Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to Ina Insights, where prominent leaders and influencers shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector discuss topics that are critical for executives, boards and investors. Ina Insights is brought to you by Ina AI, a firm focused on working with industrial companies to make them unrivaled. Segment of one leaders to learn more about Ina Aihdev, please visit our website at www. Dot Ina DoT AI.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Good morning and welcome to our INA Insights podcast where today our focus will be on a consumer tech company. We have with us Brett Goodson, who is the CEO of almond Cow. Almond Cow launched in 2016 with a collection of appliances that produce plant based milk in less than a minute, as well as single serve ingredients.
Almond Cow has been featured on Forbes, food network and Business Insider, to name a few. And so Brett started almond cow to reduce the amount of plastic that households consume. From reducing store bought plastic milk carton waste to offering biodegradable packaging, his products are able to transform any nut, seed or grain into plant based milk for any additives, flavors and gum.
So Brett, welcome to our podcast. We are super excited to have you and are looking forward to talking about your journey as a founder and CEO. So to start us out, for those not familiar, could you explain what almond cow does?
[00:01:46] Speaker C: Sure. Well, happy to be here. I guess the simple answer is that almond cow is an end to end solution of how you can make plant based milk at home or in any environment as conveniently as you would be buying it. Almond cow itself is a machine that processes plant based ingredients into a colloid, which is colloquially called a milk, and the end to end piece of that being the ingredients that go into it and where you store it when you're done. So end to end every aspect of it, but the machine itself is processing at a high speed, turning those ingredients into a milk at very high speed. That's, that's almond cow, briefly.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Great. Yeah, thank you. And it really sounds like almond cow is focused on revolutionizing the way consumers consume milk. Can you delve into the benefits of the homemade plant based milk compared to store bought alternatives and how almond cow enhances the consumer experience?
[00:02:52] Speaker C: Absolutely. So, essentially, the milk paradigm for most of most of the world is milk comes from a cow. And because it comes from a cow, it has certain supply chain details that are inherent with that system, where if it comes from a cow, then it has to be refrigerated, then it has to be refrigerated cold chain, whole way, all the way to your house. Every single step of the way has to be refrigerated, paradigm shifted with the advent of plant based milk, and because it's plant based milk, well, technically not all aspects of that have to be refrigerated. What almond cow does is steps in and says, wait a second, what about the store to the end consumer?
Is that even necessary anymore? And is this whole concept of our milk supply chain infrastructure actually necessary? Well, to be honest, no, not really. And there's an example that already predates us. In China, soy milk is enormously popular and is a situation where for decades people have been making plant based milk at home. It just happens to be soy milk. And with the same kind of shift towards plant based milk here in this country, the same truths are now our own. And basically, you can make plant based milk at home, and you do not need the rest of the supply chain to be refrigerated or complicated or anything else. If you're talking about plant based milk, almond cow lets you make that milk on site, at home, on your terms, any day of the week, any time of the day. And that's sort of the beauty of the whole thing, is that what I just described requires no plastic, literally none. And you can eliminate effectively all packaging waste. If you're making at home the milk that you plan to consume, you're making the right amount, you're making the milk that you choose with the right ingredients, you're storing it in something that is reusable, and the ingredients you choose are as sustainable as you want them to be.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a really great point. It seems like sustainability is a really key aspect of almond Cow's mission. So how does your company approach sustainability and what impact do you hope to make in the consumer industry?
[00:05:16] Speaker C: Yeah, we're pretty anti waste, I'd say it's something that from the beginning, I mean, in a previous life, I was an automotive engineer working on hybrid vehicle batteries. And a big detail in the automotive field is the concept of the Toyota production system. Where is waste? Get rid of waste. Get rid of waste. Get rid of waste. Taking the same methodology to milk and the ecosystem surrounding it. Get rid of waste. That's waste and packaging. Like, oh, is there a plastic bag that comes with this machine that is not adding additional value to a customer? Well, how about we turn into a bag that's actually useful? So essentially, you see this reflected in terms of something as basic as the packaging. Our machine comes in. Our machine is packed in a reusable bag that is actually worth $10 if you sell it or buy it on the market. It's a nice bag. It's just genuinely a nice bag, by the way. It obstructs dust from covering the machine, but there's a no waste. That's the whole point. And every single aspect of the packaging that technically has to be discarded in some way, it's recyclable. So whatever it is, it's recyclable or it's zero waste. And that is a pretty simple philosophy to follow. It requires some level of conviction to make sure that's the case the whole way through. But throughout the entire customer experience, it's get rid of waste. And if there is something that's not providing some benefit to the customer, find a way to get rid of it.
[00:06:57] Speaker B: Absolutely. I love that philosophy. And looking forward, how do you see the plant based movement evolving in coming years? And where does almond cow fit into this landscape?
