What if the ingredients discarded daily in food production could become the foundation of a more sustainable food future? On this episode of Earth911's Sustainability In Your Ear, discover the pragmatic vision with Yousuf Ahmed, founder of B-SIDES, a Brooklyn-based startup, proving that upcycled snacks can be delicious and environmentally responsible. Inspired by tasting a single slice of spent grain bread in 2014, Yousuf transitioned from finance and music to food innovation, launching B-SIDES to bring upcycled, plant-based snacks into the mainstream. The company's flagship product, Crunch Puffs, transforms oat pulp—typically discarded during oat milk production—into protein-rich, allergen-friendly snacks packaged in home-compostable materials. From sourcing pulp from small Midwest oat milk makers to manufacturing in Canada and selling through Amazon and New York indie grocers, B-SIDES is creating a playbook for how small brands can lead on both climate action and culinary creativity.
Yousuf shares the technical challenges of working with oat pulp as a primary ingredient and the complexities of achieving a moisture seal with home-compostable packaging. We explore how his background in finance and music has influenced his approach to food startups, including the trade-offs between local production and proximity to raw materials, as well as strategies for positioning upcycled food to sustainability-conscious consumers. As Yousuf emphasizes, sustainable products must deliver on taste and price to succeed in the market—environmental benefits alone aren't enough. His pragmatic approach offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs: real market-winning products that can change manufacturing's negative impacts while sustaining profitable companies must compete on quality first, with sustainability as an added benefit rather than an excuse for inferior performance. You can find B-SIDES Crunch Puffs on Amazon and at select retailers. Learn more about the company at enjoybsides.com.
Yousuf shares the technical challenges of working with oat pulp as a primary ingredient and the complexities of achieving a moisture seal with home-compostable packaging. We explore how his background in finance and music has influenced his approach to food startups, including the trade-offs between local production and proximity to raw materials, as well as strategies for positioning upcycled food to sustainability-conscious consumers. As Yousuf emphasizes, sustainable products must deliver on taste and price to succeed in the market—environmental benefits alone aren't enough. His pragmatic approach offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs: real market-winning products that can change manufacturing's negative impacts while sustaining profitable companies must compete on quality first, with sustainability as an added benefit rather than an excuse for inferior performance. You can find B-SIDES Crunch Puffs on Amazon and at select retailers. Learn more about the company at enjoybsides.com.
- Subscribe to Sustainability In Your Ear on iTunes
- Follow Sustainability In Your Ear on Spreaker, iHeartRadio, or YouTube
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: Alter Eco Foods CEO Keith Bearden Is All-In On Regenerative Chocolate Farming
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: Imperfect Foods’ Maddy Rotman on Eliminating Food Waste
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: PFAS Everywhere – Consumer Reports’ Kevin Loria on Forever Chemicals in Food
- Earth911 Podcast: Farmstead’s Pradeep Elankumaran on Building Sustainable Food Delivery
- Bioplastics, Biodegradable Plastics, and Compostable Plastics: What’s the Difference?
- Best of Earth911 Podcast: Better Earth’s Savannah Seydel on Compostable Packaging
- .css-j9qmi7{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:2.8rem;width:100%;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:start;justify-content:start;padding-left:5rem;}@media only screen and (max-width: 599px){.css-j9qmi7{padding-left:0;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;}}.css-j9qmi7 svg{fill:#27292D;}.css-j9qmi7 .eagfbvw0{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;color:#27292D;}Mark as PlayedTranscript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition
to a sustainable carbon neutral society. I'm your host, Mett Tracliffe.
Thank you for joining the conversation. Today. As food systems
face growing pressures to address their climate impact, waste, and
(00:32):
supply chain disruptions, a new generation of entrepreneurs is rethinking
not just what we eat, but how we make it
and what we make it from. What if the ingredients
that we throw away every day could become the building
blocks of a more sustainable food future. That's the bold
vision behind B Sides, a Brooklyn based snack company founded
by Yusuf Ahmed, a former finance and music industry professional
(00:55):
turned food innovator. He was inspired by a single slice
of spent grain bread in twenty fourteen, and after that,
Yusef launched B Sides to bring delicious, upcycled plant based
snacks to the mainstream. He's starting with crunch puffs, a
savory puff made from oat pulp discarded in the oat
milk making process. In other words, he's turning what we
(01:16):
call waste into a valuable material and a tasty treat.
Each crunch puffs are alligen friendly, protein rich, and packaged
and compostable packaging. But behind the simple snack is the
product of a complex vision that fuses supply chain resilience,
circular economy thinking, and flavor forward food design. B Sides
(01:36):
sources pulp from small oat milk makers across the Midwest
to produce the snacks in Canada and sell them online
and in New York independent groceries. B sides is building
a playbook for how small brands can lead on climate
and creativity. So today we're going to talk with Yusuf
about building a startup rooted in food waste, what big
food can learn from small experiments, and how B sides
(01:59):
is carving out space for flavor and sustainability in every
crunchy bite. You can learn more about b sides at
enjoybsides dot com. That's all one word, no space, no dash,
enjoybsides dot com. So we're going to get to the
conversation right after this quick commercial break. Stay tuned, Welcome
(02:24):
to the show yousef How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I'm doing fantastic, Mitch.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Thanks for having me first start off by talking a
little about b sides, crunch puffs, what used to happen
to the oat milk pulp that you're using.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So typically what happens with kind of any manufactured byproduct
from food is it gets thrown out. It's the co manufacturers.
They wrap the access and these giant plastic bags and
on a daily basis, they get moved to whatever municipality
dump is within reach, which is crazy if you think
(02:58):
about it.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
They weren't even feeding this to cattle. They just threw
this away.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Yeah, so that's you raise an interesting point. Sometimes it
gets routed to cattle. I think taking a step back,
when you process something like oat milk, you're basically blending
a bunch of raw oats with heated water and then
straining out the pulp. So you have a temperature and
(03:24):
time component that from a food safety perspective, like it's
a ticking time bomb.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Right.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
You don't have a whole lot of time to do
what you gotta do, and so you don't really want
to be sending livestock rotting food, although that does happen.
And the other thing to keep in mind is livestock,
so cows in particular, they're ruminants. They're intended to grass,
not grains. So when you feed them things like you know,
(03:51):
spent grain from brewin beer or spent oats from making
oat milk.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
They'll eat it.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Like if you feed a diabetic hit a donut, the
kid's going to go to town on the But there
are a lot of digestive issues that actually contribute negatively
to things like methane emissions, carbon emissions, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
So, yes, part of them would go to livestock.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
It's not efficient and it's certainly not the best route
for those oats to take.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, you just hit on a number of things, the
fact that we're using a material that otherwise would have
gone to landfill that would have produced methane and so forth.
How's this changed the sustainability of a snack like crunch buffs?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
So the tricky part about like trying to calculate what
what is the exact impact of using whatever ten percent,
fifteen percent, fifty percent of an ingredient like upcycled oatnal
flower in a snack is there are kind of two
ways that you can measure the impact. One is, because
(04:47):
you don't have to then go and plant additional oats
and then harvest those oats. They're you know, they're like
downstream effects. You know, you get kind of the it's
tough to calculate what those would be because it's it's
a crop that wasn't actually grown on the flip side,
you know. The way that the way that we've been
tracking kind of the impact metrics are with regards to
(05:10):
just the raw material itself. Instead of going to a landfill,
you're averting those CO two emissions and instead of using it.
So there's like water involved with taking it apart, transitioning
it into a shelf stable ingredient, and then transporting in
to where it needs to go. So we use the
(05:30):
metrics around how much water was saved there and the
CO two emissions that would have happened if it broken
down in a landfill. So, just to give you kind
of back of the envelope math, one case of any
flavor of my crunch puffs avoids a half a pound
of nutrition waste, avoids two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions,
and seventy five gallons of water gets saved. And that's
(05:52):
just from using the upcycled o pulple loan.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
That's a real impact. I'm impressed working with something like
oat milk pull. Had anybody done this before? And how
did you overcome the challenge of turning this into the
particular texture and taste that you were trying to achieve.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah, so that's a loaded question. I'll take the second
part first because it's a little clearer and it actually
answered your first question. So the short answer is, yes,
a lot of people have been working in the space
that I'm in, so upcycling, taking the buy products from
manufacturing food and putting them back into the food system.
