Oats are one of the longest marketed and most well-recognized healthful foods in America. However, they've long lacked the convenience and versatility necessary to allow them to be enjoyed much beyond the breakfast bowl—where they’ve been a staple for more than a century as oatmeal and cereal—or the cookie jar, where they always are unfairly compared to the star of the jar, chocolate chip cookies.

“I've always loved the health benefits of oats, but found the traditional ways of eating them to be limiting,” admits Rodger Morris, founder and CEO of Pop Oats, LLC and creator of Pop Oats, a new crunchy, roasted whole oat snack. Morris, with an on-the-go family and lifestyle, was frustrated that there weren't more ready-to-eat, snackable ways to enjoy oats throughout the day. So, the former SVP and Head of Environmental, Social, and Governance for a large finance firm jumped ship, dropped an “n” from banking and veered into baking. Oats, that is. Organic, whole-grain oats.

Pop Oats are a new product, patented in collaboration with the USDA, that combines craveable crunch, bold flavors (both sweet and savory), and ready-to-eat convenience. The unconventionally toasted, flavored whole oat snack Morris and his team developed are truly an innovative offering that quite possibly represents oats’ greatest innovation since instant and flavored oatmeal varieties were first introduced more than half a century ago. “Our goal was to truly launch oats from the breakfast and bakery world into the snack universe,” Morris shares.

Creating the crunchy whole oat snack involved an “immense amount” of R&D. “Two of our biggest challenges were first devising a process for making the product, and refining our production line for mass commercialization,” Morris explains. “Without any food science background, I was fortunate enough to partner with a great team at the USDA who saw my vision as an opportunity to expand Americans' consumption of this awesome grain. Our public/private partnership created a truly innovative process whose utility goes far beyond just oats. While Pop Oats is  our first commercialized product, we’re already beginning to explore how our technology can be equally innovative in other areas of food as well.” 

A Deep Dive into the Future of Food & Beverage

Morris and his team had to overcome numerous difficult roadblocks during both the R&D/patent process and subsequently the scaling/commercialization phase. “For the R&D and patent components, I don't come from a food science background so the process for first finding, and then forging, the relationship with the USDA was no small feat,” he admits. “But now we both tout our unique public/private partnership as a model for how entrepreneurs and government can amplify each other’s strengths. On the R&D side, we spent more than a year studying nearly two dozen product-and-process variables with the USDA to ultimately create a desirably crunchy end-product from whole oats. This was a far cry from the many rolled, steel cut, and puffed oat options on the market, none of which possess Pop Oats’ distinctive—and addictive—crunch.”

To meet the challenge of mass commercialization, Morris and his team ended up custom-designing nearly every aspect of the production line. On one hand, a “reinventing of the wheel” approach meant an immense amount of effort and creativity. On the other hand, the blank canvas we were provided allowed the opportunity to design a modular—and highly scalable—process that solidly positions the company for future growth.

Focus groups and initial soft launch sales were overwhelmingly positive, with consumers “loving the combination of ready-to-eat crunch and bold-yet-smooth flavors” and appreciating the absolute reimagining of such a longtime favorite as oats. “We continue to get more than 90% positive feedback from nearly every surveyed audience,” says Morris. “People are consistently asking how it is that something like this didn't exist before.”

For the scaling aspect, the patented roasting process—plus the fact that it is a truly new product—made it nearly impossible for the company to acquire any equipment off the shelf. “We had to custom-design our entire initial production line, and then building it for subsequent scale-up was even more difficult,” Morris explains. “It took us nearly a year just to get everything set up in a modular, scalable way, and we've had to continue refining it to further enhance production efficiency and product consistency.”

Pop Oats engaged a soft launch in 2023 and subsequently began in a combination of retail and foodservice (notably K-12 schools) in 2024 before going fully into the retail market later that year. Currently, the company is poised to collaborate with one of the largest national retail brokers to expand the product’s awareness and significantly extend its reach. “We're now exploring ways to use our patented technology for future products of our own, as well as providing Pop Oats’ distinctive crunch to other food makers for use in their own new products,” adds Morris.

Pop Oats is in discussions to expand its school service side to one of the largest school districts in the US. To that end, Morris currently is seeking production partners to help facilitate that growth as well as its current growth in both retail and ingredient sales channels. He invites interested parties to email him at connect@popoats.com and to “Snack Awesomely!”