Starting Something Big in the Middle of Somewhere Small – Mary’s Gone Crackers

By Susie, 13 September, 2011,

Past orchards, the ground littered with wind-blown nuts. Elephant-eye-high corn fields. Sneeze-and-you’re-past towns. Keep going, down winding roads with frustratingly changing speed limits you know have got to be designed for the radars to catch you. You’re not in the city anymore. You’re not even near the main highway anymore. How did you get here? And why?

In my case I was on a mission to meet Mary Waldner of Mary’s Gone Crackers, someone whose factory in Gridley, CA I’d wanted to visit since the first time I munched on her gluten-free black pepper crackers while on a roadtrip (and had no idea where Gridley was). I honestly didn’t actually think I’d one day be sitting in Mary’s rural office–in a cozy pre-fab building–eating uber crunchy Curry Stick Twigs for breakfast.

Oh sure, the world has thousands of rural businesses and food businesses based on freshly harvested produce, logically situated by the farms. Yet, Mary and her husband dale Dale did not grow up in the countryside. Not at all. They moved here from the Bay Area after putting a stake in the ground to pursue this food business, near their organic rice suppliers. They now love the “country” life.

Touring with Mary through the production facility made me think a lot about the use of “hand made” and small batch. I’ve visited factories my whole life, from Wonder Bread, to General Mills, and the good old Hershey walk-through factory in Oakdale, CA that closed. Much as in I Love Lucy’s time, many food types require hand labor, and many are nearly fully automated including ultra cool mechanisms to discard “bad” batches.

When you see a factory like Mary’s first hand, you realize how even if a company seems “big” it really may run like a small bakery. This is partly due to how simple and natural the ingredients used to make Mary’s products are: organic quinoa, rice, and others. The herb crackers have full pieces of rosemary.

From a smaller facility in Chico, the company moved to this larger warehouse where they set up production, taking employees who had started out as helpers and seeing them move up to managing production. It’s nice to see the heart that goes into healthy products and how locating in a semi-rural location can allow for growth at a more affordable price while building up a regional economy.

Smart Lessons for Food Entrepreneurs

Stick to your intuition even if your circle says no or has ideas that don’t seem right to you. The company is expanding into different sorts of products (I’m addicted to the ginger cookies) rather than extending the same product lines to the moon.
Source the best ingredients. You can see on the packages the company can make every desirable health claim that makes the products ideal for every sort of eater.
Plan your production smartly. With such unique products the team knew they would run production themselves rather than setting up with co-packers to manufacture for them.
Solve a need. It was just luck that Mary and Dale started at the beginning of the gluten free boom. However their excellent products that appeal to all snackers are what makes them so successful.
Keep improving and be nimble. The spirit of invention and continual process improvement is critical to reduce costs and to be able to expand with demand.
Clearly define your founders’ roles. Mary is product. Dale is operations. (“If it weren’t for Dale, I’d probably still be making these in my kitchen,” Mary told me with a smile.)

Come to think of it, these principles apply for any entrepreneur!

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Choose Your Food Business Investors Carefully

By Susie, 26 August, 2011,

It is with dismay we face another great artisan confectioner and patissier in San Francisco closing, related to issues with the business investment. First, it was Charles Chocolates (who aims to re-open) and now Tell Tale Preserve Co.–both known for superlative products. Take choosing investment partners than a marriage (e.g., don’t run off to Vegas for a shotgun signing). See what Richard Branson has to say and consider the possibility of community investment.

The Dramas of Food Entrepreneurship ala Entourage

By Susie, 24 August, 2011,

Who would have guessed one episode of Entourage Season 7 could make the perfect tutorial on the travails of small batch food production. Or in this case, tequila. As the plot progressed, I ticked off the lessons learned, chuckling. For you non-Entourage watchers, here’s the synopsis:

Modern branding – “The design looks a little old,” Turtle complains to the tequila company owner, adding that he’s selling it in trendy clubs.
Promotion exceeds supply = problems – The plot thickens as Vince tweeted about the tequila, driving a number of orders and stressing out the producer who explained that they are a small scale tequila company. I was surprised jacking up the price to level out demand and supply didn’t come up.
Launching with exclusivity – Loved seeing Gil Turner‘s, the West LA classic liquor store that’s been there forever by the Whiskey and Roxy Theaters asking for a one-month exclusive. (The “sales guy,” Turtle, gets him to buy twice the quantity in exchange for the exclusive and offering to tweet that Gil Turner’s was the place to get it.)
Roles and responsibilities – Turtle gets chewed out for selling when he’s supposed to be merely putting a marketing campaign together. Damn us passionate types! The chew out doesn’t stop him.
Connections to the right people – If you can finagle yourself into a Hollywood agent’s office, hand out product to your target customer, and be ready to pitch to your fans who will gladly evaluate investment possibilities — well you might be ready for your own entourage and TV show, not to mention success.

