Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio right now. I am supremely honored to be sitting down with Gabi Lewis, who's one of the co-founders of Magic Spoon. Gabi, it's great to see you. Thank you for having me. Great to see you too. Uh, Scott, living in America, what part of Scotland are you from? I grew up in Glasgow.
Isn't Glasgow Anthony Bourdain's favorite city, or was his favorite city? Rest in peace. You know, I haven't heard that. That would be amazing news. If, if that's the case. I'm pretty sure that's what he said. Uh, what's so special about Glasgow? I haven't been, I've heard amazing things, but is there something particularly amazing about that city?
Uh, I'm not sure what there would be from Anthony Bourdain's perspective. It, it's definitely not a, a food capital in any sense. We have great fish and chips. We have great curry. I mean, great people. I mean, there's a lot to love about the people, the culture, but certainly not a a foodie destination.
Interesting. Okay. So I'll have to investigate more into, yeah. I'm curious, or maybe I'm getting the city completely wrong and we have to edit all this out, but I don't, I think I'm right. I think I am right. Where did your food sensibility come from? How did you start to appreciate food as a food entrepreneur yourself?
It's a great question and. My parents always ask me that as well. 'cause they, they're not huge food lovers themselves and it's not like it was imbued from them. But for as long as I can remember, I've been absolutely obsessed with food. You know, as a kid I would remember. Airports or places we'd visit by the food that we had there.
Like I remember, I remember this certain airport in Spain from this amazing sweet shop candy shop I went to as a kid. And that was like the only reason I wanted to go back to Spain was to get candy at this shop in the airport when I was a kid. But I love food, I love restaurants. It's kind of, I love cooking.
So I think about, so I talk about, and also really into fitness as well. And so sort of fusion of being interested in foods. Fitness, cooking definitely led me to become, uh, a food entrepreneur. Did you eat a lot of crickets as a kid? Is that, you know, part of your, part of your childhood diet as well? Uh, it's not a Glasgow specialty, no.
The first time I ate crickets was actually, I took a year off after high school and backpacked through South America, and it's obviously a very common staple in many countries there. And so in, I think in Ecuador we had crickets for the first time. Okay. I didn't know it was a common staple in South American countries.
And obviously I'm asking you this question not completely outta the blue, because before you launched Magic Spoon, you were a cricket protein entrepreneur, which I think that's a first of ever. I don't think anyone ever thought that someone would say, Hey, you know, I'm, I'm the first cricket protein entrepreneur of all time, but hey, it's a title.
Yeah. And actually I don't even know if I deserve that title. So we launched that business, it was called EXO, in our final year of college. So that was 2013. And you know, briefly the idea is that insect protein in general, but cricket specifically, are a really high quality source of protein. All the amino acids, but also really sustainable.
So it requires less feed, water space to raise them compared to conventional proteins. And it was an idea that seems. Intellectually engaging. Interesting. How do you convince people to eat something they think is a little bit strange or even gross if it makes sense logically from a nutritional and environmental perspective?
But when we launched that business, there were two or three others that launched a similar time to us. There was one called Pul in Utah, a couple of others. One in San Francisco. And so I'm not sure if we were technically the first, but a, a few of us launched all around the same time in, in 2013. Sounds like a risky proposition, but it was one that generated a lot of interest and a lot of enthusiasm in the industry at the time.
How do you evaluate risk? How did you evaluate risk as a first time entrepreneur and how do you do it today as the angel investor and as the co-founder of Magic Spoon? I would say at the time, how did I evaluate risk? I probably didn't really evaluate it or it was a very simple rubric where I actually thought I was going to go into finance, and so I had interned at a, what was it, the time, the largest hedge fund in the world.
I thought I was gonna go back there when I graduated, and so I started playing around with this idea for EXO in the months before I graduated and I was gonna go work in this hedge fund and. As I was working on the idea, I just became more and more in love with it and met, um, some angel investors in, in Rhode Island where I was at college.
Met some people at a CrossFit gym, at a farmer's market who convinced me this was the best idea they'd ever heard of. And so at the time, as you know, 21, 20 2-year-old, to me it just seemed like. This is the time to do something crazy like start a cricket protein bar company, right? If this doesn't work out at that age, I knew I'd be okay.
