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

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 https://www.klaviyo.com/ for sponsoring today’s episode. You can follow HIBT onX https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis &Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis and sign up for Guy's free newsletter atguyraz.com http://guyraz.com/. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. And you get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more.

• 0:15Guy Raz?

  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. 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? Well, why don't we find out? This week and next week, in a special episode series brought to you by Klaviyo,

• 0:57Guy Raz?

  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. 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 Kawi Supplisi 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 2016. But back then, she didn't really think of herself as an entrepreneur.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  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 I 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 and the one that I was in right as I started Fishwife.

• 1:59Guy Raz?

  What was the startup?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  It was a British music startup. And it was essentially, we work for musicians. And it 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. It has not stood the test of time.

• 2:19Guy Raz?

  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 started to get the bug.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:29Guy Raz?

  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 and COVID.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was honestly no started. There was just one day that was a light bulb 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. I was living in southern Spain in Granada and was traveling around mostly in Andalucia, traveled to Portugal, and that was where I had my exposure to high quality tin fish or conserve us.

• 3:00Guy Raz?

  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 didn't I know about this?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 3:29Guy Raz?

  Tuna fish.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Tuna fish, exactly. That was the only exposure I had. 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.

• 3:42Guy Raz?

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

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Exactly, working remotely for this British music startup.

• 3:54Guy Raz?

  Got it, and you're starting to think, I don't know, your mind wandering. Has it landed on going back to the fish that you experienced as a student, you know, six years earlier?

• 4:04Speaker 02

  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 shelves that didn't, you know, was not contingent on our day of, week of meal planning.

• 4:17Guy Raz?

  And this is you living at home with your parents at the time?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  This is me living with my brother and his then girlfriend.

• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it was like sardines and tuna, like that's kind of the, the kind of fish you were eating?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Sardines, tuna, mussels, that was the bulk of it.

• 4:33Guy Raz?

  On bread or just like in pasta or both or?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:47Guy Raz?

  Got it.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  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 any meaningful way. And when we had that lightbulb 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 sometimes.

• 5:18Guy Raz?

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

• 5:29Speaker 02

  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 tinned fish 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.

• 5:55Guy Raz?

  All right, we're gonna come back to your story in a moment, so hold that thought. I want to turn to you, Brian, and talk about Banza. I know that you, I know that you went to business school. You studied at Emory.

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Undergrad business school.

• 6:06Guy Raz?

  Undergraduate, yeah. And at a business school, you worked for like a digital marketing platform for a couple of years.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:13Guy Raz?

  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?

• 6:22Speaker 03

  I don't think I knew what I wanted to do. I, 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 then I was like, oh, this is really fun.

• 6:36Guy Raz?

  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.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, everyone has their own journey with this.

• 6:47Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 7:04Guy Raz?

  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. There are things that people experience in different ways. 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 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.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I was making a bunch of things in my kitchen.

• 7:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  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. And I grew up eating pasta three, four nights a week. It's one of my favorite foods, so.

• 7:57Guy Raz?

  Delicious.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  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 have at least some less carbs. They are gluten free, grain free, they're vegan, they're affordable, they're great for the environment. There are so many things about chickpeas that are 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.

• 8:31Guy Raz?

  I can tell, I love that. I mean, 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?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, the very first version of Banza was made with a wine bottle and a knife.

• 8:49Guy Raz?

  This is before Banza was even a glimmer in your eye. This is just for you, right?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  This is just seeing what would happen.

• 8:54Guy Raz?

  Okay.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  And it was quite bad. But went from that to then buying a hand crank pasta machine, to then buying, I actually got a little pasta machine from a pawn shop at one point, really just experimenting. And then maybe a few months in, started to realize this might be a thing that I could actually turn into a career.

• 9:18Guy Raz?

  Okay, how did that happen? Because you're not a guy, I mean, you came from business school, you worked for a digital marketing firm. I don't think you were thinking about starting a consumer brand, let alone a food brand. What was the tipping point where you were like, you know, this is fun. I like this. I'm eating this. I'm going to leave my job and start a chickpea pasta business, which is kind of crazy.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  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. 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. 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, 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.

• 10:17Guy Raz?

  The ideas that you had before, you were like, God, this is, I could do it, but this could be boring.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  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 has food restrictions, is deeply personal. And the way that you can impact someone's life through food is very special.

• 10:38Guy Raz?

  So 2014, you decide to do this and you recruited your older brother, Scott, 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.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. I feel very fortunate that I was able to rope Scott away from his actual career. I was 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, at some point, he asked me if he wanted to, or if he could be an advisor to Banza. 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, true partnership.

