Six ingredients. Four growers. One ridge.
Ridgeline is a Denver, Colorado company started in 2021 by two backcountry guides and an ex‑pastry chef who got tired of bars that crumbled and butters that separated. We make snacks we'd actually carry. That's the whole brief.
Hannah Wexler used to run multi-day fastpacks in the San Juans. By mile six, every bar in her pack had split into crumbs. Sam Ortega had been baking pastry at Acorn in Denver and could not understand why a protein bar needed twenty-seven ingredients when a croissant needed five. They started Ridgeline in a rented commercial kitchen in RiNo with one product — a cold-pressed cacao bar held together by date paste and stubbornness.
We don't sell adventure. We sell food you'd be glad to find at the bottom of your bag.
Five years in, we make three things — trail mixes, nut butters, and bars — and we make them in our own small facility in north Denver. We know each of our growers by name. We pack at altitude, ship from our own dock, and read every customer email ourselves until it stops being feasible (it has not stopped being feasible).
How we source.
Our supply chain is short enough to fit on a postcard. Almonds come from a single 80-acre orchard in the Capay Valley. Oats are grown by a co-op in Cibola County, New Mexico. Cacao nibs are fermented by a single family fermentary in Tabasco, Mexico, and shipped to us via a Colorado freight partner who handles about eighty percent of our inbound. We don't use brokers. We've never used a flavor lab.
When something changes — a drought year, a new packaging vendor, a freight surcharge — we write about it in the field notes. The mailing list is short because we send one email a month, and only when there's something worth knowing.
The way we work.
We're a public benefit corporation. One percent of our revenue funds trail maintenance through the Colorado Mountain Club and the Continental Divide Trail Coalition. We don't make a thing about it on the bag because it isn't the reason we exist; we exist because we wanted better snacks. The trail money is just rent.
We don't have venture capital. Our investors are a small group of operators and friends-of-friends who understood we were going to grow slowly. The team is forty-three people. The freight bill is real. The snacks are very good.
A short timeline.
Started in a rented kitchen in RiNo.
One bar, sold at one farmers market. Sold out in six weeks.
First trail mix, first wholesale account.
REI Denver flagship took 200 bags as a test. Reordered in nine days.
Almond butter launches; first own facility.
4,200 sq ft in north Denver. Series A from operator-led group.
Whole Foods regional pickup.
Mountain region first, then expanded west. Bars now in 312 doors.
Series C · 140 employees · $28M revenue.
Three product lines, nine SKUs, three regional freight carriers. Still no flavor lab.
Spring batch · compostable wrapper v3.
After two failed iterations, the wrapper finally seals at altitude and breaks down in 90 days.
The people in the basin.
Forty-three of us, mostly in Denver, a handful in the field. The names on the bag are real.
Backcountry guide turned operator. Reads the customer inbox at 6 a.m.
Ex-pastry chef. Will not let a sugar number creep above 8 g.
Ran logistics at a regional grocery before us. Speaks fluent freight.
Joined in 2024. Closed the Series C. Quietly proud of our gross margin.
Three numbers we publish every year.
$284,000 in 2025
One percent of revenue, paid to trail-maintenance nonprofits. We name the recipients on the bag.
100% compostable
Independently certified by BPI. Breaks down in 90 days in a commercial composter.
−18% YoY
We consolidate inbound on three regional carriers and use rail for half of our finished goods.
Read the full founder letter.
The long version — including the part about the year the wrapper kept cracking and what we learned from it.
Read the letter