Top Seedz Founder Rebecca Brady Wins US Grant

Food-focused operations, including New Zealand-born Rebecca Brady’s Top Seedz cracker company, made up nearly half of the grant recipients awarded by Ignite Buffalo judges in July.

Ignite Buffalo is a mentorship, sustainability and capital infusion programme, in partnership with Facebook and other organisations like M&T Bank, Quickbooks, Amazon Web Services, WordPress.com and WooCommerce, helping to equip Buffalo’s small businesses to ignite growth and succeed in the digital economy.

Brady lives in Clarence, New York where she moved with her Irish husband, William Brady, who works at Moog.

They’re raising three children, 11, 13 and 15 years old. In her spare time, Brady started a company that sells crackers made from seeds, flavoured with sea salt, cumin or rosemary, rolled out and baked to a crisp.

Now demand has exceeded supply. In her rented kitchen, she must use “four little ovens in two rooms, and I’m running back and forth, rotating trays manually,” Brady said.

“With this money, I’m going to be able to buy an oven the size of a small bathroom, and roll trolleys in filled with crackers, and the oven will rotate them,” she said. “Another piece of equipment will roll the crackers out for me. At the moment, I’m rolling every cracker out.”

She expects to be able to produce 700 boxes of crackers a day instead of 350, and work more days.

Original article by Andrew Galarneau, Buffalo News, July 24, 2018.