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The basics:

• Montville-based Day Out makes plant-based protein snack balls for on-the-go consumers
• Founded by pharmacist Becky Dheri after struggling to find healthy travel snacks
• Products are now sold in more than 850 stores, including Costco and Fairway Market
• Startup recently secured investment to support retail expansion

After seeing a void in healthy snack options on the road, pharmacist Becky Dheri pivoted from medicine to munchies with the launch of better-for-you snack brand Day Out.

Headquartered in Montville, the woman-owned, eight-year-old startup produces dessert-inspired, nutrient-dense, bite-sized protein balls that are designed for functional snacking on-the-go. Packaged in resealable bags, they’re formulated to provide healthy fuel for whatever one’s “day out” may be – whether it’s a busy workday, activities with the kids or an outdoor adventure.

Made in small batches, the snacks combine plant proteins like pea, chickpea, sacha inchi and chia seeds to deliver 12 grams of protein per serving. Its collection of core flavors (brownie batter, cookie dough, cinnamon bun and peanut butter cup) is free from gluten, dairy, artificial flavors, sugar alcohols, seed oils, gums and emulsifiers.

In addition to selling through its own website and Amazon, Day Out has a retail footprint of more than 850 stores nationwide, such as Costco and Fairway Market.

Over the past year, it’s been featured as one of the Best Healthy Snacks on NBC’s “Today Show” and selected as one of the 17 Best Healthy Snacks on Amazon by Men’s Health Magazine. Dheri also was included in NJBIZ’s 2025 In the Lead: Women Owned Businesses.

Day Out also has bragging rights as one of two winners of Wakefern Food Corp.’s supplier summit in 2024. The victory landed Dheri a deal that placed her snacks on the shelves of Keasbey-headquartered co-op’s ShopRite stores across the Northeast.

“Day Out was completely a side hustle from the beginning … I thoroughly enjoyed what I was doing but I also had a passion for healthy eating and wellness,” she said. “So, never in my wildest dreams did I ever think ‘Oh, my goal is to start a snack company.’ This very much sort of fell into my lap.”

Hunger pains

For Dheri, the idea for the business grew out of the frustration she felt trying to find something that wasn’t junk food while traveling for work.

As a medical science liaison in the pharmaceutical industry, Dheri’s job included meeting with health care professionals across a territory that stretched from Maine to Virginia.

“That’s why I would constantly find myself either on an airplane or in the car for a very long road trip,” she said.

After graduating from Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in 2013 with a Doctor of Pharmacy, the upstate New York native went on to do a post-grad fellowship with a major drugmaker.

Day Out was completely a side hustle from the beginning … [N]ever in my wildest dreams did I ever think ‘Oh, my goal is to start a snack company.’ This very much sort of fell into my lap.
– Becky Dheri, Day Out founder

Though Dheri has always tried to eat healthily, stay active and take care of herself, it became harder to do as she became more entrenched in her career.

“I really started to feel the impact of not necessarily having access to the types of snacks and foods that I was trying to eat while I was on the road … the majority of my meals and my snacks, I was getting those either from airports while I was waiting to board my flight or it would be stopping at random convenience stores while I was driving through God knows where — where there wasn’t a Sweetgreen, Cava or access to really foods that I was looking for,” she said.

“I noticed that as I was trying to even make healthy decisions to have a quick snack, it was grabbing a protein bar in an airport and I’d be like, ‘What are all these additional added ingredients in there?” she said.

“And day after day after day eating that, I didn’t feel my best even though I was trying to prioritize making healthy choices. So that’s really where the wheels started turning. I felt like I needed to take control of it and start to make something healthy right in my kitchen and actually bring that with me,” she said.

Getting the ball rolling

Shortly after moving to New Jersey to be with her now husband Aakash Dheri, she began trying to come up with a convenient, healthy snack that satisfied her sweet tooth and nutritional needs.

Dheri quickly thought of energy bite recipes she had experimented with in college.

So then – for more than a year – Dheri toyed with different versions of the snack, making and tweaking recipes before work trips and vacations to create a portable, shelf-stable option like a protein bar but smaller and with wholesome ingredients.

“In the beginning, it was really just trying to solve this problem for myself … Sometimes you think you’re alone in a vacuum when you have a problem like this and you’re not fully aware of the impact that it could potentially have and that this is a common problem that a lot of people were facing,” she said.