When I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I, I could try something for a period of time and still know that ultimately I would be okay if it didn't work out, and it wasn't as if we did deep analysis on the idea. We didn't do a ton of consumer testing. It was simply an idea that we thought was worthy to exist in the world.
It was a business that we thought. Should exist, somebody should do it. And it was kind of product that we thought logically made sense if you could figure out the marketing angle. And so we just went all in. We moved to New York and we graduated. I didn't go to the hedge fund. My co-founder, who was my roommate at the time, was gonna go into a PhD.
He obviously didn't do that. And we, we moved to a tiny little apartment in Brooklyn. So tiny and so bad. Actually, the, when my mom came to visit from Scotland for the first time, she cries slightly when she we're living, but that's what you do. And we spent five years building that business, and it was an absolute monster of an education in CBG and entrepreneurship taught us a huge amount.
We met retailers, we met investors. We learned how to build something from nothing, and ultimately that became the foundation and the education for, for Building Magic Spoon, which has obviously been far more successful in mainstream than than cricket bars. Maybe I should ask you about the risk that your investors saw in the brand, because again, a Cricut protein bar company isn't necessarily the most intuitive investment for well anyone.
How do you convince them of your vision? You know, I actually think it was probably easier to convince investors for that business than this business because for a lot of investors, firstly, it depends whether you're talking about VCs, range of investors, and you know the domain they know. But for a lot of investors, they're looking at something and they're asking, can this become a billion dollar business?
And. Risk or likelihood of success is maybe even slightly secondary. So can this become a billion dollar business and can this dominate an in industry? And at the time, so back in 2013, this was gonna peak alternative proteins. This was, you know, a lot of talk about the environment and. We were basically making the case that insect protein is going to be an entire category of protein similar to the plant-based protein movement, right?
We were saying it is more sustainable, better quality protein. People essentially wanna have the amino acid profile on the protein quality of, uh, of an egg or a beef protein, which is kind of the highest PDCA score. But they don't want the environmental footprint. And so insect protein, the way we positioned it was like, it's sort of the best of all worlds.
It's the environmental credentials, the plant-based protein, it's the protein quality of animal-based protein all in one. And so for some investors, this was a bet on the future of the food system being both high quality and sustainable. And you know, they could believe that there's. Some odds that this thing could actually become as big as the soy or other kind of staple protein sources.
Obviously, we all knew it was a long shot, it was a huge swing, and I think everybody went into it knowing that if this works, it's gonna be massive and food system changing, and if it doesn't, that's, that's investing, that's starts up. I think that was kinda the lens that everybody took. I'm gonna be honest with you, and I'm sorry if I offend you in any way, Gabi, but if I were an investor when you were launching Magic Spoon and you said, Hey, we've got this great idea for a very.
High macro, ultra premium cereal, that's probably gonna cost about 10 or $11 a box. I would've been like, I'm sorry, hang up the phone or leave the room, or whatever it is that an investor might've done. And I'm sorry for saying that because clearly I would've been in the wrong. Again, going back to risk, magic Spoon as a business proposition wasn't necessarily something that made sense, at least I, I think for most people.
What did you see as the opportunity? What did you see as that quote unquote white space for a brand like this? I think you're right, and it's not actually just you, lots of investors we spoke to casually gave us a list of reasons why this business wouldn't work or didn't make sense to them. And some of the reasons were the market was declining, right?
So serial, yes, it's enormous, but it's was in decline for several years. And investors would say to us, you should never get into a declining category. Which is kind of funny because some of them would say, Hey, you should enter this growing category that's very small. But when I looked at that, I saw, you know, 10, $12 billion category very slightly declining.
Still gonna be big for a very long time. Or you look at a $200 million category, which even if it's growing 30, 40%, that's still gonna be pretty small for a long time. So I didn't really get that argument, but we heard it. They'd say to us, you'll never get shelf space. You know, they'd name the the big three serial companies.
They say it's gonna be very hard for us to break through. I'd actually seen with XO though, that if you generate enough hype, enough consumer demand, retailers will take a gamble on you, or at least at least enough retailers, one retailer, that then you get a chance to prove yourself with velocity. Take that the next retailer.
So I didn't really buy that argument. They'd say to us, nobody will ever pay nine $10 for box of cereal. Which again, nobody had proven that you could do it, but all these other categories, you'd seen something similar happen. Right? And that's true in food and beverage where there's many categories where a brand creates something that's genuinely better and can charge a premium.
