Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Yousuf.

Yousuf Ahmed:
Thanks for having me, Fabian.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I am so excited to have you. This is going to be a really interesting conversation. So you are in the business of supplying us with plant-based and protein packed upcycled crunch puffs that taste like summer camp and save the world. This of course comes straight from your website. I didn’t just come up with that. You launched in January, so B–Sides, it’s just a puppy right now. Tell us how you came up with it. Why were you convinced to take this particular idea of usually many I’m sure, that are floating around in everyone’s head all the way to production in a space as cutthroat and competitive as CPG?

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, so we did launch this line of products under this brand in January, but I’ve been working on this problem of upcycling for four years now. I launched kind of the basic concept in 2021, so I’ll work backwards on your question. I come from a pretty unconventional mix of industries that are very cutthroat. So I worked both in the music business and as a private banker at Goldman Sachs. I am kind of no stranger to having to have sharp elbows and a keen sense of keeping what’s most important kind of top of mind. A lot of people that I’ve worked with don’t have time for fluff, and neither did I really wanted to. When I left the world of finance, I wanted to do something totally different, and I in particular wanted to solve this problem of upcycling, which is essentially taking the byproducts from food manufacturing and putting them back into the consumer food system. So think about the leftover oats from making oat milk. What do companies do with those leftovers and how can we potentially valorize those ingredients, repackage them and serve them in a way a consumer might enjoy? That was the genesis of this whole idea,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And this came up very much on a consumer level that you just realized, wait, what is actually happening there? From there on, then you just got onto a crazy research trip, I assume, and at some point you realize that, hey, I can actually use this, upcycle it, but then the big question is what do you upcycle it to? What shall it become? Right? And that’s most probably the tougher part of the journey is what kind of product will this become and where and how do I actually, I don’t even say do you do SA manufacturer, do you say create or do you say, how do you create this product at that point? I think for a lot of people, this is something that’s a really weird gray zone because if you want to create a product, you understand, you hire a product designer and then you find factories and then off you go with food. There are all these nuances of, and all these roadblocks being thrown at you, I’m sure.

Yousuf Ahmed:
Oh, yeah. And I think the pitfall that a lot of founders in food brands and CPG, the pitfall that they find themselves in is they’ll take a specific ingredient that they want to kind of hold up and highlight as the key driver of whatever product they’re making and they force that ingredient into a product that’s not appropriate. So a good example for this, when I started this whole research adventure back in 2021, I was working with what’s known as spent grains, so the leftover grains from brewing beer. And when you think about beer in context, a lot of times it’s salty, savory snacks or you want something like a pizza. But in reality, spent grain is predominantly malted barley and malted barley has a very specific flavor that is best geared towards confections. So if I tried to commercialize a salty savory snack using malted barley, I would go nowhere very fast. And to your point about trying to figure out the best use from a culinary perspective of, so I’m using upcycled oat milk flour, I also use upcycled corn flour. I knew kind of directionally where I wanted to go in terms of macros and form and things like that, but then it was just a matter of, I went through probably over a hundred different formulations to get to the right taste and texture of the Crunch Puffs. So yeah, it was a long journey.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s really awesome. And I mean, the idea that Crunch Puffs equals, well, I don’t want to see any brand names, but one specific brand name and it usually equals really not healthy, but also very addictive. It’s such a cool place to go and disrupt with something that should taste somewhat similar in the way that it becomes addictive and fun and you actually want to eat it, but on the other hand, it completely goes against what crunch Puff stood for so long. So super interesting. How did you manage that from a messaging perspective in the beginning to make sure that people actually understand that this is good for you, but yet it is that fun snack that you should get addicted to?

