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Episode: What It Really Takes To Build a Food Business: Part 1

Author: Guy Raz | Wondery
Duration: 00:36:16

Episode Shownotes

Innovation is a constant in the food industry. But it’s incredibly difficult to go from a tasty idea to an actual spot on the grocery store shelves. So if you have an idea for a food business, how do you turn it into reality?In this special two-episode series brought to

you by Klaviyo, three founders share what it took to get their products on those shelves – and what it still takes today to keep their brands growing. This episode covers the journey from ideation to production and actual sales. Guy is joined by Becca Millstein from Fishwife, Brian Rudolph from Banza, and Caue Suplicy from Barnana.This episode was produced by Alex Cheng with music by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella. Our audio engineer was James Willetts.Our thanks to Klaviyo for sponsoring today’s episode. You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram and sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Full Transcript

00:00:02 Speaker_03
Hello and welcome to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So I love going to grocery stores, whether in the US or overseas. It's my happy place. I just walk around the aisles and look at all the cool things on the shelves.

00:00:15 Speaker_03
And it's often how I discover new ideas for the show. Because there's so much innovation in food.

00:00:21 Speaker_03
But if you listen to the show regularly, you know that it is incredibly difficult to go from a tasty idea to an actual spot on the shelves of a grocery store.

00:00:31 Speaker_03
And maybe you have a great idea for a food business too, but how do you turn that idea into reality? Well, why don't we find out?

00:00:39 Speaker_03
This week and next week in a special episode series brought to you by Klaviyo, I'm going to talk with three founders about what it took to get their brands on those shelves and what it still takes today to keep their brands going.

00:00:53 Speaker_03
My guests are Becca Milstein from Fishwife, which went viral for its beautiful tinned fish, Brian Rudolph from Bonza, which makes pasta, pizza, and more from chickpeas, and Kauai Supplisi from Barnana, which upcycles imperfect bananas and plantains into healthy snacks and treats.

00:01:13 Speaker_03
So let's start with Becca from Fishwife. She graduated from Brown University in 2016, but back then, she didn't really think of herself as an entrepreneur.

00:01:24 Speaker_00
I was always starting clubs in school, which I think is the exact same thing, but you don't think of it as a business.

00:01:28 Speaker_00
So I really enjoyed building communities and building brands for those clubs, but I didn't know that many people growing up that were entrepreneurs.

00:01:36 Speaker_00
So I didn't think about it as a possibility for me until I had worked at a startup, which was my third job out of college. and the one that I was in right as I started Fishwife. What was the startup?

00:01:47 Speaker_00
It was a British music startup and it was essentially we work for musicians. And it, you know, had some bones, but it didn't totally work out. It also was extremely community IRL centric and The week we launched COVID-19 came to our shores.

00:02:03 Speaker_00
So it has not stood the test of time.

00:02:06 Speaker_03
So you did not necessarily have any intention of starting something until just a few years ago when you were working for this startup and you started to get the bug.

00:02:15 Speaker_00
Yeah.

00:02:16 Speaker_03
Tell me about when you started to get an idea for a tinned fish company. I mean, I guess I guess it started during COVID, right, during the lockdowns and COVID.

00:02:24 Speaker_00
Yeah, there was honestly no started. There was just one day that was a lightbulb moment and the next day I started working on it. So the seed of fishwife was planted when I was living abroad in Spain in college.

00:02:36 Speaker_00
I was living in southern Spain in Granada and was traveling around mostly in Andalusia, traveled to Portugal, and that was where I had my exposure to high-quality tinfish or conservus.

00:02:47 Speaker_03
Right. And this is like, and they eat it with a pickled peppers and it's so delicious. This is just, I think when people go to Spain and Portugal, they're like, wait, what, why don't I know about this?

00:02:57 Speaker_00
Yeah. It's just a really beautiful way of eating sort of with tapas where you are really focusing on high quality ingredients in sort of their barest form.

00:03:06 Speaker_00
So anyway, that's where I was exposed to the product form, you know, growing up in New Hampshire. The only thing that I knew about canned fish was commodity, water packed. Tuna fish. Tuna fish, exactly. That was the only exposure I had.

