Hannah Barnstable: Co-Founder & CEO of Seven Sundays

Episode 815

On today’s episode, we welcome Hannah Barnstable, CEO & Co-Founder of Seven Sundays — the certified B Corp breakfast brand on a mission to flip the cereal aisle on its head. What began as a farmer’s market side hustle after Hannah left her investment banking career has grown into one of the largest natural cereal brands in the U.S., now found in Whole Foods, Sprouts, Costco, Target, and more.
Inspired by a honeymoon discovery of real muesli in New Zealand, Hannah set out to prove that breakfast could be made with 100% real ingredients — no refined sugars, artificial flavors, dyes, preservatives, GMOs, or glyphosate. In this conversation, we talk about building a mission-driven CPG brand from scratch, pioneering upcycled ingredients in cereal, scaling sustainably, and redefining what the American morning routine can look like. A thoughtful episode for founders, operators, and anyone passionate about real food, better systems, and building brands with purpose.

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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be you. Just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control. Control. Control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs and really, some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. Have you ever walked down the cereal aisle and wondered, How did breakfast become this processed, sugary, preservative filled, artificial everything our next guest did just this, what started as a honeymoon discovery of real mousley. Am I pronouncing this right? Muesli? Yep, I haven’t said that in a while. Muesli in New Zealand turned into a bold idea. What if breakfast could be made from 100% real food again? And boy, am I glad that she had this realization so Hannah Barnstable, co founder and CEO of Seven Sundays, the certified B Corp brand. She and her husband started at a Minneapolis. Love Minneapolis. She and I had a little talk about that right before coming on. But Minneapolis farmers market after she left her investment banking career, woo hoo to flip the cereal aisle on its head. Since then, Seven Sundays has grown into one of the largest natural cereal brands in the US. Love, love, love everything about them, the taste, the upcycled ingredients, eliminating artificial additives, and so much better for people and for the planet. So today, I cannot wait to talk all about the founding story leaving a stable career. I don’t know if anything’s really that stable anymore, but just leaving a career that she is not, that wasn’t doing what she is today. I’ll leave it at that. And why breakfast is about more than just what’s in the bowl. So, Hannah, thank you so much for joining us today. So excited to meet you.

Hannah Barnstable 2:27
I’m so glad to be here, and likewise, so

Kara Goldin 2:31
very, very excited. So Seven Sundays for listeners, just discovering the Seven Sundays brand or maybe they had a bold this morning and were wasn’t really that familiar with the backstory or or really what the brand stood for. Let’s start with the what the brand stands for. What do you want people to know about Seven Sundays in the brand?

Hannah Barnstable 2:55
So I started the company, and we can, we can go back to the why, but as far as what the company stands for, I felt like there was a real disconnect between breakfast being a great way to start the day, one of the most important meals of the day, and what was being offered in a traditional, you know, grocery store breakfast style. And so the idea behind the brand, if you really boil it down, was to make Sunday inspired breakfast that bring people together.

Kara Goldin 3:27
I love it. So hence the name. I always ask, Where did the name come from? Yeah.

Hannah Barnstable 3:33
And so Sunday tends to be at the time when I started the business, Brady and I were living in New York. We were working. He was an environmental consultant. I was in finance, and, you know, we were working the long hours and didn’t feel like, you know, breakfast was as it used to be growing up, where you would take your time and, like a Sunday morning, like, actually prepare, maybe you’re making pancakes and you’re spending time around the table and it’s a proper meal time. And while that’s just unrealistic for most people, especially now with three kids, we did want to bring back that feeling of like Sunday inspired breakfast foods, where you feel a little bit more intentional about what you’re eating, and maybe there’s a together or connecting this aspect to what you’re eating, which I felt was really, really lost in the breakfast aisle.

Kara Goldin 4:26
So I read that your honeymoon in New Zealand kind of sparked the original idea. Can you go back to that moment? Yes.

