The Fate of 18 Rabbits

My father never told us why the 18 rabbits all suddenly disappeared one summer evening in Farmers Branch, Texas. We would piece it together many years later - my brothers, sisters and me. My dad built a large cage four feet off the ground for the rabbits with plenty of room for the mom and her 16 bunnies to stretch out. Blackjack the 18th rabbit, the wild daddy, came to visit on occasion when the bunnies were hopping around the backyard and sipping water from the swimming pool.

Next door to our house lived a congenial turkey named George, a mean next door neighbor with a barrel shotgun, and an unruly German Shepherd who had the advantage of tall pines marking the boundary line so he could cross whenever he chose. When the sun had set late one summer night, the dog wrestled the rabbits out of the cage rendering them helpless and massacred them all.   

My father didn’t believe in guns only baseball bats. But the bat was kept in the back of the car and, one horror doesn’t mean another one needs to occur. The German Shepherd was hungry and following his natural instincts that hadn’t been curbed.

So what does this have to do with the fate of 18 Rabbits.  I can finally tell you. In 2017, we had a bar manufacturer Hearthside Food Solutions who despite every effort couldn’t produce our bars. They took our money and only produced a few of the half a million we paid them to make.  What they did produce was mostly hard and inedible. On what was to be the last production run with Hearthside Food Solutions, the samples we received could bruise your jaw and break your teeth the bars were so hard. The bar maker wouldn’t take responsibility or give our money back and in the end it crushed an already vulnerable 18 Rabbits.  

18 Rabbits was on a precipice.  With more stores and higher sales than ever before, we expanded quickly across the nation in grocery. There is only so long a store will allow their shelves to go bare.

For the ten years before then, we had sustained 18 Rabbits with investment and a smart customer mix that made money instead of draining it. Making organic granola bars is expensive. Getting them on the grocery shelves requires money to endure a couple of years of it draining the bank account before they take hold and start to fill it up again.  

So why now, 18 Rabbits sued the former bar maker Hearthside Food Solutions for breach of contract. The case took six years to get to trial. 18 Rabbits won. A jury of twelve found Hearthside Food Solutions guilty. It was a pyrrhic victory in that a bad actor supplier brought the company down but, there were not enough assets recovered from Hearthside Food Solutions to do anything more than pay the legal fees. Justice was served not in a wrapper but on record.

I am grateful for the time I had with the rabbits - both the real and the mascots. They brought me and my family much joy. The profound impact of 18 Rabbits still reverberates with its mission that everyone has the right to pure and simple food using organic and regenerative oats, fruit and nuts. 

I invite you to join me as I travel in a new direction. With over twenty years of baking experience, sourcing regenerative ingredients and traveling the globe, I share recipes for granola and other baked goods using regenerative flours, roots and sweeteners along with some writing on my website AlisonVery.com and Instagram @alison_very.

Thank you for being part of the 18 Rabbits journey. May your life be filled with treats and wonders of all kinds.