At 4 a.m. on Monday, June 1, Leah Marcus woke up to 70 missed calls from her co-founder. The cause: influencer Alix Earle had posted a TikTok video about Hot Girl Pickles, the debut product from Marcus and co-founder Yasaman Bakhitar’s Los Angeles-based startup Good Girl Snacks. The catch: much of the video showed Earle struggling to open the jar.
“Imagine our horror,” Marcus said, only half-joking, in a response video posted hours later. The panic soon turned to adrenaline as hundreds of orders flooded the startup’s Shopify store the following day, according to Marcus and Bakhitar. Turning that chaos into content has become part of the recipe at Good Girl Snacks, which sells jars of Hot Girl Pickles nationwide online and in grocery stores including Whole Foods Market and Erewhon, plus grab-and-go packets online and in smaller grocers.
The startup declined to share revenue figures or profitability status, but was most recently valued at $8.5 million following a $3 million seed fundraising round in March, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Branding over brine
The co-founders tout original recipes, but at a fundamental level, they didn’t invent a new method for soaking cucumbers in vinegar. Instead, Marcus, 26, and Bakhitar, 27, say they’ve built the company around an aptitude for branding aimed at a Gen Z audience, both online and offline.
Hot Girl Pickles packaging comes in bright pink, purple and teal, standing out against the sea of primary colors used by legacy brands on grocery store condiment shelves. Their tone on social media — where they count nearly 175,000 Instagram followers, more than most traditional pickle brands — is dry, self-deprecating and a little sarcastic.
“Everything we do is to create a reaction,” Marcus said.
The Gen Z appeal
An online-first business that’s atypical for its category resonates with many Gen Z consumers, says Americus Reed, a marketing professor at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Gen Zers, currently aged 14 to 29, are in a life stage where building “social credibility” among peers matters, Reed said. Sharing niche products online helps them express part of their identity — like how a colorful jar of organic pickles can signal conscientious snacking.
Pickles are also a genuine trend right now. Twenty-somethings pushed retail into “peak pickle” this summer, said Marni Shapiro, co-founder of research and consulting firm The Retail Tracker. Pickle-flavored snacks brought in $518 million in sales between February 2025 and February 2026, up nearly 40% from the prior-year period, according to Circana data cited by food giant Conagra in a May 18 news release.
From TikTok to grocery shelves
Bakhitar and Marcus, college friends who graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022, started as pickle-obsessed 20-somethings themselves, sending each other TikTok videos about pickles as early as 2023. They quit their jobs that summer to launch the company, riding the wave of social media trends like Hot Girl Walk and Girl Dinner that inspired their brand’s name and look.
“Our brand doesn’t take itself seriously. We’re self-deprecating on social media all the time. We do things that aren’t typically done in our category,” Marcus said.
The pair sought advice from USC classmates Troy Bonde and Winston Alfieri — co-founders of pasta sauce startup Sauz — and from industry experts on LinkedIn to learn about funding, operations and logistics. They raised an undisclosed amount from friends and family, and sold their first pickles direct-to-consumer in February 2024. By day one of sales, they had amassed 24,000 Instagram followers by chronicling the startup journey online.
The following month, they applied to sell at Erewhon and Whole Foods despite having little business history, a move their network recommended. Both applications were approved in 2025, expanding Hot Girl Pickles’ reach to less-online shoppers.
Big brands and bigger challenges
Gen Z still only accounts for about 20% of the U.S. consumer market, and the pickle industry remains dominated by decades-old names like Mt. Olive and Vlasic, according to an August 2025 report from Instacart. Mt. Olive sells 230 million jars of pickles, peppers and relishes per year, per its website. Vlasic is owned by Conagra, which had a market cap of $7.72 billion as of Friday’s market close.
Bakhitar and Marcus plan to expand beyond pickles, applying the same branding playbook to other snack categories. They’ve already weathered early stumbles: their first inventory order accidentally froze in shipping, yielding 3,000 pounds of defrosted, soggy, crunch-less cucumbers, and another shipment was delayed by a crop-destroying storm in Mexico. They documented both episodes in an online series they dubbed “cucumber gate.” Growing pains, they say, make great content.
Source: www.cnbc.com — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/29/how-two-gen-z-founders-made-hot-girl-pickles-stand-out.html
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