Krystle Mobayeni:
I think it was really great advice because I felt like things started coming together after that because, I could talk really confidently and speak really confidently about the things that I was good at versus trying to just be this other person.
Kerry Diamond:
Hey, Bombesquad. Welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe, the show that's all about women and food. I'm your host, Kerry Diamond, coming to you from Brooklyn, New York. We have a bonus episode for you today. This one is all about startups. Startups come in all shapes and sizes but they're similar in that they take a lot of grit and tenacity to get them off the ground.
Kerry Diamond:
Despite all the love and hard work that goes into startups, about 90% of them fail. Oof, that is such a painful stat. Still, that did not deter today's guests, Krystle Mobayeni of BentoBox and Julia Joseph of Maple Hill Creamery. Their companies went from startups to success and they're here to tell us about everything from the bumps to the triumphs. Speaking of startups, later on during the break, we're going to hear how a certain Silicon Valley startup came to be, and it's not what you expect.
Kerry Diamond:
Stay tuned for a special excerpt from, "There Was Cheese Parked in Adeena Sussman's Garage." That's a great title, right? It's the latest episode of Schmaltzy, the podcast from the Jewish Food Society. You can listen to Schmaltzy wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you to Schmaltzy for being our partner on today's episode.
Kerry Diamond:
First up is Krystle Mobayeni of BentoBox. If you work in the restaurant industry or spend time on restaurant websites, you might know the name BentoBox, the tech company that describes itself as a restaurant's digital storefront. They help with websites, online ordering, gift cards, event management and a lot more.
Kerry Diamond:
During the pandemic, BentoBox was a lifesaver for many establishments. Co-founder and CEO, Krystle, is here to tell us how BentoBox has grown from a side hustle to a flourishing company with thousands of clients. Enjoy our chat. What was hot and happening on the internet when you graduated from college?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Napster was that whole P2P sharing thing, was a big instant messenger like AOL instant messenger. Even though you weren't on AOL, just that was the way that you were communicating. We had Hotmail accounts not Gmail accounts. Those were the main highlights I remember.
Kerry Diamond:
And then, how did you start working with restaurants?
Krystle Mobayeni:
After working at a few agencies, I was like, "I'm going to work for myself. I'm going to be a freelancer. I'm going to start a mini agency with a bunch of different freelancers together." I worked with different kinds of clients from fashion. I worked with Mark Jacobs, I worked with some liquor brands, Sailor Jerry Rum. And then, through a friend, I think a high school friend, I got connected to, actually, Momofuku was one of the first restaurant websites I ever worked on way back in the day. It was 2012.
Krystle Mobayeni:
They were looking for a web designer and I knew how to make websites so I started on that. It was just serendipitous so I got to work on it. And then, subsequently worked with The Breslin on their website. And then, I got a call from The Meatball Shop. When I was working with the Breslin and The Meatball Shop, it was just like, "Okay, well, there's a real common theme here in terms of what restaurants are looking for online."
Krystle Mobayeni:
There was a common frustration about wanting to use their website to do more than historically it would do because there were different technologies popping up like Yelp and OpenTable. They felt they were losing control with technology and their website was a way to get it back. I was having a hard time giving them exactly what they needed through Squarespace or WordPress. It was just very costly to set something up like exactly what they wanted-
Kerry Diamond:
I had a restaurant back then and I remember what it costs to hire someone to build a website. It was over $10,000-
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah, it was crazy.
Kerry Diamond:
... I think for even a very basic website.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. I was talking to The Breslin and The Meatball Shop, for that same cost, I could just build something custom that does exactly what you want it to do and it won't have some of the problems that WordPress had at the time. They were into it and they were the first two customers on BentoBox. That was back in 2013.
Kerry Diamond:
When BentoBox become an official company?
Krystle Mobayeni:
It was April 2013.
Kerry Diamond:
Okay. What happened to the design agency?
Krystle Mobayeni:
The design agency that I was running, and I put it in these air quotes I'm doing because it was just a one-woman show. I would pull in different people I knew for different parts of it. It was called Neon & Sons. I kept doing that to make money to then put into BentoBox to work with more restaurants. That burned out through 2013 and BentoBox started started becoming the main thing.
Kerry Diamond:
When you looked into your crystal ball, no pun intended, what did you see for the future of restaurants and restaurant websites because, what you were doing and what you saw back then was very different from, even pre-pandemic, what was going on in terms of websites?
Krystle Mobayeni:
I think I always saw the opportunity for restaurants to have their piece of the internet that was theirs and to actually be able to use it in a way that really supported their business. Really, actually, they could make money off of it. What it actually came down to is that, it didn't have to be a cost center and that was really important. That underlying idea was pretty clear at that point. Now, what it was going to turn into wasn't obvious. I couldn't have said that we were going to get to where we are today, but the core theme was clear.
Kerry Diamond:
What was it that you liked enough about restaurants to want to pivot and focus more exclusively on restaurants?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Well, I think I knew how to solve the problem and that was important. I think that, just given my background and my natural problem-solving combined with design nature, I probably could have solved it for other industries I think like an auto body shop or some other small business, but I just wouldn't have cared as much so I just cared. I just thought this was such a cool industry that had given me some of the best experiences of my life and just played a really important role growing up.