(06:33):
There are a couple of companies that have raised a
couple of million dollars to get really good at the
upcycling component. And that's everything from establishing where we call
it product valorization, so the byproduct, using that as kind
of a adding value to it. That's been done in
(06:53):
the beer and distilling space. It's been done with alternative milk,
so oat milk, and it's all been done in the
production of kind of tofu so soy okara.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
So everywhere throughout.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
The food system somebody has tried to tinker with what
do we do with this byproduct? And to answer your
second question, I think one of the reasons that upcycling
hasn't really broken into the mainstream is the product, Like,
the consumer facing products are just frankly not that good.
So I knew when I went into this space, I
wanted to put texture in flavor first and have that
(07:27):
be the thing that drives the product rather than just
selling based on impact. So directly answering your question, I
went through hundreds of formulations before I got to the
point where I was like, this is like this blend
of upcycled oat milk, upcycled corn flour, and pea protein.
This is the this is how we do it.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
So what's the nutritional profile of crunch puffs?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yeah, so it's super high in protein. We've got basically
in a twenty eight gram or one ounce serving, you've
got five grams of a complete plant based protein. The
way that I've formulated these crunch puffs, basically you've got
half the fat of Cheetos and everything you're avoiding any
(08:13):
kind of The whole thing is plant based. So the
topical ingredient itself, while I have a cheddar flavor, there's
no actual dairy in the cheddar. The quote unquote technology
around seasoning and vegan seasoning in particular has gotten really
really good, and I think broadly is overlooked because a
lot of people associate kind of plant based foods with
(08:33):
having no flavor or like being a cheap facsimile of
the actual product. So the macros are all quite positive,
particularly when looking at something like a cheeto.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Well, I have to.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Say that's one of the reactions I've had to most
upcycle foods I've tried, which is is kind of utterly bland. Yeah,
yours weren't. How are you flavoring it? Are you also
using sustainable sourcing to flavor the crunch puffs?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
So so sustainability I think just taking a step back
that mean that term catches a lot of different meanings,
and depending on who you talk to, some aspects are
more important than others. For me, I think I think
just going down the line of what does sustainability mean
from a food system perspective, I think going directly off
(09:26):
the source of like can we make these products using
plants alone? Is that was kind of my north star
when trying to go for sourcing, because introducing things like
like milk and dairy and you know, artificial food colorings,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can make great products,
and you can make them cheaply, but like, in terms
(09:47):
of sustainability, you're not growing yeast extract right Like if
you're if you're harvesting dairy and then processing it, you
actually have to treat the live stock. There's got to
be land for them to ruminate. You know, there's a
whole kind of supply chain around that versus growing the
yeast extract in a lab, which to a consumer sounds
like not that interesting or not that delicious, but the
(10:10):
reality is we've actually been doing this as humans for
a really long time. Yeast extract is the primary mommy
kind of component in the topical seasoning, and that's something
as simple as harnessing things like the natural occurring glutamates
(10:31):
from something like kelp or seaweed, and that's how you
get that dairy cheese kind of hits without actually using
the dairy. So you know, the sustainability in the supply chain,
it's plant based first, and that's kind of the approach
that I took, but you could take any number of
attacks on that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I think you raised a really important point, which is
everybody has their own definition of sustainability. In a sense,
you are part of a circular economy too. You're recovering
a material from another production process and using it. How
do you think of about growing the company b sides
in an environment where there are so many new potential
connections to be made within various circular supply chains that
(11:11):
you might be able to leverage in order to find
another base material for making another product.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I am a pragmatic realist when it comes to sustainability.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
You know.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
I think a lot of companies that are mission driven,
they get they drink a little bit too much of
their own kool aid, and they end up getting the
unit economics wrong, so they can't scale and they'll collapse
under the weight of just business reality. So for me,
it was really focusing on, Okay, these are the byproducts
that are kind of readily available. I know how to
(11:43):
work with them. They it's an easier story to tell,
you know, everybody kind of understands what oat milk is
and that it had to have come from somewhere. But
to your point about like, there are tons of holes
in the food production supply chain, whether it's the grains
from brewing beer or the use pulp from you know,
juiceries or coffee grounds that I A. There are companies
(12:06):
that are trying to work on those problems and come
up with the raw materials to work with, and I
have partnerships with a lot of those companies and we've
done a lot of R and D. But for me,
it's kind of let's put one foot in front of
the other. I've got this product line that tastes good,
is good, hits all the impact metrics I want to
and let's see if I can kind of find product
(12:26):
market fit before saying, let's expand across every kind of
supply chain hole that there is, because if I can't
prove out the business case, I can't do any of
the sustainability impact metrics that that are really important to me.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Well, you've just demonstrated your background in finance, but you
also were working in the music industry before this. How
did how did the combination of those two experiences influence
your thinking about B sides?
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Yeah, so I come from an unconventional background, to be sure,
but I think one of the one of the positive
that it affords me is the ability to kind of
look at an industry with a fresh set of eyes
a new perspective.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
So look the music business, I had a knack for.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Translating very complicated, complex, just mind numbing financial data to
people who did not have a financial background in a
way that was compelling and kind of understandable and easily digestible.
So I worked with musicians both on the personal and
professional side, managing their finances, so that could be anything
(13:37):
from paying their mortgage or their insurance to reconciling a
world tour that they went on and making sure all
the dollars and cents are accounted for. I then took
that experience and moved over to gold and Sacks. I
was a private banker, so I kind of did what
I did in the music business, but for entrepreneurs on
the investment side. So in private banking esecially a Goldman Sachs.
(14:01):
To become a Golden Sacks client, you've got to have
ten million dollars or more of investable assets. And that's
a very small kind of subset of the American economy.
But in order to hit that threshold, basically it was
all entrepreneurs or venture capitalists or hedge fund principles who
had built and grown a business and then sold it.
(14:21):
That's how you end up with ten million bucks or more. Right, So,
taking the skill set of complex financial numbers and distilling
it to this is how you approach it from an
investment side. I took all of that and was able
to build a book, a business at Goldman dealing with
entrepreneurs in the sustainability space.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
So this is twenty fifteen to twenty twenty. A lot
of venture capital money is going towards sustainable efforts. Some
of them are great, some of them are just kind
of rubber stamping sustainability on everything. I wanted to start
b sides by saying like, look, I think there's an
actual impact problem that I can line up the unit
economics behind and we achieve everything profitable business and the
(15:01):
impact metrics that everybody's looking for.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I've talked with a lot of people who are in
the circular economy. What was it that you that spurred
the realization that oat, pulp and corn meal left over
from another production process was the basis of your next.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Business outside of just those into two ingredients by themselves.
I back in twenty fourteen, there's a chef named Dan
Barber who has done a lot of work both in upcycling,
but just kind of within food waste from a restaurant perspective.
He was He released a documentary called Wasted that sheds
a light on a lot of the food inefficiencies from
(15:39):
a waste perspective that the like the American food consumer
world has just ignored, and he chose to highlight this
in a dinner that it was a basically thirty nights.
So over the course of a month, he had a
new chef come every night and they would do a
tasting menu.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Where every course was born.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Out of sustainability, so it was off cuts of not
just meats, but also vegetables. And one of the courses
in that meal was spent grain bread, so it was
bread baked with the leftover grains from brewing beer. And
you know, again, this is eleven years ago. I had
never heard of this before. I thought, this is such
(16:23):
a simple, beautiful, delicious circular idea, like this should be everywhere.
I don't understand why it's not everywhere. And so you know,
for me, that's kind of where the kernel was born.
And I watched and I waited over the course of
a decade to see is somebody taking this on, like
why hasn't this become a thing? And you know, after
(16:44):
a number of years and just not seeing it reach
escape velocity or kind of proliferation throughout the consumer food discussion.
That's where I decoiught, I wanted to plant my flag.
I thought, there's got to be a way to do this.
I want to plant my flag here. There's so many
examples that we as we've kind of earlier throughout the
supply chain where you can make an impact across multiple
(17:05):
product categories.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
It's impressive, but you didn't just dive in and make
a bunch of mistakes, which is also how most companies
either end up succeeding or going completely bust. One of
the most impressive things is that you have a one
hundred percent home compostable package. How did you achieve a
moisture seal in a compostable product like this?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So, first, mitcheer, give me way too much credit. I
have pivoted and failed multiple times throughout this product.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Okay, so this is this is a this is another
night's success born of years.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yeah, okay, a decade, a decade of failures. Yeah so yeah, No,
I look, there are many times, many product categories that
just like didn't achieve lived off. And to your point
about the home compostible packaging, I figured, look, what's the
point of kind of creating a sustainable product if you
then wrap it in plastic packaging. And to your point
(18:01):
about the home compostable, how do you create a moisture barrier?
