238. From Chef to Quinoa Milk Pioneer: How Kyle Stoulil is Shaping the Future of Plant-Based Dairy

0:01Kyle Stoulil:Welcome to Startup to Scale, a podcast by FoodBevy. I'm your host, Jordan Buckner. Join me as I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs, seasoned industry experts, and everyone in between as we unlock the keys to growing from startup to scale.

0:18Kyle Stoulil:Today on the Startup to Scale podcast, I'm talking with Kyle, the founder of Kyle's Organics, a brand that's making clean label nutrition bars and is launching a new quinoa milk product. all organic. Kyle's journey started as a personal chef and he spent years in the space and often knowing as much as the formulators that he hired when he was creating his products. So his story is all about curiosity, persistence, and creating food that's both functional and delicious. So Kyle, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it. You started as a personal chef and as a chef, what made you step into the world of packaged CPG and why start with nutrition bars?

0:58Yeah, I mean, it really, the Kyle's Organics brand started in my home kitchen, just as I always do, cooking, meal prepping. And that's really where these kind of innovations came from. And it started with the quinoa milk and then kind of parlayed into the nutrition bars. But these are home recipes. These are stuff that, you know, like I said, I was making in my home kitchen. So that's kind of the exciting part. And it really supports the narrative of the brand, I think.

1:26Kyle Stoulil:Awesome. So give us a sense of where the brand is now, when you got started, how long ago, and where you can find your products. Yeah, so we launched into retail April 25. So just this past April in Erewhon with our nutrition bar line, we've picked up some more retail locations here in Southern California. So it started with the quinoa milk, but really the retail push was with the nutrition bars. and that's kind of where we are today, just kind of building out our retail footprint and, you know, scaling and, you know, just kind of finding our footing. And, you know, the website is about to launch here in a few weeks.

2:06So we're kind of, you know, in the thick of it.

2:09Kyle Stoulil:So there's, you know, hundreds of products that you could have started with. Why did you choose to focus on these and I'm curious how that kind of fit into your story or journey? Yeah, yeah. The, you know, the quinoa milk, it was something that I was working on a personal chef service. And it's something that I wanted to provide to my clients, really, dairy alternatives. You know, in the 2010s, they became more of a lifestyle consumption choice than just an alternative to dairy for food safety reasons. And so, you know, that's really, that's kind of the focus was the quinoa milk right off the bat.

2:40And then once that kind of got going and I figured out that, hey, you know, I can make other products too. And that's really just the nexus of it all.

2:49Kyle Stoulil:Going from the chef world to the CPGA world, I'm sure came with some good foundational knowledge, but also a lot of challenges. What are some of the obstacles that you faced in launching the products? Yeah, I mean, cooking on your home kitchen and on your stove is a lot different than producing things commercially. Obviously, food safety is number one. If the products aren't safe, then they can't be on the shelf. So there's definitely, you know, big industry behind manufacturing ingredients that go into commercial products. The commercial ingredient for quinoa milk was not available. So that's something that I had to kind of like dive headfirst into is how to create the ingredient on a commercial level first and then turn that into a product.

3:29So it's been this kind of multi-year long endeavor of just taking an innovation that was kind of by chance and then turning that into an ingredient and then turning that into a fully commercial product.

3:41Kyle Stoulil:Yes. I mean, I'm curious about that because there's been a lot of different like seed-based milk products, nut-based milk products. So I think there's some capacity for it, but what was the kind of challenge with using quinoa as the base? Yeah, quinoa is difficult. That's, you know, when I ask people how many quinoa milks they've seen on the market and people say none, and there's kind of some technical reasons for that. You know, ours is the first. I have seen quinoa milk on the market before, and I have seen products that have kind of utilized quinoa in various ways in a beverage application, but ours is the first saponin-free quinoa milk.

