Invest in Philosopher Foods: Gut Nuts

Tim, Founder and CEO of Philosopher Foods, graduated from Haverford College as a Philosophy major and continued studying to be a Certified Holistic Health Coach. He was suffering from his own gut health issues, but could not figure out why.

At the beginning of his journey, he started sprouting almonds and grinding them into a sprouted almond butter. He found the sprouted nuts to be sweeter, more digestible, and more nutritious.

He shared his nut butter with his housemates, who said “dude, this is the best almond butter ever!” He continued to perfect the recipe for himself and them. They encouraged him to start a business selling the nut butter. 

At the beginning of his journey, he started sprouting almonds and grinding them into a sprouted almond butter. He found the sprouted nuts to be sweeter, more digestible, and more nutritious.

He shared his nut butter with his housemates, who continued to say “dude, this is the best almond butter ever!” He perfected the recipe for himself and them. They encouraged him to start a business selling the nut butter. 

When one of his housemates eventually handed him a wad of cash for his nut butters and said “I want to buy your sprouted almond butter!”, he felt a jolt and got the message. He woke up the next day and started Philosopher Foods on Earth Day 2013.

Over the course of 12 years, he built a stable business on the nut butters, which by themselves netted over $916,000 in 2024. He got them into over 250 stores, including Whole Foods Northern California:

But while Philosopher Foods was founded on Tim’s sprouted almond butters, there is a new breakthrough product he accidentally created that will take the company to the next level of scale and success. 

One fateful day, he walked into the production room and saw something horrifying—his sprouting almonds were bubbling!

Devastated, he went to dump them out. But then—he smelled something… familiar. Was that… sourdough?!

In a moment of either bravery or sheer recklessness, he popped one in his mouth.

EUREKA! These almonds had transformed—delicious “sourdough” almonds. They had spontaneously fermented!

This was Tim’s fortunate “snaccident” that led to his next big product line launch: Gut Nuts: The World’s First Fermented Nuts!

Gut Nuts are fermented in probiotic brine, which unlocks tangy and umami flavors in nuts that were once just… plain nuts.

Then, they’re dehydrated into crunchy, crave able, shelf-stable snacks—offering breakthrough gut health benefits.

Why do we need to ferment nuts? In a nutshell, it makes them more digestible, more nutritious, and more bioavailable, with fewer anti-nutrients, toxins, and agricultural pollutants. 

Thanks to fermentation, fermented nuts literally pack five superpowers:

• 2x more B vitamins – It’s like these nuts took a multivitamin
• 9x more antioxidants – Basically, these nuts hit the gym
• More prebiotics & postbiotics – these nuts are a superfood for your gut bacteria
• 41% less phytic acid – so you don’t get Nut Gut - that heavy, bloated feeling after eating too many nuts. 
• 28% less oxalic acid – so you are less likely to form a kidney stone from nuts!

Gut Nuts are packed with benefits. While we have no direct competitors because no one else is fermenting nuts, no similar snack nut products or others come close:

Gut Nuts are moving the needle in innovation, according to SPINs data:

Philosopher Foods launched Gut Nuts to the bigger stage in March 2024, and the response was insane. Gut Nuts Fermented Almonds were a NEXTY Award finalist for Best New Functional Food and Tim won runner-up in the pitch slam:

They went on to win the Naturally Bay Area Pitch Slam - both the People’s Choice and Grand Prize awards:

The retail world noticed, and Gut Nuts gained great traction in key national grocery store chains. They had a successful three-month trial in the innovation section at Sprouts Farmers Market nationwide and are pending approval for a nationwide launch at Sprouts’ next review in September.

Gut Nuts also launched into Whole Foods Northern California in 24 stores this past January as a store test to launch nationally.

Awesome off-shelf placement at hot bar in Whole Foods Market Sunnyvale:

Gut Nuts are in 75 stores currently, approaching 100 stores and generating a lot of revenue with minimal marketing investment, so we are extremely excited and optimistic that with investment from Wefunder, we can capitalize on our momentum and grow much faster.

Finally, we launched with Gut Nuts nationally on our website, Amazon Prime, and Thrive Market.

All of this led us to Philosopher Foods earning $1.1M in gross sales in 2024, with almost $200K coming from Gut Nuts—after just 9 months since the new product release.