Krystle Mobayeni:
I felt like restaurants were a place that, it was almost this third place for me and my family that was more about bringing them into my American culture versus I always had to kind of be part of their Persian culture. Just bridging that gap was really tricky. Restaurants were a place that were warm and hospitable and we were taking care of, but it was an Indian American world where, otherwise, my only other time where I was in those worlds were school or sports that my parents wouldn't be there with me obviously. So, they just played a really important role in my life and who I was and how I connected with people.
Kerry Diamond:
Even though that was almost 10 years ago, 2012 was a very hot time in New York City in the restaurant world. It sounds like you were right in the middle of it. You mentioned Momofuku, The Breslin, The Meatball Shop, those places, 2012 was a major year for all of them.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. I got very lucky to have gotten to work with such great restaurants early on because, BentoBox would not have been what it is today if I hadn't gotten that opportunity. It was really luck. I got introduced to the right people and then doing right by people too. I think the restaurant industry is obviously one of community and sharing and do good work. I think it builds a lot of good will. So I think that went really far too.
Kerry Diamond:
How did you start to set up the company for growth?
Krystle Mobayeni:
I would say it was pretty slow to do that in the beginning. Here, all of these companies that go out and they just raise a bunch of money or they're able to get things in place to just really start just sprinting towards what they're looking to do without having much to show for it. Without having much proven, I should say.
Kerry Diamond:
Proof of concept.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. I had a product and I had customers that were in the first year or two. We got 50 to 100 restaurants starting to use the platform. It was really tough to get capital behind it to be able to go faster, to even actually pay ourselves. Me and my co-founder, we were like, BentoBox had to be on the side because we couldn't dedicate everything to it.
Krystle Mobayeni:
I think there's a couple of reasons for that. One was, I do think that, historically, restaurants have been scary businesses for anyone that is funding businesses. I think that's changing a lot right now because I think a lot of people see a lot of opportunity, but historically, I think they've been very scary. I didn't really speak the language. I was a designer, I didn't have a finance background.
Krystle Mobayeni:
It took quite a while for me to learn the way I needed to be thinking about the business, the way I needed to be thinking about growth, what ROI meant, what all these metrics meant, why they even mattered. And they do matter, it's not just these fancy words. Actually, they're real. It took a while for me to be able to do that. And then, just my nature, I'm pretty understated. I think that we hear a lot about these entrepreneurs that are just so eccentric, outspoken and just have a real big presence and I just didn't have that.
Krystle Mobayeni:
I'm like, "Hey, I built a platform. Some restaurants like to use it and they're paying me for it so why wouldn't you give me money to grow it more?" I just wasn't as good at the vision casting, but that was very motivating. I really liked the idea of becoming good at something I'm not good at. That's a great challenge. It launched in 2013 and then probably got our first real outside capital in the door in early 2015, so a couple of years.
Kerry Diamond:
So you bootstrap things for two years?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. It was just a lot of doing the side projects with the agency that I was running and stringing things together to try to make it work. It was tough. But when I look back on it, it was just such a learning period that it doesn't feel tough. If anyone was telling me the story of just trying to make ends meet and trying to work through all this, I would have been like, "Wow, that sounds really hard," but in the moment, it all had to happen to get to where things are today.
Kerry Diamond:
I think a lot of restaurateurs and restaurant owners, chefs, et cetera, can relate to that. Like you said, people aren't dying to give restaurants money to open. Some of the bigger projects, of course, are well funded and capitalized but, smaller restaurants, absolutely not. I know a lot of our restaurant folks can relate to that feeling of having to go at it on your own.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah, I think there's a lot of similarities. You have this thing that you love to do and you're opening a restaurant not having done it before but there's a lot of passion behind it. You need to be able to sell on, not just your passion and just being at your craft, but the vision and the numbers and that stuff takes practice.
Kerry Diamond:
What was the turning point for BentoBox? When were you able to bring investors on board or capture their attention?
Krystle Mobayeni:
I spent a lot of time. I would talk to a lot of investors, I would pitch a lot of investors and we were too early or we'd get a ton of feedback around what was missing or what I needed to work on. I felt like that was always trying to be this person that these people wanted to give money to, this other person that wasn't me. I got advice somewhere along the way that was, "You're an amazing designer, you are a great digital product thinker, you should just lean into that. That's what you're good at. That's what makes you confident."
Krystle Mobayeni:
I think it was really great advice because I felt like things started coming together after that because I could talk really confidently and speak really confidently about the things that I was good at versus trying to just be this other person. I would say, pretty soon after that, we got accepted into this program called Techstars, which is a tech accelerator where they give you a little bit of money and they take a significant percentage but there's a lot of value add that comes with it.
Krystle Mobayeni:
They pick 10 companies and they give mentorship. It's like a stamp of approval too in the tech and VC world. Once that happened, things just started accelerating after that. That was early 2015. And then, by the end of 2015, we raised our first seed round, which was $2 million, which, that amount of money sounded like a fake number to me.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so interesting though that, once you were being your more authentic self, things started for you.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. It feels so obvious but it's not obvious. When you're going through the motions, you just think people are looking for something and you're just trying to perform and be that.
