Answer extracted from the How I Built This with Guy Raz podcast — listen to the full episode below.
What inspired the creation of an organic cracker brand in the early 2000s?
Nicole Bernard Dawes spotted a glaring gap while pregnant and shopping at Integral Yoga health food store in New York City: despite the organic produce and dairy sections thriving, the snack aisle remained stuck in the 1970s with no organic crackers available. That simple observation—realizing crackers were a huge category in conventional retail but completely absent from the organic world—sparked the idea to create Late July Snacks.
A family legacy meets an unmet market need
Dawes came from the snack industry by inheritance: her father Steve Bernard founded Cape Cod Potato Chips in the early 1980s and sold it to Anheuser-Busch in 1985, then bought it back in 1996 for under three million dollars. She worked directly in the marketing and innovation department, developing the reduced-fat potato chip line before Cape Cod was eventually sold to Lance. But her family's success in conventional snacking didn't blind her to an emerging opportunity.
The USDA Organic Seal had just become law in 2002, opening a regulatory pathway that didn't exist before. Dawes recognized that the organic food movement had completely transformed the perimeter of natural food stores—fresh produce, dairy, meat—yet the snack section remained a static, decades-old inventory of non-organic products. It was a category-wide oversight waiting to be filled.
When Dawes launched Late July Snacks in 2003, she led with organic crackers and became one of the first brands to launch entirely under the newly established USDA Organic Seal. The insight was simple but powerful: if organic could reshape every other food category, why should snacks be any different?
"We debuted the company in 2003 at the Natural Products Expo in Baltimore. And we basically left that show a national brand."
Nicole Bernard Dawes — Founder and CEO of Late July Snacks. Daughter of Cape Cod Potato Chips founder Steve Bernard, Dawes graduated from Tulane University in 1995 and gained hands-on experience in snack innovation before launching Late July. She is also founder of Nixie and has built Late July into a leader in certified organic snacks.
The speed of that debut reveals something worth exploring further: the full episode dives deep into how a single trade show appearance turned Late July into a national player overnight, and how the founder navigated scaling a brand in a category that had never existed before.
See also
What is Raised Nutrition and what makes its protein bar different from competitors?
Raised Nutrition, founded by Darcy and his wife Jess and based in Ballina, New South Wales, Australia, makes whole food protein bars free from artificial ingredients.
What is the business model and social impact of Cooks Who Feed, the kitchen linen company based in Canada?
Cooks Who Feed is a for-profit social enterprise based in the Niagara region near Toronto, Canada, founded about six years ago. The company produces kitchen linens with a focus on social impact.
How did FUBU gain early brand awareness and traction before becoming a mainstream brand?
Daymond John credits mom-and-pop stores as the ones who made FUBU, explaining that store owners told customers that the four young men behind the brand were the real deal.
Key takeaways
- The organic snack category didn't exist in the early 2000s—natural food stores had organic produce and dairy but conventional snacks only.
- Dawes leveraged her family's snack industry expertise from Cape Cod Potato Chips while recognizing a completely different market opportunity in certified organic products.
- Late July Snacks debuted at the Natural Products Expo in Baltimore in 2003 and achieved national distribution in the same show, becoming one of the first fully organic-certified snack brands.
- A single moment of frustration—not finding organic crackers while pregnant—revealed a billion-dollar gap in an entire category.