Eureka: Why pistachios are having a moment 

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Roxana Saidi is the founder and CEO of Tash, the world's first pistachio milk brand. A San Francisco native of Iranian descent, Roxana grew up with pistachios as a staple. They are a familiar ingredient in Middle Eastern households, prized for both their flavour and cultural value. Yet, despite the rise of alternative milks, pistachios were largely absent from the growing category dominated by almonds and oats.

0:52In 2015, though, Roxana began making her own after she discovered that pistachio milk requires significantly less water to produce than the almond version. Now, a decade into the journey, Tash is available in around 4 ,000 cafes globally and is expanding to more countries, including France and right here in the UK. Here is Roxanna with more on how the journey began.

1:18We're on a mission at Tash to make dairy-free delicious without sacrificing quality, flavor and sustainability. And we're also giving back along the way. So the story of how Tash came to be is quite a fun one. It actually, the idea was born in Paris. I am of Middle Eastern descent. My father grew up in Iran. I grew up in San Francisco. So I had two lifelong passions woven throughout my life. The first one was a passion for pistachios. And as many people know who have friends of Middle Eastern descent, we have a deep love for pistachios. The joke is like we have a separate stomach just for pistachios.

1:55I was no different. And so lucky enough to grow up eating my whole life. And they're really a cultural symbol of community, of love, of generosity, all these things. And then the other lifelong passion came from my mother, who is a, to this day, two-cup coffee drinker per day. So every day growing up in San Francisco, I would go out the front door with her and I would have her first cappuccino alongside her as a little five-year-old. And she would let me have the foam off her cappuccino. And I just really got into the routine and the ritual of coffee at a really young age through my mother. And so fast forward to 2015, I was on a family vacation.

2:34traveling in Paris. And at this point in time, Oatly really hadn't made its mark into the U.S. Oat milk was not yet a thing. Almond milk was growing in popularity. And I had moved over from drinking dairy every day to drinking almond milk. And in Paris in 2015, that was not yet a thing. So I'm sitting around the lunch table with my family. It's very typical Parisian two-hour lunch, rosé flowing. Everybody's enjoying their espressos at the end of the meal. And I was longing for my go-to at the time, an almond milk latte. And as I was sitting there, I just had the light bulb moment just hit me like a bolt of lightning.

3:11And I thought, wow, like, wouldn't my family's favorite nut, the pistachio, make an even more delicious plant-based milk than the almond milk I'm drinking? And so that just sent me on a journey to learn everything I could, brick by brick, on how you start a plant-based milk company that's geared for baristas and coffee.

3:32I have this deep belief system that pistachios were just being underutilized and there was such immense affinity for it but there was basically two use cases you either had it out of the shell as a nut or you had it in some ice cream or gelato and so it was this super dynamic super delicious super healthy nut that just was totally underutilized and so So with Cash, a lot of what the team is so obsessed with and our ethos is making pistachio more mainstream. We say we've been pretty successful in going from niche to mainstream. And, you know, it's always been beloved by like chefs and culinary folks and bakers, but it really hasn't had its moment to shine the way that almond has.

4:15And so we're on a mission to change that. And I think that, you know, Dubai chocolate and all these other things are totally helping to, you know, a rising tide type of scenario. which is fantastic. We really believe it's here to stay. So while the moment just keeps growing with momentum and it's sort of this snowball effect, we don't believe it'll ever really die back down. I can't really, you know, hide from the fact that alt milk fatigue was a lot of phrases that we heard from, you know, would-be investors and just concerns about whether the market needed another plant-based milk. But how we broke through was through three really key areas.

4:57One, 90 % of our consumers drink Tash on its own for pure pleasure. People take a sip of Tash and this like wave of like shock kind of comes over their face, usually coupled with the sentence around, wow, I would drink this entirely on its own because most people have an affinity for pistachios. You don't really see people reaching into their refrigerators and pulling out their almond milk or their oat milk and drinking it on its own for pure pleasure. So that's the first one and we're really proud of that fact. The other two are around sustainability and health. On the sustainability side, almonds unfortunately have an enormous water footprint in California where a majority of the almonds are grown that are consumed in almond milk around the world.

5:37The almond trees require more water than all of the inhabitants of the state of California combined, So quite a large water footprint. And by contrast, pistachios require about 75 % less water. And then compared to oat milk, back when we were starting Tash, most people had to put two and two together on what break seed oil really was. That's changed tremendously. But, you know, you look at the nutritional panel of most oat milks and there's that canola oil there. So not great for many people. And by contrast, Tash has that really nice velvety consistency that more closely mirrors dairy milk, but without the added rapeseed or industrial seed oil.

6:19So that's what allowed us to break through and sort of have this zeitgeisty moment leading the pack among what is now three or four other pistachio milks that have followed Tash.

6:34we are deeply passionate about empowering underserved and underprivileged girls we have a non-profit partner called the Lower East Side Girls Club of New York and they are an incredible institution helping very young girls living in the nearby projects get the resources the mentorship the you name it that they need to become healthy and successful women. And so we donate some of our profit to them as well as we do in-person programming and we donate product to the girls and their families in the wider community. And that was just born out of a lifelong passion of mine of just giving back where I can and in particular to young girls.

7:19I think comparing Tash to the other pistachio milks that have come into market, there's just one glaringly obvious distinction is that they're actually all blends. So whether it's soy or oats or almonds, the other pistachio milks are not pistachio milks at all. They're blends using these other, what the industry calls filler ingredients, cheaper ingredients that sort of bolster up the product so that they're able to keep the price of the product down. What we're trying to do is be a pure pistachio milk, no fillers, which we're really proud of. And we're in about 4 ,000 cafes across the globe, predominantly in the U.S., as well as Canada and soon to be the U.K., which we are so excited about, and some other European countries, especially France.

8:09It feels like every day there's something new popping up, whether it's connected to Tash directly or more broadly with pistachios in general to brands that we adore. Alex Ice Cream and Graza announced their collab on a pistachio ice cream, which, you know, is just incredible. And we're so excited that we'll be collabing with Alex on a little Instagram post about that. But yeah, most excitingly is that on July 15th, we'll be launching with Blank Street across all of their UK locations as well as their US locations, which will be a matcha drink that we're tremendously excited about. It's beyond delicious.

8:49So that'll be our first large coffee and matcha chain in the UK with more to follow.

9:06That was Roxana Saidi, the founder and CEO of Tash. And you can learn more about the brand and the new collaboration with Blank Street Coffee by heading to pistachio-milk.com. And that is all for this episode of Eureka. My thanks to Monica Lillis for her report. We'll be back at the same time next week. Do look out for The Entrepreneurs, which is available every Wednesday. Eureka is produced by Laura Kramer with audio editing by Jack Dewars. And if you would like to get in touch with the team, send an email to Laura on lrk at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye. And thanks for listening to Eureka.