Protein-bite brand started at 60 reaches $2m and 13,000 shops

Theresa Burnley was 62 and running a bakery business when she started a second one.

She owned Wiley Road Foods in Milford, New Hampshire, which made clean-label baked goods for brands including Trader Joe's and Milk Bar. In 2023 she began Circ, a protein-bite brand, on the side.

At the end of 2024 she sold the bakery business and moved to Circ full-time. She is now 65.

Circ sells six flavours and did about $2 million in top-line revenue last year, according to Burnley. She says it is stocked in more than 13,000 retail locations in the United States, including Starbucks and Walmart, and that she expects the run rate to quadruple this year.

Her stated reason for starting was that the protein bar had stopped matching how people eat — grazing, on the go, portion control, and the appetite changes that come with GLP-1 drugs.

The product decision that followed was a shape, not a recipe. Her team had already taught itself to make ball-shaped food while working for Milk Bar, and the research staff were pastry chefs rather than food scientists.

The harder part was the pack. Burnley says it took a couple of years: adapting packaging equipment to form packs holding five bites, then working with material suppliers on a resealable lid.

All in, she says the business put over $1 million into process and product development before it had a brand anyone recognised.

Circ did not use a co-packer. Burnley's account is that owning the manufacturing meant higher fixed costs at the start than a co-packed rival would carry, with a cost advantage arriving only at scale.

It also means owning the failure modes. She lists trucks that do not show up, machines that break and materials off spec, and says the defence is slack in the system — spare capacity, spare parts, buffer inventory, unhurried lead times.

The brand launched at Expo West, the American natural products trade show, and picked up early retail placements there. Revenue followed quickly, she says; profit did not.

Asked what she would do differently, Burnley says she treated Circ as a manufacturer with a brand and only later understood it was a brand with a manufacturer. She would build the brand earlier.

For a founder reading this, the useful number is the $1 million and two years spent on packaging before scale. On Burnley's account, the shelf placements came after that work, not instead of it.