Michael Tierney Has Now Launched Two Brands Into Walmart. The First One Took Seven Years (and a camp stove).

HallPass landed in Walmart stores nationwide and on Walmart.com on August 30 with three products, Peanut Cups, Peanut Creme Crispy Wafers and Chocolatey Candy Pieces, each at 70 calories and one gram of sugar per serving.

It is priced at $1.82 and sits in Walmart’s Milk Chocolate aisle, not in a better-for-you set. It arrived as a first-party item rather than through Marketplace, and a photograph the brand published this week shows a branded pallet on a store floor beneath a sign reading Everyday Low Price. Both listings we checked on September 3 showed zero ratings.

National placement, a pallet on the floor, and no customers yet.

He got the Walmart commitment before he could make the product

The idea arrived at a campfire while Tierney was a college student, irritated that the chocolate in a s’more never melted. He left Eleven Madison Park to chase it, by his own account, and could not let the marshmallow go. Established manufacturers told him it could not be made at scale. Forbes reported that some of them had already spent millions trying. So he set out to design the equipment himself, telling ConfectioneryNews he spent “seven years figuring out a truly innovative system that breaks the rules” of conventional candy making. He funded the work with a second company, the gluten-free frozen brand Mikey’s.

Then, out of the blue, a Walmart buyer called and invited him to Bentonville to pitch Mikey’s.

Tierney went, and the meeting went well, and then he did something else. He unpacked a butane camping stove in a hallway at the Home Office, lit it, and started offering people homemade Stuffed Puffs, asking only that they mention to the baking goods buyer that he was there. Eventually that buyer came down. As Tierney told Entrepreneur, “three hours later I had a near eight-figure commitment.” Walmart did not comment for that story, and Entrepreneur does not date the visit.

He still had no factory. The commitment came first and the manufacturing came after, funded by an investment from Factory LLC and its managing director Richard Thompson, a retired Freshpet chief executive who liked the idea because everyone said it was impossible. The first Wisconsin plant opened in April 2019, and Tierney says that was when Stuffed Puffs shipped nationally for the first time. He brought in DJ Marshmello as an equity partner just before launch. A second plant followed in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a $65 million facility per Lehigh Valley Economic Development.

By its second year the brand was in more than 22,000 retail locations across all channels, according to Forbes, and by its second summer it was Walmart’s top-selling marshmallow by dollars, according to Inc.

When Mount Franklin Foods acquired the Stuffed Puffs assets in 2024, Tierney marked it publicly as twelve years after leaving Eleven Madison Park to chase the dream, and thanked the team, the customers and the investors who took the ride with him. Peter Rahal, who built RXBAR and then David Protein, brought him into Medici Brands last November. HallPass is nine months old.

The moat was never the recipe, and this time he did not have to build it

Tierney once described Stuffed Puffs to Forbes as “a technology platform,” an odd label for a marshmallow and an accurate one for the machinery underneath it. His plan from the start, as he told Lehigh Valley Economic Development, was to develop the intellectual property and then launch nationally “right out of the gate,” to outrun the fast followers he knew would come.

HallPass runs the same play without the seven-year detour. Medici owns Epogee, the company that makes the EPG fat replacer that both HallPass and David are formulated on, so the ingredient platform came with the parent rather than having to be invented and financed first.

The thesis is borrowed from soda, deliberately. Tierney has pointed to Coca-Cola’s second-quarter 2026 results, citing Coke Zero up 16 percent and Diet Coke up 7 percent, both outpacing the classic, as evidence that people do not abandon a category, they switch inside it. Those are his figures rather than ones we verified. His own summary of what he and Rahal set out to do is shorter than any of it: “We just wanted to change the math.”

That $1.82 is where the math shows up. Better-for-you candy has always cost more because the inputs cost more and the volumes are small, which parks those items in the specialty set where they get bought on purpose rather than on impulse. Reaching conventional pricing means controlling the expensive input and moving national volume immediately. The claim holds at the pack level and gets harder per ounce, where Walmart’s own comparison module, viewed at one store, put HallPass above Reese’s, M&M’s, Cadbury and Hershey’s own zero-sugar line.

The channel tells the same story. HallPass did not arrive through Marketplace, build reviews, and work its way toward a merchant conversation, which is the route most emerging brands run. It arrived as a first-party item, SNAP eligible from day one, in the mainline chocolate aisle. That is how a brand enters when the supply question was answered before the brand existed. Walmart has not disclosed a store count, and the brand names no other retailer.

It also did not arrive alone. In his launch post, Tierney thanked Rémi Robertson, Callie Dunnaway, Angela Mayo, Ryan Peterson, Tasha Tandy, John Laney and the rest of the Walmart team for believing in the vision and partnering to bring HallPass to shoppers. Founders do not usually name their merchants in public. That he did says something about how this one came together.

One honest note before the celebration. The panel declares 21 grams of carbohydrate against 11 of fiber and one of sugar, a construction now drawing class actions across the category, including one naming sister brand David.

There is something worth admiring in a founder who spent seven years building a machine nobody believed in, and who is now good enough at this that the machine was already waiting for him. The first time, he had to talk his way into a hallway and light a fire to get a merchant’s attention. This time the pallet was on the floor before a single person had tasted the product. Which of those is the harder position to be in when the reorder conversation comes?

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