Latest / The Growth Class with Phil Masiello / CPG Innovation: Reinventing Kids’ Frosting for Direct-to-Consumer Growth with Tomo Delaney
Transcript
- 0:20SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Growth Class.
- 0:23SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Phil Massyello.
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: And if you're looking to take your brand from a spark of an idea to a powerhouse on the shelves, you're in the exact right place.
- 0:31SPEAKER_00: Today, we're diving into a side of entrepreneurship that doesn't get talked about enough.
- 0:36SPEAKER_00: How do you completely reinvent a category by making it fun?
- 0:40SPEAKER_00: So my guest today is Tomo, a brilliant founder behind Noshi for Kids.
- 0:45SPEAKER_00: If you haven't seen Noshi Nashi, uh it's probably pronounced Nashi yet, they're changing the game of the kids' food space with organic, edible food paint.
- 0:55SPEAKER_00: Imagine giving kids a tube of delicious, healthy fruit pure fruit puree and telling them, go ahead, draw on your food.
- 1:02SPEAKER_00: Turns breakfast into a canvas, solves a massive pain point for parents everywhere.
- 1:08SPEAKER_01: The product we're about to launch is not organic fruit puree, it's frosting.
- 1:15SPEAKER_00: Okay, so it's icing.
- 1:17SPEAKER_01: Frosting, icing, yeah.
- 1:19SPEAKER_00: Okay.
- 1:20SPEAKER_01: I just didn't want you to get all the way into that and then let me have to correct you.
- 1:25SPEAKER_00: Right.
- 1:26SPEAKER_00: So um but as every founder listening knows, turning a playful creative concept into a scalable CPG product with retail distribution is a whole different piece.
- 1:36SPEAKER_00: So today we're gonna get into that grit, the growth strategies, the big wins that put Nashi on the map.
- 1:42SPEAKER_00: Tomo, welcome to Crunch Growth.
- 1:44SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me.
- 1:45SPEAKER_00: Yeah, my pleasure.
- 1:46SPEAKER_00: So why don't you uh explain it then a little bit?
- 1:50SPEAKER_01: Well, um I'll try and keep it under three days um because you don't have that much time.
- 1:56SPEAKER_01: But uh briefly, I was working in the fashion industry for 20 years.
- 2:00SPEAKER_01: That's all I'd ever wanted to do.
- 2:01SPEAKER_01: Then I sort of outgrew it.
- 2:03SPEAKER_01: I was I felt like I was the oldest person in the room and it was time for a change.
- 2:06SPEAKER_01: So I became a stay-at-home parent.
- 2:08SPEAKER_01: And that was blissful, obviously, in nearly every respect, except for the fact that neither of my kids was very interested in mealtimes.
- 2:14SPEAKER_01: They weren't picky eaters, they would eat vegetables happily, but it was just getting them up to the table and inspired by mealtimes.
- 2:20SPEAKER_01: And I Googled picky eating, and because it this was definitely a version of it, I suppose.
- 2:28SPEAKER_01: And the answer was staring me in the face.
- 2:29SPEAKER_01: If you Google picky eating, the answer is very, very easy to come by, which is to say what you have to do is give kids more control in the preparation of their food, both in the kitchen and at the table.
- 2:40SPEAKER_01: And so to my mind, that meant giving them products or there being products that they could use themselves.
- 2:47SPEAKER_01: And so I went shopping in New York here, and to look for these products, I assumed there were numerous of them, and of course there were zero.
- 2:54SPEAKER_01: And that really surprised me.
- 2:57SPEAKER_01: Because it is a problem that every single parent on the face of the planet has encountered at least once, if not a million times.
- 3:05SPEAKER_01: And so I started to think about a new career, and that new career centering around products that children, food products that children could use themselves.
- 3:16SPEAKER_01: And a friend of mine, when I was talking to a friend of mine about that, and they jokingly said, What about edible paint?
- 3:21SPEAKER_01: And I laughed.
- 3:22SPEAKER_01: And then I actually stopped and thought, actually, that's that's that's that's that's the solution to my problem, because my kids are sitting over here playing with crayons and watching cartoons, and they don't want to stop doing that to come and eat this food.
- 3:34SPEAKER_01: Why don't I make that appear on the table?
