Bobo's: Beryl Stafford — A Single Mom Turns a Baking Project into a $100M Business

When Beryl Stafford's marriage collapsed at age 40, she found herself a single mother with two daughters, no recent work experience, and a desperate need to earn a living. What began as a rainy afternoon baking project with her daughter — a simple four-ingredient oat bar — became Bobo's, a national snack brand now estimated at $100 million in annual sales. In this conversation with Guy Raz, Stafford tells her story with remarkable candor, describing the terror of walking into her first coffee shop sale, the years of buying ingredients at full retail from Whole Foods because she didn't know about food distribution, and the slow, scrappy grind that eventually turned a hobby into a real company. The episode captures the texture of building a food business from nothing: the humiliation of running into acquaintances who sneered at "the cookie business," the unexpected camaraderie of sharing a kitchen with Justin's Nut Butters, and the painful transition from founder-led scrappiness to outside investors and the pressure of Costco.

08:35Divorce, Desperation, and the Decision to Bake

Beryl Stafford grew up in a small Louisiana town where nobody locked their doors, the kind of place where family expected her to attend Tulane or LSU like everyone else. Instead, she visited her aunt in Boulder, Colorado, during high school, "thought I had died and gone to heaven," and enrolled at the University of Colorado in 1977. She arrived with a thick Louisiana accent that made her a curiosity in the dorms — friends would beg her to say "my pie" instead of "Mai Piece" just to hear her drawl. She changed her accent quickly to fit in.

After college, she worked as a paralegal, married a man she met in Boulder in her late twenties, and had two daughters. She chose to stay home full-time, driving the girls to activities, building her social life around other parents. When the marriage unraveled — she was just turning 40 — it became "probably the worst time in my life." The divorce dragged on for what felt like two years. "It was the kind of feeling where your heart physically hurts," she said. Her ex-husband insisted on 50/50 custody, which meant she had to figure out how to support herself without the option of full-time work.

She had been out of the workforce for over a decade. The idea of returning to an office — "put on a pair of pantyhose and go work for someone else" — felt impossible. Who would hire her? She took a job at a gourmet cooking store called Peppercorn for $7.45 an hour, mostly because her lawyer told her she needed to be employed during the divorce proceedings. Friends advised her to learn software, go into tech. She had no interest. The only thing she knew she loved was cooking — she was self-taught, a devoted reader of Paul Prudhomme and Marcella Hazan, and had done small catering jobs from her kitchen for extra income. But professional catering was too hard and didn't work with raising kids.

13:01The Accidental Product: A Daughter's Snack Becomes a Business

The origin story is deceptively simple. One rainy afternoon, Stafford's daughter Alex — nicknamed "Bobo" as a baby — opened a cookbook and announced she wanted to make oat bars. The recipe had four ingredients: oats, corn syrup, brown sugar, and butter. They happened to be in the cupboard. The bars were "dripping in butter and corn syrup," baked at low temperature for 15 minutes, and delicious. Alex took them to school, her friends loved them, and she kept asking to make more.

Friends in the natural food industry noticed. They told Stafford she should make the bars healthier and sell them. The original recipe used corn syrup — genetically modified, shelf-stable, good mouth feel, but bad for you, according to the experts. Stafford experimented for months, swapping corn syrup for brown rice syrup, butter for coconut oil, and standard brown sugar for Sucanat (a less processed cane sugar). The bars were unusual because they were fresh-baked, not guillotine-cut into perfect squares like most commercial bars. Each one was imperfect, handmade-looking.

The timing mattered. Larabar and Clif Bar were relatively new. The vegan category was growing. Stafford's daughter's nickname was Bobo, which became Bobo's Oat Bars — "kind of cute," she thought, imagining maybe farmer's markets, a hobby. Her own children thought she was insane. "They were becoming teenagers and they were weirded out by it," she said. But she didn't care.

One day, a friend came over, sat down at Stafford's round kitchen table, and said, "Let's draw you a label." She grabbed a Sharpie from the kitchen drawer and sketched a little girl on a piece of paper — the same illustration that appears on Bobo's packaging to this day. It took five minutes. The friend, a trained graphic designer who was also a stay-at-home mom, then drove Stafford to a local coffee shop and made her get out of the car. "I'm very shy," Stafford said. "I don't know how to do that." Her friend's response: "So what? Let's just try it."

Stafford walked into the coffee shop, saw a long line of customers, and panicked. She put the bars — wrapped in Saran Wrap with no nutritional label — on the barista's shelf and started to run out. The barista stopped her: "What do I sell these for?" She hadn't thought about pricing. She made up a number — $2.50 or $2. Two weeks later, she came back. The bars had sold out. The barista reordered. She made $14 that first month. "I thought, okay, this might work. $14 could be $14,000."

