ANNOUNCER: Major funding for "Made in Maryland" is provided by... Offering big bank capabilities and boutique bank care, CFG Bank supports businesses of all sizes and industries including manufacturing across Maryland.

We are CFG Bank, your success is our business.

This program is in part made possible through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente which has been serving the Maryland community with high-quality healthcare for over 35 years.

The Maryland Marketing Partnership amplifies all that makes Maryland a great place to live, work, and do business in, including our bright minds, diverse population, and connectivity.

Learn more at business.maryland.gov.

Chesapeake Employers Insurance, proud to support "Made in Maryland" and the exciting future for manufacturing in Maryland.

And by... NARRATOR: Small businesses, whether located on main streets or online storefronts, are the backbone of the US economy.

Their ingenuity, resiliency, and innovation sustain and support our communities.

These businesses are intimately connected to their neighborhoods and the relationships built between small businesses and their customers are key to their success.

Maryland small businesses exemplify the entrepreneurial spirit that makes America the land of opportunity.

The American Dream can take root in farmers markets and small festivals before growing into multi-million dollar success stories.

Like Michele's Granola.

MICHELE TSUCALAS: I'm pretty amazed that a recipe that I developed in my home kitchen and started selling at the farmers market just for fun, has become what it is today.

♪ (theme music plays).

♪ NARRATOR: Small businesses are big business in Maryland.

The state's 650,000 small businesses employ more than a million people.

That's 99.5% of all companies.

And almost half of our total workforce.

Small businesses drive Maryland's economy, and the smallest of these can be found at farmers markets and craft fairs.

Festivals and farmers markets offer local entrepreneurs a chance to showcase their handcrafted, artisanal foods and goods, connect with new customers, and establish a presence in their community.

In Anne Arundel County, Kurtz's Beach is a family-owned small business along the Patapsco River, celebrating 90 years in business.

Established as a bathing beach in 1933, Kurtz's Beach was for generations a family retreat on the Bay.

Today it is a venue for events, weddings, and notably, the Made in Maryland Festival.

JOHN MASON: As we started the Made in Maryland Festival, we realized that this is more than just a festival.

It allows us to open our gates and doors and have folks come in who have never known us otherwise.

So it's been a very good thing for our business also.

NARRATOR: Started in 2016, the Made in Maryland Festival supports over 100 small business owners.

JOHN: The entrepreneurial spirit was just amazing.

These craftsmen, it's amazing the commitment that they have.

ASHLEY MASON: It just takes one person with a good idea to have enough faith in themselves.

Taking that leap of faith to say, you know, let's try it out and see what happens.

Those small businesses, they're priceless.

NARRATOR: The popular festival draws a wide variety of vendors.

ERIKA: I've been with Lyon Rum since October of 2022.

I love it so much, I'm full-time with them now.

Started part-time, I'm now full-time.

We are made in Maryland, it makes sense for us to be represented here.

Whether it's a rainy day or a sunny day, we want to be there and show that we love our rum and we love our people who support our rum.

As soon as you have a sip, you're gonna want the whole collection.

And we have plenty of tote bags to take them out of here with.

NARRATOR: Every artisan shares a passion for creating something genuine and unique.

SHAWN BROWN: So we started in 2018.

My wife started with a little Cricut, we started doing outdoor vinyl signs.

At that point, we just started moving on from outdoor signs to flags, to different things, to cutting boards, and then maps and stuff like that.

It's just something I enjoy to do.

It doesn't bother me to spend six, eight hours in the garage every Saturday and Sunday, just to make something.

NARRATOR: Working the festival circuit is an important business strategy for many vendors.

RANDY WOLFENSBERGER: It was a great day.

I got to meet a ton of people, talk to a lot of people.

This is our third year being here, so a lot of people who see us here every year come back, give us feedback on our products.

It's neat to me because it means they want to see new products from us.

NARRATOR: Listening to customer feedback helped catapult one Maryland business from farmers markets to grocery store shelves across the nation.

MICHELE: I've always been passionate about baking foods from scratch and got into natural and organic foods as I got a little bit older.

And I had a bite of a fresh baked granola bar out of a scratch bakery up in New England and never forgot it.

And soon after started experimenting with my own homemade cereals.

NARRATOR: Michele Tsucalas started baking granola as a hobby while working for a bakery at a Montgomery County farmers market.

Although the bakery didn't produce granola, customers were asking for it.

MICHELE: And so one day after I'd worked for them for a little while, and gotten to know them, and gotten to know the customers, I mentioned to them that I made granola and my friends told me it was pretty good.

And they said, "Well, why don't you make some and bring it out next week and we'll try to sell it".

NARRATOR: The rest is granola history.

