It started with a folding table in San Diego
In 2010, Starr and Luke Edwards set up at a San Diego farmers market with an almond-based dip and not much else. No retail strategy. No investor backing. The original base recipe was almonds, lemon juice, garlic, nutritional yeast, oil. People kept coming back, so they kept showing up the following weekend. That was the whole plan.
The brand is now past 15,000 retail locations. Costco, Target, Kroger, add Whole Foods and Sprouts and you're there. Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, China, Mexico are all running. Canada too. UK and Sweden are coming.
The recipe is the same one from that first farmers market.
A story of staying when it would have been easier to leave
Starr Edwards is the kind of founder whose real story takes a while to surface. The official version: husband and wife, farmers market, clean-label mission, making ends meet. What it actually looked like was much messier.
She taught herself QuickBooks with a sleeping infant beside her. Back on the job the week after giving birth because the orders were there and nobody else was going to fill them. Then 2015 hit: a business separation, all the financial liability in her name, the company close to not surviving. She stayed anyway.
She doesn't talk about that stretch much. Fair enough. What came out the other side was $56M in peak annual revenue in 2024. Still family-owned. Still in Carlsbad. The team sticks around in an industry that usually burns through people in under two years.
What she built for the people who work there
Starr built Bitchin' Kids around a belief: no parent should have to choose between providing for their child and actually raising them. The program started as free, on-site childcare, a real space where employees could drop their kids into a loving, educational environment and pop in during breaks or lunch. It built community. Kids grew up together, parents became friends, the kind of closeness that doesn't come from a team-building offsite.
As the company shifted remote, Bitchin' Kids shifted too, becoming an annual non-taxable reimbursement of $7,500 per employee, with over $1.6M offered since 2019.
Food manufacturing turnover runs around 28%. Bitchin' Sauce is at 16.4%. Around forty percent of the team has crossed four years on the job. People don't stay because the work is easy. They stay because Starr removed the thing that usually forces them out.
Fifteen years later, the dip is still the same
Bitchin' Chips, Salsacados™, refrigerated bean dips, The Snacker with The Good Crisp Company: the 2026 expansion is moving into new categories. Every product gets built under the same constraints as the original. No preservatives. No synthetic additives. Nothing added to make production more profitable than the recipe allows.
The farmers market table in San Diego was fifteen years ago. The original recipe hasn't changed. Neither has the approach to making the product. Most brands that hit national distribution have reformulated at least once by now. Bitchin' Sauce never saw the point. What does it look like when a business grows without losing the thing that made it worth building in the first place?
About Bitchin' Sauce
Bitchin' Sauce is a family-owned, Carlsbad, California-based brand founded in 2010 by Starr and Luke Edwards. The company pioneered the almond-based dip category and has grown from local farmers markets to national distribution in 15,000+ retail locations including Costco, Whole Foods, Sprouts, Target, and Kroger. Committed to clean-label manufacturing and industry-leading employee benefits, Bitchin' Sauce remains a plant-based, better-for-you leader in the snacking category. Learn more at bitchinsauce.com.
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