4:14So once you - What's saponin? Okay. Yeah, saponin is like a, it's a plant compound. It's ubiquitous in the plant world and it's kind of, it's believed to be a deterrent for animals and insects. It deters them from eating the seed before it has a chance to kind of develop and then grow. So it's kind of a defense mechanism. It's a bitter compound that just makes things not taste very good. So when you're harvesting quinoa, oftentimes it gets washed multiple times to remove that saponin. And I just happened to figure out a way that we can remove it indefinitely and kind of really enhance the flavor of the quinoa.

4:49So that was really the innovation. And so that's the big challenge. Once you solve that problem, then it can be manufactured into a milk, like any other high starch seed, like an oat or barley or something like that.

5:01Kyle Stoulil:So with that, I'm always curious because launching new to market products is both very enticing because there's a lot of opportunity, but it's also challenging in terms of educating consumers. With my brand that I ran, Tea Squares, there were a line of energy bars that were made with tea as one of the main ingredients, black and green tea. And there's a huge educational hurdle that we faced. And I'm wondering what you're kind of finding, right? So people are familiar with not in seed alternative milks, but maybe not quinoa. What are some of the conversations that you're having and what's kind of leading people to choose Kyle's Organics version compared to other options out there?

5:40Yeah, no, that's a great question. You know, I'm really pushing the flavor and the functionality. So the flavor is absolutely delicious. If, you know, if you were to kind of inquire about oat milk, say you just, do you love oat milk? You got to have it. You got to have your oat milk lattes. You know, the way that they manufacture oat milk, it lends a strong, pleasant, but rather strong kind of raw oat flavor. It's great. I mean, there's a lot of great oat milk products out there. But our product tends to kind of, the flavor of the quinoa works kind of with the coffee instead of against it. So there's less of like a strong flavor coming from the milk.

6:16and the flavor that does come from the quinoa milk kind of blends into the coffee or your cereal. So I like to tell people that it tastes just like the milk leftover from Honey Nut Cheerios. Remember, as a kid, you'd finish your cereal and then drink the milk. That's what it tastes like. It's got this nice kind of toasted, nutty kind of honey flavor to it. And so that's the first thing is really focusing on the flavor. It's different. It works with your cereal, works with your coffee. And then the second is the functionality. I think a lot of people gravitate towards oat milk because it foams so well.

6:47And so that's been a multi-year long endeavor is trying to get the foam of the quinoa milk just right. And I'm at a point now where it's functionally identical to oat milks, the top brands on the market. I test them one-to-one and I see they're a perfect analog for the best oat milks out there. And so the functionality is really the second one is that you can foam it just like you can oat milk. You know, I do five, 10 minute tests oftentimes on different ages of the milk and I see really no fall off in the thick head of foam that you get, you know, in your glass or just in your latte. So it's the flavor and the function is really the talking points.

7:27Kyle Stoulil:So I'm curious then, as you're building out, it sounds like the quinoa milk has taken a long time and gone through a lot of adaptations to kind of get the product right, which happens during the R &D phase. How are you kind of blending your focus between the milks and the nutrition bars? Because they can live under one umbrella, but I'm wondering, like, is it a different consumer base for the nutrition bars? There's definitely different usage occasion. How are your customers seeing those two together? Do you find them as like overlapping customer base or is it two different customers? Yeah, no, again, another great question.

7:58I personally believe that it's the same consumer base. The brand, I mean, that's the kind of the positioning part. Kyle's Organics is a lifestyle brand. We're not just milks. We're not just bars. I do have other products that I want to kind of launch down the road. But launching things in different categories at the same time definitely is difficult. The tie-in is the lifestyle brand. And, you know, I don't believe in, you know, that health comes in like a package. You know, I think it's a lifestyle. And so that's really the Kyle's Organics ethos is we're there to support your healthy lifestyle.

8:28And again, focusing on the people, focusing on the ingredients. And then we have a strong element of sustainability in our ingredients and just the endeavor in general. So really, that's the tie. That's where it all kind of comes together is just is focusing on that consumer base and really making products that stand out in terms of just how they taste. In the end, these are food products. They have to taste good. We can do it with less sugar. We can do it with no additives, you know, preservatives. We can preserve things with, we can preserve them in more natural ways. And things aren't meant to sit on the shelf for five years.