- 3:37SPEAKER_01: And so I just ran with it.
- 3:39SPEAKER_01: I had the time to do it because my youngest child had just started preschool, and so I had three hours each day to start looking into whether I could do this, and of course I had no industry experience and floundered around for months before anybody, before I found anybody in the industry in a position to help me.
- 3:56SPEAKER_01: Um, and that was 11 years ago, and I'm still doing it now.
- 4:00SPEAKER_00: And but you started out doing puree's.
- 4:04SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because at the time I was my target audience.
- 4:06SPEAKER_01: I was a millennial mom, right?
- 4:08SPEAKER_01: And so I wanted to feed my then four-year-old and eight-year-old children as healthily as possible.
- 4:14SPEAKER_01: And so my interpretation of edible paint was that it had to be organic, and so the only way it could be organic is if it was fruit and maybe vegetable puree, different colored fruit and vegetable puree in different tubes.
- 4:26SPEAKER_01: This being one of the earliest iterations of it.
- 4:28SPEAKER_01: That's the strawberry tube.
- 4:30SPEAKER_01: Um and again, down to my lack of industry experience.
- 4:35SPEAKER_01: My lack of industry experience is what caused me to just keep going because I didn't realize how tough it was going to be, but it was also what hindered the development of this product because I thought I'd created a unique, well, I had created a unique product, which I thought was a really good thing.
- 4:50SPEAKER_01: And of course, if you have any any industry experience, it's the worst thing in the world you can do because you need people to be buying stuff that they understand and that they already buy.
- 4:58SPEAKER_01: Um, so my interpretation of edible paint was organic fruit puree.
- 5:03SPEAKER_01: And children loved it immediately.
- 5:05SPEAKER_01: I mean, this was the thing, this is the thing that's always driven me forward and driven the business forward, is that whenever you, whenever I've given our products to children, they cannot wait to get their hands on it.
- 5:14SPEAKER_01: They can't believe that you've created something for them to use.
- 5:17SPEAKER_01: And the whole thing, you know, our tagline has always been play with your food.
- 5:21SPEAKER_01: Some parents have pushed back against that.
- 5:23SPEAKER_01: And I've said, why are you objecting to that?
- 5:25SPEAKER_01: What you don't understand is that as soon as you give a child a task, all they want to do is complete it to show you that they can be trusted to do it and that they can do it.
- 5:35SPEAKER_01: They're not going to squirt this stuff over their little baby sister's face or up the walls or across the kitchen.
- 5:40SPEAKER_01: They are going to use it to do what you've told them it's for.
- 5:44SPEAKER_01: And that's what that was really encouraging.
- 5:46SPEAKER_01: But the parents never quite got on board with the first version of this, and that was because we had created an organic product, so we couldn't add food colouring to it.
- 5:55SPEAKER_01: And because of that, the colours were quite underwhelming.
- 5:58SPEAKER_01: Organic, you know, when you've pasteurized strawberries, they start to turn brown, and the textures were different, and it just wasn't right.
- 6:07SPEAKER_01: And so we persevered and persevered, and you and to be, you know, to be fair, I got that product into Walmart and I got it onto Chart Tank, and I got a deal from Mark Cuban, and it was actually Cuban's team who helped me start to reimagine it as frosting, which is the product we're about to launch now.
- 6:23SPEAKER_00: So why why not just change the puree's from organic to non-organic?
- 6:31SPEAKER_00: Because what you're doing now is is not organic.
- 6:33SPEAKER_00: So why not just change that so that the color would hold?
- 6:36SPEAKER_01: Well, a couple of things.
- 6:38SPEAKER_01: If you call a product food paint and you put it in a tube like that, as a parent, of course, you want, you expect the product to come out of that tube to look like paint.
- 6:51SPEAKER_01: And frosting enables it to come out of that tube looking like paint.
- 6:55SPEAKER_01: But when I was introduced to the guy who first put the idea in my head, of course, I did push back against that.
- 7:00SPEAKER_01: I said, We can't possibly do that.
- 7:01SPEAKER_01: This is an organic brand, but thank you so much for for your thinking.
- 7:05SPEAKER_01: Um what happened later was that I met a woman who inspired me to actually start looking into this.
