Transcript

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

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0:01 Hello and welcome to How I Built This. I'm Guy Roz. 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, and it's often how I discover new ideas for the show. Because there's so much innovation in food, 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. And maybe you have a great idea for a food business too, but how do you turn that idea into reality?

0:37 Well. Why don't we find out? This week and next week in a special episode series brought to you by Clavio. I'm gonna 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. My guests are Becca Millstein from Fishwife, which went viral for its beautiful tinned fish.

1:00 Brian Rudolph from Bonza, which makes pasta, pizza and more from chickpeas, and Cowie Suplice from Barnana, which upcycles imperfect bananas and plantains into healthy snacks and treats. So let's start with Becca from Fishwife. She graduated from Brown University in twenty sixteen, but Back then, she didn't really think of herself as an entrepreneur. 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. So really enjoyed building communities and building brands for those clubs, but I didn't know that many people growing up that were entrepreneurs. 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.

1:43 Um and the one that I was in right as I started Fishwife. What was the startup? 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

2:00 The week we launched Covet nineteen came to our shores. So it has not stood the test of time. So you did not necessarily have any intention of starting something until just a few years ago when you were working for the startup and you start to get the bug. Yeah. 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 during the lockdowns in Covid. Yeah, there was honestly no started. There was just one day that was a lightful moment, and the next day I started working on it. So The seed of Fishwife was planted um when I was living abroad in Spain in college.

2:36 Um, I was living in southern Spain and Granada, and was traveling around mostly in Andalusia, traveled to Portugal, and that was where I had my exposure to high quality tinfish or conservas. Right, and this is like and they eat it with the 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? 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.

3:06 So anyway, that's where I was exposed to the 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. So When I went to Spain, 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. Didn't think oh one day that's gonna be a business. But but it but it turns out it's May of twenty twenty and you're in lockdown. Working remotely for a startup at the time.

3:38 Exactly, working remotely for this British music startup. 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 I that you experienced as a student, you know

3:50 Six years earlier. 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. And this is you living at home with your parents at the time. This is me living with my brother and his then girlfriend. And it was like sardines and Tuna like that's kind of the the kind of fish you're eating? Sardines, tuna, mussels, that was the bulk of it.

4:19 On bread or just like in pasta or both, or 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. Got it. 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. 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 in any meaningful way.

4:56 And When we had that light bulb moment, I was completely convinced that I was gonna spend the rest of my life working on this. I think it just happens like that. It just happened like that. Wait a minute, there's an opportunity here. There's no culture of eating preserved f you know, conserva, you know, tinned fish like there is in

5:15 Parts of Europe. 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 conservas. 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, and there just hadn't been a brand that coalesced that energy into a movement. Alright, 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 I know that you went to business school

5:50 you studied at at Emory. Undergrad business school. Undergrad, yeah. And at a business school you worked um for like 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? I don't think I knew what I wanted to do. Uhhuh. I um out of college, I did an entrepreneurship program, but still even then didn't know I would start a company. It was only once I was the first employee at a small company that

6:20 Then I was like, Oh, this is really fun. But I guess For you the turning point was In twenty thirteen, when you cut gluten out of your diet. Tell me about About that decision.

6:31 Yeah, I mean everyone has their own journey with this. Yep. 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. 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. 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. They're things that people experience in different ways.

7:02 And you know, oftentimes when people change their diet, they start to experiment even in the kitchen. And I guess you kind of started doing that. Like you because when people who who cut out gluten will often turn to like rice or corn, which are gluten free, right? Um and you did that for a while, but I guess you felt like you you wanted a different experience, especially with pasta. 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 uh pasta made from chickpeas. Uh I wasn't

7:33 super happy with a lot of the available pasta options for People who have food allergies. And I grew up eating pasta Three, four nights a week. It's one of my favorite foods. So delicious. Uh what I started to recognize though is rice and corn pasta, they have often even less nutrient density than traditional pasta. And I mean chickpeas are kind of the whole package. They're packed with protein, fiber, they're um have at least some less carbs. They are

8:01 Gluten free, grain free, they're vegan. They're affordable. They're Great for the environment. They're so many things about Chickpees that are

8:11 Great. And unfortunately here in the US we just we don't eat enough of them. Cut me off at any time. I can talk about beans for a long time. I can tell. I love that. I mean I and cheek peas are delicious. 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?

