Cole Glass and the Education of a Muffin

Cole Glass brought a Lululemon bag to investor meetings. Inside were muffins, cookies and waffles. The pitch deck lived on his computer, but the more persuasive material could be eaten. There are advantages to selling an idea that comes with breakfast. There are also disadvantages: a slide can survive a little exaggeration; a disappointing waffle is harder to talk around.

Before Hero Bread became a brand in grocery aisles, Glass had spent roughly two years teaching himself to bake with combinations of proteins and fibers. He had no culinary background. The task he set himself required familiar results from unfamiliar formulas. A muffin still had to be recognizably a muffin. Whatever happened in the mixing bowl, the person eating it should not need an explanation.

He eventually cold-emailed Mattson, the Bay Area food-development firm, to ask for an assessment. Testing gave him a reason to take the next step and approach investors. The journey from his kitchen to someone else’s conference room was short in geography and substantial in everything else. Private experiments were about to acquire employees, purchase orders and expectations.

A business student meets an uncooperative dough

Glass studied at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business from 2008 to 2012. His public profile lists the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Club and Georgetown Collegiate Investors among his activities. Those interests fit the eventual founder. They do rather less to explain the sheer amount of baking that followed. A business education supplies useful questions. Dough reserves the right to ignore them.

His experiments began in 2017. Hero’s own account describes more than 100 muffins a day as he changed ingredients and worked toward the texture he wanted. The quantity is the company’s account of its beginnings, rather than a production record independently audited by a muffin inspector. Still, the practical point is clear: Glass kept making batches long before there was a national audience waiting to taste them.

An early investor connection came through a particularly well-timed email. Glass approached GreatPoint on the day Beyond Meat went public. He was asking investors already interested in changing familiar foods to consider another familiar food. Ray Lane became part of Hero’s board. The proposition had a reference point that venture investors could understand, even if its immediate evidence arrived in a shopping bag.

Every shape had its own argument

Glass’s product thinking grew more specific as the range expanded. A tortilla has to bend around a filling. A bun has to hold its shape. A croissant needs a dough that can form layers. Calling all three bread-adjacent does very little for the person trying to manufacture them. Each product required its own formulation and its own answer to the question of how it should behave.

He described the work as building a library of ingredients and learning what happened when they met different amounts of water and fat. That is a useful glimpse of his habits: experimentation organized into knowledge that can be used again. The cheerful branding sat on top of a demanding process. A failed batch could still offer information, even when it offered very little prospect of lunch.

By October 2022, Glass said the team had tested about 180 iterations of sandwich bread in six months. He explained that a crust turning out too crunchy might suggest a future baguette; a tortilla rolled too thin could point toward pastry. Errors became possible entries in the next product brief. For a founder whose original work involved repeated trials, that was a practical way to keep the trials useful.

“It becomes a giant probability math problem.”Cole Glass, on developing different doughs, 2022

The first door was a very large one

Hero’s public debut came through Subway in October 2021. A six-inch roll joined a restaurant operation where choosing the bread is part of the ordering ritual. Glass wanted customers to be able to use Hero with their usual sandwich. It was a commercially legible introduction: keep the order recognizable and change one component.

The backers made the launch unusually visible. Tom Brady, Kevin Durant, Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, The Weeknd and Lil Baby were among the names attached to Hero. The roster brought sport, music and venture capital to the same bread basket. A person encountering the brand could reasonably wonder how a home-kitchen project had acquired such an elaborate guest list.

By June 2022, Hero announced that its rolls would reach more than 1,600 Subway franchises. New markets included New York, the Bay Area and San Diego. At the same time, other routes were opening. Hero began selling directly through its own website in April 2022. It was learning how to reach people both through a restaurant counter and through the considerably less fragrant experience of an online checkout.

The founder votes to change the recipe

The Subway arrangement became difficult to sustain. The problem reached beyond whether the roll was good. Servicing the account consumed resources, and the economics were unfavorable. A product can pass a taste test while the business around it struggles. For Glass, this meant confronting the limits of the route that had introduced his company to the public.

YuChiang Cheng became involved through an investment on behalf of 444 Capital and took an interim marketing role in 2022. Hero withdrew from Subway and put greater attention on direct sales and retail. Cheng later described Glass as a board member who advocated for the pivot and supported his eventual appointment as CEO. That is a consequential detail in a founder’s biography: Glass helped approve a different answer, including a different person at the operating helm.

Cheng took over as CEO in November 2023. Glass remained the founder, a former CEO and a board member. The change puts an interesting boundary around the usual story of entrepreneurial persistence. Continuing to bake through failed experiments had helped create Hero. Continuing the original commercial arrangement indefinitely would have asked a different question of the same instinct. Glass supported changing course.

The second purchase says more

In early 2023, the company’s retail presence was still small enough to count without a spreadsheet of intimidating proportions. Its May announcement described an expansion from 23 grocery stores to 2,300 across 32 states. A $15 million Series B brought total funding to $47.5 million. Sprouts and regional grocery chains would put the products in front of shoppers who had never watched the launch or read an investor announcement.

The company reported that 54 percent of grocery purchasers bought again during its first five months on shelves. That figure belongs to that early period; it should not be mistaken for a permanent rate. It mattered because a second purchase offers a different kind of evidence from a celebrity endorsement. Someone had taken the bread home, used it, and decided to spend money on it again.

Glass was also talking about margins and the difficulty of setting a price that worked for both the customer and the company. His language had moved toward execution. By then, Hero supported retailers through sampling, coupons and employee education. The founder with the bag of muffins was operating in a world where making the product understood on a shelf mattered alongside making the product itself.

“The key for us was going from pitching a dream to pitching a business.”Cole Glass, 2023

The tortilla refused to cooperate

Even after the leadership change, Glass continued to speak publicly about product development. In January 2024, he discussed Hero’s move from canola oil to olive oil, a change prompted by customer feedback. The rollout had taken close to six months. Most products accommodated the change relatively easily. Tortillas made the team work harder on flavor.

That small detail gives the story some welcome resistance. A broad company announcement can make a reformulation sound like changing a line on a label. Glass described the less tidy reality of getting one particular product to behave properly. The ambition was to make the change across the range, including the awkward member of the family. Anyone who has cooked for a group will recognize the trouble caused by one holdout.

Hero was also making room for products with a different sort of appeal: croissants, Hawaiian rolls and biscuits, alongside its everyday loaves and buns. Glass said new offerings went through consumer sensory testing. The range gave his original technical work more places to go, while the tasting process kept bringing it back to an ordinary question. Would someone actually enjoy eating this?

A cupboard bigger than a job title

By June 2024, Hero announced another $21 million in funding and had distribution in more than 4,000 retailers. Those developments came under Cheng’s leadership. They are part of the company’s continuation, rather than achievements to assign entirely to its founder. Glass’s part in that continuation includes having built the initial product foundation and supported the transition that followed.

His stated ambition remained expansive. In March 2024 he talked about extending Hero across the things people make with flour. It is an aspiration broad enough to include the humble hot dog bun and the much more demanding croissant. There is something appealingly domestic about that scale of ambition. The imagined destination is a cupboard with more possibilities in it.

In October 2026, Cheng described a company that had reached about 10,000 retail doors and generated $54 million in revenue the previous year. The distance from Glass’s early investor visits is substantial. Yet the original test remains stubbornly personal. Someone takes a bite, decides what they think, and eventually chooses whether to buy another package. Glass began by carrying that test into a meeting. The company he founded now encounters it in thousands of shopping baskets.