Susan Phillips Moskowitz had lived in Palo Alto for more than 30 years, but she had never been to The Old Pro, a bar in the city known for its allegiance to Stanford. While she was a student in the Stanford Ignite program in early 2013, the group had a social night at The Old Pro.
Moskowitz entered the bar hoping to make a connection with her fellow students, who were younger than her and lukewarm about working closely with her.
“They saw grandma and they didn’t want grandma on their team,” Moskowitz says.
Fortunately, Moskowitz had struck up a friendship with a 30-year-old Asian student named Daniel and he was about to make a suggestion that would forever change her standing in the class.
“Some of the students were riding the mechanical bull and Daniel looked at me and said, ‘Susan, it’s your turn to ride,’” she says. “I thought, ‘OK, I’ve never done that.’ But I signed my life away and I got on the bull.”
Her classmates suddenly saw her as a peer — not a grandmother — and everything began to change.
Flash back to 1994 when Moskowitz was inspired to create Mrs. Moskowitz’s Munchies LLC.
“I came up with this recipe during Passover and we all started eating it and I sent some to my friend in Minnesota and she said, ‘Susan, this is so good. You should package it,’” Moskowitz says.
She started small, selling her munchies of granola-like clusters — she uses matzo instead of oats — to Palo Alto Baking Co. She soon got into Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s. Then, in 1996, she was a finalist for best snack food at the Fancy Food Show.
“My husband said, ‘Here’s the checkbook, go be the next Mrs. Fields,’” she says.
That ambitious goal didn’t pan out, however, and Moskowitz had to shut Munchies down in 1998. She worked other jobs and even became somewhat of a YouTube sensation with a series of knitting videos, but Munchies was out of the picture.
Then, in the fall of 2002, she was hired as a project coordinator in the geophysics department at Stanford.
“I didn’t know anything about geophysics, but I knew how to do events and they taught me the software I needed to manage grant money,” she says.
After 11 years on the job, she became familiar with Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture. With the help of Daniel and her other newfound friends in the Ignite program, Moskowitz decided to give Mrs. Moskowitz’s Munchies another shot.
She applied for a permit through the new California Homemade Food Act, formed a limited liability company and passed a couple other legal hurdles to enable her to sell her product anywhere in the world through her website, a technology which wasn’t really an option the first time around.
“Munchies are not flying off the shelf, but I have so much support from friends that I’m still doing it,” she says. “They won’t let me stop.”
She also sells at the Palo Alto Farmers Market and continues to be involved with Stanford Ignite as an event host.
“I have a lot of fun being with these young people,” she says. “You just never know who you’re going to meet.” ●