But you even saw it in, you know, the time native deodorant I just saw to PNG, and you know, they had a natural deodorant three times the price in conventional deodorant. So you've seen all these examples in different aisles of the store that prove to us that people will pay for something that's actually differentiated and.
We also just knew that there are, there are very few categories that are as big that people love so much and you'd speak to anybody and they have all these incredible memories of eating cereal as a kid and they stopped and that that included me and my co-founder. But it's also, most people you talk to that care about health and wellness.
And so it seemed obvious to us that if you could create a breakfast cereal, they looked and tasted close enough to the sugary classics. But was massively upgraded in nutrition, so not just. 20% less sugar. 'cause that had been done before, not just a few grams of protein that had been done before. Not just making the ingredients more natural and organic, but keeping the macros the same that had been done.
But actually taking the protein from one gram to 14 or 15, the sugar from 20 grams to zero, it's a completely different product. We thought that there'd be a lot of people very excited to eat that. In place of their Greek yogurt, their stodgy protein bar, their green juice, all these things they eat that they don't really enjoy.
So that was what we saw. Low investors didn't see it, thankfully a few did. And so we raised some money and we got to work at launch or actually at pre-launch. Can you arrange in order of importance, these three aspects of the brand hype product brand? Products, I think is gonna be number one. I think brands, brands can mean so many different things and I think when you're launching, when people say brand for an early stage company, they probably just mean packaging and website or for a brand that's not D two C, probably just packaging.
Ultimately, brand encompasses like every interaction somebody has with your, your company. Including how do you perceive the product, including how customer service interacts with 'em, if they write in social everything, but when you're just launching, there's not really a brand there. There's packaging in a site.
I think for us, packaging was really important because we wanted to create that feeling of nostalgia and we wanted somebody to not see this as just another better view health product. There had been cereals or better view cereals, and they all took this approach of basically. Doing the opposite of what the sugary cereals do.
So you see the sugary cereals characters, bright colors. They're fun, you know, they're not very good for you. All these other better few brands, cereal, but you see this more broadly at the time as well. They're going very minimalist. They're doing muted packaging. There's, you know, maybe on the back there's a farmer with a stock of wheat.
It's very kind of like wholesome branding and it's, it, it's not fun and it's not enjoyable and you don't think it's gonna taste good. And so for us. It's very important from a branding perspective to say to people, we're creating something that doesn't involve compromise. You can have something that's fun, tasty, makes you feel good, makes you feel like a kid, but it's legitimately good for you, in fact, better for you than all those other brands that try and make it seem like they're healthy with the white minimalist packaging.
So brand and packaging was really important to us, even the format of the product. So. We thought for a moment, huh, maybe we should do a standup pouch that's resealable. 'cause cereal boxes are actually. Not a great experience, right? You kinda rip it open, it tears you, you don't reseal it. Like it's not a great way to package and consume something.
But what it does have, there's an amazing feeling of nostalgia and it's fun to rip open a cereal box. It's fun to like look at the back and play the game. And so we even chose the format of the packaging through that lens of brand and we wanted someone to feel, so that was very important for us. But ultimately, product is number one.
We basically had. A list of all the nutritional attributes we were trying to meet and formulating. And so we had to be over 10 grams of protein as close to zero sugar as possible, gluten-free, grain-free, low net carb, and then within that taste as close as possible to the cereals that people grew up with.
And yeah, I think we, we got close enough and the launch was a really, really amazing launch. And then I think if you get the products right and you get the brand right. The hype a little bit comes from them. It's not something you build in isolation as distinct from those two aspects. To be fair though, there was a lot of hype for Magic Spoon, and I feel like that's where I learned about the brand.
I wasn't necessarily seeking out a serial brand for me. I understand that, you know, this is something that, or the brand that is Magic Spoon is something that was sort of right place, right time, as particularly in, in 2020. But for a time it was known as Instagram's favorite cereal, right? Yeah. So we, we generated awareness a few ways early on.
So one was we relied heavily on health awareness influencers. Not with massive followings though, so. We actually brought on some small health and wellness influencers as, as investors in the business. You know, Kaleigh Leve, for example, is one who, she's a nutritionist, dietician to a lot of celebrities.