MICHELE: And so that's really how the whole sales part of Michele's Granola got started, and that first week I think I brought six bags, three original without raisins and three with raisins, and the ones without raisins sold first.

And so from then on, I didn't make any with raisins.

NARRATOR: It was at the farmers market where Michele's Granola took off.

MICHELE: So I was selling granola on the weekends, I was baking overnight, and I was still working a full-time job.

Once I'd been selling the granola out at the farmers market for a few months, I started to think about maybe this could become a full-time opportunity for myself.

NARRATOR: Michele was considering taking the leap from her full-time job and putting everything she had into her granola business.

MICHELE: I was attracted by just the opportunity to take all of my passions and all of my experiences and all of my learning's and create something of my own, like forge my own path.

NARRATOR: 17 years later, that path has led to nationwide distribution.

MICHELE: So, it just happened as we needed to do it.

We figured out how to scale and how to grow.

NARRATOR: It's a growth that's always been cented on people and our planet.

MICHELE: People are at the center of every part of this company, but it's especially important in the production of our products, that we have real people's hearts and eyes on all of the ingredients and every step of the process, from the mixing and baking right down to the packaging and shipping of our products.

Being environmentally minded is just key to any business in any industry.

There is just no question whether or not it's something you should be thinking about as a business leader or not.

And from the very beginning, it was very important to me to make sure that we were doing the best that we could to be mindful of all of the Earth's resources as well as the resources that we had available to us as a business.

So, some of the things we've did from early on was we started with recycling and composting, just right away.

Our first delivery truck ran on recycled vegetable oil, which was as much a financial necessity as it was a great thing to do for the environment and a good marketing tool.

Our facility now runs on wind power and we do all kinds of cool up-cycling with our packaging.

So our e-commerce shipping team brought in a machine that would shred all of the packaging materials that came into the door, and they reused those shreds as packaging, like cushioning for the granola shipments that go out the door.

NARRATOR: Remaining true to the original recipe of those first batches of granola sold at the farmers market is paramount.

MICHELE: The granola we make today at Michele's Granola is just like the very first batch of granola I made in my home kitchen back in the early 2000s.

I love that I come to work and I can smell the granola actually being baked in the ovens every day, and also hearing the laughter of the people who are making the granola for our customers every day.

And for so many years, I was in the production kitchen with our team as we grew this business together.

The very first recipe of Michele's Granola is what is now known as our original, and that's a vanilla almond flavor granola.

The second flavor we ever created was our pumpkin spice, and we now have about a dozen different recipes of granola in our rotation.

The foundation of every recipe of Michele's Granola is certified organic, gluten-free oats.

And to that, we add brown sugar, sunflower seeds, and a variety of seeds, nuts, and flavorings depending on the recipe.

I think the most important thing is the taste and texture of our products, so it tastes like all-natural whole grains, just lightly sweetened, and then accentuated by delicious crunchy seeds and nuts.

My current favorite granola is the Cinnamon Raisin, and that is one of our oldest recipes, it's a really traditional mix that reminds me of an oatmeal raisin cookie.

It's delicious.

NARRATOR: A key component of Michele's manufacturing process is making all of their own products.

MICHELE: That's actually pretty unique in our industry, for us to own our own manufacturing process and for everything that you buy from us to be made right here in our own facility.

NARRATOR: Being hands-on is essential.

MICHELE: This is our raw materials warehouse.

This is where we receive and store all of the ingredients that you'll find in every batch and every bag of Michele's Granola and Toasted Muesli.

All of our ingredients are sourced from vendors and farmers that we know and trust, always all-natural and GMO-free.

You'll see that we receive these ingredients and store them on pallets in fairly large quantities.

We've grown quite a bit since I started at the farmers market back in 2006, when you could find me running around to every grocery store in the state of Maryland, digging out their bulk bins for the oats and seeds, and nuts that we use in our products today.

This is our quality control room.

Every ingredient in our products undergoes a rigorous quality control process, and that means that we're physically sifting through every ounce of every ingredient that you find in bags of Michele's Granola and Muesli, to make sure that it is absolutely of the highest quality.

Liquid ingredients are blended together with dry ingredients in every batch of Michele's Granola.

This is where those liquid ingredients are measured.

So here we have our pure vanilla extract and some organic lemon juice that's going into today's batches.

Nothing would be possible here at Michele's Granola without our team of incredible employees.

We have a wonderful partnership with The Arc, who helps us employ people with differing abilities.

Eric here has been working at Michele's Granola for over three years, and he is one of our key quality control associates.

Eric's working on our brown sugar now to make sure that our brown sugar is fine and completely free of clumps of molasses.

This is also where our lot code tracking process continues on from the warehouse and into our production space, where we keep track of where every ingredient has come from and each bag of granola that it goes into.

