Hey everyone, welcome back to Inc.’s 1 Smart Business Story! Most founders dream of landing their product on Costco shelves, but for Inc. 5000 honoree Peppertux Pistachios (No. 136), it almost became a nightmare.

Husband-and-wife founders Ahat and Malia Caskurlu started Peppertux with about $35,000 from a Covid-era buyout and a simple observation. While peanuts had conquered every aisle of the grocery store, pistachios were still mostly sold as snacks. They began turning Turkish pistachios into pistachio butter and cream, selling at farmers’ markets and on Amazon before winning shelf space at Gelson’s, Target, and Wegmans. Their business generated more than $4.5 million in revenue in 2025.

Then came two game-changing moments: First, the viral Dubai chocolate craze sent demand for pistachio cream soaring. Second, Costco called. The retailer loved the product so much that buyers wanted it in warehouses within 60 days, describing it as the “Ferrari of pistachio creams.” For a bootstrapped company, that kind of order should have been a breakthrough. Instead, it created an enormous challenge.

In this story you’ll discover:

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Ahat and Malia Caskurlu turned pistachios sourced from Turkey into a hit with big-box stores.

BY ROB VERGER, SENIOR EDITOR

The husband-and-wife team of Ahat and Malia Caskurlu weren’t always into nuts. Ahat worked in the airline industry, including for Delta, and Malia worked for automakers like Mercedes-Benz USA and Kia America. A trip to Italy in 2018 seduced them into trying their hand at importing olive oil and then pistachios sourced from Ahat’s native Turkey. The couple used about $35,000 that Ahat had earned from a Covid-era buyout to fund Peppertux Pistachios, a company based in Irvine, California, that brought in over $4.5 million in revenue in 2025. (The brand is named for their gray tabby, Pepper, who has a white tuxedo marking.) Retail distribution came fast—almost too fast, as a big order from Costco posed a significant risk that the founders are still recovering from, as Malia explains.

Five years ago, we saw a green opportunity: Walk into the grocery store, and you would see bags of pistachio nuts for snacking. And we wondered, why isn’t this beloved nut in any other part of the grocery store? You look at peanuts—there are snacking peanuts, and peanut butter, and peanut butter-flavored snacks. So we thought we would grind pistachios, put them in a jar, and see how it went. So that’s our humble beginning.

We started selling pistachio butter and other products in farmers’ markets in Orange County and on Amazon at the time. The butters consistently sold out. Eventually, an L.A.-area grocery chain, Gelson’s, picked us up for distribution. We launched our first pistachio cream in 2023.

In March 2024, Target and Wegmans expressed interest in carrying our products. Target was a magical story. We were at Expo West, the natural products trade show. The booth was banging with folks. There was a line. And the Target buyer walked up with her badge flipped over, so I had no idea who she was. And she waited very patiently. We do our usual spiel: This is how you use the product. This is where it goes. Then she flips her badge over and says, “You know, this would be a perfect product for Target.” Our jaws dropped.

When the Dubai chocolate trend hit in the summer of 2024, we were in retailers, on shelves, and in stock. It really did help us grow fairly quickly. People no longer ask us, how do you use this thing? Honestly, we’re not a Dubai chocolate company—we are a pistachio company that makes what happens to go inside those viral chocolate bars.

By this point, we were pretty much debt-free, growing very responsibly, and then Costco happened. The main buyer of the bulk department told us, “We tried so many different products, but hands down, yours is like the Ferrari of pistachio creams, and there’s no runner-up.” They loved it so much that they wanted our products in their warehouse within 60 days. We were like, we’ll do our best.

We were really killing ourselves to make this happen. As a bootstrapped company, we were challenged to even find the funds to create the product. It’s nearly impossible to get a large loan for a multimillion-dollar purchase order like the ones that come from Costco. We went to every traditional bank you can think of, and they all said no. Thankfully, with the help of our friends, we had connections to a specific provider called Lunr Capital. It focuses on financing up-and-coming companies that have Costco POs. We were able to secure a loan from it and another PO financing company. We borrowed over a million dollars.

Meanwhile, because of this whole Dubai chocolate trend, some smaller companies came out of nowhere to compete with us. There was one, specifically, that was importing raw pistachios, which were found to be contaminated with salmonella. We don’t use raw pistachios—we roast them, and food safety is key. But ever since that moment, the FDA has monitored anything containing pistachios very closely. Even with us, though we’ve had a track record of having food-safe products, they still wanted to check every single container coming into the country. Our first shipment bound for Costco was held up for over a month, and then a second shipment got held up for almost a month too.

It was hard because we had a deadline to hit. Costco kept asking us, Where are these products? You’re past the deadline. What’s going on here? Why aren’t you shipping products? We had to explain over and over that we were really trying, that the delay was out of our control. We would tell them, it’s the FDA review. Our hearts would drop every time we saw an email from Costco checking in on us.

We were afraid Costco would cancel the POs, but thankfully, they didn’t. If they had canceled, I don’t know what would have happened to us. We would have tried selling the premade inventory on Amazon or pushing it to other wholesale accounts. The truth is, many companies go down because of moments like this.

I’m getting chills in my spine thinking about it, because we did eventually hit the deadline, and today Costco is a huge part of our business. But it was a very, very emotional and rough road for us. If anyone looks at us and thinks, “Wow, you guys are a bootstrapped company. You guys are doing it all on your own. You guys must be banging, right?” Yes, absolutely! From the outside in, it’s super glamorous. But the experience hasn’t been a bed of roses.

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