Thirty years on the factory floor.

The Co-Packing Years

Then the shelf changed. Larger brands could fund 99-cent promotions and direct-to-store sales teams. A self-funded independent couldn’t, and BumbleBar was getting squeezed out. So Glenn and Liz made a strategic call: put the plant to work making bars for other brands.

Through CleanCopack, the co-packing operation that grew out of BumbleBar, Glenn and Liz produced for other people’s brands and supported the development of more than 150 clean-label brands. Every scale-up problem a growing food brand can meet walked through that facility: formulas that behaved in the kitchen and misbehaved on the line, audits that arrived before the paperwork was ready, buyers who doubled orders overnight. Glenn ran the plant. Liz ran the R&D center and built the systems that ran the business, formulating new products for client brands and reworking the ones that wouldn’t run.

The plant earned SQF certification with human food, pet food and supplement scopes, and never scored below 94 on an audit. Much of that food safety and process improvement discipline came from food safety, lean and process improvement training with Impact Washington, the state’s manufacturing extension (MEP) center, food safety training at Washington State University, and from talented quality and food safety managers and a crew that cared. Visitors noticed the culture the moment they walked in: food safety first, teamwork, constant improvement, excellence, and real care for each other.

As bootstrappers climbing out of that 300-square-foot kitchen, Glenn and Liz leaned on technology to grow. They were early to paperless, digital food safety records, which made the SQF program easier to run and the plant easier to audit. It’s now a core part of Snackteva’s work: digitizing clients’ SQF programs and building dashboards that flag incomplete or unauditable records long before audit day.

The Work We Love

We’ve both always been builders. Glenn got an Apple IIe when he was 14, and it changed his life. He’s been building with technology ever since.

Liz has driven the technology in every business we’ve run. A co-packer is one of the most complicated businesses in food: many clients and formulas, allergen changeovers, lot tracing and audit records, all moving at once. At CleanCopack, Liz oversaw the systems behind all of it, and our food safety and quality team helped build them. Building systems is her favorite part of the job, and automated workflows are her specialty. When a workflow runs well, everyone’s job gets easier: less manual paperwork, fewer missed steps, safer and higher-quality product, and more throughput on the line.

What we both love most is using AI to build systems for small natural foods companies, and we’re still amazed by what it can do for a small business. A good system lets a ten-person company run with the discipline of a much bigger one, and it stays with your team after we’re done. We run Snackteva the same way. See our plant systems →

Why We Do This

Snackteva is two senior operators, by design. Liz leads formulation at the bench, Glenn leads manufacturing on the plant floor, and we both build the systems behind it. You work directly with the people doing the work, backed by more than 100 vetted partners.

We didn’t build that experience alone. At BumbleBar and CleanCopack, a dedicated team made millions of bars, ran the lines and kept the food safety program tight. We owe them a great deal, and we bring their standards into every plant we walk into.

More than 150 brands have trusted us with their products. We don’t take that for granted. The founders take the risk. Our job is to make sure it’s a smart one.

How we work. We tell you the truth, and “not yet” is a real answer we’ll give. No manufacturer pays us for a recommendation. Fixed price, fixed finish line, and nothing quietly renews. You work with Glenn and Liz, not a junior team. Glenn is on the floor for your first run. And we leave systems behind, not binders.

What We Learned the Hard Way

Glenn and Liz never took investors. Much of the business was funded by Liz’s R&D work: she has formulated for more than 150 brands, always focused on clean-label food, and still does today. The rest came from debt they took on themselves, which kept them independent but left little cushion. Then a building its owner promised would suit food manufacturing turned out to have a septic system that couldn’t handle the plant. They hadn’t hired an engineer to check. For five years they hauled out wastewater to keep running, then had to build a new plant, and that drained their cash.

So when a lot of macadamias arrived that didn’t meet spec, and neither the QC team nor the line caught it, the plant made a few hundred thousand dollars of product it couldn’t sell. A healthy company could have absorbed that. With wildfire-smoke shutdowns and COVID already straining the business, they couldn’t, and they closed the plant in 2023. They’re still proud of how many families that plant supported, for so many years.

That’s why Snackteva works the way it does. We verify instead of assuming, because one missed lot can cost more than a year of profit. We get the right expert in before you sign a lease, a co-man agreement or a first run. And we plan for the bad day, because one surprise shouldn’t sink a company. And we protect brands before they ever reach a plant, because a clean-label formula built to run at scale is the first line of defense.

The Work Now

Snackteva exists because that experience turned out to be the thing growing snack and natural food companies need most and can least afford to hire full time. Every wall you are about to hit, Glenn and Liz have already hit. The systems that prevent those walls are familiar because they were built first for their own lines: SOPs a real crew will follow, food safety records that hold up when an auditor walks the floor, co-packer relationships that survive pressure, formulas that scale without losing what made them work.

After the plant closed, Impact Washington recruited Glenn and Liz as resource providers, helping other Washington manufacturers with food safety and process improvement. They now serve CMTC, California’s MEP center, as well.

Formulation is a large share of that work. Liz’s formulation credits include Full Turn Nutrition and Verb Bar, and she has worked for PepsiCo, Dole, and Dean & DeLuca. Today she develops new snacks from a blank page for funded startups, builds line extensions for growing brands, and reworks formulas that won’t behave on the line, while Glenn takes them through the plant. For a startup, that is development-house expertise without the development-house overhead. See how formulation works →

Our Network

We grew up in this industry alongside many of the co-packers we work with today. We’ve known some of them since we were all starting out. Liz has deep connections in the ingredient world, and together we bring 30 years in organic food as pioneers of the clean-label snacking movement. When you work with us, we open that network up: over 100 vetted co-packers, ingredient and packaging suppliers, equipment makers, labs, certification bodies, and the brokers, sales and marketing people who help brands grow. We refer millions of bars a year to our co-packer partners. The right introduction can save you from a bad partnership, a failed run or months of searching. And no co-packer or supplier pays us to recommend them.

Not consultants with a framework. Operators with a roadmap.