Kerry Diamond:
I would imagine, especially in the tech world, trying to raise money, you really are expected to go into these rooms and perform and be who you think they want you to be. It's funny, when you were talking about all of that, I was thinking design to CEO is not a typical career path or a path to the CEO office, but then I was like, "Well, there was Steve Jobs." Steve Jobs was a genius designer and product person.
Krystle Mobayeni:
I think that he probably was really his authentic self, from what we've read and what we've seen.
Kerry Diamond:
From what I have read, he did not have a problem being his authentic self. Maybe some people would have liked that he was less his authentic self, but that's, I guess, for another podcast.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah, exactly.
Kerry Diamond:
When you finally were successful in raising money, how was BentoBox doing at the time? Had the company become a profitable yet, what was the story there?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Things were going really well. I would say, in terms of raising money, it's really a means to an end to be able to accelerate growth. It was less about getting to profitability but more about, how can we go faster in terms of building product, how can we reach more restaurants, how can we get the right team on board? I think that we started being able to really build out our products more, which was important to me.
Krystle Mobayeni:
We were able to start transitioning BentoBox from just this website platform to, how can this actually be like more the restaurant's digital storefront and their digital property and not be that cost center? I remember, we first launched gift cards and it was for the holidays and a couple of restaurants started using that. And then, we started doing catering, ways to sell catering and the merchandise and tickets.
Kerry Diamond:
And this was even before the pandemic?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. We were in early 2016, I would say, when all of this started being built in to the platform.
Kerry Diamond:
Did you have clients across the whole country?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah, we did. I remember we had a lot in New York to start, we had a bunch in D.C. I'm from the D.C. area so I knew a couple of people there. It just started slowly spreading out. We got a couple in Florida. I think it was probably by 2018 we had restaurants in all 50 states.
Kerry Diamond:
Very cool. That must've been a nice moment. You started at such a high-level with Momofuku, The Breslin and The Meatball Shop, were there any milestones along the way? Were there any restaurants that you signed on that you considered a personal victory, either it was the restaurant you loved or a restaurateur you really admired?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. It's not going to be a big name one. Hopefully, that's that's okay. I went to school in Philadelphia and there was this restaurant I would go to there. That was right in my list. When I was becoming 21, old enough to drink, it's when I started really first appreciating wine. There was this restaurant there called Tria. It was a beer, wine and cheese place. I was just learning. I'm like, "Wow, you can have cheese and you can have it with wine and it just tastes so good together. This is magical."
Krystle Mobayeni:
I was a college student so I didn't have that much money. On Sundays, they had one wine and one cheese, half off. They called it the Sunday School and they would teach you about them. Anyway, I would say, maybe in 2017 or 2018, we have a Slack channel and we sign up new restaurants. I saw it pop up and I was like, "No." I couldn't believe it. It was that one. The sales rep said something to the restaurant owner about how I was just probably doing cartwheels in the office, I was so excited.
Krystle Mobayeni:
The owner sent me a note. It's this random restaurant in Philly. He was like, "I heard you were a big fan of Tria and you go there all the time." I was just like, "Yeah, I'm so excited. This was such a great moment," but it was a small little victory.
Kerry Diamond:
That's really sweet. When did you start to notice that 2020 was not going to be business as usual?
Krystle Mobayeni:
I think that it was probably, I remember it was a Thursday. We did a practice work-from-home day just to make sure everyone had their stuff, just in case, who knows what's going to happen.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Krystle Mobayeni:
And then, the next day was a Friday and they announced in the city that restaurants were shutting down. I think it was just that moment. We never went back to the office full time. I was like, "Wow, this is real."
Kerry Diamond:
New York City shuts down and other cities similarly start shutting down. I would have to imagine that, for executives in your position, in lots of different industries adjacent to restaurants, it was not a great moment.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. You're in the position of having to experience this thing that's going on but then know that there's 100 plus people that are looking to you to tell them, "Everything's going to be okay. We have a plan and don't worry." The thing that worked for me and our company and for us was just constant communication and dialogue. Even if the news wasn't going to be good, we were always going to be honest. We were always going to be as transparent as we were able to be. That's all you can do.
Kerry Diamond:
What were you hearing from your restaurant partners back then?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Everyone was really scared. Honestly, everyone was just trying to find ways to keep their staff. It was really interesting. If I think about what I really remember is, everyone was really concerned about their staff and they were just trying to find ways to accommodate their staff. They're like, "Okay, well, if I sell a bunch of gift cards today, even though the restaurant's not going to be open, maybe I can pay my staff for another week. And I take my maître d and turn them into a delivery person." It was a lot. There was just a lot of care for the people that were at the restaurant, was the main, main message.
Kerry Diamond:
It's amazing how restaurants pivoted and the amount of creativity they all brought to the process over the past year. How did BentoBox have to pivot or did you even have to pivot? It seems like you were poised to help them with the things they needed help with.
