How These Siblings Burnt Their Boats To Build MadeGood’s Snack Empire

LeadershipCMO NetworkHow These Siblings Burnt Their Boats To Build MadeGood’s Snack EmpireByDave Knox,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Dave Knox is a writer focused on startups, tech, innovation, and CPG.Follow AuthorJun 11, 2026, 10:00am EDTNima Fotovat, along with his sisters Salma Fotovat and Sahba Fotovat, built an allergen-free, organic granola bar and bite brand, scaling to roughly 500,000 square feet of owned manufacturing and a recent partnership to serve MadeGood on every Delta flight.MadeGoodWhen Nima Fotovat launched MadeGood with his two sisters in 2014, the family took loans against every one of their homes to bet on an allergen-free snack their kids might actually want to eat. Twelve years later, the brand sits in tens of thousands of doors across North America, manufactures everything in-house at a roughly 500,000-square-foot facility, and recently won placement as a snack on every Delta flight. The story of how a second-generation entrepreneur built a category challenger by burning every boat is a master class in family business, vertical integration, and the discipline of staying agile at a thousand employees.A Family Bet On An Allergen-Free SnackDave Knox: Let’s start with the origin story. What led you to launch MadeGood?Nima Fotovat: I have to give credit to my kids. That’s the point at which the tension was observed. The kids want something tasty. Parents want to give them something healthy. And then there’s a third stakeholder, which is society, the classroom. If you have a kid with an allergy, everyone wants the classroom to be safe.We were parents who wanted to give our kids the healthiest products possible, so we started packing lunch boxes with fruits and vegetables. We said we weren’t going to go near packaged goods. But we got a high return rate on those lunch boxes. As the kids were exposed to packaged cookies and granola bars, we lost that battle pretty quickly.I’d been in the food...