet. If that sounds like a brand you want to stock, invest in, or just snack with, we'd love to hear from you.
