This summer, you can buy a special seventh-inning snack – take me out to the ballgame – at any Chattanooga Lookouts home game.
“Curveball Crunchies,” said Stacy Martin. “It’s a play on ‘buy me some peanuts and Crackerjacks’.”
Martin created Curveball Crunchies for her Seahorse Snacks brand, a protein-rich, highly portable snack business headquartered in the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce’s INCubator.
Martin started Seahorse Snacks because she needs a good healthy snack every two hours.
Literally.
“Every two hours,” she said. “I have to eat.”
Why?
“I don’t have a stomach,” she said.
Welcome to the story of Stacy Martin and Seahorse Snacks. Part of our ongoing series of INCubator profiles, it’s one of the most compelling, compassionate and gutsy – yes gutsy – business stories in Chattanooga.
“I fought very, very hard for my life,” she told Food as a Verb. “I owe it to me to live it the best way possible.”
In 2017, Martin’s mom was diagnosed with stage IV uterine cancer. Treatment also showed that her mom carried the genetic mutation for CDH1.
The CDH1 mutation is genetic.
There was a 50% chance she and her siblings would carry the same CDH1 mutation.
CDH1 mutations increase the risk of stomach cancer to 80% and the risk of breast cancer to 60%.
Months later, she visited CHI Memorial, where a nurse drew blood for a genetic testing panel to reveal the presence or absence of a mutated CHD1 gene.
On February 6, 2019, her phone dinged.
You are CDH1 positive.
“I thought I was going to die,” she said.
Martin’s genetic testing revealed she, too, had a CDH1 mutation. She now faced frightening odds: an 80% chance of developing stomach cancer and a 60% chance of developing breast cancer.
It placed her at the most difficult of crossroads, choosing between three options:
Do nothing.
Regular endoscopies every six months.
Stomach removal.
Not only would surgery upend her everyday life – she was 41, with a robust career and social life – but it would also threaten the very thing she enjoyed most.
“Food,” she said. “I love food. I’m a foodie.”
Eventually, she made the life-changing and ultimately life-saving decision: stomach removal. Signing up for surgery as part of a National Institutes of Health longitudinal study, Martin traveled to Bethesda, where, the night before her stomach removal, she enjoyed one of the finest meals of her life at Rose’s Luxury, a Michelin-star restaurant in Washington, D.C.
She ate with an IV in her arm, already prepped for surgery the next day.
The evening was a long part of last-suppers: she’d traveled to Chicago, New York, long-night dinners with good friends and family.
On September 12, 2019, she woke up without a stomach only to begin the long recovery of learning how to live without one.
“I eat every two hours,” she said. “I chew my food to a puree. That’s where the breakdown occurs.”
Food moves from her throat to esophagus to small intestine; there’s no stomach to hold meal-sized amounts of food, so without a regular deposit of calories, Martin must continually restore and replenish. She emphasizes: every two hours.
Nuts became a great way to do that.
Soon, she began making her own, experimenting with pounds in her kitchen. Friends encouraged her to sell at local markets.
In the spring of 2021, Seahorse Snacks debuted at the Chattanooga Market.
“There are two animals that don’t have stomachs,” she said. “Seahorses and platypus. How do you even spell ‘platypus’?”
Seahorse Snacks sells almonds, cashews, pecans and pistachios with different combinations of flavors, spices and oils, like Chili Turmrific and Maple Chaitastic.
And Curveball Crunchies.
Today, Seahorse Snacks retail in two dozen stores across four states. Martin works full-time at WestRock while continuing to promote, build and advance Seahorse Snacks, which she also sees as a way to promote stomach cancer and genetic testing awareness.
She’s lobbied local and state governments to declare November as Stomach Cancer Awareness Month. She travels to conferences, speaks with families and represents this fighting, compassionate, immensely huge-hearted resiliency in the face of tremendous odds and fear.
And she’s eating normally again. Well, mostly normal.
On New Year’s, she traveled to Vegas and celebrated with a steak. It was a long celebration.
“I was chewing and chewing,” she said. “I got to 80 and still wasn’t done. Just me and this steak took three hours,” she told Food as a Verb.
Not long after the surgery, doctors contacted Stacy with the biopsy results of her removed stomach.
“They found 17 spots,” she said. “I know I saved my own life.”
For more information on Seahorse Snacks, visit seahorsesnacks.com.
For more information on INCubator, visit chattanoogachamber.com/incubator/
