Taking 10 Years to Become an Overnight Success

Toom is the fastest growing food company in America in 2025 with 6,291% growth over 3 years. Wow!

Toom is the number 1 fastest-growing food company in America.

6,291% growth in 3 years.

The difference? They took 10 years to become an overnight success.

Most founders think speed is everything. Launch fast. Scale fast. Exit fast. They see the Minneapolis farmers market as a starting point to rush past.

Matt Joyce saw it differently.

8 years of R&D just to reach the starting line. Product molding on shelves. A $40k packaging machine that didn’t work. Getting booted from their first co-packer. Moving back into his parents’ house after quitting Target HQ.

While competitors were “disrupting” garlic, Toom Garlic Dips was learning how to make it shelf-stable.

This obsession with getting it right created something nobody else could replicate.

Example: The first California garlic shortage in 35 years hit. Most brands would’ve folded. Toom had already built relationships with multiple suppliers. They’d learned that lesson the hard way years earlier.

COVID cancelled demos and Expo West. Their packaging supplier went under. Each crisis that would’ve killed a younger brand just made Toom stronger.

The math tells the real story:
- Years 1-8: Foundation (aka “failure”)
- Year 9: Finally crack the formula
- Years 10-13: 6,291% growth

But here’s what really matters:

You can’t build the fastest-growing food company by being fast. You build it by being unkillable.

Every setback made them better. Every failure taught them something competitors would have to learn later. Every extra year of struggle was actually a moat.

While everyone else rushed to market, Toom built a foundation that could handle exponential growth.

The lesson? Stop racing to the starting line. Start building something worth finishing.

Sometimes a decade in the making is precisely the right speed.