What It Really Takes To Build a Food Business: Part 2

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/deecf73b0407a393

Hello and welcome to How I Built This.

Last week I spoke to three founders of three different food brands about how they got their start.
This is part two of that conversation on building food businesses presented by Clavio. And if you haven't heard part one from last week, go back in your podcast feed and check it out. It's a great conversation.
In that episode we heard Becca Millstein, who co founded her brand Fishwife, that's
figured out how to make tinned fish cool.
We also heard from Brian Rudolph, who wants to transform the pasta category with his chickpea based brand Banza.
And finally, Cowie Suplicy, who brought his favorite childhood snack of dried bananas from Brazil to America with his company Barnana.
In today's episode, you'll find out how these three entrepreneurs have grown their brands into category defining businesses. You'll hear about some pretty challenging moments and also strategic advice if you're building your own food business. But first,
How do they even get people to try their products?
Here's how Becca from Fishwi did it, while selling tinned fish direct to consumer.
During the pandemic.
Here you are living, you know, in a desert town a couple hours outside of LA.
You've got the labeling.
Um, and I know you raised a little bit of money from friends and family to get a production run. You've got a cannery in Oregon that's gonna work with you.
But you gotta sell it, right? Then you gotta get it the word out. What did you do? Did you
Even with like
ads on Instagram and social media, like how do you get people to click the order button and
And try this.
It's the most universal truth in CPG and in food, that your packaging has to be extremely compelling, both on the grocery shelf, but also very much on social media.
So I think, you know, the position that we had was
by being the first to really try to upend the category and by doing it in such an interesting way. I mean people just got really excited about it when they saw the packaging.
The thing that supported that was uh influencer seeding. So from day one, it was just
Me on Instagram trying to find all of the micro to macro food influencers.
I'm reaching out to them and saying, Hey, you know, wanna make the canned fish category a much more exciting place. This is our brand. This is what it looks like. We think it's really, really delicious. Wanna try it out.
So you would go you would you would find them yourself.
Yes, yes. I you do everything yourself the first year, maybe two years, and you should.
And so you would go to micro influencers, right?'Cause this is'cause a lot of'em will say, Well, I'm not gonna do this unless I'm paid and or unless, you know, there's some something in it for me. So how did you navigate that with you know, with a limited amount of money that you were working with?
Yeah, at that point it's really easy because we had no money. Um, you know, I bootstrapped the business for the first eight months. There wasn't a question, can we pay this influence or not? because there were no cash reserves. So it's a great way to see if
Early signs of
whether you have product market fit or not, if these influencers are excited about what you're doing.
If they're not excited at all about what you're doing, you
probably need to revisit the drawing board and say what's not right about the brand, what's not right about the product, what am I not
Telling well in my story.
And did you give
influencers advice on how to talk about it like
Because for some people
they would see it and say, Well what do I do? Do I just open up the can and just eat it with a fork?
Do I make a pasta out of it? Do I throw it in in a pan and heat it up? Like did you help?
the influencers kind of show people.
What to do with it?
Not at all. Um, I really didn't want to be prescriptive. I wanted to use it as a, you know, a learning lesson for me, sort of market research to see how.
These influencers naturally gravitated towards utilizing the product. So
Not at all, and learned a ton from that.
But really to get them to try it, you really focused on
Just getting them to buy it'cause they thought the packaging was really cool.
And interesting.
Yeah.
And the storytelling as well. I mean people
People wanna see small businesses win. They wanna see small women owned businesses win. They really wanted to see something win during COVID because it was such a challenging time for so many people, such a lonely time. Um, that I really do believe
People were just looking for any sliver of joy. And that was very much, you know, fundamental to the brand identity was
joy and delight and color. So I think people just wanted to champion the brand from the beginning, which they're grateful for.
Um Brian
Once you got into Meyer, just having it on the shelf is not enough. Uh eventually you would settle on on your sort of now iconic orange packaging. It really jumps off the shelves. Orange is just an orange box, very few things on the packaging, but still you need people to try it
And to adopt it.