Hannah Barnstable 4:38
So you know, really like you can appreciate as an entrepreneur, the idea really builds from way, way back, right, like being a child in the 80s and 90s, and having all the different flavored cereals growing up and the diet fads that really kind of screwed a lot of us up in the 90s, right, the fat food. Diets and sugars and marketing to kids and and all of that stuff really, like built some foundation and then being in finance, but working with food companies. A lot of my job was touring food plants. So with all of that background in mind, now we go to a time of our lives where Brady and I had just gotten married, and we took a few weeks off to go back country, camping in New Zealand. And on that trip, I think one of the things we one of the conclusions we came to was that we wanted to feel more connection to our work, like we’re starting our life together. We wanted to do something that was impactful first and foremost, and so Seven Sundays today is still very much a mission driven company all the way through to we have a pretty strong focus on Planet health and how food companies can impact that. So that idea started in New Zealand. How we landed with muesli and breakfast, also tied to New Zealand, every morning, we would wake up at, you know, a sheep farm turned bed and breakfast, and we would be served these beautiful bowls of muesli. And it was a type of cereal that I had never had before. Brady had never had before, and the way that it made us feel, they were all homemade cereals that kind of got us ready for the day. We loved it so much that we came back to New York City, where we were living, and I just remember scouring every single grocery store looking for this product or something similar. And ultimately came up short. The few mueslis that I saw were like, bottom shelf imported from another country, and like, more importantly, just if you spend time walking that aisle, you know, that was where I had my aha moment, as I’m looking for this muesli experience that I had that, you know, I was a distance runner, and so was Brady. So what we ate was becoming more important to us in our 20s, and the cereal aisle just completely fell up, fell short for us, for what we were looking for. And so that was the moment, that entrepreneurial moment was in a cereal aisle thinking, there is a disconnect here. There’s an unmet demand for something better to start your day a better way. And so from there, I did what every on you know goes through all the emotional that decision making process of like calling your boss and quitting and telling him you’re starting this company, and everybody telling you you’re crazy and and there I went.

Kara Goldin 7:34
Okay, so from the moment that you decided we’re gonna go and build Seven Sundays to actually getting that first product on the shelf. How long did that take?

Hannah Barnstable 7:46
It was a good so we decided to move back to Minnesota, mainly because living in New York and starting a company did not seem financially feasible. I don’t think that it was like most entrepreneurs, we were gearing up to go several years without pay, so we moved back to Minnesota, and I was able to reconnect with an old family friend who had a diner style restaurant in South Minneapolis, and so they would be open from eight to 2pm every day, and I said, hey, could I come in and use your commercial kitchen space? I’m gonna try to mess around with some cereals. I’m gonna apply for a slot at the farmers market. I’ve got like, a bike and a trailer, and I’m gonna, I’m gonna give this a go. And she was generous enough to allow me to use her kitchen space. She still worked. She now works for us back in the warehouse. Her name’s Kara. She’s awesome. They sold their restaurant, and so that was how I started. I mean, it wasn’t like I went out and raised a bunch of money and had this, like, super buttoned up business plan. I wanted to make food. I called and got to know, like, farmers in Minnesota who were growing oats and rollin oats on site, and they were dropping bags of oats off at my house in Minneapolis at six in the morning. And I really I wanted to talk to people and share this food experience and these muesli recipes at that ground level. So that was probably all within six months of quitting my job, I was out there making muesli at my friend’s kitchen, and then I was hustling it over to the farmers market and displaying it. And then what happened next is a you know this because you used to live in Minneapolis, but we have an incredible kind of local food community here. And in particular, there’s a lot of small Co Op grocery stores that are naturally focused and focused on buying local. And one of the buyers to one of those stores came to the farmers market, tried my product, and said, Hey, would you ever like to sell it in the store? And so that first year, I was able to package up some product in my station wagon and actually deliver it to a. Store for the first time,

Kara Goldin 10:02
wild, and so that took so from the would you say it was like a year or six months? Or how long did it actually take?

Hannah Barnstable 10:12
It was probably within that first year I was delivering some product to stores, yes. So, I mean, that’s the beauty of food, is the barrier to entry can be low. And you probably appreciate this. It’s more those next phases of growth that can be really challenging, right? Like building the distribution from there absolutely.

Kara Goldin 10:35
So how many SKUs Did you launch with? We had

Hannah Barnstable 10:37
four different muesli cereals at the time, yeah, and so I was pregnant with my first and I would just go to the stores, I started to sell to some some other local chains and build some distribution up in that first year. And I would go to the stores, very, very pregnant, and I would do demos, and I would get people to try it. I don’t know. I’ve probably done like, 1000 different demos and events over the course of our history, but it was such a great way to connect with the consumer and just hear what they wanted and needed out of breakfast. And I think that was like validating, right? I was getting a lot of people who were really grateful there wasn’t anything like it. They were also fed up with options in the traditional cereal aisle, and so I spent a lot of time in those early years, like in stores, at events, tweaking recipes and just talking to people about, you know, what they wanted from breakfast or what was missing.

Kara Goldin 11:35
It’s amazing how when you engage with those, especially with the early consumers, it not only possibly tweaking the recipe or flight variations on the brand, but I remember speaking with hint to some early consumers that had issues with type two diabetes, which, at the time, in 2005 no one was even Talking about type two diabetes and why hint would be such an incredible product for somebody who was facing facing this. So the brand Seven Sundays avoids refined sugars, artificial dyes, all kinds of yuck stuff. Was that a kind of a personal decision, a business decision, both. I mean, how did you decide exactly what would go in, what would not go in every product?

