B-Sides: Flavor, Sustainability & Profit with Yousuf Ahmed

Think about the app you've been wanting to build, sell something you've created, run your community, manage your business, or launch your next idea. Now imagine it's live, before today's over. Meet Base44, the fastest way to turn any idea into a fully functional app. No code, no waiting, just describe what you want, and watch it come together, back end, design, and all in minutes. A real product ready to share. From idea to live app fast, start building today at Base44.com. Most businesses are just focused on whatever the end product is that they're making, and so trying to convince them, hey, you've got this buy product, why don't you invest more money to figure out what to do with the buy product? It's just a really tough sell. It took me a while to figure this out, because I tried doing pizza, bagels, all sorts of stuff, and stuff that's terrible. And then I started baking cookies, doing plays on pop charts, and that's when everything clicked, where I was like, oh, instead of me trying to like shoot more in this ingredient in a direction I wanted it to take it, why not like pay attention to the ingredient and formulate a product around that? This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. Right about now. That's why we've got the founder. He's the King of Crunch of B-Sides. What's up, you said? Hey, Ryan, how you doing? Good. You said, oh, man, the King of Crunch. I've already given him a name because he's a disruptor. He's from Goldman Sachs to the King of Crunch. You got quite the story there. Oh, yeah. I'm a curious guy. I feel like if you're going to try to take a swing in this world, you got to do everything that you can't. I like everything about this package when it hit our desk. Go like, okay, we've got snacks. I'm a snack guy. Snacks. We got crunchy things like tasty flavors. B-sides. I got the music play there. Growing up in a very musical family, I love the brand sustainable. We checked a lot of boxes, you said, in things that seem interesting and disruptive, but also cool. Yeah. I wanted to throw everything against the wall. I thought there were a couple of different ways that I could approach building a brand. You hit them all in the head, right? Delicious stuff that also happens to be good for you, good for the planet. What more could you want? Exactly. Look, you're right down the road. South Carolina is where we're at Greenville, South Carolina. Born and raised in Atlanta? Was that, did I hear that? Born and raised in Atlanta. Yeah, born and raised in Atlanta. Went to undergrad at UGA. Oh, well, I won't hold that against you, but I'm a climpsing guy. I don't know how much you're into the, you got to be college football guy, right? If you were to Georgia. You know, it's so funny. I tried. I tried really hard, but I just, I couldn't get into it. I was, you know, we're talking about the music background. I started my career in the music business actually in Athens, a huge music town. And so I spent most of my time at the recording studio there, not at Sanford Stadium. Music? I mean, Goldman Sachs. Like, what got you to be sides? Let's give a little bit of that, that founder story of, you know, what got you into all this? If you look backwards, you can kind of connect the dots pretty easily. So on the son of a couple of immigrants who like did not want me to work in restaurants or work in food, but, you know, food culture was kind of always top of mind for kind of I'm used to both in the US and abroad. And the business manager handles everything with regards to the money, both on the personal and the professional side. So you get kind of a holistic picture of how the business works, how artistry works, how these people kind of function in their everyday lives. And for a young, single guy living in New York City in his early 20s, like, it was a dream, but it's also like, you're working investment banking hours for not even close to investment banking pay. So I kind of hung up that apron and like a good millennial, you know, quit my job, traveled around the world, ran out of money, came back to New York, got a job as a dog walker and played a business school. And then I switched over into investment management. So that's how I went to Goldman Sachs. So I spent the next five years managing money for the top, top 1% of this country. So I was a private wealth manager that basically means if you had 10 million bucks or more of investable assets, you were qualified to become a Goldman Sachs private wealth client. So that category is mostly entrepreneurs and I did a lot of work in venture capital. And that's the financial side. And then I wanted to basically spend 10 years managing other people's money. And I wanted to do something entirely different. So I took the food out of the back pocket and said, okay, how can I plant a flag here? And that's essentially how I got to this company. The whole millennial journey there. Jason, the superstars and managing their money and their problems. Their problems. Yeah. And there are many names dropping you can do. Yeah. So my biggest clients at the time were arcade fire, cut copy, go TA, the scissors, sisters, Vanessa Carlton, hot chip. So it's kind of a broad cross-section of different genres. Some of the artists had eight days, you know, in years prior, but we're still living on residuals. Some of them were just coming into the forefront. And it was a fascinating time because so this is like 2010, 2011 Spotify really like it had just started to percolate, but it hadn't changed kind of music business entirely. So there was tons of money to be made in the old model. And we were just transitioning