In 2022, hungover one morning on New Year’s trip to Miami Beach, Meta engineer Steven Rofrano saw his friend Seth Goldstein, then working in private equity, eating a bunch of “not very high-quality” tortilla chips. Rofrano, who always tried to eat healthy but never really loved the better-for-you snack foods that were available, was appalled. “It was shocking to me to find one of my friends eating this seed oil pesticide slop,” the 31-year-old Rofrano says, recalling that he went on to describe his perfect chip: no additives, no pesticides, fried in grass-fed and -finished beef tallow, and finished with sea salt. The problem was, it didn’t exist—so Goldstein bet him that he couldn’t make it.

Rofrano accepted the challenge. He soon began experimenting, frying organic corn tortillas in grass-fed beef tallow in a turkey fryer in his parents’ backyard and seasoning his extra crunchy creation with sea salt. Goldstein was impressed and the two decided to start a business.

They spent $8,000 from their savings on an industrial fryer, a tortilla chopper and a pouch-sealing machine. Their first official batch of Masa chips was produced in July 2022 in a 400-square-foot commercial kitchen that summer and they pre-sold them online. The chips sold out in one day.

After that initial release, Erewhon, the upscale health food chain in Southern California, reached out and Masa launched exclusively in its stores that fall. Within a few months, it was Erewhon’s top-selling chip.

But there still wasn’t a manufacturer that wanted to work with the duo. Most plants were set up for cheap vegetable oils (another name for seed oils) not beef tallow. They spoke to some 200 manufacturers and got 200 rejections

So the pair spent another $250,000 of their savings—“We had been working decent jobs for a few years. We had money to throw in,” Rofrano says—to build a........

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