People who have food allergies want the same options as everyone else, said Brooke Navarro, the entrepreneur behind Raleigh-based Without a Trace Foods.
Food allergies run in Navarro's family. Her mom had them and so does her daughter. It’s scary – and it’s inconvenient, particularly when traveling and looking for a grab-and-go snack, she said.
“It started with my own personal frustration with being able to find on-the-go snacks that are filling,” she said.
Typical snacks – from granola bars to candy bars – tend to come with the same kinds of warning labels, “made with traces of ...” and “manufactured in a facility with ..."
From time to time, Navarro thought about doing something about it, but just never went all in.
“I had the idea back when I was in business school, many, many years ago,” she said. “But my professors said, don’t do food. Food is hard. So I tucked it away.”
Instead, she spent 11 years on Wall Street at firms such as Barclays Investment Bank and tZERO Group. Then one day, she was at a CVS when she saw a granola bar listed as “school friendly” and “allergen free.”
“I got really mad,” she said. “That was my idea. No, I’m going to do that.”
So she did. While still working on Wall Street, she hired a professional chef and gave her a mission – “I wanted everything to taste like normal food.” After about eight months, they took the potential products to a food scientist for help with commercialization and sourcing. And a business was born.
“It took about two years,” Navarro said.
Move to the Triangle
Realizing New York City would be an expensive place to start a business, she looked at the Triangle, where her husband had gone to grad school and had family. In 2020, just as the pandemic was starting to shutter businesses, she moved her family – and her business – to the Triangle, setting up Without a Trace Foods in a small manufacturing space between Raleigh and Garner, going all in on the idea.
“It was just one step at a time for me,” Navarro said. “Eventually you get so far along you’re like well, I’m either going to launch this company or I just spent a lot of time and money doing a very expensive hobby. That’s when you’re like, okay, I can do it. I’m there.”
The company does face an uphill climb. The food space is competitive, and right now the company self-distributes its bars and power bites. Primarily, that happens through its website, though its products are in some brick-and-mortar cafes and specialty stores.
Navarro said she’d be “open” to partnerships with big retail someday, but added that “there’s still a perception that allergen friendly foods is a bit niche.”
It’s a misconception, she said.
“One in four Americans shop for allergen friendly foods,” she said.
The company does not release specific revenue data, Navarro said. "I would say we’ve had very consistent growth from where we started to a point where there is no question that there is more demand than we can meet,” she said.
Navarro bootstrapped the company through product development, closing a small friends and family round last fall totaling $188,000, according to a securities filing. The company in the process of evaluating what’s next on the financing front, she said.
Without a Trace Foods was recently named as one of the 13 finalists for a Fall 2021 NC IDEA SEED grant.