into this new kind of streaming model. So lots of personalities, lots of personality management, you know, part therapist, part accountant. It was always fun. Was it the name? I mean, obviously your own guy. I mean, probably impressed by that. Like, but obviously getting to flex your kind of business management, you know, muscle. I mean, was it like the chase of, you know, the buzz of working with celebrity artists, but also getting to do the business out of what you like? Was it the combination to do? Yeah, it was both. My very first job in the music business was at a recording studio. I wanted to go to where the the artists were. So I that was like the natural kind of, okay, every artist has to record now. Let's go do that. And then it was like to become a recording engineer, you have to be a special kind of massacres that I just was not. And I wanted to, you know, in your words kind of flex the business muscle of it and figure out how this, like I said, the music business was in flux back then. And I really wanted to figure out like where the money was going, how to help artists capitalize on different things. So the allure of business management was the peak behind the curtain and, you know, sitting on the same side of the table as a lot of these artists. Yeah, the names are, you know, they make the job, it gives it a sense of cachet. There are plenty of artists that you have probably never heard of that I also worked with who also need help, you know. But it's the bigger the the bigger the artists, kind of the bigger the personality and that can start to become grading over time. Yeah, I'll use the word for you ego. You're worth my mind. Yeah, I know. You didn't say that. You enjoyed every moment of, but I've just heard that some of them have egos. It's a fascinating business and that could be another episode for another day talking about the evolution of that, the music business. But why the hell do you want to become an entrepreneur, man? I mean, managing other people's money sounds awesome sometimes. I mean, I own five companies now and, you know, it's I love it. And I wouldn't go back, but at the same time, was it just you wanted to do your own thing? I think you just phrased it perfectly, right? Like you love it and you wouldn't go back. Once you once you kind of scratch the itch, there's there's not going back. Look, so a couple of different things. One, I'm a super curious person. I think to be an investor, a successful investor, you have to have a sense of curiosity and private wealth management. So the way that Goldman Sachs model worked is here's a phone. Here's a computer. Go build a book of business. So it was quite entrepreneurial in that regard, right? Like I could go prospect across every sector and, you know, you're just cold calling dialing for dollars. The dollars just happen to be like very big in size. But to become fluent in the language that a certain sector uses and how that sector is organized with regards to access to capital or how these entrepreneurs themselves became very successful and then getting to the table of the entrepreneur and meeting them and learning about their journey and their goals. All of that was so captivating to me and it kind of just, I just kept taking it one step further, right? I basically said, okay, I think I figured out what traits are common to a lot of these successful entrepreneurs. I think I know how the deck is stacked with regards to fundraising. I have a pretty good network here. What's the sector that I really want to take on that I'm really interested in and food and in particular upcycling, which I'm sure we're going to touch on at some point, it was a question that not on me for, man, like over a decade before I actually like decided to plant my flag and say, okay, I'm going to figure this out and that's that's how I got into it. Now I can't imagine not doing it. If you're watching, we do have the the goodness here, which I'm going to be taking my first sampling here shortly as we get used to talking about the product, but I'll tell you what, food innovation, you had me a food, then I mean, innovating, something like a cheese putt, when I first got this package, I was thinking back to I was a kid. That was like my first favorite snack was the cheese doodle. I think that's what they were called, but they called cheese doodles or cheetos, but that's not yeah, that's a small cheetos. It's their big round ones. Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, totally. I used to love that stuff too, man. That's why I started on puffs. I feel like every American has this childhood memory, whether it's at summer camp or on road trips or whatever, and you got cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, basically anything from the Edo family, salty, and just, you know, I'm the biggest doom snacker that there is. I'll stand up pantry and just crush anything that's in there. And so for me, when I wanted to get into food, I knew savory snacks was going to be part of the equation just because I loved them so much, and I wanted to figure out how can we kind of push the boundaries in a admittedly overcrowded, hyper competitive space? Upcycling, that was the first, you mentioned a second ago. I want you to talk about product development and what you've learned, but definitely want to go down that upcycling. I mean, I had not heard that term. Now, think I understand it, but explain to me sort of product development and what the hell upcycling is. You know, to be fair to you and all your listeners, upcycling is something that I didn't even know that was like the catch all phrase for the sector. And this is something that I had spent a lot of time