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, so this is a delicate dance that, well, I’ve approached a not so delicate of a manner because I think a snack like this. So there are a lot of different vectors that you can market across. You’ve got the health vector, you’ve got the sustainability vector, you’ve got the nostalgia, deliciousness vector. And those three in particular are how I did this, what I’m calling a soft launch. So as you mentioned, we launched this product in January. I did kind of an omnichannel approach where I’m selling both online and through retail. And one of the advertising strategies that I had was, okay, we’ve got these three core components, deliciousness, sustainability and health. Let’s run ads on all three of those messages and see what comes back. What do people, what resonates with people and what’s more helpful is what’s actually not working. And if you had to guess, Fabian, what do you think out of those three attributes are the least kind of resonant when it comes to consumers opening their wallets and buying a snack they’ve never heard of? Is it health deliciousness or sustainability?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
All three are hard sell these days.

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yes, totally.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Sustainability I would say would be number one because it’s so hard to cut through and understand how deep that goes. And it’s such a buzzword

Yousuf Ahmed:
Even more than that. So you’re spot on, a hundred percent correct. Even more than that, in this snack category, people don’t view sustainability as a driver. Big snack is not this food waste behemoth the way that it exists in fast fashion,
If my whole core identity of the product formulation is around this sustainability effort, but I don’t advertise it at all. It’s kind of difficult to strike that balance. But I think over kind of iteration and learning and doing a lot of qualitative panels, quantitative panels, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, I’ve kind of honed in on the business case for upcycling. You get a lot of impact metrics from nutrition rescued and water saved and all these other things. But what really has kind of opened the floodgates in terms of, I’m fundraising right now, what started to bring a lot of people to the table is using upcycling as a production tailwind. So basically how do you make it such that your Crunch Puffs from an economic perspective are more advantageous than the next crunch puff producer to produce? And that took a lot of trial and error, figuring out a lot of false starts, but really relegating the sustainability aspect into a manufacturing process and putting it in the background with regards to how consumers view the brand has really opened a lot of doors that when I first started this journey, that was not the case.
I wanted this to be the most sustainable snack brand. I wanted sustainability to lead everything. And what I found is consumers are less noble than they think they are. Everybody’s noble until they get to the cash register.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly. That’s what we all learn. That’s kind of like all of those buzzwords and branding, and at some point they’ve been used too often, and then people are just immune to them and they’re not that interested anymore. But that being said, if you navigate the B–Sides website and then at some point further down the line you read about B–Sides is tracking to become the most sustainable snack company in the world, it intrigues you. It might not be number one, it might not be why I go back and buy the snack because I want to go back and buy the snack because I like the taste and I think that they’re doing something really cool by upcycling, but then the sustainability, the deeper layer, it’s kind of like in a brand pyramid that’s coming lower and lower and lower, but all of these different things that you do in the end make you stand out. But it’s not the number one reason of why people are going to buy the product.

Yousuf Ahmed:
And you speak with more founders than I do on a day-to-day basis. But if I had to guess, I think a lot of founders, particularly in sustainability, they start out their businesses, their ventures, wanting sustainability to be kind of the champion of the whole brand and realizing it’s a much more difficult, for all the reasons that you mentioned, it’s a crowded space. Consumers get hit over the head with all sorts of terminology that they don’t even know is real. And so if you view sustainability as a set of outcomes that you want to achieve, like reducing plastic, reducing carbon emissions, if you can achieve all those metrics without advertising it, then you do the same thing that you set out to do in the first place. Right. It’s you’re not advertising it as loudly as you would like to.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly. And I always think a brand journey is very much like a website journey. So if you come from the music world, so let’s say you buy a new kit, you buy a new Hi-Fi kit, you buy some sort of component for your stereo, you go to the website, you fall in love with the design, you fall in love with how it looks, and then all of the quotes from music magazines of how great it sounds, and you look at all the pictures and then you look at the price, and then 20 minutes later you arrive at the spec sheet that’s 50 pages long where it talks about inputs and outputs and this is how it works, but all of it needs to be there. All of it has a reason for being. And so I think that the sustainability story, what you learned very quickly, or maybe not so quickly, I don’t know, but what you learned is there are stories that are more B2B, B2C, direct to consumer, whatever yours is. The sustainability story is becoming more production story that is actually really good to tell investors of how you can have a legs up there to the competition versus maybe making that the number one story for consumers. But it could be the number seven story or number eight story. And I think you need all of these stories. The more stories you have, the deeper of a brand connection you create. In my humble opinion, that’s what

