Ep.09 / Bringing Bold Tastes to the World of Business & Entrepreneurship with Clara Paye, Unite Foods

0:04All right. Today I'm talking with Clara Pay, the founder of Unite Foods, the world's first globally inspired protein bar brand on a mission to bring unique flavors from around the world to your pantry. I love this brand. It's delicious, but it's also healthy and nostalgic and comforting, but also brings these amazing flavors like churro and baklava and Mexican chocolate, as well as, you know, American favorites like PB &J. So delicious, interesting. I love your graphics. We're going to talk about that. And Clara also is the founder of a nonprofit supporting other founders in CPG, a mentor and just an active member of CPG and founder community.

0:58So hello. Thank you. Hi. Thanks so much for the introduction. Appreciate that. I know. I was so thrilled when Denise put me in touch with you. We're going to start easy. Obviously, I've tried your brand. I've been looking at, I'd heard of it before I was introduced to you. But do you want to just quickly start off by giving us a quick kind of elevator pitch for Unite? sure yeah I'd love to so Unite is the world's first what we say globally inspired protein bar we believe that you know the world is full of flavor and the protein bar aisle wasn't when we started it was really kind of like you know a rerun of the same flavors chocolate peanut butter and vanilla and so I'm an immigrant I was born in Africa in the Sudan and came to the U.S.

1:48at the age of five and was on my own wellness journey when I was diagnosed with gluten intolerance and went on a quest to find diet compliant food, found my way into the protein bar aisle and just said, Hey, like we can do better. Like these flavors just don't resonate with me and they can be really yummy and be good for you. So that's how we started. That's amazing. Um, how, how did you, so I was, uh, you know, you're obviously, um, a real go-getter and you seem to have always had quite an entrepreneurial spirit. Like, how did you make the move into being a founder of a food company? Yeah, I mean, it was just out of my own personal frustration and wellness and a need that I kind of identified.

2:34And I think when you're wired for entrepreneurship, it's natural to always be thinking like what's missing and where can I plug something in? It's just how you approach life. Like, wouldn't it be great if there was somebody that made X? Wouldn't it'd be great if there was a service that did why? And I think that that's just like normal entrepreneurial people. Like that's how they're always thinking. And I think actually most people are always trying to problem solve for their own problems. And so it really started very grassroots. I started as a frustrated mom and a frustrated person trying to find diet compliant food that tasted good, that didn't taste like cardboard, you know, food I wanted to eat, not food I had to eat.

3:11And so really started blending in my own kitchen and experimenting and said like, why, you know, why doesn't this exist? And then started looking at, you know, I always like to corroborate my hunches with data. And so I started looking at U.S. Census data and saw that like, you know, the U.S. population was continuing to grow in multiculturalism and there was, you know, greater growth in diversity. And that was not just a trend that was going to continue. Yeah. So starting in your kitchen, playing with favours. And then how did the brand come about? talk to me about your kind of brand creation process yeah so that first impetus i got my cuisine art out and started you know mixing up all these different flavors and my you know my poor friends and family you know they were my guinea pigs and i'd say try this one and try that one and i probably tried 15 different iterations of different flavors everything i could think of everything i was inspired by kind of my own local community or in my personal life and then once i knew that I did have something and it did taste great.

4:12Those are kind of foundational. I had to do a job and it had to taste great. Then I kind of got serious about it and found a food scientist that could help me professionalize my recipe, you know, my formula, as we call it in the CBG space. Manufacture. Yes. And so, you know, I wanted it to be high quality. And so, you know, that's where kind of being a novice helped me is that I didn't use artificial things. I used things that I could find in my own kitchen, things that I could find in my own grocery store. It didn't come out of a lab. It really came out of my own, you know, creation inside, you know, what an average American could go buy locally.

4:49And so that was, you know, we found the food scientist and she took my recipe and made it into a manufacturable formula. And then it was about pitching co-packers to try to get somebody to make it and, you know, wanted to make sure I made a really high quality, safe product. So, you know, we had very high safety and quality standards and that's where we started amazing amazing and so you know I think it's so interesting when did you're starting to make these things um is that when the kind of inspiration for the global flavors came into it or you're thinking there's a gap on you know that the flavors are also dull in the current kind of protein bar category like talk to me about how you started putting this brand together?

