Long before gluten-free became a buzzword, Mary Waldner was making wholesome, addictive crackers that fit her celiac disease lifestyle. Today she’s making them for a gluten-free world—and running a highly successful food company. In this adaptation from the new book Cooking Up a Business, author Rachel Hofstetter tells how Mary converted her secret recipe into cha-ching.
Imagine feeling sick—not for a day, or a week, or even a year, but for your whole life. That was reality for Mary Waldner, who, by the age of three, was regularly experiencing painful digestion after meals. As Mary got older, the symptoms only worsened, leaving her fatigued and suffering from constant, low-level depression. While she had a hunch that her ailment was food related, she had no idea what was causing it. Worse, doctors seemed to think her pain was all in her head.
Finally, in 1994, when she was 43 years old, Mary’s chiropractor came up with a possible diagnosis: Could it be a little-known disease (at that time) called celiac? The only true test for the disease was for Mary to give up gluten entirely for at least a month and monitor her symptoms. She switched to the new diet and started to feel better almost immediately. “The change in how I both felt and looked was so dramatic that I’d run into friends I hadn’t seen for a while, and they would barely recognize me,” she explains. “I looked like I was at least 10 years younger, and I had energy I’d never had before!”
Mary could control her food easily at home, but the avid baker wanted to go out and socialize. Gluten-free dining was especially hard at restaurants: “While everyone else was munching on warm, fluffy bread, I was starving and couldn’t eat anything,” she says of the omnipresent pre-dinner freebie baskets.
While she wasn’t consciously looking for a fix, Mary started playing with an idea for a snack. On a quiet Sunday in 1995 she combined brown rice, quinoa, flaxseeds, and sesame seeds by hand, cutting the baked results into crispy, cracker-like pieces. They were good. Really good. That week, Mary made another batch, and then another. As she tweaked her recipe, Mary realized that these crunchy, portable snacks were crackers; she’d concocted a gluten-free cracker! From then on, Mary kept a stash at work, brought bags to parties, and munched on them in lieu of raiding the bread basket. And wherever she went, the crackers were a certified hit. Kids loved them. Health nuts loved them. Big Mac fans loved them. Here was a recipe with crowd appeal.
And then, on the morning of January 1, 1999, after a holiday fete where hundreds of her crackers had been snapped up, Mary awoke with a flash of an idea: She should manufacture and sell the crackers. She immediately found her husband, Dale Rodrigues, and told him about her brainstorm. Could they do it? Dale readily agreed, even though it was the first time either had even considered this crazy proposition.
But if the crackers were next-to-impossible to make at home, then people would be willing to pay for them, right? The idea for Mary’s Gone Crackers was officially born.
Mary and Dale spent the next two years researching all things crackers on the side. Then, in 2002, Mary significantly reduced her workload as a therapist to devote more time to find the right equipment to create her handmade recipe, and Dale left his job as a general contractor to handle their finances and write a business plan. The only way they could make peace with the risk was their faith that they would eventually be successful; after all, they’d seen more over-the-top enthusiastic reactions to the crackers than they could count. Although it wouldn’t be fun, they calculated that they could repay all of their growing debt within four years.
Mary found a facility, called a co-packer, who would make her crackers in their factory, but Mary first had to find the right machinery. None of the traditional baking machinery worked (her gluten-free dough wasn’t like regular dough) so she ended up repurposing machines from other industries—even the beauty industry! When her first batches were ready, she sent a box to all of the celiac support groups across the country, and then to all of the leading natural foods stores. A prominent store buyer had received one of the sample boxes Mary had sent and loved the crackers so much that she specifically asked her distributor to carry Mary’s Gone Crackers—and Mary was in business! Within a year, Mary and Dale moved the company into its own 50,000 square foot facility in Northern California and haven’t looked back.
“People will talk to me all the time and say, ‘Poor you; gluten-free must be so limiting and hard. How can you do it?’ And while there are certainly moments when it’s challenging, this lifestyle has opened up an amazing world to me,” exclaims Mary. “And it was the problem that led to the cracker solution which led to Mary’s Gone Crackers.” By now Mary has sold well over 8 million boxes of those crackers, which can be found in 10,000 stores. And her homemade recipe is now also, without a doubt, a million dollar recipe.
Mary Walder’s story is adapted from Cooking Up a Business: Lessons from food lovers who turned their passion into a career—and how you can, too (Perigee) by Rachel Hofstetter. Find out more at cookingupabusiness.com or by following @RachelHoffy on Twitter.