After the ingredients pass the quality check they're placed into these totes and wheeled into the production room where they're then weighed for every batch of granola.

After the dry and wet ingredients come together beautifully in our mixer, the batches are brought over here where they are weighed out onto 10 sheet pans.

Where the granola is spread across the trays and prepared for the baking area.

The baking area is where so much of the granola-making magic happens.

Our incredible team of bakers is responsible for baking thousands of pounds of Michele's Granola every day to golden brown perfection.

After the granola is baked and cooled, it heads to the packaging area.

Behind me, today's batches of Michele's Granola are being hand-scooped into 12-ounce packages, running down a conveyor line to a sealing machine.

And they'll be taken off there and packed into case boxes for shipment.

After our granola is packed into case boxes in the packaging hall, it's loaded onto pallets and it comes back into our warehouse, where it's prepared for shipment by our warehouse and distribution team.

We are proudly made in Maryland, and we have lots of local customers all across the state, but you can also find our products on grocery store shelves across the country.

This pallet here is headed to Atlanta.

We also have a strong e-commerce business where we pack and ship orders individually for households all across the country coast to coast, and that process happens here in our facility too.

If we didn't have our hands in the granola, I don't know where it would have gone, but to me, that was what that whole experience was all about was really making this product together and thinking about what the potential for it was.

So the manufacturing is the key to everything.

NARRATOR: When she started in her home kitchen, Michele's goal was to make six bags of granola at a time.

MICHELE: It took four hours and now we just have the benefit of being able to overlap those batches, but a single batch start to finish still does take several hours.

NARRATOR: The overlap of batches means Michele's Granola is operating nearly around the clock, Monday through Friday across two shifts.

MICHELE: Between the two shifts, we're producing just about 36,000 pounds a week, which is over 50,000 12-ounce bags of granola and toasted muesli, which is distributed to over 4,000 retail outlets across the country.

NARRATOR: Overseeing every stage of the production line helps manufacturers like Michele's Granola control the quality of their product and ensure they meet customer expectations.

MICHELE: I don't think that it would be quite as rewarding if we were outsourcing the making of our products somewhere else, and we were just controlling maybe the distribution side of things.

And that so much about the way that we run the company and the way that we produce our products and the intention behind everything that we do here is so much the same as it was as when it started.

NARRATOR: Giving back to the community is fundamental for Michele's Granola.

MICHELE: We give 1% of all of our sales to organizations that are leading the way to a healthier, more equitable food system.

So, we support organizations that are growing healthy foods and distributing those foods where they're needed most, in communities all across the country.

And that's been a commitment of ours for over a decade.

NARRATOR: And remaining a Maryland-based business is essential.

MICHELE: One of the things I feel most fortunate about, having grown up in Maryland and keeping our business based here, is the strategic location for a business like ours.

We're smack dab in the middle of the eastern seaboard.

We have a large base of savvy, health-conscious consumers.

We have many, many, many opportunities for our wholesale business to continue to grow.

We have small locally-owned markets, we have organic grocers, and we have large conventional grocery chains, all based here in Maryland.

NARRATOR: Michele's Granola serves as a role model for entrepreneurs of all types.

MICHELE: I think you have an idea, you just begin it in whatever capacity you can at whatever stage you're in.

I support any entrepreneur ever, but I think for women we have overcome some hurdles that have made being in business for yourself more challenging.

I think being a female business leader is different, and so it's helped us stand out.

We have received a lot of support from the state through various programs for women and diverse-owned businesses over the years.

Our women-owned business certification is something that helps put us in front of a set of consumers who are very interested in the social impact that they can make by buying from a women-owned business.

NARRATOR: Each step has been meteoric for Michele's Granola.

MICHELE: When I think about how much we've grown over the last 17 years, uh, I'm pretty amazed that the recipe that I developed in my home kitchen and started selling at the farmers market just for fun has become what it is today.

And it is incredible that we're producing 36,000 pounds, but what's even more incredible than that is that we have nearly 100 employees who work at this facility.

It's been so interesting over the life of this company as we've grown and had more people come onto our team, we've also gained a lot of expertise in the process.

So now we have people who did go to culinary school, or who majored in food science, and they're all part of this process helping us discover every day how to achieve the most consistent product possible.

So, they do discover things like the moisture content in the oats produces a specific texture, and if we want it to be a specific texture we have to change X, Y, and Z about the process, depending on the quality of the oat that comes in the door.

So yes, there's a lot of adapting, but there's also a lot of knowledge that we've benefited from as our team has grown.

Ryan is a key member of our operations team.

He has taken on so much in the short amount of time that he's been here and he's one of the people who's leading us towards manufacturing efficiencies.

He's a creative thinker, he's a capable implementer, and he's a fantastic people leader.

