Health is wealth. But sometimes, we are tempted to trade that for a moment of indulgence. And having very limited options only gives us an excuse to fall for the junk food that is readily available. But not anymore! Nikki Azzara, Founder and CEO of P.S. Snacks, is here to talk about their plant-based whole foods treats that you can indulge in. She also shares the challenges of starting and scaling a business and their vision of reinventing childhood treats into healthier alternatives that everybody can enjoy.

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Listen to the podcast here

P.S. Snacks: A Healthier Alternative To Childhood Treats With Nikki Azzara

One thing we didn’t talk about was a few episodes back, we crossed a milestone. There are over 100 episodes of this so far, which is shocking to me that 100 times people have been subjected to having to listen to me. It is cool. This episode is going to be no exception. Before I introduce our guest, here are a couple of reminders. We are in the midst of raising for our TIG Venture Community. This is a rolling fund where people in the industry can support the founders that are trying to bridge the gap and make it to the next level.

For more information, please reach out. I’m also looking forward to seeing many of you at Expo East coming up not too far in the future. We have some cool things planned there as well. For our brands, we’re doing a pre-retreat in Philadelphia and then we’re going to be having a lot of cool guests come and speak to our audience. If you want to learn more about either of those things, feel free to reach out. Now that I’ve done our shameless plugs, here’s one other reminder.

Wherever you get this show if you could take a minute and give it a five-star review, it helps us get the word out. More people can hear about how you can build a tardigrade, not just a unicorn in this industry. I want to introduce Nikki from PS Snacks. I always let our guests introduce themselves because I’m lazy, they do it better, and it’s always good practice for them to have to give their little bit of an elevator speech about themselves and their brands. Nikki, take it away.

Thank you. My name is Nikki Azzara. I am the Founder and CEO of PS Snacks company. I am on a mission to modernize nostalgic treats focusing on this real-food ingredient approach to completely reinvent childhood classics, which was inspired by gluten intolerance that I discovered when I was in college. For me, this all started as a passion project because I was looking for healthier ways to satisfy my sweet tooth.

I couldn’t anything in stores that were healthy enough for me to eat every day. I wanted something that would facilitate being able to treat myself, but also helped maintain the healthy lifestyle that I was trying to achieve. I started playing around with my recipes and then saw an opportunity to turn the concept into a brand. That is how PS Snacks came to life. I am based in Denver, Colorado. I’m happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

I’m super excited to have you. I’ve also been looking forward to this conversation. I’ll start with a basic question. You started this as a passion project and to solve a problem for yourself. When did you come to the realization, “I’m an entrepreneur now?” Did you ever think that’s where you were going to be at this stage in your life?

Here’s a funny story. I was briefly studying finance in college. My parents are both CPA accountants. My mom is my CFO. She was a CFO for a financial services company while I was growing up. I thought maybe that was the track that I wanted to head down. It’s a running joke in my family that I did an internship in finance during college and cried on my way home every day. Looking back, I do believe entrepreneurship has always been in my DNA. I’m more of a creative-minded type of person.

In college, I did discover a passion. I was studying undergrad business and had a passion for marketing and brand management. I was taking entrepreneurship courses. I was in the undergrad business school at Wake Forest University. I did gravitate towards that aspect of the business. The true a-ha entrepreneur at that moment came when I was looking for jobs in the food industry because I felt like it was a culmination of the passion for health and wellness and food, but also what I had been learning in my marketing and brand management courses.

I would go to Whole Foods and scope out brands that I could potentially work for. I went down the path of applying for jobs when I graduated knowing that I wanted to be in the food space. It was that realization that there’s no brand that’s doing what I want to accomplish, so I should do it myself. Being 22 and naive and willing to take the risk was hugely beneficial at the time.

I always say, “No one said it was a bad idea.” That propelled me into taking the leap. My parents were super supportive and everyone loved this recipe that I had been concocting, which was our first product. It’s the chickpea-based cookie dough. The stars aligned in the sense that this passion project did have a space in the food set. I wanted to create something of my own.

What do your parents think about this choice? Your mom is involved, but being involved and thinking your daughter is crazy isn’t mutually exclusive. What are they saying about the journey you’re on?

