NIK INGERSOLL, co-founder, Barnana: 'We want to do for the banana what POM Wonderful did for the pomegranate'

“When you don’t have a big marketing budget, you’ve got to try and do crazy things that will get you a ton of attention, so guerrilla marketing is at the core of what we do​,” says Nik Ingersoll, CMO and co-founder at Santa Monica-based Barnana, which launched its snacks at the Expo West show in 2012, and is now in 2,500+ stores from Safeway and Wegmans to Whole Foods, Sprouts and Vons. 

And so far, it’s paying off. Barnana revenues are set to top $2m in calendar year 2014, and within 3-4 years, reckons Ingersoll, barnana could be a $30m+ brand.

Which is not bad going considering that it is actually a surprisingly simple snack.

Indeed, the original variant only has one ingredient: organic bananas, which are gently heated at less than 104 ̊F (so they can be marketed as ‘raw’) in solar powered ovens to remove most of the water, chopped into pieces by the firm’s partners in Latin America, and then shipped over to California to be packaged.

“The banana is America’s #1 selling fruit, but no one’s really branded it,​” says Ingersoll.

Click HERE​ ​to read our recent interview with barnana.