From Buffy to Betty Crocker: Sarah Michelle Gellar Launches Baking Start-Up
*By Carlo Versano*
Sarah Michelle Gellar wants to slay the baking industry.
The actress formerly known as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and her two partners are the brains behind Foodstirs, a new organic, non-GMO line of baking products that seek to inject some new life into a stale aisle of the grocery store.
Partners Galit Laibow, Greg Fleishman, and Gellar told Cheddar in an interview Thursday that, as parents of small children, they all saw an opportunity to re-imagine the baking process when they noticed that most of the mixes on the market had hardly changed since their grandparents were using them.
The opportunity was "hiding in plain sight," Gellar said.
Foodstirs sells cake and brownie mixes, "bake your own" bars, and kits for pancakes, donuts, cake pops, and other treats for anyone with a sweet tooth.
Products sell for an average of $5.99, Fleishman said, thanks to the direct-to-consumer model. "We get the best costs because we direct source."
The organics craze has spread from a "hippy dippy" corner of the market and become one of the most-important attributes to the modern consumer, Laibow said. Still, amateur bakers were at the disposal of a $7 billion prepared-foods industry that was slow to transition to a healthier product. "People are more aware of what goes into the body," Laibow said ー and that extends to desserts. Foodstirs leverages social media and Gellar's star power to market itself as a disruptor ー "modern baking," as its tagline reads.
For Gellar, her new role as an entrepreneur was a natural outgrowth of her other job: mother to two kids under 10. She said she noticed that the best "times of connection" in her house were around food, whether it was cooking or eating together. But she found that when it came to baking, most products were either delicious and bad for you, or nutritious and "taste free." Foodstirs aims to solve all the pain points of the home baker at once: ultra-clean ingredients, easy recipes, and a "from-scratch" taste.
"We were answering our own problem," she said.
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