5:32Like what came first, the global flavors or the, I can do this better. Yeah. How did you kind of bring this idea to life? It was for sure the global flavors. So it was actually, I was listening to another founder of a very successful food brand talk about her startup journey in bars and, you know, she exited and sold her business, but she was talking about how she was inspired to make the bars. And then she, you know, started creating like apple pie flavor and blueberry flavor. And that's when I kind of had an aha moment. I was like, oh, like, that's why I don't like bars. Like those are not nostalgic to me.

6:07And so, you know, I started to think about nostalgia and like what that means in wellness. And like, you'll only eat food, you know, the food that you grew up with, the food that you akin to like comfort is the food that you crave. And so I wanted it to be craveable. And so I saw this huge opportunity in Global Flavors, quite frankly, because I live in Los Angeles and where I'm surrounded by this multicultural community of immigrants from all over the world. And, you know, every kind of cuisine is available. And I just thought like, gosh, like this could be a really interesting, you know, merge.

6:39And I don't think that, you know, it was intentional. I don't think the ones community intentionally left everybody, you know, kind of on the sidelines. I just think it was oversight, like keep making bars that people buy. And if people keep buying peanut butter bars, they're only going to sell peanut butter bars. So that's really how it started. And yeah, it was always flavor first like flavor was the the unique selling proposition that I had in mind yeah amazing and then the name and the graphics I'm interested I you know for background I help brands often big companies create products and brands like talk to me about your process starting from scratch you've got this great idea global flavors it's going to be uh good for gluten intolerance it's going to be you know better for you like talk to me about the name and the design who helped you how did you go about this process yeah the name was the hardest part because I knew what I wanted to do which was like include more people I wanted um it to represent fun and flavor and so my process was pretty funny like I just got post-it notes and I just wrote every like adjective of everything I wanted to accomplish in this brand and just started writing all these words and posting them up, you know, kind of behind my desk.

7:57And every time I think of a word like adventure or wanderlust or, you know, whatever the words were, and I would just like put them up. Right. And then, you know, I just almost like a vision board where you're just trying to manifest like what the brand name should be from like this jumble of words. I just let my brain work, my subconscious work on it. And so I went on a hike one day when like, it was kind of coming, like, do you kind of like, you need a name, like pick a name, because we need to work on the packaging. And I was like, I am stuck. And I don't know the name yet. And I'm going to go on a hike and see if it'll come to me.

8:28And I was, you know, talking it through with myself. And I was like, you know, what is it that I'm actually trying to do? And it's really like to unite the United States of America is like multicultural, it's this beautiful melting pot. so I was like I wonder if the name Unite is available right and it didn't seem like plausible that it would be I know yeah I mean it is amazing that the trademark was available I mean well done it's a great name and I love how you built out you know each each letter standing for something and everything's kind of coalescing around that thought it's a it's a yeah I'm surprised you got the trademark but it's it's a great name yeah thank you yeah and I filed the trademark myself so you know it's like you know when you're a scrappy entrepreneur you kind of like do the things that you need to do but I love the name it really does represent the brand well it represents you know my intention well and it's been a fun journey and then the packaging design you know back in 2019 when I was ideating 2018 kind of building thinking you know the protein bar space was a sea of white and beige and green and brown and it really all screamed natural and wholesome and organic, but it didn't scream fun or flavor or food that you wanted to eat.

9:43So I took a lot of cues from food you wanted to eat, potato chips and candy bars and, you know, food that was like yummy and, you know, was associated with, you know, treating yourself, not like, you know, just being on some kind of diet. And I saw that like, you know, color really stood out to me in my mind. And, you know, when I think of global flavors, I think of color. I think of, you know, the world markets and I think of travel and I think in color when I think of, you know, travel and world. And so I knew that I wanted color to be strong in the brand. And now like lots of people have jumped on that bandwagon.

10:18And so, you know, the nutrition bar space is now very colorful, but I like to think that we help set that tone and set that intention in the space. Yeah. No, it's amazing. So the brief was color, world, global. Yeah. And I love that you have, you know, you really do, unlike a lot of the protein bars, I feel like you've really brought in taste and flavor and craveability into, into your packaging in a, in an interesting way. Um, who, did you work with someone or did you bring someone on to help you or? Yeah, I found a small boutique agency in Austin and I remember we, I flew down, um, um for a meeting and I think in like two hours we had the whole thing designed you know we had done some brief work ahead of time but I knew very clearly what I wanted I you know and she was a great partner um in helping me you know kind of ideate on how could that show up and like the you know the first iterations were were you know not quite what I wanted but I knew that if I could just you know I can't draw but I can tell you what I want right and I can very clearly see what I want and so we were just a good team because she was open to allowing me to like co-create with her and so you know I wanted and she did all these beautiful hand-drawn patterns that became you know really great collateral for the brand and like that was like you know it was just it was a good combination.