And if you’ve got a retail location? I wonder if the exposure (and payment?) Urth Caffe has garnered over the seasons exceeds the intake from their cafe. Probably not, but it must certainly be worth the equivalent of Vince tweeting about the tequila in this episode which, by the way, is only for food entrepreneurs of a certain age.

Start an Energy Bar Business the Easy Way

By Susie, 4 August, 2011,

Save 5% off on your energy bar or other custom mix order with PROMO CODE: YourBarBusiness

In the heart of Los Angeles lies a small family business that’s spawning a world of both small and big businesses: YouBars. They are what’s called a “co-packer,” which is a contract manufacturer who handles the production of food products–whether you have a recipe or want them to start from scratch.

YouBars works with individuals and food entrepreneurs launch natural energy / protein / meal replacement bars as well as trail mixes and other healthy, customizable products, at minimal effort. How hot are they? Just this month, the company expanded from their one-person apartment-sized space near the CBS studios to an 8,000 square food facility in downtown Los Angeles (hooray for the local economy!).

Working with a contract manufacturer like YouBars makes it easy for anyone with a plan to create and market a product with no food skills or production facility. I recently chatted with YouBars founder Anthony Flynn to learn the steps to launch a line of bars. It all starts with strategy: What kind of product are you looking to develop?

How You’ll Make the Next Great Energy Bar

To start your business, you’ll need to get licensed as a “business.” A major nugget though: They can add you to their insurance policy which is an extremely affordable way to get liability coverage.

1) They help formulate a recipe. You’d tell them if you want it raw, organic, the nutrition facts you’d like to have such as if it’s high protein or low sodium. They’ll recommend a bar size too, such as if you’re targeting a 100 calorie bar or 9 grams of protein. They approve it or make adjustments. Then do a sampling and ask their friends for feedback.

2) You get an initial price. Then based on the ingredients and packaging they’ll come up with a final estimate for your energy bars.

3) They work with a few different packaging companies and can get packaging from one unit (very expensive) to a million packages (the definition of “economies of scale”). It takes about a month to have the packaging made.

Then production!

Voila you have your own line of snack bars to sell on your Facebook, gyms, restaurants, dieticians, and stores. “You see all sorts of creative things, such as using bars as business cards or wedding favors,” says founder Anthony Flynn.

Of course you taste the formulas before anything is finalized.

How Fulfillment Works

Say you order 10,000 bars. You can pull from that purchase order in smaller quantities and get the bulk discount. They can dropship for you, either to stores like Whole Foods or for orders that come in on your website. They have great shipping rates and can handle your website as well as customer service.

For some customers only when they get an order do they make it. So there’s no inventory or shelf-life issues.

Successes

Customers around the world look to YouBars to help develop, launch, and manage their energy bar and meal bar companies. You’ll find YouBars in the Middle East munched on by soldiers, throughout Europe and Asia.

You won’t find the YouBars brand on your store shelves. They exist to help food entrepreneurs and consumers bring their energy bar visions to life.

We sampled some bars on a visit. Ranging from a halvah-like cashew bar to traditional granola bars, we loved the variety. My mind is reeling with ideas. Is yours?

Save 5% on your energy bar or other custom mix order with my PROMO CODE: YourBarBusiness

Mast Brothers Chocolate Sets Sail on a Chocolate Making Adventure

By Susie, 19 July, 2011,

A short walk from the L train Bedford Street stop in Brooklyn’s strikingly hip Williamsburg area, you arrive at Mast Brothers‘ small chocolate making “factory.” Meeting their growers and giving tours of their bean-to-bar operation jazzes these two brothers: Rick, a chef and Michael, a film maker.

