When Starr Edwards started selling almond-based dip at San Diego farmers markets, Costco wasn’t on her radar. Making rent was.
The early years looked like this: weekday farmers markets (it took a while to break into the weekend ones), every dollar going right back into the product, and at one point a friend showing up to visit and finding Starr behind her closed bedroom door, infant asleep on the bed, laptop open, trying to teach herself QuickBooks. That’s the foundation. And then there’s the part that doesn’t get mentioned in the press releases.
A business built on resilience and a good recipe
Starr and her husband Luke founded Bitchin’ Sauce in 2010. The original recipe: almonds, lemon juice, garlic, nutritional yeast, oil. No preservatives, no stabilizers, nothing added to make it shelf-stable on the cheap. That recipe has not changed. Twenty-plus flavors have since come from that same base, and the product now sits in 15,000+ retail locations: Costco, Target, Kroger, Whole Foods, Sprouts.
On paper, a clean growth story. There was also a chapter in the middle that nearly ended all of it.
2015: When she had to decide if she was going to keep going
In 2015, Bitchin’ Sauce faced a business separation that landed every ounce of financial liability on Starr’s shoulders. Not just the manufacturing facility lease and the inventory. She was the sole lessee on the family home. Loans for family members’ vehicles were in her name. She was the guarantor on multiple rental leases. She had continued to act as the authorized farmers market party for family members’ new ventures even after they left. And she was the one staring at potential bankruptcy while holding the brand she’d built from scratch.
Most people would have folded. She didn’t.
She kept showing up. Cut her pay in half. Called every single store to let them know that despite the false narrative that the defective family members were spreading, Bitchin’ Sauce was still very much in business. She kept paying what she could. She kept the recipe the same, kept the standards the same, and eventually got the company to the other side. Bitchin’ Sauce hit over $50M in annual revenue in 2024. That number did not come from a funding round. It came from years of reinvested revenue, zero shortcuts, and a founder who refused to walk away from what she built.
The workplace she built after surviving all of it
Here’s the thing about people who build something through genuine hardship: they tend to build differently. Starr didn’t survive 2015 and then run a company like every other company. She built the workplace she wished she’d had when she was balancing an infant, a farmers market table, and a laptop open to QuickBooks.
Bitchin’ Kids started as free on-site childcare at the facility: a real space, a loving and educational environment, where parents could step in during their lunch break and check on their kids. Colleagues’ children grew up together. Parents became friends. The workplace started to feel less like a job and more like a neighborhood.
When the company shifted to a remote workforce, the program shifted with it. Today it’s an annual, non-taxable reimbursement of $7,500 per employee per year. Since 2019, Bitchin’ Sauce has offered over $1.6M through the program. Total benefits average $41,909 per employee annually, which runs about 30% above industry average per Bureau of Labor Statistics benchmarks for the category.
The turnover numbers are what you’d expect when a company actually means it: 16.4% voluntary turnover against an industry average of roughly 28%. Forty percent of the team has been there five years or longer. Average tenure sits at four years, in an industry where people bounce constantly.
She went back to work a week after giving birth
This is the part that reframes everything else. Starr Edwards is a mother of five. She never took maternity leave and physically went back to work one week after giving birth. She built Bitchin’ Kids because she lived the version of work where you don’t get to choose between providing for your child and being present for your child. She didn’t want that to be someone else’s story.
15,000 retail doors, over $50M these are outcomes, but the real story is a woman who had everything stacked against her, in 2015 and in the earliest farmers market years, and kept going anyway. Not because it was easy. Because she’d already decided she wasn’t stopping.
For anyone building something right now, in the middle of the messy part, before the revenue figures and the Costco shelves: Starr Edwards was also in the messy part once. She just didn’t let it be the last chapter.
About Bitchin’ Sauce
Bitchin’ Sauce is a family-owned, Carlsbad, California-based brand founded in 2010 by Starr and Luke Edwards. The company pioneered the almond-based dip category and has grown from local farmers markets to national distribution in 15,000+ retail locations including Costco, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, and Kroger. Committed to clean-label manufacturing and industry-leading employee benefits, Bitchin’ Sauce remains a plant-based, better-for-you leader in the snacking category. Learn more at bitchinsauce.com.