Krystle Mobayeni:
We made one really big pivot, which was, we had actually just launched online ordering in February, which was crazy, but you had to buy a website to buy online ordering. That week, we started decoupling the website and online ordering. Everyone worked day and night and, by the end of the week, we could have an online ordering product that was just separate and that restaurants would buy it separately.
Krystle Mobayeni:
And then, we did a bunch of other little things like, we built in the little COVID relief checkbox, 199 fee, and we just built in these little things to help do whatever we can. We paused, I can't remember how many subscriptions, but anyone that reached out to us, we went ahead and pause their account for however many months. If they ever asked for more months, we gave them more months. So, we did a lot of little things.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Like you said earlier, in some ways, we were ready for this moment. In some way, we were just focused on how can we just be accessible and available to help restaurants? The funny thing was, as I remember, we were doing planning back in 2019 and we were thinking about, what is our next product? It was going to be one of these two big things, it's either going to be reservations versus the online ordering.
Krystle Mobayeni:
It wasn't 2019, it was late 2018. It took us almost a year to really build it. We did a lot of analysis on our customer base and we decided that we were going to build online ordering.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Krystle Mobayeni:
What a game-changing decision that we made not even knowing what the impact was going to be?
Kerry Diamond:
How many restaurants do you work with today?
Krystle Mobayeni:
It's about 7,000.
Kerry Diamond:
That must have been, I don't want to say life changing, but business changing for those restaurants to have that option.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah, it was great. We just got so many great success stories of people being able to keep their staff on board. Some of the restaurants on our platform have made, over 2020, millions of dollars through online ordering, direct, no fees have been taken off of.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Krystle Mobayeni:
It's a significant amount of money. The restaurants I'm even talking about, a lot of them are not in New York City, they're in other parts of the country. So I think that, as a restaurateur, if you were able to really think about your business in a different way, and we're willing to, it's not the right decision for every restaurant, I think you could have really done well.
Kerry Diamond:
Explain to me how BentoBox makes money from the online ordering. So you're not charging a fee similar to like DoorDash or Caviar?
Krystle Mobayeni:
Yeah. Well, we don't do a commission fee that the restaurant pays, we have a $0.99 fee that the diner pays. I think it's a pretty smaller price to pay from the diner side when you're used to actually getting so many more fees like service fees or whatever they are from other marketplaces. It helps us make sure 100% goes to the restaurant.
Kerry Diamond:
What is your take on the state of things for U.S. restaurants?
Krystle Mobayeni:
I think that, I don't think we're out of the woods yet obviously and I think that there are a lot of after effects, what we're hearing with staffing and just the restaurant industry is completely changed. They're still a lot of adapting that needs to happen so I do think that we're not in the clear yet. But I do believe that there has been a really interesting, powerful and I think positive change in the restaurant industry where restaurants, because they wanted to continue to serve their communities, needed to think of themselves outside of what they provide the meal in the brick and mortar.
Krystle Mobayeni:
They have so much more to offer and they were forced to do that. I do think that, by diversifying their businesses and becoming almost more like lifestyle brands and not just restaurants in some way and offering groceries or virtual classes or merchandise or meal kits or whatever it is that they did, these are real revenue streams that are pretty high margin. I do think that restaurants can like emerge as stronger businesses on the other side of this as they embrace and adopt these different ways of running their business.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Again, I don't think it's for every restaurant. I think we all read that, it was amazing, the prune one. That was just so heartbreaking. You can choose to have a restaurant that is a certain way or you can choose to have it a different way. Both of those are great ways to run a business. I think that there's this opportunity for restaurants to really go beyond what they've been doing and I do think the effects are going to be really positive.
Kerry Diamond:
Back to the money part. Again, you, when was it, October, raised $20.8 million as part of your VC, what was the intention with that round of fundraising? What are you hoping to do next with BentoBox?
Krystle Mobayeni:
A big part of it was growing our team. I've been really focused on building an executive team. I think we have like a huge opportunity ahead of us. We have had an amazing team of people that are just working really hard and throwing it out on the go, including myself. Since we raised that round, we've been focused on bringing in some experience to help us in this new phase of growth.
Krystle Mobayeni:
Honestly, what that does is, it allows us and me to focus on the areas that I like focusing on most. That's been a big part of it. And then, on the product side, I think that there's this huge opportunity right now, as digital payments and digital commerce has become a bigger part of restaurants, to really think of that more holistically. What I mean by that is that, an online payment and an on-premise payment shouldn't be two different things. One shouldn't be a swipe while another one is not.
Krystle Mobayeni:
We're really thinking about, how do we bring those two things together and how do we restaurants in that, have a more complete idea of who their guest or their diner is because you have a relationship with them online and offline? It's just much more deep and fulfilling and you can have a bigger impact in their lives than just when they're sitting at the restaurant.
Kerry Diamond:
As BentoBox grows, how do you avoid becoming a brand that restaurants don't feel like they have a partnership with anymore? If you look at what's happened with these third-party delivery companies or Yelp, they are not viewed as entities that are looking to help restaurants, more that are preying on their vulnerabilities and their tech inabilities. What are you doing to make sure BentoBox doesn't fall into that wonder?
