Bethesda Magazine

A Tasteful Solution

Mary Schulman couldn’t find healthy snacks for her kids—so she came out with her own.

Five years ago, Mary Schulman began researching children’s nutrition while pregnant with her first child. She was dismayed by how few healthy kids’ snacks she found. So she left a profitable job as an investment banker and started her own healthy snack food company.

She called it Snikiddy Snacks.

“I had this urge to build something for myself,” Schulman says. “Also I was pregnant—so I think all sorts of things were going on with me.”

Today, the 35-year-old Bethesda resident’s snacks are being tweeted about by The View‘s Elizabeth Hasselback. They’ve been featured on Rachael Ray’s daytime television show as “Snack of the Day.” And model Cindy Crawford has sent Schulman a personal thank you for creating the healthy alternative.

Schulman initially pitched the idea to her mother, Janet Owings, a Rockville resident. The two spent much of 2005 scouring old family recipes and strategizing a business plan. The first of Schulman’s two children was born in March 2005. Snikiddy Snacks was born the following year.

The company’s name refers to a time when Schulman’s grandmother sent her children to school with home-cooked meals while other children typically bought cafeteria food. A teacher commented, “You guys are so persnickety about what you eat.” The kids couldn’t pronounce “persnickety.” So “they became known as the ‘Snikiddy Kids,’” Schulman says.

“We launched two lines right away—cheese puffs and cookies—and right out of the gates we were extremely successful,” Schulman says. “In one year, we were a national company.”

The company discontinued its cookies, but now sells baked fries, as well as cheese puffs, both of which come in four flavors. The snacks are gluten- and wheat-free, with no preservatives or hydrogenated oils.

Manufactured in Boulder, Colo., Snikiddy products are sold locally at Whole Foods, Giant, Wegmens, My Organic Market, ToysRUs, BabiesRUs and select Safeways. They’re also available online at www.snikiddy.com as well as on www.amazon.com.

“They taste really good, and kids are going to like them just as much as other products laden with chemicals and preservatives,” says Schulman, who tests the snacks on her own children, Sunny, now 5, and Sadie, 3. “They cost a little bit more, but it’s not astronomically higher.” A six-pack of lunch-sized cheese puff bags sells for about $5.

The company employs nine people: three in Bethesda, three in Colorado and three marketing reps throughout the country. Snikiddy received $15 million in financial backing two years ago from New York-based D.E. Shaw & Co., a global investment and technology development firm. “Given the opportunity, people will pick the healthier choice if it doesn’t involve compromising on taste,” says Bryan Martin, managing director of D.E. Shaw.

Owings says her daughter’s career path is not surprising.

“After school, I can remember picking Mary up and she would already have a list of things that needed to be bought at the grocery store,” Owings says. “…At 10 years old, she’d go in and buy all the groceries, and I’d sit in the car and read.”

Schulman partially credits her success to good timing “with what’s happening right now with the healthy food movement.

“I think we’d all like to have kids who are a bit persnickety about the choices they make and the food they eat,” she says.

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