- 7:12SPEAKER_01: And I then went to my food scientist, Fred, and I said, You can't make frosting healthier, can you?
- 7:18SPEAKER_01: And he said, Yes, we can.
- 7:20SPEAKER_01: And I said, How?
- 7:21SPEAKER_01: And he said, natural colours, natural flavours, vitamins, nutrients.
- 7:25SPEAKER_01: And at that point, I suddenly saw the way forward.
- 7:28SPEAKER_01: And that actually was about six months before RFK Jr.
- 7:33SPEAKER_01: ever mentioned his personal crusade against artificial food dyes.
- 7:37SPEAKER_01: Because of course, artificial is the one sensible thing he's ever said.
- 7:40SPEAKER_01: Artificial food dyes are a big, big issue in this country and and all over the world, in fact.
- 7:45SPEAKER_01: But in this country, especially because of the lack of regulations, some of the food colours that are used in kids' food, especially, are really not healthy.
- 7:52SPEAKER_01: And so there's a growing voice of discontent amongst parents in America for more naturally coloured versions of products they already buy.
- 8:01SPEAKER_01: And so again, that was an obvious box that I could check by creating a naturally coloured version of frosting, and that is our big selling point.
- 8:08SPEAKER_01: That's the most, that's the thing I'm most proud about of our product, is that it is naturally colored.
- 8:12SPEAKER_01: The colours don't look natural at all.
- 8:13SPEAKER_01: They look highly artificial, which is, again, brilliant.
- 8:17SPEAKER_01: Um, but they are actually all natural.
- 8:19SPEAKER_01: And it's naturally flavored as well.
- 8:20SPEAKER_01: And though other, you know, frosting generally isn't flavored beyond vanilla and chocolate.
- 8:24SPEAKER_01: Ours is blueberry flavored, mango flavored, lime flavored, and raspberry flavored.
- 8:28SPEAKER_01: It's it's a product that I'm really, really proud of.
- 8:31SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I agree with you about artificial colors.
- 8:34SPEAKER_00: I mean, we have a couple of clients that have products with no art that's that's their pitch in the in the gelatin uh pudding space.
- 8:44SPEAKER_00: Uh and and it and I think it's great because when you travel around the world, nobody uses the colors that we use.
- 8:50SPEAKER_00: Even if you go to Canada uh, you know, and you look at the products that are equivalent to here, same brand, same brand name, that they don't have artificial colors in them.
- 9:00SPEAKER_00: So I I agree 100% about uh, you know, with with getting rid of artificial colors.
- 9:06SPEAKER_00: Uh and we see the difference.
- 9:07SPEAKER_00: I mean, we we market we market a ton of brands that are on that uh that are on that path.
- 9:14SPEAKER_00: And uh and it's not just in food, it's also in uh cosmetics and uh and beauty products and personal care products, etc.
- 9:23SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think it's a trend that's not going away, and I think uh I'm I'm not uh against it at all.
- 9:29SPEAKER_00: I think it's great.
- 9:30SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
- 9:31SPEAKER_00: So what's uh so what's on the next phase then?
- 9:34SPEAKER_00: You've re-engineered the products, now what?
- 9:36SPEAKER_00: Now you've got to go out and sell them.
- 9:38SPEAKER_01: True.
- 9:39SPEAKER_01: Um I had that conversation with Fred last January, January 25, and he spent all of last year developing a product which he got to a point in December that we were both really, really happy with.
- 9:52SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was quite uh what's the word I'm looking for?
- 9:55SPEAKER_01: Quite um demanding, I suppose.
- 9:58SPEAKER_01: You know, it I you know it has to be this good for us to actually bother moving forward with this product.
- 10:04SPEAKER_01: And he got it to a point where it was that good, and the the colours were amazing, the flavours were amazing.
- 10:09SPEAKER_01: And then we were introduced to um our now current copacker, who happened to be um a a company that works with colours, and they had just finished developing their own range of natural food colours, and they said, We'd love to do this with you, but would you mind if we imp if we integrated our natural colours into your product?
- 10:28SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, show us.
- 10:30SPEAKER_01: And they showed us these amazing, amazing colours.
- 10:33SPEAKER_01: And and so that was an obvious, you know, a match made in heaven, as far as I was concerned.