Krystle Mobayeni:
For us, it's really simple. All of those businesses, I think the thing that they have in common is that they have businesses like restaurants as their customers and they have consumers as their customers and they have their own brand as well. BentoBox, the customer is always the restaurant.
Krystle Mobayeni:
No matter what, there's never going to be a BentoBox marketplace or a BentoBox brand. The BentoBox brand is invisible in my opinion, it's only there to serve the restaurants brand, to bolster the restaurant brand. That just aligns goals so much easier. It's like push and pull between who the business is actually serving. I think that's just the one defining thing that goes wrong when you think about all of these third parties.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you so much to Krystle Mobayeni for joining me. If you'd like to learn more about BentoBox, visit getbento.com. Right after the break, I will be back with Julia Joseph of Maple Hill Creamery. I am very excited to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll really enjoy. It's called Schmaltzy. It's a storytelling podcast about food, identity and everything in between from our friends at the Jewish Food Society.
Kerry Diamond:
Each episode features a personal story told by a celebrity chef, a grandmother, a cookbook author or entrepreneur followed by a wonderful conversation with the storyteller and host, Amanda Dell. Schmaltzy has featured some of our favorite folks, including Zoe Kanan, Liz Alpern and Umber Ahmad. This week, cookbook author, Adeena Sussman, shares her story about growing up in Palo Alto, California, with an unusual addition in her family's garage, a Kosher cheese shop.
Kerry Diamond:
Silicon valley has seen a lot of startups founded in garages but nothing like this one. What I love about Schmaltzy is how it illustrates the unique power of storytelling to unite us even when we are far apart. You can find Schmaltzy wherever you get your podcasts. And, as promised, here's a clip from Adeena's episode.
Adeena Sussman:
And then, there were those Chuck E cheese birthday parties of my youth, which for me were pure sheer torture. While everybody else was eating this delicious smelling and looking pizza, I had a different menu for the party. It was the tuna on wheat that my mom had prepared for me and wrapped in a little plastic sandwich baggie.
Adeena Sussman:
I think I even knew back then that I didn't want to separate myself from the world when it came to food. I really wanted to connect with people and explore one bite at a time. Now, a lot of the differences that my family had centered around food and around Kosher cheese, for some reason, we didn't eat unKosher cheese because it contained animal rabid. The few Orthodox Jews in Palo Alto and those around Northern California really wanted this product but it was something that they had a really hard time getting their hands on.
Adeena Sussman:
So, my dad somehow became a bicoastal pack mule. Every time he would go to New York on a business trip, he would load up his giant leather suitcase with Kosher cheese and he'd drag it all the way across the country. Mind you, this was long before the days of roller bag suitcases. One day in the airport, disaster struck.
Adeena Sussman:
My dad was pulling the luggage off of the carousel and the entire suitcase busted open on the floor of San Francisco International Airport. Cheese went tumbling everywhere and the DEA agents came right over to my dad. They were convinced that there was something far more nefarious in that suitcase than cheese. My dad showed up at home later that night, he looked at my mom, he threw the suitcase on the floor and he said, "That's it, Stephie, I'm done, no more schlepping."
Kerry Diamond:
Would you like to hear the rest? Of course, you would. You can catch the entire Schmaltzy episode with Edeena wherever you get your podcasts or at jewishfoodsociety.org/podcasts. Now, here's my interview with Julia Joseph, one of the founders of Maple Hill Creamery, the 100% grass-fed organic dairy that has grown from one farm on the verge of collapse to more than 150 small family farms.
Kerry Diamond:
Maple Hill Creamery is committed to regenerative agriculture and doing right by their customers, their farmers, their cows and the environment. We'll hear how the team weathered the pandemic and the increased demand for milk and have they stepped in with product donations to help those in need, including some friends of Cherry Bombe. You might not think cows when you think startups, but you will soon enjoy my interview with Julia Joseph. Let's start with just what's going on right now. How has the past year been with the pandemic?
Julia Joseph:
It's been trying for all of us, but we're a dairy brand and we are staple in homes, people's refrigerators or grocery lists. We were coming out okay at the end, but we also have a responsibility to help others during this trying time. Right off the bat, as soon as the epicenter of the pandemic hit, which is in our area, New York City and Westchester, we worked with food banks and Feed America to do donations. Tractor trailers of our product every week went down. I think we've donated over 100 tons for sure of dairy at this point and we continue to do so. That's a responsibility we have as brands.
Kerry Diamond:
You very kindly donated to the Food and Finance High School and the Food Education Fund in the spring so thank you for doing that.
Julia Joseph:
We were happy to do it. It's such a great school and program so thank you for asking and bringing it to our attention.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us what your job is. You wear many hats at Maple Hill, tell us what you do officially.
Julia Joseph:
In the beginning, we did it all. All of us, we wore the hats of accounting, cleaning toilets, doing marketing, putting fences up, across the board. But, the last couple of years, we've been in business 11 years, the last three, four years, I've been able to really focus on what I love to do within the company. I'm the head of creative.