[00:07:09] Speaker C: Well, I think almond cow plays a critical role, actually, given that we're the first brand to open the space far beyond soy milk in the western world. At least, I think part of it is making the ability to make plant based milk incredibly accessible and open the doors to any kind of milk. So we're empowering people to make milk on their terms, at home, on their timetable. And by doing so, we've also knocked down one additional barrier, and that is the concept of monoculture milks. People talk about almond milk, people talk about oat milk. These are one word to describe a milk. There's no reason why a milk has to be one thing. There's literally no reason. And in fact, it actually probably doesn't work as well as making a blend. So you'll find that our most popular of our single serve varieties is actually coconut cashew, and dates for sweetness. So it's coconut shreds, it's cashew pieces, and it's date pieces as well. Those three together are more delicious than pretty much, I don't know, most other single milks out there. While plenty of people like almond milk, it's pretty well known thing.
Almond milk might taste a little bit better with cacao in it, depending on who you are. But, I mean, I will say, at least for me, cacao in almond milk is definitely better. Combinations is the next frontier. And if you start opening that door, you say, well, okay, what about functional milks where you add in, perhaps chaga like chaga mushroom powder or protein powder, you kind of allow milk to be a delivery vehicle for, well, whatever your nutritional makeup should be. And that's your choice. Your nutritionist may help you with it, but it's your choice. It could be vitamins. There are certain kinds of milk. Pumpkin seed is a great example, very, very high in copper. Maybe you need more copper for some reason. Some. Some people do. I don't know the exact conditions, but I'd have to say that you can use the milk as a vessel for your own health. Customizing it. So customization is the frontier. Long winded answer, but that's the basic thing. Milk personalized to you?
[00:09:37] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds great, how personalized it is. And knowing that consumer trends and healthy habits and wanting to curate to individuals makes a lot of sense for where it's heading. I did want to switch gears a little bit and focus on your journey to date. So tell us a bit more about your background and why and how you started the company.
[00:09:58] Speaker C: Sure. So I mentioned a little bit briefly earlier that I originally started my career as a product developer in automotive space. Worked on hybrid vehicle batteries, essentially adapting a chemistry of battery towards hybrid cars that really hadn't been done before. Sort of an interesting field, working to commercialize something that was poorly understood and adapting it to something else. Fast forward a few years, start almond cow, following an MBA at Georgia Tech and really diving into, well, sustainability and where that fits the need for new products and health foods in general. I'm very conscious of what I'm consuming food wise, and really just deeply tied to agricultural concerns. I grew up on a farm and have been familiar with food and where it's produced my entire life and really very focused on whatever we can do to improve that ecosystem. And it happens that plant based milk is a great opportunity for many reasons. That's sort of where the concept came from and started that back in 2016. Myself and a colleague, we launched it together as a Kickstarter. It was enormously successful without a lot of marketing behind it, and kind of continued to drive the company since then. To be essentially the harbinger of the homemade plant based milk space.
[00:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds like a good career journey and quite the pivot from the automotive space, but makes a lot of sense given you want to try new challenges and how you kind of tie those two experiences together. And I feel like it must have been difficult starting your own company. So what challenges did you face in the early stages of building Alman cow and how did you overcome them?
[00:11:51] Speaker C: Well, there's plenty of challenges getting kicked off. I think any entrepreneur would say that first challenge is product market fit. By launching on Kickstarter without any additional advertising support, it was very clear we have that. So that being sort of the North Star, now that we have product market Fitzhen what do we do to further improve that? And it's actually somewhat simple to develop a product roadmap for the concept because I myself, in developing the balm and cow machine, encountered plenty of problems just trying to do it. So one example is, where do I get the right ingredients to go into the machine? Okay, this was actually a pain point I experienced, and I promise you, every one of our customers will experience, if they're not buying from us, the ingredients. It's somewhat challenging to get the right kind of coconut shreds or the right kind of almonds. Like, there are differences. It's not obvious which works. And so that was an obvious next piece of the product roadmap. And then where does the milk go? I bought probably 15 different kinds of glass vessels for a photo shoot at Ikea. And, like, none of them were great. They were all fine for certain things, but definitely not for milk. And so you kind of have a product roadmap almost immediately. So it's kind of a deep marketing involvement. I really just kind of dove in to the customer experience. I lived vegan for a week to better embody and understand the consumer experience. And just like all the potential pain points you might have just going through just kind of method marketing type approach to, you know, what customers experience. So that's the product roadmap that sort of speaks to all the problems to be solved. That gives you kind of the basics. Next question is, how do you get the product to customers?