- 10:38SPEAKER_01: And the product that we've now come up with, which was actually finalized, the formulations were finalized literally three weeks ago.
- 10:45SPEAKER_01: Um and next phase is launch, where the tubes are being printed now with the new ingredient panels.
- 10:50SPEAKER_01: That was the thing that was delaying that process to move forward.
- 10:53SPEAKER_01: And we should be live and selling product and shipping products out to customers uh by the end of July, if not early August.
- 11:00SPEAKER_00: You have do you have customers?
- 11:02SPEAKER_00: Do you think you're gonna get Walmart back or or No?
- 11:04SPEAKER_01: This is a DTC play.
- 11:06SPEAKER_01: Um I loved I I I sold my products into Walmart for five years, and I actually only came out um on the advice of various people around me because the margins just weren't good enough.
- 11:17SPEAKER_01: Again, you know, we had four layers of packaging.
- 11:19SPEAKER_01: It was an organic product, all of the ingredients were organic.
- 11:21SPEAKER_01: It was it worked and it made us enough money to keep moving forward, but it was never going to be a game changer, and and I very, very much hope to continue working with Walmart.
- 11:29SPEAKER_01: A lot of people have a problem with Walmart.
- 11:30SPEAKER_01: I don't really understand why.
- 11:31SPEAKER_01: As a CPG brand owner, they are the best customer in the world because they're huge, there's no um distribution stage of the game.
- 11:40SPEAKER_01: You you ship straight to Walmart.
- 11:42SPEAKER_01: Um so I very much hope to be selling into Walmart uh in the future, but for now, we're launching this product on Amazon and TikTok shop.
- 11:49SPEAKER_01: TikTok TikTok shop especially, because of what the product is and how good it looks and the branding, I know that it's going to go viral.
- 11:56SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm very, very confident that it has a really, really good chance of going properly, properly viral.
- 12:01SPEAKER_01: And so something like TikTok shop is a game changer, of course, because people will see a TikTok with my product in it, and they can just go straight to my TikTok shop and order it through Shopify, and it'll be on its way to them by the end of the day.
- 12:13SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 12:14SPEAKER_00: I know exactly what the problem is, why people have problems with Walmart.
- 12:19SPEAKER_00: And, you know, and it it's with any retailer, actually.
- 12:23SPEAKER_00: You know, when you have most people attack uh go to Walmart and they have a Me Too product.
- 12:29SPEAKER_00: Walmart doesn't need another pasta sauce.
- 12:31SPEAKER_00: So when you go in there and you push your pasta sauce and you want Walmart to take your pasta sauce, they've already got that problem solved.
- 12:37SPEAKER_00: So now you're pushing hard to get it in there, and they don't really need it.
- 12:41SPEAKER_00: So, you know, when you have a unique product, Walmart is great to work with.
- 12:46SPEAKER_00: They're very fair, in my opinion.
- 12:48SPEAKER_00: They've always been fair.
- 12:49SPEAKER_00: They don't play a lot of games on the back end.
- 12:51SPEAKER_00: You're not playing, you know, uh slotting, rebates, discounts, accruals.
- 12:56SPEAKER_00: It just doesn't happen.
- 12:57SPEAKER_01: And that is amazing.
- 12:58SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 12:58SPEAKER_00: But you and again, you're you're 100% right.
- 13:01SPEAKER_00: You there's no middleman, you're going direct to to Walmart.
- 13:04SPEAKER_00: But where I found people have problems with it is when you're you're going in there trying to give them a solution to a problem they've already solved a hundred times.
- 13:13SPEAKER_00: And so that's the one.
- 13:14SPEAKER_01: Well, I think frosting is a strange space.
- 13:17SPEAKER_01: It's sort of almost entirely monopolized by four brands in this country.
- 13:20SPEAKER_01: Um there's organic frosting, there's smaller organic frosting brands, but that's a different, different formulation process, a different, you know, it's a different business model, effectively.
- 13:30SPEAKER_01: The four existing frosting companies, the big frosting companies, which is Betty Crocker, Duncan Hines, Wilton, and Pillsbury, they're trying to choose my words carefully.
- 13:43SPEAKER_01: Natural colours are ten times more expensive to buy than artificial colours.
