Plants and plant-based foods are already in various forms and eaten in various ways due to the widespread knowledge that eating them has an abundance of health benefits. However, there still exists a conflict in human minds in going to a plant-based eating lifestyle because of concern that plants may not have enough nutrients, specifically protein. That is exactly why Lupii launched Lupini, the plant-based protein that is a nutritional powerhouse! Join us in this episode as Isabelle Steichen, the Co-founder and CEO of Lupii, shares her journey on how she was inspired to launch Lupii and make it possible for vegans, omnivores, and even carnivores to eat plant-based without missing out on protein.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Launching Lupii: The Plant-Based Protein With Isabelle Steichen

Before I introduce Isabelle and we talk about Lupii, here are a couple of things to get to do my typical commercials. Two of our very important initiatives that I want to make sure to call out first and is our TIG Ventures community. This is our approach to trying to be part of the solution to the funding challenge that exists now. The reality for many of the brands that are here reading is to get to institutional money. It takes you being further along more trailing twelve, all those things, and it’s very challenging. It also requires you to automatically determine that you are going to sign up for that hamster wheel.

We feel there’s a different way. Most funds are out there trying to find, it used to be the grand slam but now it feels like it’s the walk-off grand slam and the seventh inning of the world, or in the ninth inning of the World Series game seven. It’s so hard to be that brand. We think there’s an opportunity to fund a lot of the singles and the doubles.

The brands that can be strong growing, even positive brands with options. We have started the TIG Ventures community for the brands within the TIG community. We are interested in bringing earmarked directed dollars to help them bridge that gap and bring them to the point where they can choose what makes the most sense for them, whether that’s true institutional dollars, becoming bankable, PE money or other forms of venture debt. That choice comes from giving them the earmarked dollars to get there. The reality is that we believe it will return a very nice return for the LP. If you are interested in learning more about the TIG Ventures community, either as an LP or a participating member, please feel free to reach out.

The other thing I want to talk about is the TIG Collective. The TIG Collective has a dual purpose and dual mission. It’s an advisory collective. Its first mission is to help entrepreneurs be surrounded by the people who can help them make the best decisions, avoid mistakes, and see maybe some of the impending cliffs and brick walls ahead of them in advance so that they can navigate around them. It also helps them learn to become more effective leaders and with the advisors, they work with in terms of extracting value. We do that through master classes and so forth.

The other purpose of it is that we need to see more diversity on our boards. We need to see more women, BIPOC, LGBTQ plus board members. Our industry needs our boards to reflect the communities that we serve. To do that, we have to give these advisors the opportunity to learn the craft of being advisors and board members. That comes through experience, confidence, and education on topics like governance and fiduciary responsibility.

Through the Collective, we are doing that. Bringing good subject matter experts in as advisors and not only giving them the opportunity to advise but, while they are doing that surrounding them with the education that they need to build that level of confidence and hone the craft of being a board member. Hopefully, through our relationships with the women onboard projects, the JEDI Collaborative, and all the folks at New Hope, HEI, and VCs, then we will have this new crop of diverse future board members that can help shape the brands that are the future of this industry.

If you are interested either as a brand, as an entrepreneur, wanting to be a part of the collective or as an advisor, somebody who’s got lots of experience that you want to share and grow, and also have an opportunity to find yourself onboards in the future, again, feel free to reach out to any of us here at TIG Brands. Deep breath. Done with my commercials. Now, the fun stuff. I get to have a conversation with the super cool entrepreneur. I met Isabelle a while back. I love what they are doing. I love the mission, and I will let her do her own introduction because, I will do it complete injustice. Thanks for joining.

Thank you for having me, Elliot. I’m very excited to be on the show and also be part of the community in general. I’m Isabelle, one of the Cofounders and CEO of Lupii, and at Lupii, we are building a brand platform for what we like to call the small but mighty Lupini Bean. Lupini is the underdog of plant-based protein. It is an incredible ingredient that has a long cultural and culinary history back in Europe.