Julia Joseph:
What you see on shelf is my baby. I'm really proud of our packaging, I'm really proud of our brand voice and tone. I'm also the spokeswoman more public-facing for our company. I believe in what our pillars are at Maple Hill, and I live that. I make my choices around the pillars that we built with Maple Hill, which is transparent, traceable, sustainable, regenerative, humane to animals, living healthy, making the right food choices, low sugar. These are all things that I live every single day.
Kerry Diamond:
When everything started to go down back in March of 2020, how did you react as a company?
Julia Joseph:
Well, we all paused just like everyone paused. There were so many unknowns. We really weren't sure what was going to happen. We, of course, were concerned for our farmers. They are always number one. We, of course, were concerned about what's going to happen to the economy during all of this, the sales. Like I said, we were very fortunate. We offer a really great high-quality product and this is what people wanted. They want it to feel good about what they were buying during this pandemic.
Julia Joseph:
There were so many limitations so they're making choices. They made a choice to buy the best quality milk you can get and that's Maple Hill. So we were really fortunate there. Our company functions, at the company level, for our office, we were already 50% remote and then 50% in office. So there wasn't much of-
Kerry Diamond:
That was prior to the pandemic?
Julia Joseph:
Yeah. So there wasn't much of a blip. We all knew how to function through email and some Zoom. Zoom, obviously, is widely used as it is now.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us about the history of Maple Hill. How did this company even come about?
Julia Joseph:
Well, Tim and Laura, Tim's my brother, Laura is my sister-in-law, they purchased a conventional farm in State of New York, Western New York. They had never farmed before but Tim was definitely born in the wrong era. He was working for a larger corporation and he was a director there. He said, "I really just want to do something different." So we did both at the same time.
Julia Joseph:
It was definitely a learning curve. He had never farmed, we had a homestead kind of farm. We lived on 20 acres. We had horses, chickens, donkeys, but not one cow so we had no experience. Tim and Laura purchased the farm. They knew they wanted to transition to organic so they started transitioning to organic. When you purchase a farm, there's so much financial burden on top of your shoulders. Doesn't matter, any farm, you have the financial burden.
Julia Joseph:
So they had that going and then they wanted to transition to organic, which was what they wanted to do but then that added more heavyweight onto their shoulders financially. Because, when you transition, there's a transition period for your price of milk so you're doing a higher input costs, which is corn and grain. At that time, they were feeding corn and grain because that's what everyone told them to do.
Julia Joseph:
It was like unheard of to be the cows grass ever. They ended up making that transition and it got worse. It was just so heavy to feed their cows corn and grain that was organic. They already had layers and then they added another layer. So they knew they wanted to go to grass-fed organic at one point, but it was by default, they couldn't afford the corn and grain bill. They had enough acreage to farm all of their cows grass-fed organic.
Julia Joseph:
Once they made that transition, first, there was no market for that milk whatsoever, but they still made that transition because they wanted to survive. They wanted to feed their cows and be able to keep their farm. Once they made the transition, they realized how much healthier their cows were and how much healthier their land was. It was like, they knew that these were the benefits but then they actually witnessed it. That happened.
Julia Joseph:
And then, we all know what happened in 2008, the bubble burst. That means, the milk prices dropped even more and milk prices were not great. Then, Tim was thinking of a more creative way to get the revenue back so he ended up saying because it was easy, "Let's create a yogurt and sell it on farm stand. The farm stand was on part of the farm. During that time, about three months in of starting that, I started going up and helping him. Every weekends, I would drive three hours from New Jersey and then three hours back.
Kerry Diamond:
Tell us what you were doing at the time. You were not involved in farming, you weren't a farmer, you didn't make products, none of that?
Julia Joseph:
No. I was a bit of a country girl. Because, if you think of New Jersey, you don't think there's beautiful rolling hills or anything, but it's a beautiful area where I grew up. I was fortunate to grow up on a small hobby farm and really enjoy the outdoors, but I had no clue about a dairy farm. I was running my dad's businesses down in New Jersey for about 16 years, which was commercial building, real estate.
Julia Joseph:
I ran his business for 16 years of custom framing and a high-end art gallery, not even close to where I landed. Again, I wasn't planning on landing up at Maple Hill at all. I was able to take three days weekends and go up and help. Tim and Laura at the time had four kids, now they have five, so you can imagine the complete insanity that happens on a farm plus five kids and then running a creamery and then the farm.
Julia Joseph:
So, I ended up at Maple Hill after three months. It was the same month that my grandma had passed away. It was in 2009. I remember I was in the church in Brooklyn. That's where she was born and raised so we had her funeral there. I was in the church and my spouse at the time, Pete, was on one side and Tim was on the other, my brother and I had this urgency and clarity and calmness come over me and anxiety all at the same time. I knew at that time, we had to help Tim.
Julia Joseph:
It was falling apart. There weren't enough hands, there wasn't enough money, it was a mess. It's not that they made it a mess, it's just farming in general and startups are crazy. At the church, I thought to myself, we need to make a change. I waited. In the evening, when we were done through the day, I talked to Pete and I said, "Pete, I think we should go up and help Tim." And he said without a skip, "Okay."
