The Most Successful Business To Come Out Of The Den
Corin Mullins and Brian Mullins are a husband and wife team that started Holy Crap cereal with $129 in 2009. They’ve grown the artisan cereal business in a few short years to an award-winning business success story.
The gluten-free, vegan, certified organic breakfast cereals are made in Gibsons, British Columbia, a rural community outside of Vancouver, BC.
Institute B: What did your day-to-day look like before founding Holy Crap?
I was a newly retired flight attendant on a pension working at the Canadian Tire Garden Centre in Wilson Creek on BC’s Sunshine Coast. A nice quiet life until the cereal I was developing for a survival kit leaped out and became a runaway hit on its own.
Holy Crap was officially founded in 2009, but how many years did it take to develop the product before launching it and do you recall an “aha” moment that led you to actually start the business?
It took about a year for me to perfect the original recipe. Brian and I started selling the cereal in May 2009 at the Saturday morning Sechelt Farmers Market located on Shishal Nation land. At the end of the summer we rented a kiosk at Vancouver’s Granville Island Market for $35 a day. The timing coincided with the run up to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics. We sold an amazing $10K worth of cereal each weekend to visitors from around the world.
How is Holy Crap, both the products and the overall business strategy, contributing to the greater good?
First, the cereal is the healthiest thing available for the money in any supermarket. Fiber is a proven cancer preventer and the Omegas are key fats in the building blocks of life. Holy Crap promotes a plant-based diet that will ultimately help solve world hunger, mitigate pollution, reduce health care costs and save the economy.
Our business strategy is to listen to our customers, expand our reach into non-traditional cereal markets and develop new line extensions. We sell more online than any other cereal company in Canada. We offer free shipping and guarantee satisfaction with all our products. We feed more athletes, celebrities and astronauts than any of our competitors.
Holy Crap has received some great publicity (e.g. Dragon’s Den, a testimonial from Astronaut Chris Hadfield). Was publicity part of your intentional marketing strategy or did it happen organically?
The Dragons’ Den has been worth millions in publicity. We cannot thank the show enough for our three appearances. We do not use a PR firm and all of our media coverage is organic. We really play it down. Our food bank donations, community involvement and charity contributions are kept low key. It was a customer that entered Holy Crap cereal in the Snacks in Space contest that won a spot on Commander Chris Hadfield’s menu for Mission 35 on the International Space Station. Riley was a nine-year old space junkie whose sister ate the cereal and got better. Our little friend knew that NASA’s food requirements included a long shelf life, an ability to be hydrated with water and no dust or crumbs. The astronauts get the final say on their menus during a tasting session that takes place about six months before each mission.
What’s it like being spouses and entrepreneurs? Do you have any advice for other couples running a business together?
We don’t give advice but we will share our experience and our thoughts. We would tell other couples to be sure to be like of mind and have the same attitude towards money, success, risk taking and failure and by that we don’t just mean blind compliance but sharing a vision and each contributing 110 percent. As Arlene Dickenson’s new book states one has to be “All In.”
How many employees are employed by Holy Crap and how would you describe the company culture? How has the culture developed over time?
We have over twenty employees. The company culture is small town. Everybody has known each other over a lifetime. Our employees pride in workmanship, self-respect and creativity has resulted in a superior cereal and fantastic productivity.
With such rapid growth, what has been the biggest challenge facing Holy Crap?
Financing, ingredient procurement and constant facility and machinery expansion are the biggest challenges. Maintaining margin discipline with retailers and distributors is another top line challenge. We have literally absorbed every price increase over the past three years by increasing sales and reducing production costs in order to keep the cereal accessible.
What can we expect from Holy Crap over the next five years?
We are rapidly expanding into export markets while solidifying our #1 position in Canada along a raft of new product offerings through new channels. We are funding clinical research to support positive outcomes that doctors and clinics are reporting their patients are experiencing using the cereal.
What has been your most profound wake-up call as a leader or entrepreneur?
It happened to me in Palm Springs last November at the EY Entrepreneurial Winning Women awards. While being interviewed by Dr. Woody for Fox Business News I realized that I really knew my business from the ground up and inside out. I was being applauded for creating a culture of ethical employees and sustainable products that are not only healthy but contribute to the overall good of the planet and humanity. To me it seems like the only way to go.