Photo by Christina Gandolfo

Management consulting doesn’t lend itself to a balanced diet. Always on the go for her projects at Kurt Salmon, Kate Flynn (MBA 2012) would grab whatever packaged food appeared healthiest to her. For a long time, she sought low-calorie and low-carbohydrate options but ignored the other information on the back of the package. Eventually, “I really started focusing on the actual ingredients I was putting in my body,” she recalls. When she did, Flynn discovered that a diet of nutritionally rich, minimally processed foods gave her more energy. “It made a really positive impact on my life,” she says.

Yet maintaining that healthy lifestyle was a challenge when Flynn was traveling. And she knew she wasn’t the only one facing this problem. As a consultant within the food industry, she observed that many consumers were asking for the same types of convenient, healthy food she was craving. From that hunger, Sun & Swell was born in 2016.

“We started with the mission of bringing healthier foods to the world,” says Flynn. But that goal quickly expanded as she began to research the grocery and packaged food industry. Packaged food wasn’t only a detriment to the health of individuals; it also damaged the health of the planet, with single-use plastic from food packaging clogging landfills. Flynn had never imagined herself as an entrepreneur, but she quickly recognized that the food system was not one she could change from within the existing structures. She envisioned a new company that would become the “Patagonia of the food industry.”

To reach that ambitious goal, Flynn would have to eschew the traditional supermarket approach, which requires products that have long shelf life—a bad match for her preservative-free foods and biodegradable packaging. Many companies launching healthier products in the food industry are thinking, ‘How can we make the best product possible within the existing grocery supply chain?” she says. Flynn decided to launch Sun & Swell with a different approach: “Let’s make the best product possible—the product we think that people want and need—and we’ll figure out other ways to get it to them.”

Today, Sun & Swell’s sales come principally through website and wholesale channels that can accommodate the products’ shorter shelf life, including corporate offices and coffee shops. The product line includes pantry staples (nuts and seeds, condiments and, yes, coffee) and snacks (brownie “energy bites” and trail mix with almonds, walnuts, raisins, and dates). All ingredients are organic, vegan, and gluten-free. They are grown mainly in the United States, and most products come in compostable packaging (with a return service for those who lack their own compost pile). The firm’s customer “isn’t the perfect zero-waste consumer,” Flynn explains, “but the person who is just trying to make small changes in their life, to make better choices.”

In 2021, those small changes kept about 50,000 plastic bags out of landfills, notes Flynn, citing one of the company metrics of which she’s particularly proud. The ultimate goal is to build a circular food system, one in which you buy a good-for-you snack in a compostable bag, and that bag turns back into rich soil to grow more food. “We hope to move the entire industry forward in the direction of compostable packaging,” Flynn says.

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