How I Built This Sep 21, 2026 58m 38m saved
With Brian Rudolph, co-founder of Banza
An advocacy group published tests claiming Banza's chickpea pasta carried the herbicide glyphosate, and the company's sales fell 30% the following week.
The usual story about a decade-old brand in more than 25,000 stores is a run of good decisions. Brian Rudolph's account is mostly production runs that failed, a product he was ashamed to ship, and a crisis he says he had no prepared answer for.
"For absolute clarity, our sales went down 30% week over week."
Rudolph started the company in a Detroit apartment in 2013 while working as the first employee at a tech startup, rolling chickpea dough with a wine bottle at five in the morning. He and his brother Scott built it into the first chickpea pasta on the market and, this year, the fifth-biggest pasta brand in the United States.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 58 minutes of audio, 20 minutes of reading.
Here are the 18 moments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Sales fell 30% week over week after an advocacy group published pesticide tests, with no warning and no prepared response Its own later testing came back 98% lower than the claim, and still was not zero
The natural channel has been the slowest to recover, and those were the best per-store accounts
The first big production run turned to mush at 1,000 pounds an hour, having worked at 150
20,000 boxes shipped with a sticker over the cooking instructions telling buyers to steep the pasta like tea
The plant manager who threw him out later became his manufacturing partner
"Chickpeas" on the front of the box scared shoppers, so the lead message became protein and fiber
The box is orange because every other pasta was blue
A pitch competition he lost produced the first retail account — a full-chain listing in about 190 Midwest stores
The founding question was whether he would still care in 10 years
His model was Chobani: do in pasta what Greek yogurt did in dairy
He now answers glyphosate mentions personally, including on Reddit, and calls it exhausting
1. Venture For America
Rudolph graduated in 2012 and went to Detroit on a fellowship that Andrew Yang had started before running for president.
What the program was for
He started this nonprofit with the idea of creating jobs in cities that had lost jobs and doing it through entrepreneurship.
Brian Rudolph
Where it put him
And yeah, that's what brought me to Detroit, getting to be the first employee at a tech startup.
Brian Rudolph
The company built urgency-driven promotions for big brands, the feeling of Black Friday on other days of the year, and he did everything, customer service and cold outreach included. He calls it an incredible way to learn.
2. The Elimination Diet
The business exists because of a health problem. Rudolph was cycling through antibiotics and steroids for sinus infections and was, on the trend line, heading for surgery.
The suggestion came from an unlikely direction
And my dad, of all people, recommended I try an elimination diet.
Brian Rudolph
A month without wheat, then a reintroduction, gave him his answer.
The test was a beer
And then I remember reintroducing it in the form of beer. And the next day, I was like, I can't breathe. My nose is fully stuffed.
Brian Rudolph
The specialist he spoke to was not persuaded by the mechanism and did not argue with the result, telling him
listen, I don't know what you're talking about. But if it works for you, stick with it.
Brian Rudolph
There is more research on the connection now, he said, than there was then.
3. Chobani, But Pasta
It took about a year for that to become a business idea. He was working through other things, subscription boxes being the fashion at the time, when someone in that industry asked him a question that redirected him.
The question that decided it
And she asked me, if you were to work on this for 10 years, do you think that you'd still be excited about it 10 years from now?
Brian Rudolph
He was already making high-protein breads and ice creams in his kitchen, and already dissatisfied with gluten-free pasta.
What the question surfaced
it dawned on me that you can actually build a meaningful food business and have it be healthy
Brian Rudolph
And the model he had in mind
I looked to what Chobani did in yogurt, creating Greek yogurt, and it kind of clicked. I was like, I want to do in pasta what Chobani did in yogurt. That would be the dream.
Brian Rudolph
Guy Raz pointed out there were already gluten-free options in 2012 and 2013, brown rice pasta among them. Rudolph's answer was that brown rice pasta is much better now than it was then.
4. Why Beans
The nutritional case was the obvious one: protein, fiber, antioxidants, and a vegetable rather than a starch. The argument that made him commit was about farming.
Beans are the efficient protein
The more I learned about the environmental side of beans, that they're the most efficient form of protein per greenhouse gas emissions, I just started to think, like, how cool is that?
Brian Rudolph
The appeal, he said, is a product that does more good the more of it you sell.