'Cause it's a new thing.
Chickpea pasta, a little weird at the time.
How did you get people to to try it, to start to use it?
Very similar to Becca, actually. We were
Extremely lucky to send a lot of free pasta to influencers and
It's actually so similar to Becca, right? We were not prescriptive. We really just wanted to put it out into the world and we noticed
That because it was so novel in part.
And a lot of the content on social media was very focused on health and eating healthy. It's so easy to say, look how easy this swap is using all the same recipes as regular pasta.
And we noticed a lot of influencing that we would send free pasta to just excited to share it on their feed.
Um and it would get a lot of engagement.
And then a lot of people who buy our products were otherwise not buying pasta. And so we had to catch them outside of our sort of
Typical pasta space.
And we noticed that N Caps were just transformational for the long term success. When you've got on the a at that at the end of the aisle in the grocery store. Because I'm assuming you were put in the gluten free section initially. You weren't put with the regular pasta.
We fought so hard to not be in the gluten free section.
We actually intentionally did not put gluten free on the front of our packaging because we want it to be seen as a mainstream option for anyone who's buying pasta.
But so frequently in the early days, yes, we were put in the gluten-free section. And while fighting that battle, if they put us on an end cap.
We just saw an immediate amount of trial.
Which would then lead to repeat and it became a really helpful case study for the retailer.
Yeah.
Cowie, how were you guys able to
I mean dried bananas are not
Totally.
unusual, but still, you know, obviously raisins, I'm assuming, and
and dried apricots, you know, when you're talking about dried fruits.
Those are
The best sellers.
But dried bananas.
You know.
Not so much. So how did you get people to to try this thing?
'cause the combination of the product, the packaging and the story. And a lot of research I I learned that bananas were the number one selling item in grocery stores. Yes. So I knew that people love bananas. So they like the flavor. They're just not used to uh their format.

So
Uh we create a package that it would take people to the place where we're sourcing the banana. So a very tropical kind of look, banana leaves. A little monkey on there. A little monkey. And we on purpose did not put a window on the product.
Because what a lot of people are telling me Americans are not ready for this. It doesn't look good. Oh, because they're brown they're like brown, right? They're brown.
So we just kinda made sure that the package was really beautiful and once you buy, okay, I don't like the look, but I'm gonna try anyway. And to us was uh was all about trying. So what we did is we invest a lot in in demos.
I was doing demos myself, so getting and sampling.
People in stores in events, so a lot of triathlons that I knew running races and also telling the story.
Barnana's really unique because of the way that we source the product.
And at the beginning we didn't really talk about that.
But when when I was having one on one conversations, I would end up mentioning that we're buying these bananas that didn't qualify as fresh produce export because they were green but not green enough, or had the wrong size or shape. So at that stage we realized that people were very intrigued about that.
So that was kind of focusing on on the food waste reduction.
efforts that we had, the upcycling, and then later on on the sourcing from indigenous communities in the Amazon.
Which I think
Навадейс консумер з армора вери.
When we launch
They were buying because of taste and price.
And then we have seen that they were kind of supporting us more and more because of our sourcing practices and how we had a social and environmental uh responsibility.
Bec uh, you know, in your first full year you guys did pretty well. I think about seven hundred fifty thousand dollars in sales. That's correct.
And that was entirely
through direct to consumer sales.
Ninety percent D to C, the rest was in specialty markets around the country.
Um in your first full year
You also ran into a pretty um difficult setback. I guess the cannery that you're working with in Oregon
was backed up and they said, We cannot get your product out.
for many, many months.
That was the first time that I learned the lesson of redundancy in supply chain and why it is so important.
Thankfully, I had started to work with another cannery in Washington State, who with whom we still work today on developing a smoked salmon product.
Yeah.
