😋 MASA: LVMH of Food

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Read time: 5 mins 47 seconds

Miami, early 2022.

Two friends were hanging out on a beach. Both were a bit hungover. They started talking about how bad modern snacks are and how most of them are fried in seed oils that make you feel like crap.

One was an ex-investment banker. The other was a software engineer turned online health crusader who goes by “the Tan Man.”

Steven, the Tan Man, said, “I bet I can make a tortilla chip with just three ingredients—organic corn, beef tallow, and salt—that tastes a million times better than this garbage.”

Seth, the finance guy, called his bluff. 

Steven went home, fired up a fryer, and actually did it. He won the bet and recruited Seth to build a business around this idea. 

Three years later, that three-ingredient chip, now called MASA, has become:

Continue reading to find out how two complete outsiders took one of the most boring commodities and engineered it into a status symbol.

They’re building what they call “the LVMH of food.”

A word from our partner

Big shout-out to Pixel Theory, the growth partner that has helped MASA Chips grow from a startup to one of the most promising premium CPG brands, on track to hit a nine-figure run rate this year. They’ve helped generate nearly $1B in revenue for brands like Mad Rabbit, Lucky Energy, and Ceremonia.

I went to high school with Pixel Theory’s co-founder, Graham Welter. He’s one of the best growth minds I know and has been crushing the consumer brand game since his first high school venture, Nantucket Bucket. I convinced him to offer startups in our community a free growth consultation.

This is available to the first 10 people only over the next 7 days. Grab a time below:

MASA has two founders who are perfect opposites. 

Steven Arena, the visionary, is the soul of the brand. A Yale math major, he went on a decade-long health odyssey and became an expert and influencer in ancestral nutrition. He built a cult following as "The Tan Man" by being the loudest, funniest, and most aggressive critic of seed oils. He provides the why.

Seth Goldstein, the operator, is the Wharton-educated, ex-PE guy who takes Steven’s radical vision and makes it an investable, scalable business. He provides the how.

There are two unique insights behind MASA's meteoric rise:

They observed a massive cultural shift, a war against industrial seed oils (the "Hateful Eight": canola, corn, soy, etc.). This movement, born on podcasts and social media, argues that these oils are the primary driver of modern inflammation and chronic disease.

Many leading nutritionists are arguing that seed oils cause those diseases because they are mostly composed of poly-unsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). PUFAs react very easily with oxygen at any temperature. In the body, this means that they deplete your antioxidants (for example, Vitamin E). As a result, you feel sluggish and negative after you consume them.

This movement has garnered increased momentum.

MASA gave this digital movement a physical product to rally around. 

Seth and Steven also realized they could play a different ballgame, escaping that price war with most other CPG brands.

They’re selling a bundle of HEALTH + TASTE + STATUS. 

The health (ancestral ingredients) and taste (tallow fry) provide the alibi for the consumer to purchase the status (the premium branding). 

When they first started, Steven and Seth tried to find a contract manufacturer to produce their chips.

They were rejected by EVERYONE. 

The entire US snack food supply chain is optimized for liquid vegetable oils. Virtually all chip manufacturing is kosher-vegan. No co-packer would risk cross-contaminating their lines with beef tallow, invest in heated tanks for solid fats, or disrupt high-speed lines for a niche product.

Faced with this blockade, they made the pivotal decision to build their own factory. 

They bootstrapped with $250,000 of their own capital, leased a facility near NYC, and built a production line from scratch. Despite an expensive head start, this approach gave them 100% control over the supply chain, a zero cross-contamination guarantee that competitors can't make, and made them one of only three legitimate tallow chip manufacturers in the entire country.

Here is a brief timeline of MASA’s growth story:

MASA’s growth strategy started with a zero-CAC launch, leveraging Steven’s “Tan Man” audience to build an instant, fiercely loyal initial customer base. 

From there, they followed a deliberate playbook to build social status, used a velvet rope strategy to expand into retail, and brought on growth partner Pixel Theory to systematically scale revenue.

Reframe restriction as hedonism: 

Most health foods market themselves through restriction (no sugar, no gluten, no fun). MASA flipped the script. The "Vintage Vogue" aesthetic—high-contrast flash photography, European coastlines, Amalfi vibes—positions seed-oil-free eating as aspirational hedonism instead of deprivation. 

By eating this way, you feel more beautiful and vital. You're not giving something up; you're joining an exclusive club.

Create a visible tribal marker: 

The distinctive packaging functions as a social signal. It’s simple, recognizable, and premium. When you bring MASA to a party, you’re communicating something about your identity and values. It’s the Patagonia vest of snacks. It’s a signal that you are “in the know.”

Premium price point: 

MASA’s visible tribal marker is reinforced by its premium pricing. At $13 per bag, MASA costs more than three times as much as other chip brands. This price positions MASA as a luxury snack.

