The Tan Man Talks MASA Chips And How He's Changing The Snack Industry For The Better

We’re only now recognizing how much our food choices have affected our well-being. The ubiquity of junk food has raised concerns about the sinister ingredients lurking in our guilty pleasures. In the past couple of years, many of us have learned that we're consuming a myriad of synthetic ingredients: additives, artificial flavoring or coloring, and, of course, seed oils.  

The truth is, they aren't just your harmless everyday crushed seeds; these oils are extracted via an intensive industrial process that requires heavy-duty equipment and toxic solvents, turning them into a long-lasting, cheap, and potentially toxic product that’s found in our favorite snacks. So, while an image of yellow petals in a field may conjure up in your mind when you see "sunflower oil" on a label, it's really not as innocent as it sounds.

Seed oils are high in omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA), including linoleic acid. Studies in mice have shown how linoleic acid can lead to increased food consumption, larger fat cells, and disrupted hormone levels. It's also been linked to obesity and diabetes. Human studies have hinted at similar trends in the past, with linoleic acid substitutions potentially worsening cholesterol levels and weight. These studies only scratch the surface, and the seed oil rabbit hole is not for the weak.

Thus, as the demand for more nutritious – and tasty – alternatives grows, one popular snack has taken the health-conscious community by storm: MASA Chips. Designed by one of the most health-conscious entrepreneurs, Steven Arena (otherwise known as the Tan Man), these tortilla chips are free of preservatives and unhealthy seed oils. They're made by hand, fried in beef tallow, and prepared via nixtamalization, an ancient technique cherished by the Aztecs for centuries that enhances the healthful effects of corn.

Disclosure: Evie employees were gifted samples of MASA Chips to try.

"We're the number one chip in all of Erewhon," Arena shared. That's a big feat. "So that's fun too. I'm here to just enable people to be healthy without sacrificing the things they enjoy in life."

Andrea Mew, a long-time Evie reader and writer, was pleasantly surprised when she tried her first MASA tortilla chip a while ago. Like so many of us, she wanted to improve her diet and well-being without giving up delicious snacks. “The oils used to fry most chips make me pretty bloated and have caused breakouts, the salt content is unbelievable, and both flour and corn varieties are super dusty,” she told me. “When I tried MASA Chips, I knew I found the one corn chip ‘to rule them all.’” 

Others have raved about its texture, quality, and “umami” flavor. “You can really taste the authenticity in each bite. I never realized how fake and flimsy regular tortilla chips are until I tried these. The MASA chips are SO crunchy, they're thick, and they're sturdy enough to not completely give way under the weight of chunky salsa. The flavor from the organic corn really shines through, balanced by just the right amount of salt,” Rachel Squire shared with me. “I'm almost annoyed because I'll never be able to enjoy seed oil chips again now that I've had MASA.”

MASA Chips' success is reflected in its sales, selling upwards of mid-tens of thousands of bags each month, all made by hand. As with many successful products, there's often a source of inspiration behind their creation. In the case of Tan Man, his story is relatable to us all: He repeatedly fell ill due to the processed food he consumed. Once he uncovered the truth about nutrition, Arena felt compelled to craft a tasty solution.

Nicole Dominique: How did you learn about seed oils?

Steven Arena: That's a 10-year story, which I'll try to keep brief. After freshman year in college, I was just very sick because, growing up, my mom was the daughter of an Italian immigrant and she cooked everything I ever ate. I never had school lunches. So, the dining hall was a new experience for me.  

So it was like foreign food, if you will. And that left me feeling terrible by the end of freshman year. I was very sick. I was getting the flu all the time, classic health symptoms of the modern world. Then, I ended up doing an internship at this neuroscience lab in Belgium, where I had to cook for myself for the first time. There were no dining halls on campus, and you can't just eat out all the time on an intern stipend. So I was like, okay, if I'm going to cook for myself, I should figure out what to cook. And this kind of curiosity led me to discover the fact that diets exist. I never paid attention to food prior to this, so I started cooking. I think Paleo was the diet program that I followed then. 

Within two weeks, the congestion that I had had for years sort of cleared up. And I was like, wow, that's kind of crazy. This is the type of thing that I thought was inherent to me, something that wasn't changeable. And the fact that I was able to change it was eye-opening because it meant it opens the door. What else can you change about yourself through health and, of course, food, but also the lifestyle components? It's like taking control of your own destiny, right? And so I just went down all the rabbit holes.

I went back to school. I was fermenting kombucha in my dorm room, making sourdough bread in 2018 in my 200-square-foot studio apartment off campus, fermenting foods. I ate keto. I did the carnivore diet. I did the intermittent fasting thing, like basically every trend except veganism. I just became obsessed with it.

