Emily O’Brien returned to Toronto from vacationing in the Caribbean with drugs strapped to her body. She was promptly arrested and sentenced to federal prison. Where her story diverges from what you might expect is in what she did during her time behind bars: she started a company. Comeback Snacks was born while she was incarcerated and she now uses the platform to shine a light on what happens to people when they go to prison — and the positive impact they can have on society when they’re out.
Emily O’Brien returned to Toronto from vacationing in the Caribbean with drugs strapped to her body. She was promptly arrested and sentenced to federal prison. Where her story diverges from what you might expect is in what she did during her time behind bars: she started a company. Comeback Snacks was born while she was incarcerated and she now uses the platform to shine a light on what happens to people when they go to prison — and the positive impact they can have on society when they’re out.
[00:00:00.070] - Speaker 1
If you look at so many people on LinkedIn, half of them are, like, lying about what they do. So if we can actually encourage people to be honest about what happened in their lives, that's what you want. You don't want someone with this flashy resume that looks great because often they're the ones that are going to disappoint you the most. What I teach people is to talk about your resume of failure and what you learned from it.
[00:00:29.370] - Speaker 2
Good day and welcome to the Leading With Nice Interview Series podcast where we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty and get results. My name is Mathieu Yuill and as per usual, I am super excited about today's guest. I'll tell you how I came across her. I was in a local store in my community and it was a new shop. And I asked the owners, I said, what should I buy? And they pointed to two products. They said, these are the two products you want to bring home. One of them was coffee and the other one was a bag of popcorn, which looked delicious. I actually bought three different varieties of it and my kids promptly ate it. It was called Comeback Snacks, and like you do when you learn about something you like, you Google it. And then I stumbled upon this awesome story behind this brand. Emily O'Brien, who's my guest today, is the founder. And she is the driving force. The original concept, the dream, the desire, the goal, the mission behind everything that this bag of popcorn is, which is so amazing. So Emily, welcome to the show. And if you wouldn't mind, just give our listeners a little bit of who you are and what the brand is all about, for sure.
[00:01:43.970] - Speaker 1
So I started the company in 2018 and that was actually when I was in federal prison. And growing up, I never imagined myself there. Great family, want a rural student, always volunteering, always had jobs and ran into some issues with substances. And then often with issues of substances comes bad relationships. And that relationship ended with me on a trip to St. Lucia where he told me, you know, he went from being one person in Canada to someone that told me that I had to bring drugs back from St. Lucia to Canada. And so very long story short, I had 2 kg of narcotics trapped in my body and was sentenced to four years in prison. When I got caught up here in the airport and in prison, I really saw how similar everyone's story really was and how people just wanted to get back on their feet. But they felt so lost and felt so misunderstood because that was the only bad thing that they had done in their life or they just had never been supported in their life and that was all they knew. So I wanted to recalibrate my own life, but also help redefine others lives.
[00:02:55.910] - Speaker 1
And instead of it just being from that one thing, helping them reach their potential, because everyone does have it.
[00:03:06.150] - Speaker 2
I love the idea that you just talked about the recalibration, and I want to help people take it. So if you're listening today, what I'm hoping you pull away from this is a paradigm shift on how we view people that have had past that may not look like your white picket fed storybook because there's real value there. But I want to actually dig into a little bit right now on the individual who has that past. And how difficult is it for that recalibration to happen, for their paradigm shift to happen?
[00:03:38.870] - Speaker 1
Personally, I would say the first obstacle is getting past it internally. Right? Because once you're charged with something, that's all they look at, and that's kind of what they just hit you on the head with over and over again. And incarceration is not about rehabilitation. That's just like the label they put on it. It's just like some foods that say healthy, and then you read the label, and if you didn't read the label, it wouldn't actually be healthy. So that's kind of what incarceration is like. And they applauded as being a way where people go in and will learn. But that's not true because a lot of people never had the support going in. And you truly need support in all kinds of ways, not just financially, but emotionally, mentally and physically. There are so many ways you actually need more support than just being locked in a box and then just being left to the walls when you leave. Right. So that's kind of what I wanted to help redefine. And if I didn't have the support that I did, I had a great family, but I also had to hold at my end of the bargain because I knew that my substance use and substance use can come out in any range.
[00:04:42.730] - Speaker 1
It can be illegal or legal. Overuse of anything can lead us down a path where we wish we didn't go. Right. So that's kind of what led me there. And if I didn't address this, then I wouldn't have had that support. Right. So I did not get off easy. I had to go through a lot of challenges within my own family, and I had a lot of work to do. But if I didn't do that and if I didn't have their support as well, then my trajectory would have been very different.
