EVANSTON, ILL. — Every Body Eat, a manufacturer of allergen-free, gluten- and grain-free snack thins, has a new manufacturing facility to call home.
As an allergen-free manufacturer, the company found it difficult to co-manufacture its products due to the risk of cross contamination, forcing it to manufacture on its own.
“Contract manufacturing wasn’t an option for us because we couldn’t find one that was 100% free of the top 14 allergens and corn,” said Trish Thomas, co-founder and chief executive officer of Every Body Eat. “So, we had to build it.”
Thomas and co-founder and president Nichole Wilson founded Every Body Eat in March 2020 to provide consumers with free-from snacks.
“I have auto immune diseases and my business partner Nichole has food allergies and dietary issues in her family,” Thomas said. “I changed my diet about 10 years ago and I’ve been off medicine ever since. A super clean diet can have a massive impact on your health. What we’ve been trying to do is create food that tastes so good it appeals to people with and without a special diet.”
The company initially began its production in a 1,000-square-foot facility when it launched in 2020. With growing demand for its products and COVID protocols, it moved to an 8,500-square-foot facility by the end of 2020.
“The reason we made the jump is that our business grew quickly,” Thomas said. “We needed to add more equipment and expand production within months of launching, which was quite a challenge in the middle of the pandemic.”
Growing demand for its products continued for the four-year-old company, prompting yet another move to its new home in a renovated 20,000-square-foot former car dealership and service center in Evanston, Ill.
“Since we launched mid-pandemic, we have been selling everything we make faster than we can make it,” Thomas said. “The challenge was we have been making our products in a very small space. Food facilities need a lot of power, plumbing, and floor drains, this facility had all that.”
The facility will pivot the company from a manual process to an automated one. Facility features include automated sheeting and depositing lines, as well as automated pouch and vertically form fill sealed packaging. In addition, there also will be a small batch innovation kitchen and its corporate headquarters.
“Everything was done manually in the old facility,” she said. “Everything from mixing, sheeting, cutting, oiling, salting; think one cookie sheet at a time. Our new facility has the space to automate our production process to 10 times our current production capacity for our (cracker) thins as well as launch our grain-free crispbread crackers and cookie bites.”
Thomas said the facility will help the company keep its warehouse and inventory stocked.
The cracker thins are sold in Whole Foods Market, Sprouts Farmers Market, Natural Grocers, ThriveMarket.com and the company's website at everybodyeating.com. Regional grocers include Lunds & Byerlys, Mariano’s, Gelson’s Market, Berkeley Bowl, Kings, as well as Protein Bar Restaurants. The crispbread crackers are currently being launched at Whole Foods Markets in the Mid West and rolling out nationally.
“We want to be able to meet consumer demand to do promotions and also be able to participate in the community in broader ways that we couldn’t before,” Thomas said. “We haven’t even had the inventory to sample our own product. We’ve just been sold out; now we can finally grow.”
The company’s employees from the previous facility will be moving with them as well.
“We’re still keeping our team,” she said. “Sixty-five percent of our team were formerly incarcerated and homeless. We’re creating a workforce that matters and they’re all coming with us.”Enjoying this content? Learn about more disruptive startups on the Food Entrepreneur page.