8:31 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. But uh went from that to then buying a hand crank pasta machine to then buying uh I actually got A little pasta machine from a pawn shop at one point, uh really just Experimenting and then maybe a few months in started to realize this might be a thing that

9:02 I could actually Turn into a career. Okay. How did that happen? Because you 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.

9:15 What was the tipping point where you were like, you know This is fun. I like this. I'm eating this. I'm gonna leave my job and start a Chick pea is the business. Which is kinda crazy. It is. So I maybe six months into my first job. realized that I wanted to start a business.

9:32 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. And I was validat new ideas every month. I had a whole process for trying to understand what the right business would be for me to start. And as I was sort of banging my head against a wall, someone asked me a a really great question on one of the ideas that I was thinking of starting, which was If you were gonna work on this for ten years. Do you actually think that this is something you're gonna want to

9:59 Keep doing. And it was such a good question because so many of the ideas I just didn't care about. The ideas that you had before. It's c it 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 um you know has

10:17 Foctions is deeply personal, and you know, the way that you can impact someone's life through uh food is is very special. So twenty fourteen you decide to do this and you 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 he left his job to join you doing this. Yeah.

10:40 I feel very fortunate that I was able to to rope Scott away from his actual career. I was, you know, just out of college basically. So it was a big win. 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

10:59 Be an advisor to Bonza. And I was like, No, I 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. Yeah. Let's come back to you in a moment. I'll turn to you, Cow A, and talk about Barnana because

11:16 You are originally from Brazil. You grew up in Brazil and were a triathlete. You not just a good triathlete, you were really great. And I guess you moved to the United States In two thousand one to San Diego in particular,'cause that's sort of the birthplace of triathlons, and you wanted to really pursue this dream of becoming a professional triathlete. Tell me a little bit about that time in your life and what you

11:40 What you are sort of Pursuing. Since I was very little, my my parents always were very focused in telling us that we should do what make us happy and have a balanced like lifestyle. Ah, so in high school I started to race triathlon, that became a really big part of our lives. That was at the early stage of triathlon in the nineties.

12:01 So that was one magazine that we could buy. And that was out of San Diego. So um there was a lot of stories about San Diego. We knew that the traffic was started there. So I at one point said that's where I want to be. So um decided to kinda make a move and Drop out of college.

12:19 At that point my parents are saying, Okay, we told you to pursue your dream, but your dream of become uh architect like your father, not of like jumping out of college and and going to raise triathlon. But um that's what I did. I moved to San Diego and I didn't really know uh anyone there, but Uh in one of my first races I met kinda my idol who was c traveling world champion and he finished first at the race and I finished second. So wow that to me was already kinda Okay, I I made it because uh I made zero with my items, was was really cool. Alright, so you really I mean you moved to San Diego to pursue this

12:53 incredible like you know athletic career. Um not thinking oh I'm going to start a business and and and this is gonna be what I'm gonna do. Like But meantime While everybody around you is, you know, sucking down those gels and goo and

13:08 Yeah, 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

13:27 you know, you're fire for whatever Whatever sport you're playing. Yeah, so i in the nineties that's when the like sports nutrition started to evolve and but it was still very little. There was not a lot of options. You had basically power bar and you had one jaw at that time. And we had a lot of these dehydrated bananas in 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. So every time that I we travel back to Brazil to visit my family, I used to smuggle a lot of bananas back to the US. Dry bananas. And that's what I dry bananas, dehydrated bananas. And that's what I was eating. And when you are

14:07 Uh athlete eating something that is unusual, other athletes they wanna know what you're eating. Yeah. Because they always wanna know like what is the edge that the other guy has. Yeah, because I imagine at the time like you could get Maybe tried bananas and some like you know, co ops or a few natural grocery stores, but there it wasn't really Easy to find. In meantime, you're finding that uh'cause you need a lot of calories, right, for for a triathlon. So you have to consume

14:33 high dense d like sort of carb dense foods, right? And and you want something that's gonna really get to you quickly. And I guess I imagine like just The banana. goes right to you. It just it's absorbed very quickly.