[00:05:09.210] - Speaker 2
I can't get over how often I hear this, because in our work leading with nice, we deal a lot with trust building. And obviously the first thing we do is build a lot of trust with our clients. And not anymore. But I was at first surprised how many people have something in their life either that they experience personally, a family member that has been in a situation, sometimes criminals, sometimes. It's not that they'd be embarrassed or shy to share. And I think the first thing, just hearing what you just shared, I'd want our listeners to know is that if you look to your left and right, you're probably much closer to somebody who has a situation like this in their life. And I'm sure you've come across that as well. As people learn your story, I'm sure they open up to you with their own.
[00:05:54.300] - Speaker 1
Oh, absolutely. And the thing is, before I even went to prison, I had a pretty successful social media business. And there are still people that were breaking laws except just not getting caught or having really powerful lawyers or the resources to hide those decisions. Right. And often it's the people that don't have the resources to hide them are the ones that are getting short, end of the stick just but actually doing the exact same thing that a lot of people.
[00:06:19.210] - Speaker 2
A lot of other people are doing this season on the podcast, we're talking a lot about overcoming adversity. And so you have this incredible true life store that you've lived and you've gone through and you're still going through and the journey is still ongoing. Tell me about where do you find that drive to put 1ft after the other to get up every morning to keep going forward? Where does that drive come from?
[00:06:48.810] - Speaker 1
The well, it comes from the drive to make an impact in other people's lives. And we've all worked jobs and for people where we just feel like we're not motivated because we don't feel like we're doing anything except make our company money. And I've learned that that's not the endall be all end all to happiness and actually feeling good about your life and where you want to go and what actually wakes you up in the morning, maybe for some it is obviously, we need it to survive. And we also want to have enough of it that we can do nice things for ourselves and our families. But along with that comes with the ability to help others and spending time helping others, volunteering, doing things like that. So when you can actually make little and small changes, that's when you actually want to keep going. And also when you're just, like, addicted to being curious, I guess you could say. I've always been fascinated with learning, whether it's like learning about insects when I was young or space and going to the Planetarium or learning about plants and traveling around the world. So I've used this insatiable thirst to learn more about others and the changes that we need to make to truly live in a world that we do want to wake up in the morning.
[00:07:57.670] - Speaker 1
We do feel good about what we've done, but also we know that we have done things that have maybe harmed others, but we want to fix it. That's how you live like a happy life and a life where you feel confident is when you know that you've messed up and done your best to fix it and also tried to help others at the same time.
[00:08:14.860] - Speaker 2
You said something there but curiosity. There's a quote I love by Molly Fletcher. She was a sports agent in Atlanta. She dab does consulting, and she says trade defensiveness for curiosity because curiosity is the essence of a hungry learner. And you said it right now. It's such wise words to live by. You also said something earlier and you said, I don't know, some people get out of bed for different reasons. Sometimes it's for money. I would argue that money is actually never the reason they might think it is, but it's usually something different. But you mentioned one earlier about helping people reach their potential. Was that something you felt before you had gone to prison, or is that something you developed during that time and afterwards?
[00:08:58.110] - Speaker 1
It was something that I've always kind of done. Like, even when I was young, I'd like to volunteer and learn about different cultures and organizations and how they can learn from me. So just like seeing how happy seeing others happy made me, people expressed gratitude for the simplest things. Right. And so we live in a world where everything is just like transactional. And when you're not living life like that, when you could just do things to be kind. As I said, that's honestly how I wake up in the morning, because you never know how you're going to do it. You never know who you're going to meet, and you never know where that's going to take you, because I've always been curious. Seeing all these things opens up the world even more to me. And I'm very confident I'm going to live a very long life just because I'm very thirsty to learn and help and drive impact, and whether it's in the form of a text message or even a grant or something like that. Right. So it's like these little ways of helping people and changing people's lives in the smallest of ways. It might turn into the biggest of ways.
[00:10:00.750] - Speaker 2
Emily, listen, I'm looking forward to your book, because I don't know if you're booking the works right now, but definitely just in these last ten minutes, you've given three or four chapters that I would eagerly read. And one of them is this. You talked about how when you were young, you like to volunteer and you're really active socially. And so it's not like this moment, this incident changed the trajectory of your attitude and personality and who you were. You made a mistake, but you were always a good person. But this moment you made a mistake is now people look for like, oh, what did you learn? Like, how did you change? No, I actually had this as a Corey. It's a message that I think it's not like, oh, I need to change the totality of who I am now. I just need to reconcile with this action I took own it, which you totally do. If you Google Emily O'Brien, come back snacks. You're going to see tons of news articles. You can read the whole story. There's great articles out there. And I want to use Emily as an example to the people in your life that have this piece of their story.
[00:10:58.990] - Speaker 2
It often wasn't necessarily the entire pivot of their personality and wholeness. So we can go on and on about that. But I think that's what's really interesting people would want to know about is it's hard enough to run a business in my basement. How do you start a business when you're in prison? That sounds immensely complicated.