8:59So that's really the kind of ethos.

9:02Kyle Stoulil:I know that getting people to taste the product is one of the biggest challenges, right? Both probably for the milks and the bars. And so I'm curious about your approach to marketing, to sampling, and how you've been able to get the product out into the world. yeah i mean kind of piggybacking on your last question the the active outdoor lifestyle is is a kind of big function of the whole the marketing potion just the brand in general so getting out like i'm i'm a avid kind of day hiker on the weekends so just getting out into on the trail and showing people the product and doing product reviews and so you like carry it around with you and just hand it out to people that you see on the trail yeah yeah i i will literally carry like two or three boxes with me and just you know because people stop at watering a place to get water and and so you just kind of have that conversation hey i'm kyle and you want to try something new and try this and and that's done that you know those are kind of like micro marketing gorilla campaigns um but i hope to do that in the coming year we hope to do that at a much larger scale um just doing sampling in stores i'll be doing that at erwan in the next month or two.

10:07And then just, like I said, the guerrilla marketing, getting out there and just getting people's reactions and using those reactions on social media, I think is powerful. Love that idea, actually.

10:16Kyle Stoulil:Yeah, I could almost imagine, right, there's all this talk around sampling and grocery stores where people are buying. But I remember having this conversation with early in my days with Peter Rahal, who is the founder of RxBarno, David, where he mentioned, he used this phrase as like, go where your product hunts the best. But it basically was like, where do you want people using your product and how can you sample it there for our products was like in corporate offices so that's where we went for yours it's like on the trail hiking doing outdoor adventurous things and so i could almost imagine like a whole ambassador program where you find like hikers and like hey we'll give you two three boxes go out on the hikes give them to as many people as you can like maybe film video for people who want to try it and sample it and get like hundreds of samples out.

11:00Kyle Stoulil:And so it's people consuming it where they're going to be using it and make an entire sampling program out of people on trails hiking everywhere. Yeah, and that's exactly what we're doing and just getting it out into the hands of the people that are using it in the environment that it's kind of designed to be in, which kind of another little aspect of the bars that I'm really proud of is our nutrition bars are nut butter based. So we don't use any flours. We use a little bit of the sugar that we do use as functional. It adds sweetness, obviously, but it performs a couple other functions. But these are cashew butter bars that have a high natural fat or oil content.

11:35Most brands, most people would kind of opt out of that format simply because there are challenges with it in the heat, you know, whatever. But we figured out a way to turn cashew butter into a solid little bar that has 220 calories. It's 50 grams. It fits perfectly in your pocket. You can put 16 of them in your backpack for a weekend and have a nice snack along the trail. So they really are like functional and they're kind of meant to just go with you. And that's, like you said, you got to go where the consumer is and that's what we're doing.

12:06Kyle Stoulil:I love that, Kyle. I think what you're doing and how you're approaching building the brand is really exciting. And I'm really looking forward to seeing how the brand continues to grow. For those listening, where's the best place to try the product now? Well, we're available in retail in Southern California at Erwan and Clark's Nutrition, which are great, great natural food stores. We have to pick up business in the Southern California area and just grow regionally. I'm not somebody that wants to just explode overnight. I want to do it right. I want people to really understand that the products are high quality, made with high quality ingredients.

12:41They're delicious. So we really want to grow it, no pun intended, but organically. And so check us out on Instagram, Kyle's Organics, the Kyle's Organics website, kyle'sorganics.com will be kind of finalized in the coming weeks. And, you know, connect with me, send me a DM, check it out. But check us out at Errol and Clark's, you know, right now.

13:02Kyle Stoulil:Perfect. Kyle, thanks so much for being on and sharing your story. And we'll look forward to seeing more. Yeah, thanks, Jordan. I appreciate it. Thank you.