People really trust her for food recommendations, nutrition recommendations. So we actually brought people on like that, as kind of part of the business. And so that was one piece we were, we did a lot of seeding of small kind of micro influencers on Instagram. Literally just me and the dms. Finding someone with 30,000 followers that I thought might like the product, asking them if they were interested in trying it.
No pressure to share, but if they like it, they typically will share. So a lot of that with smaller influencers. And then as the sales started to come in and we had some money to spend, we, we also started to invest in podcasts. And the podcast environment was a little bit different five years ago than today.
Um, a little bit more underpriced. You were able to invest in some of these podcasts and actually. For us, that was a profitable acquisition vehicle kind of on day one, right? So it wasn't what of DTC brands back in the day were spending more cap, they can really afford getting the payback over a longer period for many of these channels, including podcasts.
That wasn't the case for us. And so we're able to generate a lot of early interest through influencers, podcasts, and of course some ads on Instagram as well. But as you say. That's incredible, but only ultimately matters if you can then get the repeat rates. And so that's where it's really important to make sure the product delivers and also find ways to keep people excited.
And so in our first few years, we actually launched new flavors online every four to six weeks, somebody might come in on a sampler pack, four boxes, top four flavors, but then in four to six weeks they get an email saying, Hey. We have a brand new limited edition flavor. We developed a bit of a playbook for that, so we wouldn't make very much of these flavors.
We drop them to our kind of air access VIPs, first of all, through SMS, through email, and that generated a lot of excitement, but also. A reason to repurchase as well. I think there's so many options out there, and so for us to be able to say to someone, you can have, you know, your classic flavors, but also there's more coming every six or eight weeks.
We're always gonna keep it exciting. There's no reason to get bored of this product, this brand, that was really key. The generation that was repeat sales in the first few years, D two C as well. So it was about maintaining that enthusiasm and excitement for Magic Spoon among your core consumers, were they.
By that point, convincing a lot of other people to try the brand. Was word of mouth a really big part of generating excitement for Magic Spoon? A hundred percent. And I think it's word of mouth at every level, right? So we took the view early on that running ads and our brand saying, trust us, this brand you've never heard of.
This product is good for you and delicious. That's not how you build a brand and no one's really gonna believe you. And so we, we realized early on that word of mouth at every level is how we're gonna get this product out there. And so that's, that was some early celebrity investors. That was these kind of mid-tier and smaller tier influencers.
That was the micro influencers we're just sending product to hoping they talk about it. And that's also just your customers telling their friends. And if you can facilitate that or encourage that more through referral program or something like that, it can also be powerful. But so at every level, you're building it through word of mouth, broadly defined a hundred percent.
Just wanna back up for a sec. 'cause I wanted to ask about the name Magic Spoon, which feels pretty intuitive. It feels fun, it feels like a cereal brand. If you think about the names of cereal brands, the legacy ones, anyway, they're often two words. You know, a Corn Flakes, the Frosted Flakes, uh, honey Smacks, corn Pops, you know, lucky Charms, any of those.
And Magic Spoon, each word is five characters, which again, feels really easy for that consumer. How much did you think about the brand name as being a really important part of the brand itself? Were there any other names that were on the cutting room floor? Yeah, we thought about it a lot. We probably overthought it and I think every founder probably overthinks it.
There was actually a different name we had for a while, which was disco and that that wasn't the name was gonna be we, we thought, you know, disco seventies vintage nostalgia. They're shaped as os discos. People told us they liked that name. Looking back on it, I think that's a horrible name at the time.
You know, 'cause these names before you launch, there's no brand or world built around them. And so it's very hard to wrap your head around what a word or two words really feels like or means until you build everything around it. We eventually thought that disco is felt too small. Too tight, didn't feel like, you know, a big brand.
And we wanted to nod at this idea of magic. Where that came from is we want somebody to, to think when they try our product for the first time, what is going on here? How did this company create cereal that tastes and looks so colorful and sweet, but there's zero sugar in it? It must be magic. So that was the idea we wanted to convey and we also felt like a two word name kind of made sense in, in this category.
See Spoons cereal. One of us just said, what about magic Spoon? And it kind of felt right. But it didn't feel instantly, right? It wasn't like someone said that, and we all thought, that's the name. We have to have it. And I think until you actually build the, the branding and the world and the packaging around it, it's very hard for a name to, to mean very much.