I’m very lucky to have extremely supportive parents. From the get-go, they encouraged me to follow my dream. We talked quite a bit about this on the various Tardigrade workshops but I do still wake up every morning thinking there is nothing else I would want to be doing even though it’s extremely challenging. Some days are terribly difficult. Other days are much more rewarding, but at the end of the day, I do wake up feeling passionate and grateful that this passion project did turn into a sustainable career.

My parents at this point are fully on board. We always joke though because in working with my mom, the dynamic is incredible like 95% of the time, but then there’s the 5% where I have to call my dad and start getting upset or frustrated. The family dynamic comes into play at times, not that it always was a family business but it was rooted in this need to create these alternatives that my whole family could enjoy.

My sister is allergic to peanuts. The entire reason that I created this initial recipe to be made with almond butter and peanut-free is that she also has trouble finding things that are not containing peanuts. In my mind, it was also a solution for her. We have a running joke in my family. My dad somehow was at the forefront of all of these health trends.

The funny story is growing up, for a while, he would order us pizza without cheese because somehow he caught on to the plant-based phenomenon that was ahead of the time. We would get dairy-free pizza. It wasn’t until later that I went to a friend’s house and realized that it is not pizza. This healthier lifestyle was in my DNA. My parents would go out of the way to go to Fresh Fields, which now is Whole Foods, and bought organic products. I still to this day have never had fast food. That is one of my fun facts.

You’ve never had fast food ever.

Never in my life. That’s my claim to fame. Many people have tried to sway that and persuade me otherwise but now it’s a fun thing. There’s no need to now, so I don’t. When I look back at my upbringing and the way that we enjoyed treats and this whole lifestyle that came second nature for me, it’s being able to create products that fit that. I hope to be able to spread joy to all those that may be looking for healthier alternatives. To your point exactly, it was this solution for myself but it felt more widespread to not only my family but others that may be looking for healthier alternatives.

I would hope you stay strong and make that forever and ever. Who needs that stuff? It’s such a rarity that somebody who in this day and age raised in the modern world hasn’t been subjected to something like McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, or something along those lines.

To bring this full circle, my family is my biggest fan, which is such an asset. As an entrepreneur, having that support system is critical. My dad will send me pictures on the golf course of our cookie dough bites. He shares them with friends. His office orders them and stocks the fridge. Not only do I have loyal customers but an incredible support system.

That’s awesome. What a cool thing that this was something that started from the very get-go in your life of healthy foods and alternatives like that. As you’ve gone through this journey, I’m curious as to what have been some of the biggest surprises like, “I never expected this to be so hard. I never thought this would happen.”

It’s COVID. I always laugh and I’m like, “They do not teach you that in Entrepreneurship 101.” I think about this quite often. I don’t know if I would have expected sometimes how long things can take. Back in 2018 leading up to COVID, I spent eighteen months or so working on a complete revamp of the brand, the foundation, the margins, the supply chain, the product, and the packaging because prior to that, it had been that product-market fit phase. I had been living in DC doing the farmer’s markets, selling locally in the stores, selling off of friend’s food trucks to try and gauge interest, selling in random events, and going to college campuses.

It’s that quintessential founder startup story starting hyper-local. When I got my first Whole Foods order and I got into UNFI, I realized this need to make a scalable business. It just took so much longer than I expected to get that foundation built. That took longer than I expected. COVID and the repercussions from that took longer than I expected. The retail category reviews take longer than expected. People-responding, capital raising, and everything take longer. There is this element of patience that I’ve had to learn, but it does not get easier.

We talk about this a lot. It’s this concept of being patiently impatient. You have to have a degree of realism to know that things never happen at the speed we want them to happen and always seem to take longer and so forth. At the same time, you can’t use that as a narrative or an excuse to lull you into passivity or complacency. You have to be both outwardly and appropriately impatient with that right sense of urgency and fire in your gut. At the time, wash it down with a bit of a tonic of realism, which says, “I’m going to keep pushing and it’s going to continue to drive me nuts but I know this is just part of the journey.”

That has also been a silver lining in many cases because it does push me to be proactive in other ways that I would not have been had things happened faster or maybe come more easily. I do think it’s a bit of a double-edged sword but sometimes I’m like, “When is there going to be some break here?”