11:46Yeah creating lots of assets that you can use everywhere I think that's great and then in terms of do you do research like how do you start thinking about new products How do you do you bring consumers into the journey? Like what sort of ways do you kind of do consumer kind of testing or thinking about, you know, whether whether a product is right, whether a package is right? Yeah, we do some consumer testing. We do some surveying when we're trying to make packaging design or or choices between them. I think for like flavor and cues, that really just comes from my own inspiration. Like, what do I see, you know, in my community?

12:30What do I, you know, what is craveable to me? And I think a lot of founders do this, like they identify themselves too much with the brand. And so I'm trying to be a little bit more strategic about how I come up with flavors. But we do invite our community to help us. And we get great flavor suggestions all the time, you know, on the back of every package is an invitation to tell us your favorite flavor. And, you know, that is a big part of the brand. It's to unite. It's not to tell you what you want. It's let's co-create what you want and build something together. And every flavor is kind of a nod to a certain culture or region of the world.

13:04And I like to pick broad flavors that appeal to a lot of people. Yeah. So being inspired by the community in the world is kind of part of the process. It seems very fitting for the brand. Now, you did launch right smack bang in the middle of COVID. I mean, that's quite... Tell me about launching your first food brand, first brand, actually, in the middle of COVID. It seems like it definitely didn't make things easier. Or were there positives? positives? Yeah, I think it definitely, you know, the timing of our launch set the trajectory for the brand. You know, before COVID, global flavor was not a trend.

13:54Global flavor travel was, they were not big trends in flavor. And so we were bringing something completely new, completely different. And the intersection of not being able to travel and everyone being at home really made everybody crave travel and like, how could I, you know, experience something new and unique when every single day literally looks the same. And so we, we hit this like inflection point just at the right time, having a packaged food that was a global flavor and being right on trend. And that was very lucky, right. In terms of like the timing of that, I think a lot of people would not, you know, have discovered the brand if we hadn't been in COVID, right?

14:40Because people were looking for new things. Retailers were looking for new things. And, you know, we had an opportunity to pitch some of the world's largest retailers our first year, which is amazing and unheard of and wonderful, right? And so for me, it ended up being something that helped. But at the very beginning, it did feel very dismal. And I remember people just like apologizing to me, like, I'm so sorry that this is happening to your brand. I'm so sorry. And, you know, in my thought, I'm an eternal optimist. I'm like, well, it's not just happening to me. It's happening to you too. And it's happening to everybody.

15:08So at least the playing field is level. It's not like a fire that burned down my factory and only my factory was, you know, affected. This is a global thing. And there will always be opportunities if you look for them. And so, you know, and the opportunity for us was really to be charitable from the very beginning and to start donating bars really from month one. and, you know, going into food banks and first responders and hospitals and charities and really set the tone for the business. I mean, we always had a charitable aspect to what we wanted to do, but it's just like from the very beginning was that.

15:40So it was just, it ended up being okay. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I didn't even think about that as actually something that could be quite helpful, like people being stuck in their homes and this being an opportunity to to literally travel through what you eat that's such an interesting um yeah and it reminds me having kind of listened to a few interviews with you I'm kind of amazed by you've got such an amazing kind of optimism um and kind of growth mindset um yeah where does that come from? How do I get some of that? I think it just comes from resilience building. You know, I think I, you know, came to the U.S.

16:27and I didn't speak any English, you know, at the age of five. And so from the very beginning, you know, had these barriers that I had to overcome and become really self-sufficient. And when you're a child of an immigrant, you almost become a parent sometimes where you're like doing things for your parents, like translating or helping make doctor's appointments are. So you're thrust kind of like in this adult world. And so I, you know, by, by, you know, nature or nurture, I was like thrust into this environment where I had to be self-sufficient and I've been able to figure it out, figure it out.

17:00And I always like to say everything is figureoutable, right? Like it's just your, you know, if you want to be in business, your job is to solve problems. And when you welcome problems as a part of the process and not like, oh, what was me? Something that's happening to me. It's just a challenge. And you go hard towards that challenge. That's where you can, you know, it's, it's like a muscle. And so you know, it's possible and you know, you can continue. You just have to figure out the next step. Yeah. I mean, I love that you've called it kind of fearless positivity, having that, you know, drive and optimism to help you solve problems, get through.