And I think it ultimately probably matters less than everything you, you build around it. So we thought about it a lot, weren't incredibly confident of it, honestly in the early days, but now we think it's a very strong name and it's served as well. Oh, for sure. Disco is actually, feels like maybe a dive bar in Brooklyn so I can understand when you Yeah, a hundred percent.
Yeah. Or, or which we didn't even think of this at the time. Getting discouraged from a retailer, right? Like it's got pretty negative connotations in cpg. Definitely don't wanna be discontinued at a retailer. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that for a sec. 'cause for a long time you were D two C and patient about going into retail, or at least brick and mortar retail.
When did you feel like you had permission to make that leap and think about Magic Spoon as more of an omnichannel brand? So we actually thought about it as an omnichannel brand pre-launch when we launched. It was not my intention to launch a D two C brand. We didn't think that our innovation was in channel.
We thought our innovation was in product. And so people would talk about us in the early days of Magic Spoon is the, you know, the Casper, the Harry's, or the whatever D two C brands of cereal. And that actually annoyed me a little bit because those brands, whilst they're incredible brands. Their innovation was cutting out a middle man, getting someone essentially the same product, but more directly and more affordably.
They didn't really do like the whole amount of, of product innovation for us. Everything we thought we were doing was product innovation. We were taking, you know, sugary cereal and making it vastly healthier with similar taste, and it just so happened that we were selling on the internet, so that wasn't important in our minds to the business model and pre-launch.
If you had asked me when we would go to retail, I would've said six or 12 months into our journey. Our goal was prove the concept online just enough to convince a retailer to take us. That was shattered in our first week. So our first week online, we probably did more in sales than we'd forecast for our entire first year.
It's a massive first week, and a lot of that was due to. The excitement at launch, some of the press, some of the creators that got behind it, and just incredible efficiency. Once we turned on ads a little bit later as well and that continued. And so because D two C was growing at such a clip and it was enough for us to focus on, we didn't need additional things to think about, we kept our heads done and throughout the entirety of the business, it's been really important for us to do as little as possible.
We wanna be really good at a small number of things. And not get distracted by any of the shining objects. And so to the extent the D two C was working really well and we were growing as quickly as we could have ever wanted to grow, we just kept our heads down and retailers would reach out. We, we'd very politely explain that we we're excited about partnering with them at some point when the time is right, but we weren't quite ready yet.
And we ended up building the business D two C only for essentially three years and. Then we launched in retail two, three years ago, and we did it in a, in a major way. So we launched Nationwide in Target. Firstly, six months later, we were in Walmart, SPRs, Kroger, Costco, lot of retailers. When Magic Spoon was the D two C only brand, what was the most important metric for you as a founder, and how has that changed, if at all, in becoming an omnichannel brand?
In terms of sales metrics, we're D two C only. We're looking at some measure of what it's costing us to find and acquire customer, so cac, cost of acquisition, and then we're looking at some measure of how long does that customer stick around? How much are they spending with us over time? So lifetime value, lifetime revenue.
And we're trying to find the balance there that makes sense to build a sustainable business. And of course within those, like they, they capture a lot of different things, right? So within lifetime value, lifetime revenue. Repeat rate kind of factors in there. So it's also a measure of how much someone likes your product, you know, within the cost of acquisition, obviously.
How efficient can you get the eyeballs in the first place? How efficient can you get a click? And so your brand matters, your packaging matters, the creative matters. So within those, there's a lot of stuff, it's kind of bound up, but those are ultimately the two things that kinda mattered most in the D two C days.
Now, no retail velocity is probably the number one sales metric. We're less concerned about things like door counts. We're really trying to be healthy in terms of velocity and flying off shelves, and that's gonna be true since day one in retail. That's been a major focus and a lot of things go into that as well.
Right? So. Repeat rates, really important front of pack, like are you getting someone to pick you up off the shelf? So there's a lot that goes into that that we look at kinda one layer down. But ultimately, retail velocity is probably the single most important sales metric at this point. And then higher level as a company, you know, in the early days we're thinking a little bit more about revenue.
For startup, it's zero to three years in revenue. Growth is probably one of the more important metrics, especially because the market was a little bit different six years ago. Now, profit's far more important, both because we're a more mature business that needs to generate a profit and should be generating a profit, and we are generating a profit, but also because the market's changed a little bit and the expectations have changed.