Hannah Barnstable 12:33
That’s a great question, because there’s lots of different ways to go about health food and like you walk into Whole Foods, it’s almost overwhelming, right? I’d say I’ve stuck to really not relying on food scientists, for example, to develop products, even as we got into more like, I guess, more complicated products, like a puff cereal and things like that, really tried to avoid any sort of Food Science or flavor labs, things like that. I’m a huge foodie, and that’s why, like, I absolutely love food. My favorite places on Earth are in my kitchen making food from scratch, or in a grocery store, like meandering through the aisles. I love entertaining. I even love to forage, like, in the summer, you’ll find me finding like, wild grapes or blueberries up in northern Minnesota. So I have a true I have a real appreciation for the way that Mother Nature intended food to be for us, not only down to like actual soil level, but all the way through to when we share it together, and how it makes us feel after we’re done eating. So one of my guard rails that we just have never budged on is we develop our products in a kitchen using ingredients that we recognize we’ve never even used a natural flavor. So if it’s a fruity cereal, we’re going to find, you know, freeze dried strawberry powders and maybe a little lemon extract. And like things that are ingredients that people understand, and I think that it ultimately makes you feel better when you’re eating foods you know, that aren’t lab created, that are meant to have a certain taste. You know, if it’s maple, should be real maple syrup. That’s a beautiful ingredient, like the fake maple. Not a big fan. Don’t like how it makes me feel. So we’ve really, you know, held on to that guardrail as being one of our guiding principles. It’s so easy to jump on the train of, like, I don’t know, 20 grams of protein, zero sugar, like, high intensity, zero calorie sweeteners. And we’ve never done that. You mentioned, no refined sugar. So one of the things we say is, we sweeten our cereals with the trees and the bees. So we’re using, we love maple syrup. We pull a lot of maple syrup out of lutes in northern Minnesota, which is up against Lake Superior, and the trees up there create like a really lovely vanilla maple we use a lot of dates to sweeten our cereals honey. So. So I think those are the things we’ve hung on to, just because I actually think it tastes better and makes us

Kara Goldin 15:06
feel better. So you became the first upcycled cereal brand in in the US. What does the word upcycled mean in practical terms for consumers? A lot of people will hear the word upcycled and sounds good, but, but what does it really mean?

Hannah Barnstable 15:26
Yeah, I think a lot of consumers go to like, the ugly fruit place, like, oh, it was a banana that would have been tossed because it was bruised. What, what we’re doing? There’s kind of a whole nother half to half to this. There’s kind of the the food waste, or the bruised fruit, or what you think about in your own home, but there’s actually in the in the food industry, in the US, lots of what we call byproduct waste, meaning there’s a ingredient or a process that’s taking place. There’s a demand for something, and that demand results in the waste of something else. And so I’ll give you a great example. You know, oat milk is something most of us are really familiar with, especially if you are one who’ve tried to avoid dairy at some point in your life. When oat milk came out, it was kind of groundbreaking, because you could actually make a latte with it and like it was creamy and sweet. And oats are awesome. So as that demand went up, as a company that bought a lot of oats for our oatmeals and our granolas and our mueslis, we noticed that there was a major oat shortage, and it was in part due to climate change and fires in Canada. But it was also in part, because the oat milk industry was starting to buy up a lot of the available oats. If you ever think about how oat milk is made, you’re mixing up the oats with water, and you’re basically like extracting out the starches or the sugar, which has like the lowest nutritional value of the oat. So what’s left over is, like a concentrated Oat, it’s like three times the protein and twice the fiber of a whole Oat. And because the oat milk industry has taken off, there’s so much of this, we call it byproduct left over, that it’s being land dropped, or, best case scenario, may be sent out for animal feed. And so instead of creating, you know, a cheerio cereal with oat flour. We actually are using a oat by product from the oat milk industry in there. So it’s a lot higher protein, a lot higher fiber, and it’s ingredient that otherwise would be wasted. So there’s upcycling from like the ugly fruit standpoint, but then there’s a fair amount of processes in the US and industries that just generally create by product, based on the demand and supply.

