Elizabeth Stein, who first sold baking mixes made out of her New York City kitchen, will remain CEO of Purely Elizabeth after its estimated $800 million sale to Ferrero closes. The sale is among the largest deals recently in the natural foods industry, and puts Stein in a position that few food founders ever achieve.
Purely Elizabeth
Seventeen years ago, Elizabeth Stein started making muffin mix in her Upper West Side Manhattan apartment to sell to her nutrition clients. Now she’s worth an estimated $400 million, thanks to the recent sale of her Purely Elizabeth granola and oatmeal brand.
A triathlete, marathoner and nutrition coach with ten clients started promoting her private practice with healthy muffins at the end of her races 17 years ago. That side hustle quickly morphed into an online business peddling baking mixes made in her west side apartment and later transformed into Purely Elizabeth, a popular brand of 40 granolas, oatmeals and cereals now found in supermarkets and specialty stores across the country.
Now the accidental entrepreneur, Elizabeth Stein, is making the biggest sale of her life. On Friday, she agreed to sell her fast-growing $250 million (estimated trailing 12-month revenue) brand to Ferrero, the Italian chocolate and candy giant behind Nutella, Kelloggs cereal and Tic Tacs. While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Forbes estimates Ferrero is paying more than $850 million, or a multiple of over 4 times sales, for the entire company, including Stein’s estimated two-thirds stake. The deal for the company, which claims to sell a bag of granola every .7 seconds, is among the largest recently in the natural foods industry.
Stein, 45, who will pocket an estimated $400 million after taxes, will remain CEO. (Stein declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal.) The deal puts Stein in a position that few food founders ever achieve.
“I really hope it shows women that they don’t have to choose between being a visionary founder and becoming a scaled CEO,” Stein says, who says staying on as CEO was something that mattered a lot to her. “While those do require different muscles, you can learn and evolve and remain at the table. It’s never shown how uncommon it is for a woman to receive meaningful gross capital, but then build a scaled company and retain leadership through an exit.”
“I’m really proud to have this be an example of what women can do,” she adds. “I know what needs to be protected, where we have room to grow, how we can keep the brand close to the consumer.”
From the very beginning, Stein’s mantra has been “feel the fear and do it anyway.”
Philadelphia-born her story starts in September 2008 when the then nutrition coach brought her freshly baked blueberry muffins packed with superfoods like quinoa, chia seeds and coconut sugar to a triathalon in Westchester, New York. She’d run plenty of races previously, and after many of them she’d set up a table to promote her private practice helping people improve their eating and health through nutrition. This particular time, the certified holistic nutrition counselor (trained at the Institute of Integrative Nutrition in 2007) brought along her muffins, which were far more popular with potential customers and other competitors than her counseling services.
When Elizabeth Stein started her business 17 years ago, she didn’t realize then just how many customers would eventually want her products, which now includes 40 kinds of granolas, oatmeals and cereals.
Purely Elizabeth
A year later in 2009, Stein, then 28 years old, went back to the same race to sell the muffins and they were a huge hit.
Within a few months, Stein took out $5,000 out of her savings to buy ingredients and set up a website to sell muffin mixes. (Amazon wasn’t even selling food online at the time.) Baking out of her upper west side apartment, she thought she’d sell mainly to the clients of her private practice so they could make the muffins at home.
But the first $10,000 worth of online orders came within the first three hours of her first day in business, thanks to a link in a popular newsletter (the now-defunct DailyCandy). Eventually, the manufacturing moved out of Stein’s apartment and into a small commercial kitchen in Pennsylvania.
Stein had no business plan when she started, and decided to pivot to selling granola in 2011 after thinking about how to use puffed quinoa in a new product and trying out a granola recipe on a whim. Stein says she “was not a granola eater and had never eaten granola in my life.” But her mother Nancy was, and she happened to be visiting her daughter in New York City when Stein made granola for the first time. After trying the granola, her mom said it was the best she’d ever had, and that it should be Stein’s next product.
She helped her daughter by cold calling 40 shops in the mid-Atlantic region and convinced Whole Foods to start selling the granola brand that first year. By the end of 2011, revenue hit a record $200,000, up from five figures previously.
Within two years, Whole Foods was selling Purely Elizabeth in six regions, helping boost revenue to $1 million. It took it nationwide the next year, putting it on the shelves of all 300 of its stores. Stein says she has not tweaked the granola recipe since the very first attempt in her Manhattan kitchen, and it’s still her top-selling product.
Next came a move to Boulder, Colorado in 2014. As the granola rolled out on Whole Foods shelves, it launched its first oatmeal, Purely Elizabeth, at Target.
Walmart brought on the brand in 2017, and that same year, the business also became the top-selling granola at natural grocers nationwide. That’s also around the time she decided to raise her first outside capital, securing a series A of $3 million from such investors as General Mills’ venture arm. “I never put pressure on myself to raise money early on. I kept my head down,” Stein recalls. “I wanted to bootstrap. I didn’t have a need to grow quickly.”
She waited another five years before raising $50 million in a series B funding round from such partners as publicly traded Fresh Del Monte Produce to build infrastructure,scale production and invest in marketing and new product development.
By the end of 2024, Purely Elizabeth hit about $150 million in annual revenue and more than 10,000 retailers. That year, the brand, which was already profitable, launched its now bestselling cookie granola.
Now in more than 30,000 stores around the country, Purely Elizabeth more than doubled its sales in the last two years and is on track to top $300 million in revenue by the end of this year.
It’s a full-circle moment. When Stein started the business, the entire granola category was estimated at $300 million in retail sales in all. Today it’s more than four times that size, and her brand which sells nearly four times faster than the overall category growth is helping drive the category’s growth.
Stein is excited to see how the next chapter unfolds, and is looking forward to the ways in which Ferrero will help it develop its product pipeline and eventually take it international. “I picked Ferrero because I know the brand will survive there,” says Stein. “This is a forever home. “Ferrero was incredibly exciting to me as an 80-year-old family-owned company,” Stein says. “They aren’t looking at quarters. Ferrero is looking at generations.”
Giovanni Ferrero and his family, who are worth nearly $48 billion, own the privately held firm. Long known for its dominance in sweets and chocolates like Kinder and Nutella, its becoming a breakfast staple thanks to its $3.1 billion acquisition of WK Kellogg Co last year as well as its latest purchase of Purely Elizabeth, the $20 billion (revenue) business is pushing hard into consumers’ breakfast routines.
As CEO, Stein says she will focus on protecting her strict standards for ingredients and quality while expanding the business’s reach and impact. “Our community is what got us here and it is what will shape the next phase of growth,” says Stein. “They have all put so much trust in me and the brand over the last 17 years. Hopefully they can take that trust and continue it for the next 17 years.”
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