Summary
Overview
Val and Breezy Griffith, a mother-daughter team, share the story of building Skinny Dipped, a chocolate-covered almond snack brand that reached over $100 million in annual sales. Starting in 2013 with just $25,000, they spent years perfecting a thin chocolate coating technique, hustling through farmers markets and demos, and eventually landing in 1,800 Target stores. Despite rapid growth and appearing on Forbes lists, they nearly went bankrupt in 2022 due to razor-thin margins before making dramatic cuts and achieving profitability in 2024. Their journey highlights the importance of persistence, financial discipline, and the power of family partnerships in building a consumer brand.
The Origin Story: From Personal Tragedy to Business Partnership
After losing a close family friend Josh to cancer in 2013, Breezy moved back to Seattle from New York to be closer to family. She had been experimenting with various food businesses including sorbets and cupcakes, but none were profitable. During a road trip taking Breezy's sister to college, she and her mom Val started discussing the lack of better-for-you snacks that were also delicious. They landed on the idea of reinventing chocolate-covered almonds with a much thinner coating and less sugar, using whole food ingredients and Val's culinary philosophy of moderation.
- Breezy had been experimenting with micro food businesses in Miami and New York, all of which were losing money
- Josh Dickerson, a close family friend and Breezy's sister's boyfriend, passed away from cancer at age 18, prompting Breezy to move back to Seattle
- Val was a freelance TV producer facing empty nest syndrome and looking for her next chapter
- They wanted to create 'girl snacks' - portable, better-for-you options with less sugar but still delicious
" I will never forget the image of my mom sitting there. I walk into this kind of dark conference room, and she's sitting at the table with like hundreds of nuts that she's bitten in half, and this pale look on her face, and she just said, there's nothing we can do. They're rancid. "
The Technical Challenge: Perfecting the Thin Chocolate Coating
Creating a thinly-coated chocolate almond proved far more complex than expected. They experimented for nearly a year, trying everything from hand-dipping on forks to using paint sprayers with heat guns. They even spent four days at an Oregon facility individually placing nuts on a conveyor belt through a chocolate waterfall. The breakthrough came when Breezy found a chocolatier on an obscure Reddit blog who knew how to use a specialized rotating pan to apply thin, even coatings. They eventually set up operations in a converted chicken coop with one oven and no hot water.
- Hand-dipping almonds one by one on forks was completely unscalable
- An attempt to spray chocolate using a Home Depot paint gun completely failed - the chocolate atomized into the air
- They spent four days in Oregon hand-placing nuts on a conveyor belt, ending up with just one cooler of product
- The solution involved using a specialized rotating pan that gradually builds up thin layers of chocolate
- They used an old culinary technique called 'truffling' - dusting the chocolate with cocoa powder, raspberry powder, or espresso to protect it
" We went to Home Depot. We bought a paint sprayer. We filled the paint sprayer with chocolate. And the chocolate would start to harden. So you couldn't actually get it to work. So we had to MacGyver some heat guns next to the paint sprayer to try to keep the chocolate warm while we sprayed these sheet pans of almonds. And let me just tell you, it is a complete failure. We just had like it just chocolate just atomized into the air. "
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