So technology has gotten really, really good to the point
where things like cornstarch can create It's not quite a
p l A seal because pl polylactic acid. I won't
go into the signs of it, but essentially that is
a material that you can create compostable packaging, but predominantly
industrial compostable. It has now gotten to the point where
(18:24):
you can create home compostable seals using PLA equivalents that
break down in more kind of natural environments. The problem,
and it's it's interesting that you bring this up because
I'm now running to this issue where it's great that
this is a home compostable package. The problem is it'll
(18:45):
start composting on the shelf right if you if you
sit on product for too long, and so trying to
get that.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Right problem, I mean, it's a huge rom what's your product?
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Yeah, so essentially a year and that sounds like a
long time. But if you think about what a lot
of consumers don't see is you've got to start procurement, shipping, packaging,
and then shipping on the back end, and then it
goes kind of to a warehouse where it sits and
then you start fulfilling orders. You could use up you
(19:19):
know of that twelve months, three to four months just
getting the product of the warehouse, right, so then you've
got eight months to move all.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
The product forward. It starts composing. So I'm you know,
I'm running into.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
This issue of how do I scale this thing profitably
without having product because nobody wants a Nobody wants to
buy a bag of puffs that has started to compost,
right like. And the point that I keep bringing up is,
you know what the least sustainable company is, Mitch, like
just industry agnostic. If I had to ask you that question,
what would you say?
Speaker 1 (19:50):
The least sustainable company not counting fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
And it could be it could be a fossil fuel company.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
As well, I would say shell.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Okay. The argument that I would make is the least
sustainable company is one that's not profitable because you can't
achieve any of the impact metrics if you go out
of business before you do it.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
So nice jiu jitsu move on the use of.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah, look one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I'm as I mentioned earlier, I'm a pragmatic realist about this,
right I. Packaging is something that I have wrestled with
on how to capitalize on this, what to do about it.
There's actually a company called Repurpose Global where what they
do is they kind of account for every pound of
plastic in your supply chain and they go into high
(20:41):
impact areas like China, Southeast Asia, and they when you
partner with Repurpose Global, they take part of your grant
money and they deploy it into plastic taking plastic out
of the environment. And it can be commensurate with how
much plastic you've used throughout the supply chain. There are
different kind of metrics you can use to estimate it.
The whole reason I'm bringing this up is like, look,
(21:03):
it's going to be really difficult to get homecom postable
packaging to a mass audience, a mass market if my
product starts to degrade on shelf before I can even
get it to a target or a whole foods Right
and so trying to strike a balance between how do
I maintain this ethos of sustainability if I have to
use something like plastic packaging or a plastic kind of
(21:26):
corollary and repurpose and what they're doing with kind of
capturing plastic out of the environment, I think is a
really good balance between the two. So like, yes, at
this launch, small scale, kind of emerging stage that I'm
at homecompostable is fine. But as I move to scale nationally,
I've got to figure out a pragmatic way to do it.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
At this moment on this fulcrum of success or failure.
Great place to take a break. We'll be right back
to talk more with Yusuf. Now let's return to the
discussion with yuse Off Ahmed. He is the founder of
b Sides, a maker of upcycled crunch puff snacks. We're
(22:09):
just speaking to the question of how do you reach
a national audience. Is this going to be primarily a
direct consumer business or do you see yourself being at
retail everywhere.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
All of the above.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
I think for any kind of food, especially emerging food
brands in the consumer space, to quote unquote make it,
you have to have some kind of retail presence or
retail strategy otherwise like the numbers just don't work. The
problem with doing that, though, is retail is so stacked
against emerging brands that it's really really difficult to do
(22:41):
it unless you raise a ton of money. So the
way that I've thought about my go to market strategy is, Okay,
how do I approach retail thoughtfully enough that I can
get kind of the Velocity metrics, which are a number
of SKUs sold per week and hit like the Escape
(23:02):
velocity to get to a mass market kind of national
distribution footprint without going out of business. And the way
that I've launched this product, I'm calling this kind of
a soft launch phase. Basically, in January, I spun up
a direct to consumer e commerce present where you can
go to the website and buy I'm on Amazon dot com.
You got to be like where consumers are right. And
(23:25):
then in parallel to that, I did a limited retail
footprint here in New York City. I'm in twenty five
different kind of grocery retailers, but wholesale buyers, so shoppy
shops all around the country. They can find me on
fare dot com, on air Goods dot Com, on Podfoods
dot Com. The trick to winning in retail is you
(23:46):
have to get every single aspect right before you end,
like get on the shelf, because you can't just start
playing jazz with things like packaging or positioning, like retailers
don't like that, distributors don't like that. So right now,
this whole phase is what's actually resonating with consumers? What
are they like, what are they not like? What do
they open their wallets for? Like, so I'm running different
(24:06):
ad strategies to try to figure out what messaging resonates best.
And then I want to get a track record of
buying from the audience. You know, what flavors do they want,
what's selling well, what's not selling well? And then I
can take that data and go to a meeting with
a retail buyer and say, hey, look, you know, I've
already got the data. This is the kind of consumer
(24:27):
who wants to buy this product. Here's the price point
that they're buying it at. If you're interested, like we
can have a conversation versus me going to a retailer
as an emerging brand with kind of no leverage in
the negotiation and having to just adhere to every single
demand that they make, because that's how you go out
of business.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Well, the other challenge is once you get on the shelf,
what's the messaging to the consumer. I don't think the
first thing people think of is I'm looking for a
responsible snack. How do you exactly to the person who
does encounter crunch puffs at retail?
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Going back to the top of the conversation where we
discussed how the oat milk pulp, the leftover corn flour
from million corn grits, what is the best way to
use that in a product that tastes good and has
great texture. When people go to buy snacks, they want
flavor first, then nutrition, and then they care about everything else. Right,
(25:22):
everything else is a nice to have. And so if
you nail the flavor and the texture and you get
the packaging right where, it looks like a very intriguing snack.
So I'll flip over the packaging and look at the
backpack and check out all the nutrition and all of
those kind of nutritional aspects, check all the boxes that
the consumers looking for, and then the price points good.
(25:45):
Everything else falls into line behind that. So to your
point about you know, people aren't going down the snack
aile saying how sustainable is my snack buff The way
that I approach sustainability is like, you have to sell
the product, right, like the people have to want the product.
And then if you've done, if you've implemented a sustainable
mindset properly, then that, in my opinion, should be kind
(26:06):
of invisible to the consumer. There are consumers who care
about it. It does drive velocity, not the velocity metrics
necessary to win. And so you know, if you think
about selling sustainability, if I achieve all the impact metrics
that I want without actually having hit the consumer over
the head with this is what we're doing, then didn't
I achieve the same outcome?
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Right? That's how I'm approaching it.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
A lot of us think you have to wear this
on your sleeve, and what you have to do is
cater to the not the values necessarily the consumer, but
of their taste. What's the initial response from consumers when
they find out that it's upcycled? Do they understand the idea?
Does that increase their sense that this is the right
product for them?
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah? Excellent question.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
So most consumers, if you ask them on the spot,
you have them frag crunch buff, they eat it, and
then you tell them, you know, can you believe this
is made from the leftover roads for make a oat milk?
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Most of the time it's shock.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
A they haven't thought about that problem, and B they
can't believe that something like a leftover byproduct can taste
this good. And you know, to your point about is
this something that will make a consumer feel like this
is the right snack for them?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
You know, if.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
You're catering to those top two attributes flavor and then
nutrition first, I tend to actually think that consumers are
more forgiving or at least more kind of curious as
to what else is in the product, and so it
becomes a natural selling point of oh, okay, I bought this
because it looked interesting, it tastes good, it doesn't break
(27:42):
the nutritional bank. Oh and I have all these other
you know, kind of sustainability attributes that I'm contributing positively towards,
Like that's what gets them to buy the next snack.