I’m stereotyping here, but given the fact that both of your parents are CPAs, both of them are likely to be more of the linear-sided mindset, “Things progress from A to B to C to D with some degree of surety and a little bit of a degree of being able to forecast or predict.” You are in an entrepreneurial world where things go from A to X to O to W and back to C again. There’s no ability to predict. There’s very little linear flow. That has to be counter to the way you were brought up and the environment you’re around. How is that working for you? Do you think that you had an extra degree of learning because of that? Do you see the pattern among the chaos?

Looking back at my childhood and early internships or ways in which I created opportunities to make money during the summer, I do believe I always went against the grain. My dad is a CPA accountant but he also is an entrepreneur at heart and more of the not-so-linear type of thinker.

What makes that so?

To give more of my backstory, my parents met at their CPA accounting firm early in their twenties. That’s when they met. At the time, my dad did not like the rigidness of accounting. They got married and then didn’t want to be working together. They parted ways in terms of their career. My mom took a lot of hard work but was climbing the corporate ladder. My dad was not enjoying that CPA accounting track as much. When they had my sister who’s three years older than me, they were looking for childcare.

My dad wasn’t super excited about his career path and decided as an interim solution to stay home with my sister and then me while they figured out childcare. My mom was crushing it at her company and working her way up. She ultimately became the CFO of that financial services business. My dad was a stay-at-home dad for all of my childhood. It was such an incredibly unique upbringing for my sister and me. We had this badass mom role model leading the charge.

My dad did work part-time but he started to then dabble in things that he was more passionate about, whether it was real estate or doing some more accounting work. He’s more passionate about those roles rather than in a big four accounting firm as an example. That was a prime example of being able to take a step back and pursue something that you’re passionate about.

I do remember growing up that my mom would always tell me, “The best gift that you can have as an adult and young adult is to be passionate about what you do.” It was a good life-learning lesson that she was incredibly talented at what she did but she wasn’t necessarily passionate about it. That was ingrained in me early on. There are more examples but I always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As a young girl, I wanted to do lemonade stands all the time to rake in the cash.

My dad would be like, “You have to sell 100 lemonades to even cover the cost of the supplies. We only have many people in the neighborhood. You’re not going to be able to make money. Why don’t you do car washes? You can charge $20.” He was all about that. My mom was like, “Let them have fun for God’s sake.” We always joke about that as well because it was like, “That is a good idea.”

In high school, I figured out a way to make money doing a summer camp. My neighbor and I teamed up. I was no more than sixteen. We had so many neighborhood kids. We were on the older end of the ages. It was during 2008 right when the recession was happening. People wanted to save money. We decided to host this camp in our backyards three times a week. We both made thousands of dollars that summer which was a big deal at sixteen. Looking back at that entrepreneurial spirit, it was ingrained in me early on. My dad helped contribute to the fact that it didn’t always have to be this linear-type thing.

Working with my mom, there’s sometimes tension because she does look at things much more linearly. I’ve become more resilient. It’s like it’s going to go 10 steps forward, 5 steps backward, 3 steps forward, and 8 steps backward. I’m more accustomed to that. We have been working together for a few years now. There is a better understanding of different work styles but it was hard early on because my brain does not work that way.

What a blessing, honestly, first of all, for your parents to be somewhat contrarian. It’s a great lesson. You got both. You got to see your mom for the most part take on probably a fairly misogynist business and financial services, rise to the top, and be a total bad-ass. You get to see your dad do something that takes incredible strength. I wish more men had that confidence and strength.

I remember when our kids were young. My wife and I were having that same discussion around hiring childcare and doing all of that. She was a teacher. We realized that for what you make as a teacher versus what you pay as childcare, she would be happier. Our kids would be the beneficiaries of her being a full-time mom. Whether you’re a full-time mom or dad, the real hard thing is that you hit pause as other things pass you by. I remember when my wife looked up one day. Our kids were all out of the house and all grown. She’s like, “I got forced into retirement. What would I do now?”

What a great set of lessons. It makes complete sense as to why you would find yourself so entrepreneurial. It comes from that combination. Let’s go back and talk about the brand a bit. You have quite a few skews. You crossed into refrigerated, frozen, and shelf-stable. How did you wind up choosing to go into the various places that you did and as many as you did to start?

