Dial Nine Oat One if you want to reach Amanda Krog’s granola hotline of granola products.
Krog makes Annye Lee’s Nine Oat One granola and chocolate-covered granola, which she now sells at various locations, including the Agricenter Farmers Market and Tamboli’s Pasta & Pizza restaurant.
She makes her granola products in her kitchen with the assistance of her daughter, Doris.
Amanda Krog and her Nine Oat One granola
“I love granola,” she says. “But everything that I kept buying, the front of them read ‘healthy,’ but they were still packed with sugar and sodium. At the time, I had cut out sugar and processed foods, trying to eat as clean as possible.”
Granola is “oats and nuts and dried fruits mixed together,” she says. “The first time I made it, I just made it from stuff we had from the house: oats, pecans, pumpkin seeds, honey, almond butter, some cinnamon spice. There are different kinds of oats in there.”
She got in the habit of making granola “and keeping it in the house,” she says. “I’d give a bag or two away to people when they came over.”
People began asking her for the recipe. She thought, “I wonder if anybody else is interested in this?”
She put some of her granola on Facebook. “I sold 20 bags that day.”
Her husband, chef David Krog, is the reason she came up with the chocolate granola, which is called Those Chocolate Things. He gets busy and “needs something he can just shove into his mouth right then,” Amanda says. “So having some oats and some chocolate, it’s a good power bite.”
Doris came up with the name Those Chocolate Things, Amanda says. “Because that’s what she calls them: ‘Can I have one of those chocolate things?'”
Amanda and David are slated to open their eagerly awaited restaurant, Dory, in a month and a half or so. “We’re opening a restaurant, so [the granola] was really just a side thing. If it could get me to the beach, that would be great. We had these delays with the restaurant, and the world is kind of scary right now. Being something that caught on really quickly, this is generating some income. It’s good for the family.”
Her friend Gillian Lepisto, with Phrizbie Design, designed the packaging color scheme, inspired by objects on the Krog’s fireplace mantle.
Amanda’s mother, Laura Gentry, suggested the name Annye Lee. The restaurant was named after David’s grandmother, Doris Marie Krog, so she said they should name the granola after Amanda’s grandmother, Annye Lee Mitchell.
“Since I’ve probably never taken a suggestion from my mom in my life, I decided this was a good place to start. But, also, my mom is going to be doing sales. We would love to get into grocery stores and things like that. So we have decided to partner, and she is a co-owner of Nine Oat One.”
Amanda gets all her prep work done on Sunday and then cooks the granola on Monday. “Doris loves to help us in the kitchen, playing around with different granola and stuff. And I let her mix the big bowl.”
David helps, too. “David and I late-night it after Doris goes to sleep and get everything bagged up, sealed up.”
He also does the delivering, Amanda says. “I’m probably about to switch from once-a-week delivery to either twice or a couple of days after you order. It’s getting to where I have enough orders I need to split it into two. So far this week, I have made 80 packages of granola and maybe 100 Those Chocolate Things.”
The granola comes in 4-, 8-, and 16-ounce bags.
Amanda already is planning to broaden her Nine Oat One product line. “At Christmas time, I did one with cranberries, pistachios, and candied pecans. I think I want to try that again at the holidays.”
To order Nine Oat One granola, go to nineoatone.myshopify.com.