Six months after Julie Mountain and Dana Noorily convinced a Westport farm stand to take a case of their homemade granola, the product was on shelves in 52 Whole Foods stores. They were also making almost no money on it. Walking away from that business is how The Granola Bar became a ten-location restaurant group, and it is where the co-founders started with Marc Cohen and Rich Sweeney on the latest episode of Behind the Numbers.
Mountain and Noorily are co-founders and co-CEOs of The Granola Bar Restaurant Group. They opened their tenth location in Midtown Manhattan in July 2026, they have been Restaurant365 customers since 2017, and neither had a day of restaurant experience before opening the first store.
The two met in 2010 at a three-year-old’s birthday party in the Connecticut suburbs, both recently out of New York careers. Noorily had been in finance. Mountain had been in the concert business, where she specialized in nontraditional distribution.
They positioned the granola as a gift rather than as health food: an artisanal jar with a homemade tag, pitched as the thing you bring to a dinner party instead of a bottle of wine. The first buyer, Lloyd at a Westport farm stand, asked for a case. Mountain got back to the car in tears and called Noorily to ask what a case was. Six months later they were in 52 Whole Foods stores, then a second Whole Foods region, then Fresh Market and Stew Leonard’s.
Volume did not fix the margin. Once production moved to a co-packer in New Jersey, the founders got a fast education in food science, yield, and inventory.
The larger problem was that by the time everyone in the chain had touched the product, the founders made close to nothing and the co-packer was positioned to earn more than they did. People offered the standard CPG answer, that someone buys the brand at a million bags. Their response was that a million multiplied by zero margin is still zero. Cash conversion was no better, since wholesale ran on net 30 and every payment went straight back out to buy inventory for the next bake.
The pivot came from a cold call. They walked a bag into The Yogurt Culture Company, a Dannon-owned concept store at 39th and Park, where Will Sears became a mentor. His advice was to flip the model: bring manufacturing back to their hometown, build their own kitchen, keep distributing granola, and put a small front of house on it.
Both of them asked what a front of house was.
They googled what a pro forma was, built one for a front of house they had never operated, and found a Westport location with room for a 1,200 square foot kitchen and an 800 square foot dining room. Fourteen years on, that dining room is still 800 square feet, and the back of house now serves as the commissary kitchen for the rest of the group. The menu they wrote by playing restaurant in a home kitchen is roughly 80 percent intact today.
They built a good, better, best pro forma and took it to local investors, who asked who was going to run the place and who was going to take care of their kids. The answer to both was the same, and the original 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. hours came directly from the school day.
They took no outside money, beat their own best case, and were profitable in year one. The accounting curve was steeper. The first week open, Noorily handed Mountain the cash and told her it was hers, then had to explain how much belonged to sales tax.
Restaurant365 came in right before unit three, the Stamford location that opened in March 2017. Cohen noted on the episode that The Granola Bar is customer number 421 out of more than 6,000 at the time, putting them in the top 7 percent by tenure. Cohen ran the implementation himself, spending three days onsite loading their recipes on his first customer visit.
Before the platform, the P&L arrived through QuickBooks about two weeks after the month closed. Someone asked Noorily what a specific item cost, she did not know, and he told her the fish rots from the head. They were flying blind. The group now runs on daily reporting: labor, costs, year over year sales trends, forecasting, and scheduling, with managers building the weekly forecast themselves.
Scaling from three units to ten has been largely mechanical. The Midtown flagship at 330 Madison Avenue is the exception, because one kitchen there feeds dine-in, delivery, takeaway, and catering, so the mapping from Toast into Restaurant365 and the third-party vendor setup both have to be right.
Around the corner at 22 East 43rd Street, the group opened The Granola Bar Takeaway, a grab-and-go format they see as a potential franchise concept on its own. It pulls delivery couriers out of the flagship’s front door and gives the brand an R&D test kitchen where a new item can be tested in one location instead of ten. Catering is the channel they are pushing hardest, supported by a 3,200 square foot cellar kitchen in a building that holds 2,600 people, and both the online and concierge sides are first party.
Alcohol accounts for less than 5 percent of overall sales. The founders applied for a liquor license during Covid, received it within a few months, and it changed the Rye location entirely. The point was removing reasons for a guest to say no, the principle they call the no veto restaurant.
The hospitality standard they train to is clairvoyant hospitality: know what the guest wants before they do, learn the name, never forget it. The Takeaway runs without kiosks; guests are checked out by a person with a Toast handheld before reaching the POS. They hire for temperament over resume, on the logic that goodness, kindness, and honesty cannot be taught, and their answer on hiring was hire slow, fire fast.
The Granola Bar operates ten locations across Connecticut and New York, including the two new Midtown Manhattan locations. You can find Julie Mountain and Dana Noorily on LinkedIn.
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