When Michael Tierney was nineteen years old, he had an innovative idea that he assumed no one ever thought of: putting chocolate inside the marshmallow. He soon discovered that not only had others thought of it, but top candy manufactures invested (and wasted) millions of dollars trying to make this idea work. For nearly a decade, he was faced with constant rejections of “this idea cannot be done,” but through perseverance and superhuman work ethic, Tierney eventually solved the unsolvable and created Stuffed Puffs, one of the only filled marshmallows in the market. This resulted in a national launch with Walmart, and today in its second year, Stuffed Puffs is carried in over 22,000 retail locations nationwide. I sat with Michael to talk through his long journey of launching Stuffed Puffs, how he solved the manufacturing challenge, and where the business is headed next.

Dave Knox: What was the inspiration behind Stuff Puffs?

Michael Tierney: When I was nineteen years old, I was sitting around a campfire in a friend’s backyard, and everyone was roasting s’mores. The problem was that at the time I didn’t like s’mores. What bothered me about the traditional s’more was that the chocolate never melted. It never looked like that TV commercial of that really ooey, gooey chocolatey s’more. It was always ice cold and slid around the graham cracker, like a hockey puck on ice. As I was sitting there, I ripped a marshmallow in half and shoved a piece of chocolate inside and put it over the fire. And of course it melted from the inside out.

At that age you think you know everything. I felt like I invented the wheel or something monumental on that stature. I was sitting around and my friends were saying, “Oh my God, this is a million dollar idea.” So that was the genesis of the idea around 2009 but it wasn’t until 2012 that I actually started the company. 

Knox: What happened in 2012 that led you to starting the business? 

Tierney: I was working in the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park in New York City and trying to figure out where I wanted to go next. The entire time since inception of the idea I couldn’t go a day without thinking about this chocolate filled marshmallow concept. Every summer I would go and look in the stores and go, “They haven’t done it yet. I still have time.” So in 2012, I decided to take 6 months, move out of the city back home to Long Island and try to get this thing off the ground. I told myself if in six months I can’t achieve anything, I will go back to the three Michelin star restaurant world. I’ll just call it a sabbatical.

And so that was the start of it. On the first night back home, I went to the hardware store and I built a giant Rube Goldberg machine in my mom’s basement. A marshmallow is a pretty messy substance, and I was playing mad scientist, trying to figure out how to do this at scale with no manufacturing background. I started looking for partners and meeting with everyone in the candy industry from manufacturers to equipment suppliers. I had a meeting with one of the biggest players in the space and I came in with these beautiful handmade samples. I sit down for this big reveal and the reaction was, “You don’t think we’ve thought of this?” I’m sitting there, and in the back of my head I’m going, “No, I really didn’t think you thought of this!” They went on to tell me that this is the running joke around the company. They get requests every day from consumers on this idea and have spent millions and millions of dollars on it. They left me with “son, go get a job”.

And so that’s what really pushed me into this. When somebody challenges me to do something, that is where I really get the most motivated. All of these equipment suppliers and big manufacturers said they had spent money on this idea, and that it doesn’t work. They told me that you cannot do it. I just refused to accept that as a possibility. But I also knew the clock was ticking because I realized this wasn’t just my great idea anymore. However, it would be a great execution if I could do it.

I had to figure out a way to keep this alive. The pitch was tough. Every equipment supplier has said this idea can’t be done. That’s a tough proposition to raise capital on. So, I started another brand as I was really trying to save Stuffed Puffs. I said,” What can I do that I know I’m good at, that will keep me from going and getting a traditional job?” It started as catering and morphed into a partnership with a very small forward-thinking health food store in Long Island. Eventually, it grew into a brand called Mikey’s, which is a frozen better-for-you, gluten-free brand that you can find today at about 10,000 stores. That success is what allowed me to continue working on Stuffed Puffs.  