Julia Joseph:
This is very rare for me because I don't like change. I am a Virgo through systems. I like consistency. The fact that I was able to make that choice and a huge leap from one life to another, a life that is totally extreme opposite of what I was used to, it said something. There was something else happening there spiritually. I feel like it was my grandma basically saying with her Brooklyn accent, "You've got to help you brother. You can't let him fall." I really truly feel like she had something to do with it.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow.
Julia Joseph:
We ended up going up. I wrapped up our life. We sold everything. Pete went up for a year without me. I'd go up every weekend still and help and work and then I made the full move. And Again, let's backtrack, we did not think that we were going up to build a brand like we have now.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow. It's amazing. But things got worse before they got better, right?
Julia Joseph:
Yeah. It was bad when we got up there, financial, really bad. Just day-to-day, two buyers that would just be starving and we had to just put them out. It was really tough. Every single day was a challenge. I look back on how we got where we're at today and I feel like I've blocked a lot of it out, but when I sit down and talk with you or anybody else and I go through the memories, I'm like, "Oh my God, how did we do this?"
Julia Joseph:
You're managing the farm. In the beginning, we did it all. We didn't have a staff like we have now or a company that we have now. We would be milking and then we would have to make the products after we're done milking. And then, cows get out, you got to chase the cows. And then, there was accounting and marketing that was neglected so I took that on. And then, there was just cleaning and then making dinners, mowing the lawn. It was just insane.
Kerry Diamond:
None of you came from a product background so how did you even know to start a brand, to figure out the marketing, the product design, product development, all of that? You're shaking your head.
Julia Joseph:
None of us had any idea. There was no business plan either in the beginning of this. It was just supposed to be a small farm stand and then it started going regionally. And then, we started to get into New York City and then that rolled everything out and kept us going. So it threw us under a heavy financial burden because we were growing so fast. But that was a learning curve right there.
Julia Joseph:
You think when you're growing, you would grow 100%, 200%, 300%. Each year, it was insane. But you don't realize you have no cash when that happens. There was so much that we had to learn just blindly going through from figuring out how to do UPC codes, from building a website to federal regulation for dairy and distributing in different regions. You name it, it was all new and we all did it together. We all just landed where we were supposed to be, our strength and weaknesses. We seemed all bond together and get through each day.
Kerry Diamond:
Why didn't anyone give up?
Julia Joseph:
There was no way we were going to give up because it wasn't just our family that was relying on this. Actually, Tim and Laura, it wasn't just for them. After two years, we ended up adding more farms. They were small family farms and there were 100% grass-fed organic. They were just as crazy as we were to do grass-fed organic in a conventional world. So they took a risk and they jumped off the milk truck, which is crazy to do for a startup, but they knew we had the same core beliefs. It wasn't just us. If we gave up and we failed, we had three, four years in. We had 100 small family farms so we would've been giving up on them. So there was no way that was going to happen. No way.
Kerry Diamond:
What was the turning point, Julia?
Julia Joseph:
There were a bunch of turning points. There were a bunch of pivotal moments. I distinctly remember one. It was way in the beginning, it was a year after we had joined Maple Hill. It happened in Brooklyn again, which is bizarre. It was under the Brooklyn Bridge and there was a Greenmarket that was just a seasonal Greenmarket once a month, September to December. Tim was ready to lose the farm. This was before we had a bunch of farms. We had two local farms with us, two or three, and we were like, this is it, we've got to do this. If we do, this is like we did it to try to save the creamery and save the farm.
Julia Joseph:
So we went down, we pulled as much money as we could. Our two sisters who had nothing to do with the business, came and helped us. We ended up getting our first distributor under the Brooklyn Bridge, and that got us into New York City, into Park Slope, all the great co-ops. That really set the stage for Maple Hill and where we were going to go.
Julia Joseph:
It just snowballed from there. Just being on New York City shelves got us into larger distribution regions. So we then went to Midwest and then, it was crazy, but we ended up going to California because there was a distributor that said, "We can do this for you." And then we ended up closing into the center eventually and now we're national.
Kerry Diamond:
Wow. Did you have to raise money at any point?
Julia Joseph:
Yes. Just like any startup, there's a bunch of series and you go through investors. It's a tough process for sure. But, in order to keep growing, like I mentioned, we were growing so fast, there was no cash, nothing, but we somehow did it. I don't think we'd have gotten where we're at today if there wasn't an influx of funds.
Kerry Diamond:
Not only all of this, but you're really betting so heavily on grass-fed because, I enjoy going to supermarkets and looking at product both personally and professionally and I didn't see other grass-fed brands. You were it in New York.
Julia Joseph:
Maple Hill created the category really.
Kerry Diamond:
For milk, you created the category?
Julia Joseph:
We created the category, the price point for farmers to get paid what they deserve for their grass-fed organic farming above organic pricing. So we created that nationwide, which is pretty crazy. Also, for consumers, when we 2009 came out, it was unheard of. Grass-fed beef was the buzzword and starting to get more understood and more in the-
Kerry Diamond:
I think my first exposure was to grass-fed beef and then Kerrygold, who you know we work with them a lot, and their grass-fed butter. And then, I hadn't seen another grass-fed yogurt or milk brand until I started to notice you on the shelves.
