Better-for-you bites are growing more rapidly than their conventional counterparts, according to Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery’s State of the Industry: Snacks coverage. While many producers are tapping into the trend, LesserEvil stands out. The producer has innovated in myriad ways—launching popcorn popped in BFY oils, offering extruded products for snackers of all ages, and introducing totally unique flavors to tempt adventurous eaters. Its approach to BFY snack making has attracted a great deal of attention—both from consumers, who have helped the brand’s sales skyrocket in recent years, and from a corporation who acquired the fast-growing company earlier this year. For these reasons, LesserEvil has been declared SF&WB’s Snack Producer of the Year for 2025.

Getting started
Before Charles Coristine purchased LesserEvil in 2011, the snack company had hit a standstill—despite its better-for-you mission, not enough snackers were biting and sales were flagging. Meanwhile, Coristine was a successful executive who had made waves in the finance world and succeeded on Wall Street but found himself under a mountain of stress and feeling burned out.

“I was kind of worn out, and I felt like I was just sitting sometimes at my desk, wondering what it would be like to do something else,” he admits. “I had suffered from some stress, particularly as I was getting into my late 30s, and then I was turning 40, so I was like, ‘You know what? I’m going to try something else!’”

Coristine made contact with LesserEvil’s previous owner, a friend of a friend, hearing that the man was thinking about getting out of the snack business. The timing was fortuitous, considering Coristine was considering a career change.

“I'm a big believer in synchronicity, and for some reason my intuition said, ‘Let's take a look at this,” Coristine said. While Coristine was interested in making a shift, he had to wait until the end of the year to get his EOY compensation to collect funds ($250,000) to start a new life as a snack food mogul.

“Knowing what I know now, I probably wouldn't have made that decision,” Coristine confides. “I didn't realize at the time what a competitive and expensive field it is to get into.”

While the company under Coristine’s charge in the early days saw some rough seas, ultimately, he says, those challenges helped LesserEvil ultimately come out on top.

“With so many companies, they get friends and family money, and maybe some professional money, and then they spend a lot on marketing, and they don't concentrate on the product first,” he says. “Because we weren't able to raise any money and we had to be so frugal, we tried to fail quickly on products that didn't show a lot of potential, and we couldn't afford to hold onto them for very long.”

Another move that paid off in the long run, Coristine says, was investing in its manufacturing, centering its attention on used equipment to save on expenses.

“You want to look at how fast, if you bought a machine, it would pay for itself,” he advises. “Typically, new equipment is four or five times more expensive, so you’re looking at multiple years, potentially, before a new piece of equipment will pay back. There are investments as you mature, but in the beginning, you just want to get out of the gates.”

Moving and growing
Fast forward to 2023, just a little more than a decade before Coristine took the $250,000 leap into snack-making, and that initial investment—combined with the savvy spending on manufacturing and additional wise moves—has more than paid off. LesserEvil started off with one production line; now the producer is up to 13, with plans for up to five more in the works. The workforce has been growing steadily, from 200 to about 450 in just a few years. Additionally, its 2023 sales reached $104 million, 2024 $169 million, and 2025 are projected to hit $225 million, which is quite a return. The core of the product portfolio is extruded snacks (puffs and balls), along with a line of popcorn, all of it offering BFY benefits.

Coristine says LesserEvil has placed an emphasis on innovation, which proved to be beneficial during the rocky road of the pandemic.

“During COVID there just was not a lot of snack innovation happening, and everyone was just focused on keeping their main SKUs in the stock, because the co-packers were basically beholden to big retailers, and everyone was just scrambling to stay alive,” he relates. “Retailers were like, ‘Hey, can you do this? Because we just don't have anything.’ And so, we started really getting creative.”

In addition to more traditional flavors like cheddar cheese, Himalayan salt, and spicy varieties, LesserEvil’s R&D team has come out with more unexpected tastes, including sweet popcorn with summery flavors like Pink Lemonade and Watermelon Hibiscus—flavors inspired by trendy seltzer flavors. Coristine says the team likes to brainstorm and run with the unique ideas they come up with.

“We’ll be like, ‘I love my lattes—let’s see if we can do a latte popcorn," just weird stuff like that,” he laughs. “Nielsen or SPINS say that you need to have a sweet, you need to have a cheese, you need to have a salty, you need to have a spicy," but all the rest of the stuff is all just internal.”

