Why 5% of everything we make goes to brain tumor research

I'm not someone who writes about personal stuff on the internet.

I'm a working mom of two little girls - Olivia is four and Madison is two - and most days I'm just trying to keep up.

I work in tech. My husband Joe works in tech. My sister Jenna works in tech. None of us are serial entrepreneurs. We didn't start Better Snacks Co. because we saw a market opportunity. We started it because we kept showing up to kids' activities and thinking - why is this the only option?

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In 2025, I was diagnosed with an Acoustic Neuroma.

It's a rare, benign tumor that grows on the nerve connecting your inner ear to your brain. Non-cancerous, slow-growing, and for many people - including me - the approach may be to monitor it before immediately treating.

Which means I'm living with it. Watching it. Waiting to see if it grows.

When something like that lands in your life at 37, with a four-year-old and a two-year-old at home, you go through a lot of emotions fast.

• Relief that it wasn't something worse.

• Gratitude that we caught it.

• And then something quieter - a shift in how you think about the things you can actually control.

The diagnosis had nothing to do with how I ate or lived. My doctors were clear about that. But when you're sitting with something you can't fix or make go away, you naturally start paying more attention to the things you can influence.

For me, one of those things was food. Not in an obsessive way. Not a dramatic overhaul. Just - hey, let's actually pay attention to what we're putting in our bodies and what we're handing our kids.

I'd always cared about eating well. But this made it more real.

Around the same time, we kept noticing the same thing at their sports & gym classes. Kids running up hungry after an hour of hard work, and the only option was a vending machine full of seed oils, artificial dyes, added sugars, and ingredients none of us would buy at the grocery store on purpose. Not because the facilities didn't care. Just because nobody had put anything better there.

Jenna, Joe, and I talked about it enough times that eventually we stopped talking and started building.

Better Snacks Co. is what came out of that – clean vending machines in the places kids already are. Real snacks that pass one test - would we give this to our own kids without hesitation?

We're not experts.

We're parents who got tired of the default and decided to do something about it.

Which brings me to the donation.

Five percent of everything Better Snacks Co. makes goes to the National Brain Tumor Society.

Not because we're trying to make my diagnosis part of our brand story. But because when something touches your family, you want to do something to help. The National Brain Tumor Society funds research, supports patients, and advocates for better treatment options for the 700,000 Americans living with a brain tumor right now. Some of them, like me, are in the monitoring phase. Others are facing something much harder.

If this post resonates with you - if you or someone you love has been affected by a brain tumor - I hope you'll consider a donation or reading about their wonderful work.

And if you want to support the work we're doing at Better Snacks Co., know that every machine placement, every snack purchase, puts something toward research that matters to our family.

We have two opinionated little taste testers making sure we get the snacks right.

And we have a reason to do this that goes beyond the business. That feels like enough for me.

- Brittany