00:03:20 Speaker_00
So when I went to Spain and went to Portugal and saw this entirely new, you know, interpretation of the category, I was kind of blown away. Didn't think anything of it at the time.

00:03:29 Speaker_03
Didn't think, oh, one day that's going to be a business. But it turns out it's May of 2020 and you're in lockdown working remotely for a startup at the time?

00:03:38 Speaker_00
Exactly. Working remotely for this British music startup.

00:03:41 Speaker_03
Got it. And you're starting to think, I don't know, your mind wandering. How does it land on going back to the fish that you experienced as a student, you know, six years earlier?

00:03:51 Speaker_00
So basically during lockdown, I was eating a lot of tin fish because we were trying to limit grocery store trips, looking for a high quality protein that we could leave on shelf that didn't, you know, was not contingent on our day of week of meal planning.

00:04:04 Speaker_03
And this is you living at home with your parents at the time.

00:04:07 Speaker_00
This is me living with my brother and his then girlfriend.

00:04:10 Speaker_03
And it was like sardines and tuna. Like, that's kind of the kind of food you were eating?

00:04:16 Speaker_00
Sardines, tuna, mussels, that was the bulk of it.

00:04:20 Speaker_03
On bread or just like in pasta or both or?

00:04:23 Speaker_00
Pasta, rice, sandwiches, salads. You know, just between Zoom meetings when you're trying to make a good lunch in like five minutes, it was the most easy solution.

00:04:33 Speaker_03
Got it.

00:04:35 Speaker_00
So that was going on, and then really the three of us were on a hike one day and were brainstorming business ideas for no reason.

00:04:42 Speaker_00
I mean, we were living together for four months on our own, so we had a lot of time to talk and really stumbled upon this idea of revitalizing the canned fish category because it had not at all been reinvigorated in any meaningful way.

00:04:57 Speaker_00
And when we had that lightbulb moment, I was completely convinced that I was going to spend the rest of my life working on this. I think it just happens like that sometimes.

00:05:05 Speaker_03
It just happened like that. You're thinking, wait a minute, there's an opportunity here. There's no culture of eating preserved fish, you know, conserve a, you know, tinned fish like there is in parts of Europe.

00:05:16 Speaker_00
Yeah, it was clear to me that there were a lot of people that were really excited about it, like a nice base of early adopters that were hyper passionate about tinfish and conserve us.

00:05:25 Speaker_00
But the only place you could get it would be, you know, a small specialty shop and they were few and far between. So I had a sense there was a founding customer base there, a lot of excitement, a lot of passion.

00:05:37 Speaker_00
And there just hadn't been a brand that coalesced that energy into a movement.

00:05:42 Speaker_03
All right, we're gonna come back to your story in a moment, so hold that thought. I wanna turn to you, Brian, and talk about Bonza. I know that you went to business school. You studied at Emory. Undergrad business school. Undergraduate.

00:05:53 Speaker_03
And at a business school, you worked for a digital marketing platform for a couple of years. So you were clearly, I think, I'm assuming, already oriented towards maybe starting your own thing. Was that on your mind after you finished college?

00:06:09 Speaker_01
I don't think I knew what I wanted to do. I'm out of college. I did an entrepreneurship program, but still even then didn't know I would start a company.

00:06:17 Speaker_01
It was only once I was the first employee at a small company that then I was like, oh, this is really fun.

00:06:23 Speaker_03
But I guess for you, the turning point was in 2013 when you cut gluten out of your diet. Tell me about about that decision.

00:06:31 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, everyone has their own journey with this. But I did a large sort of elimination diet to see if anything was causing these recurring sinus infections that I had at the time.

00:06:43 Speaker_01
And it turned out that when I cut out gluten, those sinus infections basically went away. And then when I reintroduced it, they started coming back. Coming back, yeah.

00:06:53 Speaker_03
A lot of people have these experiences when they change their diets or their routines. You know, when I gave up most grains and sugar, you feel it. There are things that people experience in different ways.

00:07:02 Speaker_03
And, you know, oftentimes when people change their diet, they start to experiment even in the kitchen. And I guess you kind of

00:07:10 Speaker_03
started doing that like you because when people who cut out gluten will often turn to like rice or corn, which are gluten free, right? And you did that for a while, but I guess you felt like you wanted a different experience, especially with pasta.