14:46 It does, and I think a health healthier A to get calories are kinda from like a natural foods that your body's used to. I always felt that that was better than the processed like a simple sugars that you find in jails. But looking back 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.

15:13 I ate dehydrated bananas as a form of candy. So it was very unique because it's a product that I've been eating my whole life. So I guess from what I read, Kawi, at a certain point You notice that other Brazilian products that were just a kind of a you know a 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 a on the beach, you know, from the back of his his car. All of a sudden you see Zico and Vita Cocoa. We did Vita Cocoa on the show many years ago. It's and it's an amazing story.

15:46 the coconut water wars of the two thousands, um, you're seeing asae bowls and things like that, right? And you're thinking, Wait a minute, these Brazilian products that were just like on you know, streetcarts in Brazil are now becoming really popular in the US. Maybe there's something to these Dry bananas. These dehydrated bananas.

16:04 Yeah, and it's funny because in my mind I never had It sounded ridiculous that I'm gonna start a banana company. But after seeing coconut water and as I become very popular. What I noticed is they were uh Brazilian commodities. then now or so that's premium products because like you mentioned it in Brazil if I went to a run at the park or went to the beach there was a

16:28 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. But that's not very convenient. So uh I saw the the Ziko and Videoko had that product.

16:45 in a more convenient format. And then same thing with Asai. As I you had Sambazon. selling us a 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

17:02 People love these bananas. I gonna put a a brand behind this commodity, but also kinda make it better. I want to introduce different flavors, different formats. So that's kind of where The idea for the company. I started was more like I miss out on the coconut water and the and the side. If someone else does the bananas before I gonna really be pissed off. I gotta better jump on there really quickly. When we come back in just a moment, how Becca, Brian, and Cauley turn their ideas

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19:32 Learn more at K L A V I Y O dot com slash BF. C M 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 Kawe Suplisi of Barnana. And at this point, we've heard out 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.

20:13 You wanna start a European style Conserve a brand Where do you go? Where did you start? How did you even begin to Get this off the ground. 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

20:33 It's very, very messy. Um, so 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, and I knew I wanted that person to be an illustrator. 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.

20:58 landed on um our illustrator, Danny Miller. So I wanna Talk about this for a moment because if anybody knows your products, they pop off the shells. I mean You figured out that if you could

21:11 packaged this in a way that was arresting and interesting. Maybe people would try it, which is what happened. And really people should just go and uh on your website and see this if they're not familiar with their packaging,'cause it's like kind of psychedelic, but very colorful and It seems like this was like a clear sort of strategy from the beginning that even before

21:32 You had something you knew that you wanted it to look Different. Yeah, the canned fish category it was lacking Basically everything. Um, it was lacking, you know, diversity in the in the species, it was lacking flavors. But

21:47 the most clear thing that it was lacking was any brand that was interesting, beautiful, compelling to customers. So I knew that we had to start there, um, and in order to, you know, I think fight against certain stigmas about canned fish and also to Basically Create an entirely new

22:07 Identity entirely new positioning we were going to need to start with the visuals, the tone of voice, everything that goes into creating a brand. 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 covet. It's May of twenty twenty. And how are you gonna source the fish?

22:28 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. 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 fishermen at the time, but and actually that was the way that we found our first cannery in Oregon. I was connected to someone who knew a He was actually a weed farmer in Northern California, but was uh a sports fisherman on the side. 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 and Googling in in Spanish to see what we could come up with. And we actually threw that process did find a cannery partner that we still work with today for our sardines. Wow.

23:23 And one of the things that really differentiates You Becca from Bonza and Barnana is You decided I If I'm not mistaken, from the very beginning to start this as a direct consumer business. you didn't even want to deal with retailers at the start. Eventually you would, but

23:39 You wanted to figure out a way to get this in front of people online. So they would order it. At home. Yeah, I think intuitively it was the heart of Covid. So I knew that Everyone was glued to their phones and and was really looking for something super exciting on them. 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.

