How can you sell your product to the marketplace? How is it different from others? Join your host Elliot Begoun as he talks with Rob Simcic about the challenge and satisfaction of doing something innovative and unique for customers. Rob leads the overall direction and supports the Little Beauties team to be the best it can be and produce the world’s finest dried fruit products. In this episode, he discusses how their company utilizes every piece of produce grown and shows respect for the land and the environment. Rob also shares surprising lessons throughout the course of his career when he decided to shift. He gives us an overview of the challenges, capital raising, and a glimpse of the future for the brand. He is confident they achieved something outstanding that is worth sharing with the world.

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The Challenge Of Innovation In Today’s World With Rob Simcic Of Little Beauties

This is one of our ongoing series, just having a heart-to-heart conversation with people in the trenches who live in this day in and day out, but now it is going to be a slightly different perspective because Rob is joining. I will let Rob introduce himself and his brand, background, and do all that fun stuff, but Rob is joining from half a world away. He’s joining us from New Zealand on the South Island, one of the more beautiful places I have ever been to. Hopefully, get to be there again. He’s doing all of this and trying to build a business from an island nation, half a world away from the US market. It adds a bit of complexity.

We’ll talk about what’s going on, what he has seen from his perspective and in his home market, and see where the conversation takes us. I will invite those that are in the studio audience to fire your questions away. I will be looking at our online community for any questions there. Rob, it’s good to see you. Why don’t you let those reading know what we are looking at? For those in the audience who get to see the beautiful view out your window, where are you, what you are doing, and a bit about you and Little Beauties?

Thanks very much for having me. My name is Rob Simcic. I’m coming to you from the top of the South Island and around New Zealand. The view behind me is a vineyard. I have 30-acre mixed enterprise property, which is somewhere between Nelson. To those of your readers that are familiar with this region.

A bit about me. I have gotten to know you through my involvement as a shareholder and CEO of specialty dried fruit company, Little Beauties, based here in New Zealand. My background, I grew up here in New Zealand, the son of an Australian immigrant who moved down here as part of an immigration scheme with a few pounds and very limited English. About £5 in his pocket, a serial entrepreneur that he is, and the Kiwi mom.

I mentioned my father because, no doubt, this fair degree of influence as I was growing up was very strong. They had a restaurant and a salad manufacturing business. They didn’t move them to cheese, biscotti, and all for the domestic matter, but that was quite an influence on them. What I went on to do was I did an Agricultural Science degree majoring in Soil Science.

I ended up working with farmers as a consultant before falling into banking and spent nearly twenty years working for New Zealand’s largest bank. I end up working with farmers and then with more work commercial businesses beyond the farm gate. That saw me specialize in the food and beverage space and create a role within IMC as a food and beverage specialist working with food and beverage businesses across here, connecting them with opportunities, creating insights, and so forth. That ultimately lead me to Little Beauties opportunity.

Tell us a little bit about Little Beauties. I know and love the product, but I’d love for those reading to understand what you are doing because it’s very different and unique and how you look at the opportunity and growth for the brand.

If you look at our proposition at Little Beauties, it continues to evolve. It hinged around creating the world’s most delightful fruit snacks from New Zealand, and that’s underpinned by two pillars. One of those pillars is the belief that all fruit is beautiful, therefore, no fruit should be left unpicked and wasted. We want to utilize every part of that production system from every angle. It makes sense to do that from an environmental and socio-economic angle.

The other pillar comes back to the ethos behind our founder, Ian Wastney, who started this wanting to create something quite unique and special to share with the world. That centered around a fruit called Feijoa, which your readers in North America will be more familiar with if they are familiar with that at all, as pineapple guava.

