Snack ProductsBetter-For-YouNuts & Trail Mixes

Wild Fox Foods aims to deliver clean, craveable snacks

The recently launched company offers roasted nuts, trail mixes, and protein bars.

Two pouches of Wild Fox Foods fruity trail mixes — Courtesy of Wild Fox Foods

Founded by a trio with BFY snack experience, the new brand crafts wholesome snacks with bold flavors.

Consumers these days are more particular than ever—specifically, when it comes to snacks, they want what they want and are not often about to compromise. The founders of Wild Fox Foods had this idea in mind when launching their line of snacks—the better-for-you products are aimed at shoppers who demand healthful foods while also insisting they taste great. To learn more, we connected with Kevin McCray, one of the seasoned food founders behind the company.

Jenni Spinner: Could you please tell me about how Wild Fox Foods got started? I know the founders have a history in the BFY goodies space.

Kevin McCray: Wild Fox Foods officially launched in early September with the promise to clean up the snack aisle through their cleverly clean, craveable snacks. The team started with their debut line of roasted nuts, trail mix, and protein bars, all featuring nature's purest ingredients and zero compromises when it comes to nutrition, ﬂavor, and quality.

The Wild Fox founding team—Dan Costa, Kelsie Costa, and myself—is the same team that created Kevin’s Natural Foods in 2019. We were able to rapidly grow the business and become a leading brand in the prepared meals category, which led to the acquisition by Mars Foods in 2023. Although it’s a wildly different offering, we see Wild Fox Foods as a continuation of Kevin’s Natural Foods’ mission: Empowering even the busiest people to eat clean without sacriﬁcing ﬂavor. Only now, we’re focused on the food that people eat between meals: snacks.

Driven by the same desire to make a meaningful impact on the way the broader society eats, snacks made it on our radar based on how prevalent they are in the daily lives of today’s consumer. We saw some estimates state that a quarter of the calories people consume come from snacks. With this in mind, we feel that by giving people clean on-the-go snacks, Wild Fox can make a signiﬁcant and positive impact on society that will complement the progress we made at Kevin’s.

JS: In our initial chat, you mentioned one of the goals is to reinvigorate the nuts/trail mix category—could you talk about what about that category makes it primed for livening up?

KM: At Wild Fox Foods, we’re dedicated to creating genuinely healthy snacks. When we dug into one of the categories with the best reputation for “health” in the store –nuts– we were surprised to ﬁnd that most roasted nuts on the shelf are actually not “roasted” at all. In fact, they’re fried in inﬂammatory seed oils. We set out to improve that process by truly “roasting” the nuts with a light coating of avocado oil.

We brought this same philosophy to the trail mix category, which is oftentimes loaded with reﬁned sugars. Our trail mixes have no added sugar, with only 6-8 grams of sugar, which is naturally occurring in the fruit we use.

JS: Tell us about the current product lineup—the ﬂavors, ingredients, etc.

KM: For our ﬁrst set of products launched, we started with Roasted Nuts, Trail Mix, and Protein Bars.

Roasted Nuts: We use a proprietary roasting process that allows us to truly roast our nuts and spritz with avocado oil and seasonings from our ﬂavor house partners. Varieties include Sea Salt Almonds, Lightly Salted Almonds, Hickory Smoked Almonds, Sea Salt Cashews, and Chili Roasted Almonds.
Trail Mix: Each trail mix balances the earthiness of almonds and cashews with the sun-dried brightness of fruit to bring the ﬂavor to whatever trail you’re blazing. Varieties include Cherry Burst Trail Mix, Cranberry Crunch Trail Mix, Cashew Cherry Berry Trail Mix, and Dark Chocolate Berry Trail Mix.
Protein Bars - Using milk protein isolate crisps as the base, the texture is crispy yet chewy (a refreshing break from the current protein bar options). Flavors include Dark Chocolate Sea Salt, Cinnamon Churro, and Caramel Sea Salt. The protein bars have a similar texture to a Rice Krispy Treat but are gluten-free and high-ﬁber with 15g of protein and only 3g of sugar.

Image courtesy of Wild Fox Foods

JS: Then, tell us about the BFY bona ﬁdes of your products—it’s “free from” a lot of stuff consumers are on the lookout for.

KM: All Wild Fox Foods snacks are free from seed oils, reﬁned sugars, and artiﬁcial dyes, ﬂavors, and ingredients. Each product is gluten-free, grain-free, soy-free, glycerin-free, and sugar alcohol-free. All are ﬂavored with natural spices and ﬂavors to enhance the ﬂavor of its star ingredients: nuts, dark chocolate, fruits, and milk protein isolate crisps.

JS: In addition to the clean-label aspects, what makes Wild Fox stand out in the nuts/snack mixes categories? You mentioned bold ﬂavors, so could you talk about that?

KM: Our secret sauce is the ability to make healthy food taste delicious. For the roasted nuts, that meant improving the oil from common seed oils to avocado oil, removing reﬁned sugar from the seasonings, and avoiding ﬂavor crutches like hydrolyzed vegetable proteins. For the trail mix, we had a head start because we already redesigned the roasting process and elevated to using avocado oil for the nuts. Next, we worked hard to develop cleaner inclusions like dark chocolate and dried fruits without reﬁned sugar and seed oils. All of these moves had to be made without sacriﬁcing ﬂavor. This is a practice we honed at Kevin's, where we had to make rich, indulgent sauces while still meeting the strictest nutrition standards in the category. This experience gave us the ability to elevate the process, the ingredients used, and the recipes in a way that positions Wild Fox to be both the cleanest and tastiest products in the category.

JS: What’s next for Wild Fox? Please feel free to talk about retail expansion, new products/ﬂavors, whatever you like.

KM: Our focus is to continue to expand distribution and keep the pedal to the metal on innovation. We recently launched in Raley's, HyVee, ShopRite, and Save Mart, with Sprouts in the pipeline for early 2026 and more retailers to be announced soon. As far as innovation, we just launched a new trail mix--Dark Chocolate Berry—and a new roasted almond ﬂavor—Chili Roasted. We have more new products lined up in all three categories that will be hitting the shelves in January.

JS: Finally, do you have a favorite product among your offerings?

KM: Our new Dark Chocolate Berry Trail Mix is deﬁnitely one of my current favorites. Between the custom chocolate with just four ingredients (cacao beans, coconut sugar, cocoa butter, monk fruit extract), the avocado oil-roasted almonds, cashews, and the cherries and cranberries with no reﬁned sugar, it is unlike anything else on the market.

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Jenni Spinner is the chief editor of Snack Food and Wholesale Bakery with more than 25 years of experience in business-to-business communications. She has written extensively about food production, safety and packaging; pharmaceutical drug development; concrete and masonry construction; and more. She holds a Bachelor’s in Communications from the University of Illinois. Jenni can be reached at spinnerj@bnpmedia.com.