24:05 And uh knew that the best way we could, you know. generate conversion and sales. from Instagram from that platform would be directing them to a D2C business. It also is just the easiest to get going. Yeah. Candidly. Retail is extremely complex. And at that point, uh, even if you wanted to get a retailer, you couldn't do it. They were not taking meetings, they're not taking new products, right? So it was like extremely difficult to try to go to any retailers, even if you had the relationships. So the constraints sort of forced you to make those choices.

24:35 Yeah, it was a very fortunate limitation and I think it was absolutely the right strategy. Okay. Um, Brian, I wanna find out about Bonza. Okay, so you're making pasta, you decide We're gonna make this commercially. Right.

24:48 And I know one of the first things you did was you did a crowdfunding campaign. You raised a little under eighteen thousand dollars. to try and, I'm assuming, find a a partner who could Help you make this. I mean there are a lot of

25:02 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, and I imagine that it's a different kind of

25:17 Process, right? Like the extrusion, I d I don't know if that's the right word. Pasta is gonna be very different than wheat pasta. So how did you find somebody who was willing to work with you? So you're one hundred percent 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.

25:39 Very easily. But the eighteen thousand dollars 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, uh, we also heard from a reality TV show. That was called restaurant startup. And uh that show gratefully ended up going well, and we received another seventy five thousand dollars uh in the form of an investment.

26:04 And we quickly leverage that to get interest from our first retail partner all before launching. And it was Meyer, right? The Midwestern or the Michigan kind of based grocery store chain. Correct. And my I think saw that we were a Detroit based business and was

26:22 excited to work with a local business and They wanted to carry our products in all of their stores, which accelerated our entire Timeline. Yeah. And that's like what, like eighty, ninety stores? I think it was right around two hundred at the time. Oh. And

26:38 We were so grateful, but also very nervous uh 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 Shabani did in yogurt, and make a higher protein version. The new standard. Yeah, they 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

27:01 Yeah, larger scale. And were you gonna start with one shape, like Rotini or I don't know, elbows, like what was the shape you're gonna start with? Penne and Rutini were our first two shapes. Penne and Routini, okay. Yeah. And how did you so you've got Meyer 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 Have we gotta fulfill this order?

27:23 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.

27:36 And it just went horribly wrong. What was wrong? Making chickpea pasta is really hard. Uh, 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 two thousand pounds an hour or Yeah, by the time we knew if if the product was successfully produced, we had already produced I think Ten thousand pounds and then what was the problem with it? I mean you would boil it and it would fall apart within thirty seconds. It was it was not being produced correctly and uh

28:08 It was very scary, very, very stressful. I honestly did not think that we would make it Because we Had this happen, right? Ten thousand pounds. Try again another ten thousand pounds, and you just keep going and going and you're like I Some point we're gonna run out of money.

28:24 Yeah, you're paying for all these runs and they're just not working. Yeah, and uh 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. So literally just

28:42 Hot water. Drop it in. Pull it out after five minutes. And clearly that's not how you cook pasta. This is not a long term solution, but We ended up stickering twenty thousand boxes, shipping them out, uh the next two days later. W stickering the boxes what with what?

28:59 The cooking instructions when we printed the packaging said boil it for five to seven minutes. Yeah. But we realized that boiling was not gonna work. So we ended up having to apply a sticker to the packaging that said just drop in hot water. Cook it this way. Yeah. Well Okay. Which is tricky because not everybody reads the cooking instructions for pasta. They just are like boil water, you put it in there. Yeah, I mean, we hoped that people would see the sticker. We also recognized this was not a long term solution.

29:27 But when we spoke with the retailer and particularly the distributor, they basically said if we didn't fulfill the order, We may never have a chance to work with Meyer again. Of course, they presented it in very dramatic terms, which uh you know, I I I think wasn't very nice to us. 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

29:53 a period of time until eventually uh we opened our implant. 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. Yeah, finding the precise steps that are required to make sure that this is a good product. And doing it at a smaller scale.