Maybe it didn't get them to buy it the first time,
but you want them to come back and get it
the second time.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
In terms of B sides strategy, are you planning to
be a net zero company, what kind of KPIs are
you putting in place to ensure that the company reduces
its overall impact in the long term.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, so from an impact metric perspective, Yeah, look, certified
BCorp net zero. There are a lot of different ways
you can plastic negative, plastic neutral. There are multiple kind
of vectors of attack here. The thing that I want
to prove first is that there is a consumer market
for upcycled snacks, and whether or not that's hitting the
(28:31):
consumer over the head with the fact that it is
upcycled or not. Once we can achieve kind of yes,
there is a market for it, Yes, people pay a
green premium for it, then I'm going to solve for
we're going to be net zero or net negative on
emissions and plastic et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All
of those things are important to me, and they're important
for the company roadmap. But right now, in this kind
(28:55):
of time and place, I need to prove that consumers
want to snack that taste like this looks like this
like this before I start solving for kind of the
broader sustainability goals that I have in mind.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Just digging into those a little bit more. You're producing
in Canada for largely a North American market, but primarily
the United States. As you look at the configuration of
your supply chain, are you already thinking about how to
reduce the transportation time and distance.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Absolutely?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
So, I am producing in Canada because, believe it or not,
the Canadian government actually is quite favorable to circular economy
projects and renewable.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Sustainable food efforts.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
So producing in Canada, from an economics perspective, it was
the only way to get this thing off the ground.
I basically bootstrap this company right like. It's very difficult
to raise mission dollars from a venture capitalist in this
day and age, and that's you kind of need the
venture capital dollars to produce at the scale to do it.
(29:58):
In the United States, the minimums were an order of
magnitude to your point about reducing the footprint of where
trucks have to travel, It's absolutely top of mind for me.
I think again, this comes back to this pragmatic realism
of how to get a sustainable food company off the ground.
There are manufacturing facilities that I've talked to throughout the
(30:18):
United States. Ideally, you want to be making the food
as close to where you're going to be selling the food.
But in order to do that, and you know, to
your point about a North American market, I'm only selling
in the United States right now. I only am an
expert in kind of the US snacker. Snacking changes, like
the cultural kind of identity around it. If you go
across the border to Canada down to Mexico, behaviors change,
(30:42):
and so I need to kind of get it right
on the US footprint first. But the short answer to
your question is like, yes, I'm actively seeking partners who
will help me produce this in the United States.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's just a way heavier lift for just economic reasons.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
How did the tariffs change that calculus for you?
Speaker 2 (30:59):
They didn't, So I.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Guess I got very lucky in the sense that I
kind of sifted out that our fearless leader was going
to be charging forth with these economic misadventures. So I
bought as much product as possible before quote unquote Liberation
Day and had it chip across the border. And my
hope was that either we would come to amicable resolution
(31:26):
or if not, I would have enough product to last
me through when the devastation from the reality of implementing tariff,
some of our greatest trading partners were going to come
to light and they were going to get resolved. The
more coherent business answer is I started just moving the
supply chain into Canada, so I'm not paying for raw
materials to go across the border.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Round tripping kinds of charges are going to be the
death of a lot of companies as you think about
the emerging challenges that thinking sustainably faces because of the
rhetoric in our country right now, are we doing more
harm every day by attacking these emerging industries? If you
(32:13):
had a moment with the fearless leader, what would you
tell them?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
This is a fascinating question because there's a fundamental tension
between the status quo, the way things are today and
where kind of people who think sustainably want the economy
to go. And the idea that we're going to be
digging something out of the ground and burning it to
(32:38):
create energy indefinitely is kind of a It's obvious on
its face what the pitfalls of that approach is right,
But the problem is humanity, humans and consumers, like just
down to the most granular level, that problem can become
sort of nebulous in their day to day life. You know,
they've got to get from point A to point B,
(32:59):
and that the easiest, cheapest way to do it is
using like a gas powered car. And so having our
fearless leader try to pick winners and losers in the economy, which,
by the way, what tariffs do. It's kind of a
fool zeron because you're now getting to the point where
you're just he's going to sell access to the highest bidder.
(33:19):
And I would argue that's just like not a way
to run economy broadly, and and you know, trying to
then shoehorn this idea that we've got to have a
broader foresight of investment on where we can make better choices.
Like it's just not in his lexicon. So I don't
actually think that's a productive conversation. One way that I
would phrase it is, look, the rest of the world
(33:40):
is moving on without us, and if we don't catch up,
we're not going to be competitive. It doesn't matter if
these things are produced, if these things being anything pick
you know, an iPhone or a snack product, it doesn't
matter if it's produced in you know, Missouri or Arkansas.
No American consumer is going to pay for it. So
having these globalized supply.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Chains, it's good business.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Like he just accepted a four hundred million dollar plane
right that was manufactured not here, and so trying to
contextualize it as a why don't we make this competitive?
From an American pragmatism standpoint, That's the way that I'd
frame the conversation.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
It's just good business.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
We've got to figure out how to solve this in
place the bet so everybody wins.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I think you hit it on the head. Engineering advantage
in a marketplace is counterproductive because the market is designed
to undo advantage precisely, What advice would you offer to
entrepreneurs who are considering launching food brands in the sustainable
or upcycled or circular economy space? What should they be
(34:44):
thinking about?
Speaker 3 (34:45):
It depends on where they sit in that spectrum. So
a food brand is so far arranging, right, you could
go from producing raw materials all the way down to
an end consumer product. The advice that I would give
any entrepreneur is you got to figure out what the
people want. And at the end of the day, the
(35:05):
trickiest part about getting an upcycled snack food brand off
the ground is consumers are just not familiar with upcycling,
so using that as a selling point is a really
really tricky thing to do. Instead of doing that, why
don't you figure out where there are gaps that a
consumer wants that you can solve for outside of sustainability.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
And then try to figure out how to use.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Sustainability as the method for achieving the solution that that
consumer is looking for. The best way I can explain
this is in my crunch plufs the texture and the flavor.
I can't make that texture or flavor without using upcycled ingredients.
So it solves for everything at once. So don't do
(35:48):
what I did where you go and back solve for
a supply chain problem. Go identify kind of that gap
in the market first and then formulate everything around that gap.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
So what materials potentially upcycle materials are you thinking about
using to make your next snack?
Speaker 3 (36:04):
So the way that this mission all started was spent grain.
So the leftover grains from brown beer distilling alcohol. That's
what I've got my eye on next. I don't want
to say too much because I'm running a lot of
different kind of R and D trials, and spent grain
is a very tricky animal to work with. A lot
of people don't realize this, but when people think about beer,
(36:26):
they think about salty savory snacks that go along with
the beer. To produce the beer, most of the time
you use malted barley. Malted barley has a very distinct
flavor that is excellent in confections, not so good in
salty savory snacks. So how do you kind of bridge
that gap? Right, Because like, people don't want to be
(36:48):
thinking about a muffin when they're drinking a lager, and
so that's kind of like the next rubicon that I
want to cross.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
I can't wait to see how you've crossed that rubicon.
Books find and try B Sides crunch pumps.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
So you can find us on Instagram at enjoyb Sides.
You can buy our products on the website. We ship
the nationwide of the lower forty eight so enjoybsides dot com.
You can find us on Amazon dot com, on Walmart
dot com, and if you're in New York City door dash,
we'll deliver it directly through your apartment.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
God damn well Y said, thanks so much for your
time today. It really is interesting conversation.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Thanks so much for having me, Mitch, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
You've been listening to a conversation with Yusuf Ahmed, founder
of b Sides and creator of the upcycled crunch Puffs
line of snack products made from the by products of
oat milk and corn gritz production processes. You can find
crunch Puffs on Amazon and at select retailers. Learn more
about the company at enjoybsides dot com. Enjoy b sides
(37:56):
is all one word, no space, no dash, enjoy bides
dot com. You know, we heard a pragmatic, realistic perspective
on sustainability, one that's important to keep in mind as
the United States moves into an era of perhaps the
final but certainly more resistance to recognizing the continuing damage
produced by runaway climate change. Sustainable products must taste good
(38:20):
at a competitive price to win in this market, and
too often entrepreneurs, sustainability entrepreneurs in particular, embrace the idea that,
regardless of the downsides committed environmentalists will embrace a product,
regardless of the flavor or price. That's the green premium
we talk about so often, but real market winning products,
the ones that can change the negative impacts of manufacturing
(38:42):
while turning a profit capable of sustaining A company can't
compete based solely on a mandate to be sustainable, to
tell consumers that they must be responsible, or in the
greenwasher's favorite term of art, eco friendly use of followed
the hard path towards success. Budding entrepreneurs should take note
of b sides determined testing first of the product, then
(39:06):
of the packaging, and finally the supply chain necessary to
move a product that's better for the planet to market
and in this case in time to prevent the compostable
packaging from breaking down. But that compostable packaging is a
significant improvement in something that if we can figure out
a logistics system to manage all these materials, can reduce
our overall impact. A sustainable economy must be built from
(39:29):
the ground up, because the existing approach was erected on extractive,
wasteful processes whose time has passed, they don't work anymore.
