September 25, 2025
4 min read
MUSH is redefining breakfast by making healthy food more accessible
Born as a father-daughter inside joke, the Chicago-based company is now a $100 million business.
Key takeaways
- Headquartered in Chicago, MUSH is an overnight oatmeal company with products on shelves in nearly 12,000 stores across the United States.
- Ashley Thompson, the company’s Co-founder and CEO, calls making healthy food affordable one of the company’s key tenets.
- With the help of Wells Fargo, MUSH recently brought manufacturing operations in-house, allowing it to stay focused on food equity and accessibility.
Mankind’s Ultimate Source of Health, or MUSH, didn’t start in a fancy lab with dozens of scientists and nutritionists experimenting with high-tech, state-of-the-art equipment.
The oatmeal company was founded on an inside joke between Ashley Thompson, the company’s co-founder and CEO, and her father. As a child, Thompson loved cereal and ate it daily. Her preferred style was unique, however. She’d add oatmeal and milk to the cereal and let her concoction soak overnight.
Each day, her father would ask, “What’s in your mush this morning?”
“My dad is one of my heroes,” Thompson said. “When I built this business, I thought about him a lot, and those morning interactions have stuck with me across decades.”
She started MUSH in 2015 after quitting her job as a trader of asset-backed securities at Goldman Sachs.
Today, MUSH is headquartered in Chicago, with manufacturing operations based in Salt Lake City. The business is tracking toward $100 million in revenue this year and is on shelves at nearly 12,000 stores across the United States.
By the end of 2025, MUSH will have sold more than 200 million cups of oatmeal in a little more than 10 years.
MUSH CEO Ashley Thompson (left) and sister Jackie before Ashley started MUSH.
“As a young professional trying to cut my teeth in the big corporate world, I spent lots of hours at the office. It’s hard to stay active and be health conscious when you’re rarely home and don’t have a ton of time away from your desk or area of responsibility. If I didn’t have a good, healthy breakfast I’d be super hungry throughout the day, and it would impact my ability to do my job … So, I started making overnight oats that I could bring in as a nutritional snack. One day at work, I just thought to myself ‘Why hasn’t anyone commercialized this opportunity? There are so many amazing health benefits from this food, and it’s convenient.’”
Access to healthy food for all
Thompson doesn’t view accessibility to healthy food as a political stance. Instead, it’s a foundational principle for MUSH and embedded in every action the company takes.
“When people eat healthy foods, they feel a whole lot better — mentally, physically, and spiritually,” she said. “Food affects the experiences people have, and we want everyone to live amazing, healthy lives because you only get one. And right now, in America, the inequalities when it comes to food are astonishing. Generally, the cheaper the food, the unhealthier it is.”
She considers striving to make healthy food affordable a “human mission.”
“Healthy food is a human right,” Thompson said. “Aside from the inaccessibility, we also have an education problem. Most Americans struggle to fuel themselves well because of so much conflicting information about what’s healthy for our bodies. We try to close the information gap for consumers by only using whole food ingredients … ones you can pronounce. MUSH is there so you don’t have to sacrifice health for convenience or cost.”
MUSH Director of Manufacturing Dylan Landow and COO Gui Freile in the MUSH R&D lab in Salt Lake City.
MUSH SVP Sales, Laura Troiano, with Ashley and Gui on a work trip.
Keeping costs low
As MUSH grew, Thompson knew keeping prices down was going to be a big challenge. As she explained, co-manufacturers don’t typically like to give up profit margin as they scale.
Bringing manufacturing operations in house has allowed MUSH to control the two most important things to a business — cost and quality.
“From the very beginning, Wells Fargo has been an incredible partner. Their team understood our needs and funded the capex that enabled us to reduce retail prices by 50% over the last five years. Equity is the most expensive form of capital, and thanks to Wells Fargo, I was able to retain a meaningful stake while carrying out our mission of making healthy food more affordable and accessible to as many people as possible. I’m profoundly grateful — we couldn’t be where we are today without them.”