00:07:24 Speaker_01
Yeah. So I was making a bunch of things in my kitchen. Yeah. And one of the things that I was making for myself was pasta made from chickpeas. I wasn't super happy with a lot of the available pasta options for people who have food allergies.

00:07:39 Speaker_01
And I grew up eating pasta three, four nights a week. It's one of my favorite foods. So. Delicious. What I started to recognize, though, was rice and corn pasta, they have often even less nutrient density than traditional pasta. Yeah.

00:07:52 Speaker_01
I mean, chickpeas are kind of the whole package. They're packed with protein, fiber. They have at least some less carbs. They are gluten-free, grain-free. They're vegan. They're affordable. They're great for the environment.

00:08:07 Speaker_01
There are so many things about chickpeas that are great. And unfortunately, here in the U.S., we just, we don't eat enough of them. Cut me off at any time. I can talk about beans for a long time.

00:08:19 Speaker_03
I love that. I mean, I, and chickpeas are delicious. And so you're starting, you're messing around with chickpea flour, making pasta in your kitchen and what you got like a little pasta maker and you started just testing it out.

00:08:31 Speaker_01
Yeah. The very first version of bonza was made with a wine bottle and a knife. This is before Bonza was even a glimmer in your eye. This is just for you, right? This is just seeing what would happen. Okay. And it was quite bad.

00:08:45 Speaker_01
But, uh, went from that to then buying a hand crank pasta machine to then buying, uh, actually got a little pasta machine from a pawn shop at one point, uh, really just experimenting.

00:08:58 Speaker_01
And then maybe a few months in started to realize this might be a thing that I could actually turn into a career.

00:09:05 Speaker_03
Okay, how did that happen? Because you're not a guy, I mean, you came from business school, you're working for a digital marketing firm. I don't think you were thinking about starting a consumer brand, let alone a food brand.

00:09:16 Speaker_03
What was the tipping point where you're like, you know, this is fun. I like this, I'm eating this, I'm gonna leave my job and start a chickpea pasta business, which is kind of crazy.

00:09:25 Speaker_01
It is. So I, maybe six months into my first job, realized that I wanted to start a business. And I thought it would be a technology business because that's what I was working in. That's really what I understood and knew.

00:09:39 Speaker_01
And I was validating new ideas every month. I had a whole process for trying to understand what the right business would be for me to start.

00:09:47 Speaker_01
And as I was sort of banging my head against a wall, someone asked me a really great question on one of the ideas that I was thinking of starting, which was, if you were going to work on this for 10 years,

00:09:57 Speaker_01
Do you actually think that this is something you're going to want to keep doing? And it was such a good question because so many of the ideas I just didn't care about.

00:10:04 Speaker_01
The ideas that you had before, you were like, God, this is, I could do it, but this could be boring. Yeah, or it just, it doesn't, I'm not like uniquely capable of working on this. But food, especially for someone like me who, you know, has

00:10:18 Speaker_01
Food restrictions is deeply personal. And, you know, the way that you can impact someone's life through food is is very special.

00:10:26 Speaker_03
So 2014, you decide to do this and you recruited your older brother, Scott. He's I think he's eight years older than you to join you. Was that I mean, he must have believed in it because he left his job to join you doing this.

00:10:39 Speaker_01
Yeah, I feel very fortunate that I was able to rope Scott away from his actual career. I was, you know, just out of college basically, so it was a big win.

00:10:48 Speaker_01
But I had done a crowdfunding campaign and he had helped me out in just sort of reaching out to his network. And in that process, you know, at some point he asked me if he wanted to, or if he could be an advisor to Banza.

00:11:02 Speaker_01
And I was like, no, I want you to be my co-founder. And we had a sort of heated discussion at first. And then it was from then on, you know, true partnership.

00:11:11 Speaker_03
Yeah. Let's come back to you in a moment. I want to turn to you, Cauê, and talk about Barnana, because you are originally from Brazil. You grew up in Brazil and were a triathlete. You're not just a good triathlete. You were really great.

00:11:25 Speaker_03
And I guess you moved to the United States in 2001 to San Diego in particular, because that's sort of the birthplace of triathlons. And you wanted to really pursue this dream of becoming a professional triathlete.