And as the yusef said, you must start by finding
the gap in the market that you can address, then
reverse engineer it to deliver the better alternative sustainably both
financially and in terms of the product's environmental impact. Finding
(39:52):
product market fit for a snack food is a matter
of taste, price, and only then selling based on sustainability features.
If your plan is to respond to customers that the
product doesn't taste as good or is more expensive because
it's better for the planet, you probably need to go
back to the drawing board and start over, because there
simply aren't enough consumers out there who are going to
pay that premium in order to have the option available.
(40:15):
But we are seeing more products that have moved past
the responsible snacking phase of the market, and we're going
to continue to talk to and learn from innovators leading
that charge. So stay tuned, folks, and I hope you
also take a moment to check out one of the
more than five hundred episodes of Sustainability in your Ear
that we've produced. You know, writing a review on your
favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. You, folks,
(40:39):
are the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create
less waste, So please tell your friends, family, and coworkers
that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible,
or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you
for your support on Metracliff. This is sustainability in your
ear and we will be back with another Innovator interviews soon.
(41:02):
In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care
of one another, and let's all take care of this
beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
Hello, good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you
are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability
in your Ear, the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition
to a sustainable carbon neutral society. I'm your host, Mett Tracliffe.
Thank you for joining the conversation. Today. As food systems
face growing pressures to address their climate impact, waste, and
(00:32):
supply chain disruptions, a new generation of entrepreneurs is rethinking
not just what we eat, but how we make it
and what we make it from. What if the ingredients
that we throw away every day could become the building
blocks of a more sustainable food future. That's the bold
vision behind B Sides, a Brooklyn based snack company founded
by Yusuf Ahmed, a former finance and music industry professional
(00:55):
turned food innovator. He was inspired by a single slice
of spent grain bread in twenty fourteen, and after that,
Yusef launched B Sides to bring delicious, upcycled plant based
snacks to the mainstream. He's starting with crunch puffs, a
savory puff made from oat pulp discarded in the oat
milk making process. In other words, he's turning what we
(01:16):
call waste into a valuable material and a tasty treat.
Each crunch puffs are alligen friendly, protein rich, and packaged
and compostable packaging. But behind the simple snack is the
product of a complex vision that fuses supply chain resilience,
circular economy thinking, and flavor forward food design. B Sides
(01:36):
sources pulp from small oat milk makers across the Midwest
to produce the snacks in Canada and sell them online
and in New York independent groceries. B sides is building
a playbook for how small brands can lead on climate
and creativity. So today we're going to talk with Yusuf
about building a startup rooted in food waste, what big
food can learn from small experiments, and how B sides
(01:59):
is carving out space for flavor and sustainability in every
crunchy bite. You can learn more about b sides at
enjoybsides dot com. That's all one word, no space, no dash,
enjoybsides dot com. So we're going to get to the
conversation right after this quick commercial break. Stay tuned, Welcome
(02:24):
to the show yousef How are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (02:26):
I'm doing fantastic, Mitch.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Thanks for having me first start off by talking a
little about b sides, crunch puffs, what used to happen
to the oat milk pulp that you're using.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
So typically what happens with kind of any manufactured byproduct
from food is it gets thrown out. It's the co manufacturers.
They wrap the access and these giant plastic bags and
on a daily basis, they get moved to whatever municipality
dump is within reach, which is crazy if you think
(02:58):
about it.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
They weren't even feeding this to cattle. They just threw
this away.
Speaker 3 (03:04):
Yeah, so that's you raise an interesting point. Sometimes it
gets routed to cattle. I think taking a step back,
when you process something like oat milk, you're basically blending
a bunch of raw oats with heated water and then
straining out the pulp. So you have a temperature and
(03:24):
time component that from a food safety perspective, like it's
a ticking time bomb.
Speaker 1 (03:29):
Right.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
You don't have a whole lot of time to do
what you gotta do, and so you don't really want
to be sending livestock rotting food, although that does happen.
And the other thing to keep in mind is livestock,
so cows in particular, they're ruminants. They're intended to grass,
not grains. So when you feed them things like you know,
(03:51):
spent grain from brewin beer or spent oats from making
oat milk.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
They'll eat it.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Like if you feed a diabetic hit a donut, the
kid's going to go to town on the But there
are a lot of digestive issues that actually contribute negatively
to things like methane emissions, carbon emissions, et cetera.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
So, yes, part of them would go to livestock.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
It's not efficient and it's certainly not the best route
for those oats to take.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Well, you just hit on a number of things, the
fact that we're using a material that otherwise would have
gone to landfill that would have produced methane and so forth.
How's this changed the sustainability of a snack like crunch buffs?
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
So the tricky part about like trying to calculate what
what is the exact impact of using whatever ten percent,
fifteen percent, fifty percent of an ingredient like upcycled oatnal
flower in a snack is there are kind of two
ways that you can measure the impact. One is, because
(04:47):
you don't have to then go and plant additional oats
and then harvest those oats. They're you know, they're like
downstream effects. You know, you get kind of the it's
tough to calculate what those would be because it's it's
a crop that wasn't actually grown on the flip side,
you know. The way that the way that we've been
tracking kind of the impact metrics are with regards to
(05:10):
just the raw material itself. Instead of going to a landfill,
you're averting those CO two emissions and instead of using it.
So there's like water involved with taking it apart, transitioning
it into a shelf stable ingredient, and then transporting in
to where it needs to go. So we use the
(05:30):
metrics around how much water was saved there and the
CO two emissions that would have happened if it broken
down in a landfill. So, just to give you kind
of back of the envelope math, one case of any
flavor of my crunch puffs avoids a half a pound
of nutrition waste, avoids two pounds of carbon dioxide emissions,
and seventy five gallons of water gets saved. And that's
(05:52):
just from using the upcycled o pulple loan.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
That's a real impact. I'm impressed working with something like
oat milk pull. Had anybody done this before? And how
did you overcome the challenge of turning this into the
particular texture and taste that you were trying to achieve.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
Yeah, so that's a loaded question. I'll take the second
part first because it's a little clearer and it actually
answered your first question. So the short answer is, yes,
a lot of people have been working in the space
that I'm in, so upcycling, taking the buy products from
manufacturing food and putting them back into the food system.
(06:33):
There are a couple of companies that have raised a
couple of million dollars to get really good at the
upcycling component. And that's everything from establishing where we call
it product valorization, so the byproduct, using that as kind
of a adding value to it. That's been done in
(06:53):
the beer and distilling space. It's been done with alternative milk,
so oat milk, and it's all been done in the
production of kind of tofu so soy okara.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
So everywhere throughout.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
The food system somebody has tried to tinker with what
do we do with this byproduct? And to answer your
second question, I think one of the reasons that upcycling
hasn't really broken into the mainstream is the product, Like,
the consumer facing products are just frankly not that good.
So I knew when I went into this space, I
wanted to put texture in flavor first and have that
(07:27):
be the thing that drives the product rather than just
selling based on impact. So directly answering your question, I
went through hundreds of formulations before I got to the
point where I was like, this is like this blend
of upcycled oat milk, upcycled corn flour, and pea protein.
This is the this is how we do it.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
So what's the nutritional profile of crunch puffs?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Yeah, so it's super high in protein. We've got basically
in a twenty eight gram or one ounce serving, you've
got five grams of a complete plant based protein. The
way that I've formulated these crunch puffs, basically you've got
half the fat of Cheetos and everything you're avoiding any
(08:13):
kind of The whole thing is plant based. So the
topical ingredient itself, while I have a cheddar flavor, there's
no actual dairy in the cheddar. The quote unquote technology
around seasoning and vegan seasoning in particular has gotten really
really good, and I think broadly is overlooked because a
lot of people associate kind of plant based foods with
(08:33):
having no flavor or like being a cheap facsimile of
the actual product. So the macros are all quite positive,
particularly when looking at something like a cheeto.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Well, I have to.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Say that's one of the reactions I've had to most
upcycle foods I've tried, which is is kind of utterly bland. Yeah,
yours weren't. How are you flavoring it? Are you also
using sustainable sourcing to flavor the crunch puffs?