And they were actually just getting their co-packing business up and running. We were their first co-packing partner, and they were able to and eager to take on the two SKU that we'd produce that we'd been producing with the Oregon cannery.
So in your business it makes sense that you've got sort of a
clear and I would say limited
Number.
trout and anchovies and tuna and sardines and smoked salmon and and a couple of different flavor variations, right? But I wonder, and and this is for all of you, and I'll start with you, Becca,
How do you decide?
How many different
product lines, different products to offer.
And is it in your view, like as you kind of begin to grow in scale,
Is it
just tinned fish that you
want to focus on or like at what point do you start to think
Maybe we should sell
You know, pasta to go with this tin fish or certain kinds of uh crackers or other things.
Yeah, I think the other most universally agreed upon principle in CPG is that focus is the ultimate value. Um, and growing from the core is really the best way to do it.
Spreading yourself too thin is really just never a good idea. So for us, what we're trying to do, which is change the nationwide perception of tinfish of a category, it behooves us completely to just focus on being the absolute best.
In the category.
having our brand name be synonymous with the category.
That is really the way to to build a strong business.
Brian, one of our earliest episodes was with Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines, and he talked about the secret of their success, which is
They only fly seven thirty seven, so they only need to service
those aircraft, right? They only need to get parts of that plane, which is like the Honda Accord of airplanes.
And they turn planes around very quickly. So very efficient business, not too many offerings. They you know, you just you line up and you go on the plane.
That principle also applies to food businesses. In our burger, we've had uh Raising Cains on the show, right? They offer four things.
Initially you had two
different types of pasta, right? Rotini and Pene. Now you've got like Cavatelli and Rot you know, and beyond Rotini, you've got wheels and alphabets and
cascatelli and bucottini and penne, I mean all these different and you've got rice and pizza and mac and cheese and protein waffles. I mean arguably it's more it would be more efficient to just do two kinds of pastas.
and really lean into that.
When does it make sense? When did it start to make sense for you guys to really start to expand it out?
And why did that make sense?
Yeah, so it really all comes back to the mission. Our goal is to get people to eat more beans. Beans are one of the best ingredients for human health and the environment. We don't eat enough of them. So how do we sneak them into people's lives? And
Uh what started with Penne and Rotini expanded into many shapes.
And then we looked at all these foods that are typically made from wheat and said
Can you also make that from beans? Why not?
Pasta still very much so our baby. I would say it gets the overwhelming amount of attention.
And we are constantly challenging ourselves, sort of like Becca said, to be
the leader in what we do, and to make it clear that we are extremely focused on chickpeas and we want to be the best company uh when it comes to chickpeas.
How about you, Kaway? I mean you guys also have
several different products. I mean you've got, you know, the chewy classic dehydrate bananas, but then you've also got chocolate dipped bananas, and then you also have
other products that you sell, chips for example, plantain chips and and other things.
How do you guys decide?
you know, what works and have you have you tried something that didn't work and then you just kind of
Pulled it down.
Yeah, absolutely.
Uh when launching the company as Beck mentioned it, focus was very important to us. So for a very long time we had two products.
Chew the original chewy banana bites, just bananas one ingredient and then the bananas covering chocolate. Yeah. And with time, like of course you want to introduce more products, grow the portfolio, uh retailers ask you for that.
In our case, the more that I learn about the food industry the
I learned that there was a lot of things that were wrong with the industry. We have kinda a broken system in a way where
Most of the efforts go into growing
Corn.
Soy and wheat.
That is not necessarily good for people or the environment.
So
we start focusing on the sourcing, so reducing food waste, but then also working with these indigenous communities. And I realized that if I could buy more products from these communities or different products
I was really helping change their lives for the better.
So
That has been part of our innovation where we started with just the bananas.
And now we are buying plantain from the same communities in the Amazon, and we're also buying cassava from these communities because they can grow cassava.
In the same land that they grow
Plain things.
So
it has been a little different, more kinda while we can grow to help these communities and then introduce products
Based on that.