Ultimately, I stumbled upon seed oils in early 2021 as this very fundamental thing that's wrong with almost everyone's approach to food. All the diets that people have gone on about for the past 40 years, all of them ignore the seed oil question. Because seed oils are so fundamentally toxic and so fundamentally ubiquitous, it's this type of thing that's hard to ignore. It's hard to escape. And if you don't have knowledge about seed oils and actively seek to avoid them, none of your other efforts are really going to succeed. I'm not saying seed oils are the only problem with health, of course. However, it's like this big elephant in the room that no one seemed to be paying attention to up until maybe the last year or two. As I learned more about it, I was like, okay, this really is a big deal. And so I started talking about that more.

ND: Give me the story of how MASA Chips came to be. Where did you get the idea?

SA: About a year and a half ago, for New Year's, I was in Miami for winter break with a few of my friends, and at one point, I came downstairs in the Airbnb and my friend is just gorging himself on Tostitos. I asked, "Dude, what are you doing?" I had been a seed oil activist for maybe six months at that point, and I was thinking, "A friend of mine eating seed oils? Mercy!" so I started lecturing him about seed oils, and he retorts, "Yeah, dude, I get your diet stuff, but I work in private equity, and I have 100 hour work weeks. I can't cook for myself, seed oils are in everything," etcetera.

The classic sort of "Oh, I'd rather enjoy my life than be healthy" kind of thing. So then I respond, "You know you don't actually have to not enjoy your life to eat healthy." Most people have this perception in their heads that diet foods consist of kale chips, chia seeds, flax seeds, and gross things that no one wants to eat. If that's their mental framing, they reject the very idea of eating healthy outright because they don't want to be miserable. So I go on talking about how that's not true. "It's not that tortilla chips are inherently bad, you could have good tortilla chips. Here's how I'd make them."

I knew about frying in tallow because of my time in Belgium, and the french fries there (which are the most famous in the world) are fried in beef tallow. McDonald's french fries used to be fried in beef tallow, and that's one of the reasons why they're so popular. Even today, they actually add beef flavoring to their seed oils to sort of mimic the classic taste. So I was describing this perfect tortilla chip, and he's like, "Okay, yeah, that sounds great – but there's no way I'm making it. Where can I find this?"

I said, "Well, you can't." And he's said, "Well, why don't you go make it?" I thought, "Well, you know, maybe I will." So, over the intervening months, we tried to figure out how to do this thing, because obviously nothing like this exists. There's not a single fried in tallow anything in the snack market.

The classic thing that you would do if you were to start a food startup or a CPG startup, is you go find a CPG startup consultant. They find you a co-manufacturer, which is for big factories where all the food is made, white labeled with all the brands' packaging. We found one and asked him to help us, and he said, "Dude, there's just no way. You have to use at least coconut oil or avocado oil because there are so many issues in making animal-fat foods. It's just not something that's done."

That wasn't going to happen because we're making the perfect tortilla chip, and the perfect tortilla chip is fried in beef tallow. It became clear that we weren't going to have someone make it for us, so I had to figure out how to make it myself. I went and bought a box of grass-fed tallow, got some organic corn tortillas, and bought a turkey fryer at Costco. Last year at Easter, while my family was eating their normal food, I was in the backyard of my parents' house trying not to burn the place down with my propane tank and my boiling tallow of 350 degrees. I made the first prototype of MASA chips. I tried them – they were delicious. I fed them to my family, and they also thought they were delicious, and that's when I knew that all my theorizing about the perfect foods, the healthy foods, are the good tasting foods.

The last issue was bringing it to market. How to package it in a way that would make it appealing. Because beef tallow makes people go, "Oh, what's that? Strange." And we were going to make it by hand, so it was going to be very expensive. We needed a way to demonstrate the high quality, luxury nature of it. At that time, I had been talking a lot about seed oils and tanning on social media. I developed a sort of Mediterranean-like vintage aesthetic in my posts, and it just appealed to me significantly. My Substack is called "Tan Land," and I thought that would be a good aesthetic for tortilla chips.

We had an artist in Scotland that my friend knew come up with the bag design based on that sort of philosophical framing, and he chose this motif of the stripes on the umbrellas and the beach towels from the resorts on the Amalfi Coast and Positano. When we saw it, we were like, "This is beautiful. This has to happen." That was the final piece of the puzzle. So we got all the stuff together to start our first production runs, and we launched last July, and we've been rolling ever since.

ND: I see you named your company "Ancient Crunch." Could you tell us the inspiration behind that?

SA: Corn is a New World agricultural product. It was first farmed by the Aztecs or maybe even the tribes before their civilization rose to prominence. One of the things they realized is that corn, like almost every other grain, needs to be processed in some way to make it more digestible. Civilization has invented ways of dealing with this. For example, in Europe, you have sourdough bread. You don't just eat wheat. You have to ferment it in a way that makes it more digestible. 

