We have gotten so accustomed to the sea of ultra-processed products in our grocery stores that food created with respect on shelves seems out of place. Industrialization has allowed us to reach the masses, but we have gotten carried away. We now need to marry scalability with health in a way that tastes even better.
While many brands today take staples from our past and modernize them for today’s consumer demands, Ancient Crunch looks in the opposite direction, taking a page from pre-industrial diets. That means natural processing, organic ingredients and no industrialized oils.
“If you make food the right way, it’ll be both healthier and more delicious–the holy grail,” Ancient Crunch Cofounder and CEO Steven Rofrano tells me. “That’s what Ancient Crunch is building.”
After a few years of prioritizing its online sales, Ancient Crunch is beginning to make itself more accessible, now in about 2,000 doors. Its Masa Chips, made from nixtamalized corn, have become the top selling tortilla chip brand at Sprouts Farmers Market and they are set to enter Whole Foods Market stores in April. Many more retail rollouts are expected this year too.
Ancient Crunch more recently released its Vandy Crisps–organic potato chips–and packaged in bags that are borderline works of art themselves. The brand reveals to me that it is also releasing a third product line, Golden Age Popcorn. All of its products are fried in grass-fed beef tallow.
“Everything is about the good life,” Cofounder and President Seth Goldstein tells me. “You actually feel better about these products when you turn the bag over, not worse.”
Ancient Crunch is in the process of building out a brand new, 80 square feet custom factory to expedite the process, which will unlock the ability to produce a few million bags of Masa Chips a month to prepare for its upcoming retail expansion.
“There are so many psychological problems Americans have with their relationship to food,” Rofrano adds. “We’re trying to solve that by conveying a mentality that will allow you to solve it more broadly.”
The Weird Food Guy
Walking around the Yale campus, Rofrano used to receive a lot of double-takes. It primarily started when he returned from a term abroad in Belgium, where he began cooking for himself for the first time in his life, leading to him taking control of his health after years of suffering from poor immune and digestive systems fed by the addictive snacks he loved. “I had a lot of health problems, so I always had weird diets,” he says. “There was always this tension between what I was supposed to eat and what I wanted to eat.”
His new religion became finding ways to prepare and process his own food in the name of his health. “I would make kombucha in my dorm room and bring my soaked sprouted quinoa with my filtered water to the dining hall.”
Many ingredients that he avoided by cutting out ultra-processed foods were industrial seed oils–realizing the harm they were having on his health given the issues he was facing. There was one exception. “The one food that I still ate with seed oils was tortilla chips because they were gluten free. I always had a problem with the pesticides in bread,” Rofrano says “If you want to eat natural food, you look to the foods that were available prior to the industrial invention of the modern diet and seed oils are not part of it–they didn’t exist. Crisco was the first edible seed oil product available in the 1900s.”
Rofrano worked as a Facebook software engineer during the pandemic, which, admittedly, wasn’t much work for him. “It afforded me a lot of spare time, so I read a lot of books, cooking three meals a day, going to farmers markets,” he says. “I ended up starting a TikTok account about eating healthy.”
A large part of what he would talk about on that account was eating ‘ancestrally’–prioritizing organic food, nixtamalization processing and avoiding seed oils. The oil substitute he would often discuss on his page was beef tallow, which he learned about while living in Belgium, the home of the French Fry, originally fried in beef tallow. “I ate a ton of them there and they were great,” he says. “Tallow is naturally sourced and has fat soluble vitamins, whereas no plant-based oil has that micronutrient content.”
Engaging with his followers there made him realize that the problem wasn’t that people didn’t want to eat healthy, but more so that busy people crave convenience. So he pulled out a propane-powered turkey fryer and glugs upon glugs of beef tallow, which was not widely available at the time. People in his life who didn’t even care too much about the health component were impressed with how good his ideal tortilla chip tasted. “It’s not an alternative chip,” he says. “It’s just a chip and it’s delicious.”
Around the same time, he reconnected with his friend, Seth Goldstein, his now-cofounder and President of Ancient Crunch, who was working ninety-hour weeks in private equity. Convenience was his best friend. “I would sleep for three hours then go back to work–definitely not cooking,” Goldstein says.
The two had individually given entrepreneurship in other sectors a shot, but never had the drive with those concepts to go all in. With this new idea of creating the ideal tortilla chip that was nowhere to be found in mainstream stores, they felt they could make a point about the inherent beauty of food prior to the industrial takeover.
“We want to make an everyman’s chip…,” Goldstein adds, “…the best version of it.”
Ancient Basics
The base of Masa Chips is simply organic corn. The brand is on track to begin field trials for two different varieties of regeneratively farmed corn over about 50 acres in an effort to potentially make the product regenerative organic.
“You can actually improve the land by farming,” Rofrano says. “My job is to take every ingredient and turn up the dials as hard as you can on every quality metric that matters for that ingredient.”
Ingredients are one step, but the way in which those ingredients are processed often takes a back seat, especially given that back-label packaging doesn’t require processing details. Modern quality has been stripped in the name of quantity. “Quality determines if it’s healthy or not,” Rofrano says. That’s why Ancient Crunch nixtamalizes the corn before turning it into tortillas, in the same way that traditional tamales are made. “Modern food systems like to cut corners, but every civilization that has a staple crop figures out that you can’t just eat it plain,” he explains. “Nixtamalization makes it more digestible, makes certain B vitamins more bioavailable and removes mycotoxin activity.”
