#7 - Playground Stuff
I Found a Food Scientist in The Schoolyard
Summer 2015. We’d come up with the idea for Food Paint a few months beforehand and then Shark Tank found us on Kickstarter and we came that close to getting on the show but we didn’t have a viable product - in large part because the food scientist we’d been working with was - not to put too fine a point on it - rubbish.
It was a real blow but we also knew that it had been too good to be true. Shark Tank is an extremely well-oiled machine - they’re very very good at what they do - and if they said we weren’t ready, we weren’t ready. We were brand new in fact - we didn’t even have packaging! But as I’ve mentioned before, this was another of those little moments of validation that spurred me on, that smoothed over the self-doubt: If Shark Tank thought this was good then it must be good: onwards!
I kept tinkering:
Plus, I now had a bunch of Shark Tank email addresses and an open invitation to contact them directly as soon as we got Food Paint into stores. Let’s go!
The next thing I did was find the confidence to fire Bob, the food scientist. I’d given him multiple chances to correct course but he just hadn’t wanted to. I put my new-to-the-industry nerves on hold (along with the fear of not knowing where to find his successor) and kicked him to the curb via email. He responded with veiled threats about damage to my industry reputation but it was silly. If you have a vision and people can’t see it, you shouldn’t be working with them. Your brilliant idea deserves a team to match. They’re out there and you will find them.
Next up I decided to hold Sara’s feet to the fire, to tell her that we really wanted to put this product in tubes, not pouches. I called her and asked if she’d made any progress finding any (in the six weeks since I’d asked her) but she said no, it seemed as if there just weren’t any suitable tubes out there. As I was on the phone to her, listening to this, I opened Google and typed in some words. It was done almost absent-mindedly, but with tubes on my mind. Apart from ‘tubes’ I have no memory of what the words were, or the order I typed them, but when I pressed return there it was: the first result was for a company in Montreal that makes food-safe tubes in any number of different materials. *Sigh. I told Sara, made my excuses, got off the phone and immediately sent her an email letting her know that we no longer required her services. Sometimes (most times, in fact) you have to trust your gut.
And there I was, back to square one. But now I knew about co-packers and food scientists and, having cast off two people who I’d known weren’t good enough for quite some time, I felt a weight being lifted off my shoulders. I was inspired again. And I’d found tubes!
By this time the kids were out of school for the Summer so I put everything on hold while we went went to visit their grandparents in the UK, then came back in September, fired up and ready to kick some food industry butt.
I phoned the tube company in Montreal and Kathy, the woman I spoke to, was lovely. She immediately understood the brief, said it was the most fun project she’d had for a long time and offered to send me samples of all their different tubes. While I waited for them to arrive, I ordered some stickers. And when they did arrive, I got sticking:
And with the kids back in school every day, I was back in the school yard every afternoon, hanging with the moms. I mentioned the Summer’s events (the near miss with superstardom, the useless food scientist, my new friends in Montreal, my current stuck-in-the-mud status) and one of the moms, Judy, mentioned an old friend from college called Phillip, who worked in the food industry. And through Phillip, I met Fred.
Fred our amazing food scientist, who I’ve now worked with for the past nine years.
Thank God for Greenwich Village address books.
You can say that I was lucky (Shark Tank) and fortuitously placed (the schoolyard), but all I was doing was putting myself out there and asking the right questions. It’s the same as looking for investment: you have to ask, ask and ask again. Lose all shame. Plant a flag on the hill that says “this is what I’m doing now. Can you help me please?”
But do make sure you ask nicely.