And we tr we try different things.
That
For some reason or another didn't work. One that I think it was a grey product.
We introduced a plantain based tortilla chip. Mm-hmm.
Which it tasted great, there was a lot of nutrition in the product.
But
In this industry you have to plan a lot of uh ahead of time of launching. Yes. You have a category review and we're launching the product nine months later.
And then
came t time to launch was at the beginning of the pandemic.
Where uh retailers are not bringing those kind of end caps promotions, they're not happening. So we had it was very difficult.
To launch that product, I still think it's a really good product. We might bring it back. It is, I've had it. Eventually.
But uh yeah, it was wrong timing.
And I just heard like a a this week that
I think not only
twenty twenty four, but the past three years were like the lowest amount of innovation in the store because you couldn't really launch new products in stores and consumers were not really buying.
A lot of new things. So um I think it's time to start innovating again. Consumers are probably ready. But Becca showed us that you can really launch something new and do well.
We come back in just a moment.
Becca, Brian, and Kaway talk about some of their most challenging moments and
Advice for founders starting food companies today.
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CM
Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.
Here's more from my conversation with Becca Millstein from Fishwife, Brian Rudolph from Bonza, and Kawe Suplisi from Barnana.
So I do wanna ask uh and we've talked about challenges, but I do want to ask about a a couple of tough moments that that you've all been through. And I wanna start with you, Becca, because starting a business is challenging, especially when you have
co founders and others, and I know that you had a co founder, you had a
Falling out.
You haven't talked about it publicly m very much and I'm sure it was
personally painful, but I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about what you've learned
As you've navigated.
that experience because this is very common. We've had many, many examples of this in the show. Humans are humans, and we make different decisions and we have different views and philosophies about where the business should head. So
Tell me a little bit about
What you've learned from that.
Yeah, of course I can only talk about it in sort of broad strokes and what I learned from it.
Yeah.
So I think
When people are considering having a co founder, you know, I just tell them
Really make sure you're listening to your gut.
Really make sure you are having the hard conversations.
Up front, very much at the beginning.
Talk to a lot of people.
and get their thoughts on, you know, the balance of skill sets between you and your co-founder.
really look deep and say, is this the person that has the best compliment to my skill sets?
And
Do I want to work with this person for maybe fifteen years um side by side? Do I think they'll stick
You know, stick with it with me and be the best person in the trenches with me and have the attitude that I have about this business. You know, co-founder relationships.
A really challenging. Um, when I went through my challenging moment with my co-founder, I was
constantly talking to other people that had gone through it. Um, and that was most of the founders that I knew. It is the majority of co-founder relationships that end in a really, really tough conversation and that
Can take
A lot of resource from the business can take a lot of your resource, can take time that you would otherwise be using to build your skill set.
Yeah.
So unless you absolutely feel that you need this person by your side
And that they really have something for the business that
An incredible first employee can't bring you.
don't have the co founder.
I think the last thing I'll say is just
The most important thing a founder can provide to a business is a vision, but I think it's hard for two people to share unified vision, um, and for two people to share the responsibility of articulating that vision to their team.
So
Being a solo founder, I would very much recommend it. I think it's amazing, but
have uh just tremendous early employees. I love this perspective because it's very counterintuitive, right? Like the Paul Graham model and you know the famous founder of Why Commonry says he only invests in businesses that have co founders. And there are the reasons why it you know it makes sense for many, many people because
It's tough starting a business. And there are gonna be moments where you n you feel like you're not gonna make it. And having somebody with you on the journey
can be very helpful. I have a production company, we make kids programs. I've got co founders. We're very close.
Yeah.
Cowie, I know that you
um have very close co-founders. Brian, your brother's your co-founder. Oftentimes we don't
When we start businesses, it's most of us don't want to
sort of have those tough conversations like a something's like a pre nuptial agreement. Like most people don't do them because they just feel weird and unromantic, even though
They might make sense, right?