Speaker 2 (09:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (09:03):
So so sustainability I think just taking a step back
that mean that term catches a lot of different meanings,
and depending on who you talk to, some aspects are
more important than others. For me, I think I think
just going down the line of what does sustainability mean
from a food system perspective, I think going directly off
(09:26):
the source of like can we make these products using
plants alone? Is that was kind of my north star
when trying to go for sourcing, because introducing things like
like milk and dairy and you know, artificial food colorings,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can make great products,
and you can make them cheaply, but like, in terms
(09:47):
of sustainability, you're not growing yeast extract right Like if
you're if you're harvesting dairy and then processing it, you
actually have to treat the live stock. There's got to
be land for them to ruminate. You know, there's a
whole kind of supply chain around that versus growing the
yeast extract in a lab, which to a consumer sounds
like not that interesting or not that delicious, but the
(10:10):
reality is we've actually been doing this as humans for
a really long time. Yeast extract is the primary mommy
kind of component in the topical seasoning, and that's something
as simple as harnessing things like the natural occurring glutamates
(10:31):
from something like kelp or seaweed, and that's how you
get that dairy cheese kind of hits without actually using
the dairy. So you know, the sustainability in the supply chain,
it's plant based first, and that's kind of the approach
that I took, but you could take any number of
attacks on that.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
I think you raised a really important point, which is
everybody has their own definition of sustainability. In a sense,
you are part of a circular economy too. You're recovering
a material from another production process and using it. How
do you think of about growing the company b sides
in an environment where there are so many new potential
connections to be made within various circular supply chains that
(11:11):
you might be able to leverage in order to find
another base material for making another product.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
I am a pragmatic realist when it comes to sustainability.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
You know.
Speaker 3 (11:23):
I think a lot of companies that are mission driven,
they get they drink a little bit too much of
their own kool aid, and they end up getting the
unit economics wrong, so they can't scale and they'll collapse
under the weight of just business reality. So for me,
it was really focusing on, Okay, these are the byproducts
that are kind of readily available. I know how to
(11:43):
work with them. They it's an easier story to tell,
you know, everybody kind of understands what oat milk is
and that it had to have come from somewhere. But
to your point about like, there are tons of holes
in the food production supply chain, whether it's the grains
from brewing beer or the use pulp from you know,
juiceries or coffee grounds that I A. There are companies
(12:06):
that are trying to work on those problems and come
up with the raw materials to work with, and I
have partnerships with a lot of those companies and we've
done a lot of R and D. But for me,
it's kind of let's put one foot in front of
the other. I've got this product line that tastes good,
is good, hits all the impact metrics I want to
and let's see if I can kind of find product
(12:26):
market fit before saying, let's expand across every kind of
supply chain hole that there is, because if I can't
prove out the business case, I can't do any of
the sustainability impact metrics that that are really important to me.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
Well, you've just demonstrated your background in finance, but you
also were working in the music industry before this. How
did how did the combination of those two experiences influence
your thinking about B sides?
Speaker 3 (12:51):
Yeah, so I come from an unconventional background, to be sure,
but I think one of the one of the positive
that it affords me is the ability to kind of
look at an industry with a fresh set of eyes
a new perspective.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
So look the music business, I had a knack for.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Translating very complicated, complex, just mind numbing financial data to
people who did not have a financial background in a
way that was compelling and kind of understandable and easily digestible.
So I worked with musicians both on the personal and
professional side, managing their finances, so that could be anything
(13:37):
from paying their mortgage or their insurance to reconciling a
world tour that they went on and making sure all
the dollars and cents are accounted for. I then took
that experience and moved over to gold and Sacks. I
was a private banker, so I kind of did what
I did in the music business, but for entrepreneurs on
the investment side. So in private banking esecially a Goldman Sachs.
(14:01):
To become a Golden Sacks client, you've got to have
ten million dollars or more of investable assets. And that's
a very small kind of subset of the American economy.
But in order to hit that threshold, basically it was
all entrepreneurs or venture capitalists or hedge fund principles who
had built and grown a business and then sold it.
(14:21):
That's how you end up with ten million bucks or more. Right, So,
taking the skill set of complex financial numbers and distilling
it to this is how you approach it from an
investment side. I took all of that and was able
to build a book, a business at Goldman dealing with
entrepreneurs in the sustainability space.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Right.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
So this is twenty fifteen to twenty twenty. A lot
of venture capital money is going towards sustainable efforts. Some
of them are great, some of them are just kind
of rubber stamping sustainability on everything. I wanted to start
b sides by saying like, look, I think there's an
actual impact problem that I can line up the unit
economics behind and we achieve everything profitable business and the
(15:01):
impact metrics that everybody's looking for.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I've talked with a lot of people who are in
the circular economy. What was it that you that spurred
the realization that oat, pulp and corn meal left over
from another production process was the basis of your next.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Business outside of just those into two ingredients by themselves.
I back in twenty fourteen, there's a chef named Dan
Barber who has done a lot of work both in upcycling,
but just kind of within food waste from a restaurant perspective.
He was He released a documentary called Wasted that sheds
a light on a lot of the food inefficiencies from
(15:39):
a waste perspective that the like the American food consumer
world has just ignored, and he chose to highlight this
in a dinner that it was a basically thirty nights.
So over the course of a month, he had a
new chef come every night and they would do a
tasting menu.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
Where every course was born.
Speaker 3 (16:03):
Out of sustainability, so it was off cuts of not
just meats, but also vegetables. And one of the courses
in that meal was spent grain bread, so it was
bread baked with the leftover grains from brewing beer. And
you know, again, this is eleven years ago. I had
never heard of this before. I thought, this is such
(16:23):
a simple, beautiful, delicious circular idea, like this should be everywhere.
I don't understand why it's not everywhere. And so you know,
for me, that's kind of where the kernel was born.
And I watched and I waited over the course of
a decade to see is somebody taking this on, like
why hasn't this become a thing? And you know, after
(16:44):
a number of years and just not seeing it reach
escape velocity or kind of proliferation throughout the consumer food discussion.
That's where I decoiught, I wanted to plant my flag.
I thought, there's got to be a way to do this.
I want to plant my flag here. There's so many
examples that we as we've kind of earlier throughout the
supply chain where you can make an impact across multiple
(17:05):
product categories.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
It's impressive, but you didn't just dive in and make
a bunch of mistakes, which is also how most companies
either end up succeeding or going completely bust. One of
the most impressive things is that you have a one
hundred percent home compostable package. How did you achieve a
moisture seal in a compostable product like this?
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (17:30):
So, first, mitcheer, give me way too much credit. I
have pivoted and failed multiple times throughout this product.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Okay, so this is this is a this is another
night's success born of years.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
Yeah, okay, a decade, a decade of failures. Yeah so yeah, No,
I look, there are many times, many product categories that
just like didn't achieve lived off. And to your point
about the home compostible packaging, I figured, look, what's the
point of kind of creating a sustainable product if you
then wrap it in plastic packaging. And to your point
(18:01):
about the home compostable, how do you create a moisture barrier?
So technology has gotten really, really good to the point
where things like cornstarch can create It's not quite a
p l A seal because pl polylactic acid. I won't
go into the signs of it, but essentially that is
a material that you can create compostable packaging, but predominantly
industrial compostable. It has now gotten to the point where
(18:24):
you can create home compostable seals using PLA equivalents that
break down in more kind of natural environments. The problem,
and it's it's interesting that you bring this up because
I'm now running to this issue where it's great that
this is a home compostable package. The problem is it'll
(18:45):
start composting on the shelf right if you if you
sit on product for too long, and so trying to
get that.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Right problem, I mean, it's a huge rom what's your product?
Speaker 3 (18:59):
Yeah, so essentially a year and that sounds like a
long time. But if you think about what a lot
of consumers don't see is you've got to start procurement, shipping, packaging,
and then shipping on the back end, and then it
goes kind of to a warehouse where it sits and
then you start fulfilling orders. You could use up you
(19:19):
know of that twelve months, three to four months just
getting the product of the warehouse, right, so then you've
got eight months to move all.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
The product forward. It starts composing. So I'm you know,
I'm running into.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
This issue of how do I scale this thing profitably
without having product because nobody wants a Nobody wants to
buy a bag of puffs that has started to compost,
right like. And the point that I keep bringing up is,
you know what the least sustainable company is, Mitch, like
just industry agnostic. If I had to ask you that question,
what would you say?
Speaker 1 (19:50):
The least sustainable company not counting fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (19:54):
And it could be it could be a fossil fuel company.
Speaker 1 (19:56):
As well, I would say shell.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Okay. The argument that I would make is the least
sustainable company is one that's not profitable because you can't
achieve any of the impact metrics if you go out
of business before you do it.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
So nice jiu jitsu move on the use of.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
Absolutely yeah, yeah, yeah, look one hundred percent.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
I'm as I mentioned earlier, I'm a pragmatic realist about this,
right I. Packaging is something that I have wrestled with
on how to capitalize on this, what to do about it.