Yousuf Ahmed:
I think. I think you’re spot on. I think you run into the place where you run into trouble, particularly with consumers, is branding is about clarity, consistency, and emotional resonance. And so you have to kind of consistent, particularly in the snack category where it can be an impulse buy, it’s a low dollar purchase, it’s something that upcycling is not really familiar to the average consumer. And in fact, if you go around yelling, I took these leftover oats and made them into this delicious puff, the first thing people are going to say is, I don’t believe you. How could the leftover oats actually be delicious? And so we’ve done actually some social content where taking people walking off the street ask them that they like snacks, feed the mar snack, they have a super positive reaction. And then we tell them, what would you say if we told you this was made from the leftover oats from making oat milk? And they’re just completely, it just blows them mind. They’re like, yikes.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
What?

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Super, super interesting. Super interesting. Alright, well let’s move a little bit how it’s the brand side of things, even though we’ve been flirting with that topic, which is eminent. You cannot not talk about this on my podcast, but I’m a record collector, I’m a amusing enthusiast. I’m also building a product design company in the audio furniture world with my startup. So I have to ask you about the story behind the name, which I personally like quite a bit, not only for my personal reasons, but also strategically for your company. But tell us a little bit about how B–Sides came along.

Yousuf Ahmed:
So to your point about it being an homage to music, that’s spot on. My background is in music, kind of like my cultural upbringing in America was through the lens of music. And I originally, when I started this foray into upcycling a couple of years back, I basically did, what I tell people is I started a pilot brand called Mixtape, and the whole idea behind it was taking ingredients that people may or may not be familiar with, but serving them in a way that felt familiar or was quite unexpected, much the way that if you make a mix tape, it’s a love letter, it’s a collection of songs that people may or may not be familiar with, and I want to do that with food. And I ran into a ton of problems around copywriting, trademarks, brand. It was a complete nightmare. It was with a different product category that ultimately I ran into lots of different growing pains within CPG.
And so I wanted to keep this music ethos and I wanted to have something that your point about long-term expandability would be functional in that regard. And B–Sides works, it does a lot of duties here. So to your point about being a music enthusiast, a B-side, for those who don’t know, it’s basically when a band records an album, the album that gets put out into the world might have 12 to 15 songs. That band recorded between 15 and 20 songs. It’s just not all of them makes it onto that finished album. And oftentimes if the album’s a hit, they’ll release this limited edition release of these collection of songs that didn’t make it on to the original album. Those were called the B Sides. And as a guy who came up in recording studios and then worked as a business manager, so super fan of music, oftentimes I found myself actually loving the B–Sides to albums more than the actual album themselves.
I thought this is kind of a cool idea where we’re overlooking all of these ingredients. The leftover oats are making oat milk, the leftover grains from brewing beer. What if we could make them even more special than the actual end products that people try to take to market to begin with? And so that’s duty number one, just from a purely apples to apples comparison from music to food. The other thing is it’s a hominem, right? So if you flip over our packaging on the back, we pose a question, you ever wonder what happens to the leftover oats from making oat milk? We wanted to figure out what else can we make with those oats besides oat milk? And you can apply that hoy basically across categories and ultimately crunch puffs. It’s the first product I’m releasing. It’s not going to be the last product that I release under this brand name, but that’s the origin story there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And what you just said is exactly what I thought the whole idea behind it was, meaning it is apparent enough to the ones who know that. The interesting thing is would’ve never in a million years thought about explaining what a B-side is on this podcast because I’m such a record collected that for me, and this is the world that I live in where we all talk about B–Sides and stuff. But you’re right, I mean people don’t know it’s a Spotify single. What is a B-side, right? It’s so funny. I just felt really old for a second, so thank you. Hear me both. But no, I love the idea that you say B sides are actually very often more interesting. Why? Because they’re more authentic. They’re a little more raw. They might not be spotlight ready, but they have something that’s just really, it’s more interesting and that more interesting part and you have to work a little harder.
And to overcome putting that out, are you even going to make that a B-side super interesting. Okay, so just a little bit of a background here. You and I put this into this episode, into the calendar, into the books, I don’t know, weeks or months ago. And we knew that we are going to have this recording and then you can’t make this stuff up. So last night, as I usually do before my podcast, I do a deep dive into the brand and then suddenly I see one of your last posts from six days ago reached out to your followers in a very personable video on Instagram announcing that your branding fell kind of flat with your audience and that you’re ready for a rebranding. And then you asked people to chime in along the way. So in that post, you envision evolving the branding with your audience’s help.
And here I am about to interview you about your brand. So I was like, this is really, really funny. This is a great coincidence, great timing on all sides. But tell us a little bit, what is the plan there? Because you may know or you may not know, but a lot of people listening who are deep in the drenches of branding focus groups and design by committee have been proven to be very dangerous paths for many in the past. What is your idea here? Involving the audience of course is always a great thing, and that’s how you started the entire company. But where do you go from here? This is exciting.

