By Debbie Gardner
dgardner@thereminder.com
On first impressions, Jeff Greim doesn’t come across as a social innovator. The soft-spoken Longmeadow resident was more concerned that his wife be recognized for her work with a church project to aid foster families than he was in telling his own story when Prime first caught up with the Glenmeadow Age of Excellence winner in late September.
But it didn’t take long to get the man Glenmeadow had recognized as an Impactful Entrepreneur to open up about his dream of creating a business with the purpose of giving back to the community. With a little prodding, Greim shared the story of how he envisioned, founded, grew and eventually created a succession plan for his innovative startup, Jeff’s Granola.
Even teachers get inspired
Greim explained that during his tenure as graduate director of nonprofit studies at Longmeadow’s Bay Path University, he’d written a paper examining Paul Newman’s company, Newman’s Own, and how that company gave all its profits to charity.
With a background in nonprofit work before he became a BayPath professor, he found the business model behind Newman’s Own more than intriguing, Greim shared.
“I got smitten with the idea and wanted to see if someone who was not a movie star could pull it off,” Greim said. He also wanted to take the donation to charity concept one step further, allowing the customers to choose the charity to receive any profits.
Finding the product for his business experiment was “a story” in itself, Greim said.
“My neighbor across the street, Beth Paulson, is a very good baker and her son and I share a birthday,” Jeff said. Back in the early 2010s when Beth’s son, named Henry, was an infant, Greim gave the child a birthday gift. “Beth in turn gave me some of her homemade granola,” Greim said. “After the second bowl, I knew I had found the product I wanted to market.”
Granola, Greim said, was an ideal product for his business model. “Granola is fairly easy to make, [the business] didn’t require a lot of capital investment to start up.”
He also had a manufacturing facility right across the street, as his neighbor agreed to make the granola in her home kitchen for Greim’s experiment.
An idea becomes a startup
Greim launched his business, originally called Our Choice Brands, in 2012, following the Newman’s Own business model of giving profits to charity.
“I had a fabulous product,” Greim said. “Initially, I sold it to Baystate Medical Center’s Patient Services [department]. They needed granola to go on the yogurt they served to patients” and were looking for a local provider.
It was a great fit and a good first placement.
“The first big break [after that] was being able to sell through Big Y in three stores,” Greim said.
Greim was still working full time at that point, Paulson was baking the granola for him in her kitchen and his startup “trundled along,” he said, with the company donating to the charity of its customers’ choice despite it not truly making a profit.
“When you start a business, you are typically losing money,” explained Greim, who added he didn’t draw a salary in the beginning as he was still working. “I didn’t think it was fair to say I was a company like Newman’s Own [and not donate], so I arbitrarily picked 10% as the donation [amount.]” for those early years.
In a short time the Big Y retail sales were followed by placements in River Valley Co-Op in Northampton, folowed by other retailers over the years.
The granola production arrangement with Paulson continued until 2015, Greim said, until the retail volume became too much for his neighbor and he moved the granola production to the commercial kitchen at St. Andrew’s Church in Longmeadow, becoming the sole baker for his product.
“Once Beth stopped baking we had a handshake agreement that I would give her 1% of my gross sales each year (up to $10,000) as a royalty for the use of her recipes,”Greim said, adding the agreement was formally included in his succession plan.
Hitting the onramp
In 2016 with his full-time job in the rearview mirror, Greim turned retirement into a full-time press to grow his granola startup into “a bonafide business,” he said. That included moving production from St. Andrews to the former East Baking Company on Whiting Farm Road in Holyoke, which let Greim “use the facility and rent at an amazing price” and in time, hiring an assistant to “help with the baking and stocking of the stores.”
“Eventually I had five different flavors and was selling through about 20 different local stores including Big Y [locations] and River Valley,” Greim said of how the retail arm of the business developed over the years. All the retail flavors he sold were developed for him by Paulson in her kitchen, he added.
“For a long time, River Valley Co-Op was my biggest customer,” he said.
For example, in 2018, the year his granola hit a total of $16,000 in retail sales, a company press release announced Greim’s startup donated $920 from its sales at the Cop-Op to their charity of choice, United Way of Hampshire County
In 2018 Greim also changed the name of his product from Our Choice Brands to Jeff’s Granola.
As the business grew, Greim said he started “a relationship” with an organic baking company based in Greenfield called New England Natural Bakers.
“They make a high-quality, low-cost granola for me based on [the original] recipe that Beth had developed,” Greim explained. “Using that relationship, I started to be able to sell [my granola] to schools to use in their breakfast and lunch programs.”
In 2019, Greim said he got his first “big break” with schools when Pat Roach, chief financial and operations officer for Springfield Public Schools had Sodexo , the city’s contracted food service providers “use my granola for their breakfasts and snacks.”
“That relationship is what has propelled [Jeff’s Granola] to its current size,” Greim said. Total sales that first year when the Springfield Schools came on board reached $118,000.