00:11:36 Speaker_03
Tell me a little bit about that time in your life. and what you are sort of pursuing.

00:11:43 Speaker_02
Since I was very little, my parents always were very focused in telling us that we should do what make us happy and have a balanced lifestyle. So in high school, I started to race triathlon. That became a really big part of our lives.

00:11:58 Speaker_02
That was at the early stage of triathlon in the 90s. So there was one magazine that we could buy and that was out of San Diego. So there was a lot of stories about San Diego. We knew that the triathlon started there.

00:12:12 Speaker_02
So I at one point said, that's where I want to be. So I decided to kind of make a move and drop out of college.

00:12:20 Speaker_02
At that point, my parents were saying, okay, we told you to pursue your dream, but your dream of become an architect like your father, not of like dropping out of college and going to race triathlons. But, um, that's what I did.

00:12:31 Speaker_02
I moved to San Diego and I didn't really know anyone there, but, uh, in one of my first races, I met kind of my idol who was triathlon world champion and he finished first at the race and I finished second. So that to me, it was already kind of. Okay.

00:12:46 Speaker_02
I made it because I am here with my idols was, was really cool.

00:12:50 Speaker_03
All right, so you really, I mean, you moved to San Diego to pursue this incredible, like, you know, athletic career, not thinking, oh, I'm going to start a business and this is going to be what I'm going to do, like, but meantime, while everybody around you is, you know, sucking down those gels and goo and

00:13:09 Speaker_03
you know, different like energy bars, you're eating what you ate in Brazil, which I guess, like most athletes, or a lot of athletes eat dried bananas, because it, it's got all the right balance of like sugar and potassium and energy and carbohydrates that you need to fuel your, you know, your fire for whatever, whatever sport you're playing.

00:13:31 Speaker_02
Yeah, so in the 90s, that's when the sports nutrition started to evolve, but it was still very little. There was not a lot of options. You had basically Power Bar, and you had one gel at that time.

00:13:43 Speaker_02
And we had a lot of these dehydrated bananas in Brazil. So like you said, they were the perfect package. They had all the nutrition you needed. They tasted really good. They were easy to digest.

00:13:54 Speaker_02
So every time that I would travel back to Brazil to visit my family, I used to smuggle a lot of bananas back to the US. Dry bananas. Yeah, dry bananas, dehydrated bananas. And that's what I was eating.

00:14:06 Speaker_02
And when you are an athlete eating something that is unusual, other athletes, they want to know what you're eating. Yeah. Because they always want to know what is the edge that the other guy has.

00:14:16 Speaker_03
Yeah, because I imagine at the time, like you could get maybe dried bananas and some like, you know, co-ops or a few natural grocery stores, but it wasn't really easy to find.

00:14:26 Speaker_03
And meantime, you're finding that because you need a lot of calories, right for a triathlon, so you have to consume high dense, like sort of carb dense foods, right? And you want something that's gonna really get to you quickly.

00:14:40 Speaker_03
And I guess, I imagine like just the banana goes right to you. It just, it's absorbed very quickly.

00:14:46 Speaker_02
It does. And I think a healthier ways to get calories are kind of from like a natural foods that your body's used to. I always felt that that was better than the process like a simple sugars that you find in gels. But looking back,

00:15:02 Speaker_02
I was eating that product as a kid as well because my parents were following this microbiotic diet and there was no refined sugar allowed at the house. So as a kid, I ate dehydrated bananas as a form of candy.

00:15:17 Speaker_02
So it was very unique because it's a product that I've been eating my whole life.

00:15:22 Speaker_03
So I guess from what I read, Kauai, at a certain point, you notice that other Brazilian products that were just a kind of a, you know, throw that it was around all the time, like coconut water, like the kind of thing that you would see some dude in like a VW Beetle, selling it on the beach, you know, from the back of his car, all of a sudden, you see Zico and Vitacoco.

00:15:42 Speaker_03
We did Vitacoco on the show many years ago. It's an amazing story. the coconut water wars of the 2000s, you're seeing acai bowls and things like that, right?

00:15:53 Speaker_03
And you're thinking, wait a minute, these Brazilian products that were just like on, you know, street carts in Brazil are now becoming really popular in the U.S. Maybe there's something to these dry bananas, these dehydrated bananas.

