The Calgary ultra-runner who couldn't find an oatmeal worth eating, so he built one from his kitchen

A geologist, a kitchen, and an oatmeal worth running on

The story does not start in a grocery aisle. It starts on a mountain ridge. Simon Donato earned a PhD in geology, then spent years co-hosting the Esquire Network series Boundless, chasing some of the longest, hardest races on the planet. Multi-day mountain ultras are an unforgiving feedback loop, the food either works or it does not, and Donato kept running into the same problem: there was no instant oatmeal on grocery shelves clean enough, dense enough, and balanced enough for what his body actually needed at four in the morning before a twelve-hour day on his feet.

So he made his own. From his Calgary kitchen, he blended certified organic, gluten-free oats with chia, flax, and hemp, the kind of line you can read on a pouch in three seconds. He brought cofounder Brad Slessor in, and the two put in roughly $30,000 to $40,000 each to take the kitchen recipe to market. The early venue was unromantic and exactly right for a Prairie food brand: Calgary farmers' markets, weekend after weekend, talking to the same health-conscious shoppers who would later become Stoked's first online customers.

“We had a really strong community straight out of the gate of health-conscious, athletic individuals who are early adopters.”

The next chapter was the Canadian growth rite of passage. Donato, Slessor, and team member Shaun Stevens took the brand to CBC's Dragons' Den and pitched a line of protein-infused oatmeal to a national audience. The exposure helped, but the deeper move was the slow one. Donato has said he ran Stoked part-time, around twenty hours a week, for years because he had built distributor relationships patient enough to let the brand compound rather than burn out. That discipline shows up on the shelf today.

What they actually make

The oatmeal: The core of Stoked is its quick-cook oatmeal blends, certified organic and gluten-free, with each variety built around the same base of Prairie oats and a working balance of chia, flax, and hemp. Some blends layer in additional ingredients like cocoa, cinnamon, dried fruit, or plant protein, but every pouch reads short and clean.

Beyond oatmeal: Over the past few years the range has stretched into granola, an OatRice ready-grain pouch designed as a faster substitute for cooked rice, and a pancake mix that follows the same gluten-free organic blueprint. Each new format keeps Prairie oats at the centre and adds a use case, from breakfast bowl to dinner side to weekend brunch.

Where the oats come from: All of the oats are sourced from family farmers across Alberta and Saskatchewan, milled and packaged by Stoked Oats Ltd., and certified through the Canada Organic Trade Association. The sourcing story is not a marketing flourish, it is the supply chain.

Why people love it

Stoked earned a loyal following in two waves. First the early adopters, the runners, climbers, and cyclists who wanted a breakfast they could trust on the morning of a hard effort. Second the everyday grocery shopper, drawn to a label they could actually read and an oatmeal that cooked in under three minutes without compromising the ingredient list. The praise tends to land in the same place, that the blends taste like food rather than fortification, and that the gluten-free organic promise is one the brand actually keeps.

How it compares to other Canadian oat & whole-grain brands

Canada has a deep bench of independent breakfast and whole-grain brands, especially across the Prairies and the West Coast. Stoked sits in a specific lane: organic, gluten-free, athlete-led, and distributed broadly in conventional grocery. Here is how it lands next to other Canadian players you might already have in your cart:

Categories and positioning reflect publicly listed information on each brand's site as of June 2026. Pricing intentionally omitted because it varies materially by retailer. See the live product links below.

The growth story operators should pay attention to

The instructive part of Stoked Oats is the pace. Donato did not try to lap the category. He sold a few hundred pouches at a time, in person, at farmers' markets, where the customer told you what worked and what did not before you spent a dollar on packaging. That direct feedback loop is unglamorous, but it is also the cheapest, highest-fidelity product research a CPG brand can get, and it is why Stoked's flagship blends were already tuned to a real audience by the time grocery buyers ever saw a sell sheet.

The second move was treating distribution as a partnership, not a land grab. Donato has said he ran the business part-time for years, around twenty hours a week, because the distributors he chose were patient enough to grow the brand in line with the brand's capacity to deliver. That kind of supply-chain patience is rare in early-stage CPG, where the temptation to fill every shelf you can win typically outruns the brand's ability to actually service those doors.

The operator lesson is sequence. Prove the product to a defined community, in person, with a label they can read in three seconds. Choose distributor and retail partners who can scale at your pace, not theirs. Add formats only when the core product is already a habit. That discipline is why an oatmeal recipe built in a Calgary kitchen now sits on Walmart and Costco shelves across the country, with a Prairie supply chain that connects a shopper in Toronto back to a family farm in Saskatchewan.

What people are saying

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes directly to a live Stoked Oats listing or the brand's own site, not just a homepage, so you can add a real pouch to your cart without hunting:

For the full range, including granola, OatRice, and pancake mix, browse stokedoats.com. Availability varies by retailer and region, so the direct site and Amazon storefront are usually the fastest way to check what's in stock today.

Bottom line

Stoked Oats is the proof that the most reliable Canadian CPG growth path is still founder-led, ingredient-honest, and patient. An ultra-runner with a PhD could not find an oatmeal worth carrying into the mountains, so he built one in his Calgary kitchen, ran it part-time for years to keep the supply chain honest, and grew a Prairie-sourced brand from a farmers' market table to the shelves of every major Canadian grocery chain. The oatmeal is the easy sell. The patience behind it, prove it small, then scale on your own terms, is the part worth studying. If you want to try it, the Classic Oatmeal is the place to start.