It is packed with nutrients. It has the highest concentration of plant protein, a complete protein, so all nine essential amino acids are packed with fiber and is naturally low in carbs. Hitting all of the consumer claims that you ask consumers are shopping for. It also happens to be a regenerative crop that’s fantastic for soil health.

It is used extensively in regenerative agriculture abroad and is very resource efficient to grow. Bring together to better for humans and the planet solution. Alexandra, my Cofounder, and I believe that the time is right to introduce Lupini to the US market. We have a product range and market Lupii bars that launched in January 2020, and then we launched our second product range, Lupii Pasta.

I love pasta. It’s going to be a huge hit. I have been a bar fan for a while. Tell me about how this all started. What made you begin this crazy journey? It is a bit nuts when you step back and think, not only launch a CPG product. We are going to launch it with an ingredient that most people in the US are completely unfamiliar with, and we have got a big story to try to tell and a fairly large educational threshold to meet. Why are you doing it?

When you put it like that, I’m like, “It is a little bit nuts.”

It’s the right kind of nuts. I love that. That’s what entrepreneurship is all about. If you simply step back or even when you talk about it and you go, “If I listen to myself tell about this, why the hell am I doing this? This is crazy.” It’s for that reason that it makes sense, and I know that sounds strange but what inspired you both to do this?

I would say it was inspired by a lot of entrepreneurs by a personal journey that I went through. I moved to the States from Europe, and at the time, I transitioned from a vegetarian to a vegan diet. That was very much against my European family’s will but they have since gotten over it, thankfully. As I started on that journey here in the States and being vegan, I kept getting this one question from all of my American friends and family members, which was, “Where are you getting enough for the right type of protein from on a plant-based diet?”

I was blown away by that question because functionality is not the primary decision maker or driver for decision-making in Europe when it comes to food decisions but it is very much here in the States. Someone asking me so much about a macronutrient. At first, I was confused, and then I started hearing it so much that I started looking at some of the research and data.

I understood that US consumers are driven by functional claims and that there was a huge shift over the last several years more acutely towards eating more plant-based here in this country. At the same time, there was still this real conflict in people’s minds that plants cannot deliver on the nutrition side, and specifically, that protein was going to be a concern. When I heard that inside, I looked at the space and what I saw were a lot of these transition foods that are great in terms of taking animals out of the supply chain if you care about that.

They are meat and dairy replacements that mimic the animal-based version of something. The challenge that I saw personally was these endless nutritional and ingredient labels with tons of processed ingredients. Tons of protein isolates that then require other ingredients on top of that to mask the off-flavors of protein isolates. I found personally that I was staying away from these food foods.

When I started talking to consumers and looking at some of the research, I heard similar things out there that people were eating these products to feel better because that is the main reason for US consumers to eat plant-based. It’s not so much the environment or the ethics. It’s health that is the primary reason but people weren’t feeling better.

That sparked this idea in my head that was around going back to our beginnings and looking at some of these incredible ingredients that are out there in the world that have been used and consumed in other cultures for a very long time and that are uniquely powerful to deliver on what consumers are looking for now, which is a high-quality plant-based protein that makes you feel better.

That brought me back to my origins. I grew up in Luxembourg, and lots of my friends growing up were Portuguese and Italian, and they have been eating Lupini in those cultures. It was an ingredient that I knew about that I was familiar with but didn’t know that much about until around 2017, when my research project started. I started talking to farmers in Europe, researchers, and other entrepreneurs that were using the ingredient back home. As I was uncovering these incredible functional benefits around protein, all nine essential analyses but also the fact that there has been a so packed with fiber and low in carbs. I thought this was the perfect ingredient for the US entrepreneur.

Let me ask a couple of personal questions first, if I may, out of curiosity. What brought you? You said you were vegetarian first and then became vegan. What started you on that journey and why? I’m always curious. I, too, am vegan and tend to eat a whole food plant-based diet but I’m curious as to what brought you to them.