So, you know, revenue growth is still very much top of mind, uh, incredibly important, but, but profits up there alongside it. A lot of founders might ask you, Gabi, what's the biggest mistake you made? Let's clarify that for a sec. What's the biggest mistake that you or just Magic Spoon has made? When it comes to costs?
We've made a lot of mistakes across lots of different things. I think with costs, there's mistakes we've made that maybe in hindsight were mistakes. We probably made the best decision with the information we had. You know, we've had situations where. There were ingredients that we, we believed there was gonna be a shortage of a certain kind of ingredient for a certain period of time.
And so we bought a huge amount to make sure that we don't risk running our product. And then, you know, we contracted at a higher price than we should have, for example, on the ingredient. And then for a period of time, our cogs were inflated, which potentially a mistake, we're paying more for our ingredients.
We removed the risk of having no product on shelf. So there are, there's lots of situations where we may find ourselves a little bit on the wrong side of a bet, but it's probably still worth it, in most cases, broader mistakes. I think in hindsight, we probably should have gone to retail a little bit earlier, not massively earlier.
I think it's really important to wait until you know you're gonna really fly off the shelves to go to retail, but I think ultimately almost all cereal is bought and sold. And brick and mortar. I think just from a pure customer experience perspective, we now want to be everywhere that cereal's bought and sold.
We wanna be where the customer's looking for us. And for three years our business wasn't there. Right? And so there were many, many instances, probably daily emails, social comments of being like, Hey, I went to my local grocery store and you weren't there. And so I think of just from the perspective, trying to build a kind of consumer first business, probably would've been better to be in brick and mortar sooner than we were.
Was there some shock value for that target consumer when they walked in and saw this beautiful package of cereal with high macros and just seemingly speaking to them and then saw the price of the product and bulk, how much did you have to overcome as price point for that new consumer? Not as much as I thought we were going to have to pre-launch.
Pre-launch. That was my single biggest concern was can we justify the price? And to be clear, it's, it's not that we want to charge a high price. I want this to be as accessible as it possibly can be. The issue, of course, is we're using whey protein rather than corn flour, and we're using natural sweeteners rather than cane sugar or high fructose corn syrup.
And so our ingredient costs are just vastly, vastly more expensive than that classic box of cereal. So there's not really a way around it and. For us, it just became really important to message that even though this looks and tastes like a box of cereal from an ingredient perspective, it's actually a protein bar or a protein shake.
And so making sure the macros are really clear on front, making sure we have some explanations on the back, making sure most of our ad copy, our web copy is really explaining why the price is more than it is. Usually people understood it when we get a chance to explain the issue. Going to retail, of course, is it's not like a Facebook ad where someone asks in the comments, you can respond and explain.
There's no one there in the, in the aisle to respond and explain. And so packaging becomes that much more important 'cause that is your billboard. But retail's been working really nicely, I think, because. Compliment the in-store offline experience with still a lot of online ads, podcasts, Instagram ads, things like that.
We're able to kind of educate around it. In addition to kind of the work the packaging is doing in store, there's enough people that have kind of understood the price point within the context of the products, actually giving them what's the most important part of your front of pack? Is it a word? Is it an image?
Is it the logo? We think a lot about the kind of hierarchy on the front of Pack. I think logo's number one in terms of just if you had to set a hierarchy, logo's the most important thing, especially if you're doing a fair amount of advertising in other areas, you need someone to be able to walk down the aisle and go, oh, that's Magic Spoon.
It's the brand I heard on the podcast last week, or whatever it might be. For us, we are always trying to balance the fun of the packaging, meaning the character, the color, the feeling. With the actual education we want the front of pack to do, which is the, the reasons to believe the macronutrient call out.
So we've got protein, sugar, net carbs, and those macros are certainly bigger now than they were when we were just a D two C brand because they now have to do more work on the packaging than when the packaging is just one small part of an ad where we can put other words and things around it. I was wondering if the term protein really is the game changer for Magic Spoon.
I mean, it is for so many other brands and so many other categories, especially today when protein seems to be the number one macro for, well, everyone, but for me, I, I mean everything begins with taste and on front of Pack. I just wanna make sure or just have the sense that this is gonna taste great. How do you communicate Taste on front of Pack or in an online ad?