thinking about until I really rolled up my sleeves and just got, you know, my hands dirty with this stuff. So upcycling in a nutshell is taking byproducts from food manufacturing and putting them back into the consumer food system. The easiest kind of example that I tell people is like, you ever wonder what they do with a leftover oats from making oat milk? And the answer is usually they get thrown out. And I wanted to figure out what else could we make with those oats besides oat milk? And the crunch puff that you're holding is powered in part by the leftover oats from making oat milk. And this kind of example like exists all throughout the food system. If you think about the leftover grounds from, you know, brewing coffee or the leftover pulp from juice presses or, you know, the leftover grains from brewing beer and distilling alcohol, there are ingredients to be recaptured all throughout the food system. It's literally just backsolving for a supply chain problem is essentially what upcycling is. You consider yourself like, I can see use if I can the kitchen. Like, were you and I literally like like in the laboratory kitchen, like coming up with these cheese puff formulations? Yeah, so that's a good question. I didn't actually start with the puff like the puff that you're seeing now is a culmination of a lot of different work. The first category that I worked in was actually with the leftover grains from brewing beer. So it's called spent grain. And so I used to live around the corner from a brewery. They had distribution not throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania. It's kind of local. Every month they were putting out 10,000 pounds of spent grain. So multiply that by every micro brewery. Don't even like account for the big boys, right? That's a whole different, you know, category. And then every micro brewery throughout the United States and just the broader kind of world, it becomes mind-boggling how much of this stuff actually gets thrown out. And so when I started this whole path, I wanted to figure out, okay, like what am I actually dealing with here? Like what does this ingredient look like? What does it smell like taste like? How can I work with it? How can I get the health department to let me work with it? How do I then scale this? And so the cheese puff is kind of the epilogue of that journey. I actually started with a super premium line of baked goods. So if you think about breweries, like I don't know if you're a beer drinker. When I drink beer, I love salty, savory snacks, right? Like I'll eat pizza at breweries, I'll eat pretzels, I'll eat, you know, beans. Yeah, exactly. Southern boy. That's kind of where my mind went originally, but the problem with that is spent grain. Most of the grains that are left over from brewing beer, 90% of it is barley. And barley, multi-barley especially, works terribly in savory products. This is something that like Jewish deli owners have known for a really long time. The melted milkshake or melted milk bars are confections for a reason. Malt works exceptionally well in confectionery products. So it took me a while to figure this out because I tried doing pizza, bagels, all sorts of stuff. And I was like, wow, this stuff is terrible. And then I started, you know, baking cookies, doing plays on pop tarts. And that's when everything clicked where I was like, oh, instead of me trying to like shoot horn this ingredient in a direction I wanted it to take it, why not like pay attention to the ingredient and formulate a product around that. And so, yeah, the first product category I worked on was, you know, high-end takes on Oreos and pop tarts and Will Debbie's oatmeal cream pies, which totally different from, you know, broom beer, but that's how we ended up there. Why do you think food waste hasn't been tackled more aggressively by legacy brands? This is the sad reality of just the way that kind of our food systems have developed. It's just not part of their business model when, um, but let's take, you know, oatmeal producers, right? If you take a company like only that produces millions of gallons of oatmeal on an annual basis, everything they do is around bringing oatmeal to market. So all of their unit economics, all of their costing strategies, all their production is around that end product. It has nothing to do with the buy product. That's actually cost to do in business. We have this thing that we produced out. We got to throw it away. That's just built into the bottom line. And there's not a lot of incentive to get those companies to reorient around, you know, we call it byproduct valorization. Like what do you do with all these leftovers? And so, while there is ample opportunity to create additional revenue streams, most businesses are just focused on whatever the end product is that they're making, right? And so trying to convince them, Hey, you've got this byproduct. Why don't you invest more money to figure out what to do with the byproduct? It's just a really tough sell. Yeah. So you just went straight for the solution. I guess of the byproduct and then exactly part of your core business model, correct? Yep. Exactly. How do you balance the whole sustainability with great taste with upcycling with, I mean, like a lot of balls to juggle there? Yeah. You know, it's an excellent question because it's something that I've wrestled with for years and continued to wrestle with that. You know, I always think I'm getting closer and closer to that answer. The fact of the matter is consumers, everybody is noble until they get to the cash register. And ultimately, it's about flavor and convenience. That's just like the sad reality of humanity. Like