And there's there's kind of a version of this with
getting a co founder. And I wonder
Kaway, when you brought on your co founders, did you guys have those tough conversations at the beginning?
We did because I think as Becca said, it's very important to have a understanding of whose vision you are following.
And I think in my case it was a little easier because I was the one that grew up eating this product and uh brought it.
Here. Yeah. So
If you have that understanding, okay.
We're starting this because I came up with this idea and I I need you guys to help me execute.
because you are better than me in these other areas, it makes things a little easier.
Yeah.
Brian, I wanna talk to you about a recent challenge. You your brand has become the fifth best selling pasta brand in the United States, which is extraordinary. It's remarkable. I mean, this is a huge category.
Pasta is a massively widely consumed food product.
But earlier this summer there was a group that claimed that you know there was a chemical detected in your pasta that's not healthy.
And they started to kind of talk about this.
Tell me a little bit about how you
how you've dealt with that, how you're responding to it, and
And what you feel businesses can do to protect themselves from attacks at
maybe unfair or or or not rooted in
In research and science.
So I'm gonna be honest, this is this is still very recent.
Very raw.
But we live in a time where
fear and misinformation.
Spread so fast.
On social media. Anybody can say anything.
Anybody can say anything and so first of all I want to quickly address that.
Foods have always been safe to eat. Uh we published a statement very quickly on our website that
you know, not only uh acknowledge historical testing results for what was sort of being questioned, but also even test at the same lot.
So there was
A lot about it that felt uh incredibly unfair, incredibly unjustified. Aaron Powell And to be clear, your ingredients are basically chickpea flour, salt, and water. It's four ingredients. Yeah. It's a very simple, simple product.
I don't think we still we yet have a playbook for how to deal with these things is the everybody. Like any everybody, yes. Any any any misinformation that spreads. It th this is such a dynamic world that we live in. You feed the flame when you engage
With some of these things.
And I should be clear, I am sympathetic to uh concerns around this.
Yeah, I have food allergies, right? I'm very concerned about what I'm eating. I have to think about it all the time. Whenever I go to restaurants, I'm asking tons and tons of questions. But
Yeah.
trying to control a narrative.
Like this is just
It's really hard. And we took a very respectful
sort of behind the scenes approach.
We released a statement very quickly.
We did not
Discuss it in a very loud way intentionally.
And I'm not sure if that was right.
I think time will tell.
What I've learned I think from over you know
Six hundred episodes of the show is that
crises pass faster than you
Think.
That we remember them.
as being longer than they actually are in the grand scheme of things.
Brand every business has had.
a crisis or some kind of you know crisis that has passed. I'm sure all of you
But I mean, Becca, you talked about your your own, you know, with the falling out with your co founder. Cow, um
I'm assuming you guys have had some crises as well that you had to deal with.
Oh.
Plenty. That's what you don't really know uh when you're starting a business.
Just starting a company is already hard and every day you have things being thrown at you. Yeah. From unwanted
Litigation.
Unfortunately several times.
Sorry. Because it it can be from something on your package that then someone like thinks that it should be in a different way.
Or a a nutritional panel thing that you test it.
hundreds of times and someone came up with a test that is different than yours. Like they'll say, Oh, it doesn't have seven grams of potassium, it's four. Correct, yeah. And it's tricky because
Food uh is not always kinda a correct science, like a uh different bananas have different nutritional content.
And then there is opportunistic
lawyers out there just trying to make a quick buck.
Who are looking for class action lawsuits. And and again, not to vilify lawyers, I'm married to one, but there are industries out there people who are looking for, you know, ways to go after brands because there's a business opportunity.
Things always go wrong.
If there's one thing that I learn is
Doesn't matter how well you are prepared, things will take longer.
uh usually three times longer they always will cost a lot more as well.
So
I always take that in consideration launching a new product or doing anything new because it's things will go wrong for sure. Yeah.