In Latin and Meso America, it was similar but with corn. Instead of sourdough fermentation, they figured out that if you boil corn with limestone (calcium hydroxide), it enables a whole host of microbiological processes that make the corn more digestible. It also makes it taste really good. Lastly, it's what allows you to have tortillas, because if you try to grind corn and flatten it with water, it will not form a tortilla.

So when we were trying to make the perfect tortilla chip, we had to figure out how exactly the corn is processed to make it ideal. A lot of tortillas just don't do this process the right way. There's a whole host of corner-cutting methods that, say, Tostitos uses because it saves water, it's faster, it's cheaper, but it doesn't actually do the same chemical process, so the benefits are not there. We had to go back to square one and make sure the tortillas were already good to go. Then we were able to fry them in the tallow, and that's how it came together to be MASA chips.

The word masa in Spanish refers to the dough prepared after you do this process to corn, which is called nixtamalizing. So you nixtamalize corn, and the wet dough left over is called masa, and that's why our chips are called MASA.

ND: Does Ancient Crunch have any plans for the future?

SA: Yes. Imagine the center aisle of the grocery store, your standard American pantry: tortilla chips, spicy chips, potato chips, crackers, pretzels, all the crunchy, carby things that everyone loves and everyone thinks are bad for them.

There's a whole host of methods for growing and preparing food that make things real and good. The nixtamalization is just one example. Sourdough bread is another good example. Of course, organic farming is another important point. There's an entire grocery store section full of foods that people love that are basically terrible for them, but they don't have to be terrible if they're made the right way. But no one makes them the right way, except we plan to do that. So imagine your Ancient Crunch pantry – that's the idea.

ND: How much has MASA grown in the past year?

SA: I'll say we've grown 600% in our first year in business. We have 14 employees at the factory making chips by hand, which we still do because, again, this is the exact thing we're talking about. When you're big, you can have a factory full of robots to make your product. We can't afford a factory full of robots, so we have to keep making it by hand. Our Instagram is just shy of 20K, and we're probably doing a hot mid-tens of thousands of bags every month.

ND: What can people expect if they decide to cut out seed oils?

SA: There's a laundry list of seed oil effects, and I think they fall into four main categories. The first has to do with the fact that seed oils are highly inflammatory. When the seed oils break down in the presence of heat and oxygen, which your body is full of, they produce inflammatory molecules known as reactive oxygen species. This causes oxidative stress. Antioxidants are good because they inhibit oxidative stress, and oxidative stress is a fundamental biological issue that affects every tissue that it touches. If you have oxidative stress and inflammation in your eyes, you'll have macular degeneration. If you have it in your skin, you might get skin cancer and sunburn. If you have it in your liver, you'll get fatty liver disease.  

Other things people might care about that seed oils have some relationship to are PCOS, endometriosis, estrogen dominance, and the female hormonal problems that cause it. Acne is another big one, as is skin health in general. IBS is also a big one. People are bloated. They have gut problems. They can't digest their food as easily. That's inflammation in your gut.

That's one bucket. The other bucket is the relation to energy and metabolism, and no one really talks about this enough as far as seed oils go. But when you eat seed oils, they don't signal the same fullness pathways in your cells that saturated fats do. Your cells don't want to get obese, and they know when enough is enough. They should, when everything's working correctly, but when you eat seed oils, they have this funny biological act that allows them to not signal your fullness hormones, even though you eat the same calories as tallow or butter.

You'll eat seed oils, and you won't feel full; whereas if you ate tallow, you would feel full. The seed oil connection, I think, is an important part of this because if the diet foods that you're eating had saturated fat like tallow or butter, then it would be a lot easier for you to eat fewer calories because you'll actually be full.

The third part of this is that seed oils will lower your metabolism. This goes sort of back to the oxidative stress part. The stress-lowering metabolism phenomenon is very important, and seed oils are not the only cause of a lower metabolism, however, they're a big one. When your metabolism is slower, your base rate of energy consumption is lower. A good example of this is that 100 years ago, our average body temperature was about one degree higher. So everyone knows 98.6 degrees, right? Well, right now it's like 97.5. We lost an entire degree of body temperature, and body temperature is indicative of metabolic rate. Everyone's metabolism is screwed up, and when your metabolism is slow, you don't burn as many calories.

The fourth bucket is hormones. Seed oils are estrogenic, and can throw your hormones off balance. When your hormones are unbalanced, your fertility is messed up, which is why we're seeing so much talk about estrogen dominance, fertility issues, painful periods, irregular periods, and PCOS. Everyone knows about increased estrogen and breast cancer in women, and all this stuff. But the seed oils and the polyunsaturated fats play an important role in moderating all of this.

Again, seed oils are not the only thing that causes inflammation. They're not the only thing that causes hormone issues. However, they are 20% of all our calories, and they cause all of these things. They are uniquely destructive across the entire range of biology that humans possess.

Eager to try one of Tan Man's guilt-free and healthy chips? You can visit their website and Instagram here.

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