if you ask 100 people, nobody's going to say, you know, screw the environment. But like when you really get down to brass packs, trying to change consumer behavior is not a good business strategy. So, you know, to your point about like flavor and product, like I started with let's make a really good product and let's fold sustainability into that really good product. So that way you don't have to ask a whole lot of the consumer, right? Like you snack, I snack, everybody snacks to some degree. Here's just another really good snack. Why don't you eat that snack and oh, by the way, all this other sustainable stuff went to power that snack. It's not really, you know, it's kind of like if you think about sustainability, the whole goal is a set of outcomes, right? Like lowering carbon emissions or reducing plastic waste or whatever, it's a set of outcomes. Now, if you can achieve those same outcomes without having, you know, beat the consumer over the head with, hey, pay more for this because we've done all these things. Like, haven't you accomplished the same goals? So like the way that I view sustainability is like just fold it into the business model, make a good product, create branding that resonates with people and it takes care of itself. Yeah, smart. I think two people get a little too caught up in that you're right, consumer behavior is very difficult and more importantly, very expensive. Very expensive. Very expensive. It's a lot of people have failed in that either running out of money or running out of the ability to change consumer behavior. And, you know, I'll ask this not being too presumptive, but you kind of answered it with how you balanced, you know, all of those three things with sustainability with great product, but a lot of purpose driven brands kind of fizzle out. And so how do you sort of scale differently and or knowing that? I mean, really, you can almost remove a lot of businesses or brands fail period, right? Yeah. But it just seems like the purpose driven ones seem to maybe sizzle a little a little fast or sizzle at first then kind of, you know, is that what are you doing to sort of avoid that? It's a great question. It's because at the end of the day, the least sustainable company is one that's not profitable. So like you can be as mission driven as you want, but if you can't actually figure out a business model that scales based on just product or service, like what what are you actually solving for? Like what are you doing? And so for me, I wanted to lead with flavor and crevability and sustainability is just like baked into the process, right? It's not the headline. DC politicians want to enact harmful credit card mandates that could take away your cash back and rewards points, perks that stretch your budget and make life a little easier. Losing these benefits means less money for your families every day essentials like gas and groceries. The perks you rely on could disappear, leaving you with higher costs and fewer options. Tell Congress to guard your card and oppose the urban martial credit card mandates. Paid for by electronic payments coalition. It's it's it's a you know, a third of the minimalist small kind of type on the front of pack. It's not beating the consumer over the head and the truth is a lot of consumers like they can sniff this stuff out. A lot of companies they'll just rubber stamp kind of a green like we are green. We are a purpose driven. And like what does that really mean to a consumer, right? And so like to your point about having sustainable companies be a flash in the pan, just make a good product. Make a product that people want and all the change you can you know if you figured out how to make that product and you backed into how to scale it sustainably from an economic perspective, then you've solved for all of the chronicle like green outcomes that you were looking for in the first place. 100% I love that perspective too because you can't save the world if you go out of business. Exactly. Exactly. So you got to go with the impact. It was our target for these because my mind was sitting here going as I was eating. I was like, okay, well I have four boys, something I'm like moms, moms to put them in like kids lunches that help you your snack or is it the fit people on the go that one little you know want to indulge but also be you know like who's the target? Yeah, it's so this is also an excellent question. Basically so the upfront answer like the moment that I think b-sides is built for is kind of the the 3 p.m. post lunch slump and you're you're sitting in an office and it's 1145. And listen man to teach their own right like teach their own. I eat them all the time. So we can be time-agnostic to your point about like who I'm really trying to target here. Yes, there are plenty of moms who are looking for better for you snacks. There are plenty of kind of fitness people who are doing the same. There are plenty of people who are just trying to make kind of better eating decisions throughout their lives. Here's the thing. The CPG space consumer package goods and snacks particularly. They are so overcrowded with people saying no I'm a better for you option. No I'm the better for you option. Or I have a cleaner ingredient label. No my ingredient label is cleaner or shorter. So I think consumers today a they're exhausted by this right like it is just like ping pong and back and forth. No it should be grain free. No we should do a blend of grains. People at the end of the day they just want a snack that's good they're going to be able to feel good about and that just like scratches the itch of wanting to eat a cheeto or a Dorito without actually doing that. And