17:21The Scrappy Early Years: Saran Wrap, Whole Foods Retail, and a $25,000 Gamble

For the first year, Stafford bought all her ingredients at Whole Foods — full retail price. "It was crazy expensive," she admitted, but she didn't know about food distribution networks. She wrapped bars in Saran Wrap with a three-day shelf life and dropped them off at local co-ops and coffee shops, always running out as fast as she could. She was terrified of being seen. "I was a stay-at-home mom, tennis player who had a social life. And now this was the new me." The fear was irrational but real.

She moved out of her home kitchen early, knowing the health department wouldn't approve. She found a shared commercial kitchen — a sandwich delivery company that rented oven space by the day. She came in once a week, hired two of their employees to help, and paid an hourly fee. After about a year, she outgrew that space. She found a larger commercial kitchen next door, loved it, and went back the next day to sign the lease — only to discover another food entrepreneur had already taken it. That entrepreneur was Justin Gold, founder of Justin's Nut Butters. They struck a deal to share the space.

The arrangement was unusual. Stafford and Gold formed a separate LLC that owned the space and employed the workers. The employees made nut butter one day and oat bars the next. Each founder had their own bank accounts; the LLC only covered rent and payroll. They argued constantly — about scheduling, about sharing the bookkeeper, about whose work took priority. "I'd be like, no, no, get out. You can't talk to her now," Stafford recalled. But the arrangement kept costs low and both businesses running.

The biggest early investment was a packaging machine for $25,000. Stafford took a second mortgage on her home and maxed out credit cards. She got a $100,000 bank loan — "back then it was easier," she said. She had no idea if she was making money. "I didn't know anything about payroll and I didn't care. I had no idea if I was making any money or what things cost. I just knew at some point I'd figure all that out." The business didn't become profitable until six or seven years in.

33:54The Whole Foods Breakthrough: Saying Yes Before You Know How

Around 2007, Stafford walked into the Whole Foods in Boulder and asked for the bakery manager. The manager's response floored her: "Oh, we've been buying these and eating them from the co-op down the street. We've been wondering when you're going to walk in." She said yes on the spot — but with conditions. Stafford needed freezer-safe packaging and a six-month shelf life. She needed to get the word "organic" off her label until she completed certification. And she needed to demo the product in all 12 Colorado stores.

Stafford had no idea what freezer-safe packaging meant. She didn't know how to do a demo. But she said yes anyway. "I'm like, are you kidding me? This is my big break." She called her packaging supplier, figured out the shelf-life requirements, and started driving to Denver every weekend to stand behind a folding table and hand out samples. "I always tell people when you're standing behind that table, you know, you're kind of in charge and they don't know anything about you, and they're happy to eat free food." For someone who described herself as shy and not a performer, the demo table became a safe space.

The organic certification issue was a recurring headache. Stafford had been using organic ingredients and putting "organic" on her label without certification. Whole Foods told her to remove it. She switched to conventional oats — which made up 80% of the product — and changed the label to "made with organic ingredients," later learning that even that phrasing had legal limitations. "I pushed it as long as I could," she said.

For years, Stafford was the only full-time employee. She eventually hired a part-time marketing and sales assistant and a contract bookkeeper. She resisted hiring a more experienced salesperson because she didn't want to manage people. "I didn't have experience in that," she said. She did everything herself: baking, selling, demoing, trade shows, shipping samples to mom groups and athletic events across the country. Her marketing budget in 2013 was 10% of revenue, handwritten in pencil on a scrap of paper.

42:13National Distribution and the Pressure to Grow

The big break came at Expo West, the natural foods industry's largest trade show in Anaheim. A woman with a clipboard walked up to Stafford and said, "Please fill out this paperwork. I'm running the Whole Foods and the whole East Coast, and I want to get your bars in there." She handed over the forms for UNFI East — the country's largest natural food distributor — and walked away. Stafford thought, "What just happened?" She filled out the paperwork, figured it out as she went, and suddenly Bobo's was in national distribution at Whole Foods.

By this point, the snack bar market was exploding. Stafford faced pressure to follow trends — protein bars, keto, paleo. "The protein push was brought to us many years ago," she said, "and we are sticking with what the bar was in the beginning, which is just an old fashioned cookie that your grandmother could bake in her oven. We'll be a hundred year old brand. We're not trendy and we're not adding any superfoods to it." She made one strategic shift: converting all bars to certified gluten-free. Originally she had two lines — regular and gluten-free — but it confused consumers. Making everything gluten-free became a major selling point.

By 2015, Bobo's was doing $8 million in annual sales. But Stafford was burning out. She was traveling constantly, doing trade shows alone, working weekends and nights. She started asking around about selling the business. A contact introduced her to TJ McIntyre, a veteran of the natural food industry who had never been a CEO. McIntyre told her not to sell. "You're too little, you're too young, you're too small. You need to grow." He pressured her for an answer over the holidays while she was visiting her daughter in New Orleans. She said yes.