The nixtamalized corn gets washed and ground into a paste, called masa, and turned into tortillas before they are baked, cut into triangles and fried in 600 degree tallow, which is a relatively gentle and low temperature for frying chips.
“A lot of tallow gets burned, oxidized, or is beefy-tasting, but ours is controlled and domestically sourced,” Rofrano explains. “The fatty acids in plant oils are shorter, so they work their way into your pores more easily. Saturated fat, like tallow, is a longer molecule so it’s less greasy.”
The pair tested frying in other oils, like avocado oil, but grass-fed beef tallow allows them to achieve the crunch they’re aiming for, leaving you free from greasy fingers. “When it’s super grease-logged, it crumbles. We want a heartier crunch,” Goldstein says.
The company goes through about 100,000 pounds of beef tallow every month. “Hopefully it’s ten times that in the near future,” Goldstein adds. The new machinery will allow the tallow to stay fresher for longer to get more use out of it. The waste goes to biodiesel.
Ancient Crunch now brands its own brand of tallow, also called Golden Age, which is sold individually in limited quantities.
The chips come in Original, Lime, Cobanero, Hatch Chile, White Corn, Blue Corn and Churro. Vandy Crisps are available in Original, French Onion, Herbes de Provence, Smokehouse BBQ flavors.
Several spices used in the line of tortilla chips are sourced from Burlap & Barrel, while sugar is sourced from Regenerative Organic Certified Florida Crystals. Every ingredient that enters the assembly line is carefully curated to meet its high standards, and if it doesn’t meet those standards,it’s back to the drawing board. When no organic lime powder was available on the market with one ingredient (limes), Rofrano bought his own limes and began zesting and dehydrating himself. They have since formulated their own custom lime powder.
The cinnamon sugar of Churro shows the depths of what a tortilla chip can be, a sweet dessert chip that you don’t have to wait for dessert for. The Hatch Chili chip is a Cool Ranch Dorito with powerful spices that seem to have just been milled. While the taste of the nixtamalized organic corn in the Original and White varieties is all the real, earthy flavor we need.
Igniting The Senses
For Ancient Crunch, standards aren’t just about health and taste, but also beauty–on the outside and the inside.
“A typical chip bag is cheap, thin cellophane that you rip down the side…you view that product as disposable,” Goldstein says. “Everything you buy should be beautiful and should make your home lovely.”
The means in which Ancient Crunch packages its salty snacks is a reflection of the new way that it wants all Americans to interact with the snack aisle.
We display bottles of olive oil and showcase our most prized bottles of spirits. A bag of Masa Chips and Vandy Crisps sitting on a counter is a statement in itself, given most bags of chips don’t stand upright. But these are postured to be seen, maybe even reused. A strong zipper keeps the matte bag closed tight, its opacity creates curiosity of something worthwhile inside.
A bag of Masa Chips is the crisp Mediterranean sunshine. It’s a beach towel lying flat on the beach in Positano, reminding Rofrano of his own experience eating healthy in Europe. “There’s the widely understood experience that food in Europe is both nourishing and delicious,” he says. “We’re bringing that concept to the American way of thinking about food…You shouldn’t have to choose between enjoying your life and destroying your health.”
Meanwhile, Vandy Crisps, like all Ancient Crunch snacks, have their own unique personality. They exude a comedic royalty that you practically love to hate and hate to love. “Vandy is Masa’s brother,” Goldstein says. “He’s a 24-year-old super senior, partying every night, genius– doesn’t go to class, barely graduating.” Opening a bag of Vandy matches the scent of walking into a fast food chain, the whiff of fried potato hitting you in the face–but tasting these is tasting how a potato was organically grown to taste like.
The chips are a work of art themselves. Every tortilla chip is a perfect triangle, but curved in its tallow bath to give it some charm, the thick blanket of spices evenly distributed throughout the entire vessel of the chip. Each potato crisp has the same bite, as if they are an addicting fry in chip form. Rustic, even without the skin, just by being true to form, igniting every sense.
Accessing Quality
As Ancient Crunch expands its retail presence, Rofrano and Goldstein want to prioritize access, and are confident that within the next two years, the products will have a presence in most American grocery stores–not just on the coasts. In fact, thanks to their D2C business, their highest per capita state is Idaho, followed by Montana, Tennessee and Wyoming.
“A lot of our customers don’t know there’s tallow in it. They just want the most delicious chip,” Goldstein says.
The next grocery chain that will carry Masa Chips and Vandy Crisps is Whole Foods Market in nearly 100 locations dispersed throughout the country. Jennifer Mandanici, Whole Foods Market Category Merchant for Salty Snacks, has every intention to take the brand chain-wide.
“Tortilla chips are a competitive segment,” Mandanici tells me. “Ancient Crunch has had great D2C success–building out that brand equity online is powerful before getting into retail. They know how to create excitement. Now customers can just get a bag at a time in the store when they want it.”
Whole Foods Market is working to create a spectrum of options among categories for products made with different types of oils, including beef tallow, one of Whole Foods’ trends of 2026. “This hits the need for what consumers are looking for,” Mandanici says. “They are going to get a play from our perimeter shoppers, the guests who really invest in their health, getting them to shop in the center store space.”
Rofrano himself is one of those consumers who is willing to get back into the center store if there are more options like Ancient Crunch. But the current center store customers who remain there also deserve healthier options, and they’re going to be able to get them much more easily with the rapid upcoming retail expansion. “You’re not convincing 95% of people to stop eating chips…We want to convey to people that you deserve to have the best,” Rofrano says. “The goal is to give the Masa treatment to all salty, crunchy snacks.”