17:39I mean, it's interesting. I'm an immigrant here. I'm actually a child of immigrants. I don't know if I'm so optimistic. Maybe that's growing up in England is lacks the cultural positivity. I don't know. It is. I mean, you know, it's hard to ignore everything going on at the moment politically in terms of immigration. And, you know, I'm sure just like me, psychically, it's got to be a little depressing, you know, not woe is me, but, you know, how do you think about your fantastic, optimistic brand that's all about inclusivity? The whole brand is built on the idea of sharing global flavors with everyone.

18:32It comes from, you know, a founder story that is, you know, that shows the drive and, you know, entrepreneurialism of immigrants. I am curious, like, how do you, you know, the cognitive dissonance between that and how some of the conversations in culture are going? How do you think about that? Yeah, well, at Unite, you know, we believe in seeing the way that we're the more, you know, what matters is how we're the same, not how we're different. And politics and media and everybody will try to drive a wedge between othering somebody. Oh, we don't like them because they believe something different than us.

19:17And for me at Unite, it's like that's the whole reason I created this brand is to use food as this instrument of inclusion. And that's why we make flavors for every culture and everybody. So American culture, every culture, right? We want to build a wellness table where everybody's invited to have a seat. Obviously, there's a lot of benefit in diversity. It's not, you know, opinion. It's been studied and fact-based that when there's diversity, thoughts and the quality of thoughts in a room go up and the success of businesses goes up. So it's like not diversity for diversity's sake, but diversity because it's actually good for business.

19:54And, you know, I always say diversity is delicious. So, you know, it's really – it'll be an interesting, you know, moment in time here to see what happens with DEI and inclusivity and everything. But at the end of the day, at Unite, we're really about like celebrating, you know, each other and how we're the same and building bridges of compassion through food. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, it's going to be an interesting, interesting time. Yeah, there's so many positives and people love the food. I mean, that's an amazing, you know, it's a it's a great way to share and learn. And tell me a little bit about, you know, you did mention you got amazing distribution in a very short time.

20:41What is your advice to others starting brands and how did you approach, you know, the kind of distribution footprint and how to how to get it? Yeah, I think for us, you know, we did get exhibition really fast. You know, when the world's Fortune One company says we want your product and puts you in, you know, it's incredibly validating as a brand. And, you know, an ability to execute at a large, large retailer obviously shows other retailers, smaller ones, medium ones that you can do it. So it's like, you know, you get your you've earned your stripes. And so, but I think having said that, it's really, I think in this day and age and five years later, what I would recommend would actually be a more local approach.

21:26And that was actually my goal was to like kind of start at home, own home and build in concentric circles kind of out from there. I think really failing fast, identifying your customer, testing your product in retail, just in a small format, see is it selling, see is your packaging standing out and then growing and like accelerating and trying to, you know, maintain as much control as possible, maintain as much, you know, capital efficiency as you can, because it's a very expensive business. It is easy to get over your skis very quickly with large distribution. But I had come also from a background of big box and large distribution, plumbing and hardware, not food.

22:06But I knew what the stakes and I knew that, you know, there would be big expectations of, you know, fulfillment and inventory. And I was prepared to take those risks. But I wouldn't say that unless you understand big box, unless you understand a mass, like that's necessarily where you should start first. You should probably just start locally. Yeah, that's that's a big scale. Like you get that wrong, then there are issues. Right. Yeah, it's interesting. So you started with your family's plumbing business and then took the, you know, the gamble to build your own build your own brand, which is amazing.

22:44um what are the key things that you learned going out on your own versus being part of the I mean it's a completely different category like what are the biggest biggest things that you learned things that were transferable yeah I think the biggest overall lesson in business in life and whatever you want to call it is that people do business with people that they like right and people that they enjoy. So like bringing fairness and integrity and clarity and clear expectations to any partnership, whether it's a co-man or a packaging supplier or a data supplier or anything like that, like, you know, those are table stakes.

23:25So I think, you know, if you can operate at a very high level, have a bias for action, like those are the things that create success in whatever your industry. You know, I was very lucky. I got to spend 17 years building a business, watching a business be built, you know, since I was a child, actually. So before then, and having this front row seat to entrepreneurship and allowing myself, you know, I was able to get involved in everything from operations to HR, to marketing, to, you know, distribution, to, you know, setting up new warehouses and everything in between. And so I have this great globalist education, global education in supply chain and in manufacturing and distribution.

