Hungry Squirrel LLC, a California-based maker of healthy food products, has chosen Brownsville as its distribution point serving what it describes as a rapidly growing Texas market.
The small company, founded in 2019 by San Diego-area restaurateur Sandra DiCicco, is leasing warehouse and office space near the Brownsville South Padre Island International Airport and shipping product from California to Brownsville for storage and distribution. The company makes keto sauces and dressings and is developing more product lines such as keto and gluten-free pizza dough and pie crust. DiCicco is predicting fast growth.
“We’re hoping we’re just going to blow up, which I feel we are,” she said. “When I do things — I don’t know if it’s good, bad — but I don’t think small. I’m going to think big, because that’s going to give me the drive to push me to do what I need to do.”
A 35-year veteran of the restaurant business, DiCicco said she comes from a family of talented cooks. She has five restaurants (two more to open in 2022) and three retail locations, Cork & Knife, DiCicco’s charcuterie and wine business, in the San Diego area. She has also bought a house in Austin.
Hungry Squirrel premiered at the 2020 Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, the West Coast’s largest specialty food event.
“It was a really good show for us,” DiCicco said. “It was where all the new products were. We had quite a bit of activity at our booth.”
The event has been moved to Las Vegas for next year and Hungry Squirrel will be there, she said. The company’s Keto Teriyaki and Keto Sweet and Spicy Chili sauces made Amazon’s Hot New Release list last January. Hungry Squirrel products are available domestically through major online retailers Amazon, UNFI Community Marketplace and Walmart, and internationally through Alibaba.
“We’re still a startup company,” DiCicco said. “We’re still new. We have a lot of irons in the fire, and there’s going to be a lot of things happening after the first of the year. We’re still small right now but I feel this next year it’s going to grow quite a bit, and it would probably be a medium-sized company then, and then hopefully we’ll keep growing.”
She developed the company’s original recipes for her son, who suffers from Type 1 diabetes. DiCicco herself has Type 2 diabetes. The dietary restrictions they have to follow means certain foods, especially foods containing sugar, are off limits, while too many times sugar-free options “just don’t taste the same,” she said.
“I wanted something that tasted just like the regular products on the shelf that had sugar,” DiCicco said.
Enter Hungry Squirrel, which also plans to add dry products such as mixes for brownies, cookies, pancakes and so on, she said.
Amy Baklund, the company’s vice president of marketing and sales, said the decision to open a warehouse in Brownsville was a “last-mile equation.”
“We want to be close to our customer base,” she said. “We relaunched in January 2020 because of COVID. … We’ve got the grocery retailers that are in Texas, the big guys that are in Texas right now. Brownsville just made sense for us. … It’s a great location we found and we think there’s a great opportunity in Brownsville.”
Baklund said the company will announce a major national distribution launch in the new year but wasn’t at liberty to provide details.
DiCicco said that for the time being Brownsville will serve only as office and warehouse space for product to be distributed across Texas, though it’s possible co-packing operations could be added at some point in the future, depending on demand.