Kara Goldin 17:46
So in growing any company and in any industry, you’re always going to make mistakes along the way. Or maybe it’s not necessarily a mistake, but it’s, it’s something that you have to get through in some way. I always use this as as an example for anyone who’s listened to any of the other episodes. But the founder of Bowlin branch, the linens and sheet company, he said that his mom always told him that every bed needs to have a bed skirt on it. So when he was creating Bowlin branch. He said, buy a lot of bed skirts. You know, we’re gonna make a ton of them and and he still has the original bed skirts. He said that he made because he didn’t realize that you don’t change your bed skirt very often. So were there any stories like that overruns or flavors that you thought were gonna be like they’re gonna just kill it, and they didn’t.

Hannah Barnstable 18:49
Kara in 15 years in running Seven Sundays, the list is endless of errors, and even just this week, new ones have popped up. I would say one of the things that we hung on to the longest was our original category of developing mueslis. And, you know, you struggled with pronouncing muesli. Imagine how hard it was to try to sell it when people couldn’t even pronounce it. So we went, I think it was seven or eight straight years, really like pushing the category of muesli and that style of cereal, which, if you’re unfamiliar, it’s essentially like an unsweetened granola. It’s a beautiful still, the one I eat every day. And same with my oldest son. He won’t eat any cereals. He eats his muesli every day. But the reality is, I think, as a company, you in order to get through the hump and to survive, you have to appreciate that like your company can’t be a product. It has to be a solution that you’re building. And I was definitely a founder that probably hung on too tightly to my product and not you know, perhaps me. Maybe lost sight of the the mission or the solution that we were trying to provide to a real problem, which is the breakfast category needs a restart. We need to have more connection. We need more real food ingredients that make us feel good and nourish us for the day. And so, you know, that’s probably the biggest example of we always refer to the muesli days as our eight year education on building a food company, because we were able to make all the other mistakes at a smaller scale, like whether it’s, you know, working with a co manufacturer to help make your product, or getting into Target nationwide and then losing the distribution, like all of those things, we were able to kind of learn that on a smaller scale. But, I mean, that was a big shift for us to say, you know, now that we’ve we kind of understand the industry and our consumer and the need, how do we scale it from here? Well, we have to think more broadly about how we, you know, really lean into that problem that we set out to solve, and then develop products around that, so that we can solve the problem, and we’re not just a little niche category. So I can appreciate the bed skirt. I mean, that’s a when you said bed skirts, I’m like, I got a bed skirt that’s our measly and we still sell it. It’s just a much smaller part of our business than it was in those early days when it was all we were making.

Kara Goldin 21:21
One of the episodes that hasn’t aired yet, but it came from an interview that I did earlier or earlier today, actually was from a brand, an incredible brand, I was mentioning to you, called Tibby, and she was talking about how she had to just hit restart on the brand that she had just she had lost the core, right, lost what she had been doing. And I think any founder can appreciate moments right, where in any industry, and that’s why I love doing this podcast, because it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, whether it’s in the food or beverage industry or clothing industry. It just especially when it’s a consumer industry, I’m finding there’s so many similarities along the way. Did you ever have a moment when you felt like, I don’t know if this is gonna make it right, like we ran into some scary moment? I mean, there’s so many, so many stories that come up with hints right where it was, it was definitely that. But were there any moments where you just thought, I don’t know.

Hannah Barnstable 22:31
Yep, I remember the year even. I mean, we’ve had lots of challenges over the years, and you know, now we look at challenges differently, and we see them as a hurdle. But back then, you know, every blow felt like, this, is it right? Like I remember, you know, we finally got into a local grocery chain in the Twin Cities, and I was really proud of it. And within a few months, they came to us and said, You know, it’s just not selling. Is your cereal? Your mueslis are not selling at the volume that we hope them to be, so we’re discontinuing them. And at that moment, you know, you could decide, like, why don’t have it in me, or my my products not what it needs to be. Or, like most of us entrepreneurs, you kind of just like, dig in more and you say, Okay, I still like how it really tests, like how strongly you believe in that problem that you want to solve, right? And for me, it was always really personal, like it is for a lot of I noticed, especially women entrepreneurs, what the problems that we’re trying to solve are personal. Fixing the food system and planet health for my kids is really personal. I want them to eat a certain way and feel a certain way, and I want the planet to be left in a way that’s healthy for them. So I think that, you know, you hit those moments, and we had many of them, but I would say absolutely, whenever I’m talking to entrepreneurs, it’s pretty common to have a moment where you feel like you’re on the brink of throwing in the towel, and you may even walk through the scenarios of like, what that would look like and how it would be done. And you know, half of what we do is persistence and grit as entrepreneurs in order to make it to that next you know that next phase of growth, or through that big hurdle to come to come out the other side