RYAN: I've been working here at Michele's Granola, and I came in with just small business, cafe management experience.

Working here at Michele's has just been very special, being a part of all this growth.

And have our hands in the community, and creating new jobs, and being able to continue to improve the culture and maintain our values here throughout this growth process is both very challenging and a lot of fun.

The thing I like the most about my job is just getting to look at issues that people are dealing with and find better ways of doing them to make their jobs easier.

And with a growing company like this, I have my work cut out for me to continue to change and improve and grow along with it.

So I've been most excited and grateful for the ability and the opportunities here to get to learn and grow as an individual as well.

MICHELE: As we've grown, we've created job opportunities, a huge variety of job opportunities.

And one thing that's interesting about working in manufacturing is that the jobs can be very complex or they can be broken down into smaller parts that require repetition.

We found that we're able to offer jobs for people of a variety of abilities and interests.

And our partnership with The Arc has been one of the most rewarding professional partnerships I've ever had.

We've been working with The Arc for several years.

We have several employees who have been with the company for many years, working in positions that fully utilized their skill sets and also offer them the comfort of steady employment.

I personally understand how challenging it can be for people with differing abilities to be out in the world, especially as they move into adulthood.

And, finding meaningful employment and a regular schedule, a way that they can utilize their skills and be productive members of the community can be really difficult.

And so, the fact that we're able to provide those opportunities here at Michele's Granola means a lot to me, but I, I, it means a lot to the families of the people that are employed here as well.

So I've just been really grateful for that partnership.

NARRATOR: Michele's path to granola greatness was a winding journey.

MICHELE: I went to college and I majored in economics, which I think gave me a really good business background, like a basis for business, and also understanding money.

After school I graduated and I didn't really know what I wanted to do with that degree.

I ended up starting off in tech sales.

That was my first, you know, full-time work experience.

But I also did learn a little bit more about what I liked about working and also what I wasn't very good at and sales was one of those things.

So, fast forward a few years, I worked front of house restaurants for a long time, but never in the kitchen.

But I loved the customer service aspect of serving somebody a meal and seeing how happy the food and the whole service experience could make them.

I worked in nonprofit fundraising for a couple of years, and I think that also taught me about the value of good business and corporate social responsibility and all the need that existed in our communities.

When I started selling granola at the farmers market, I just became so engaged with the local food community and was very fortunate to be surrounded by farmers and their families who were taking farm businesses and really remodeling them into direct-to-consumer businesses.

And I just observed this magic that they were making out of the dirt and into the hands of the customers that we served every week at the farmers market, and I was so inspired by that.

That experience, I think, helped me understand that local food's very powerful connection to a maker is very powerful.

And so as we've grown from that farmers market stall into 4,000 grocery stores around the country, we've really kept that at our core.

Just that farmers market, honest experience of good, well-made food, and a connection to the people who make it.

The thing that I've learned is, when you're passionate about something, the path is so varied to get to wherever it is that you're meant to go.

So sure, I had in my head that I was going to sell granola, but really, why was it that I was making granola and interested in selling granola?

And that's what got me out to the farmers market was I was just interested in food and also business.

So, all those job opportunities that really weren't hitting for me or I felt like weren't quite the right fit.

I thought maybe I can just make it for myself, and I'm really glad that I did.

SARAH BATLEY: Hon's Honey is dedicated to giving women dignity and purpose for meaningful employment.

The core of what we do is a life development program for women and 100% of the profits go right back into the business.

BOBBIE JENKINS: We come in and we learn how to make all of these products from scratch with 100% raw, natural materials.

All of our products have either honey or beeswax in it.

MANDY MEMMEL: We found that creating a business to employ women kind of brought about full circle for our holistic approach by giving them a paycheck and helping it be self-sustained.

SARAH: And then to go on from there to see them rise in areas that they never imagined possible, whether that's education, beekeeping, management, new opportunities, both here at Hon's Honey and also now at our marketplace.

BOBBIE: It is giving a woman survivor an opportunity to rise above her circumstances, above her mind set, and it's giving her opportunity.

ANNOUNCER: Major funding for "Made in Maryland" is provided by... Offering big bank capabilities and boutique bank care, CFG Bank supports businesses of all sizes and industries including manufacturing across Maryland.

We are CFG Bank, your success is our business.

This program is in part made possible through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente which has been serving the Maryland community with high-quality healthcare for over 35 years.

The Maryland Marketing Partnership amplifies all that makes Maryland a great place to live, work, and do business in, including our bright minds, diverse population, and connectivity.

Learn more at business.maryland.gov.

Chesapeake Employers Insurance, proud to support "Made in Maryland" and the exciting future for manufacturing in Maryland.

And by... ♪ ♪