The Cumin Club

0:00Kiru:Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42Kiru:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. I have a really cool co-founder on the show today,

1:32Ragoth:a brand that I've been following. I have it in my pantry, and I truly admire how they are bringing incredible food from India to the U.S. market and making it so easy and so convenient. So Harish Vishweshwaran is the co-founder of The Cumin Club, and I'm so happy to have you on the show today.

1:56Harish Visweswaran:Thanks, Kelly. It's just a pleasure to be here. And I know you've interviewed so many of my other friends who are also emerging brand founders. So it's cool to be here.

2:06Ragoth:Well, I'm so happy to have you now in the community of incredible founders that have been so gracious to come on the show. Like I said, I've been following your brand. I really admire what you're doing in innovation and also bringing incredible flavors and spices and dishes from India to the U.S. market. It's one of my favorite personal cuisines. So I would love to kick it off with how did you originally come up with the concept for the Cumin Club?

2:41Harish Visweswaran:Yeah, we are all about flavor. So that's a good, good thing to lead with. So my co-founder, Agoth, and I, we are immigrants from India. We moved here about 10 to 12 years ago. And then we, in India, you grew up culturally not needing or learning how to cook on a regular basis just because you when you live with parents they take care of food for you that's a very cultural thing and then when you move out you you have enough access to labor so you can get people to come and cook for you not great but that's how we grew up and then we moved to the u.s and tech jobs um and at some points in our life we both had full-time jobs and we're studying part-time ragot got his mba i got my master's in data science and we just struggled to eat right.

3:27Harish Visweswaran:Anything on on Indian food shelves just didn't resonate with us because those are not the flavors we grew up eating. A lot of them were Indian inspired but we were craving for the real deal Indian food that we grew up eating. So that struggle was real and we had always been thinking of other startup ideas but never thought about food as a solution, thought about solving the food problem as a solution for us and other immigrants like us until Ragot, my co-founder's mom, Ragot's mom, shared a bunch of dry roasted ingredients from India, shipped it all the way from India. So, and then we just added water to it and it just like popped out with so much flavor.

4:09Harish Visweswaran:It was unbelievable. So we were actually pretty surprised that you could take ingredients at the source because that's very important, dry roast them, put them together in the right proportions and then ship them all the way to the US, you just add water and it just comes back to life. So that sparked the idea for the cumin club. Of course, we had to do a lot of digging to figure out how do we make that possible across all of the regional cuisines of India. And that's where freeze drying comes in. And I'd love to talk about that later in the interview. But as such, the idea sparked from Ragot's mom sending him a carrot package.

4:43Ragoth:Okay, I love this brand even more because the fact that the origin story involves a care package from a mom that sparks a whole brand. I love that so much. So you said that your background was in tech and startup?

5:01Harish Visweswaran:Tech and data science.

5:04Ragoth:Data science. So making the switch to become a CPG founder must have been really shocking maybe to your family or just even friends of what a different path that is.

5:18Harish Visweswaran:Yeah, absolutely. It's surprising and not at the same time. And I'll explain why.

5:24Ragoth:Yes.

5:24Harish Visweswaran:So food is very important to us in India. Again, it's a cultural thing. So when you have visitors or relatives or other family coming in, the way we communicate our love is to provide them with amazing delicious food even even with strangers a lot of strangers you hear stories in India where strangers are welcomed into homes and foods provided that's the form of communication that we care so food is in the culture but my parents also had the food processing facility so I grew up in and around food and then my wife is a pastry cook and I myself I'm a big foodie. So we're always trying to explore new places all the time.

6:08Harish Visweswaran:So this has all been happening in the background. Just that it's part of our lives. And Rigoth and I met at our first job in analytics in India. And we were analyzing data for Walmart in retail stores and in the food space, right? So it all came together beautifully, but yeah, it wasn't like a planned decision. When we eventually started this, it was like, okay, this has to be given all the background.

6:40Ragoth:Interesting. Yeah. And putting all those pieces together, what a perfect scenario to then make that shift into CPG. So what did that look like? You started to, I'm sure, get curious, okay, how do we do this? How do we actually make this into a brand and a product line. You mentioned freeze-dried technology. I personally really admire that advancement because of the way that it preserves food. You don't need to add a lot of preservatives, right? It comes straight from the source. So what did it look like of actually creating the product line that I have in my pantry now? Yeah.

7:25Harish Visweswaran:So let's go back to the care package. once we figured that this can be a solution for our own personal needs and a lot of people who look like us are struggling with the same problem we said we'll tackle this problem for everyone but dry roasting only goes so far you cannot dry roast a tikka masala there are some dishes in india that can dry roast not everything then we encountered this technology called freeze drying which has been in use in other spaces. You take camping food, space food, it has been in use. So we knew that if that technology could be applied to everyday Indian food, that would be awesome.

