The granola aisle isn't short on competition, but most of it is still fighting over the same square inch: the breakfast bowl. Emtru, a woman-owned granola brand founded by sisters Alexa and Silvana Marzuka, is staking its launch on the part of that fight nobody's had: granola that's built to be eaten anywhere else, too. The line debuts with three flavors, each built to work as more than a breakfast: Muy Maple (maple, pecan and cinnamon), the brand's original recipe; Hot Honey (chili and honey), built to double as a topping — on salads, or even as a breading; and Xocolate (dark chocolate & butter), a Mexican-inspired take rich enough to eat on its own as a snack.
The recipe didn't start as a pitch deck. About five years ago, co-founder Alexa got tired of choosing between granola that was clean and granola that tasted like something, so she started making her own in her kitchen, built around the Mexican flavors she and Silvana grew up on. For years, it stayed a family recipe - until friends started asking for a bag of their own. "It was just for us at first. Our family was eating it, and that was enough," said Alexa, co-founder of Emtru, a Cordon Bleu Grand Diplôme-trained chef and health coach who is currently midway through an engineering degree. "Then friends started asking for it, and that's when we realized it wasn't just ours to keep."
That became the only standard that mattered: never put something on a shelf they wouldn't eat themselves. Kosher-certified, high-fiber, no seed oils, no refined sugar, nothing artificial - every claim on the bag was true long before Emtru was a company, back when it was just how Alexa cooked for her own family. It was Silvana, who holds a degree in business and hospitality, who decided a five-year-old house recipe was finally ready for a shelf - and left her own job to get it there, now leading Emtru's operations and retail strategy full-time.
"Cravable enough to snack on, clean enough to trust, different enough that it doesn't belong only at breakfast," said Silvana, co-founder of Emtru. "Five years in our own kitchen, and we still only launched it once we couldn't stop eating it ourselves."
Emtru arrives in New York City on October 9th at Pop Up Grocer. Follow EmTru on Instagram.
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