I honestly always struggled with the concept of eating animals. In Europe, eating animals is a little bit more in-your-face graphic than it is here. I remember my grandmother preparing cow tongue or us preparing bunny rabbits that we would get from the farmer’s market, and it would still have the eyeballs and the fur on them.

As a kid, we also always had pets, and I never understood where we were making that distinction. The foods that were landing on our plates versus the animals that we loved. I always struggled with that. I never liked eating meat, and my family was very traditional European. What I mean by that is that there was no way for me to be vegetarian when I lived at home because it was considered rude and not respecting our cultural heritage.

I have a French grandmother. Giving up cheese was absolutely not an option as a sixteen-year-old. There was always this conflict with food from me, and then when I moved out from home when I went to university when I was nineteen, I decided, “I’m living on my own now. I can eat and make what I want to,” and then I went vegetarian. I didn’t know a ton about the agricultural and animal industry, and I thought that I was doing my part in it.

The more I was learning about Act production and dairy production. I felt like I couldn’t unlearn what I knew. I asked myself, “Can I be a healthy, functioning human, not consuming animal products in my food but also cutting it out of other parts of my life like when it comes to clothing or beauty products?” The answer was yes because I live in a privileged place. At the time, I lived in Paris, where I went to school. Now that I live in New York, I have access to lots of alternatives. That made it clear to me that this was the path that felt more comfortable with who I am.

It’s interesting to me, and this is not what we will spend most of the show on for those reading, so don’t worry. It’s always interesting to me to see where that journey starts and how it evolves. The more people I talk to, oftentimes, the motivation is either personal health, weight loss, animal activism or animal rights but once that starts, all of the aspects get pulled together.

Suddenly you are like, “This is a healthier way for me to eat. If I was doing this for health, I feel better about what I’m doing for the planet and what I’m doing for the animals on it.” the one thing I want to be careful of saying and this has nothing to do with what you were expressing but I feel like it’s not said enough.

There’s room for everybody. We have tribalized diets in this country. At the end of the day, there are plenty of paths to healthy diets that are also relatively climate-friendly and animal friendly. You don’t have to be vegan, although my personal bias puts it that way as ideal because it hits those three legs. Michael Pollan said it best. Regardless, they are all fingers pointing at the moon but if you eat whole foods, mostly plants, not too much, you are going to be okay. Whether that includes a little bit of dairy and animal products, we shouldn’t be tribalized. We should accept. There’s a lot of pasts to it and so forth.

That’s one thing that’s interesting about the way you’ve approached it. Although for you, the way it came, the genesis of it was this recognition that as a vegan living in New York, you are getting a lot of questions around protein which I always find funny because nobody in the United States or anywhere in the Western world has ever died from protein deficiency. There are plenty of them. There’s nothing on the package. There’s nothing in your messaging that is only marketing to the plant-based eater or the vegan activist. You are welcoming all comers who want a clean, nutritively dense product that is also good for you and the planet. Was that intentional?

That touches on something that is so near and dear to my heart, and what you said before about tribalizing diets, I recognize that. That is the last thing that I want to do. Building this business is not about converting people to go vegan. I used to be way more binary as a thinker, and I don’t know where that was coming from, maybe because I was younger or I tried to rebel against my cultural heritage in some ways.

I now think exactly about what you said. There’s a place for every diet. To me, what’s important is people who want to eat more plant-based. I want to empower them to do that wherever they are on their journey. I want them to have access to the highest quality possible plant-based foods but I’m not looking to build a vegan world. These are incredibly personal choices, and that’s not the goal.

I’m trying to give people tools on the journey that they are on. Having been building this business with Allie, who comes through the plant-based diet from a very different perspective. She came from health. She had been dealing for years with chronic health issues and gut health issues. Plant-based eating helped her, and then that’s when she started learning about the ethical and environmental benefits. She’s someone who’s always taught me from day one to be inclusive in our messaging and built this brand for everyone versus having a super narrow consumer.

