141. Growing a Food Brand: Angie and Dan Bastian + Yoga Pops

Angie’s Boomchickapop–one of the most legendary homegrown Minnesota brands in recent history and the benchmark for just about every new packaged food startup hoping to make it big. As the story goes: Angie Bastian was a nurse; her husband Dan Bastian a teacher. They bought a kettle corn machine off the internet in 2002, and started selling at festivals, in hopes of making some extra money. Soon they were selling to grocery stores, building their own manufacturing center, and becoming the first truly national ready-to-eat popcorn brand. In 2017, the company was acquired by Conagra for an estimated $250 million. Today, another Minnesota-made popped snack is slowly gaining shelf space at stores around the country: Yoga Pops, made of popped water lily seeds—a snack as popular in India as popcorn is in America. Currently sold in 350 stores across the country, co-founders Nalini Mehta and Anita Balakrishnan want to make Yoga Pops a household name. They get advice from the Bastians on manufacturing, marketing, culture building, and what it really takes to build a lasting packaged food brand.. As Dan Bastian says, “Leaders work for their people, and then they in turn will work for you.” Stick around for Office Hours with Kingshuk Mukherjee, chair of global business leadership at College of Saint Benedict and Saint John's University. He talks about the school's entrepreneurial alums, the Bastians, and tariff volatility.