8:06Harish Visweswaran:Then we spent a lot of time touring different facilities in India only to realize that nobody does freeze drying Indian food well. So eventually we built up our own facility because we manufactured everything in our own FGIRG facility that gives us a lot of control over quality. We use authentic recipes, source regional ingredients from different parts of India. And we have chefs from different parts of India because they specialize in different cuisines. We make them all in our own facility in India and then ship them over to the US. But that's not how we started. We started with using co-packers and we knew that was suboptimal.

8:43Harish Visweswaran:And once we demonstrated that this is a concept that works and we had good traction, we just said we really have to build our own facility to scale this business. And we started D2C first. And I'd encourage anyone who has a CPG business to start D2C, not because I'm saying the scale exists there. For us, the scale exists there because we are a weekly, monthly meal solution. If you're a snack brand, I'm not saying D2C is where your revenue or scale is, but what you can get from D2C is gauge interest, get feedback. get some data about the consumer. So for us, it worked out that we have like 20, 25 dishes and we have a build-your-own-box experience.

9:26Harish Visweswaran:So we collected a lot of great data from D2C, but that's where we started. And then what shifted over time is that the consumer base shifted. We started off with a lot of immigrants and first-generation Indian-Americans who consumed this product. Let's say 90 % was people like me. 10 % was the larger American. And then over the years, that shift is, it was massive. So now it's half and half, even though it's a build your own subscription or one-time ordering business that where you have to buy five, 10, 20 meals at a time, half of our customers are not of Indian origin. And with that shift, we realized that we need to be in the channels where this larger consumer is buying.

10:11Harish Visweswaran:And that's when we said about a couple of years ago, we launched an Amazon. We're number two brand in Amazon in the Indian set. And then last year we launched in retail. We're in about 1 ,200 stores now. Sprouts Nationwide, HEB, Mariano's, United Supermarkets, Fresh Time, Earthfair. Just a bunch of more retailers coming on board. But that channel shift was dictated by the consumer shift. And we knew that once we hit that consumer shift, we knew that this is a product that everyone in the U.S. can enjoy, not just people like me.

10:43Kiru:And thank you for doing a lot of that there. So happy to dive in deeper too.

10:50Ragoth:Yes. So I would love to hear more about how you made the shift from D to C to retail, because that is something that I know is on the mind of listeners who are building brands who are maybe in the really early days of starting their business, but they want to be able to pitch to retailers. So how did you all then leverage? Was it showing, okay, this is the data that we have from our website, this is the amount of sales that we're doing, and was that appetizing to then the retailers, or do they also see the shift in demand for Indian food and flavors becoming more mainstream? I would just love to hear a little bit more of just how you made that transition, because it's incredibly impressive what you have done from D2C and retail.

11:42Harish Visweswaran:Yeah, that's a great question. I would say it's a combination of things. And that's why it's not a straightforward answer. But for instance, we made sure that we have our D2C data handy all the time. So we now know, and not now, we always knew, but we use that in any detailed conversation, is we have our D2C data showing us where our hotspots are. For instance, California is huge for us. Texas is huge for us. Midwest, because we are based in Midwest. New York area is huge for us. The Seattle area is huge for us. This is all shown in the D2C data as areas where we've grown and penetrated the market.

12:25Harish Visweswaran:that's a very useful piece of information to have because when you're going to that retailer in California, telling them this is our number one region. And even if you don't have a huge DTC presence, there are tools that you have that you can add to your website that says, hey, where is your local store? And would you want to find us in your local store? If so, tell me where. So you can just collect that data from that consumer. So even if they're not buying on your DTC site, they're kind of telling you this is where I am and I want you to I'd love to see you in my store in my area so then you collect that in aggregate and you know okay it looks like there's a good bit of consumer base in California so maybe I'm going and pitching to the California retailer that's one second there is something called retail readiness and it's it's not a joke for sure for us luckily we've built a few years of D2C presence we've optimized and made our supply chain efficient.

13:24Harish Visweswaran:We've been manufacturing in our facility for a while. So we kind of knew we were ready for retail. It was just a matter of executing well. And that's what we started doing that last year. One thing we really struggled with is our packaging. And this is how our packs look now. Much better than how it used to look before. But still, yeah, still a long way to go, but much better than what we started with. Because we were DTC, we didn't pay attention to packaging as much, You're telling the story on your website, and then the customer is making the purchase, and then they see the packaging in hand.

13:58Harish Visweswaran:It doesn't have to be seen next to another brand or in a set. So our packaging was really bad. And that's one thing I wish we'd fixed even sooner. And we are constantly trying to iterate on our packaging design all the time. That's important because unlike in D2C, you have a lot of touch points. You have ads, you have the website, you have emails. In retail, like your packaging is your billboard. So you have to be good at it. So that's kind of important, I would say, early on for people to solve before they get into any big retail.

14:33Ragoth:That's a great piece of advice. And also the nuance of D2C and retail packaging being a huge piece of that. Where do you see the cumin club going? I mean, already it's incredibly impressive. You have your facility in India, 1 ,200 stores and retail, incredible DTC business as well. Where do you want to continue to see it grow?