00:16:05 Speaker_02
Yeah, and it's funny because in my mind, I never had, it sounded ridiculous, I'm going to start a banana company.

00:16:11 Speaker_02
But after seeing coconut water and acai become very popular, what I noticed is they were Brazilian commodities, then now we're sold as premium products because like you mentioned it,

00:16:24 Speaker_02
In Brazil, if I went to a run at the park, I went to the beach, there was an old VW van, someone with a massive machete, they would chop the top off the coconut water, put a straw, and it was delicious. It was really great.

00:16:38 Speaker_02
But that's not very convenient. So I saw that the Zico and Vitacoco had that product in a more convenient format. And then same thing with acai. Acai, you had sambazon.

00:16:52 Speaker_02
selling acai in several different formats with a great branding and also with a great story of sustainability. So that really caught my eye. And I said, Hey, people love this bananas.

00:17:04 Speaker_02
I'm going to put a brand behind this commodity, but also kind of make it better. I want to introduce different flavors, different formats. So that's kind of where the idea for the company started.

00:17:15 Speaker_02
It was more like, I miss out on the coconut water and the acai. If someone else does the bananas before, they're going to really be pissed off. I got to jump on that really quickly.

00:17:27 Speaker_03
Why don't we come back in just a moment, how Becca, Brian, and Kawe turn their ideas into real food businesses. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to a special episode of How I Built This, brought to you by Klaviyo.

00:17:48 Speaker_03
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00:19:46 Speaker_03
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, I'm Guy Raz, and today I'm talking to three founders who've built food businesses, Becca Milstein of Fishwife, Brian Rudolph of Bonza, and Kauai Suplisi of Barnana.

00:19:58 Speaker_03
And at this point, we've heard how each of them came up with the idea for their business. For Becca, that happened in the heart of the pandemic, which presented some obvious challenges. You're in the pandemic. There's a supply chain crisis.

00:20:14 Speaker_03
You want to start a European style conserva brand. Where do you go? Where did you start? How did you even begin to get this off the ground?

00:20:23 Speaker_00
The only word to properly describe the process is janky. And I think that's it's really important for aspiring founders to understand that, you know, the process to get off the ground is very, very messy.

00:20:36 Speaker_00
For me, you know, I had worked in marketing and brand partnerships in the music industry and that's kind of immediately where my mind went was, you know, I want to find the partner who will help me create this brand.

00:20:46 Speaker_00
And I knew I wanted that person to be an illustrator.

00:20:48 Speaker_00
So, so found through a, you know, a big research process, really looking at Instagram for many, many hours and talking to some friends and getting referrals landed on, um, our illustrator, Danny Miller.

00:21:01 Speaker_03
So I want to talk about this for a moment, because if anybody knows your products, they pop off the shelves.

00:21:08 Speaker_03
I mean, you figured out that if you could package this in a way that was arresting and interesting, maybe people would try it, which is what happened.

00:21:18 Speaker_03
And really people should just go on your website and see this if they're not familiar with your packaging because it's like kind of psychedelic but very colorful.

00:21:25 Speaker_03
And it seems like this was like a clear sort of strategy from the beginning that even before you had something you knew that you wanted to look different.

00:21:36 Speaker_00
Yeah. The canned fish category. It was lacking. basically everything. It was lacking diversity in the species, it was lacking flavors, but the most clear thing that it was lacking was any brand that was interesting, beautiful, compelling to customers.

00:21:54 Speaker_00
So I knew that we had to start there. And in order to, I think, fight against certain stigmas about canned fish and also to basically create an entirely new identity, entirely new positioning.

00:22:09 Speaker_00
We were going to need to start with the visuals, the tone of voice, everything that goes into creating a brand.

00:22:16 Speaker_03
And in terms of just finding a way to get the fish, I'm assuming you started by looking in Portugal, right? Because it's COVID. It's May of 2020. And how are you going to source the fish?

00:22:29 Speaker_00
I started doing everything at once. So I was asking everyone I knew who might know a fisherman. So, you know, people that lived in coastal California, people that lived in Oregon, people that were from Alaska that I knew.

00:22:40 Speaker_00
I was really texting them and saying, hey, I know you're from Cambria. Do you know any fishermen, any commercial fishermen? I didn't even know the word commercial fisherman at the time.