“I have a 2-year-old now, so I’ve gone from somebody that didn’t have a family when I started this to now being married and having a kid. And you’re trying to fit so much into your day that you can really lose sight of the most important self-care, which is just movement and eating healthy foods. Those things can really fall to the wayside so quickly. So being able to have a quick solution that can enable you to bring some of that power back into your life, it helps a lot,” she said.

‘Almost like a comfort food’

A huge fan of peanut butter-chocolate mashups, Dheri was guided by that combination in creating something that tasted satisfying, homemade and “almost like a comfort food.”

“When I was designing and playing around with different recipes, the first thing I had to tackle was nailing down the flavor profile of peanut butter and chocolate,” she said.

That led to the development of her first flavor – dark chocolate peanut.

“We had been working at making these basically for over a year. And I’ll never forget when my husband looked at me and he was like, ‘We should think about selling your protein balls,’” she said.

She also recalled how he pointed out that friends and family were always asking her to make the snacks for them.

“And I was like, ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to buy them, but sure,’” Dheri said.

Connecting with Rutgers

Ahead of the launch, Dheri found a commercial kitchen to work in. She also connected with the Rutgers Food Innovation Center in South Jersey for guidance on how to adjust her recipe “to make hundreds of protein balls instead of just 20 or 30 at one time.”

“They were great. They were so responsive and so helpful. So, a lot of that really helped inform the early day recipe testing and scaling. I’d say that was one of the trickiest parts initially,” she said.

The product was first sold online and at a few local farmers markets. Additionally, Dheri promoted the snacks through samplings, pop-ups and events at gyms.

“As we continued to scale, we were making our protein balls in New Jersey with a co-packer here for a long time. But then as we started to grow … we knew our goal was to really expand into retail. So, we needed to find some partners that were well equipped to handle that kind of volume,” she explained.

Day Out wound up moving production to a co-packer outside Chicago that can better fulfill large-scale orders for national chains, Dheri said.

‘An inventory nightmare’

That was just one of several changes Dheri has made to ensure her brand finds its place in the country’s roughly $13 billion better-for-you snacks market.

“In the beginning, it was just trying to try out as many things as you possibly could. At one time, we had up to nine or 10 flavors available at once,” she said.

However, that soon “became a lot logistically, because that’s just a lot of different recipes to do and a lot of products to have on hand,” she said. “It was a little bit of an inventory nightmare.”

By 2022, Day Out began testing an “indulgent” product line and introduced flavors such as brownie batter, cookie dough and cinnamon bun.

“I think being able to be in tune with our online community and our customers and see what they want and what makes sense, it really guided us in the direction that people want something that reminds them of eating a dessert,” she said. “We would constantly get this feedback of like, ‘I love these protein balls. I feel like I’m eating a treat. It’s like a guilt-free way to indulge.’”

Dheri believes the decision to narrow down Day Out’s offerings and lean into dessert-inspired flavors was “such a pivotal moment for the brand.”

She also still maintains a small commercial kitchen locally. Dheri uses it to test out limited-edition flavors and special drops, because “that’s something we like to infuse into our line.”

Recent offerings included apple cider donut and pecan pie last fall, followed by gingerbread and peppermint bark for the holiday season. Day Out just debuted peanut butter crunch in March for National Peanut Month.

“Limited releases allow us to intentionally test new innovations, gather direct consumer feedback, and validate demand before committing to a full-time SKU,” Dheri said.

Making a ‘Day’ of it

The startup also underwent a rebrand in April 2024 from Protein Power Ball to Day Out.

“The name change was directly related to how we as a company show up to our target demographic and our target consumer,” Dheri said.

“Our target consumer is usually a millennial female. They’re 28 to 45. They’re probably grocery shopping for their family. They’re looking for clean options that they can enjoy on the go. And the name Protein Power Ball, I feel, makes you think of something totally different,” Dheri said. “It makes you think of a guy walking out of Gold’s Gym who wants a 30-gram protein shake. So, I started to notice very early on just the name itself was a total disconnect with who we wanted to be and what our snack really was, which in fact, we’re a lifestyle snack.”

After a few years of working with various creative agencies on the perfect name, Dheri said a New York City marketing firm hit the sweet spot.

“It was our third meeting with them, so they had gone through a lot of the brand discovery, our vision for the brand, who our customers were, and now we’re at the point where they were presenting like 25 or 30 names that they had,” she said.

“Day Out was the third or fourth name that they read out. And I wrote it down and I was like, ‘That’s it.’ Day Out was so perfect because it really speaks to us as a company and it also speaks importantly to the product itself. The whole idea behind this product is that it’s portable. You bring it with you when you’re going somewhere, when you’re out of the house,” Dheri said.