Julia Joseph:
We definitely were the disruptors.
Kerry Diamond:
Now, I was somewhere outside New York, we don't have to name names, but I saw another milk company that was selling grass-fed milk and their product, the packaging was such a rip off of your packaging. I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe this." Now, you have to deal with competition.
Julia Joseph:
Yeah. We take it as a compliment. The copycat, we'll take it as a compliment. But it's okay, we want to have more options out there that are grass-fed organic because, consumers will understand it more when you're not just the one product on the shelf.
Kerry Diamond:
The competition is good because it brings more understanding of what grass-fed is, but all milk brands should be grass-fed.
Julia Joseph:
Correct.
Kerry Diamond:
For the environment, for people's health, all of that.
Julia Joseph:
They should, absolutely. I hope that we can get there someday absolutely, but it's going to take a lot of time. Like I mentioned earlier, our soils are done. There's not enough healthy soil. Just farming in general is just, again, so financially heavy. Conventional farming and industrialized farming, these farmers can't make a transition like that. First, they don't have the lands because their farms have been in the family for probably centuries.
Julia Joseph:
So they don't have the land to be a grass-fed organic farm. If they do, the transition is so painful financially that they may not survive it. That goes back to, maybe we need to talk about this more with agricultural legislation because, not everybody is interested in this but, as a whole, if we want to save our environment and bring our soils back to life, we have to offer something to these farmers to fill the gap in their transition or they're not going to make it.
Julia Joseph:
So what we did is, when there was a transition from organic to grass-fed, we filled that gap for our farmers by giving them a higher price point so they can survive to that two-year mark so that their cows can transition to the lands. Even their fence posts, everything has to transition to organic and then grass-fed. We tried to do that on a small scale within our company, but this is a much bigger discussion across the whole agricultural industry.
Julia Joseph:
When we talk about other farms and conventional industrialized farming, I always like to say, a lot of these farmers didn't have a choice. So we're not attacking the farmers, it's the practice of the farming. I want to make that very clear because we know how hard farming can be. No matter what practice you're in, it's very hard.
Julia Joseph:
So, what we need to do is, we need to support one another farm to farm and help figure out how we can make this shift for other farmers who may want to make that shift. It's really important just to bring that to the forefront. That's not just on us, it's on, like I mentioned, legislation and government too.
Kerry Diamond:
And how consumers spend their dollars. I think that has been such a proponent of change on so many levels. When you go to the supermarket, do your homework and try to buy these brands that are doing better and support your local farmers markets. That's where Maple Hills started out. I think that might've been the first place I saw you, was at the Union Square Farmers Market. Were you there?
Julia Joseph:
What year was that because we had a distributor-?
Kerry Diamond:
Oh gosh, when you had the old packaging.
Julia Joseph:
Really, old. I think we had a distributor who would bring it down for us.
Kerry Diamond:
Because, or maybe I saw it somewhere else, but I distinctly remember the old yogurt packaging.
Julia Joseph:
Great. There's no way we could've gotten it together to actually go every weekend [inaudible 00:51:14]. We could only do that one market.
Kerry Diamond:
I must have seen it somewhere else, but anyway. To everybody listening, I know we have a wonderful audience and they really do think about things like this, but be mindful when you go to the supermarket and support your farmers at your farmers markets however you can.
Julia Joseph:
Absolutely.
Kerry Diamond:
It's so important. Julia, I guess I just have one more question. When you look at how different your life is today and what it was a decade or two ago, what goes through your mind? You've had such a journey.
Julia Joseph:
I can't imagine where I was 12 years or it's around 11 years. I never thought I'd be where I'm at today, co-founding a national dairy brand and being able to feel really proud. It's very rewarding to have a company like this. I'm not just the co-founder of Maple Hill, but I also I'm a certified Karate's teacher. During that time, when I found a moment, two or three years ago, I was able to get certified. So I get to live a very rewarding life and I feel very fortunate about that.
Julia Joseph:
We offer an amazing product. We help farmers every day. That's so rewarding. That's number one. And then, I get to teach at a smaller scale and help people turn their head an extra inch or build their core up and feel really good about it and just have better mobility. Everything that I've come to at this point, I feel so fortunate.
Kerry Diamond:
That's it for today's show. Thank you so much to Julia Joseph of Maple Hill Creamery for sharing her story and for making such beautiful products like my favorite, their grass-fed organic Greek yogurt. It's good stuff. Look for Maple Hill products at Whole Foods market. You can learn more at maplehill.com.
Kerry Diamond:
Thank you also to Krystle Mobayeni and special thanks to today's partner, Schmaltzy, the podcast from the Jewish Food Society. Radio Cherry Bombe is produced by Cherry Bombe Media. Today's show was engineered and edited by Jenna Sadhu. Jenna, you are the Bombe. You know who else is the Bombe, you are. Thank you for listening.
Harry from When Harry Met Sally:
I'll have what she's having.