00:22:49 Speaker_00
And actually, that was the way that we found our first cannery in Oregon. I was connected to someone who knew – he was actually a weed farmer in Northern California, but was a sports fisherman on the side.

00:23:01 Speaker_00
And we first sourced albacore tuna from him and worked with a cannery in Oregon. So that was going on on one side. And then on the other side, I was diving into the internet to try to find a cannery partner in either Portugal or Spain.

00:23:13 Speaker_00
and Googling in Spanish to see what we could come up with. And we actually, through that process, did find a cannery partner that we still work with today for our sardines.

00:23:23 Speaker_03
Wow. And one of the things that really differentiates you, Becca, from Banza and Barnata is you decided, if I'm not mistaken, from the very beginning to start this as a direct-to-consumer business.

00:23:36 Speaker_03
You didn't even want to deal with retailers at the start. Eventually you would, but you wanted to figure out a way to get this in front of people online so they would order it at home.

00:23:46 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think intuitively it was the heart of COVID. So I knew that everyone was glued to their phones and was really looking for something super exciting on them.

00:23:57 Speaker_00
So it was very natural to me to A, start building the business and building the brand on social media. So Instagram was the platform of choice. and knew that the best way we could generate conversion and sales.

00:24:11 Speaker_00
from Instagram, from that platform, would be directing them to a D2C business. It also is just the easiest to get going, candidly. Retail is extremely complex.

00:24:21 Speaker_02
And at that point, even if you wanted to get to a retailer, you couldn't do it. They were not taking meetings, they were not taking new products, right?

00:24:28 Speaker_02
So it was like extremely difficult to try to go to any retailers, even if you had the relationships.

00:24:32 Speaker_03
So the constraints sort of forced you to make those choices.

00:24:35 Speaker_00
Yeah, it was a very fortunate limitation, and I think it was absolutely the right strategy.

00:24:41 Speaker_03
Okay, Brian, I want to find out about bonds. Okay, so you're making pasta, you decide, we're gonna make this commercially, right.

00:24:48 Speaker_03
And I know one of the first things you did was you did a crowdfunding campaign, you raised a little under $18,000 to try and I'm assuming find a partner who could help you make this.

00:25:01 Speaker_03
I mean, there are a lot of probably co-packers, co-manufacturers that make white label pasta for different grocery stores and, you know, other brands around the United States. But I imagine none of them were making chickpea pasta.

00:25:15 Speaker_03
And I imagine that it's a different kind of process, right? Like the extrusion, I don't know if that's the right word, of the chickpea pasta is going to be very different than wheat pasta. So how did you find somebody who was willing to work with you?

00:25:29 Speaker_01
So you're 100% right. Chickpea pasta did not exist, so there was no precedent for manufacturing it. And we were pretty naive to think that we could bridge that gap very easily.

00:25:40 Speaker_01
But the $18,000 that we raised in the crowdfunding campaign was meant to go towards some form of a first production run. Within a few days of that crowdfunding campaign ending, we also heard from a reality TV show

00:25:54 Speaker_01
That was called Restaurant Startup, and that show gratefully ended up going well, and we received another $75,000 in the form of an investment. And we quickly leveraged that to get interest from our first retail partner, all before launching.

00:26:11 Speaker_01
And it was Meijer, right? The Midwestern or the Michigan kind of based grocery store chain. Correct. And Meijer, I think, saw that we were a Detroit based business and was excited to work with a local business.

00:26:25 Speaker_01
And they wanted to carry our products in all of their stores, which accelerated our entire timeline. Yeah.

00:26:32 Speaker_03
And that's like what, like 80, 90 stores?

00:26:35 Speaker_01
I think it was right around 200 at the time. Oh, wow.

00:26:39 Speaker_01
We were so grateful, but also very nervous, to take a product in that meeting that was made in my kitchen and having no packaging in the meeting, basically just telling the story of how we want to do in pasta what Chobani did in yogurt and make a higher protein version, the new standard.

00:26:57 Speaker_01
They were willing to take a chance on us, but that also meant that we had to figure out how to make it at a larger scale.

00:27:03 Speaker_03
And were you going to start with one shape, like rotini or elbows? What was the shape you're going to start with?