so you know for me the target the 3pm office slump a lot of people they go to their office pantry and you basically have skinny pop or you've got like a cliff protein bar or you have nuts right like and how many bags of nuts do you want to eat when really what people start to crave like they they want the bag of cheetos but they just feel like they can't have it. And the reason I'm going to be like the office space and kind of higher end corporate pantries and hotel mini bars and angles like that are the trying to go for the like cheetos and Frito lays core consumer. They've got like 80% household penetration so they can compete on price right like they'll they can charge 40 cents a bag. I'll go out of business if I try to charge 40 cents a bag. So I got to go for people who have a little more flex in what they can pay for and the people who just just want a good snack without feeling like they've broken the nutritional bank that's the target consumer. They're typically wealthier. They're typically you know they're not so overbent on reading every single ingredient on the ingredient label even though we've checked all those boxes. They just want a good snack. Ironically it could be in the backroom of those recording studios. Exactly. Exactly. We're looking for sponsors so you know right about now is on the target list. And hey I'll tell you what the iron co-work space as for me is called social house we're a co-work lounge and that was the first thing I thought actually was. There you go. These need to be in social house you know like as our yeah people were working but also it's the bar hangout crowd because we have a bar kind of a sports bar meets a co-work space and hey perfect that's a great place. Yes I know. You kind of nailed this it's like the rise of like functional snacks. I mean is protein still pack a punch or consumers evolving past macros. Yeah you know so protein is such an interesting thing because it I think it depends on who you talk to. For example I talk to a bunch of friends who um their gym rats they they're like jacked they love going to the gym and I ask them in like a snack what is the minimum amount of protein that snack has to have for you to like buy it they'll say like it has to have like 30 grams of protein I'm like dude that is that's like a rotisserie chicken like that is not a snack and so you know I've got five grams of protein per serving right that bag that you're eating right there has 10 grams of protein that's 20 percent of that. Oh that'd be 10 and a hurry. Boom. Yeah yeah exactly right and so it's kind of like I'm not going for the gym bros they want the David Protein bars having said that like what you'll start to see as you eat more and more of these is like they become quite fulfilling like you don't feel hungry in five minutes seven minutes ten minutes after the fact and just think like Jesus said I just like you know crush a whole bag of chips for nothing like it gave me nothing you you actually feel like pretty satisfied so you know not going after the gym bros there's a whole market of people like myself like I am not a as I'm sure you can tell like I am not a gym bro but I do want a fulfilling snack I want to end kind of the doom snacking cycle that's that's kind of the whole idea behind product development. How are we scaling this did we start D to C what's been that path to distribution and scaling? I took a all of the above omnichannel approach so like right now you can find these products on amazon.com, walmart.com you can get them direct consumer e-commerce via my website. I also did a limited kind of retail footprint distribution strategy here in New York City so I'm in 25 different retail shops it's a mix of kind of higher-end independent family run grocery chains some higher-end bodegas some of the higher-end delis but geographically distributed across different neighborhoods different cross sections of people it's all market testing I wanted to figure out who's buying it are they repy buying it where's velocity the highest and I'm running kind of a a paid ad strategy targeting the different aspects of the snack right do people buy it because of sustainability do people buy it because of nostalgia do people buy it because of protein and the punchline is all three so like trying to figure out how to pick a lane has been tricky but that's why I led this whole conversation with you know I got to go to what consumers really want whereas consumer behavior really kind of driving this because at the end of the day that's where snacks become quite interesting snacking is personal and experiential and people snacking habits and they're buying habits revealed preferences like where they actually spend the dollar versus what they say that they do two totally different things and so distribution strategy how am I scaling this I think doing this omnichannel approach is kind of table stakes in this day and age you there aren't really brands that are successful just doing retail or just doing e-commerce you have to have a little bit of both so I am a little bit hesitant to really go aggressively at the national retailers so that's like the targets the Wal-Mart's not walmart.com Wal-Mart kind of retail Whole Foods etc etc etc etc Costco and the reason for that is for to make those business models work you have to get everything right the branding has to be right the packaging has to be right the brand positioning has to be right and you have to take all the above kind of advertising approach and if you get any one of those things wrong you can't get to escape velocity before getting crushed under the reality of just scaling for retail so I'm I'm taking a more tepid kind