There's actually a company called Repurpose Global where what they
do is they kind of account for every pound of
plastic in your supply chain and they go into high
(20:41):
impact areas like China, Southeast Asia, and they when you
partner with Repurpose Global, they take part of your grant
money and they deploy it into plastic taking plastic out
of the environment. And it can be commensurate with how
much plastic you've used throughout the supply chain. There are
different kind of metrics you can use to estimate it.
The whole reason I'm bringing this up is like, look,
(21:03):
it's going to be really difficult to get homecom postable
packaging to a mass audience, a mass market if my
product starts to degrade on shelf before I can even
get it to a target or a whole foods Right
and so trying to strike a balance between how do
I maintain this ethos of sustainability if I have to
use something like plastic packaging or a plastic kind of
(21:26):
corollary and repurpose and what they're doing with kind of
capturing plastic out of the environment, I think is a
really good balance between the two. So like, yes, at
this launch, small scale, kind of emerging stage that I'm
at homecompostable is fine. But as I move to scale nationally,
I've got to figure out a pragmatic way to do it.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
At this moment on this fulcrum of success or failure.
Great place to take a break. We'll be right back
to talk more with Yusuf. Now let's return to the
discussion with yuse Off Ahmed. He is the founder of
b Sides, a maker of upcycled crunch puff snacks. We're
(22:09):
just speaking to the question of how do you reach
a national audience. Is this going to be primarily a
direct consumer business or do you see yourself being at
retail everywhere.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
All of the above.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
I think for any kind of food, especially emerging food
brands in the consumer space, to quote unquote make it,
you have to have some kind of retail presence or
retail strategy otherwise like the numbers just don't work. The
problem with doing that, though, is retail is so stacked
against emerging brands that it's really really difficult to do
(22:41):
it unless you raise a ton of money. So the
way that I've thought about my go to market strategy is, Okay,
how do I approach retail thoughtfully enough that I can
get kind of the Velocity metrics, which are a number
of SKUs sold per week and hit like the Escape
(23:02):
velocity to get to a mass market kind of national
distribution footprint without going out of business. And the way
that I've launched this product, I'm calling this kind of
a soft launch phase. Basically, in January, I spun up
a direct to consumer e commerce present where you can
go to the website and buy I'm on Amazon dot com.
You got to be like where consumers are right. And
(23:25):
then in parallel to that, I did a limited retail
footprint here in New York City. I'm in twenty five
different kind of grocery retailers, but wholesale buyers, so shoppy
shops all around the country. They can find me on
fare dot com, on air Goods dot Com, on Podfoods
dot Com. The trick to winning in retail is you
(23:46):
have to get every single aspect right before you end,
like get on the shelf, because you can't just start
playing jazz with things like packaging or positioning, like retailers
don't like that, distributors don't like that. So right now,
this whole phase is what's actually resonating with consumers? What
are they like, what are they not like? What do
they open their wallets for? Like, so I'm running different
(24:06):
ad strategies to try to figure out what messaging resonates best.
And then I want to get a track record of
buying from the audience. You know, what flavors do they want,
what's selling well, what's not selling well? And then I
can take that data and go to a meeting with
a retail buyer and say, hey, look, you know, I've
already got the data. This is the kind of consumer
(24:27):
who wants to buy this product. Here's the price point
that they're buying it at. If you're interested, like we
can have a conversation versus me going to a retailer
as an emerging brand with kind of no leverage in
the negotiation and having to just adhere to every single
demand that they make, because that's how you go out
of business.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Well, the other challenge is once you get on the shelf,
what's the messaging to the consumer. I don't think the
first thing people think of is I'm looking for a
responsible snack. How do you exactly to the person who
does encounter crunch puffs at retail?
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Going back to the top of the conversation where we
discussed how the oat milk pulp, the leftover corn flour
from million corn grits, what is the best way to
use that in a product that tastes good and has
great texture. When people go to buy snacks, they want
flavor first, then nutrition, and then they care about everything else. Right,
(25:22):
everything else is a nice to have. And so if
you nail the flavor and the texture and you get
the packaging right where, it looks like a very intriguing snack.
So I'll flip over the packaging and look at the
backpack and check out all the nutrition and all of
those kind of nutritional aspects, check all the boxes that
the consumers looking for, and then the price points good.
(25:45):
Everything else falls into line behind that. So to your
point about you know, people aren't going down the snack
aile saying how sustainable is my snack buff The way
that I approach sustainability is like, you have to sell
the product, right, like the people have to want the product.
And then if you've done, if you've implemented a sustainable
mindset properly, then that, in my opinion, should be kind
(26:06):
of invisible to the consumer. There are consumers who care
about it. It does drive velocity, not the velocity metrics
necessary to win. And so you know, if you think
about selling sustainability, if I achieve all the impact metrics
that I want without actually having hit the consumer over
the head with this is what we're doing, then didn't
I achieve the same outcome?
Speaker 2 (26:28):
Right? That's how I'm approaching it.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
A lot of us think you have to wear this
on your sleeve, and what you have to do is
cater to the not the values necessarily the consumer, but
of their taste. What's the initial response from consumers when
they find out that it's upcycled? Do they understand the idea?
Does that increase their sense that this is the right
product for them?
Speaker 2 (26:49):
Yeah? Excellent question.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
So most consumers, if you ask them on the spot,
you have them frag crunch buff, they eat it, and
then you tell them, you know, can you believe this
is made from the leftover roads for make a oat milk?
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Most of the time it's shock.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
A they haven't thought about that problem, and B they
can't believe that something like a leftover byproduct can taste
this good. And you know, to your point about is
this something that will make a consumer feel like this
is the right snack for them?
Speaker 2 (27:20):
You know, if.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
You're catering to those top two attributes flavor and then
nutrition first, I tend to actually think that consumers are
more forgiving or at least more kind of curious as
to what else is in the product, and so it
becomes a natural selling point of oh, okay, I bought this
because it looked interesting, it tastes good, it doesn't break
(27:42):
the nutritional bank. Oh and I have all these other
you know, kind of sustainability attributes that I'm contributing positively towards,
Like that's what gets them to buy the next snack.
Maybe it didn't get them to buy it the first time,
but you want them to come back and get it
the second time.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
In terms of B sides strategy, are you planning to
be a net zero company, what kind of KPIs are
you putting in place to ensure that the company reduces
its overall impact in the long term.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, so from an impact metric perspective, Yeah, look, certified
BCorp net zero. There are a lot of different ways
you can plastic negative, plastic neutral. There are multiple kind
of vectors of attack here. The thing that I want
to prove first is that there is a consumer market
for upcycled snacks, and whether or not that's hitting the
(28:31):
consumer over the head with the fact that it is
upcycled or not. Once we can achieve kind of yes,
there is a market for it, Yes, people pay a
green premium for it, then I'm going to solve for
we're going to be net zero or net negative on
emissions and plastic et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All
of those things are important to me, and they're important
for the company roadmap. But right now, in this kind
(28:55):
of time and place, I need to prove that consumers
want to snack that taste like this looks like this
like this before I start solving for kind of the
broader sustainability goals that I have in mind.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Just digging into those a little bit more. You're producing
in Canada for largely a North American market, but primarily
the United States. As you look at the configuration of
your supply chain, are you already thinking about how to
reduce the transportation time and distance.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
Absolutely?
Speaker 3 (29:26):
So, I am producing in Canada because, believe it or not,
the Canadian government actually is quite favorable to circular economy
projects and renewable.
Speaker 2 (29:36):
Sustainable food efforts.
Speaker 3 (29:38):
So producing in Canada, from an economics perspective, it was
the only way to get this thing off the ground.
I basically bootstrap this company right like. It's very difficult
to raise mission dollars from a venture capitalist in this
day and age, and that's you kind of need the
venture capital dollars to produce at the scale to do it.
(29:58):
In the United States, the minimums were an order of
magnitude to your point about reducing the footprint of where
trucks have to travel, It's absolutely top of mind for me.
I think again, this comes back to this pragmatic realism
of how to get a sustainable food company off the ground.
There are manufacturing facilities that I've talked to throughout the
(30:18):
United States. Ideally, you want to be making the food
as close to where you're going to be selling the food.