[00:11:16.670] - Speaker 1
Well, that's exactly why it just sounds immensely complicated, because that's what we've been taught. Right. We've been taught and surrounded with marketing messages all the time that we need all these fancy bells and whistles and the ability to acquire so many things to build something that matters. But when you strip away everything, like every big business, you also get down to, like a root Corey and a root cause. And that, for me, came with lived experience. Right. So I had everything that I needed in there. I had my experience. I had the experience of others. And I had very simple ingredients that I could create something with. And I also had a system that needed significant overhaul early certain parts of it. Right. So that was another driving factor.
[00:12:01.870] - Speaker 2
Tell us about that. What do you mean?
[00:12:03.280] - Speaker 1
Well, how it's not conducive to recovery or rehabilitation or people actually leaving the system. It's actually what I call a criminal reinforcement system because a lot of people in there, even when you get out on parole, the conditions are so crazy and so ridiculous. Some of these conditions, like the rule that you can break. I got in trouble once because I didn't call from a landline like a landline before 06:00 at night while I was out doing speaking engagements. And this is like while I was living in a house. So it's like the rule that you can possibly break are just they line you up to fail.
[00:12:38.630] - Speaker 2
I wouldn't even know where to find. I'd have to go to my mum's house to get a landline now.
[00:12:42.160] - Speaker 1
Yeah.
[00:12:42.530] - Speaker 2
I didn't even know where I'd get one of those.
[00:12:44.060] - Speaker 1
A bank or the library or Starbucks or some small businesses.
[00:12:50.310] - Speaker 2
Can you imagine? I'll have a Grande Frappuccino. And also, can I borrow your landlord and to check into my parole?
[00:12:57.990] - Speaker 1
That was the actual real moment for me.
[00:13:03.070] - Speaker 2
So can you just give us a brief overview what it looked like to start this while you're in prison? What were you doing? Who are you working with? What was the actual business at that point? Because obviously it's grown since then. We were talking before we started recording.
[00:13:15.820] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I can actually like, I wasn't about to sell it in there, but I was building the brand, and that was through storytelling and things that were going on. So I wrote a lot in there. I wrote articles, and I also wrote about other people's stories. And I kind of harnessed all the things that were misunderstood by the public about others in there, whether it's about their capacity to be strong or the capacity to know how money works or their capacity to build something or be crafty or be creative or to love or be kind. And I kind of focus on all those things. And it wasn't very hard because when you're in there, that's where you see the human in everyone. So I did that. I documented everything. And then from a popcorn food perspective, we actually lived in houses, like where I was. They were locked at night. You had your own room when you're locked in there at night, but you cooked all of your own food. And so we had access to a very small grocery list so we could get certain spices on there. And then we also had access to a canteen list where you can buy your own stuff.
[00:14:23.910] - Speaker 1
So I bought popcorn kernels off there and just would experiment with different spices. And one time I put crafting or powder on my popcorn. So that's actually going to be our next flavor. It's called triple cheddar, but in there I called the glass cheese. So each flavor has a story and how it's created, why it was created, and the meaning behind it. Right. So that's how I did it. And then as soon as I was able to leave, I started just, like volunteering to share my story at schools and making little samples for events, and then got into commercial kitchen, got the proper licensing, and then was able to actually start selling it to retailers, and then just went from there and then moved into a grocery store kitchen. And then we got more poppers. And then eventually we got a partnership with the manufacturer. So that was a very big stage. And now we just have a partnership with our second manufacturer for a second line. So this has all been since about two and a half years.
[00:15:22.960] - Speaker 2
Yeah. I was going to say people listening like, oh, this seems to fall into place. We got a manufacturer. There's a lot of in between moments, I'm sure. Yeah. Okay. So I want you to speak to HR directors, managers, board of governors, policymakers, and help them truly understand what it's like for somebody with a criminal record that is trying to make their way through society. What is it actually like for them? Like, the barrier is that the difficulties to paint a picture, for sure.
[00:15:55.300] - Speaker 1
I can say as someone coming out and trying to build a business, I dealt with business insurance being charged Oprah for that. You want to have a good credit check. Often you've been in prison, you can't work, so you'd have no credit. You can't rent an apartment. No one's going to it's hard to get an apartment. There's so much competition as well. You often have gaps in your resume. And people look at those gaps. Like, most organizations aren't curious about that. They're suspicious of it. But I also think if you look at so many people on LinkedIn, have them lying about what they do. So if we can actually encourage people to be honest about what happened in their lives, that's what you want. You don't want someone with this flashy resume that looks great because often they're the ones that are going to disappoint you the most. So what I teach people is to talk about, like, your resume of failure and what you learned from it. You can just talk about it. And if you can actually be honest about that and how you learned that's when you learn the most and honesty and the ability to learn and move forward from that are like two things that you want in an employee, and that can also encourage loyalty, and it can make them feel like family.