In an online ad, it's much easier, right? In an online ad you can, you could have the visual of it pouring out with a package and some milks flashing, or a lifestyle imagery of somebody enjoying it. So ads are relatively easy. On front of pack, it's much harder. We do it a little bit through color, a little bit through, we have these floating loops around the package.
I think for us communicating taste, it's more about saying to someone, this is going to taste like a classic cereal. And so we do that through the colors, through the loops floating around, but even the character, I think doesn't work there and letting the purchaser know that it's designed in the vein of a classic cereal.
And so we're relying on a few different elements of the packaging. You mentioned protein, which is interesting. Our cereal actually didn't use to say protein cereal on it for many years. It said grain-free cereal. We're always trying to find the balance between what does the consumer want a day. But not falling into any kind of short term trend or hype cycle.
And so you're right, protein is having an a crazy moment, and it's not like it came outta nowhere. Proteins be steadily building for a long time. There've been hundreds of protein bar brands and grocery stores for a very long time. There's retailers that mostly sell tops of protein, but it's definitely having a moment becoming more and more mainstream for us.
We're really careful about not leaning too hard into any one direction because we don't want our brand to be susceptible to trends in these, you know, up and down can appearance. And for us, we want to create a product that is resilient over time. And is healthy from a variety of perspectives. And so yes, this is a cereal at Time Protein, but it's also cereal that's got no sugar.
Um, it's also cereal that doesn't have artificial colors and artificial flavors. And so we really wanna be clear to the consumer. That's, especially today when there's a lot of products just dumping in 10 grams of low quality protein into a random product. We wanna be clear that's not us. Like we are not just taking a sugary, unhealthy product and dumping in some low quality protein.
We've actually created this from the ground up. Yes, with lots of high quality protein, but also with no sugar and also with nothing artificial. And so that's really important to communicate too. But you have a new line of products and they're called protein pastries. Yeah. So you're clearly leading with protein there, and it seems like the consumer.
Would be thinking about protein first and foremost for a product like this and maybe taste second. We've had your products here at the office and I think they're great, but to be honest with you, I would probably lean more toward your new cereal line, which has marshmallows. Again, because I think for me, taste for is first and foremost the most important thing, especially when I know I'm already getting the protein from your cereal.
I don't necessarily need more protein. I would love more flavor. So when you think about innovation, how do you balance again, this consumer, I guess, balance between those two things, macros and taste? It's a really good question, and I think a lot of it depends on the category you're in. So. You're right that the pastries you launched, we call protein pastries.
Still important for us and we need to keep working on this. They've only just launched, but they're also high fiber. They're also extremely low sugar, and so we want protein pastries for a product descriptor. He wanted to convey this looks and tastes and feels like a toaster pastry, but its base is protein rather than carbs and sugar.
But we still want these other reasons to enjoy it, to come through fiber, no sugar, things like that. I think with other product categories. You essentially need to think about taste. There's clean ingredients, there's macros, and you're always gonna be trading off on those three. From our perspective, we wanna be as high as we can on the macros and the taste while still having pretty clean ingredients.
So our brand is not being built on, you know, only having four ingredients that you can pronounce and find in your kitchen, right? That that's not what our brand is. Our brand is built on. High protein, low sugar in some places, high fiber, really tasty with still clean ingredients, right? So we're still not using any artificial flavors, artificial sweeteners, artificial colors, nothing like that.
Still a relatively short ingredient list for a packaged food, but we've chosen to lean more into the macronutrients in the taste than the kind of ingredient deck. And that's true for most of our product categories. We do have these new cereal lines with marshmallows in them. They launched a couple of weeks ago.
So we uh, we have two flavors. We have classic and s'mores, and they have many marshmallows. That's actually a case where we've slightly relaxed the macro guardrails in favor of taste and indulgence. So those flavors have some sugar in them. Real cane sugar in the marshmallows, which is not something we've done with our cereal, our granola, our pastries.
We're leaning a little bit more into indulgence with that new cereal Subline, and so far the response has been incredible. So it's been really exciting to see and that that may give us permission in the future to do that more with other lines of innovation as well. Are the marshmallows intended to reward existing consumers or you try to bring new consumers to the category, to your brand more specifically?