- 13:47SPEAKER_01: So for them to launch naturally coloured versions of their existing products is going to be very expensive because they sell their existing products at a at a pretty decent, I would imagine their margin's pretty amazing.
- 13:58SPEAKER_01: Um whereas I can launch my naturally coloured frosting and sell it for the same price as their artificially coloured frosting.
- 14:06SPEAKER_01: And so that is where there is an opportunity in this space.
- 14:10SPEAKER_01: I mean, as the guy that Mark Cuban's team introduced me to, who originally put the idea of frosting in my head, was a guy called Bob.
- 14:17SPEAKER_01: The reason his words stuck in my head was that he said to me, there has been zero innovation in frosting since 1915 when buttercream was invented.
- 14:27SPEAKER_01: It was 111 years ago.
- 14:29SPEAKER_01: He's like, if you do, if you do anything to drag frosting into the 21st century, you will have a slam dunk on your hands.
- 14:37SPEAKER_01: And he's right.
- 14:38SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's an interesting space because you don't every child in America eats frosting.
- 14:43SPEAKER_01: Uh it's a$2 billion a year industry in America.
- 14:46SPEAKER_01: But it's it's sort of it sort of goes under the radar.
- 14:50SPEAKER_01: You almost don't even think about frosting.
- 14:52SPEAKER_01: You think about you know you go to a birthday, kids' birthday party and kids eat cupcakes with frosting on them.
- 14:56SPEAKER_01: But you don't actually think of frosting as an industry, but it's actually a multi-billion dollar industry.
- 15:01SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 15:02SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
- 15:03SPEAKER_00: There's no question.
- 15:04SPEAKER_00: And it and it's true, there hasn't been any innovation in in that in that category in uh you know in over a century.
- 15:11SPEAKER_00: I think there's a couple of categories out there like that that uh have just been the same, and and you start to see innovation, you start to see change uh in different ways.
- 15:20SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell My background in fashion was in production, um, and I have OCD.
- 15:24SPEAKER_01: So I'm I'm I'm um what gives me the greatest joy in the world is having boxes that I can tick and finding new boxes to tick and and and closing that one up and finding a way to close that one up.
- 15:36SPEAKER_01: And having stumbled upon this this solution to a problem that didn't supposedly didn't exist, it has been incredibly satisfying, actually, because frosting some frosting out there is amazing, some of it's delicious.
- 15:50SPEAKER_01: Um, but for the most part, because there are so few options to choose from, nobody's ever really had to try too hard to make it better.
- 15:58SPEAKER_01: And having that opportunity presented to me, and then having a team able, willing, and able to actually make real strides in in bringing frosting into the 21st century by making not just one change, but you know, numerous changes, has been incredibly satisfying for me.
- 16:16SPEAKER_01: It's it's it's I'm like, this is this is this is a big thing that we're doing here.
- 16:21SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 16:22SPEAKER_00: No, I agree with you.
- 16:24SPEAKER_00: I think it's uh it could be you know it could be huge.
- 16:26SPEAKER_00: It's um uh because it's definitely something that people use all the time.
- 16:31SPEAKER_00: Uh it they use it over and over again.
- 16:34SPEAKER_00: So you have you know, you've got that.
- 16:36SPEAKER_00: I mean, direct to consumer, I think You're right.
- 16:39SPEAKER_00: You could do on you could visually do a tremendous amount of work with with it for TikTok and for Reels and for any any digital channels.
- 16:49SPEAKER_00: Um but you're right.
- 16:51SPEAKER_00: Yeah, TikTok, I mean, I I think TikTok has been a a boom in a lot of ways when you can present something really well visually.
- 17:02SPEAKER_00: Like I said, we have a couple of clients that are in spaces like puddings and gelatins and things like that, where they've gotten rid of the uh artificial colors, and it's so visual to make the product and to shoot it and to do videos with it that it just naturally sells itself and you can do fun things with it.
- 17:23SPEAKER_00: So you can be very creative with it.
- 17:26SPEAKER_00: Uh almost like a few years ago, there was that trend with what the heck was it called?
- 17:32SPEAKER_00: Goop or gop or something?
- 17:34SPEAKER_00: Oh slime.
- 17:36SPEAKER_00: Slime, that was it.