I did not start that way. I started with this refrigerated chickpea-based cookie dough snack cup. That’s my first born as I call it. That was the initial recipe that I converted to a product when I first took the leap and decided to turn the concept into a brand. In the first few years of that product-market fit phase, I was trying to figure out if this idea would stick. It was just the chickpea cookie dough. I was living and breathing chickpea cookie dough.

It was a little bit ahead of this raw cookie dough phase. I wouldn’t even say phase. It’s more of a shift. There’s a whole category of raw cookie dough. It has helped validate the concept because early on, it was like, “What do I do with this? Am I not baking this?” There was a learning curve for customers that required education. At the time, it was fine because I was so hyper locally-focused only in the Washington, DC market because that’s where I’m from.

I moved home after school to start working on this business and found myself at a commissary shared kitchen space there. That’s why it started in this mid-Atlantic region. It started with the dough. I was making it myself, delivering it and selling it. I got into Whole Foods and started getting in one by one because it was the pre-Amazon acquisition, so you could do that.

I ended up getting into all of the stores in DC and wasn’t able to go beyond that because of the capacity maxing out on what I could deliver myself. I used that as leverage to get into UNFI. That started the whole snowball effect as we started to grow. I had dreamed of a brand where we reinvented nostalgic treats. That has always been the vision but I quite honestly always thought I would be this refrigerated snack brand. Leading up to COVID, the second product line that I was working on was a vegetable-based pudding snack cup that also required refrigeration.

If COVID hadn’t happened, I probably would have launched that with no problems but because of how challenging the supply chain was, eCommerce, the costs associated with that whole section, and the decrease in foot traffic, Whole Foods, and people not grabbing and going anywhere, it felt like launching another product in this difficult category would be further digging myself into a hole in a time where there was so much uncertainty during the onset of the pandemic.

I sat on the cookie dough for a while and started to see the eCommerce opportunities. To your point earlier and what you always say about surviving and thriving, I was not forced into shelf-stable products, but the opportunity to launch shelf-stable products to expand our eCommerce business at a time when that was the only thing moving, it felt like I would be missing out on an opportunity if I didn’t.

I call them my pajama projects because I worked on these five new skews in my home kitchen in what I call after hours. I would do a cookie dough day job from 9:00 to 6:00, get a walk-in, workout, do my routine, and cook. This was in the winter in the thick of COVID. From 8:00 PM to often until 1:00 AM, I would work on concocting these new products that fit the bill with regard to the nostalgic treats concept but didn’t require refrigeration so that I could expand our offerings and diversify beyond this refrigerated category.

The cookie dough bites had always been on my mind. It felt like that was a natural extension of the cookie dough. Our bites are also chickpea-based but instead of using chickpea puree, we use chickpea flour. That allows it to be shelf-stable. With the shift in consumer behavior towards low-sugar and low-carb, wanting healthier alternatives in that sense, I saw an opportunity to create that product to fit that set. That was the mandate in my mind of creating a low-sugar and low-carb iteration of the dough.

Back to the pudding, that category has been on my mind since I started PS Snacks. The pudding category is a $720 million category that has not seen much in the way of innovation. Eighty-five percent of the category is owned by Jell-O. By not launching pudding cups as I had expected, I wanted some way to tap into that market. I was able to figure out how to create an instant pudding mix that not only is lower in sugar but is set with non-dairy milk, which Jell-O does not. It felt like they were missing the mark on the plant-based, lower-sugar, and better-for-you opportunity.

When I think about there being a level of normalizing post-COVID, I’m still in that product-testing phase. What I am seeing is that all of the products are working in different ways. The cookie dough category is reinvigorated. We got into the second region of Whole Foods finally. That took three years. There’s interest in Sprouts. There’s finally what feels like traction in the refrigerated grab-and-go set because for a while there, I was like, “Maybe I should cut the cookie dough. It’s too expensive to ship. We’re not getting retail opportunities,” but that was part of the COVID scare.

