Early Days

Rebecca previously held marketing roles at Compaq and Hewlett-Packard, but she stepped away for a decade to raise their three children. When it was time to return to the workforce as their children grew, it wasn’t easy for Rebecca to find a new position.

However, Rebecca had her other tools at her disposal. “She had recipes that she had picked up along our travels and had been making these crackers and different assorted seed products for years,” Will says.

Top Seedz’s organic, gluten-free crackers feature a mix of chia, flax, hemp, pumpkin, sesame and sunflower seeds, and they’re flavored with a variety of herbs and spices. The original manual process involved creating the seed mixture, spreading it between two sheets of parchment paper, baking it and cracking it into pieces by hand.

After testing the crackers with friends and selling them at farmers markets, Rebecca caught the attention of Wegmans, a grocery retail chain with more than 100 locations in the Northeast. Top Seedz began selling product into a dozen stores in the Buffalo area, expanding from there.

“Wegmans were interested in developing local suppliers, local products. They were very interested in helping us grow store by store,” Will says. “But not every supermarket chain allows you to do that --sometimes it's all or nothing. We were fortunate to have some nice contacts in Wegmans that were also interested in our success.”

Whole Foods also moved into the Buffalo area in September 2017, offering another avenue to distribute Top Seedz’s products. To fulfill these orders, Rebecca leased a shared commissary space with a couple static ovens.

“She would make the product there with a handful of helpers and probably would end up burning more product than making because it's very difficult to control the baking process and control the temperature in those kind of ovens,” Will says. “But after about a year of that, she had made enough money to say, ‘OK, let's make something more of this.’”

First Move

In 2018, Top Seedz leased a 6,500-sq.-ft. location near the Buffalo Niagara International Airport that once belonged to the Niagara Transportation Association. It had office space, a dock and three-phase power, which the company needed to operate its ovens. This location also had space for rotating rack ovens — the first of which Rebecca purchased after winning $50,000 in the 2018 Ignite Buffalo competition.

“It was just night and day compared to the old commissary space,” Will says. “And we could get consistency. One rack at that time (had) 40 pans. Each pan had two packages of product. It was 80 packages of product in 40 minutes, so we thought it was a great thing back then.”

While the location offered more space and more flexibility than the commissary kitchen, it still had its drawbacks, Will says. The facility wasn’t air conditioned, nor was it pressure controlled. Top Seedz installed three more rotating rack ovens, but by then, the company was pushing the power limit.

“We were there for quite some years and we experienced quite a bit of growth, but by the end, we were really busting at the seams in that place,” Will says.

In late 2021, Top Seedz won $1 million through a competition hosted by 43North, a Buffalo business incubator program. As part of the competition, Rebecca developed a 7- to 10-year plan that would drive Top Seedz’s growth. After winning, Will joined Top Seedz in early 2022, and they began searching for a larger facility that could be customized to meet the company’s needs.

Second Move and Expansion

Top Seedz selected a 35,000-sq.-ft. facility in downtown Buffalo, and the company worked with the landlord in 2023 and 2024 to replace the floor with concrete slab, install drainage, build a wall between production and warehousing, and update the HVAC system.

However, the building also needed a major power upgrade to meet Top Seedz’s production needs. The project, which involved transitioning from 208V service to 480V, finally wrapped in May.

“Unfortunately, that power upgrade took very, very long,” Will says. “Those kinds of projects typically do, but I think this one was exacerbated by some of the supply chain challenges post-COVID.”

Will, who had previous experience bringing online a non-food manufacturing facility, says they worked off of Rebecca’s business plan to balance current equipment and capacity needs with future growth. This also involved planning investment for automation, especially key parts of the manufacturing process, like moving fragile crackers onto baking pans.

“There are other parts of the process then that were higher risk in terms of trying to automate it, so we decided to put our money, our time and our effort into developing equipment or an approach that would help us automate that particular piece of the process,” Will says.

Before Will joined Top Seedz, Rebecca spent several years working with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to develop a process that would work. The seeds – the very basis of Top Seedz’s crackers — proved to be the most challenging part. A customized piston filling system, along with some formulation tweaks, allowed Top Seedz to automate moving the product onto pans.

”A lot of the back end — the packaging equipment — it's fairly standard,” Will says. “But on the hot end, like the batch preparation, the mixing, the depositing of the mixture onto our baking pans is highly customized for our product.”

Top Seedz recently launched its second production line, expanding daily capacity from 16,000 packages to 32,000 packages. In comparison, Rebecca made 16,000 packages over the course of Top Seedz’s first year of business.

Even with increased automation, Will says Top Seedz will maintain its workforce of approximately 75, adding the company has hired engineers and experienced supervisors to advance training on complex equipment. Additionally, Top Seedz continues to employ refugees who may face some of the same challenges the Bradys have.

“Rebecca and I are immigrants to this country,” Will says. “We came through a different pathway, but we know through our travels and working in different countries, it can be difficult to integrate somewhere. Rebecca's own story is the challenges of finding a job and trying to find something to do, so we feel that a lot. The people that we do hire are hardworking. They show up, they're committed, they love working here, and we love having them.”

What’s Next

In addition to increasing capacity, Top Seedz’s power upgrade allowed the company to move from clamshell packaging to standup pouches. The pouches, which contain post-consumer recycled content, offer better shelf life and more visual appeal.

Will says Top Seedz hopes to transition to a fully recyclable pouch in the future, but the PCR pouch with metallized film serves as a stepping stone.

“Rather than going full recyclable straight away, we wanted to ease our way in through testing,” Will says. “We just don't have enough data of the recyclable pouches to have the full confidence that we can get the shelf life for our product that we want. We have a lot more data on the metallized film pouches for this type of product, so that's why we've chosen to take this first step.”

Top Seedz also has its sights set on new distribution channels now that it has the capacity to support it. The company has begun working with Costco in Northern California and is looking into foodservice and small-format packages. Top Seedz has also eyed the UK market, but expanding overseas brings different packaging and labeling requirements.

Top Seedz also has space for two more nearly identical processing and packaging lines, whenever it needs them.

“(There are) a lot of challenges ahead, but it's great. We love it,” Will says.