• 11:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Let's come back to you in a moment, turn to you, Kaoi, and talk about Barnana because you are originally from Brazil. You grew up in Brazil and Were a triathlete. You were not just a good triathlete, you were really great. 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. Tell me a little bit about that time in your life and what you were sort of pursuing.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Since I was very little, my parents always were very focused in telling us that we should do what makes 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. 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. So I, at one point, said, that's where I want to be. So decided to kind of make a move and drop out of college. At that point, my parents are saying, OK, we told you to pursue your dream, but your dream of becoming an architect like your father,

• 12:39Speaker 04

  not of like dropping out of college and going to race triathlons. But that's what I did. I moved to San Diego, and I didn't really know anyone there. But in one of my first races, I met kind of my idol, who was a triathlon world champion. And he finished first at the race, and I finished second.

• 12:56Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 12:57Speaker 04

  That, to me, was already kind of, OK, I made it.

• 13:00Guy Raz?

  That's amazing.

• 13:01Speaker 04

  Because I am here with my idols. It was really cool.

• 13:03Guy Raz?

  All right, so you really, I mean, you moved to San Diego to pursue this incredible athletic career, not thinking, oh, I'm going to start a business, and this is going to be what I'm going to do. But meantime, while everybody around you is sucking down those gels and goo and different 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's got all the right balance of like sugar and potassium and energy and carbohydrates that you need to fuel your fire for whatever sport you're playing.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, so 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 gel at that time. 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 are easy to digest. 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.

• 14:14Guy Raz?

  Dried bananas.

• 14:15Speaker 04

  And that's what, yeah, dried bananas, dehydrated bananas. And that's what I was eating. And when you are an athlete eating something that is unusual, all their athletes, they wanna know what you're eating.

• 14:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Because they always wanna know, like, what is the edge that the other guy has?

• 14:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because I imagine at the time, like, you could get maybe dried bananas in some, like, you know, co-ops or a few natural grocery stores, but it wasn't really easy to find. In meantime, you're finding that, uh, cause 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, 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.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  It does. And I think a healthier ace to get calories are kind of from, like, natural foods that your body's used to. I always felt that that was better than the processed, like, simple sugars that you find in gels. 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, 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.

• 15:35Guy Raz?

  So I guess, from what I read, Kawai, at a certain point, you noticed that other Brazilian products that were just a kind of 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 on the beach, you know, from the back of his car. All of a sudden, you see Zico and VitaCoco. We did VitaCoco on this show many years ago, and that's an amazing story. The coconut water wars of the 2000s. You're seeing acai bowls and things like that, right? 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 US. Maybe there's something to these dried bananas, these dehydrated bananas.

• 16:18Speaker 04

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

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Acai, you had sambozón, 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 these bananas. 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 was more like, I miss out on the coconut water and the acai. If someone else does the bananas before, I'm going to really be pissed off. I gotta jump on that really quickly.

• 17:40Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Becca, Brian, and Kawai 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.

• 18:01Guy Raz?

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• 18:46Guy Raz?

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• 19:31Guy Raz?

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• 19:58Guy Raz?

  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 Kawi Suplesi 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. 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?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  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 the process to get off the ground is very, very messy. So for me, I had worked in marketing and brand partnerships in the music industry. And that's kind of immediately where my mind went was, 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 big research process, really looking at Instagram for many, many hours and talking to some friends and getting referrals, landed on our illustrator, Danny Miller.

• 21:14Guy Raz?

  So I want to talk about this for a moment because if anybody knows your products, they pop off the shelves. 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. And really, people should just go on your website and see this if they're not familiar with your packaging. 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 you had something, you knew that you wanted to look different.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  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. 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, we were going to need to start with the visuals, the tone of voice, everything that goes into creating a brand.

• 22:29Guy Raz?

  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?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I started doing everything at once. So I was asking everyone I knew who might know a fisherman. So 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 fisherman" at the time. 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 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

• 23:24Speaker 02

  partner in either Portugal or Spain 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.

• 23:36Guy Raz?

  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. 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.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  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. 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, you know, generate conversion and sales from Instagram, from that platform, would be directing them to a D to C business. It also is just the easiest to get going.

• 24:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Candidly, retail is extremely complex.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  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? So it was like extremely difficult to try to go to any retailers, even if you had the relationships.

• 24:45Guy Raz?

  So the constraints sort of forced you to make those choices.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a very fortunate limitation, and I think it was absolutely the right strategy.

• 24:54Guy Raz?

  Okay, Brian, I want to find out about Banza. Okay, so you're making pasta. You decide, we're going to make this commercially, right? 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. 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. 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.

• 25:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 25:34Guy Raz?

  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?

• 25:42Speaker 03

  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. 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 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.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  And it was Meyer, right? The Midwestern or the Michigan kind of based grocery store chain?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  Correct. And Meyer, I think, saw that we were a Detroit-based business and was excited to work with a local business. And they wanted to carry our products in all of their stores, which accelerated our entire timeline.

• 26:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And that's like, what, like 80, 90 stores?