[00:16:59.940] - Speaker 1
And that's what my organization is. And that's why we've had the same staff. They don't take advantage of us. They come to us when they need something. And we have a great relationship. There's no hierarchy because we've all been there. It's just like sometimes when we get people at the top, they act like they haven't ever done anything wrong. And that's not true.
[00:17:19.220] - Speaker 2
No.
[00:17:19.950] - Speaker 1
I think coming out of prison, you think someone has no skills, but that's also not true.
[00:17:28.240] - Speaker 2
First of all, this resume of failure idea. Oh, man. I'm not sure if that's the title of your book or just a chapter, but I love that concept. And you know what? There's training to be developed there for HR directors and HR and hiring managers. How do you have a part of the interview process where that conversation happens very safely? I'm going to think about that for a while longer.
[00:17:52.080] - Speaker 1
Yeah. And even just like, about substance abuse and everything like that and using it's, like, why are we making our employees scared of that? You know what I mean? I find them places to host their AA meetings. Like they have them in our office. So it's like, why are you pretending like this is something that doesn't exist?
[00:18:11.890] - Speaker 2
Do you find because of the adversity you face and like, certain setbacks that other people would find really hard, it rolls off your back much easier.
[00:18:21.700] - Speaker 1
Yeah, but I also don't complain about things because that's another way. It's just like blaming someone else. Right. And the second you want to blame someone else, like you are 100% in control or someone is not in control of your own life, but you still have to own it, even if you lose control.
[00:18:38.290] - Speaker 2
Okay, so we talked now about some of the hardships people face. What I'd love to get from you now is you clearly have a system that works. Give people that have never considered somebody with a criminal record as a viable employee for their business. How do you find the right person?
[00:18:55.930] - Speaker 1
Honestly, we seek out people. We have partnerships with organizations that are working with people that are coming out of incarceration, and they kind of know the behaviors of them because not everyone is ready for a job right off the bat. There's a lot of unhealed trauma.
[00:19:10.970] - Speaker 2
Yes.
[00:19:11.460] - Speaker 1
Maybe they're living in a halfway house or a city like their family is so far away, getting a full time job is not necessarily going to be a priority. So you have to make sure that your candidate is someone that maybe is ready for the workforce. And so you have to talk to the people at the organization, which is great, and just make sure that everyone's really transparent. And that nothing like you can't make them feel afraid. Right. Obviously, depending on the sector, there are certain sectors that, yes, certain crimes just not going to happen, but you're going to find big organizations. Jp Morgan now in the US has hired people that have been incarcerated. Richard Branson, his whole Virgin Train has a whole section that they go in and actively train people in prisons, and they have programs that people can message them or contact them on the way out. So it's taking a more active approach. And then when you become a resource like that, that's when people will come to you for sure. And as long as you get them to lay all their cards on the table and encourage them to do that, you're going to have a really transparent and open relationship that will bring more loyalty from both ends.
[00:20:16.510] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Oh, my gosh. There's so much to unpack this before we close off. Where can they find out more about you and your product? Aside from all the great learning we've had, the popcorn is amazing. So you need to go buy some right now. Where can they find out where to pick up your product or where can they buy it? Sure.
[00:20:33.570] - Speaker 1
If you come back Snacks.com. There's a link at the top that says locations, and all the locations are there. And you can also buy directly through our website and our social media is at Comebacksmax.
[00:20:44.950] - Speaker 2
And if there's a leader or business manager or director or CEO or President that's been listening is like, okay, I feel very connected to what Emily's been sharing today. What's one thought you want to leave them with to maybe help them get on their journey of reflection and paradigm shifting?
[00:21:02.110] - Speaker 1
I would say that try to imagine the person that has been through something that is someone that's trying to either get a job with you or work with you. Imagine that person was someone that was in your immediate family. And so what I call this is like proximity, forgiveness. So if it's someone that you know and you've always known, you already know their backstory. So you're more willing to trust them so you have to be willing to learn more about that person instead of just cutting them off immediately. That way you can actually have active forgiveness and that you're being active in your pursuit of getting to know more about them and their actual history as opposed to what we call as their history because it's not their history. It was just one part of their life.
[00:21:39.370] - Speaker 2
Emily so good. Yeah, I'm glad I have it. I have a pretty light day today. I'm very fortunate for that because I want to reflect on what you've shared. Listen. Thank you so much to you for coming on. Naomi Grossman help book this Austin Pomeroy's our audio editor, Amber Hopkins and Kerry cotton take care of the business while I'm here yammering away, you get notifications going off that's them doing work and Jeff and Horn does a video for this. Jamie Hunter takes care of all our social media so if you've seen this online, you can thank him. Emily, thanks so much for more on this. We'll have an article in resources and links in the show notes and at leading with nice.com thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:22:14.740] - Speaker 1
Thank you.