A founder's note: Passport Pantry

18 months ago, I quit a well-paying job to end my 15-year corporate career and dive fully into the messy, expensive, complicated, nerve-wracking, and surprisingly wonderful community of food startups to create a food brand with my life and business partner, Zahra. Was this move naive, courageous, interesting, or foolish?Probably all of the above.

Travel and movement have been irreplaceable parts of my life ever since I was a child. From being born in India, living in Iraq, growing up and studying in Canada, getting engaged in Greece, and voluntarily risking life and limb for adventures in Nepal, Argentina, Chile, France (and more), travel has been a constant companion and grounding force. It helps that travel is intrinsically linked to life-changing experiences with people of different cultures, and sharing delicious, real, healthy, and comforting food can make even the most prickly characters transform into warm, affectionate teddy bears.

So, naturally, when Zahra went gluten free for health reasons, we both began to scan our favourite pantry category's (granola) product labels for clean, gluten-free ingredients and for flavours from our travels. Since we live in one of the most diverse cities in the world (Toronto), this should be easy, we thought. Wrong. It was packed full of refined sugars and over-processed, low-quality ingredients. Weird oils. Not enough fibre or healthy fats (even more important for us as South Asians #iykyk). Boring flavours that hadn't changed in 15 years.

Why does any of that matter? Because the early mid-life crisis (I'm about to turn 40) that led to a hard career pivot and risking a comfortable life to create something that we're proud to share feels like the most natural thing in the world. We've poured three years of our energy, time, and money into creating some of the best (and only) savoury and sweet global flavours of small batch granola you've ever seen (six of them)! Thousands of people who sampled our products at our launch at the One of a Kind Show in Toronto agreed. Some were even kind enough to tell us that we've created something special.

Still, most people don't know that we exist. You won't find us in many stores yet. We're four months old as a brand and have a long, unpredictable road ahead of us. But for this brief, fleeting, prideful moment of having launched Passport Pantry into the world, everything is wonderful and nothing hurts.

We're so grateful that you've agreed to let us into your world at the very beginning of this chapter of ours. Thank you and follow us on IG to come along for the ride.

Stay curious, 

Kunal & Zahra