That’s what we set out to share with the world. We have kegged onto that other quite unique fruit varietals that deliver a flavor and a nutritional proposition. That’s different from anything else, the gold kiwifruit and boysenberry. We have a New Zealand-growing raspberry. That’s phenomenal. Our proposition is evolving from fruit snacks to fruit experiences as we look to utilize every piece of that waste stream. I think about kiwifruit as an example. It’s what you’d call kiwi over there. There are tens of thousands of tons of gold kiwi fruit that are superficially blemished that are not suitable for sale for each port in the domestic market.

We take the skins off and we air dry that. We air dry using some quite unique technology that delivers a lovely texture in a complexly flavored kiwi fruit snack. When we do that, the skins that we take off, we also have a waste stream from that. We are now turning those skins into powders and concentrates that can be used as ingredients across a whole spectrum from the nutraceutical space to shifts and so forth.

That’s a fairly recent development.

It’s fascinating with that pillar around utilizing every piece of produce that’s grown and showing respect for the land, environment, and the resources that have gone into growing it.

What about Little Beauties pulled you away from banking? Why did you see this as the mission, opportunity, and reason to walk away from a pretty successful corporate career?

Three things. First of all, people. The Wastney family. I have mentioned who started this. Tristan and brother Alexander are good people. They had a set of values and ideologies going into the set that festered with who I am as a human being. That was first and foremost. That created a product that I felt was genuinely unique.

The nexus of a range of megatrends or consumer trends that I’d been observing in my role, no doubt, you are very familiar with around that shift to healthy snacking and that convenience. That shift to all demand for bigger flavored gastro experiences. I keep using the craft beer example as the best example of that. It’s not all about the fact that it’s craft beer. It’s about the bigger flavors that come through. I felt that the product was unique, and it re-applied to the New Zealand story. We are a nation of 5 million people at the bottom of the South Pacific. We rely on export to scale. I believe that brand New Zealand is in a good position. It’s gaining recognition as a premium producer.

The final piece was I felt that the brand had some genuine needs as well. It’s a somewhat unusual name for a brand when I think about North America. Little Beauties, New Zealand, and Australia as a colloquial term for something good. It’s common in a conversation to refer to somebody as a little beauty or who achieved something good.

You might be watching the All Blacks play. Its story is strong and the cries will come, “You little beauty.” There are a lot of positive connotations with that. It’s very unique to this part of the world, but to gain fits with this proposition. Those were three things that I felt added up to something that we could scale up. All the ideology around the fruit-wise was such a strong sense of my environmental and socio-economic beliefs.

The people around you, the closest to your wife, and so forth. When you made this announcement that you were leaving the bank to jump into what it was or a startup, were they surprised, supportive, or freaked out? What was the take?

All of the above, but much more supportive. The overwhelming sense was the support. There was recognition of the risks. If I think about it at home, my wife Nikki was hugely supportive. She’s an entrepreneur herself. We have done things differently from day one. For example, we homeschooled our four children, which is an example. You have a team to do things a little bit differently and I’m afraid to take a risk. There was good support at home, but also with an asset we have taken upon, we’ll get through this regardless of wherever it may lead. From a lot of people in business circles, there was support and a change of I quite love to do something like that too. The privilege is certainly not lost on me.

Looking back now, I’m sure there have been some surprising lessons that you’ve learned since making the shift. Do any of those come to mind? Things that you now have added to your skillset or experience that you wouldn’t have had if you stayed in the more traditional role.

There are so many things. We need all day to go through. It’s so different.

Hit a few that speak to you.

Capital rising is an obvious one. I’d been in finance for years, but raising equity capital is a completely different thing. There’s a huge amount through that. I’d worked with family businesses for years and banking. I knew I was going into it. That would bring some challenges with that. This is a good family, but it does bring challenging dynamics. People are wearing different hats, from directors to staff within the business. I would manage it or navigating my way through that has been a challenge. I am having a fully integrated business with orchards manufacturing sales and marketing. It has bought manufacturing places as complex and capital intensive. It’s challenging when you’ve got that for capital. There are 2 or 3 headline learnings that I knew would be there, but not to the magnitude that they were.