- 17:38SPEAKER_00: And uh you know, kids were making slime uh uh, you know, and doing all kinds of things with it, but it it it became a whole trend for about two years.
- 17:46SPEAKER_01: So I've got tubes of edible slime in four primary colours that are delicious, that are primarily marketed to children, that children will absolutely kill to get their hands on.
- 17:58SPEAKER_01: And then that's even before they open the tube, then they're gonna open the tube, and this bright colored product comes pouring out of the tube, and then they taste it, and it looks amazing, and it's making every child that comes into contact with it laugh and scream with excitement.
- 18:12SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it again, I I I didn't set out to tick all of these boxes, but it's just ticked them for me.
- 18:18SPEAKER_01: It's great.
- 18:19SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 18:19SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 18:20SPEAKER_00: I mean, I'm sure you could go to a uh you could start going around to to some schools and shoot some really great video of uh uh for to uh to use online.
- 18:30SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm I'm looking forward to the day where where we've got product in hand here, and I'm gonna get a cart and just wheel it around the city full of tubes of frosting and hand out hand out tubes of naturally colored frosting to every family that is uh allows me to give it to their children.
- 18:45SPEAKER_00: And shoot the video.
- 18:46SPEAKER_00: Bring it up.
- 18:46SPEAKER_01: And shoot the video of them receiving it, exactly.
- 18:49SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 18:49SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 18:49SPEAKER_00: It's almost like the uh you know, the Coke Pepsi challenge of of yesteryear wasn't really about what was better.
- 18:57SPEAKER_00: It was really about people's reaction to, you know, the the flavor.
- 19:03SPEAKER_00: And so when you start thinking about how you can capture that reaction, because that's what you want.
- 19:08SPEAKER_00: You want the reaction, you want the kids' reaction.
- 19:11SPEAKER_01: And uh and that's and it lends itself to user-generated content as well.
- 19:15SPEAKER_01: You know, I know that families are gonna buy this stuff and take it home and open it and then and then film their kids using it.
- 19:20SPEAKER_01: And and it's it's it's like I said, it's gonna have a snowball effect.
- 19:23SPEAKER_01: It's bit there's there's nothing about it that that's gonna slow down its virality.
- 19:27SPEAKER_01: It's going to, you know, everything about it lends itself to be having content created around it.
- 19:33SPEAKER_01: And that's you know, and as far as marketing is concerned, obviously that's that's that's a that's a slam dunk.
- 19:38SPEAKER_01: But I'm actually more excited to start to hear about children enjoying it and and hearing stories about you know why, why they've it's and it's not, you know, they're not just going to be enjoying it because their parents bought them some frosting that has kid-friendly branding on it.
- 19:53SPEAKER_01: It's actually delicious as well.
- 19:54SPEAKER_01: Put aside the natural colours versus the artificial flavours.
- 19:57SPEAKER_01: It tastes good.
- 19:58SPEAKER_01: If you taste, if you some of the existing frosting in tubes that you can buy, it doesn't taste good.
- 20:04SPEAKER_01: And and those brands are relying on the taste of the cookie or the cupcake that you put it on to mask the taste of the actual frosting itself.
- 20:11SPEAKER_01: Whereas my products all taste absolutely amazing.
- 20:15SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I yeah, I agree.
- 20:17SPEAKER_00: I I think the tubed uh icings and the tubed frostings are not good.
- 20:22SPEAKER_00: We don't know, I haven't really thought of.
- 20:25SPEAKER_00: But um No, I mean the kids' reactions to it and the kids the kids' endorsement is what's gonna do it.
- 20:31SPEAKER_00: But you know, the UGC content is gonna come from the moms that have the channels because there's a there's probably, you know, I know that there's well over 400 women that have channels talking about not only food but um uh uh natural uh colorings.
- 20:50SPEAKER_00: And you know, that's your sort of entrance in.
- 20:54SPEAKER_00: The flavor becomes the flavor, the taste becomes the uh hook.
- 20:59SPEAKER_00: So Yeah.
- 21:00SPEAKER_01: And the and and the branding doesn't hurt either, right?
- 21:03SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 21:04SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 21:05SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
- 21:05SPEAKER_00: It's uh I think it's uh I think it's good.