Yousuf Ahmed:
So in full candor, I’m not going to sit here and say this is all part of the plan, but when I launched this company, I did it basically bootstrapped, I was working on a shoestring budget and I didn’t have capital to hire bonafide kind of food and Bev, CPG designers to design my packaging, which is one of the reasons it’s so kind of minimalist and different. And I knew I wanted a kind of design world that felt differentiated from the sea of sameness that’s out there. A lot of food and bev brands today, they’re very prim and proper. There are a lot of pastels, there’s a lot of Samara fonts, and they take themselves very, very seriously. And I wanted to introduce a little bit of grit, a little, some differentiation from a visual perspective, but doing that in a very shoestring way. And so I always knew this was going to be the first iteration of the packaging.
I just wanted to get the product out into the world and see how it reacted, how people liked it. And then I wanted to figure out, okay, who actually is this target consumer who is buying it, right? Because a lot of times brands, they have an idea of who the target consumer is in mind when they launch. And for me it’s kind of like I backs solve for this supply chain issue and then I’m putting out a product that has a bunch of legacy brands and a bunch of better for you kind of challenger brands. I wanted to carve a space somewhere in between those two, but I didn’t know exactly where I wanted to go with it. So fast forward a couple of months, we’re getting decent traction on direct to consumer. We’re getting good velocity and retail, but this packaging is not, let’s call it impulse buy optimized.
You need to, for somebody who does not know what this brand is or what these products are, the packaging needs to be a little more inviting and it needs to scream like fun. A lot of the fun has been sapped from emerging brands in this chase for refinement and like I said, the sea of sameness and the pastels, et cetera. So trying to different ideas, to your point, focus, grouping design to death is just a misadventure waiting to happen. And that’s not precisely what I’m trying to do, but I do want to get a sense of the people who are following me and who have followed me since the early stages, what is it that they liked? What is it that they didn’t? And then if I could take the trends there and a little peek behind the curtain that I’ll give you, I convinced a couple of designers who are Pearl Fisher guys who worked on the Guts rebrand and went out on their own. I convinced them to help me do this brand reskin, let’s call it for a 10th of their normal price because they liked the product, they liked what I was doing, and they thought this would be an interesting project to work on. So we’re in the midst of a couple of rough concepts that I’m still trying to figure out the best way to deploy it on social, to figure out what kind of feedback and how granular we want to get that feedback to be. But that was the basic idea behind

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It. No, that’s awesome to hear because you’re expert guided through this journey, but you do want to make sure that you remain this personable brand where you give people, you give people the feeling that they’re part of the journey basically. And you will take, pun this coming up, you will take the feedback with a grain of salt. So that’s basically how you’re going to do it, I assume.