• 26:47Speaker 03

  I think it was right around 200 at the time.

• 26:50Guy Raz?

  Oh.

• 26:51Speaker 03

  And 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.

• 27:05Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  And make a higher protein version, the new standard. You know, 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.

• 27:15Guy Raz?

  And were you going to start with one shape, like rotini or elbows? Like, what was the shape you were going to start with?

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Penne and rotini were our first two shapes.

• 27:23Guy Raz?

  Penne and rotini, okay.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:25Guy Raz?

  And how did you? So you've got Meyer, but at the same time, it's like threading the needle, right? You got to find the manufacturer and you're probably panicking, thinking, how are we going to fulfill this order?

• 27:35Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:51Guy Raz?

  What was wrong?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  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 or, you know, by the time we knew if the product was successfully produced, we had already produced, I think, 10,000 pounds and then...

• 28:12Guy Raz?

  And what was the problem with it?

• 28:14Speaker 03

  I mean, you would boil it and it would fall apart within 30 seconds.

• 28:17Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  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? 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 gonna run out of money.

• 28:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah, you're paying for all these runs and they're just not working.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  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. So literally just 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 20,000 boxes, shipping them out the next two days later.

• 29:10Guy Raz?

  Wait, stickering the boxes with what?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  The cooking instructions when we printed the packaging said boil it for five to seven minutes.

• 29:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 29:26Guy Raz?

  Cook it this way?

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:27Guy Raz?

  Wow, okay. Which is tricky because not everybody reads the cooking instructions for pasta. They just sort of like boil water, you put it in there.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, we hoped that people would see the sticker. We also recognized that this was 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, we may never have a chance to work with Meyer again. Of course, they presented it in very dramatic terms, which, you know, 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 a period of time until eventually we opened our own plant.

• 30:09Guy Raz?

  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.

• 30:16Speaker 03

  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.

• 30:30Guy Raz?

  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. But you survived that.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  We did. It felt horrible. If I tell you, every time we got in 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 in order online. 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. You know, we're not going to sit on our hands. We need to always be better.

• 31:16Guy Raz?

  Kawai, 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, you know, make sense. You were a triathlete. But now you are going to jump into food. How did you find somebody to work with to actually dry the bananas to your specifications and to create a brand?

• 31:39Speaker 04

  It took a while because we only launched in 2012.

• 31:43Guy Raz?

  Took three years.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. I was retiring as a triathlete, but I still had a lot of drive in. And like, it was a very Taipei, wanted to race everything or everyone I could find. 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. Had friends calling other countries. So was just kind of getting a lot of samples as well as calling a lot of people here in the US that could kind of help me create a product that I had envisioned. So what I did, I actually called the largest chocolate covered raisins manufacturer in the country a brand.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  And somehow, they end up connecting me with the COO of the company. It was a very large company. 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 end up launching there. We just kind of 20-pound box of samples.

• 32:51Guy Raz?

  Kawai, how did you finance it originally? I mean, did you have winnings from your races? How were you able to even do a first product run?

• 33:00Speaker 04

  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 somehow some industry folks to invest in the business and it was friends and family. But we had zero sales. When we ended up launching, we went to this big food expo.

• 33:28Guy Raz?

  This is the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim?

• 33:31Speaker 04

  Correct, yes, we went to Expo West. Basically, the only money we had was to buy the space. I ended up going to, at the time, a store called Kinko's, printed our design of the package in a sticker and bought a little standard pouch and stickered this standard pouch with our branding.

• 33:49Guy Raz?

  Your logo.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Our logo, and that's what we showed at Expo West.

• 33:53Guy Raz?

  And you got orders from that?

• 33:55Speaker 04

  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. And we were definitely not set up for that. And brokers from across the country wanted to sell.

• 34:15Guy Raz?

  Wow. And you were just a little, I think it was you and two other co-founders at that point, that you had met in San Diego.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I had met them in San Diego. They were still in school, about to graduate, Matt Clifford and Nick Ingersoll. So if it wasn't for them, likely the 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.

• 34:41Guy Raz?

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

• 34:47Speaker 04

  I actually said no to Wegmans three times.

• 34:50Guy Raz?

  Because you didn't think you guys could fulfill the order?

• 34:52Speaker 04

  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 to Wegmans. So if Wegmans wants your product, you should make it happen." And I was like, "Oh, okay." The guy from Wegmans 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."

• 35:20Guy Raz?

  That's Kawi Suplisi, founder and CEO of Barnana. You also heard from Becca Millstein, co-founder and CEO of Fishwife, and Brian Rudolph, co-founder and CEO of Banza. 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 Klavio 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 Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by John Isabella.

• 36:04Guy Raz?

  Our audio engineer was James Willetts. Our production staff also includes Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Devin Schwartz, Elaine Coats, J.C. Howard, Catherine Seifer, Kerry 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 by Klavio.