A Simple Formula

Posted on June 29, 2018

Katlin Smith ’10 had a guiding principle for the company she founded: Keep food simple.

She had started cleaning up her eating habits in an effort to alleviate joint discomfort. “I was having a lot of aches and pains and decided to eliminate gluten and other irritants from my diet,” said Smith, who then was working as a strategy and operations consultant at Deloitte. “I discovered that real, whole foods left me feeling energized. It was then that I started brainstorming and came up with 10 different ways to change what people were eating.”

Smith, who double-majored in business and biology at Carolina, said she also recalled what she had learned in her favorite college class — microbiology and immunology. “It wasn’t until I was changing my diet and researching different foods and how they impact our immune system that everything clicked and made perfect sense.”

Smith launched Simple Mills in her Chicago kitchen in 2013. The first products were mixes for pumpkin, chocolate and banana muffins. Now the line includes more than two dozen products, including artisan bread mix, pizza dough, snack crackers (in varieties including sun-dried tomato and basil and farmhouse Cheddar), chocolate and vanilla frosting, and soft-baked or crunchy chocolate chip cookies. Ingredients like almond flour, coconut oil, flax, hemp and tapioca starch replace more commonly used flours and sweeteners.

“I wanted to change the standard of the products that were in the center aisles of the store,” Smith said.

Shortly after it was founded, Simple Mills tied for first place in the Edward L. Kaplan New Venture Challenge at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where Smith was earning her MBA. The Kaplan win put Simple Mills in the company of startups like Braintree, later acquired by PayPal, and Grubhub, among others originating from the business-incubator program.

Smith’s crackers and baking mixes also landed her in the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2017, a who’s who of young entrepreneurs. And in the five years since Simple Mills’ founding, its products have gone from being novelty items on a single Whole Foods shelf to being featured in more than 1,200 stores.

Smith hopes the growing popularity of her products will change eating habits — and not only for Simple Mills’ customers.

“We believe that providing better options makes it easier for people to choose food that benefits their bodies,” Smith said. “When I first saw a company create an ingredient line that was like ours, I got super excited and showed the team. It is wonderful to see that we are not only benefiting our consumers but also impacting other brands’ consumers as well.”

— Amber Nimocks ’94 

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Recipes at simplemills.com/pages/recipes.

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