A stock image of granola
Seventeen years ago, a holistic nutrition counselor living on the Upper West Side pulled $5,000 out of her savings, bought a pile of ingredients, put up a website and started baking gluten-free muffin mixes in her apartment kitchen. The plan was modest. She figured she’d sell mostly to the ten or so clients in her private nutrition practice so they could bake at home.
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The plan did not stay modest. That apartment operation grew into Purely Elizabeth, the granola, oatmeal and cereal brand now stocked in more than 30,000 stores across the country, and last Friday its founder, Elizabeth Stein, signed an agreement to sell it to Ferrero, the Italian family-owned company behind Nutella, Tic Tac, Kinder and, since last year, Kellogg’s cereals.Neither side disclosed the price. Forbes, which first put a number on the deal, estimates Ferrero is paying more than $850 million, or roughly four times what the brand sells in a year. Stein owns an estimated two-thirds of the company and stands to clear about $400 million after taxes, according to the magazine’s reporting. She declined to comment to Forbes on the financial terms.
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The Upper West Side chapter of the story is short but it’s where all of it happened. Stein, now 45, trained at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and started her practice in 2008. To promote it, she brought a batch of blueberry muffins loaded with quinoa, chia seeds and coconut sugar to a triathlon in Westchester that September. The muffins got a much warmer reception than the counseling did. She went back to the same race the following year, sold out, and put her savings into the business a few months later.
Her first day of online orders brought in $10,000 in three hours, thanks to a link in the now-defunct newsletter DailyCandy. CNBC has reported that she shipped those early orders from the Upper West Side apartment herself, using her hallway as an office. Production eventually outgrew the apartment and moved to a small commercial kitchen in Pennsylvania.
The granola came later, in 2011, and it also came out of that Upper West Side kitchen. Stein had been thinking about what to do with puffed quinoa and tried a granola recipe more or less on a whim, which was unusual given that she says she had never eaten granola in her life. Her mother, Nancy, happened to be visiting from out of town, tasted it, and told her it was the best she’d ever had and that it should be the next product. Nancy then cold-called 40 shops in the mid-Atlantic to help sell it. Stein told Forbes she hasn’t changed that original recipe since, and it’s still the company’s top seller.
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Stein left the neighborhood in 2014, moving herself and the business to Boulder, Colorado, partly to be closer to a manufacturer. Purely Elizabeth brought in about $150 million in revenue by the end of 2024 and roughly $200 million last year, according to Food Dive, and it’s on track to pass $300 million this year.The sale isn’t final yet. Ferrero said the transaction is expected to close in the coming months, subject to regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions. When it does, Purely Elizabeth will operate as a standalone brand inside Ferrero, and Stein will stay on as CEO alongside her existing leadership team, something she has said mattered a great deal to her in choosing a buyer.
Which means the neighborhood’s most valuable breakfast export is still sitting on the shelf at the grocery store down the block.
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