It’s exciting when we see that most of our customers are not vegans. Most of our customers are omnivores. We like to say conscious omnivores, so people who care about what they put into their bodies and who care about including more plants in their bodies but they aren’t necessarily hardcore vegans. That’s exciting because that’s the brand that we want to create.

We want to create an inclusive brand and a brand voice that appeals to everyone that is not dogmatic or talking down to people or telling them that there’s one right way to do things because we know very little still about nutrition anyway. A lot of those learnings are happening as we go and grow but we all agree that eating more plans, as Michael Pollan said, is a good way to start.

As the father of three grown kids, I say this to them all the time, “I want you to have strong opinions.” That’s important. I want you to also hold them loosely so that if you uncover or discover information that’s contra to that opinion that you hold it loosely enough to allow it to change. Society, the best challenge that we have is that we put ourselves in these camps and tribes. We have great confirmational bias, and that’s it.

We are so rigid and tethered to self-identity. We do that a lot with the brands we purchase. It’s a tough thing. Quite frankly, when you are an early-stage brand like you are, leaning into your tribe sometimes allows you to elicit initially more adoption of a product, trial, and discovery because you are motivating a very small but micro-focused few.

We see a lot of brands do that. It works well in the beginning but then the difficult thing is how do we begin to pitch a larger tent? If we pitch a larger tent, are we doing that while alienating our initial evangelical followers? To start out there and say, “We are going to democratize this. We want to put good nutrition out there. If somebody buys our pasta instead of normal pasta, great. If somebody replaces meat and does vegetable pasta because there’s protein inherent in our product, great. It doesn’t matter.” How did you and Allie come together in this endeavor? What’s the backstory there?

I got very lucky. I had this concept for Lupii before it was called Lupii, and we started researching the ingredient and learning about it around 2017. I left my last startup job in 2018, and usually I love having plants. I, at the time, didn’t have a plant. I had this urge and an idea around this business but had no time because I worked full-time for an early-stage tech startup.

I had no time to have the space to craft us more in my head. I left that job and started working on this idea for Lupii. Around that time, I reconnected with an early-stage startup studio and investor based in New York. I started working with them a little bit on doing some market research into plant-based space because they were interested in learning more about it.

At the end of those two and a half months, I pitched them the concept for Lupii, and they were incredibly excited. They have a thesis around only investing and supporting cofounding teams, so not solo entrepreneurs. That was not something that they had to convince me of because I have worked in early-stage startups and seen the most successful companies run by co-funding teams of people with different mindsets, backgrounds, and skillsets, and that can be challenging at times but that is what makes a business great. It’s the diversity of thought and backgrounds.

I took on that challenge, created a spreadsheet, and started meeting people for coffee. At first, I wasn’t 100% sure what I was looking for in a cofounder in terms of skillset. The more I was meeting with different people, the one intro led to another one. I started understanding that I was looking for someone who knew about the food and beverage industry.

I had spent my career in early-stage tech startups. Except for being a consumer of natural products. I have never worked in it professionally beforehand. I knew I wanted that, and my background is in operations and sales, so I was looking for someone with more marketing and branding background. No joke. I probably had 70 coffees and calls within 3 months and got to the point where I was like, “This is harder than I thought.” I got very lucky one day through Human Ventures, a startup studio in New York. Someone from Pepsi came to me, who I had coffee with, and told me about her co-worker who was Allie. She said, “We should grab a coffee.” We did that on a random Saturday morning and fell in love with each other.

She had spent her career in food and beverage and worked for a lot of larger companies, Fortune 500, and CPG businesses, and she had strong branding and marketing, and innovation background. Her husband happens to be from Europe, and I’m from Europe. There were a lot of personal connections, and she was plant-based. On top of all of that, she was looking to leave Pepsi, which was unique.

As I’m sure you can imagine, she had a comfortable situation there and a fantastic career opportunity but she was interested in doing something else and jumping in into a small early-stage company. A few weeks after that, she quit her job, and then May 2019 is when we started working together full-time on Lupii.