Kara Goldin 24:27
well, and I think you’ve probably gotten I remember when I first heard that, it’s like somebody telling you your baby’s ugly, right, when you’re getting kicked out. Like I remember when we were first starting hint some really wise, or we thought they were very wise at the time. Told us, you know, you’ve only got one shot, right? And so once you get kicked out, and we’ve been kicked out many stores, and then gone back in there. And I always tell entrepreneurs, as you probably do as well, that there’s buyer changes, there’s you. Lots of things that go on. But I think that the other thing that we learned is that you sometimes have to repeat back why things did not work. So for example, if a buyer, and this happens a lot for anybody who’s not in the food industry, a buyer says, Oh, we want you to create this new flavor, or they pick the flavors. They don’t want you to pick the top flavors that are going to have success, right? So they pick the flavors, and then they’re left maybe with that one flavor that they were sure was gonna be terrific. Well, then all of a sudden, your product doesn’t work right because it’s or your brand doesn’t work your your baby’s super ugly because of what they right, well, what they picked. And so you know, if you instead, swap out that one that isn’t working with the best sellers, oh my gosh. I don’t know what happened, but suddenly it works. And or you you get, instead of having two SKUs, you actually have four SKUs, so you have some kind of presence, especially in a category as crowded as serious, yeah, right. Makes all the difference, and so little things like that, yeah.

Hannah Barnstable 26:21
I often, like, especially when, whether it’s dealing with a retail buyer or maybe it’s raising money, you know, a lot of times I think about like, you know, stand firm, Believe, believe in yourself. Like, know that you’re on the right path, because if you lose faith in yourself. You don’t have a chance, right? But, and then if you come across people who aren’t buying in it’s okay to let that go and say, you know this, this isn’t a conversation that is worth carrying forward. I feel like that happens a lot. You know in this industry, where you’re either raising money or you’re up against a big retailer that’s going to make a big decision. Not everybody’s going to buy into to your story, what you’re trying to do, and honestly, that’s a good sign that you’re being innovative, right? If everybody was like, totally makes sense someone should like, maybe then you’re just another me too. If you’re really innovative and you’re trying to change an industry, there’s going to be naysayers, and I think you you have to be comfortable enough in your own skin to push through that right and and kind of decide which conversations are worth leaning into and which ones maybe aren’t.

Kara Goldin 27:36
Yeah, definitely. You talked about raising money. How have you financed the company? To date,

Hannah Barnstable 27:44
we’ve financed, I mean, we started with our own capital for the first several years, as I mentioned, starting off in a farmer’s market, basically like a lot of entrepreneurs, poured all of our savings and retirement and racked up credit card debt and all the things. It was very mature. We used to joke. There was a saying of, like, two kids or no, no kids. Two income. We were like, three kids, no income. Is there an acronym for that? So a lot of it was grit, our own capital. We eventually, once we started to gain national distribution, which was probably around, I’m gonna say, like year three or four in the company, we started to kind of move outside of Minnesota, like our core turf, and really scale the business. We started to bring in some angel investors there, like friends and family, to help us along the way, which was scary, but ultimately, looking back like that’s been kind of a fun part of our journey is to bring them along for the ride, and it helped us as a family, Brady and I, you know, be able to feel like it wasn’t all on us or or just us building this. We kind of had our team behind us, so that was really helpful.

Kara Goldin 28:58
Yeah, definitely. Well, Hannah, for anyone who has not tried Seven Sundays, what is kind of the the must have go to product, go to SKU that everyone needs to try.

Hannah Barnstable 29:14
Oh, boy, that’s like picking your favorite child. I know which I am capable of doing most days. So this shouldn’t be a problem for me. I would have to say, like, I think that our chocolate, little sunflower cereal, it’s a grain free cereal. It’s date sweetened. That one to me is, well, it’s our number one product that we sell, but it’s great dry. It’s great in milk, if you like it that way. But I would say that is the number one item. If you haven’t tried seven sundaes, you should try our little chocolate sunflower cereal. Kids love them too, because the shape is real cute.

Kara Goldin 29:53
It is so yummy. So I think that’s a great option. So well, Hannah, thank you so much. For joining me today. Your story is so inspiring, and you and your husband co founding the company together. Love, love, love that, but such a powerful reminder that sometimes the biggest opportunities are hiding in the most familiar, unfamiliar places where you’re enjoying yourself, starting in New Zealand and taking that into the cereal aisle, and for everyone listening, be sure to check out Seven Sundays.com and follow them on social. Find them in incredible stores out there too. But Hannah, thank you so much. So much so. Hannah Barnstable, co founder and CEO of Seven Sundays. So thank you again,

Hannah Barnstable 30:45
Kara, thanks for having me. This is great.

Kara Goldin 30:49
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast, just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms. At Kara Goldin, I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint, we are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening, and goodbye for now.

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