Forget craft paper-wrapped granola for grannies. Melbourne-born, London-traveled and now Amsterdam-based granola enthusiast and designer, Sarah Napier, is making granola cool again with G for Granola.
Striking graphics and quirky copy ahem, Granola for Gangsters make the granola something you want to show off on your kitchen shelves. The delicious alternative to quick weekday breakfasts is "handmade and baked with attitude" at the food incubator Kitchen Republic in Amsterdam. We talked to Sarah about our love for breakfast, Amsterdam's evolving brunch scene and finding a balance between work and baking. Tell us about yourself. I was born in Melbourne, Australia and lived there until I was A lot of Australians do, even my parents lived in London when they were younger.
Even though I still had the desire to travel more and find that next place, I found myself back in Melbourne through a series of debatable choices. How long did you stay before you decided to leave again? At that time, a friend from high school who was living in Amsterdam contacted me and I thought it was a nice opportunity to get out of London for a little while.
I wandered around town, biked along the canals on beautiful sunny autumn days, and thought, this is actually kind of nice. Although I was desperately trying to find work in London, something just came up in Amsterdam and it felt like the natural next step. That was five years ago, almost to the day. What was the opportunity that had come up in Amsterdam? It was actually a job at the retail design agency that I still work for four days a week called Storeage.
We create commercial interiors including retail spaces and banks and corporate interiors. And when did the granola start? The granola started about two years ago I suppose. I thought it might be a nice design and branding project, and from there it slowly, step by step, grew into what it is now. What originally interested you in granola? Years ago in Melbourne, I would stop by this place before work for a coffee. I think that was the very first seed that was planted since I was already making my own granola at home at the time.