Yousuf Ahmed:
A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Especially if you’re trying to grow a brand on social from zero. People want to feel like they’re part of the journey, and I want them to feel kind of invited into the fold, like, look, am I going to take every comment and distill it and run it through chat GPT and have it come out with a visualizer? No, but it’s helpful to know what people like.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, yeah, no, totally. And CPT is so difficult when it comes to shelf space and what people see and how they react and when they walk through the line and where do they stop, and then what emotions do they get when they look at the package, blah, blah, blah. It’s so much deeper than let’s say your website, because your website personally, there’s something about the homemade feel and the very different feel. And I’m not talking about the in your face gritty, hipster music, scenery vibe that you had going on in the beginning, right? I’m talking about your site right now, which there’s something about it that where it’s equal parts minimalistic, it’s eighties neon revival, and then there’s this golf all black. And to me it’s totally not punk rock, like a liquid theft, but it’s much more relatable, unapologetic golf disco party. And I think that’s actually really interesting. Now, how does that translate to the shelves? It’s a totally different story. And I mean, you are in the business of making sure people buy the product, but there’s something about it. When I first saw the site and I then invited you to the show, I’m like, this is really weird. And in a good way, it kind of makes you uncomfortable in a good way because maybe you just yourself put it together with a designer here and there, but because of it, it also felt extremely authentic.

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, I’m glad that you said that because that’s exactly what I was going for. And to your point about how does it come to life on packaging in stores, they can be somewhat disconnected, but they have to feel like they’re part of the same universe. You can’t just have two different kind of brand worlds. Exactly. But that was the whole goal behind the site, so glad that came through.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Good, good. Well, I’m glad. I’m glad. I’m glad. Very good. Well, maybe this next question, which I gave you a heads up that I will ask that is going to get you a little closer to finding your brand truth as you go through this rebrand or refresh brand refresh, I always ask my guests if they can describe their brand in one word, if they can take their entire brand philosophy, what they do, how they do it, why they do it, and they put it through a funnel and out comes that one word, which for liquid death, because we talked about them, it might be mischief, right? For Coca-Cola, it might be happiness, even though that’s totally not like the product they sell. That’s how they want to make people feel. What could be that one word for B–Sides?

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, this is such a tricky question, and I chewed on this actually for quite a while. I think the word is circularity. It captures our product or purpose or mindset believing that the best ideas and ingredients, they deserve a second life. And that’s kind of been the whole ethos behind product development. But the issue of using circularity, and it’s kind of, again, going back to the sustainability tilt, is it completely misses what you want the consumer to feel. And I want them to feel joy or delight or surprise. And I think surprise is if I had to go with one of those three, I think surprise more accurately hits people on the head, and it’s mostly surprise to the upside. Like I said, can you believe that this is the product made out of leftover roasts from making oat milk? But some people might be surprised in a different direction.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I kind of even feel like a product like yours is a little bit like a hidden speakeasy. It’s this thing where it is in a cellar. You go downstairs, it’s kind of weird. You’re like, should I really try that? And then you open up the door and you’re like, whoa. I’m in the know. I’m somewhere where I didn’t think I would be two minutes ago. And I feel like I’m part of a very special select group that understands that this is a really great snack, that I’m actually living healthier and it’s a cool brand and I want to associate myself with it. So it’s a little bit of a speakeasy thing. But I like the circularity also from the sense I agree, it’s not very consumer centric, which makes sense because you just came from years of building a product, right? I mean, your head is there, but it also, in a way, one could stretch it. And that’s what marketers like me do. You could stretch it in the idea of repeat purchases and there’s kind of the circular movement and who knows, right? But I definitely agree with you that surprise is a nice word when it comes to that journey into the unknown.