Let me ask it a slightly different way just to delve a little deeper. If you could go back to that day you left the bank and we are going to come here and give yourself some advice, something like, “Rob, before you do this, I want you to know this one thing.” What would that have been?

You use the terminology investment-ready. When I came into the business, we had plans to raise further investment within six months. We were looking to raise $1 million and it took me eighteen months to make this investment. If I come back to your question, I could have and should have set that target earlier. I put a stake in the ground and said, “Let’s be in a position in six months’ time. We don’t have to hit the back, but let’s do everything we can to make investment ready.”

Is it because to make it easier to win investment, or because being investment-ready inherently makes you a more professionalized and better-prepared business? Is that why or is it more so that you make ready to hit the button to raise, you had all your ducks in a row?

It’s probably more of the form that makes you a better business going through that. The same answer, and you told me this. Great is the enemy of good. I will retract my answer and go back and say, “That’s the biggest I wanted.” One of the reasons that it took me eighteen months to get there as I wanted us to have all the answers for investors. I think that’s great being the enemy of good. I like that one said well. Go back and give myself a bit of a slap on the face and say that.

The truth of the matter is that was a lesson learned from me as well. When you are in a larger corporation, you can’t afford to do it that way when the expectation is decisions are made with knowledge even if that’s somewhat a fallacy because you never know. The degree in which a bigger company expects its people to make decisions are from a position of knowing.

Where when you are in a more entrepreneurial role, it’s that not knowing is the space you live in, and if you can’t make those decisions in the not knowing, you don’t move and it takes too long. I have talked to a few folks who’ve said, “You spend too much time in the corporate world. One of the things that happen is that your intuition is institutionalized out of you.” You don’t know how to trust your gut as much as you need to when you are in more of an entrepreneurial role. In which so many of your decisions have to be made with only pieces of the information and a lot to go south.

That runs through everything we do. Learnings from you and others. Lots of individuals who have seen a lot. This is not so much about a five-year strategy. I’m stealing your lines here. It’s about a series of experiments and hypotheses. You will not get everything right. You got to learn fast and keep adapting. That forfeits in that same category around great is the enemy of good.

Thank you for the shoutout, but the truth of the matter is that I’m sharing the lessons I have learned along the way from lots of entrepreneurs. That is the truth. It’s a series of iterations and hypotheses, go out, experiment, find out if it’s true or not, and adjust. Using that as a thread as you’ve gone out to do that, what have you uncovered, things that maybe have been successes and surprised you the opposite that they have not worked or been failures?

The eCommerce play that we have made and we would push hard in that space. There are so many experiments we have run there. We have been privileged to have the support of investors that we are playing the field in terms of these experiments through eCommerce and alternative places to distribution to market. I’d probably say there have been more failures than successes, but all the way along, we are learning and refining it.

One of the things that I would encourage everyone to think about is don’t think of those. Small failures are lessons. Thomas Edison failed 10,000 times trying to build a light bulb. It was just he found 10,000 ways not to do it and one that worked. I want to take a slight left turn here as we investigate. You mentioned homeschooling the kids and so forth. What are the ages of your four kids?

12, 15, 17, and 18 in 2022.

As they have watched you in this new role and be more one entrepreneur but also take on a role that was true to something important to you, your love of the environment and wants to do, what do you think they have learned from watching because they do watch? Maybe is a better way to phrase it that they are recognizing and then that they will take forward.

I hope that they are building that self-belief and they can get anything correct. I hope that they are learning that economic success doesn’t need to be something that’s mutually exclusive to having an impact in this world. They have all been involved, by the way, in the business, from laying a Kiwi fruit on the trays before they get onto the dryer to working at the local market or a food store and selling the product.

They will be learning directly from there as well as hopefully, some role model line, juggling multiple work items, and adapting to challenges. They see all that. We do the last years like everyone in the world so much working from home. They are reading to these conversations. I hope that’s inspired them to go out and make a difference in the world.