Coristine says LesserEvil’s production team is not afraid to take the time to get things right, an approach that delivers standout product.

“We run our popcorn machines very inefficiently, because we want to run them low and slow to get that expansion and that texture,” he explains. “We put a lot of pressure on the kernel as it goes through the popper, and then it basically explodes at the very end; we call it multilateral expansion. It makes our popcorn very different than other people's popcorn.”

In addition to flavor variety, the company also offers a wide range of pack sizes, from smaller bags in multi-pack cartons, to sizeable bags of popcorn aimed toward club stores like Costco. Their products can be found in a range of store formats as well, although, Coristine states, some paths are more challenging to follow than others.

“If you prove yourself out in the four or five major conventional grocery stores, the move from conventional to mass is much easier,” he says. “Then, then the move from mass to club is easy, but for a brand, going from natural to conventional is really, really hard to do.”

People-centric approach
LesserEvil has succeeded in growing its products, and that achievement, Coristine reveals, is in part because of the community it calls home.

“We struck gold when we moved into Danbury,” he states. “It's a blue-collar town in a very wealthy county, but it has amazing depth of culture and particularly a lot of hardworking women.”

The company does recruit for skilled positions, such as extrusion specialists and mechanical engineers. To help build a pipeline of such staff, LesserEvil partners with Henry Abbott Technical High School and offers various training for folks once they arrive. Coristine says managers also keeps an eye out for staffers who have the right mentality and personality to succeed.

“The first word that pops to mind is attitude—‘can-do’ is what I love,” he states. “When we find can-do employees, we elevate them quickly within the organization. We're looking for people that are bright and cheery and friendly, who believe in love and joy and good things.”

Speaking of good things: when he talks about the stress and burned-out feeling of his pre-LesserEvil corporate days, they sound far behind him.

“I feel really good,” he shares. “When I get overtired, I definitely feel it, so I have to watch myself closely, so now I’m one of those people who goes to bed at 9:30, I get up at 4:30, I meditate, I stretch, I journal—I do all of these things because I don’t like feeling that way.”

And, he says, he hopes to extend that good feeling to the rest of LesserEvil.

“I know it sounds kind weird, but I built the company to work on myself,” he confides. “You want to find this internal kind of equilibrium where you feel good and grounded, so you want to build a work atmosphere that is conducive to that.”

Visitors to the Danbury offices are likely to notice the brightly colored walls, with whimsical decorations scattered throughout the offices and common areas. The building is pet-friendly, so you’ll encounter the occasional dog strolling around or snoozing in a bed next to his owner’s desk. Coristine says he spends much of his day out with the staff, only retreating to his office when he needs to hunker down and focus.

Looking ahead
“There’s still a lot of things that we can improve on,” he muses. “When I think about the future, I think mainly about the employees, and providing them with as many opportunities as possible, and that means the company’s got to continue to grow, continue to expand. Every year we strive to get better and better and better—that’s the big focus for us.”

While many manufacturing-based companies continue to struggle to find and retain good workers, Coristine says, LesserEvil has had less of a challenge in that area.

“We have a waiting list of workers that would like to work at our facilities, because of the culture we've built,” he says. “We're good to our employees. We pay them well. We care about them.”

That reputation for being people-centric, Coristine says, has helped foster a family-like environment.

“Everybody finds out that it’s a good place to work, and of a sudden there [are] brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts here. It's a really cool story.”

Coristine says the company also believes in promoting from within, rewarding entry-level staff with elevated responsibilities for a job well done.

“One of the things we're most proud of is, we've taken factory workers that we thought had worked hard and had a can-do attitude, and we brought them over to the office,” he shares. “I think 20% of the office team started in the factory, which is pretty huge. Our retention rate is 90%, which is something we're very proud of. Then, all of our senior management—95% of our factory warehouse supervisors started as people on the floor.”

One big change arrived earlier this year, when The Hershey Co.announced its acquisition of LesserEvil for a reported $750 million with an earn-out over the next two years. While the deal is still under Federal Trade Commission review, Coristine is remaining in his role as CEO, he says. And, as evidenced by its recent partnership with the Good Food Collective (a coalition of producers, associations, and other like-minded individuals) LesserEvil plans to continue its emphasis on producing premium, healthful snacks.

“Ultimately our mission and focus on high-quality, better-for-you ingredients at a great value to our customers always remains top of mind for us,” he says. SF&WB