Story

Joyce Guan and Adam Sah first met in 2010. Joyce was working as a food broker, helping brands like Charles Chocolates get into specialty stores. Adam was a senior engineer at Google. They had many friends who were active in the Bay Area food startup community, where a new generation of entrepreneurs were developing innovative foods as a healthier alternative to the highly processed foods found in grocery stores. These food startups had a common problem–it was difficult to find a way to market their products in traditional grocery stores.

Buyer’s Best Friend launched in 2010 with a vision of helping entrepreneurs bring new, healthier foods to market. It’s an online marketplace that enabled food startups like Dang coconut chips and OCHO organic candy to promote their products and sell them to large companies such as Google, Whole Foods, and Virgin Atlantic. Today, BBF has relationships with thousands of food producers and is the largest online food catalog in the world.

But you can’t taste a screen. So from 2012-2015, BBF operated 3 tiny retail shops where consumers could taste anything in the stores, earning tons of 5 star Yelp reviews. We closed the shops when the office snack business (below) took off.

One thing we kept hearing from our store customers was the dearth of healthy snack options in their offices. So in 2013, we launched our office snack delivery service, and the response was overwhelming. In Silicon Valley and San Francisco, people spend long hours in the office and are eager to embrace inventive, healthy snacks from the food startup community. Today, we are the leading snack provider to the innovation economy.