5. Chia Was A Mistake
Raz laid out why wheat is easy — flour, egg yolk, salt, water, and a gluten network that makes the dough elastic. Chickpea flour has none of that.
He started with the supermarket brand
I bought chickpea flour on Amazon. It was Bob's Red Mill.
Brian Rudolph
And a binder that did not work
I remember the very first version I made was something like chickpeas, eggs, and chia.
Brian Rudolph
His verdict on it
And chia was not the best idea.
Brian Rudolph
The kitchen setup was improvised.
No rolling pin
I didn't have a roller pin. I was using a wine bottle.
Brian Rudolph
He cut the sheets with a knife and boiled the slices.
The result
It was really bad.
Brian Rudolph
The next version dropped the chia and was better. Egg worked, but he wanted the product to be vegan so it would reach more people.
Which sent him back to the same supplier
So I also used tapioca from Bob's Red Mill.
Brian Rudolph
6. The $30 Pasta Machine
The first piece of equipment was a hand crank.
The machine
There's a very popular hand crank called the Marcato Atlas 150.
Brian Rudolph
What it cost
I bought it, I think it was something like $30 on Amazon and use that to sheet the dough and then ultimately turn it into spaghetti.
Brian Rudolph
He bought a drying rack and worked through temperatures and times.
The routine
And, you know, I was waking up every morning before work, making chickpea pasta 5 a.m. blasting country music. My roommate thought I was crazy.
Brian Rudolph
The first outside verdict came from his boss at the startup.
Damning with faint praise, and enough
And he was like, it's okay. I was like, okay, maybe there's something that we can work with here.
Brian Rudolph
The claim he is proudest of
One thing that's very cool is we can claim to be the first ever chickpea pasta, which I am very proud of.
Brian Rudolph
7. A Brother And A Name
By the autumn of 2013 he wanted a partner, and asked his older brother Scott, who had startup experience.
The relationship it came out of
So I've always looked up to my brother. We are eight years apart. And even when I was a kid, everything he did, I wanted to do.
Brian Rudolph
Scott had been thinking about what to do next and offered to be an advisor. Rudolph counter-offered on the spot, asking him to be a co-founder instead.
The decision took five seconds
And he sat with it for like five seconds. And he was like, yeah, let's do it.
Brian Rudolph
The name came out of a riffing session with a friend, starting from garbanzo, and he says he is still happy with it — partly because it scans like the word pasta.
8. Crowdfunding And TV
The money came from a campaign on RocketHub, tied to matching funds from the fellowship. He made the video himself, using a song he had written as the backing track.
Guy Raz put the number on it
And you raise $17,000.
Guy Raz
That drew the attention of producers at CNBC's Restaurant Startup, which invited him on before Banza was selling anything.
The policy at the time
our attitude at the time was we'll do anything you know we'll try anything we'll talk to anyone who will listen to us because if it wasn't going to work i just wanted to know
Brian Rudolph
Why the format appealed
a really quick way to learn, a pretty scary way to learn because if it goes terribly, like that also might be the end of it
Brian Rudolph
The format required them to open a restaurant, so they built a chickpea-pasta version of a fast-casual counter with toppings, and the judges were chefs.
Who walked through
I remember Nancy Silverton came through.
Brian Rudolph
The investor judge was Joe Bastianich, a co-founder of Eataly, and the negotiation was staged for television.
How the deal was done on camera
he took a box of pasta, ripped it open, through the pasta everywhere on the table. It was like reality TV to a T.
Brian Rudolph
And the second tranche of money
We also raised $75,000 on the show.
Brian Rudolph
9. 190 Meijer Stores
The other founding account came out of a competition he lost.
His method was volume
I was just doing any pitch competition anyone would hear me at.
Brian Rudolph
He came last at a University of Michigan competition, which he attributes to not having gone to Michigan and the vote being a popularity contest. One judge knew the gluten-free buyer at Meijer and made an introduction.
He turned up with no packaging and no ask
I showed up to the meeting still with pasta in a bag, a little baggy, no packaging, and just said, you know, I was looking for advice.
Brian Rudolph
He proposed five stores, then ten. The buyer wanted something else.
The answer he was not expecting
And he was like, no, actually, I want it for the full chain.