The rebrand also introduced new packaging with bright, vibrant colors that emphasize the flavor names. Dheri said the move quickly resonated online as social media users and content creators began tagging and sharing the product.

Ready to check out?

“Up until 2024, we were primarily only sold online – on our website and on Amazon,” Dheri said. “So, the whole goal of doing all of this was so we could catch the attention of retailers. Like every CPG brand, as you grow, your goal is to get on shelves at Whole Foods, Costco and have national retail presence. But to win at retail, you have to catch someone’s attention in less than a second as they’re walking by.”

“Shortly after the rebrand, that is when we started going down the road of trying to figure out who would be the best retail partner for us to really help elevate the brand, get us in front of people, really figure out what our retail experience is going to be like,” she said.

Nailing down distribution with Costco was “by far one of the most adrenaline rush, exciting moments of this journey,” Dheri said.

“I had been cold calling Costco buyers for probably a year and a half before we started to see anything transpire with them. My first contact that I had with somebody was before the rebrand, so we were still called Protein Power Ball … I remember sending them samples and I never heard anything back,” she recalled.

Following the rebrand, Dheri sought out Costco again. After the retailer received some samples, it reached out to see if Dheri would be interested in participating in its signature Roadshow in-store sampling events.

During the course of eight roadshows spread across four weekends in the spring of 2025, Day Out generated more than $50,000 in sales and gave Costco buyers early insights into the product’s performance.

By August 2025, Day Out launched its protein balls at dozens of Costco locations in the Northeast. It expanded its retail presence last month with a rollout at 47 Costco stores in the San Francisco Bay Area and 28 Dierbergs Markets across the Midwest.

A clean (snack) break

It wasn’t too long ago that the idea of “functional snacking” – foods that deliver health benefits beyond basic nutrition – was barely on shoppers’ radar.

“When we first started approaching retailers or even very early on at farmers markets, people didn’t get the concept … They’d be like ‘I don’t understand. Can’t you just make those at home?’ And I was like, ‘Well, technically you can, but who has the time for that?’” Dheri said.

As consumers have become more informed and discerning about their dietary habits, they have been increasingly seeking options that avoid – or limit – artificial ingredients, additives, preservatives and added sugars. They’re also looking for foods that target specific health benefits, like immunity, weight management or gut health, along with transparency in ingredients.

With the global market for healthy snacks projected to hit $78.2 billion by 2030, consumer packaged goods companies are racing to meet the demand for healthy, on-the-go, affordable snacking options made from natural and plant-based ingredients that also appeal to taste buds.

“We are definitely lucky in the sense that we’re just riding along with this momentum of protein and the movement toward clean and healthy snack options,” Dheri said.

What’s ahead?

Going forward, the company plans to invest heavily in its retail execution teams to connect with customers face to face, a strategy Dheri credits for building the brand’s existing base of loyal fans.

“Getting people to try our product through sampling and in-store availability is how we’ve grown our business steadily over the last several years,” Dheri explained. “We’re proof that you don’t have to compromise on quality to scale.”

For Dheri, one of the biggest challenges has been managing growth.

“As we’re really starting to see this momentum pick up, it makes you realize the help you need,” she said. “Finding those strategic partners, finding the right people that can help guide you and mentor you through this time as you’re growing, it can really just help open doors for you and help you not make a lot of costly mistakes.”

Connecting with the experts

That’s what led her to bring on Crave Ventures as an equity partner last summer.

Headquartered in Charlotte, the firm aids emerging CPG brands with a service-for-equity model that gives founders access to marketing, branding, public relations and retail expertise without upfront capital.

“They are essentially industry experts … and are combining those two worlds of how to scale a CPG business, and then also having access to a team and a brokerage firm that can actually open those doors for you,” Dheri said. “What they help with is really full-scale marketing support. They are our partner when it comes to performance media, digital media, content creation and just what the digital strategy should be.”

To support growth, Day Out recently secured financing in a SAFE [simple agreement for future equity] round, according to Dheri. She declined to say how much.

Up until now, Day Out was primarily bootstrapped by Dheri and her husband.

“I did a very small friends and family round around the time we did the rebrand. And then once we really thought we had a proof of concept and were like, OK, we’re going to do this. We’re going to expand into retail,'” she said. “We knew we needed to do a larger raise at that point.

“The goal of this raise was to make sure we have funding available to onboard with retailers and build a retail success team,” she explained. “ … We want to be investing in demos and trial and getting people to really experience the brand. Our goal in 2026 is retail expansion and getting people to know Day Out.”