This is an important thing to explore a bit further. Those reading many of them would be mad if we didn’t. There are a lot of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs out there that are feeling that sense of isolation and loneliness. I have had lots of conversations with entrepreneurs who are interested in trying to find a cofounder but they have no idea how to go through that process.

How to determine if it’s the right fit but also how to maybe even talk somebody into being a part of the journey and taking the leap with them, doing those things where you are grossly underpaid if paid at all, work horrible hours, and all the things that come with it. First of all, it’s great that you were already there when it was suggested that you find a cofounder but let’s walk through the process. You started this list. How did you start the list? Did you start it based on attributes? Can you walk me through it?

I started it based on people that I knew that was working in the food and beverage space. I had done an extrusion program a few years early at Texas A&M because I wanted to know if you can extrude Lupini beans because I was looking at the meat replacement space. I had met a few people there that worked for Mars and Hershey like large CPG companies. I was the only one there that didn’t work for a food company, and they were all like, “What is she doing here?”

In any case, I stayed in touch with those people and started talking to them. Those were the first people on my list. I was telling them a little bit about my concept. I was a little cagey at the time because I was worried. I was like, “This is an amazing idea. Hopefully, nobody is going to take it and run with it.” Now, I have learned that that’s not how it works in large CPG.

I was telling them a little bit about what I was trying to do and that I was looking for a cofounder that I had a potentially interested investor that was interested in investing in the business. I didn’t come with empty hands because I had some leverage. I did have potential financing for the business. That was helpful, and then any time I would grab a coffee or have a call with any of these people, I would ask for introductions. I felt it was a little bit like a puzzle where every time I had conversations, I was learning more about the industry. I was learning what those titles meant. I was learning what the different jobs and roles were made of out of.

I understood progressively the profile and skillset that I was looking for. I kept adding people to my list. I asked for introductions. Most people would introduce me to 1 or 2 other people in their network. Some of the introductions came through that potential investor at the time, anyone that crossed the path in the food industry.

It felt very much like sales in many ways because I was trying to sell people on me and because I had this business that was a simple deck, a concept, a bunch of research, and some prototypes for the bars at the time. It was very early-stage, and I was trying to convince them more of myself and the fact that I was incredibly passionate about this idea and committed to making this my project for the future. When I met Allie, it clicked, and I don’t know if there was anyone else on that list that I talked to who I could build the business with.

I would imagine that along the way. You learned more about yourself too. In terms of what you needed in the cofounder and your strengths were. I’m also assuming, please correct me if I’m wrong, that was probably a vulnerable process to be in because you are laying your heart to bear. This is my passion. This is what I’m doing. I want to see if you want to join.

Let me ask a follow-up on the fact that once you identified Allie as a cofounder, then it’s a big step to take that trust fall because now you are giving equity up. You are bringing somebody into your dream. How did you work that meshing of the two of you into this so that you both feel like you are truly cofounders?

One big part that I noticed from the start when I met her was that she was incredibly, generally excited about this concept and idea. She followed up immediately after our call, a coffee that we had for the first time. We met a few more times. She was from day one talking to me as if she was seriously considering leaving Pepsi, which to me felt like, “She has a clear career path here but is willing to jump into this and take this huge risk.” That felt like she was going to be fit.

Did that risk feel pressure on you too or were you both cool with, “We know the risk here, and we are both making the risk assessment for ourselves independently?” Did you absorb some of that risk by improving it?

There was pressure in this, especially because I had this potential investor but it wasn’t a done deal at the time. I felt like, “If Allie wants to jump in. How do we put our best foot forward and go back to the investor together so that we can lend the funding that we can have some comfort for her.” I felt like there was a responsibility on my side to make sure that she was taken care of and wasn’t jumping into an abyss. There was that part as well. One other piece that I didn’t mention is that the investor was big into personality tests. They take this StrengthsFinder.

I had already taken it, and I knew my profile. I remember when we get got coffee, Allie and I, my conversation with her screening for some of these pieces that I knew I was ranking low on or that I needed some complimentary personality traits or skillsets. I felt like I left that coffee and was like, “She has all of these pieces.” She ended up taking the test as well, and it was incredibly complimentary, surprisingly.