14:58Harish Visweswaran:Yeah, so the easiest path for us is to expand our assortment in retail. That's our lowest hanging fruit. We have 20 amazing dishes on our DTC site. We launched retail with our four top sellers. There's a huge room for increasing assortment even in the set. And need to see, we also learned that a lot of people want to get the sauce, but add their own protein in. Like this chica masala has paneer in it and has 24 grams of protein in the pack. But a lot of people say, hey, I want to add my own chicken into this. We are fully vegetarian and vegan as a brand. But if you love the flavors, add a chicken.

15:38Harish Visweswaran:Awesome. That's awesome. We totally encourage it. So we are launching, we already have Simmer Sauces on our D2C site. We will be launching Simmer Sauces in retail later this year or early next year. So that will open up another set of audience who's like, hey, I want to take the sauce, that's where the complexity is, and then I want to make it my own. So Simmer Sauces, and then just channel expansion, right? We are in the natural and naturally-leaning conventional stores now. And there's a huge opportunity in club, like say Costco's of the world, right? So we will want to get into expanding into those channels.

16:18Harish Visweswaran:Eventually, we want to be known as the Indian food brand, right? Like if people think Indian food or Indian, we want them to associate the cumin club with it. But that takes time and brand building, etc. So we have a CMO now, which is awesome. Ragoth and I are not the creative people in the room. So she's helping us build a brand. Holly here is helping us build a brand as well.

16:41Ragoth:And Holly is amazing. A great person to have on your side. This has been such a great conversation. I just really appreciate you sharing so transparently of how you've been building and where you are now. How did you get here? Where are you going? Because again, this podcast is for founders who are in the early days. And I know that this conversation is going to be incredibly impactful to them. Is there any last piece of advice you would share with an emerging brand founder? Again, in those really early days, maybe making a career shift or being a co-founder with a good friend of theirs and taking that leap of saying, OK, I'm going to go for this.

17:27Ragoth:Any piece of advice there?

17:29Harish Visweswaran:Yeah, I have a few things to say. but one thing is the cost of experimenting and launching a brand has just come down significantly. We have a ton of co-packers, access to packaging, AI tools that will just like ideate with you. So I would say the cost of launching a brand is much lower than it has ever been. So make the jump. I know that's more straightforward than it sounds more straightforward than it is, but I would say I encourage you to make the jump. Second, there's a huge community of people, other emerging brand founders, people like you who are making their stories heard. There's a huge community that's ready to help.

18:09Harish Visweswaran:So don't hesitate to ask help. And then I would say, just based on our experience, always solve for flavor. Like we didn't want to make a healthy meal. You want to make a flavorful, delicious meal that you will crave that happens to be healthy and made with clean ingredients. like these trends will come and go but people will go back to their instinct on hey does this taste good if so i'm going to come back to it if not wait there's a trend around i mean i'm not saying protein is a trend but just using that as a broad example that everyone's paying attention protein now but in six months from now they would have just been tired and like right and i get something that has flavor if it has i'll find something that has flavor and also the protein but you're not going to start with a macro you're going to start with flavor so i would say like if you want to have a sustainable brand solve for something that people will come back to and if you have a product like that just demo get it out and tasting sampling that was one of our biggest levers of success in retail and that's a great way to get feedback from the consumer as well like I was there in a ton of demos learning from consumers what they thought well how packaging looked what is their feedback on the flavor is it spicy so you get a lot of exposure because people will sample and if they like if they come back but you also get a lot of data I know I said a lot of

19:32Ragoth:things but no that was so good my uh for people who can't see me I'm literally nodding my head of everything that you just said because that is such solid advice for demoing getting in front of people talking to real life consumers who are not your friends and family and getting it into people's hands. And also to of building a brand, building that community, talking to people, that's such a huge piece of building a standout brand. So I'm so glad that you just said that. And I totally sign off on every piece of advice you shared. It's so incredibly impactful. I know I have to let you go as you're building the incredible cumin club.

20:19Ragoth:But last question, where can people shop your products?

20:23Harish Visweswaran:Our DTC site's a great place to go. We have 20, 25 different dishes that you can choose from. We are on Amazon, if you prefer Amazon. And we are in a bunch of details. Prouts, HEB, Mariano's in the Chicago area, Fresh Thyme, Earth Fair, Market of Choice, United Supermarkets. Yeah, expanding all over, but just saying that it's a bunch of retail. So you'll find that in our store locator. But easiest, thecumanclub.com.

20:49Kiru:Amazing. Thank you again for your time and generosity and sharing here on the show. And thank you everyone for listening. I'll see you on the next episode. Bye. This episode was brought to you by Glimpse. As we know, building a brand is not as sexy and glamorous as it looks on social media at times. A lot of those unsexy problems come into play when brands start to scale in retail distribution. Founders are always incredibly excited to see their products on shelves at major retail chains, but they don't realize all the hard work that starts to begin. Retailers and distributors are known for their processes of deducting amounts from invoices.

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