It's always a balance between the two. I think this product line probably more than others. Is a bit more geared towards generating excitement and attracting new fans of the brand. We thought a lot before being comfortable with having these marshmallows in there that add a little bit of sugar. And when we're talking to different segments of our current customer base, they gave us very different answers.
If you speak to our most. Early evangelist customers, they would say to us like, absolutely do not put any sugar in their product. No marshmallows, we don't want it. Which is scary when you hear that first, and this is partly why we didn't launch this product until six years into our journey. You certainly don't want to alienate anyone, and you certainly want to make sure you're doing right by your earliest fans and creating innovation that they can enjoy and can enhance their days.
But at the same time, we wanna continue to be bringing new people into the fold. And when we asked a more mainstream audience or a customer that may be found us in the last year or two through a retailer perhaps, versus through D two C, you ask them, is it okay to have a couple of grams of sugar from the marshmallows?
They say, yeah, if it's gonna be an enjoyable experience. And so this product line is a little bit more geared towards that new customer, but we're still always careful not to alienate the existing. Gabi, what you've built is pretty extraordinary. Six years, a brand that's generating tens of millions, if not more, in terms of revenue.
I know there's been a lot of investor interest in the brand, and I know there's been a lot of excitement along strategics about Magic Spoon and, and sort of the category that you've built here. But I think most entrepreneurs that I've spoken with have always talked about. Success on their own terms and success as achieving a vision they had set out for themselves and set out for their own brands.
Did you have a specific vision for what you wanted to see and create for Magic Spoon at the outset? Has that changed? Has your perspective on acquisition or strategic investment changed at this point? I don't think I had a very set vision for where this goes. We've always been. Quite open-minded. Even just the idea of we, we launched thinking we'd be an omni-channel business.
Then we decided let's spend three years doing D two C 'cause that's working and we can lean in and that can be the best use of our, our focus. And now we're of course back to omni-channel. I think as it relates to future, we're still open-minded. There's no one set view we have of the next few years. We do want to be able to do it on our own terms and have optionality, and so very important for us to be profitable, which we are.
Get to choose our own destiny and, and keep growing fast and keep investing in innovation as well. We're always trying to strike the balance between being focused and not doing too much, but also innovating in all these areas that we see are ripe for innovation and we want to be. The breakfast company of our generation, and so we see anything within kinda breakfast broadly defined as fair game for us to go into if we think there's a gap where there's maybe a set of products that people love that aren't serving today's consumer from a nutritional perspective as much.
Okay. Most important question I think of this entire interview. Are you happy? You know, I asked Peter Ray Hall. Who, uh, is one of the co-founders of rxbar now co-founder of a protein bar called Daniel this question, and he responded by saying, you know, happiness isn't necessarily something you should think about as an entrepreneur, at least you know, in your work life because this is tough, this is hard, this, you're not gonna be happy a lot.
I and some other folks maybe took a little bit of an issue with that, but it's a fair point. This is a really tough business and you can't necessarily expect happiness. In fact, what Peter said is that you should expect the opposite unhappiness, but are you happy? How do you stay happy? I'm quite happy.
Good, and I enjoy my work and I enjoy the people I'm around. I think at the same time, entrepreneurship is, it's ups and done. There's no founder that's like only having ops. Even if maybe the metrics are only ops, there's still endless moments of. Quick panic and fire drills. And I think I am able to really enjoy those moments.
And I actually find that as a founder, I switch on more in those moments. I love the fire drill. I love a problem to solve. And so you, you do need a mindset where you're probably more focused on those negatives than the positives. And day to day, a lot of your job is thinking about all the different ways where a business is not quite satisfactory from your perspective as a founder and all these little things that you think are a little negative that you can improve.
But I enjoy that. And to me, that that's not unsatisfying, that's actually quite satisfying to spend time focusing those things, make them better. But, and the most important thing is, is the people for me as well. And we hire really slowly, really deliberately, and we surrender ourselves with that. A great group of people that they'll take themselves too seriously, either.
At the end of the day, it's just a serial company. And so we try to make a really successful business, but have fun doing it as well. I love it. At the end of the day, we're a serial company. A really good one at that and one that changed the game, I think for the aisle. So I'm really excited that I had this opportunity to speak with you, Gabi.
I think it's been a long time coming and congratulations on everything you've built to this point. I have a feeling we'll be speaking again in the future and I'm looking forward to that next conversation as well. Amazing. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
