Puffworks Tackles Healthy Snacking and Food Allergy Prevention

With healthy snacking options on the rise and America’s multi-generational love affair with peanut butter unabated, serial entrepreneur and food industry veteran Greg Murphy saw an opportunity to create something unique.

In 2017, he founded Puffworks, bringing an organic, more authentic version of peanut butter puffs (a popular Israeli snack) to the American market.

Based out of Portland, Oregon, Puffworks plays at the intersection of healthy snacking and food allergy prevention. Puffworks offers tasty peanut butter snacks made with simple and clean ingredients. The base of all of their products is peanut butter, corn and salt with 50 percent of peanut butter sourced from organic, dry roasted peanuts. Additionally, Murphy likes to tout that they have only four grams of sugar per serving while still offering the creamy sweetness of a peanut butter cup.

Puffworks Organic Peanut Butter Puffs come in four flavors: Original, Honey, Dark Chocolate and Strawberry PB&J. All are USDA-Certified Organic, Non-GMO Project Verified and gluten-free.

Around the same time Murphy launched Puffworks, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued new guidelines around peanut allergy prevention. Through the Learning Early About Peanut allergy (LEAP) study, researchers found that introducing foods containing peanuts in infancy reduced the risk of developing a peanut allergy later in life by over 80%. Murphy teamed up with pediatrician Dr. Ron Sunog, author of Eat the Eight, to expand his product line to cater to infants.

In 2018, Puffworks launched its baby product line, Puffworks Baby, which carries Peanut Butter Puffs and Almond Butter Puffs. What makes them attractive to this age group, he said, is that they are easy to hold, dissolve quickly and come in convenient grab-and-go-size bags (diaper bag approved!). This line has become increasingly popular among parents who want to introduce peanuts and tree nuts into their infant’s diet to assist with early allergy prevention.

Puffworks owes much of its success to its key demographic: Mothers. “We were fortunate to be a part of the Chobani Incubator right after we first launched,” said Murphy. “Aside from that, we have relied heavily on social media advertising and word of mouth.”

“The journey and process of being an entrepreneur is what I love,” he said. “Solving problems, finding creative ways to market solutions and the exciting process of scaling a business makes every day interesting and exciting.”

As for what’s in store for the future, Murphy would like to continue expanding the Puffworks product line to include new flavors. As its website proclaims, the end goal is always to see more people “pass the puffs.”