That was another piece that made me feel more at ease. The fact that she came so highly endorsed by this woman that I had met who was a former co-worker of hers and someone who I deeply respected also was the right thing to do. There’s a lot of analysis that you can do and rational thinking but building a business together, a lot of it is emotion and intuition. It felt like the right thing and the right time, and she was willing to jump onboard. That’s how it worked out.

Thanks for spending some time on that because it’s topical, and I know that a lot of people reading are thinking about the same thing the when, should, and how. It’s interesting. I want to go back to the product and brand. From the time you launch, and obviously, then the world turned upside down, you are now entrepreneurs in the midst of a global pandemic. What have been some of the surprising lessons and takeaways thus far in this journey? Things that have been maybe easier or harder than you thought?

When you say easier than we thought, we launched in January 2020. I remember November 2019. We completed the office production run. Packaging, everything was on time and was going great. We started getting some retail responses. I remember Allie and I looking at each other and being like, “Everything is going so nicely. What’s going to happen?” From where I had to concept of getting that to the start line, I wouldn’t say easy but it felt streamlined.

We found a great co-packer. Allie had so much experience in brand design. She was able to guide a lot of that. I’m very passionate and went out to stores and started relationships with retailers. That was surprisingly easy in some ways. The biggest piece that I have learned is that slowing down can help accelerate. It’s a mantra that I have been trying to embody because I was raised by startups.

All I have heard my entire professional career was, go fast and break fast, break everything around you and go up in flames. That’s the culture that I was raised in. On a personality level, I am operating very comfortably in a fast-paced environment and react quickly. It was amplifying that side of my personality, and I have learned the exact opposite in the last few years since I started building this business through the environment that I’m in but also through Allie.

Having come from large food and beverage companies where things are oftentimes moving too slowly but finding that nice sweet spot and asking ourselves with every decision. Does this decision need to be made quickly or can we sit for a second? I have learned to sit for a second and not react. It has been incredibly beneficial. It’s my biggest a-ha because I thought you had to move fast all day, all the time. Good things need time, and growing a crop needs a year. Building a good and strong business needs time and patience, and that’s what I have been learning through this journey.

That’s a great lesson. We talk about this a lot in the fact that you need to be patiently impatient if that makes any sense whatsoever. You still have to have that sense of urgency and drive but you have to temper it with a bit of reality. The CPG space and the natural product space, in particular is, it’s very different from tech, and so much of what we read, see, talk about, and we do around tech startups and the Silicon Valley type. That concept of sprints and designing MVPs and getting out there.

The old adage of jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. It doesn’t work the same in consumers because here, the relationship we have with most tech is linear. It’s logical but the relationship we have with the brands that we consume. Our food, beverage, personal care or something, that’s a motive.

That’s not all linear. In fact, it’s very little of it is linear. Most of it is much more tied to feeling and emotion and so forth. You can’t rush that. You have to cultivate it. You have to nurture. You have to build it as a brand builder but you also have to listen to the market and constantly reshape it. We hear and talk a lot about branding. I always think of it as branding is a verb. It’s an action. It’s the act of aligning what people think about your product with what you want them to think about your product.

In this space, we have a choice. We could either try to make everyone move to where we want to be. If we are listening, what we do is we wind up sliding to meet them somewhere in the middle, which is the smarter play. You are right. You have to be able to slow down a little bit and allow for that while still not losing that sense of urgency. It’s a tough balance. That’s fantastic that you see that and have learned that already because that’s sometimes a lesson that’s very hard.

I was having a conversation with another founder whose business has grown. His comment to me was, “Sometimes I don’t feel like we are moving fast enough. It’s not happening fast enough.” My feeling was that it’s being a parent of young kids. As a parent of young kids and you are around your kids, your kids seem to not grow that fast. It’s not happening.

