Salma and Nima Fotovat say MadeGood's first factory hand-wiped wrong date codes off 200,000 Costco bars

The MadeGood origin story has a tiny horror-movie prop: an alcohol wipe. On How I Built This, Salma Fotovat and Nima Fotovat said their new factory had to wipe the wrong best-before date off about 200,000 Costco-bound bars by hand, then run them through the date coder again.

This was not a TikTok hustle hack with oat flour. It was a family snack company in its newborn, debt-heavy, please-God-let-the-machines-work phase. The Fotovats had just lost control of their previous family business, Taste of Nature, after a split with their father’s partner. They regrouped in a basement, decided not to open a restaurant or buy an organic farm, and built a 20,000-square-foot facility because manufacturing was the thing they actually knew.

But because they knew us, and they saw what we did before in the previous business, they agreed. Indeed, before making a dollar in sales to give us a loan of $2 million.

That is the part of the glossy founder tale people tend to skip. Before the bright MadeGood boxes, before the school-safe snack halo, before the brand showed up in tens of thousands of stores, there was a pre-revenue loan, homes used as security, parents’ retirement money, and a first huge order that was not even MadeGood. It was contract manufacturing, the old trick they knew best: make someone else’s bars to fund your own dream.

The least glamorous Costco miracle

The first order was for Costco, 300,000 fruit-and-nut bars for another brand. The deadline was brutal, three to four weeks. The equipment was manual. The team was tiny. They had to hire, train, certify the plant, get organic and food-safety systems running, and ship the thing. Then, most of the way through, someone noticed the best-before year was wrong. The bars should have said 2014. They said 2013.

So we found alcohol wipes. I kid you not. Okay. This is creativity at its best. Alcohol wipes to wipe out the date code and run the bars through the equipment again with the right best before date.

200,000 bars.

There are two ways to hear that. The romantic version: scrappy immigrants, a family factory, everybody in the trenches, the snack aisle built one sticky wrapper at a time. The less romantic version: this is why food manufacturing is a stress dream with forklifts. The product was not being relabeled to cheat time. They were fixing a packaging mistake. Still, the image is ridiculous and perfect. Somewhere between Willy Wonka and a hostage situation.

The claim also explains MadeGood better than any brand-positioning sentence could. The company was born from a very clean consumer promise, organic snacks that tasted like treats and could survive a school nut-allergy policy. But the actual moat was messy: vertical integration, cost control, allergen-free production they could supervise themselves, and the ability to tell a retailer yes before knowing exactly how the yes would happen.

Saying yes built the brand, then started biting back

That reflex became the MadeGood growth engine. Nima described telling a Costco region that, sure, they could put granola bites in a pouch instead of a box, then calling his sisters to inform them of the new emergency. Salma made the family dynamic sound less like a corporate operating system than an episode of The Bear with better fiber.

We said yes to things, not because it was easy, but because we had to do it. It was the only way.

That attitude got MadeGood from Toronto-area demos and farmers markets to Whole Foods, Costco, and a reported $50 million in sales by 2017. It also produced the founder’s tax: too many shiny objects. GoodToGo, a keto brand, was eventually discontinued after quality issues, weak growth, and not enough marketing muscle. Cookie Pal, the human-grade dog treat line, survived because they separated it from the main business. Translation: even the people who built MadeGood now admit that saying yes is not a strategy forever. At a certain size, chaos stops looking heroic and starts looking expensive.

The best evidence that the Fotovats understand that is the 2024 recall they discuss near the end, involving roughly 2.5 million cases after a tiny metal bristle from a brush got into product. Nima said nobody was hurt, and he even wondered whether they overreacted, but he framed the decision as simple once safety was on the table. That is the grown-up version of the alcohol-wipe story. Same factory nerve. Different stakes.

if there’s a little bit of a chance of it not being safe, then we should just call it, right?