I’m seeing too that there’s such an opportunity for those additional products on Amazon and eCommerce in general. We’re starting to see retail traction with those as well. I am in the phase where I’m still testing the opportunities but because they are in different categories, I can leverage them. We got interest from Gelson’s. Central Market picked up the bites. There are different amounts of interest in different places. I’m holding out to see if there’s a clear winner or if one falls to the wayside. Thus far, they have all been thriving in their own way. I am very cognizant of the fact that I’ve got a lot going on.

I understand the rationale. We talk a lot about the importance of being nimble and being able to flex. The other thing we talk quite a bit about is this concept. While we all in the industry love to talk about channels, that’s not how shoppers shop. We don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I’m going to start my day in the natural specialty channel. I’ll spend the afternoon in a conventional grocery and top off my day on eCom.”

We just buy things, but within those things, certain things are going to work better than others in trying to meet your shoppers where they are in multiple places. It makes sense. It’s hard sometimes to support the messaging, the inventory, and all of the expenses to justify it. In this business, there are very few right, wrong, yes and no answers. There are a lot of trade-offs. You made the trade-off of increased complexity, maybe holding more inventory, and things like this for having more tentacles out there to potentially reach.

There are more tentacles and more revenue opportunities. It’s the prime example of what we started this call with. I didn’t want to sit passively during COVID and wait for the retail opportunities to present themselves. I had to create the opportunities. Dealing with a refrigerated product is hard in many ways. Sometimes I think back in retrospect and I’m like, “Maybe I shouldn’t have started the refrigerated product because it’s hard.” We store it frozen. It’s distributed frozen and then it’s blacked out. It works.

It adds complexity in cost and all of that, but it also solves a need that isn’t being met elsewhere. It’s the catch-22. Let me change the topic slightly. Let me ask you to put your future-looking hat on. Let’s say you and I are doing another episode 5 years or 6 years from now. Where is PS Snacks? What has happened to the business? Where do you want it to go?

The world is our oyster but what is exciting to see is that these different products are working. We have early traction. The metrics are right where I want them to be but it’s on a small scale. One of the biggest burdens I feel is that it’s my mom and myself. There’s only so much the two of us can do on our own. We have managed to stay lean, nimble, and cash-efficient. Those are all incredible assets that have forced us to be scrappy and stay afloat but I am longing for the day I can call up my sales team and my marketing team and be able to bring this to life on a larger scale.

The small victories are always an incredibly huge feeling but I’m excited to get to the point, which I hope comes in less than five years, to have a team of people, whether that’s a sales team, a marketing team, or people helping me on social media because I still do all of that or the email marketing. It’s being able to take this vision, this product, this almost family business, and amplify what we have done. In five years, I hope to have a team.

My favorite part of this job is product development. I could stay up all night dreaming up creative ways to recreate or reinvent childhood snacks and make them healthier and lower in sugar made with these real-food ingredients, which is the mantra and the brand vision. I would love to get to the point where this is a brand platform that is scalable and sustainable across different categories.

I built PS Snacks as a way to have a lot of different arms or tentacles as you called them, whether it’s only in sweet snacks or expanding into savory snacks. I look at so many brands that I admire and the ways in which founders either stay on or exit. I wake up every morning loving the fact that I have been able to build this. It’s exactly what I wanted to be doing. It’s super challenging to do it by myself. In five years, I would love to be leading the charge. I love more money and more people behind me.

It is amazing how much you can do with hard work and ingenuity but there comes a point where not only would it be nice but the business is going to necessitate it. You have to be able to have more resources, bandwidth, and things along the way to support it for it to absorb the scale you would hope for it. Looking back thus far, if you had to say, “I wish I did this better or differently,” do you have a good car crash that you can remember?

The refrigeration piece is a double-edged sword. Maybe I would have hit revenue goals faster had it not been a refrigerated product that we started with. I also think it is a point of differentiation. It has made us unique in the market. I don’t know if that’s a good example. That’s a tough question.

I’m glad that’s a tough question. That’s usually a tough question for 1 of 2 reasons. It’s the right answer for you. It’s either because you’ve made so many mistakes that you can’t pick one or that you view everything that you’ve done thus far as learning and iterative. There isn’t any other way but to fumble around a little bit in the dark to try to find the optimal solution because nobody gave you a cheat sheet or a roadmap.