Brian Rudolph
The first two accounts, launching at almost the same moment, were about 190 Meijer stores and two Eataly shops.
10. Everything Went Wrong
A tiny gluten-free plant in Michigan could only run 150 to 200 pounds an hour, which was not enough for a grocery launch, so they moved to the largest gluten-free pasta manufacturer they could find, outside Los Angeles.
A category they had never made
They had no experience working with beans.
Brian Rudolph
What followed
it felt like just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong when trying to do that scale up
Brian Rudolph
The failure mode
By the time the pasta came out, it looked okay, but you'd boil it, and it was just mush, like complete mush.
Brian Rudolph
Raz put the arithmetic on it.
The cost of a mistake scales with the line
So going from 150, 200 pounds an hour to 1,000 pounds an hour, it's just the scale of a mistake increases dramatically.
Guy Raz
Each run was eight to fifteen thousand pounds, and a failed one cost the tolling and the ingredients. They had just over $100,000 in total. After three bad runs, most of it was gone.
What it did to him
So I became extremely stressed. It was not paying attention to like taking care of myself. I was not sleeping.
Brian Rudolph
He became dehydrated enough to trigger a latent kidney stone, and ended up in an emergency room on the day of what he thought was the last run they could afford, rating his pain a nine.
What he was actually thinking about
I'm thinking to myself, this company is not going to survive before it even launches. This is the end of the world if this doesn't work.
Brian Rudolph
The cause turned out to be as basic as it gets. Going onto the floor against the plant's instructions, he asked the press operators what was happening.
Nobody had told the line what they were making
And they're like, yeah, this corn smells funny. And I was like, that's because it's not corn. You're not making a corn pasta today. It's chickpeas.
Brian Rudolph
What that got him
And that was when they kicked me out of the plant.
Brian Rudolph
11. Steep It Like Tea
With a purchase order due, a distributor warning them they would never work with the retailer again, and almost no money left, they worked through cooking times and then abandoned boiling altogether.
The idea that saved the launch
what if you don't boil it at all? What if it just sits in hot water the same way that you steep tea?
Brian Rudolph
It held together that way — not like wheat pasta, but not falling apart.
He shipped something he was not proud of
I was still, listen, I was not proud of it. I felt really bad about having to sell this under our brand, but I also knew it was a matter of survival.
Brian Rudolph
The packaging was already printed, so the new instructions went on as stickers: the pasta was even easier to cook than regular pasta, and you steeped it like tea.
Applied by hand, one box at a time
20,000 boxes. So we ended up finding some people who worked at that plant to help us. And it was brutal.
Brian Rudolph
Afterwards they retreated to the small Michigan plant, where runs were short enough to test and adjust continuously.
12. Orange In A Blue Aisle
The design went through many iterations, tested at farmers' markets, and the finding reshaped the message.
The ingredient was a deterrent, not a draw
saying chickpeas as a lead actually scared a lot of people
Brian Rudolph
So did gluten-free, which came off the front of the box and went on the side, with the certification mark.
Who they wanted the box to speak to
We really wanted people to think of this not as a product that's not for them, but a product that could be because it's high in protein, high in fiber.
Brian Rudolph
He also thinks the combination itself did work: protein and pasta are two ideas people do not expect together, and the surprise built interest.
The color was a shelf decision as much as a personal one — orange is his favorite, from growing up on Nickelodeon.
The aisle was monochrome
we also thought about what would stand out and saw that at the time almost all pasta was blue. It was crazy. You would think that they were all in cahoots because every single one would look the exact same.
Brian Rudolph
13. Owning The Plant
By 2015 the small Michigan plant was at capacity and unwilling to buy another line. The solution arrived on LinkedIn, from the manager who had thrown him off the floor in California, asking whether Banza would be a customer of a plant he was thinking of starting.
His first reaction
And I hated him. I hated him so much because he kicked me out of the plant. So it took every ounce of swallowing my pride to answer that message and say, sure, let's chat.
Brian Rudolph
The counter-proposal was to build the facility together rather than as supplier and customer, which was also less risky for the other side. Financing it is why Banza raised a seed round for the first time, in April 2016, on momentum they could show: a few thousand stores, the new orange packaging arriving, and a repeating pattern in the sales line where an end-of-aisle display lifted sales to a new baseline that held after the display came down.