30:12 And then you know when we were ready investing in in a larger process. 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 could have really I mean you get one chance. People give you one chance with food. But you survived that.

30:31 We did. It felt horrible. If I tell you, every time we got an order, I cringed. I 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. It was so confusing and That definitely created a sense of urgency that we need to make the product better and

30:52 I think that culture of continuous improvement is so core to our DNA because of that disaster. Yeah, we we're we're not gonna sit on our hands. We need to always be better. Cow, two thousand nine you decide. And I know for a a brief period of time you thought about maybe starting a a bicycle company which would you know make sense. You're a triathlete, but now you are gonna jump into Food.

31:17 How did you find somebody to work with to actually dry the bananas to your specifications and to create A brand. It took a while because we only launched in twenty twelve. Took three years. Yeah. I was retiring as a triathlete. But it still had a lot of drive in and like it was a very Taipei Wanted to race everything that or everyone I could find.

31:42 So I start talking about this idea that I had to everyone that I knew. So look in my family, I was asking my mom to go to places in Brazil that were growing bananas. Had a friends calling other countries.

31:57 So was just kinda getting a lot of samples as well as calling a lot of people here in the US that could kinda Help me create a product that I had envisioned. So what I did uh I actually called The large chocolate cover raising manufacture in the country brand. And somehow they end up connecting me with the CO of the company, it's a very large company. So he ended up introducing me to the owner of a very large

32:26 Copacking business. That I somehow convinced to make some samples for me. And that's how we end up launching there. We just kinda twenty pound box of uh samples. How how did you finance it originally? I mean, you did you have winnings from your your races, like

32:44 How are you able to even do a first first product run? I mean we we we launched the product with very little money. So basically uh bootstrapping uh the business, getting people to help for free. And then right after we launched there was uh interest and we got kinda somehow some industry folks to invest in the business. And it was kind of friends and family and

33:08 But we had zero sales. When we end up launching Uh we went to this big food expo. This is the natural product expo West in in Anaheim. Correct, yes. We went to XOS. Basically the only money we had was to buy the space. I end up going to at the time I still call Kingkows. printed our design of the package in a sticker.

33:30 And bought a little stand up pouch and stickered this this stand up pouch with our branding. Your logo. Oh logo, and that's what we we showed at XOS. And you got orders from that. We did, which we didn't expect because at the beginning our go to market idea was let's start small, learn about uh the product and the marketplace and then expand and then all of a sudden

33:55 retailers in the east coast want to have the product. And we're definitely not set up for that and brokers from across the country wanted to sell. Well. And you were just a little is I think it was you and two other co founders at that point, right? That you had met in San Diego? Yeah, I had Madame in San Diego. They uh were it still in school about to graduate uh Matt Clifford and Nick Ingersall.

34:16 So if it wasn't for them, market business was not going to be here because they were just fresh out out of school and had A lot of this uh business ideas and they brought a lot of structure to the business. I think you got an order from Wegman's at that first Expo West, which is a a mid Atlantic grocery store chain. I actually said no to Wagmans three times. Because you couldn't you didn't think you guys could fulfill the order? First I didn't even know who Wagman's a was.

34:42 Uh-huh. After like asking like uh one of like our advisor at the time that knew a lot about the industry, he said, Oh my god, it's very difficult to get Wagmans. So if Wagmans was your product, you should make it happen. Oh okay, the guy from Wagmans already came here three times and I said no. Luckily he came a fourth time and I said, Okay, I think we can do this. That's Kaui Suplisi, founder and CEO of Barnana. You also heard from Becca Millstein, co founder and CEO of Fishwife.

35:15 and Brian Rudolph, co-founder and CEO of Bonza. This is only the first half of our conversation about building food businesses. Check back next week for part two of this special series presented by Clavio 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. 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 Ramteen Erablui.

35:49 It was edit by John Isabella, our audio engineer was James Willits. Our production staff also includes Carla Esteves, Chris Massini, Devin Schwartz, Elaine Coates, JC Howard, Catherine Seifer, Carrie Thompson, and Neva Grant. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to a special episode of How I Built This? Brought to you. Like Clavio.