I think it’s the latter. The thing that I’m most grateful for is that I started this at 22 right out of college. I turned 30 and I understand why people do not go down the entrepreneurial route. Being young and naive a little bit and not having had a corporate rule book or not having been in the corporate world and having certain expectations has been hugely impactful for me as a founder and has given me in many ways a leg up because there’s no one or nothing telling me, “This is how it should be.”

If you follow that, “This is how it should be,” nothing ever goes to plan. I am very grateful for that resilience piece. Rejection becomes second nature because it keeps you piling forward. With every failure, mistake or thing I should have maybe done differently, something good came out of it. I don’t think I can pinpoint one specific thing.

That’s the right approach and attitude. There’s not a lot of benefit in lamenting the things that could have gone differently because you didn’t have the information that you do now when you did those things three days ago, let alone three months ago or three years ago. It is what it is. This is all an amazing learning journey. You were talking about what they teach you in school. There’s no way to teach this.

This is a lived experience. It has to be. I would argue that there is no better way and MBA program than five years or more of entrepreneurship. You’re going to be a much more astute business because you’re holistically having to take a look at a business not in a laboratory, not in a textbook, not just elements of it, and not the reductionism side of it but the whole thing.

I feel like a food scientist now. I did not study that whatsoever but I have a lot of activity meters. I got it down to a science.

Most food scientists are in lab coats, not in pajamas. You are in the trend a bit. You are raising a bridge around. You’re trying to bring in some capital. It’s hard in the best of times. It’s hard for a brand your size because you’re in that in-between. Let’s talk about that a little bit. What have been some of the more daunting things about the process? For those reading, what would you want them to know about as they’re going through it likely too? Hopefully, there are some investors reading this as well.

The most daunting piece of this is we have every metric that is expected of us except for the revenue thresholds that either venture capitalists or early-stage institutionalized funds are looking for. Since I pretty much dial office hours every week, I’m like, “I need the money to get to that revenue threshold. How in the world am I supposed to do that if I don’t even have enough money to manufacture and meet the demand of the second Whole Foods region that we got?”

The growth is there. We know we have interest from retailers. If someone were to knock on my door to get into 350 stores, I would need the capital to do so but I need 150 stores to get to $1 million. It’s the chicken and egg that I deal with on a daily basis, “How do you fuel growth to hit revenue thresholds when that requires capital?” There’s this circuitous vicious cycle of running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to find at this point individuals that love PS Snacks, what I’m doing and building, and the vision.

The hardest part is my immediate network of individuals that have been exhausted. I’m looking at the level-two strangers. Finding strangers that can buy into the vision is challenging, especially in this landscape. What you were asking before about the lack of linear nature of this business is I often feel sometimes like I have to justify, “We were here in revenue but then I paused for eighteen months because I did not have a scalable brand.”

I had to work on ensuring that we were set up to be making money but that made our sales suffer. You saw a down year in revenue. I relaunched everything in October of 2019 while we were projecting the threshold in 2020 but that got affected by COVID. We launched new products in ’21 but that was in October. It’s never like, “You double in sales every year.”

It’s never a straight, solid, and upward trend line. There are lots of undulations.

Not to be plugging the Tardigrades but it has been such an incredible reminder to be a part of this group. It’s a good reminder. You don’t have to be the unicorn that’s tripling revenue each year because the reality is I was not dealt those cards. I have had a hard time raising capital to fuel growth. We had a refrigerated product, so eCommerce was not blowing up during COVID. There are a lot of challenges naturally but the hardest part about raising this round is the chicken and egg. We need money to make money. It’s hard.

It’s amazingly hard, first of all. It has been getting harder at this stage in terms of a brand, not so much because of the macroenvironment of the economy and so forth. That’s not helping matters but that isn’t what has changed. The funds have moved up the market. You have to make it further on less. Because you’re having to make it further on less, that automatically is going to mean that the journey is lumpier because you’re going to have to ebb and flow, do things, regroup, do them again, and so forth. How do you bridge the gap from friends and family to angels or strangers and so forth?

