What happens when your cereal goes to space?

When Daniel Carson thinks of space food, he thinks of freeze-dried ice cream from the ‘90s, not the lavender strawberry seed cereal he spent years developing with his best friend and business partner. 

So he was surprised to find himself in Florida last month, watching Artemis II take off, feeling the rocket’s reverberations “in the core of my soul.” 

The duo’s cereal brand, Goldy’s, had been chosen as the breakfast of choice for one of the astronauts on board. 

So how big of a boost does going to space give a small business?

Spam folder

Two years ago, Carson got an email he dismissed as a spam message. 

“We get a lot of emails through LinkedIn that end up being them trying to get money out of us for some sort of consulting service,” he told The Hustle. 

When the agency sent a follow-up, the Toronto entrepreneur began to think it might be real.

The Canadian Space Agency has a division that curates food, testing nutrition, shelf life, and taste to stock the rocket’s pantry. They’d come across Goldy’s cereal, and wanted to test it for use on a mission.

They started placing orders, a box here, a box there, shipping to CSA HQ in Quebec, then Houston, then Cape Canaveral. 

After a year, it was time for Goldy’s to face the final boss: an astronaut taste test by Canada’s own Jeremy Hansen.

“They said they loved it,” he says. 

They bought 110 servings to stock the Artemis.

Space groupies

Carson hasn’t heard yet from Hansen personally, but he has heard from space groupies eager to order some of their own strawberry lavender superseed blend or asking if they sell merch. 

“I didn’t know there were space groupies!” he says. 

The sales uptick was so big his business partner Daniel Schreiber spent the weeks after the launch packing orders in his basement. As a team of three, Carson says, it’s a hands-on operation. 

The brand’s next mission? Prepping to launch in Walmarts across Canada and the US in August — which, if you have to be back on earth, seems like a pretty good place to land.