I would say with some confidence that I’m sure it is. It even amazes me. My kids are 29, 27, and 23 in 2020 and don’t live at home, but they still watch. They are still aware and interested. I hope that they recognize that. We talked before we went live about the tough time of being in the US and try to celebrate Independence Day when people are shooting from rooftops. If we want things to change, it’s going to be the kids and our entrepreneurs and innovators that change things. We need them to watch those and engage in the good fight, fighting the good fight in order to build that as a plausible route.

There’s an interesting thing. I had a conversation with some kids in the community, and I was asked to come in and talk about entrepreneurship. The question I asked is how many of them saw entrepreneurship as a path for them? I did that in one community that was more affluent and one community that was less so.

The less so almost everybody said, “I’m an entrepreneur. I could be an entrepreneur.” In the more affluent was the opposite. It was very interesting to me. I’m going to take another turn here and talk a little bit about growing the brand in North America, especially in the last couple of years when it’s been impossible to even be there. Talk a little bit about what’s going on here, how’s the business growing, and what are the goals and aspirations for Little Beauties.

It has been challenging. We have been very fortunate. I mentioned before, if I take a step back, that kiwi businesses scale significantly. Export is the pathway. As a business, we either identified the US, North America, Japan, and Australia as very key export opportunities for different reasons in those markets.

We are fortunate to get support from a New Zealand enterprise. That’s how we first got talked. They supported us with a market validation program where they effectively co-funded a series of experiments and how our pathway. In North America, we saw that as eCommerce. We set a playbook that would see us and form a partnership with a 3PL. We are established at the US. I did the US website, and the intention was to get that moving, get an online presence, and give customers access to our products in North America whilst we built out brick-and-mortar channels.

That was what we went in with. We have had a series like every business. There are many twists and turns with them and a myriad of learnings. Our success in the brick-and-mortar piece has not been forthcoming yet, and we were trying to do things a little bit differently there again and trying to avoid going down the path of hooking in with a major distributor.

We wanted to see what we could do direct, but we had multiple challenges with products maintaining quality and integrity. I hadn’t mentioned it in my introduction. Little Beauties, some of our products we pair with chocolate just two skews. Those two skews have taken a disproportionate amount of time and resources to get into consumers’ hands in a decent state. As of now, we have pulled back on supplying those into North America.

It’s the battle of temperature control and all of that.

We could get everything right, and it could still be lifted on the doorstep in the hot sun for six hours. We have got complaints and challenges on our hands again. That was a big call for us because it’s a gateway product. Most people like dark chocolate because there’s no milk. It was a nice proposition, but it’s a tough call to pull that back. I don’t want to take up all of your time going through those details. What we have done is we have shifted out 3PL from Memphis to California.

We have gone from a wide approach. As we were doing eCommerce, we could get away with that. The data back from Facebook and Instagram was supportive of that, but we have seen the success rate through those social media channels dwindling. We refocused on a targeted geographic area being, California and the Pacific Northwest. It’s re-centered around the 3PL. We have pulled back the chocolate, and we have set ourselves up on Amazon. It took us far too long to get Amazon up and running, and we underestimated the discovery opportunity that comes through Amazon. We received our bricks-and-mortar play through a lot of fear enable.

You are not describing anything that’s different from a lot of what brands domiciled here in North America experienced during that time. First of all, consumer behavior was swinging wildly as consumers were adapting to new normals and changes. They try to keep up with that and so forth. Little Beauties is a different form factor than what’s out in the marketplace, and you are dependent on driving trial. That’s the toughest thing in this new world that we are in right now. Brick-and-mortar is a specific retail grocery store. It’s one of the hardest places to drive trial if you are something completely different, even when you could physically do demos and stand in front of people from a scale standpoint. It’s a great place to replenish.

eCommerce D2C has been exploding. It exploded since the pandemic, and the cost of acquisition has gone up dramatically. You then add on top of that the impact of the changes to iOS. Releases had an impact on some of the IG and Facebook. Things are changing all of the time. That’s hard to do when you are sitting in Boulder, Austin, or San Francisco, but when you are sitting on top of a mountain outside of Nelson, New Zealand, even more so.