Stafford hired McIntyre as CEO. They created shares, brought in lawyers, and formalized the company. She stepped back from day-to-day operations to become founder and president — "face of the company." McIntyre convinced her they needed outside capital to grow. The first round raised about $8 million. "All of a sudden there were some big boys at the table," Stafford said. "It was intimidating for me. They're now in my business making decisions." She took some money off the table — her first real payout — though not enough to retire on.

54:31The Costco Conundrum and the Reality of Scale

With outside investors and a new CEO, Bobo's doubled revenue to $16 million by 2017. The company raised about $17 million total over multiple rounds. But growth brought new challenges. Costco came calling — and Costco is a double-edged sword.

"Costco likes to find the newest, best thing and be the first to market with it," Stafford explained. "They will bring you in and then want the customer to miss you and then be excited when you're back." The relationship is unpredictable: Costco might suddenly decide to "take a break" from a product, which wreaks havoc on manufacturing. Bobo's bought equipment specifically for Costco orders, invested heavily in forecasting, and built a 125,000-square-foot manufacturing facility with 500 employees. But Costco "doesn't always do what we want. They do what they want."

The pressure from investors also intensified. Each time the company needed more capital, the existing investors asked for more ownership. "As an investor who's listening knows, when the company asks you for more money, the playbook is to ask for more ownership," Stafford said. "They're trying to de-risk, I'm trying to de-risk. So everybody's trying to protect their investment." The snack bar category became brutally competitive. "People get sick of products. People get sick of eating the same thing. A lot of companies aren't around anymore because consumers get tired of something."

Stafford acknowledged that the company will likely sell at some point — investors want a return. But the acquisition market has changed. "It used to be profitable, who cares, as long as you're showing fast growth? And now it's different. It's a lot harder to sell your company now." The goal is to become "perfect with your numbers" to maximize the eventual sale price.

01:04:01Grit, Luck, and What She Learned

Looking back, Stafford attributes her success to a combination of luck and grit. "I was at the right place at the right time," she said. But she also emphasized something she learned midway through the journey: "You and I and everybody can figure anything out. Anything. You can learn how to fly an airplane. You can learn how to build an air conditioner. You can figure anything out. It's not about being the smartest person in the room. It's about desire, focus and time."

She noted that her toughness came from necessity. "There are a lot of situations where I would not have done that if I had stayed married. I would never have done it." The divorce forced her to find something she could do, and she followed what interested her. The work never felt like work — it was fun. She was "shocked anytime I would see somebody that I didn't know eating a Bobo bar." The ultimate validation came when actor Billy Bob Thornton mentioned in an interview that he eats a Bobo's oat bar for breakfast every day. "That just touches my heart," she said.

The episode ends with a reflection on the packaging — still bearing the same Sharpie-drawn girl from that afternoon at the kitchen table. The label has changed over the years, but the essence hasn't. Stafford's sister once asked her, over lunch in Boulder, "How many of those can a person eat?" Stafford's response: "How many people are in the country?"

Conclusion

This episode matters because it captures the unglamorous reality of building a food business from scratch — not the Silicon Valley fantasy of rapid scale and venture capital, but the decade-long grind of demos, shared kitchens, and figuring out packaging requirements you don't understand. Stafford's story is a counterpoint to the myth that founders need to be brilliant or well-connected. She was neither. She was a divorced mom who didn't know what a pallet was, who bought oats at retail prices for a year, who made up a price on the spot because she hadn't thought about it. What she had was desperation, stubbornness, and a willingness to say yes before she knew how. The takeaway is not that anyone can build a $100 million business — but that the path, when it works, is usually slower, scrappier, and more accidental than the story we tell afterward.

Key takeaways

• Stafford started Bobo's at age 40 with no business experience, no food industry knowledge, and no clear plan — only a recipe her daughter wanted to bake and a desperate need for income.
• She bought ingredients at full retail from Whole Foods for nearly a year because she didn't know about food distribution networks, and the business didn't become profitable until six or seven years in.
• The Whole Foods breakthrough came when a store manager told Stafford she needed freezer-safe packaging and a six-month shelf life — requirements she had no idea how to meet, but she said yes anyway and figured it out.
• Stafford shared a commercial kitchen and employees with Justin Gold of Justin's Nut Butters through a joint LLC, an arrangement that kept costs low but required constant negotiation and conflict management.
• She resisted following food trends like protein and keto, choosing instead to keep the product simple — "a cookie your grandmother could bake in her oven" — and converted all bars to certified gluten-free as her only major formulation change.
• Hiring a CEO and raising $17 million in outside capital transformed the company but introduced new pressures: investor demands for growth, dilution of ownership, and the operational chaos of serving Costco.
• Stafford's core insight: "You and I and everybody can figure anything out. It's not about being the smartest person in the room. It's about desire, focus and time."