According to a Feb. 14, 2021 article in The Republican, in 2019, Jeff’s Granola donated nearly $12,000 in profits, distributed to 50 charities chosen by its school and retail customers on the company website.
“Essentially, it wasn’t until I started working full time in the company that [it] made enough money to cover all costs and generate a 10% profit … if I didn’t take a salary… and that’s what got us to the donation [level] every year,” Greim shared.
He donated 100% of every customer’s profit back to their chosen charity, he added.
Landing the Springfield Schools as customers was what also propelled Greim to invest in a “semi-automatic granola bagging machine so that we could package the granola bought from New England Natural Bakers into one ounce for easy distribution in the [school] meal programs.”
The relationship with Sodexo, Greim explained, opened the door to more school-based sales, including school systems in Holyoke, Boston and Providence, Rhode Island. Greim also began working with Thurston Foods of Wallingford, Connecticut, to supply several smaller school systems.
“Thurston Foods, they became our biggest customer,” Greim said. Through that relationship, Jeff’s Granola added two Hartford school systems, the New Haven School District and several other smaller school systems throughout the Northeast to its customer roster.
And whether the customers bought directly through Jeff’s Granola, or through Thurston Foods, Greim said the arrangement was the same. Ten percent of profits from sales to the customer were – and are – donated to the charity of the customer’s choice.
For many of the school customers, Greim noted, that charity is related to the programs they operate. For example, the Springfield and Providence Public Schools ask to have their profits donated to their Weekend Backpack food programs, which provide shelf-stable foodstuffs to students so proper nutrition continues when they are not in school.
By 2022, Greim said total sales for Jeff’s Granola reached $353,000 and “we donated [nearly] $33,000” ($32,879 per the company’s annual report) to the charities that customers chose. It was also in 2022 that Greim decided to close the retail arm of his granola business – which was generating 20% of his profits but racking up 80% of his expenses – to concentrate on supplying school systems.
Planning his own off-ramp
By 2022, Greim said he also began thinking about a future for Jeff’s Granola without him at the helm.
I’m four years older than my wife, and she was getting ready to retire and I didn’t want to be working full time when she wasn’t,” Greim explained.
One of the people he shared his desire to step away from Jeff’s Granola with was his hairdresser, Jaimee Acadia.
“Jaimee had been cutting my hair for 20 years and I’d been talking to her about how hard it was to find someone to take over the business … who wants to take over a business where you don’t pay yourself a salary?” Greim said.
To Greim’s surprise, Jaimee and her husband, John, expressed an interest in his company.
“He was ready to move on, turning 70, and I said ‘sure, I can take a look at it’ … it doesn’t hurt, and that’s what prompted it all,” John Acadia told Prime. After years in the car business – working nights, weekends, holidays – Acadia said he “was ready to move on from that and start working for myself.” The business also fit his wife’s schedule.
Greim said one of his concerns was “to have someone take [the business] over what would keep the philanthropic aspect.”
Acadia said it was that aspect that drew him to Jeff’s Granola. “It’s one of the reasons I wanted to do it – feeling good by doing good in a profession,” Acadia said. “It’s very unusual and unique. Jeff was very clear from the beginning that this was a very important aspect of the business, and we will be very happy to carry on this legacy.”
The Acadias began working with Greim in March of 2023 to “learn the business,” stepping into running the company full-time in July of that year. The final transfer between Greim and the Acadias took place in May of 2024.
Acadia said he and his wife had made a few tweaks to the operation that allows him to draw a modest salary, as he handles the day-to-day operations of the company. But their goal is still to keep philanthropy at the forefront of Jeff’s Granola.
“We’re not in this to get rich,” Acadia said. “We’re in this to give back and that’s the important part.
“[Jeff] did a great job … in 2023 he donated $34,000 give or take.” Acadia said, adding the five-year goal he and his wife have set is to “triple that” and get “close to $100,000 ... that might be attainable.”
Finding a new passion
Greim has already rediscovered an old passion – one for education – that’s helping to fill the void left now that he’s not running Jeff’s Granola.
He volunteers in the kindergarten classroom at Square One in Springfield.
“My first job [out of college] was as a kindergarten teacher in North Carolina in 1976,” Greim said, adding that he also has a master’s degree in early childhood education from Bank Street College of Education in New York City, in addition to his master’s degree in public policy.
“Working at Square One has given me an opportunity to return to an early passion, which was working with young children,” Greim shared. “I’ve been working in one classroom for two years now,” one day a week.
“I’m trained and have experience working with challenging children. And I think they appreciate that. And I’m a guy – there aren’t any other guys in the building,” he said, adding that he also functions as a male role model for young boys and girls at the center.
“I just show up each week … I’m a dependable resource for the classroom and in that way, I’ve been a supporter of the teacher and another resource for the kids.”