I’m pleased you’ve mentioned all of that because all of that has undoubtedly had an impact. When I reflect on it all, we have learned a lot. We have seen enough and had enough feedback. This is why we live with eCommerce because we want the data. We wanted to say, “Get that real-time data back and shape our approach off the back of that.”

We have enough data and enough feedback to support our continuance in the US market. Despite not achieving what we wanted to achieve in North America, we have been fortunate. We have had picked up in other markets. The likes of Australia have gone very well for us. We have seen enough in North America to stay this.

I’m relatively new in this account. I’m on board who has a strong background in the eCommerce space, particularly Amazon. That’s going to take a lot of that load off us and we will drive the development of a lot more aces through Amazon. We have some good traction coming through, originally, Costco Australia. That’s now looking very promising to step into Costco US, starting with LA, which is great. That nice alongside our eCommerce play.

From an eCommerce perspective, too, you are a very light product to ship, so that’s good. As you think about the future for the brand, what excites you and what scares you?

I’m excited about the opportunity to deliver more in the way of fruit experiences and the access that we have to some unique supply opportunities.

Let’s expand a little bit on fruit experiences. I know you’ve talked about trying to use the whole fruit and in powders and so forth. From a more operational definition, what do you mean explicitly around the fruit experience?

I was preparing a draft product list for a new partner in North America. I had their snack range and then I had a new shift selection range, which is 100% freeze-dried powders of kiwi fruit, boysenberry, feijoa, blueberry, and raspberry, which are amazing products for the professional and the home chef. It’s good for eCommerce and bay to bay. We then have a range in our ingredient space of spray-dried powders, the same product, which are well-suited to the bulk ingredient. We complement that with pure and concentrates. We’re exploring a partnership around juices as well.

It’s a much broader platform than in multiple categories and channels. It adds opportunity and complexity.

It does. It’s a nice compliment to an existing manufacturing operation, but we can’t do all of that. To come back to your question about what’s exciting. What’s exciting is the ecosystem. They would bring back here with like-minded companies working in the fruit waste space, from the juicing companies to other manufacturers of dried fruit, different dried fruit products to different drying operations, and other processed fruit-based products.

That’s exciting because the collaboration spectrum can range from a contractual co-packing arrangement right to potentially bringing these businesses together with remarkable access to some very unique fruits. I keep using that too. I don’t think I’m overstating that New Zealand grows 80% of the world’s boysenberries.

New Zealand is the only commercial producer of feijoa. These are two quite unique flavor and functional nutritional profiles that come out of them. Gold Kiwi fruit was developed here. We have done our first arrangement with an integrated orchard. Investors purchase an orchard solely for the supply of Little Beauties that are tied up. That allows us to expand our supply. As we go down that path of building that ecosystem, we can scale that up. It’s exciting for the region for our team around New Zealand, and for consumers worldwide because we should be able to get more of these amazing products into their hands.

It sounds exciting. Now, let’s flip to the other side. What’s keeping you up at night? What’s terrifying?

It’s the same thing, again, and I’m sure you hear it elsewhere. It’s always the financials. We are building something here. We are able to do that with the good grace of some fantastic investors. We have kicked into a series to be raised, and I kept a raise. We raised $2.5 million through series A in 2021. We are looking to raise $3 million to $4 million. That’s one of those songs that’s exciting and scary at the same time.

We have got some fantastic people. I’m going to use it around this vortex. We have been able to attract people through this, and we have been so fortunate in that regard, but that’s going to continue. That’s always a big thing, people. It’s scary and exciting. I’m probably less scared of the disruption that we have seen for several years. We have learned so much and are able to adapt through that, but there’s always a niggling thing in the back of your mind about what other disruptions.