Becca, I'm curious. I mean, one of the perils of being successful and really opening up a category is
Lots of other people say, Wait a minute, why am I not in that category? And they jump in, and then it becomes more complicated, especially when the big players
in that category were kind of asleep at the wheel and then they start to
Ramp things up again.
How do you'cause now you have
attracted competitors and even some of the big brands are looking at you and thinking
Hm.
Maybe we need to do some of this.
How do you withstand that? How do you how do you pivot to make sure that you stay
sort of a leader in your category.
Yeah, I mean that's that's the fun of it all, isn't it? Um You know, people are always asking, especially investors, about what your moat is. And the reality is in the CPG industry, having an actual moat is very hard. It's kind of non existent. I mean having your own manufacturing like Brian does, um
really can help, but that's extremely expensive. And so how do you build your moat? I think the way that we've gone about that is
Probably over indexing a lot in what
Is called brand marketing.
So it's doing things like
You know, multiple collaborations a month. It's doing partnerships with small artists. It's doing menu items across the country. It's doing pop-ups that you invest a ton of your team's time into. Um
It is doing really high quality customer service. It's doing, you know, a brand ambassador program across the country and making sure.
Those brand ambassadors are really effectively communicating your brand values.
And I think that's a great question.
Our number one core value at Fishwife is build with with love.
Еннали мез-завер Фішвійшою.
It should be evident that
Our company has put so much time, probably too much time, into making sure that is a really, really special
unique customer experience. You know, even in a world where customer loyalty is actually not that easy to get, they do feel this deep connection with the brand that will
motivate them to stick with you to
pay more for your product because you're going to cost more than the incumbents. Yeah. So you have to convince them why that's the case. And that comes through a combination of the product quality, um, you know, the ethical sourcing, the packaging, the brand marketing, et cetera.
As you all know, this episode is is supported by Clavio and this is a a brand that that does sort of marketing automation, right? That kind of automates
SMS and email marketing for
businesses to acquire and then retain and and grow customers.
through that kind of marketing. And I wonder how you
Think about
customer acquisition and targeting
maybe a core type of customer or like a maybe there's sort of an avatar for who
You imagine
using your products f first to you, Brian, how do you guys
acquire and then
Seek out and and who
is the kind of person you're looking for.
So this has really evolved.
When I was making the product in my kitchen, I think the vision for what our customer segmentation would look like was a little bit different than it is today.
I mean it was it was really just as as simple as people who are gluten free are gonna like this. People who are vegan are gonna like this.
But you know, I think as we've become
More professionalized, grown as a team. We do segmentation based on these different profiles or types of consumers in the way that they think. And
You know, some are are families that are just trying to eat healthier. We also have a consumer profile of people who are very structured in how they think.
And those are two distinct.
demographics from our perspective and and we actually
Talk to them in different ways.
Yeah.
How I also grain free products that you make.
How do you think about acquiring new customers and then who do you think of
When you think of that.
Kind of.
Core customer.
When we started the company we didn't have the budget to to customer research and things like that. So I was just doing it myself, right? Like what do I like? And then I'll ask my friends and family what do they like.
And in a way
It was pretty kinda spot on.
But as you grow the company.
and introduce new products it gets a little more difficult, right?
And so we we have invested in in more research and to understand who our consumers are. And what we learn is that from the chili banana bites
Uh uh.
kinda go more towards the sweets and the the chewy ones and we realize as
the company start growing more on the cheap side. There was kind of more
males that were buying uh those type of products. So it's it's very interesting. And uh shameless plug in. We use Clavio and
did at the beginning and then someone that we hire end up choosing someone else and then we went back'cause they were battery. But it's a great way to kinda
Get that information and understand like a who is buying it and why.
Hm.
Becca.
