The Founder of This Snack Brand Totally Messed Its Name Up. Here's How He Fixed It. Turns out, most of us don't want to be reminded that we're eating a chip made out of a bird.

Jason Wright made a new kind of snack chip, and he knew it was good. When people tried it, they bought it. He even launched inside Whole Foods — a dream for many food brands.

So after it launched, why were sales dead?

To save his business, Wright needed to untangle a problem that bedevils many innovators: The concept was so new that consumers found it off-putting. "Because having a product that's never been done before, with a name that they've never seen before," he says, "puts people in a bad place, or they just walk by it." Instead of showing them his idea, Wright realized he needed to speak their language first.

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Wright never actually set out to make snack chips. His company, Wilde Brands, began with protein bars made with real meat — like an updated beef jerky. But Wilde had a larger competitor it couldn't keep up with.

"I was thinking of how to save Wilde, and I was depressed," Wright says, in his South Carolina twang. "So I turned to my Southern roots — comfort food. I was eating potato chips. And meat was on my mind, because we'd been making protein bars out of meat."

Then it hit him: Maybe he could make chips out of meat? Protein-infused chips exist in the market, but they're typically made with protein powder. He could differentiate with crunchy, snackable chips made with real ingredients.

Wright quickly put the pieces together: He worked with professors from Colorado State University and Boulder, Colorado-based food lab Spork & Ladle, created the product, and slapped together some packaging. On the front of the bag, in big letters, it described the product: chicken chips.

That's what went onto Whole Foods' shelves. When he gave out samples in the store, people bought the bags. But without samples, the bags didn't move.

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Wright struggled over the problem. What was wrong? He watched people as he gave them a bag. "They would look at it, read the words 'chicken chips,' and the expression on their face was not positive," he says. Oh no, he thought. What if the term "chicken chips" is disgusting?

Wright was stumped on what else to call it. He didn't want to use "protein chips," because of all the powder-based protein chip brands on the market, but he couldn't come up with something else. He thought about what differentiated Wilde. It was the ingredients. Maybe that was a good start?

Unlike before, when his team created packaging without any market testing, Wilde approached this rebrand more carefully. It started testing many variations on its bags, and zeroed in on a solution: The main description would be "protein chips" — which, despite Wright's reservations, is at least a familiar phrase to consumers — and underneath it would say, "Crafted from real ingredients including," followed by the three main ones: chicken breast, egg whites, and chicken bone broth.

During the research, he heard people say that this chip "checks all the boxes" for them. "So I said to our creative designer, 'Why don't we add a check box beside each ingredient?'" They did. It was the clear winner in tests. "Immediately people just understood it."

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When the new bags hit shelves in 2021, they finally started selling. Wilde has since expanded into Sprouts Farmers Market, where it has 13 SKUs, and online sales are strong. It outgrew its headquarters in Boulder, Colorado, and is opening a new one in Nashville, Tennessee. And Wright is thinking about expansion — growing into new categories.

When he does it, though, he'll always be mindful of what his customer is already familiar with — in order to whet their appetites for his big new ideas.

"A smart gentleman once told me, 'People don't buy what they don't know,'" Wright says. "And it's 100% true."