Entrepreneurs are built for disruption. We shine in that. When we are more predictable, it’s difficult to be innovative. Let me ask about the people’s questions out of curiosity because here in the US, it’s such a struggle right now, more so than at any time in our modern history. Labor and with The Great Resignation and all the things are going on. It’s very hard for companies to find good talent and people. Are you finding it any more difficult than in the past, or it’s always hard to find good people, but it’s not any harder than it was years ago?

For us, no. It’s not harder. It may be a little bit easier for us because our reputation and the belief in the community around what we are doing has grown. There are people that want to be a part of us. That’s positive at all levels within the business, to be quite honest. There are some areas, and I come back to eCommerce and digital marketing expertise, where it has been harder. That’s why this partnership with the new investor is so significant because it’s one of those skillsets that comes into the business. To answer your question, we feel somewhat blessed with the talent that we have been able to get into the business and that we know has an interest and being a part of the team.

Two last questions. The first is, to the other folks out there reading, the entrepreneurs, retailers, and investors. If you could share a lesson, learning, or a-ha moment, what would that be?

One word is humility. You don’t know everything. Whether you are pitching for investment, dealing with staff, or potential buyers, that balanced humility. It’s so important that vulnerability that shortened through when I have been having discussions with them. Humility from the business perspective and from a personal angle being vulnerable. People are so important in terms of building trust.

Those are two traits, vulnerability in particular. If you come from the corporate environment, that’s somewhat frowned upon and looked upon. I encourage everybody now to lean into that vulnerability because when you are out over your skis, feel exposed, you don’t know, or you are vulnerable, that’s where the richness of lessons, learning, growth, and all of those things happen.

When you hold yourself back so that you don’t feel that sense of vulnerability or exposure, or you can’t admit, “I don’t know this. I don’t understand it. Can you explain it that humility,” then your opportunities to grow get limited. As an entrepreneur, your personal growth is what foreshadows the ability of the business to grow. If you can’t grow and get better, then how do you expect the business you are guiding to do the same. I think those are great lessons. Last question. If people want to learn more about you and Little Beauties, here’s your opportunity to pitch for whatever you want to ask those who are reading.

As I mentioned, we are in the middle of a series B capital raise. I’m interested in talking to parties that might be interested in investing within Little Beauties in terms of product opportunities, as we have talked about. Thank you for the opportunity to do so with this new range of ingredients. You’ll be interested in collaborations with believers and the opportunities there. We’ll have all of those products stateside. All of those new patents around stateside, and we can get that out. If anyone is interested in doing something, co-branded or otherwise, I’m happy to have a chat and people can get ahold of me, no doubt through the TIG Community.

That brings us to a close. I’m thrilled we are able to do this. I enjoyed not only seeing and catching up with you, but also glancing over your shoulders and looking out into the vineyard. It’s not a bad little bit of peace and relaxation. I don’t know how you concentrate. That would be turned around the other way, staring out all day. Thanks for joining, taking the time, and sharing your story. I hope to catch up soon.

I have to take a minute to say an enormous thank you to you and the TIG community. It’s been such a privilege to be a part of that. Those learnings have been so practical. Learnings and sharing the journey with yourself and others in the community is a privilege, so thank you all.

It’s the other way around, honestly. I’m not saying this to be self-deferential. It’s the coolest thing in the world to wake up every day and see how entrepreneurs succeed. It’s a blessing. I’m very fortunate to do it. I’m a cross-pollinator, to use an ag term. The idea is that our whole community ethos is that we learn from each other and through each other, and we share. That’s the opportunity.

Every one of you is a change agent. If we are going to feed 10 billion people and do the things that we need to do from a climate, human health, justice equity, diversity, and inclusion standpoint, it’s going to be folks like you who are doing things for the right reasons. It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining. Thank you, everyone, for joining us on this episode, and we’ll see you next time.

 Important Links

• Little Beauties

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