It was not the plan
But we were very nervous about setting up our own facility.
Brian Rudolph
Every other option came first
It was only after exhausting all the other options.
Brian Rudolph
After the first production disaster, he said, they were focused on de-risking, and owning the line was the lowest-investment way to do it.
14. Target, And Pasta Content
About two and a half years in, Target took it — not chain-wide.
A test, watched closely
A couple hundred stores to see how it would go. And, you know, we watched it like a hawk.
Brian Rudolph
Raz's point was that a brand usually gets one chance at a retailer that size. Rudolph credits the orange box and an early bet on social media, at a time when he thinks most brands were not taking it seriously.
The audience they built
I remember it wasn't long before we were able to say we had more followers than any pasta brand.
Brian Rudolph
It helped in sales conversations as well as with shoppers. The method was to find people making good recipe content and send them pasta.
What he thinks actually worked
the relentless pursuit of just saying, like, please pay attention to us, right?
Brian Rudolph
By 2022 the brand was in 21,000 stores, with pizza, mac and cheese and rice alongside the pasta.
15. The Glyphosate Report
In 2024 the advocacy group Moms Across America published tests claiming Banza products contained the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup. Nobody contacted the company first.
How he found out
I was sitting in a one-on-one. I saw a Google Alert and my heart sank. It was terrifying.
Brian Rudolph
Most of the supply chain was already traceable and they knew many of the growers.
Which is why it made no sense to him
And none of the farmers that we have a relationship with were spraying glyphosate.
Brian Rudolph
The message spread through the group's network of influencers, getting more extreme as it travelled.
Why it moved so fast
fear and food is a very compelling message on social media
Brian Rudolph
The company put a holding statement on its website saying it was investigating, which he accepts was not what the most worried people wanted, and waited on lab results that kept slipping — three weeks in the end.
The commercial effect was immediate
For absolute clarity, our sales went down 30% week over week.
Brian Rudolph
He says the sales were not what preoccupied him. People he had known for years were calling; one caller was crying, frightened, because she fed the pasta to her children.
What it did to him physically
And it got to a point where a video would go online. My whole body would start shaking from the adrenaline and the fear.
Brian Rudolph
And the weight went with it
I legitimately lost like 10 pounds during that time period because I was just walking nonstop trying to work through the stress.
Brian Rudolph
Underneath it was an identity problem he admits to: he had spent a decade trying to make healthy food, and was now being accused of poisoning people.
16. 98% Lower
The results, when they came, did not match the claim.
The gap
And what we published was ultimately 98% lower than what was claimed.
Brian Rudolph
It was also not zero, which Raz pressed him on.
He does not pretend otherwise
So what I had to sit with was that's not great either, right?
Brian Rudolph
The level was below the Environmental Working Group's benchmark, which he called already very conservative, and he decided the answer was to remove it entirely rather than argue about thresholds.
Why he thought it was solvable
I know we can solve this because the majority of our supply chain is already this way.
Brian Rudolph
Within a few weeks every farmer was known, with heavy testing where they were not — the pasta made in Italy, for instance. The second half of the response was certification, through the organization behind the glyphosate residue-free mark, whose newer program tests a standardized panel of more than 400 pesticides designed by the testing laboratories rather than by the brand.
What he wanted from it
And what I loved about it is it's all focused on transparency. It's meant to be a form of accountability that is very public.
Brian Rudolph
The commitment attached to it is publishing results even when they are positive, with a root-cause analysis, because drift from neighboring fields happens.
The honest version of farming
The reality of farming is messier than most people think.
Brian Rudolph
Every box now carries a QR code to the test results.
17. What He'd Do Differently
Asked what he would tell someone in the same position, Rudolph's answer was to say more, sooner.
Over-communicate, and be specific about what you care about
if you respond with an earnest assessment of the situation, show what you care about, what you intend to do about it, I think that can be well received. It's hard to do.
Brian Rudolph
He wishes the lab results had come back faster and, failing that, that the early statement had been easier to find and more direct about what was happening.
Recovery has been uneven.
The accounts that were best are the slowest back
the natural channel has been much slower to recover
Brian Rudolph
Those stores had the strongest per-store sales and the most repeat customers, and they are also where shoppers are most receptive to the message that hurt him — which he says does make sense.