So it's really interesting to hear Brian talk about where he's at in terms of customer segmentation because Sponsor is a few years older than us, and I feel like I'm hopefully looking into the mu the mirror of my future self. So right now, we do a ton of
customer serving. So I feel like we're very much in the data collection phase. You know, our core customer has been in the four years that we've been around very much millennial women as the years have gone on, especially it's gotten quite a bit older as we've gotten into retail and also gotten more national awareness.
Um outside of just social media. Hm.
The last data point that I'll put in is we do have this
Pretty robust brand ambassador program that I'm really proud of, honestly. Tell us about it.
Yeah, um, so I mean, like Kawe was saying, you know, I think we all started out doing our own demos, and that was just such a rich data pool, um, and such a rich experience to talk to people that had never heard of Fishwife before. So at this point, we have about 15 brand ambassadors nationwide in our primary markets.
We've built that team in house, which, you know, for those that are less
indoctrinated into this area of work.
A lot of people use third party BAs, which is great, and we have done it before and it has been extremely effective.
But you know, having them internally, having them in house.
Allows us to A, I think, get them to truly understand and transmit our
brand message more effectively and also in return.
To get better data.
Mm.
How big do you wanna be? What is
What does success look like for a fishwife in your view?
It's really summed up in our mission, um, which makes it easy. Um, our mission is to make premium sustainable tinfish.
A staple in every American cupboard.
Definitely the vast majority of Americans still think of canned fish as commodity chunk like tuna.
And and having, you know, one or two use cases, a tuna fish sandwich, a tuna casserole.
We know there are so many more use cases that are so much more delicious. There's, you know, beautiful pastas, um, there's rice balls, there's onigiries, there's sandwiches. So
They're just
you know, we have this opportunity to introduce people to so many species that they're not familiar with.
To
Anchovies, mackerel, trout. Sardines. Sardines. And they're plentiful and they're all so sustainable. Exactly.
So success to me looks like achieving that behavior change.
You know, the majority of Americans understanding sort of the difference between commodity sort of canned fish and premium high quality sustainable tin fish.
And always having that in their cupboard to pull out.
Cowie to you.
I think it's very similar. The bigger we get, the more impact we have, the more food waste uh reduction we we have, the more people we help in the Amazon, like the more forests we protect, more regenerative agricultural. So um
Introducing more products and growing because every time we sell a bag we are helping someone or helping the environment. So
Just more of the same.
Brian.
Number five, pasta. What does
Uh it was again an amazing.
No, um what is ultimate
Success look like for Bonza.
I think if we can help fill that gap.
in consumption of beans where
If it's now a third of the recommended daily value that people are getting.
If we can get people to eat beans every day, it doesn't just have to be bonza, but we've inspired the consumption of of more beans.
That's a win.
We are also very inspired by what Shabani did in Yogurt, where
Fifty of the yogurt category is now this higher protein, lower sugar version of yogurt. And it's so delicious. Yogurt twenty years ago in the US sucked.
And now so much of it's so good.
So good, less sweet, right? Like how often does that happen? That the thing that's better for you wins out. Yeah. They're the real inspiration. And I think if we can do anything similar to that in pasta, that would be a huge win for so many reasons.
And if I may if I may, uh what I think is very interesting between our three brands.
is that we are focusing on things that people have been eating for thousands of years. We're just kinda reintroducing them in a way that is more convenient. So I think that is the beauty.
Uh we're not trying to reinvent the wheel. Uh it's like our bodies absorb these items uh really well. They're good for the environment, and just through history the industry change and we need to get back to those basic things that are
Good for the environment and the people.
Becca, Brian, Kaway, thanks so much. Thank you for having us.
That's Becca Millstein, co-founder and CEO of Fishwife.
Brian Rudolph, co-founder and CEO of Bonza, and Kawe Suplisi, co-founder and CEO of Barnana.
Thanks so much for listening to this special episode series brought to you by Clavio. And before you go, 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 Arablui. It was edited 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 Cypher, Carrie Thompson, and Neba Grant.
I'm Guy Roz and you've been listening to how I built this.