A chocolate making employee (as they all are), Rick, and Michael

I had no idea what to expect, and this visit proved how delightful it is when an experience exceeds anything you could have imagined:

1) Rather than drum roasters, they use small convection ovens and roast the organic beans on trays the size of a home cookie sheet. “We can do true roasting profiles and have so much more control over a drum roaster. Everyone here has a master palate. We know it’s ready by taste.”bea

2) An aerospace engineer friend designed and patented a winnowing machine that uses air to remove hulls and grind the beans into nibs. (This clever device has no hallmarks of Rube Goldberg.)

Rick Mast and the Brooklyn-made Cacao Bean Winnower

3) A domestic company builds their chocolate-making machines, powered by granite wheels. Their basic chocolate consists simply of cacao beans and organic sugar. Other inclusions like almonds come from producers they know personally. The granite wheels macerate and smooth the roasted beans and sugar for several days. With a twist of a knob, they increase pressure to make the chocolate smoother and smoother. When the chocolate is ready–all determined by taste–It sits for 30 days in metal bins to “age,” which is a new-school chocolate-making method popularized by fellow chocolate maker Steve DeVries.

4) Each bar is hand wrapped, with friends coming in during the busy season to lend a hand. In the air-conditioned bar wrapping room, which I imagine makes this the coveted job during summer, photos of the superstar fast wrappers plaster the wall. First gold foil wraps around the freshly molded chocolate bars, then a fancy gift-paper like wrapper, designed by Mast Brothers and printed by Prestone Press in Long Island City. They keep a keg filled with local beer on hand for the chocolate makers (which are all of the employees) to enjoy. “It’s the buddy system,” they explain when I asked if the brewery supplies beer is in trade for chocolate.

Wrapping like the oldies.

5) Next, The Secret Room. Just kidding. They specifically point out they are a completely open door operation with nothing to hide. Although the Oompa Loompas were disguised as hip tattooed Brooklynites.

How to Import Cocoa Beans and Travel to Another Century in 14 Days

Everything Mast Brothers uses is organic and direct trade, purchased directly from producers. The only “certifications” they embrace and need are direct connections to growers. “We consider our growers family. We will also be the first buyers from a new Belize co-operative that our friends started,” says Rick.

They point to a stack of burlap sacks filled with cocoa beans, preparing to transport me to the 19th century. “We chartered a 70-foot schooner to pick 20 metric tons of beans up from the Dominican Republic,” Rick says. He explains the impetus for sailing is that there is nothing local about cocoa. “We figure why not limit our participation in the industrialization of food. The same people who grew the cacao from the La Red co-operative delivered the shipment to the boat.” They thanked their growers with an excellent price and ample beer.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE from Mast Brothers Chocolate on Vimeo.

It took 14 days to get the bean-filled schooner back to Brooklyn, with only wind powering the boat. “We learned a lot just bringing it into the Brooklyn port. The city hadn’t played host to a schooner in decades. They were like ‘Why would you do that?’” Once it sunk in, the city agreed it was quite an awesome endeavor. At the port, they inspected the beans and found no problems–making Mast Brothers the first since 1939 to sail cargo into New York City! A few blocks later, the beans landed at Mast Brothers HQ. They aren’t sure if it cost more to transport the beans this way. Hey, lots of people might pay to take such an adventure. (Here’s more about the trip)

In the next couple of months, visitors and locals can enjoy an expanded chocolate making facility with a community center open to passersby to see first-hand how good chocolate is made. Farmer visits, chocolate history talks, and music complete the picture of a community space for the brothers. “Nothing substitutes for people coming in, meeting us, and seeing our place. We want to have a place where people walking by eating ice cream can pop in and discover how chocolate is made.” Good business is FUN.

It’s worth a trip off the beaten path to taste their chocolate where it’s made. “We make every wholesale order on demand. Nothing is sitting in a warehouse.” Visit 105 North 3rd Street (the Bedford L stop) and travel to another time and place to discover Mast Brothers chocolate bars, chips, tablets, cacao nibs, and soon, confections.

Chocolates, nibs, oh my

What’s next? After I told a beloved candy maker all about the Mast Brothers, she immediately felt a connection. I won’t give it away to them or anyone, but I see great things to come in East Coast confection collaborations through yet another synchronous food connection. Good food is good life!