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, I really appreciate that. I feel like I should have talked to you a couple of months ago. So that line that you just used for people in the know, that’s actually something that I’m working with a brand strategist right now. We did a bunch of qualitative panels, and one of the things that came up from the brief is trying to figure out who that actual target consumer is. And it’s people who enjoy discovery, people who want to see the new kind of weird cutting edge things be part of the, they want to be in the know before everybody else, so you hit it right on the head without having to do any of that legwork. So nice work, Fabian.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Thank you very much. We’re hitting the mark here. That’s what we do. No, I think that’s a really interesting point because normally you would say, well, that idea of discovery, you can’t repeat, right? You can do that for the first 24 months on the shelves, right? Because then everyone’s like, oh, cool. What’s that? I’m in a no. But then at some point you’re going to turn into something that’s not niche anymore. But the reason why this actually would work is that you will always, knowing what you did with the first product, I would assume, and you correct me, but I would assume that you would always try to come up with a new product that uses something interesting in a different way and upcycle something where people wouldn’t expect it. And if that is the case, then surprise works all the way with the brand. And if people would be excited, bingo

Yousuf Ahmed:
About thato, those are the long-term aspirations.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and here you got it. We’re doing brand strategy on the fly with thousands of people listening. This is awesome. Hey, listen, before we get on air, I said to Yousuf that I really tried to get these podcasts down to 30 minutes instead of 45 minutes. We are at the 30 minute mark. I’m so excited. So I’m just going to ask you one more question. Do you have the journey that you’ve been on of joy and tears and everything in between, the typical entrepreneurial journey? Do you have any advice for founders as a takeaway? I’m sure you have plenty because I’m sure there were plenty of pitfalls that you went through and successes, but is there anything that you want to leave the audience with that you feel like would be nice to share?

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah, and this is actually something that I still learning myself. So I love that I’m giving this advice that I’m barely have kind of incorporated. I would say don’t confuse activity for clarity. You can have great press, flashy visuals, retail placements, but if people can’t explain what your brand or your product is in one sentence, you’re not there. You got to keep refining. You got to make your through line more apparent, and you got to keep reinforcing it until it sticks. You got to repeat the same thing over and over and over and over until it’s become kind of proliferate throughout the diaspora, which is just the hardest thing. I keep wanting to go to the next thing, the next thing, where’s the biggest flash I can make? And it’s really hard to maintain that discipline

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And Don, don’t beat yourself up about knowing this, but not necessarily doing it day to day. No one does it. Most people also don’t know it, so you already know it. It’s really hard to do it day in, day out with any brand, right? Finding that clarity and keeping that consistency and keeping it fresh. But if you don’t know what it really is about how could anyone else, and so I think that it’s a big brand truth, right? That’s why I call what I do, creating brand clarity, because it’s really all about clarity. If you have that clarity internally, then it’s easy to communicate that externally. So very cool. Usually at this point in the podcast, I ask what’s next for the B–Sides brand? But right now, we already know what’s next for the B–Sides brand. There’s going to be an exciting brand journey, which I’m almost certain that anyone listening would want to be a part of, and at least a few would come together and see how you’re going to integrate the audience along the way. Where can people find you and follow the journey along?

Yousuf Ahmed:
So you can find us on Instagram @enjoybsides. You can go to the website, enjoybsides.com. We’ll have a couple of updates rolling out there over the summer. Instagram is definitely the best place to follow the journey. And by the way, for all those people listening, I would love your thoughts and your expertise on helping me do this thing, because like I said, I don’t have a background in this and I’m figuring it out as I go along.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, you just wait until your inbox is full the day after this airs. So can people connect with you on LinkedIn? Is that the best place for Them?

Yousuf Ahmed:
Yeah. You know what? On LinkedIn, that’s probably the best.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Okay. Awesome. That’s fantastic. This is so great. A very different episode today and one that I personally really, really enjoyed. I can’t wait to see where B Side is going. I already love where you’re heading with it. I really love the philosophy. I love what you do. So good luck with everything. And yeah, thank you again for your time today.

Yousuf Ahmed:
Thanks so much, Fabian. I really appreciate