- 21:08SPEAKER_00: I wish you well.
- 21:08SPEAKER_00: I think it's gonna do uh quite well with it.
- 21:10SPEAKER_00: So do I definitely uh I understand the change from doing the purees and and I understand the the the desire to do that change.
- 21:19SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean everything about the food paint version one was great.
- 21:23SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh as we're sitting here with me having been in the industry for 11 years, having not quit, having just refused to stop.
- 21:30SPEAKER_01: Um and everything I learned in getting version one of the product is probably what's enabled me to keep going.
- 21:37SPEAKER_01: You know, I I learned so much about the industry in doing that.
- 21:40SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've really chosen the most difficult path into the industry and through the industry by creating a unique product with a zero dollar budget and just refusing to stop, basically.
- 21:52SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no question about it.
- 21:54SPEAKER_00: No, no question.
- 21:55SPEAKER_00: You know, just because something doesn't work the first time doesn't mean that you stop and scrap it.
- 22:01SPEAKER_00: You you you know, you make adjustments and you move on.
- 22:03SPEAKER_00: That's what entrepreneurship's all about.
- 22:05SPEAKER_01: I think food paint as an idea.
- 22:08SPEAKER_01: My wife works in marketing, she was the one that came up with the name of food paint.
- 22:11SPEAKER_01: It's a really good name.
- 22:12SPEAKER_01: And it it it it just didn't live up to its name.
- 22:18SPEAKER_01: And it was the name that kept me moving forward.
- 22:20SPEAKER_01: Somebody turned around to me a couple of years ago and said, because we were we sort of took a brief foray into savory condiments, and somebody said, you should really get back onto the food paint thing, because that was a brilliant, brilliant idea.
- 22:33SPEAKER_01: And it was when that person said that in combination with somebody seeing my version of Shar Tank and getting in contact with me and me having coffee with her and sort of plotting with her that we came up with this plan to take the frosting route.
- 22:45SPEAKER_01: And and it's it's really played out.
- 22:47SPEAKER_01: I think it's played out very well.
- 22:48SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
- 22:49SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
- 22:50SPEAKER_00: I agree with you.
- 22:51SPEAKER_00: So uh we're almost out of time.
- 22:52SPEAKER_00: So any parting words?
- 22:54SPEAKER_00: Where will people be able to find your product?
- 22:56SPEAKER_00: You say you should be monetizing by the end of July, beginning of August, somewhere around there.
- 23:02SPEAKER_01: Yeah, um our our website, obviously, NoshiforKids.com, N-O-S-H-I-F-O-R-K-R-D-S.com, and it'll be on TikTok shop where we are also Noshi for Kids, and it'll be on Amazon probably a couple of weeks after everywhere else.
- 23:14SPEAKER_01: But it will be available by August at the at the latest, and you won't regret buying it, that's all I can say.
- 23:21SPEAKER_01: It's pretty amazing.
- 23:22SPEAKER_00: Do you have a uh a a uh pre-launch list so people can go there and put their email address in?
- 23:28SPEAKER_01: It's actually available to pre-order on our website right now.
- 23:31SPEAKER_01: You can actually go to our website and and order it and have it delivered as soon as we start shipping.
- 23:36SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
- 23:37SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's great.
- 23:38SPEAKER_00: Great stuff.
- 23:39SPEAKER_00: Um, I like it.
- 23:41SPEAKER_00: I like the pivot.
- 23:42SPEAKER_00: I like the way that you've uh you've pivoted from what you were doing before.
- 23:46SPEAKER_00: I think it's uh I think it's great.
- 23:48SPEAKER_00: So, you know, make sure to check out.
- 23:51SPEAKER_00: Nashut for kids, see exactly what they're painting a new uh future for kids, fun, kids' nutrition, kids uh enjoyment.
- 23:59SPEAKER_00: Uh so you know, if you uh if you like today's episode, hit the subscribe button, leave us a review, share this with a fellow founder who needs to hear it.
- 24:07SPEAKER_00: And until next time, I'm Phil Mastiello.
- 24:09SPEAKER_00: Keep scaling, keep innovating, and we will see you next time.
- 24:13SPEAKER_01: Thanks, Phil.
- 24:14SPEAKER_00: Bye.