NOSH Best of 2024 Awards & Interview with Rising Star Award Winner - Rind
Jan. 20, 2025 at 1:06 PM
Nosh’s annual Best Of awards recognize the year’s standout individuals, brands and products from across all categories of the packaged food industry.
Our honorees demonstrated resilience and drive in the face of unrelenting challenges that have unsettled the market and shuttered a notable number of businesses this year. Amid financial and political turbulence, continued supply chain disruption, and persistent inflation, these folks continued to operate and innovate with an eye toward building a more sustainable and equitable food system.
The top awards, Person of the Year and Brand of the Year, are reserved for those creating lasting and substantial change over the past 12 months and beyond. In 2024, Miguel Garza, co-founder and CEO of Siete Foods, culminated a decade of leading his family’s heritage-inspired Mexican-American food brand with its $1.2 billion sale to PepsiCo.
Our Brand of the Year, Good Culture, is at the forefront of a national obsession with cottage cheese. Its efforts to reimagine a staid diet staple into a pasture-raised protein powerhouse catapulted the company and category into the stratosphere.
Out of hundreds of nominees, the winners of Nosh Best of 2024 awards are changemakers, innovators and thought leaders, selected in recognition of their continued efforts to nourish the world.
Also Featuring:
Rising Star Award Winner: Rind
In the lifecycle of building a brand, there often comes a time to take a big leap in order to open new opportunities. For years, RIND Snacks has operated in an asset-light model where co-manufacturers and service providers helped the dried fruit snack maker ideate and produce its products. Last fall, RIND took the big leap and acquired Vermont-based granola maker Small Batch Organics. The deal positioned RIND with full control of its production for the first time while also providing the company its own warehousing and fulfillment space. The move from co-manufacturing to self-production has already allowed the company to operate at economies of scale and, in the process, improve margins.
An elevated level of operational control has also built out more opportunities in brand collaborations, which have proven successful in the past (look to the collaboration with Lesser Evil on fruit-flavored popcorn varieties). This year, RIND used the granola expertise of the Small Batch Organics team (who were integrated into RIND) to partner with Graza on olive-oil granola, aptly named Grazola. The dried fruit snack brand also leveraged its new capabilities to expand its Remix line (Cherry Cashew Crunch) with rumors of product innovation planned for the new year.