After selling online for 25 years, Nuts.com is making a big push into retail
Nuts.com, the online snack store known for its colorful packaging and cartoon mascots, is making a bigger push into grocery stores as it looks to solidify itself as an omnichannel brand.
Nuts.com is launching a new line, Pop & Sol, entering 1,346 Targets, 166 The Fresh Markets and 34 ShopRites across the United States for the first time. Pop & Sol currently has eight nut-based products — half sweet and half savory — with flavors including Roasted Elote Peanuts and White Chocolate Covered Cashews. Target will carry the savory SKUs, while The Fresh Market and Shop Rite will carry the sweet SKUs.
The jump into grocery is a big one for Nuts.com. The company has had a small presence in Walmart, Sam’s Club and Sprouts through the brand Kopper’s Chocolates, which Nuts.com acquired in 2016. But Nuts.com’s key business has been predominantly online since the late 1990s. Now, after coming under a new CEO in 2023, the company is looking to up its customer base and sales by broadening out into other channels. As such, it’s making its first wholesale play as its own namesake brand.
Nuts.com has spent the last year and a half retooling its business to support such a launch, its CEO, PJ Oleksak, told Modern Retail. “We wanted to make sure we were building the internal team, building the board, and making our systems and processes ready to support scale,” Oleksak said. She called Pop & Sol “a really key step, in terms of our growth strategy.” “It’s exciting times ahead,” Oleksak added.
Notably, this isn’t the company’s first go-around at selling nuts in stores. Its roots go back to 1929, when the business was a family-run store in New Jersey known as the Newark Nut Company. The company came online in 1999 as NutsOnline, then changed its name to Nuts.com in 2012. It has earned a following across the U.S. and Canada for its nuts, seeds, dry fruits and chocolates. Nuts.com serves more than 1 million customers annually and has more than doubled its sales since 2019.
As it expands, Nuts.com is facing larger economic headwinds. Nuts.com primarily manufactures its products in house, but it also imports some products like Turkish apricots and Himalayan Goji berries. On April 17, it sent an email to customers, detailing where the business stood in the face of tariffs. “Recent tariffs may influence the availability and cost of a few items, and the situation is evolving,” the email reads. “The good news is that most of your favorites won’t be affected, and you’ll continue to get great value and quality.”
In an interview, Oleksak spoke more about her plans for Pop & Sol, the future of Nuts.com’s e-commerce presence and the latest ways Nuts.com has been navigating tariffs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What led you to develop the new Pop & Sol brand?
“I’ll take it back to when I first stepped in as CEO, which was about a year and a half ago. Really, we were in a place where we were thinking about mission, vision, values and what is next for our growth journey. It became really clear to us that we wanted to take this fantastic e-commerce business we had created, … and evolve to being more of an omnichannel premium snack brand.
It became clear that, in order to be successful in that expansion, it would be important to lead with a new brand that would give us space to be bold and leverage the heritage. ‘Poppy’ Sol [Braverman] is the original founder of the family business, and so Pop & Sol actually pays honor to that great heritage. It also gives us the opportunity to say ‘pop and soul,’ because we’re being very flavor-forward with this new, innovative line. We’re taking the history of our high-quality products and leaning on innovation and bold flavors to disrupt the snacking category. So, we’re excited about how this fits in and augments the e-commerce growth strategy we have.”
The better-for-you snack category is quite competitive these days. What are you doing to stand out and make customers come to you first?
“We have a lot of experience building and putting new products out into the market. We’re partnering with the right [grocery] brands, where we know our consumer is, and we’re making sure that our bright branding is really catching folks’ eyes. … We’re also focused on propping up our retail entry with all of the marketing tactics that have served us well for the past 25 years [as an e-commerce business].
We do a lot from a digital marketing and TV perspective, and for Pop & Sol, we’ll leverage our entire playbook. … The more health-conscious [people are], whether that comes with age or knowledge, it is such an opportunity to tell the story of how these different products can be good for you and provide different nutrients. The storytelling around our products is a big opportunity for us.”
Going forward, are you hoping to have a certain percent of your business be e-commerce versus physical retail?
“We have multi-year plans and projections for how that will all shake out and how we’ll be able to penetrate the market. But overall, when we think about the enterprise strategy of being an omnichannel premium snack company, we just want to be where customers are thinking about procuring their food. We will continue to be a predominantly e-commerce business, but we will hopefully see retail grow as a portion of our total business and be an important part of our growth strategy.”
I spoke with Jeff [Braverman, Nuts.com’s executive chairman] a few weeks ago about how you all have been navigating tariffs. Has it been hard to launch a new brand at this time? Where do things stand right now, when it comes to tariffs?
“It’s so interesting, because every CEO, every leadership team, is really navigating this new world. We’re all ingesting information as it comes to us and planning how to deal with it. We’re staying really agile and informed. There are always going to be things from a macro environment that you can’t control, … but it doesn’t change the core strategy and the focus.
Thankfully, we have our fantastic history, so we have great supplier relationships. We manufacture so much within our own facilities. So, there are certain elements that are controllable, but the reality is that certain products are grown all over the world. It’s not a choice — it’s just the climate and the environment where they’re best grown. … We’re trying to make sure we are being efficient, so that we can make sure our pricing stays fair for our customers, because that’s the most important thing.
Tariffs didn’t affect the Pop & Sol launch because we were already so far along. But, it will be something we keep an eye on for the future, as well. Because, certainly, for some of these products, the core nut is grown overseas.”