Ancient Crunch, the parent company behind the MASA tortilla chip brand, will place its Original flavor in 55 Costco Wholesale locations across Washington and Oregon — the brand's first foray into the warehouse club channel and its latest step in a broader national retail push.
The Distribution Play
The Costco listing adds a strategically distinct retail format to a distribution network that already covers more than 3,000 doors. MASA's existing partners include Whole Foods Market, Sprouts, Wegmans, Target, Erewhon, The Fresh Market, and H-E-B — a mix of natural, specialty, and conventional grocery chains that signals the brand is competing across multiple premium snack tiers simultaneously. The warehouse club channel, with its bulk-format buying and high-volume membership traffic, broadens MASA's addressable consumer base beyond the specialty grocery shopper.
The brand reports current production of more than 400,000 bags per month and claims a number-one tortilla chip rank at select retail partners — metrics that suggest meaningful velocity rather than shelf presence alone. The Costco expansion will require larger-format packaging consistent with the club channel's value proposition, a move Ancient Crunch framed as improving accessibility for cost-conscious buyers of premium food.
Ingredient Positioning Drives Shelf Gains
MASA's three-ingredient formula — organic nixtamalized corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed and finished beef tallow — sits at the intersection of two durable snack trends: seed-oil avoidance and minimally processed formulations. The absence of seed oils has become a credible on-pack claim for a growing segment of health-oriented consumers, and MASA has built its retail narrative largely around that differentiation.
Steven Rofrano, Chief Executive Officer of Ancient Crunch, said the club channel's scale and its members' orientation toward quality and value made Costco a logical next partner. "We're proud to bring our snacks to Costco members and offer them in a larger format that delivers more value, and makes buying real food more convenient," Rofrano said.
What the Move Signals
For the broader premium snack segment, the MASA-Costco pairing illustrates how better-for-you brands with strong velocity data are increasingly able to negotiate entry into high-volume channels once reserved for established legacy labels. Warehouse clubs have become a proving ground for emerging food brands willing to commit to the high unit volumes the format demands.
Ancient Crunch's trajectory — from specialty independents to national natural chains to a mass-adjacent club retailer — mirrors a path taken by several snack brands that scaled rapidly on the back of clean-label claims and social media-driven discovery. Whether the brand can sustain production ramp and margin discipline as volume requirements increase will be the operational question underpinning this expansion.
For retail buyers and foodservice distributors tracking the better-for-you snack category, the Costco listing represents a meaningful channel validation for a sub-five-year-old brand. Coverage of emerging premium food brands is also tracked regularly by Food & Beverage Magazine.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