00:27:08 Speaker_01
Penne and rotini were our first two shapes.

00:27:10 Speaker_03
Penne and rotini, okay.

00:27:11 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:27:11 Speaker_03
And how did you, so you've got Maier, but at the same time, it's like threading the needle, right? You gotta find the manufacturer, and you're probably panicking, thinking, how are we gonna fulfill this order?

00:27:23 Speaker_01
It felt like a race, yeah. I'm glad we did it, but it was very scary, and we had a ton of issues scaling up. We ended up partnering with what was then the largest gluten-free pasta manufacturer in the country, And it just went horribly wrong.

00:27:38 Speaker_01
What was wrong? Making chickpea pasta is really hard. You have to be very precise in a way that you don't need to be with corn or rice. And it's really hard to make whatever it was at the time, I think maybe 2,000 pounds an hour.

00:27:53 Speaker_01
By the time we knew if the product was successfully produced, we had already produced, I think, 10,000 pounds.

00:27:59 Speaker_03
And what was the problem with it?

00:28:01 Speaker_01
I mean, you would boil it and it would fall apart within 30 seconds. Oh, wow. It was not being produced correctly and it was very scary, very, very stressful. I honestly did not think that we would make it because we had this happen, right?

00:28:17 Speaker_01
10,000 pounds, try again, another 10,000 pounds and you just keep going and going and you're like, at some point we're going to run out of money.

00:28:24 Speaker_03
Yeah, you're paying for all these runs and they're just not working.

00:28:27 Speaker_01
Yeah, and we ended up figuring it out at the very last minute. We evaluated new methods for cooking our pasta, including instead of using boiling water, just using hot water and steeping it like tea.

00:28:41 Speaker_01
So literally just hot water, drop it in, pull it out after five minutes, And clearly that's not how you cook pasta. This was not a long-term solution, but we ended up stickering 20,000 boxes, shipping them out the next two days later.

00:28:57 Speaker_01
Stickering the boxes with what? The cooking instructions when we printed the packaging said boil it for five to seven minutes. Yeah. But we realized that boiling was not going to work.

00:29:08 Speaker_01
So we ended up having to apply a sticker to the packaging that said just drop in hot water. Cook it this way.

00:29:14 Speaker_03
Yeah. Wow. Okay. Which is tricky because not everybody reads the cooking instructions for pasta. They just are like boil water you put in there.

00:29:22 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean we hoped that people would see the sticker. We also recognize that this is not a long term solution. But when we spoke with the retailer and particularly the distributor they basically said if we didn't fulfill the order.

00:29:34 Speaker_01
we may never have a chance to work with Meijer again. Of course, they presented it in very dramatic terms, which, you know, I think wasn't very nice to us.

00:29:41 Speaker_01
But we fulfilled the order and we very quickly raced to find a better long-term solution, which ended up being a very small manufacturer in our backyard in Michigan, which we worked with for a period of time until eventually we opened our own plant.

00:29:56 Speaker_03
And so it was a matter of really kind of reformulating how it was made and how it was dried and all, I guess, the whole process.

00:30:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, finding the precise steps that are required to make sure that this is a good product and doing it at a smaller scale. And then, you know, when we were ready, investing in a larger process.

00:30:17 Speaker_03
I mean, it's so risky because even with those new labels, if people didn't follow the instructions and just like had mushy, broken apart pasta, that kind of really, I mean, you get one chance. People give you one chance with food.

00:30:30 Speaker_03
But you survived that.

00:30:31 Speaker_01
We did. It felt horrible. If I tell you every time we got an order I cringed. It was like the first few weeks I was both so excited that we were finally bringing our product into the world and also feeling horrible every time we got an order online.

00:30:45 Speaker_01
It was. so confusing and that definitely created a sense of urgency that we need to make the product better. And I think that culture of continuous improvement is so core to our DNA because of that disaster.

00:30:58 Speaker_01
You know, we're not going to sit on our hands. We need to always be better.

00:31:03 Speaker_03
Coway, 2009, you decide to hit the go button on this. And I know for a brief period of time, you thought about maybe starting a bicycle company, which would make sense, you're a triathlete. But now you are going to jump into food.

00:31:17 Speaker_03
How did you find somebody to work with to actually drive the bananas to your specifications and to create a brand?

