At 4 a.m. on Monday, June 1, Leah Marcus woke up to 70 missed calls from her co-founder.
Good news: Renowned influencer Alix Earle posted a TikTok video about Hot Girl Pickles, the debut product from Marcus and co-founder Yasaman Bakitar’s Los Angeles-based startup Good Girl Snacks. Bad news: Most of the video featured Earl struggling to open a jar of pickles. “Imagine our horror,” Marcus said in a video response hours later, partially joking. The next adrenaline rush came the next day, Marcus and Bachtal said, when their startup’s Shopify store received hundreds of orders.
Turning chaos into content is part of the recipe at Good Girl Snacks. Good Girl Snacks sells jars of Hot Girl Pickles nationwide online and at grocery stores like Whole Foods Market and Erewhon, as well as to-go packs on its website and at small grocery stores. The startup did not disclose revenue or profitability status, but it raised a $3 million seed funding round in March and was most recently valued at $8.5 million, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Although the co-founders tout their original recipe, at a fundamental level they haven’t invented a new way to soak cucumbers in vinegar. Instead, Marcus, 26, and Bakhitar, 27, say they’ve grown their startup around the suitability of branding for Gen Z audiences, both online and offline.
Each Hot Girl Pickle product comes in brightly colored packaging in pink, purple or teal to visually stand out against the sea of primary colors of legacy brands on grocery store condiment shelves. The co-founders’ tone has nearly 175,000 social media followers, including some on Instagram, more than most traditional pickle brands that are generally less active online.
“Everything we do is create a response,” Marcus says.
Amekas Reed, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said doing business online and being unusual for its category is a plus for many Gen Zers. Gen Z, now between the ages of 14 and 29, is at a stage in life where it’s important to build “social trust” among their peers, Reed said. Reed says posting about niche products online can help you express a part of your identity to your followers. For example, a colorful jar of organic pickles can indicate that a person is a conscientious snacker.
Pickles are also a real trend right now. This summer, 20-somethings pushed the retail industry into a “peak pickle season,” says Marni Shapiro, co-founder of research and consulting firm The Retail Tracker. Pickle-flavored snacks brought in $518 million in sales from February 2025 to February 2026, an increase of nearly 40% year over year, according to data from market research firm Circana, which food giant Conagra cited in a May 18 news release.
Marcus and Bakitar, who are of Middle Eastern descent, said they grew up eating cornichon at family meals.
Provided by Leah Marcus
Bakitar and Marcus, friends who graduated from the University of Southern California in 2022, started out as two 20-somethings, and by 2023 they were sending each other daily TikTok videos about pickles. They decided to quit their jobs and start the company together that summer, as trends like Hot Girl Walks and Girl Dinners peaked on social media and inspired the startup’s name and branding.
“Our brand doesn’t take ourselves seriously. We’re constantly self-deprecating on social media. We’re doing things that aren’t typically done in our category,” Marcus says.
The pair turned to USC classmates Troy Bonde and Winston Alfieri (co-founders of pasta sauce startup Souths), as well as industry experts on LinkedIn, to learn about financing, operations, and logistics, and sought startup advice. They say they raised an undisclosed amount of money from friends and family, and Good Girl Snacks sold its first pickles directly to consumers through its website in February 2024. They posted about the process of building their business on social media throughout, gaining 24,000 followers on Instagram by the first day of sales.
The following month, Mr. Marcus and Mr. Bakitar made another strategic decision based on their network’s advice and filed an application to sell pickles at Erewhon and Whole Foods, despite having little history as a business. Both applications were approved in 2025, expanding Hot Girl Pickle’s audience to buyers who don’t often shop online.
Of course, Gen Z only makes up about 20% of the U.S. consumer market. When it comes to pickles, the industry is still dominated by decades-old traditional brands like Mount Olive and Vlasik, according to an August 2025 report from grocery delivery service Instacart. Mount Olive sells 230 million jars of pickles, peppers and relish a year, according to its website. Vlasic is owned by ConAgra and had a market capitalization of $7.72 billion as of Friday’s market close.
Bakitar and Marcus said they plan to use similar branding and marketing strategies to expand their customer base across other categories and sell snacks beyond pickles. They may face unexpected challenges. For example, the co-founders say their first stock order of pickles was accidentally frozen during shipping, resulting in 3,000 pounds of thawed gooey, chewy cucumbers. Another early shipment was delayed due to a crop-destroying storm in Mexico, they added.
The co-founders recorded both episodes in an online series they dubbed “Cucumbergate.” These growing pains, they say, are opportunities for great social media content.