of surgical approach doing all the above with a focus on e-commerce a lot of people are just buying more stuff online these days yeah they are and I mean they'll buy anything direct just about that Jamie's out of the bottle probably for good you know they like it and they can get it straight from the source and if you're plugged into you know that the immediacy of Amazon and even Wal-Mart's got it together with one two day shipping all that stuff that's where it is because you know I got to have that snack when I want to use it like exactly can have it in prime two day shipping like me right now reaching back for this bag that I can't stop eating now I'm doing a podcast it's not supposed to be good for TV but I can't help it because they're really tasty use of I okay I got an idea I was thinking okay B size you need to get a rock group and you'd get a couple of B size songs and you put the QR code on there and you you know the exclusive B size B size you know yeah we'll do that for you right oh man I would love it for all Jim did that for me you know at that point I could just hang it up and say like I've made it you know like if Mike agrees crush on my crunch puffs I'd be happy as a clam yeah you know the the music thing is funny because I he one of the reasons the packaging looks the way that it does the branding what's the way that it does is there's like if you look at the snack aisle there's just like the sea of sameness where you get a lot of pastels a lot of clean cut cents or a fonts and I was like you know this is a little bit boring to me I want to do something a little more a reverence a little grungeer a little more in your face and that I took that from actually 80s and 90s alternative rock that was you know grunge was like my my favorite genre growing up and you know lo and behold trying to overlay that theory onto branding for a snack like just does not work like people just did not get it and so you know we're we're kind of this is all a market testing we're going to update refresh the branding for what people like but yeah music is a it's a really tricky kind of angle to go after yeah I'm sure but the most how many people you've done enough research I'm I mean you're doing it you got it real time what if you learn from that I know that so grew up in it if you ask 10 people if they you know do you know what B sides is you know like I don't know maybe more people do than I don't know but like that and just other things you've learned from research first question first like do people know what B sides are so so I mentioned earlier that we were playing in the super premium pastry space and that brand was actually called mixtape it was a like a soft punch and you know get this 90 percent of people I would tell them the brand name they'd be like what is a mixtape and I was just like oh my god have I gotten old like that people just don't know what this is and you know so to switch it over to B sides the whole reason that I did it so for those who don't know a B side of the recording is like when a band puts out an album the album has let's say there are 12 songs in the album usually they record between 15 and 17 songs those songs that didn't make it on to the album those are known as the B sides they're usually put on a like a limited edition release therefore the super fans and the beautiful thing about B sides are when they're really really special they can be better than the entire album they just for whatever reason didn't fit the ethos of the album and so you know for me that's the philosophy that I wanted to take to food ingredients right like what about all the stuff that's left over how can we make that super special it make it even better than the product that was actually put out in addition to that it's kind of like the hominem right like it's it's on the back of the packaging you know what can we make with these leftover oats besides oat milk and we're also working on a couple of different marketing campaigns around like everybody has a B side you know you've got this duality of like life before you eat the snack could could be mundane kind of boring you have the snack and it puts life in technicolor and that's kind of your B side so you know there are multiple approaches to it in terms of like how people resonate with it they people eat with their eyes so like they see the puff first that's what kind of really draws them in and then they just treat it as like this is just a crunchy good snack I just like this snack it doesn't ultimately matter what the the brand name is you know you've got Elizabeth's granola like nobody knows who Elizabeth is even though she's like fresh the granola space or nobody knew what what a snickers was when it first comes out it doesn't actually evoke what like what the snack itself is and I view B sides as a platform to rethink food waste across categories so crunch puffs will be the first but they're not going to be the last snack that I introduce we're seconds come first out what's free you said from there where do you want this plane to land I mean and land is an interesting thing this it's a journey to being an entrepreneur where do we want to go and what's been the like biggest surprise learning and where do you want to take it where do I want the plane to land the I'll take that first so I'm fundraising right now and I've been trying to angle this towards investors for a couple of years trying a couple of different things and ultimately you know originally I was so focused on the pitfall that you kind of mentioned at the top that a lot of mission driven brands kind of fall into where you can charge this green premium and the business will come and like