This is where that same 8:00 PM to 1:00 AM stick-to-it-iveness “In my PJs, I’m going to make something cool” type of mindset has to be applied to I have to find different people and meet them in different ways. I have to find a road less traveled, figure it out, be resolute that it will happen, and in the meantime, manage the business that it’s going to take longer, and then also make sure you’re exploring all different types of options and so forth. It’s much better to constrain your growth and figure out the funding over time than to try to grow rapidly thinking that will make you more attractive to funding, and then find yourself not getting that because that’s the next central threat to the business.

I want to try to hit two more things for you. In general, you’re spending quite a bit of time on your own doing this. It’s pretty consuming. You alluded to the fact that you go for a walk and try to do your exercise. What do you do to take care of yourself? How do you turn all of this off? There’s an endless list of things that have to be done or examined and so forth, and make sure that you’re taking care of the most important asset of PS Snacks, which is Nikki.

I could have answered your other question about looking back, is there something that I would have done or should have done earlier? I should have moved to Colorado earlier. Hindsight is 2020, I had an incredible experience building my business in the early days in DC. I lived in New York City for a year. That was the first phase of growth outside of this local Washington market. I moved to Colorado. It’s coming up in four years in 2022.

Being here in this environment with this lifestyle has been such a godsend for me as someone that needs to find outlets that are outside. I’m very active. I love running, biking, hiking, skiing, camping, and all of the things outside. I work out daily and go for my walks. I love cooking and hosting. I have had incredible times here. I go to so many weddings. I’m central in the state, so I can go to California. I can go home and see my family on the East Coast.

Being here has facilitated the best work-life balance I could possibly imagine because there are things that I want to be doing outside. I found that when I lived in New York City for a year, you would work yourself over time because I wanted to go outside but I could only run so many miles on the West Side Highway. That was always my joke, “I could only go so many miles on that one path every day.”

Living here in Colorado, the lifestyle has made it easier to achieve a work-life balance. I have the days where I’m in my pajamas all day, don’t work out until 8:00, and then eat dinner late. I get caught up, but for the most part, having like-minded friends, the Boulder entrepreneurship food community nearby, the mountains, the parks, and the sunshine. To me, that has been game-changing as an entrepreneur.

I’m trying to maintain some level of sanity and be a young person. I know that too is unique in the sense that I’ve been doing this all in my twenties. I had a completely different early story and career than my friends. I take care of myself. I love being outside. I love my family and friends. I have close relationships with tons of people that I feel are so special. I do think that’s what I’ve been able to use. That is my outlet because I work all the time here alone.

If you look at the blue zones, that’s one of the big things. It’s not only the diet, what you eat, and how you feel yourself but it’s connectedness, community, and all of those kinds of things. How do people learn more about you and PS Snacks? If there are folks that want to write you a big fat check for this round to help you out, what do you want people to know?

The last piece of this is I love meeting people. I am an extrovert even though I work alone most of the day. I love connecting with people. I’m the one that runs our social media. I often pretend like it’s not me but it is me. I do it every single day. I’m the one running TikTok. I have little eighteen-year-olds helping me but for the most part, I am the voice of this brand.

I’m excited to grow mainly so that I can get the product to more customers and connect with more people. If anyone wants to chat or share ideas and thoughts, you can reach me via email, which is Nikki@PS-Snacks.com. You can send me a DM on our Instagram, which is @PS.Snacks. It’s me on the other end always. I love meeting new people.

You can call customer service. It’s Nikki. You can place an order.

The funny meme about wearing all of the hats is truly me and my mom. I’m grateful for it. If you want to contact me, you will find me.

You’re always positive, upbeat, and pretty chill. It has not been easy but I’m excited for you because your products are great. You’re in a space that needed to be disrupted. It’s going to be about continuing to be persistent and perseverant. Those two things you have in spades.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for joining me. Thanks, folks. We will see everybody next time.

Important Links

• TIG Venture Community

• Expo East

• PS Snacks

• Tardigrade

• UNFI

• TikTok – PS Snacks

• Nikki@PS-Snacks.com

• @PS.Snacks – Instagram

About Nikki Azzara

Driven entrepreneur, passionate health foodie & exercise enthusiast | Founder of P.S. Snacks Co. | On a mission to modernize treats using unconventional ingredients to create nutrient-dense alternatives.

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