Building a circular -product based- company (Part 1)
This summer 2018 I visited the USA on a solo trip. I had no plans prepared, not even a place to crash. Luckily my friend Paul, who I met in New Zealand two years before was there to give me a hand. He let me stay at his apartment near San Francisco and lend me his awesome Sprinter Van
After a little roadtrip surfing along the coast of North California, I came back to pick up Paul and we headed towards Yosemite National Park. Our plan was to hike, run and be wild in the majestic National Park.
On our third day in the Park we planned to hike to the top of Half Dome, we had everything ready and Paul the night before brought some energy bars for the hike.I told him I didn’t like energy bars because all of them are so artificial, he said those ones were not. I slid inone on my backpack and forgot about it.
On our hike the next day I was carrying a ton of food, my favourite snack for a hike like that (25km +1500m) was PB&J toasts, cut on small cubes to devore while going up. At some point I finished all my food and ended up opening one of the bars Paul gave me, at the end it was saying it had peanut butter, and I love peanut butter.
After eating that bar I was shocked. All the bars I tasted in my home country, Spain, had 2 things in common:
- They tasted awful
- They were hard as f*ck to swallow, super dry.
The energy bar I tasted that day was totally the opposite. I was hooked.
After this encounter I forgot about them… Until I was in San Francisco’s airport on my way home… I was buying some lunch and I saw a lot of these bars resting on the shelf of a counter. Then it hit me, why don’t I bring these tasty bars to Spain and stop carrying sandwiches and bananas all the way up to +2000m?
Get to work
When I arrived home, I couldn’t stop telling everyone how awesome these bars were and that I wanted to start making them, at home.
I started watching a lot of youtube videos on how to make these bars, they were super easy to create and I was feeling this could work.
On the next couple of weekends I had hikes planned so I got hands on and started cooking
Goal setting
After receiving very good feedback from my friends and family, I decided to continue this idea forward. But to bring this life to reality there was something I had to change and that would mark the difference between my bars and my competition
PACKAGING
I’m a circular economy consultant, I help companies implement circular strategies in their companies to reduce their waste generation, create more healthy products and earn more money while helping build better businesses for the Planet. I started working on this for one single reason, as a surfer I was experiencing a terrible thing, the Ocean was getting filled with plastic, and this plastic was coming, mainly, from food packaging. Food industrialisation has turned completely upside-down our relationship to food and nowadays is basically impossible to buy food without packaging. So I set one clear goal:
“This will be the first bar sold in a zero waste packaging. This will be the first circular energy bar in the World”
If I can’t sell my bars in this kind of packaging I’m not going to do it.
Finding a journey companion
Soon I realized all this adventure would be too much to walk it alone. One day having dinner with a friend and her boyfriend I told my bar idea, and I could see his eyes sparkling, we started talking about flavours, shapes, competitors… I clearly saw the idea was exciting him. One week later, I asked him if he would like to join me on building this company, he said yes. At the same time of this happening he was starting a new job, a 9–5 job in a call center, from my side I have a full time job as a circular economy consultant and some side-hustles consulting on zero waste strategies for festivals and events. Our pockets are pretty empty since both of us don’t have much high-paying jobs but we decided we will try to grow on the go, making bars, selling bars, reinvesting that money. Working on weekends and nights to make this a reality while having full-time jobs and, maybe, enjoying a little social life
Where to start?
Since both of us didn’t have any experience on building product based companies we decided to start by studying our competitors. We went to an organic food store in Barcelona and bought around 20 different bars, we started tasting them, writing notes, and more important, analysing the ingredients, the provenance of those and the target.
We also had the opportunity to ask a few buyers of energy bars on why they were buying them and if they did often, no clear conclusions can be drawn from this but we found a pattern on the kind of bar that was more popular.
However we got some clear outputs from the other competitors:
- Dates were used as a main ingredient in almost all the bars that, from our own opinion “tasted good”
- Tree nuts were also used as a main ingredient in almost all the bars.
- The bigger the brand, the more ingredients they use, we didn’t find any difference in taste or consistency from bars with 3 ingredients or bars with 25 ingredients.
- minimalist packaging, clear labeling of ingredients and honest messages are a clear driver for these brands
- Most of the brands were built in the last 5 years and none of them are based in Spain or Catalonia.
from that day we set out some principles or basics:
- We will use local ingredients as a first option, organic ones when possible but we will prioritise localness
- Packaging must be Zero Waste, we are a circular economy company
- Benjamin will focus on the product
You can check the competitors we tasted here
Moving Product Forward
After that meeting we started cooking and focusing on creating a MVP (minimum viable product) with which we could get out on the streets and start giving them away.
Trials #1
Our first trials gives us a great result in terms of flavour but very bad ones in terms of consistency, the bars were soft and not consistent as the ones we imagined.
We gave away some bars to friends and work colleagues, all of them found them very tasty and couldn’t believe they were only 3 ingredients, sometimes even only 2. However we needed to work on the consistency.
Trials #2
Last week (November 04th) Benjamin cooked a second batch changing a little bit the recipe, consistency was much better and the flavour was really good. I brought them to my office on friday and they were all gone. We added a chocolate touch to the top just for fun and see how it tastes, we won’t be using cocoa since its not a local ingredient, we are thinking of more local alternatives like carobs, highly available in Catalonia and with a similar taste to Cocoa… but for now we will stick to a simple, functional bar and give it away.
Next Steps
- Branding: We started working on the branding of the company with a friend of us that is kindly helping, you can check her work here.
- Packaging: I’m already in touch with some awesome zero waste and circular packaging suppliers, this will be one of the biggest limitations of our company when it comes to branding and price.
- Strategy and roadmap: We need to plan a forecast to roll out product and a sales forecast to plan needs that might come with possible growth of the business.
- Feedback, user journey and learning: We are close to master a very simple yet hyper-tasty recipe, our plan is to give them away to possible users to taste, we are aiming to outdoor sports lovers and endurance athletes. Do you live in Barcelona and want to taste them? Please fill out your data at the form here
