For Brass Roots founder and Chief Eats Officer Aaron Gailmor, the phrase “watch what you eat” has special meaning. With a family history of heart disease, diabetes, and celiac disease, he has to be careful about what he puts in his body.
“The concept of food as medicine has been incredibly important to me and my family,” Gailmor said.
That philosophy led him to the sacha inchi seed, a nutty-tasting superfood grown in South America. One day in his kitchen, Gailmor tossed a handful into his food processor. After two minutes, he had a creamy, allergy-free peanut butter alternative.
“There was sort of this lightbulb moment where I was like: ‘okay, we can do anything with this,’” he recalled, including turning it into a thriving business.
In 2019, he launched Brass Roots, using Facebook Ads to target people with nut allergies, offering them free sample packs and tracking how many converted into a sale.
“The conversion rate was really high,” he said. “We knew there was a pretty clear problem our seed butter was solving.”
He launched in the Amazon store later that same year and has seen consistent 50% year-over-year growth ever since. He attributes his success to a mix of Amazon seller tools like Amazon A+ Content and Subscribe & Save, which he says have created a “flywheel effect,” helping with discovery, fulfillment and repeat revenue.
For a product made from an ingredient that is largely unknown in North America, he says Amazon A+ Content has been instrumental in educating his clients, allowing him to populate product listings with explanatory videos, interactive modules and enhanced imagery.
“If you’re trying to introduce a new ingredient to someone, having a bunch of text describing it isn’t very helpful. A+ Content allows us to offer a level of detail that’s otherwise not possible,” Gailmor said. “We can show people: Here are the farms. Here’s the plant. Here’s what it looks like when it’s roasted. That functionality is invaluable.”
Brass Roots further builds trust with customers by leaning into the Amazon Vine program, which helps sellers populate their product pages with unbiased reviews from Amazon customers—something Gailmor uses as unofficial R&D.
“The reviews from Amazon Vine help us understand if a product is ready to scale or not. For example, we might get a review that says, ‘the product is great, but it arrived, and the packaging was crinkled,’ and we’ll know to change up our packaging a little bit.”
Once customers get to know and love Brass Roots, Amazon Subscribe & Save enables them to automatically reorder, which Gainor says not only provides a valuable source of renewable revenue, but improves forecasting.
“The benefit of Amazon is you start doing well, and then you keep doing better,” he said.
Beyond sales, Brass Roots is living up to its name with community outreach. The company partners with local youth organizations in New Orleans, teaching kids about nutrition, entrepreneurship, and healthy snacking.
“Louisiana is known for good food,” said Gailmor. “We want to be part of a new story here—one that focuses on kids’ health. And Amazon gives us the tools to reach families across the country.”