To the outsider who maybe hasn’t seen the kids in 3 or 6 months, it’s like, “What’s going on? These kids are freaking huge already.” They are grown. It’s so much faster because you are heads down, and that’s the reality of the business. Figuring out ways to step back and have the observer effect in your business. Step away and look at it as if like, “Where are those progress points?”

I would encourage everyone who’s reading, yourself included, to keep a journal of this process. Who knows? It could be the fodder for a great book down the road. More importantly, I find it helpful. I do for myself that on those days when I’m wondering if we are making progress. Is this shit getting done? I can go back and flip to a page 1, 2 or 3 years ago and read what I was thinking and going through. I’m like, “Compared to where I was then,” and I immediately feel more accomplished.

It’s hard to keep perspective when you sew under weeds. We sometimes do look back at old photos of our first production run, and we are like, “This is crazy.” Where we have come from and where we are now, and that then calms me down and confirms we are moving and making progress but it is a constant conversation with myself.

If you and I and Allie are chatting five years from now, what have you built? Where is Lupii?

We want Lupii to be the platform for this ingredient Lupini, and we want Lupini to be a mainstream US household ingredient that is in everyone’s pantry in one form or another. It has these unique functional benefits with high protein, high fiber, and low carb. There are so many categories across different aisles of the grocery store that don’t have functionality, and a lot of time, they are overly processed. If you can come in with this magic little ingredient and optimize these categories to keep them healthy, delicious, and simple but also add functionality, then we can win. We want Lupini to become that household staple that people have in their pantries.

What do you think it’s going to take to get there? You’ve got the bars. How do you get from where you are to there?

In the short-term, it goes back to taking one step in front of the next. We have some amazing retail launches that happened with Whole Foods Northeast. We are launching our pasta. That will be our first retail account for pasta. We are launching in a number of other chain accounts in January 2023. We have some exciting distribution.

The name of the game is to go deep there, to not get distracted by going too broad because we know it costs so much money to build the brand broadly. It’s about going deep and building the velocity stories. Building relationships with the retailers to consumers, and those retailers unestablished a brand. In 2023, we will be focused on going very deep into those existing retail accounts and then starting to scale from there. We often talk about building this platform and going across different categories but we already have two massive categories on our hands with bars and pasta. A very different category.

That was a strategic choice. We understand it’s different but we want to meet the consumer, as Allie said on different occasions during the day. We have snacking now. We have a center of the plate. We are able to start delivering the Lupini power across your journey during the day. That is part of the vision but these two categories are massive and we can go deep within those categories before needing to add any other product ranges. We have tons of ideas for other things that we could do. We are trying to stay focused on the distribution that we have at hand.

It’s going to take us on a left turn here because I was thinking about that as I comment. You said that you spent most of your career in entrepreneurial roles. Was that something that was foreign to your family? Was that, “What is she doing? She’s an entrepreneur. Is she crazy?” Is that aligned with the way you were raised?

Europe is not very entrepreneurial. My education was not entrepreneurial. I went to grad school right after undergrad. I studied Urban Planning in grad school. Totally unrelated to what I’m doing now. I was into academics, and that was very much pushed by my family and by the culture around me in general. Entrepreneurship is not a comfort zone in Europe, and there are many reasons for that.

If you can get a great government job, why would you start a business? It’s hard to start a business in Europe. It is way easier to do that here in the States. I wasn’t raised in that way but I was always intrigued by it. 1 of my 2 grandfathers was a pastry chef, and he opened a pastry store in Luxembourg that became famous.

It’s a tiny country, so it’s not that hard. He was the name in town for pastry. That was very entrepreneurial. My other grandfather went to med school in France and taught himself English on the Metro and was very much into learning and growing. There was always a growth mindset in my family. To answer your question, there wasn’t confusion about what I was doing.

It’s not typical for where I’m coming from and grew up, and even my educational path is totally unrelated to what I’m doing now, but my family has been personally very encouraging in pursuing my passion, and that was always what my parents told me, “Do what you like what fulfills you, and that will lead you on your journey.” That’s how I would summarize.