Finally in 2018, Mikey’s did a partnership with an innovation venture group in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania called Factory that opened the door, allowing us to finally build a Stuffed Puffs manufacturing plant. At this point, I had spent seven years of my life scouring the earth for a manufacturer that could do this and knew that we were going to have to do it ourselves. We purchased a candy factory in Wisconsin, tore it down to the floors and rebuilt it in six months. We had our own custom designed equipment fabricated. Most of it we were doing ourselves, piecing everything together to what was the big version of my Rube Goldberg machine from my mom’s basement years before. And it worked. Suddenly, we are here in 2019 shipping product for the first time nationally thanks to a partnership with Walmart. And I thought that plant was going to last us for years. And now here we are, not even fully two years later, and we have built a second 150,000 sqft location in Bethlehem, PA that can grow to $500M in capacity. The story is really one of perseverance more than anything else. Every entrepreneur needs to be an eternal optimist because if you are not, you are going to get derailed easily.

Knox: When every “expert” in the space said it could not be done, what allowed you as industry outsiders to figure it out? 

Tierney: The fact that I knew nothing was a huge help. Sometimes not knowing enough allows you to think way more creatively than you would if you knew too much about a specific topic. In our category, candy manufacturing is relatively archaic in nature. You have a lot of suppliers out there that are so excited to show you their machines from 1912 that are still running. That mentality is a small part of where I think people were just missing the forest for the trees on how to do this. We can send rockets to Mars, but we are telling ourselves we can’t put chocolate inside of a marshmallow?  So, I looked at industries that were much more advanced than food manufacturing for inspiration and had to come up with a lot of engineering solutions internally. We tackled it from a white sheet of paper saying nothing’s sacred. When you have a large operation and a multi-billion dollar company with plants all over the world, then everything is sacred. You have all these resources and infrastructure, and you look typically at innovation through the lens of trying to figure out how to tie it into the current assets. When you are starting with nothing, it’s really easy to think far outside of that box. That was a blessing in disguise.  Having a deep background in fine dining, but not being from the world of CPG manufacturing, allowed us to really think differently about how to approach the problem.

Knox: Once you solved this manufacturing challenge, how did you go about designing the brand?

Tierney:  I think about Stuffed Puffs as a technology platform. We have created a completely innovative way of manufacturing something that everyone else said was impossible to make. The fact that we launched with a milk chocolate-filled vanilla marshmallow, with a cylindrical shape, in a lay down pillow bag was a branding and a marketing decision. I wanted to give consumers an immediate “ah-ha” moment. I wanted to ensure the product would have the easiest entry point for a consumer to gravitate towards and understand it immediately. We have been putting marshmallows and chocolates together since the 1920’s when the Girl Scouts invented S’mores, so that combination of flavors and format just made the most sense to me.

The original name of Stuffed Puffs came within the first year of working on the product. It was my younger brother Corey, who was around eight or nine at the time, who tossed out the name “Stuffy Puffy’s” from the backseat of a car on a road trip. I shortened it up but that was the original genesis.  I wanted a name that really educated the consumer on what the product is. Stuffed Puffs made so much sense for a first of its kind filled-marshmallow. It was important to me that the name described the product because marshmallows, as a category, do not have a lot of brand affinity the way other categories do. You think about the war between Coke and Pepsi—everyone knows if they picked up a Coke or Pepsi. With marshmallows, most people know if they picked up the roaster size or the minis, and there really isn’t that unaided awareness around brand recognition and brand loyalty. So for me, I wanted to do something that felt educational and familiar for the consumer. I also liked the idea of bringing character into it. In the spirit of keeping it in the family, my mom, who is an incredibly talented artist, actually drew the first character. I liked the idea of having a mascot, this very jovial character that kids could relate to, and I hoped it could eventually be the face of the brand.

Knox: What is next for Stuffed Puffs? 

Tierney: We have a lot of fun innovation in the pipeline. Currently, our product portfolio includes our Classic Milk Chocolate, Chocolate on Chocolate, Chocolate Peppermint Bark, and our individually wrapped Halloween and Easter items. I look at Stuffed Puffs as a technology platform and we are going to start leveraging our vast abilities to launch new filled marshmallow products that continue to redefine what it means for a consumer to treat themself. We are becoming more that just a marshmallow and really going into the $40B candy space.  Whether it’s different shapes, snackable sizes, coatings on the outside, inclusions like cookie bits, or different colors and flavorings, we have a huge portfolio in the pipeline. We spend a lot of resources and focus on product development and innovation. From the beginning, we have set out to continue to do what was said to be impossible.