00:31:26 Speaker_02
It took a while because we only launched in 2012. Took three years. Yeah. I was retiring as a triathlete, but it still had a lot of drive and like it was a very type A, wanted to race everything or everyone I could find.

00:31:43 Speaker_02
So I started talking about this idea that I had to everyone that I knew. So looking at my family, I was asking my mom to go to places in Brazil that were growing bananas. I had friends calling other countries.

00:31:58 Speaker_02
So I was just kind of getting a lot of samples as well as calling a lot of people here in the U.S. that could kind of

00:32:05 Speaker_02
Help me create a product that i had a vision so what i did i actually called the largest chocolate cover raisins manufacturer in the country brand and somehow they end up connecting me with the co of the company is a very large company.

00:32:22 Speaker_02
So he ended up introducing me to the owner of a very large co-packing business that I somehow convinced to make some samples for me and that's how we ended up launching there with just kind of 20 pound box of samples.

00:32:38 Speaker_03
How did you finance it originally? I mean, did you have winnings from your races? Like, how were you able to even do a first product run?

00:32:48 Speaker_02
I mean, we launched the product with very little money. So basically bootstrapping the business, getting people to help for free. And then right after we launched, there was interest and we got kind of

00:33:02 Speaker_02
somehow some industry folks to invest in the business. And it was kind of friends and family and, but we had zero sales. When we ended up launching, we went to this big food expo.

00:33:15 Speaker_03
This is the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim.

00:33:18 Speaker_02
Correct, yes. We went to XOS. Basically, the only money we had was to buy the space.

00:33:24 Speaker_02
I ended up going to, at the time it was still called Kinkos, printed our design of the package in a sticker and bought a little stand-up pouch and stickered this stand-up pouch with our branding.

00:33:36 Speaker_03
Your logo.

00:33:37 Speaker_02
Our logo. And that's what we showed at XOS.

00:33:41 Speaker_03
And you got orders from that?

00:33:42 Speaker_02
We did, which we didn't expect because at the beginning, our go-to-market idea was, let's start small, learn about the product and the marketplace, and then expand. And then all of a sudden, retailers in the East Coast want to have the product.

00:33:58 Speaker_02
And we were definitely not set up for that. And brokers from across the country wanted to sell.

00:34:02 Speaker_03
Wow. And you were just a little, I think it was you and two other co-founders at that point, right? That you had met in San Diego.

00:34:09 Speaker_02
Yeah, I had met them in San Diego. They were still in school, about to graduate, Matt Clifford and Nick Ingersoll.

00:34:16 Speaker_02
So if it wasn't for them, Marketed Business was not going to be here because they were just fresh out of school and had a lot of this business ideas and they brought a lot of structure to the business.

00:34:28 Speaker_03
I think you got an order from Wegmans at that first Expo West, which is a mid-Atlantic grocery store chain.

00:34:34 Speaker_02
I actually said no to Wagnus three times.

00:34:37 Speaker_03
Because you couldn't, you didn't think you guys could fulfill the order?

00:34:40 Speaker_02
First, I didn't even know who Wegmans was. So after asking one of our advisors at the time that knew a lot about the industry, he said, oh my God, it's very difficult to get Wegmans. So if Wegmans was your product, you should make it happen.

00:34:56 Speaker_02
And I was like, oh, OK. The guy from Wegmans already came here three times. And I said, no. Luckily, he came a fourth time. And I said, OK, I think we can do this.

00:35:07 Speaker_03
That's Kawe Suplisi, founder and CEO of Barnana. You also heard from Becca Milstein, co-founder and CEO of Fishwife, and Brian Rudolph, co-founder and CEO of Bonza. This is only the first half of our conversation about building food businesses.

00:35:24 Speaker_03
Check back next week for part two of this special series presented by Klaviyo to find out how these three founders grew their companies into category-defining brands. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week.

00:35:37 Speaker_03
Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And as always, it's free. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtine Arablui. It was edited by John Isabella.

00:35:51 Speaker_03
Our audio engineer was James Willits. Our production staff also includes Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Devin Schwartz, Elaine Coates, JC Howard, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, and Neva Grant.

00:36:03 Speaker_03
I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to a special episode of How I Built This, brought to you by Klaviyo.