My perspective over the years has changed too because I spent most of my early days, the first 25 years of my career, in a corporate role. In a suit and tie, reporting to boards and trying to climb the ladder and make my way into the C-Suite. What I learned over time was that as I continued to have that success and move up and eventually get into that C-Suite, I was finding myself further and further away from the things I wanted to do, the things that were fulfilling to me. I thought that entrepreneurship was scary, risk-intensive, and so forth. A decade later, I look back and go, there’s so much more control, and that sounds crazy, in being an entrepreneur.

At the end of the day, you are betting on yourself. You are betting on what you can do. It’s empowering, and it allows you to do things. I have learned, and those of you who read the show regularly have probably heard me say this before. My first initial belief in entrepreneurship was that these are the same people that base jump and do crazy things. That their appetite for risk is enormous. What I have learned is that’s not true at all. There’s the normal distribution of risk.

There are high-risk and low-risk entrepreneurs. The distribution is no different amongst those in entrepreneurship is those in any other type of pursuit. Where the difference does occur, however, is that while most people who are not entrepreneurial see the risk in taking action, the entrepreneur sees the risk in not. That’s the difference. I will have such regret if I don’t work to solve this problem, fill this need or chase this opportunity. It doesn’t mean it’s not scary and not crazy but I can’t walk away from that. Inaction is more fear or anxiety creating than action.

I agree with you. I often ask myself like, “What is the worst thing that could happen?” Most of the time, the worst thing can be fixed because it’s not life or death. It’s work. That helps me to put things into perspective. I also think the part that you said about control. I couldn’t agree more with you. It’s a choice every day, what I’m doing and why I’m doing this. It’s also an incredible fortune to be able to do something that brings me satisfaction, and that teaches me so much. What better than having this playground of learning opportunities right in front of me? That’s how I think about it.

Both of us had obviously gone to graduate school. I don’t think there’s any better school or way to learn than to be an entrepreneur. You start a company. You are going to learn far more in that than in any post-grad program. We only have a minute or so left, and I want to give you an opportunity to ask this community, those reading, the entrepreneurs, retailers, investors, and folks reading this episode. Ask them for help. What can they do to help you on this journey? Is there anything that they can be doing for you?

In the very near term, we launched this new product range, the pasta line that is available online, and we will soon be rolling it out in retail, and we want feedback. We have done a lot of user research and consumer research that goes to my software lingo. Consumer research before launching the product and getting tons of feedback before. Now it’s in the market. It’s alive. It’s soon got to be on the shelf. If you have the opportunity to try out the product or even check out the website and give us some feedback on the packaging, and proposition. If you have the chance to try it and taste it, feedback is so essential for us, and that’s how we can make this better and respond to consumers in an even better way. That’s always the biggest help that we can get.

How best would you like people to contact you? LinkedIn or your email?

LinkedIn works great or my email. It’s [email protected]. That would be fantastic as well. Email is great. I’m very responsive there.

This was awesome. Thanks for doing this. What I have to do now is schedule another episode with Allie to see how aligned with you.

To get the perspective of this.

I had that coffee. As you know, you guys are terrific. What you are creating is great. I believe in the nutritive benefit of it. I will leave everyone with this. I went for a walk with a good friend, and he was in this space where he was being overwhelmed by all the negative stuff he was reading, hearing, and seeing around our society or the globe.

He was feeling pretty overwhelmed and relatively depressed and said, “How do you deal with it?” I said, “It’s simple. I wake up every single day and work with entrepreneurs who are getting up and wanting to change the world and do good. It restores my faith and bolsters my belief that brighter days are ahead.” I mean that sincerely and it’s people like you who do that. I love what you are doing, and I know you will meet with great success. Thanks for spending some time with me here.

Thank you so much, Elliot. I really appreciate it.

Bye, everyone. We will see you next time.

Important Links

• Lupii

• TIG Ventures

• TIG Collective

• Human Ventures

• [email protected]

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! tigbrands.com/tig-talks/