We established the first facility in the world that can ferment and dehydrate nuts. We also sprout and dehydrate our almonds for our sprouted almond butters here, as well as stone-grind them into nut butters.

Here are our almonds getting ready for fermentation:

Here are our dehydrators:

Here are our stone-grinders:

Here is our nut butter being deposited:

This is a 3,400 square foot facility located in Santa Rosa, California, not including mezzanine office space or vertical pallet racking storage space.

We have the capability to offer co-packing and private label revenue services here for any type of nut or seed butters, as well as anything shelf-stable that goes into stand-up pouches.

We can grow our sales to at least $13M/year in this facility, as we project to do by the end of 2027 in our three year growth hypothesis below.

At Philosopher Foods, we celebrate that Gut Nuts are the future of the brand. We are a legacy company that has been around almost 12 years with over and hovering around $1.1M in sales, with primarily from our high quality regenerative organic nut butters. However, we are now building on this success with our new ‘Gut Nuts’ fermented, prebiotic & probiotic gut-friendly product line.

We heavily believe this new line of ‘Gut Nuts’ will be an absolute game-changer for our company and allow us to scale into more stores and capitalize on new opportunities. Our brand has a strong loyal following from years of being on the market with our nut butters and also thousands of consumers and subscribers online through various e-commerce platforms such as our own company website (philosopherfoods.com) as well as Amazon, Thrive Market, and more.

We are currently in 400 stores with our classic organic nut butters and approaching 100 stores with our new Gut Nuts line.

Key points about our growth plan:

• We’re focusing most sales growth on e-commerce. -We can efficiently grow e-comm sales to $10MM+ in 3 years with <30% spend on digital marketing.
• Our current average Return On Advertising Spend (ROAS) is 3.81 & Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is <$20.
• The #guttok hashtag has over 1B views on TikTok, so we know that our customers are already seeking out gut health focused products online.

With an established nut butter business as our backbone, Gut Nuts are our future growth engine. We plan to push this line hard with the capital raised from Wefunder to expand into additional national retail partnerships including our test launch with Whole Foods in Northern California, and a potential launch in Sprouts Nationwide, pending final authorization at a corporate review later this year.

We plan to expand our product family this year to include fermented peanuts, as well as 1 oz daily gut health packs:

We’re looking forward to launching our new Fermented Peanuts this June, and also 1 oz pouches of all three types of Gut Nuts once we have the funding.

Our Fermented Peanuts are being unveiled this year at the largest natural food and beverage trade show in the country: Natural Products Expo West 2025.

The first batch of fermented peanuts is delicious! Look at these beauties before dehydration:

Our funds raised from Wefunder will primarily be used for 4 areas:

Digital marketing is the key to our growth. Having a first-to-market product requires extra education, which is most effectively and efficiently done on screens. We have organically grown to over $1.1M in annual sales with little to no marketing dollars, but our push from $1M to $10M will require more substantial marketing, which is why we’re going to invest heavily in marketing our products online. 

We’re also going to invest in in-store promotions and demos, as trying Gut Nuts is key to get people to understand how delicious they are and drive purchase. Finally, we will hire sales representatives in key regions of the country to help support our brand at store level.

This growth in sales requires producing more product and holding more inventory so we don’t run out of stock, so working capital is essential to constantly buy ingredients we need to source for production, and storing pallets and pallets of finished products to ship out to people and stores nationwide.

With our own facility, we need to upgrade equipment to keep up with demand.  With the early success of our ‘Gut Nuts’ line, we are taking steps to increase production with higher output machinery.

Gut Nuts are Regenerative Organic Certified & USDA Organic Certified, which are two of the most stringent processes to be approved. 

Regenerative Organic Certification is especially difficult to attain as its standards are at a much higher level than USDA Organic certification.

Regenerative Organic Certified is a revolutionary new certification for food, textiles, and personal care ingredients. Regenerative Organic Certified farms and products meet the highest standards in the world for soil health, animal welfare, and farmworker fairness.

We imagine a world in which farmers, brands, policymakers, educators, researchers and individuals come together to create a healthy food system that respects land, animals, empowers people, and restores communities and ecosystems through regenerative organic farming.

Invest In Us And Help Us Heal Guts With Nuts!