The podcast circuit: 

Instead of 30-second ads, they invested heavily in long-form podcasts like Joe Rogan’s podcast, Gary Brecka’s Ultimate Human, Meat Mafia, and others. These platforms tell the full, nuanced story behind the brand, the ingredients, and the movement, converting skeptics into believers in a way short-form content never could. Joe Rogan famously gave MASA a shout-out and said, “If I eat a bag of Doritos, I feel like a loser.”

MASA’s “velvet rope” retail strategy further strengthened their brand status and expanded their reach beyond DTC.

They launched exclusively in the high-end LA grocer Erewhon to create scarcity and build status. Becoming the #1 selling tortilla chips there provided the needed social proof for the rest of the industry.

The initial Erewhon success led to other premium retailers like Bristol Farms and Citarella, cementing their status in key coastal wellness corridors.

With brand equity secured, they launched in Sprouts Farmers Market in October 2025. They immediately hit top-decile velocity while being priced at 2x their competitors, proving the model could scale beyond the luxury bubble.

Turning cultural heat into a durable, nine-figure business is a whole different beast.

By early 2025, MASA had solved the hard early problems. They had a loyal audience, premium positioning, and retail validation from places like Erewhon. The open question was whether the brand could scale aggressively online without breaking its economics or diluting what made it special.

This is where they brought in Pixel Theory as a growth partner tasked with answering a very specific question:

Can MASA scale paid acquisition while improving unit economics?

They executed this through a three-part growth system:

Part 1: 30-day scale sprint

In January 2025, they ran an intentional scale sprint to 3x ad spend. Over 30 days, daily ad spend ramped from roughly $7K to $25K. 

Instead of relying on a single winning message, they treated creative like an R&D pipeline. More than 80 new creative angles launched in a single month. They realized they couldn't scale to $100M on "No Seed Oils" alone. They tested aggressive new angles like "Aspirational Hedonism," "The Most Expensive Chip," and "Junk Food Without the Junk" to find new pockets of mass-market demand.

Spend scaled to roughly $400K per month while CAC held steady, which gave the team confidence that demand wasn’t capped at a niche wellness audience.

Part 2: Offer testing & cohort modeling

This is another secret sauce. 

They test 10 to 20 different offer structures per month (e.g., buy 6 get 4 free, variety bundles, gifts with purchase hooks).

To get a holistic understanding of the offer performance, they perform deep cohort analysis instead of just judging success on Day 1 ROAS:

Part 3: Post-click overhaul 

While it might feel nice to have a large top of funnel traffic, revenue per visit is the North Star.

The team knew that selling single bags of chips was not going to support their venture-scale ambitions. They completely rebuilt the site experience to prioritize subscription architecture, nudging customers toward repeat behavior instead of one-off novelty purchases.

The results transformed the business's valuation metrics:

By combining high-velocity creative testing with a landing page engine that forces recurring revenue, Pixel Theory built the digital infrastructure that makes the "LVMH of Food" vision mathematically possible.

Seth and Steven have a long-term goal of creating “the LVMH of food.” They are looking to create an umbrella of premium snack brands under the parent name, Ancient Crunch.

They've created a repeatable 4-step playbook to attack every snack category:

1. Identify a beloved commodity

2. Perfect the recipe with ancestral ingredients

3. Design a new, aspirational brand identity

4. Launch it to their existing audience

Since MASA, they've already launched Vandy Crisps (potato chips) and Golden Age Fats (tallow). They have a few in the works next. The vision is to be a $2B+ revenue company by 2030.

As they embark on this journey, a couple of key challenges stand out to me.

The first challenge is winning the mainstream palate. Beef tallow is the whole point and also the biggest risk. Fans call the flavor rich and addictive, but some first-timers say it tastes “waxy” or doesn’t match what they expect from a chip. 

There is also a market size risk. The premium pricing of $13 per bag works well for a high-margin, DTC model, but it caps how big the business can get. Long term, they’ll need smarter pricing or new tiers to reach a wider audience without cheapening the brand. New entrants can copy their products but price them significantly cheaper. Can they withstand price undercutting?

However, it’s clear that the MASA team has accomplished an insane feat in just 3 years, reaching impressive run rates while having SaaS-like margin and 10+ LTV/CAC. 

All of it started with two outsiders and a hungover beach bet.

They understood a key lesson: Don’t just sell a product. Engineer an identity. Create a status alibi. Build a tribe.

That’s how you turn a commodity into a cult.

P.S. Want to enjoy that rocketship growth like MASA? This is your sign to go steal Graham’s brain while it’s free. Only 10 spots. Next 7 days only. Grab a time here.

See you next Tuesday,

Leo

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