His position on the people who published it
I truly believe that the moms across America team is extremely well intended.
Brian Rudolph
Assuming positive intent, he said, is what made the episode tolerable. He now has alerts on every mention of the brand and the chemical together, and answers them himself.
Including on the platform it lives on
I jump in on Reddit.
Brian Rudolph
The aim is that no version of the story appears anywhere without context.
The cost of that
which is exhausting. It's exhausting.
Brian Rudolph
18. Luck, And Doing Less
Banza became the fifth-biggest pasta brand in the United States this year and now sells a wheat-based high-protein pasta, frozen pizzas, protein waffles and mac and cheese, into a category where Barilla makes chickpea pasta too. Asked where the growth is, Rudolph named the original product.
The core has not moved
At the end of the day, our most important product is still our chickpea pasta, the very first.
Brian Rudolph
And the discipline he is trying to keep
continuing to challenge myself to do less in the face of a lot of enthusiasm to want to do more
Brian Rudolph
On how much of the outcome he attributes to luck against work, his answer collapses the distinction.
The job is manufacturing your own luck
I think when we're at our best, we are doing anything we can to increase the likelihood of luck.
Brian Rudolph
The reality show, and the chaos around it, is his example: it was worth doing because it raised the odds that something would go right.
The formulation he ended on
If we're doing it right, we're just increasing the likelihood of a tailwind.
Brian Rudolph
Bonus Insights
His diet before any of this
In college, I had a drawer of chewy bars. I had Chipotle one time 20 days in a row and hummus in the fridge.
Brian Rudolph
Food, he said, was fuel and nothing more until the elimination diet.
The show crashed the website
The CNBC episode aired on 5 August and took the site down. There was real demand and no way to buy, and a lot of frustrated emails. Rudolph's view is that even with the invented drama, it told the story to a large audience very fast, and was a dream way to get that kind of exposure.
Flavor was a known problem
Wheat pasta is close to neutral and works as a canvas for sauce. Non-wheat flours bring their own flavor, and Rudolph said a red sauce hid it while lighter sauces did not — a work in progress, in his words. What carried the product anyway was that it solved a real problem for people who wanted pasta that was nutrient-dense.
Raz's own framing of the early years
Raz noted that Rudolph had appeared briefly on the show once before, and that a listener could otherwise come away thinking Banza jumped from success to success — which is why he wanted the failures on the record.
A parting suggestion
Told about the manual work of answering every glyphosate mention, Raz suggested he build an agent to do it. Rudolph allowed that it might be helpful.
Rudolph's bottom line is that a health brand's exposure is not to its own testing but to whoever publishes a claim about it first, and that the only durable answer he found was to make the supply chain verifiable and publish the results whether they are good or not.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Banza (The company: first chickpea pasta on the market, now in more than 25,000 stores and the fifth-biggest US pasta brand)
Bob's Red Mill (The source of the chickpea flour, tapioca and gum in every early kitchen experiment)
Marcato Atlas 150 (The roughly $30 hand-crank machine he sheeted and cut the first spaghetti on)
Amazon (Where the flour and the pasta machine came from)
Venture for America (Andrew Yang's fellowship, which took him to Detroit and matched his crowdfunding)
RocketHub (The crowdfunding platform that raised $17,000 on a video he made himself)
CNBC's Restaurant Startup (The reality show that produced $75,000, an Eataly listing and a website crash)
Eataly (Joe Bastianich's chain; two of its shops were one of Banza's two founding accounts)
Meijer (The Midwest grocery chain whose buyer took the product chain-wide, about 190 stores, off a cold pitch)
Target (The retailer that made it a national brand, starting with a couple of hundred stores)
Whole Foods (Part of the natural channel that has been slowest to recover from the 2024 crisis)
Chobani (The explicit model: do in pasta what Greek yogurt did in dairy)
Barilla (Now makes chickpea pasta too, alongside the lupini and other chickpea brands)
Roundup (The herbicide brand whose active ingredient, glyphosate, was at the center of the report)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The Moms Across America glyphosate test results (The report that triggered the crisis; Banza's own later testing came back 98% lower)
The Detox Project (Created the glyphosate residue-free certification and the broader pesticide-panel program Banza now publishes against)
Environmental Working Group benchmarks (The conservative risk threshold Rudolph's own results sat below)
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