That, fortunately, was somewhat easy. Shipping in containers and shipping them out Atlanta, it's not the hardest thing in the world. So I would say logistics at first was a little bit challenging just to bring in containers and stuff, but nothing that special had some help there. I think it's really just sourcing these ingredients and sourcing the other things while continuing to improve the product and market the product. The phenomenon of direct consumer marketing has enabled a lot of this to help us understand consumer fit as well as just make sure that we're saying the right things. I mean, I guess to better understand customer pain points. After the initial sale, we did in person events for a while to really see what kinds of things people are saying and how to better tune marketing. But a lot of it was just conversations with customers are the root of most solutions.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: It seems like you're really able to innovate and iterate, and I think that it's a great experience. So for other entrepreneurs out there, as CEO of Almond Cow, how did you navigate the complexities of leadership and decision making, especially within a fast paced and competitive industry?
[00:15:12] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I think certainly clear allocations of roles and responsibilities. I mean, I think probably any business book would say that. But that level of clarity of direction for team members is very important, and certainly for even the customer journey on the marketing funnel. It's just understanding what the product is. And every piece of that clarity does so much for making business easier to run. Just clarity at all times, if possible.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense. And kind of switching a little bit into the sustainability piece. Want to spend a little bit more time on that. In what ways do you see technology driving innovation and sustainability in the food industry? And how does almond cow embrace these advancements?
[00:16:07] Speaker C: Yeah, well, in terms of technology for this space, this is a very new space, technologically speaking. Milkmaking has certainly been around for a while. There's large factories that do this. The trick is that factories exist with very controlled infrastructure. All the inputs are known, and then you control it in a controlled environment and you produce something.
We're not that way at all, because, hey, this is somebody's house, and we don't know what kind of water they're going to have. Like, maybe it's hard water, maybe it's soft water, by the way, that matters, and also the ingredients they're using. So what we try to do, by sourcing our ingredients and basically the machine, try to eliminate every potential variable as much as possible along the way. So we source almonds partially because we know they're going to work better than just any almonds and things like that. Technologically speaking, this is a wet emulsification process, not well developed. There is not a lot of literature on it. We built our own CFD model of how our blade works underwater. It took years to develop this. It is quite, quite a complex, fluid model of how water flows at very, very high speeds and what happens in a contained environment. So most of the technology that I'm referring to is really a combination of mechanical and fluid, fluid science, but it connects to food, food science at the same time, because these are protein chains. Like, how long is the average protein chain? What happens? There's a lot of empirical testing that goes on as a result of it. Where technology comes in is probably the marketing stack that goes behind it, attribution, everything else there, like tons of potential wins for finding consumers, reaching consumers in new ways. There's kind of endless ways to look at that. But effectively, the marketing side of things is probably the more easily accessible piece of how you reach a customer today can be modeled in many different ways. There's just endless social platforms out there that finding a way to track those in a coherent single customer journey is probably where technology is most useful.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: And that's a great segue. You really piqued my interest with the consumer and marketing side. So can you discuss the role of consumer education and awareness in promoting sustainable consumption habits and how almond cow contributes to this effort?
[00:18:55] Speaker C: The fun thing about this business is that we are very interested in what the machine is capable of and our customers are as well. And we have an endless list of what they're searching for, what they don't find, and that's our content development list. So anything we can do to make customer journey easier, customer use case easier, that's really what we invest in. Whether it's detailed tips and explainers how to do this, what can you do in kind of interesting scenarios like let's say you're trying to make leftover pulp into certain kinds of ingredients or certain kinds of recipes.
All of these things are very possible to develop as content pieces and effectively. If it makes our customers lives easier in some way or enables the answer to a question, that's what we work on. That's sort of the philosophy is that every aspect of the website and our content is an answer to a customer question in some way.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense and just wanted to close it out kind of on that theme. How can businesses like Almonkal Inspire and empower other companies to integrate sustainability into their core values and practices?
[00:20:18] Speaker C: I think it's perhaps setting a standard, perhaps that this is just something that is done now. Like we don't have a plastic bag as part of the machine. That's quite intentional. And if enough companies are doing that, then suddenly it looks quite unusual. When you have a plastic bag that says not child safe, don't put it on your head, that kind of stuff. I mean, that seems normal, but it's only normal because everyone's doing it. And if more people aren't doing it, then suddenly they're perspective becomes the unusual one. So I think slowly moving in the direction of better materials, better packaging, better attention to detail and sustainability is something that every brick in the wall eventually begins to build the next step.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that makes sense. And in some areas, the grocery stores were already headed away from plastic. And I excited to see, you know, where else this can take us and what other opportunities there are. So Brett, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights.
[00:21:29] Speaker C: Absolutely happy to be here.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to INa insights. Please visit Ina AI for more podcasts, publications and events on developments shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector.
