A Fire Destroyed $4 Million of Her Product. She Rebuilt Without a Single Outside Investor.

Alysa Seeland started FOND at a farmers market in New Braunfels, Texas, in 2015, selling bone broth out of a regenerative food system she believed in more than she had capital for. Her husband dropped her off that first day, and she hoped she wouldn’t come home in tears. She sold out.

In 2022, while she was in the middle of raising a Series A and pregnant with her sixth child, her co-manufacturer’s facility burned to the ground. The damage: more than $4 million in product, gone, against a $150,000 insurance payout. Most founders would call that the end of the story. Alysa walked away from the funding round entirely, put up her own equity as collateral for a $3 million rebuild loan, and launched an internal push she called “Break It and Rebuild It” — get every channel of the business profitable or cut it loose.

Here’s the part that actually matters for anyone building a business right now: eighteen months later, FOND relaunched stronger, and today it’s profitable, debt-free of outside investment, and growing 48% year over year, sold in H-E-B, Sprouts, Whole Foods, and now Albertsons — all while Alysa homeschools six boys. She didn’t trade equity for a bailout. She bet on herself and won.

It’s easy to talk about resilience in the abstract. It’s a different thing to watch someone rebuild a supply chain from a burned-down building using their own name on the loan.

Alysa tells the whole story — the fire, the loan, the rebuild — on this episode of Starting Small.

Listen to the full conversation with Alysa Seeland on Apple Podcasts