24:07So it really serves me for anything I do in life now. But yeah, I mean, people go, huh, plumbing to thieves, like, that makes no sense. Like, how did you make that jump? But I think business is the same, you know, your product is a widget in many ways. And it's all about finding that product market it fit and finding who your fan base is. Yeah, amazing. And in terms of the fan base, so talk to me about how you market, what's your kind of approach to marketing, growing community, etc. So our marketing is really organic. I mean, I think the brand embodies inclusion and welcoming people in. So we like to tell stories of our consumers, we like to engage with them as much as possible.

24:52And then the marketing is really just word of mouth and on social and, you know, TikTok and Instagram and, you know, building audiences there. And then people, you know, when people discover us organically, like that's the best, right? When they find us at an airport or find us at their local coffee shop or gym, you know, that's when we get a lot of praise letters like, oh, I just found your bar. And like, you know, I think at grocery stores, it's a little hard because we've been so conditioned to just go in and replenish because of COVID. You know, the supermarket became like a place of fear instead of like a place of like where you go and wander around and then, you know, add inflation to all that.

25:30And then people are, you know, watching every dollar and every penny, you know, premium brands really had a tough go over the past like few years. And so I think as we see consumers want to take care of their health and buy natural products, minimally processed products, then, you know, we'll have an advantage. Yeah, it's interesting thinking about some of your distribution almost as a marketing channel, you know, the joy of discovery of finding it not in the supermarket, but at your local coffee shop. Was that a conscious choice to kind of build out alternative distribution to kind of grow, you know, awareness and that kind of different types of consumers?

26:15Yeah, we're very much just like on, you know, the very beginning of that journey. But that's, you know, kind of my own experience. You know, I love being delighted when I'm traveling and finding, you know, a new product that I love, you know, that I get to bring home and tell my friends about. So it's interacting with consumers at the need state. So right when they need it. um how have you handled like uh the raising money and uh funding um you know I get a lot of people coming uh to talk to me about you know funding and uh you know building business that way what's been your approach yeah that's that's one of the hardest parts I think for a lot of people in brands I was lucky in that like again I had my family business that we actually had an exit event So I was able to use my own money to bootstrap kind of this business.

27:06So we've been bootstrapped, but that's a very privileged position that not many people get to be in and not get to start that way. And so that's why I talk about capital efficiency. You know, you want to make sure that like every dollar that you spend is wise. And like, I think of it as soldiers, like that dollar has to go out and capture 10 more soldiers. Like you can't just like send a dollar out and not get a return. And that's the hardest part is that there are a lot of startup costs. If you want to make a high quality product, if you want to make it at a very reputable co-man, there are high minimums.

27:37And so it's, you know, you have to go in with a very strong financial plan of like, how are you going to get the money ahead of time? yeah amazing but again going back to your you help build a business you understand the financials and the the value of cost efficiency and really thinking this through so yeah amazing um i have you know the the food industry is you know it's it's one of those incredibly cluttered fast moving so many different trends and actually i think your brand is interesting because it kind of leans into quite a lot of headwinds you know you've got wellness you've got uh things like food allergy gluten-free you've got global flavors like a protein with the whole glp1 etc like i think it's a really interesting uh idea because it literally leans into so many good headwinds that are coming forward how do you keep up with trends?

28:41What do you do to stay current, stay inspired? I've been really lucky in that I am, I think, naturally like a trend spotter. I just think I have it innately in me. Like before I started Unite, I actually wanted to do a keto product. This is like in 2018 and 17 before keto was like even a thing. And I even trademarked like ketofatbomb.com and keto, you know, diet and all these keto things. But then the keto diet made me sick. And I couldn't like do keto because I'm I'm like, I can't sell something of something that like I can't metabolize this much fat. And so I'm lucky in that way. But I think strategically with like AI and all these things that are coming online, you know, it's going to be a really interesting product development cycle that we go into with innovation and like, can AI, you know, innovate better than humans?

29:34And the best thing that I've always done is just like, pay attention. What are people doing? What are they talking about? Like in my social circles, in my life. And so there's a lot of that. I do research, you know, read a lot of articles. I try to like, you know, stay up to date on what's going on in our industry. But at the end of the day, like I've also just made a common sense product. Like I've used all natural ingredients that are never going to be bad for you. Like it's never going to be bad to have, you know, some almond butter and some almonds and dates. And, you know, I didn't, I wanted it to be diet agnostic.