But in order to do that, and you know, to
your point about a North American market, I'm only selling
in the United States right now. I only am an
expert in kind of the US snacker. Snacking changes, like
the cultural kind of identity around it. If you go
across the border to Canada down to Mexico, behaviors change,
(30:42):
and so I need to kind of get it right
on the US footprint first. But the short answer to
your question is like, yes, I'm actively seeking partners who
will help me produce this in the United States.
Speaker 2 (30:51):
It's just a way heavier lift for just economic reasons.
Speaker 1 (30:56):
How did the tariffs change that calculus for you?
Speaker 2 (30:59):
They didn't, So I.
Speaker 3 (31:03):
Guess I got very lucky in the sense that I
kind of sifted out that our fearless leader was going
to be charging forth with these economic misadventures. So I
bought as much product as possible before quote unquote Liberation
Day and had it chip across the border. And my
hope was that either we would come to amicable resolution
(31:26):
or if not, I would have enough product to last
me through when the devastation from the reality of implementing tariff,
some of our greatest trading partners were going to come
to light and they were going to get resolved. The
more coherent business answer is I started just moving the
supply chain into Canada, so I'm not paying for raw
materials to go across the border.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Round tripping kinds of charges are going to be the
death of a lot of companies as you think about
the emerging challenges that thinking sustainably faces because of the
rhetoric in our country right now, are we doing more
harm every day by attacking these emerging industries? If you
(32:13):
had a moment with the fearless leader, what would you
tell them?
Speaker 3 (32:17):
This is a fascinating question because there's a fundamental tension
between the status quo, the way things are today and
where kind of people who think sustainably want the economy
to go. And the idea that we're going to be
digging something out of the ground and burning it to
(32:38):
create energy indefinitely is kind of a It's obvious on
its face what the pitfalls of that approach is right,
But the problem is humanity, humans and consumers, like just
down to the most granular level, that problem can become
sort of nebulous in their day to day life. You know,
they've got to get from point A to point B,
(32:59):
and that the easiest, cheapest way to do it is
using like a gas powered car. And so having our
fearless leader try to pick winners and losers in the economy, which,
by the way, what tariffs do. It's kind of a
fool zeron because you're now getting to the point where
you're just he's going to sell access to the highest bidder.
(33:19):
And I would argue that's just like not a way
to run economy broadly, and and you know, trying to
then shoehorn this idea that we've got to have a
broader foresight of investment on where we can make better choices.
Like it's just not in his lexicon. So I don't
actually think that's a productive conversation. One way that I
would phrase it is, look, the rest of the world
(33:40):
is moving on without us, and if we don't catch up,
we're not going to be competitive. It doesn't matter if
these things are produced, if these things being anything pick
you know, an iPhone or a snack product, it doesn't
matter if it's produced in you know, Missouri or Arkansas.
No American consumer is going to pay for it. So
having these globalized supply.
Speaker 2 (34:01):
Chains, it's good business.
Speaker 3 (34:04):
Like he just accepted a four hundred million dollar plane
right that was manufactured not here, and so trying to
contextualize it as a why don't we make this competitive?
From an American pragmatism standpoint, That's the way that I'd
frame the conversation.
Speaker 2 (34:18):
It's just good business.
Speaker 3 (34:19):
We've got to figure out how to solve this in
place the bet so everybody wins.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
I think you hit it on the head. Engineering advantage
in a marketplace is counterproductive because the market is designed
to undo advantage precisely, What advice would you offer to
entrepreneurs who are considering launching food brands in the sustainable
or upcycled or circular economy space? What should they be
(34:44):
thinking about?
Speaker 3 (34:45):
It depends on where they sit in that spectrum. So
a food brand is so far arranging, right, you could
go from producing raw materials all the way down to
an end consumer product. The advice that I would give
any entrepreneur is you got to figure out what the
people want. And at the end of the day, the
(35:05):
trickiest part about getting an upcycled snack food brand off
the ground is consumers are just not familiar with upcycling,
so using that as a selling point is a really
really tricky thing to do. Instead of doing that, why
don't you figure out where there are gaps that a
consumer wants that you can solve for outside of sustainability.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
And then try to figure out how to use.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Sustainability as the method for achieving the solution that that
consumer is looking for. The best way I can explain
this is in my crunch plufs the texture and the flavor.
I can't make that texture or flavor without using upcycled ingredients.
So it solves for everything at once. So don't do
(35:48):
what I did where you go and back solve for
a supply chain problem. Go identify kind of that gap
in the market first and then formulate everything around that gap.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
So what materials potentially upcycle materials are you thinking about
using to make your next snack?
Speaker 3 (36:04):
So the way that this mission all started was spent grain.
So the leftover grains from brown beer distilling alcohol. That's
what I've got my eye on next. I don't want
to say too much because I'm running a lot of
different kind of R and D trials, and spent grain
is a very tricky animal to work with. A lot
of people don't realize this, but when people think about beer,
(36:26):
they think about salty savory snacks that go along with
the beer. To produce the beer, most of the time
you use malted barley. Malted barley has a very distinct
flavor that is excellent in confections, not so good in
salty savory snacks. So how do you kind of bridge
that gap? Right, Because like, people don't want to be
(36:48):
thinking about a muffin when they're drinking a lager, and
so that's kind of like the next rubicon that I
want to cross.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
I can't wait to see how you've crossed that rubicon.
Books find and try B Sides crunch pumps.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
So you can find us on Instagram at enjoyb Sides.
You can buy our products on the website. We ship
the nationwide of the lower forty eight so enjoybsides dot com.
You can find us on Amazon dot com, on Walmart
dot com, and if you're in New York City door dash,
we'll deliver it directly through your apartment.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
God damn well Y said, thanks so much for your
time today. It really is interesting conversation.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
Thanks so much for having me, Mitch, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
You've been listening to a conversation with Yusuf Ahmed, founder
of b Sides and creator of the upcycled crunch Puffs
line of snack products made from the by products of
oat milk and corn gritz production processes. You can find
crunch Puffs on Amazon and at select retailers. Learn more
about the company at enjoybsides dot com. Enjoy b sides
(37:56):
is all one word, no space, no dash, enjoy bides
dot com. You know, we heard a pragmatic, realistic perspective
on sustainability, one that's important to keep in mind as
the United States moves into an era of perhaps the
final but certainly more resistance to recognizing the continuing damage
produced by runaway climate change. Sustainable products must taste good
(38:20):
at a competitive price to win in this market, and
too often entrepreneurs, sustainability entrepreneurs in particular, embrace the idea that,
regardless of the downsides committed environmentalists will embrace a product,
regardless of the flavor or price. That's the green premium
we talk about so often, but real market winning products,
the ones that can change the negative impacts of manufacturing
(38:42):
while turning a profit capable of sustaining A company can't
compete based solely on a mandate to be sustainable, to
tell consumers that they must be responsible, or in the
greenwasher's favorite term of art, eco friendly use of followed
the hard path towards success. Budding entrepreneurs should take note
of b sides determined testing first of the product, then
(39:06):
of the packaging, and finally the supply chain necessary to
move a product that's better for the planet to market
and in this case in time to prevent the compostable
packaging from breaking down. But that compostable packaging is a
significant improvement in something that if we can figure out
a logistics system to manage all these materials, can reduce
our overall impact. A sustainable economy must be built from
(39:29):
the ground up, because the existing approach was erected on extractive,
wasteful processes whose time has passed, they don't work anymore.
And as the yusef said, you must start by finding
the gap in the market that you can address, then
reverse engineer it to deliver the better alternative sustainably both
financially and in terms of the product's environmental impact. Finding
(39:52):
product market fit for a snack food is a matter
of taste, price, and only then selling based on sustainability features.
If your plan is to respond to customers that the
product doesn't taste as good or is more expensive because
it's better for the planet, you probably need to go
back to the drawing board and start over, because there
simply aren't enough consumers out there who are going to
pay that premium in order to have the option available.
(40:15):
But we are seeing more products that have moved past
the responsible snacking phase of the market, and we're going
to continue to talk to and learn from innovators leading
that charge. So stay tuned, folks, and I hope you
also take a moment to check out one of the
more than five hundred episodes of Sustainability in your Ear
that we've produced. You know, writing a review on your
favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. You, folks,
(40:39):
are the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create
less waste, So please tell your friends, family, and coworkers
that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible,
or whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. Thank you
for your support on Metracliff. This is sustainability in your
ear and we will be back with another Innovator interviews soon.
(41:02):
In the meantime, folks, take care of yourself, take care
of one another, and let's all take care of this
beautiful planet of ours. Have a green day.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.