that's just not true especially not snacking and so when I tried to lead with that with investors it just didn't land you know they've got sustainability mandates but like the business case wasn't there so what I started to do was say okay how can I like fold this into the business pitch make this part of the value proposition and what I found is in a nutshell I am kind of vertically integrating at my manufacturing facility different lines and so what I mean by that is like the facility that I make the pups in also produce oat milk for independent oat milk suppliers so if I can redirect that oat milk off of somebody else's line into my extruder to make my puff instead of having to kind of source it from a different location move it to my location and then scale it up from there I can take my gross margins from you know 50% at launch to north of 80% which is like supplement margin territory and that doesn't really exist today in snack foods right so there's a business case to be had that is also the sustainability tailwind kind of drives it so my goal is because I can get these wide margins I want to grow this to a top-line revenue number at such thick margins that I can get acquired by one of the big boys way earlier on than having to grow this 100 million dollar brand that is internationally distributed doing all the things that people used to do so that's kind of the where do I want the plane to land you have a road map for that to happen yeah so 2030 is kind of the end date by the end of this year we should have the vertical integration piece in play and then starting next year is when I'll begin courting kind of those national retailers because at that point I'll have had enough kind of brand development brand awareness that I can go into those conversations from a position of strength not a hey I'm also another brand that makes a cool snack puff you know look at what I'm doing so the next you know couple of years are just grow the brand get the production so tight that you know those 80% margins are not a reach they're what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis yeah that if you can get there uh uh that kind of margin is this guy's the limit I mean are you enjoying it you know like a lot of people you know like entrepreneurship and all this gets glamorized but has got to enjoy it right yeah you know it's that is such an interesting question because I think enjoyment means so many different things to different people it doesn't mean it's fun I'm not saying it's fun yeah it's worth you know it is fun though to an extent I you have to be willing to wake up every day and get kicked in the teeth and just say yeah I'll do it again and I can get better at getting kicked in the teeth every day and you know as long as you're just solving for the problem in front of you instead of trying to solve for things that are you know future problems it becomes more manageable you can't really good at what you're doing you get really creative about what you're doing up then a lot of really interesting people to your point about the brand building there's so many different angles that you can take that just excite me the product development I love the product side of it and there's so many other products that I'm very excited to bring to market you know within the next 18-24 months like yeah I'm loving it man but at the same time I wish I wish I was five years ahead of where I am today and I wish that five years ago it's just it's always a grind but if you're if you're built for it you know just just go ahead and do it jump on the deep end there's no you know you only get one shot of this like just go for it very true you gotta put one foot on the other and you do need to enjoy the journey and because you'll look back one day you're either you're learning something one way or another every day and I've rushed through things and then it doesn't get where I want to go and then you know we're always in a hurry especially sanspreneurs like to the next thing and hey man I really like the brand they're delicious I've been able to put them down since I started snacking it's been 30 minutes of eating my one of my favorite snacks here so used to work it here by learn more about what you're doing the brand buying these things we mentioned a little earlier but let's hit on those again yeah so we're on instagram at enjoy b-sides we're online at enjoybesides.com like I said you can check us out on amazon.com we've got a couple of interesting kind of marketing forays towards the back half of the year so you should follow now so you can get kind of won't be doing lots of different sales we're sourcing a lot of hey what kind of flavors you guys want so if you want to be involved in you know building this thing together please follow along love it man really appreciate you coming on and really love the product thanks so much Ryan I really appreciate the opportunity hey guys you're gonna find us Ryan is right.com we'll find the full episode from today's get together with use if snack snack snack episode I have to think of something I don't know what it was delicious and nutritious for the brain you gotta go check out b-sides we'll have the highlight clips links to all of their stuff where you can get this amazing snack that will be at social house very soon and of course you know you can find me at Ryan offered on tiktok instagram all those that blue check before you can buy it baby we'll see you next time right about now this has been right about now with Ryan Alfred a radcast network production visit Ryan is right.com for full audio and video versions of the show order one choir about sponsorship opportunities thanks for listening