774 Yousuf Ahmed: Founder & CEO of B-SIDES

0:00Kara Goldin:I am unwilling to give up, but I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don't get knocked out. So your only choice should be, go focus on what you can control. Hi everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world's greatest leaders. We'll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can't wait to get started. Let's go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kira Golden Show.

0:44Kara Goldin:Today, I'm joined by Yusuf Ahmed, who is the founder and CEO of B-Sides, a fairly new Brooklyn upcycled snack brand proving that sustainability can be bold, flavorful, and seriously fun. Yusuf's journey is as unconventional as it gets from recording engineer to Goldman Sachs advisor to walking away from Wall Street to turn overlooked ingredients into a new wave of clean, crave -worthy snacks. Have I covered it so far, Yusuf? So far. Thanks so much for having me, Kara. Yeah, totally. So what I love about Yusuf's story is how a single question, what happens to the leftover oats from oat milk production, sparked a business that tackles food waste while actually tasting great.

1:37Kara Goldin:I can't wait to dig into his journey from finance to food entrepreneurship and how B-Sides is capturing the next generation of conscious consumers and what it really takes to build a mission-driven CPG brand in a category that's both crowded and rapidly evolving. So, Yusuf, welcome to The Kara Golden Show. So excited to meet you. Likewise. Congratulations. Very exciting. Thanks so much. It's been a wild ride. I love it. So, okay. So before we dive in, how would you define besides what the brand is at its core? So I, whenever somebody asks me what this company is, I always say that it's an upcycled snack company.

2:25And they say, okay, I know what snacks are. You have like this better for you Cheeto. Like, that's cool. I don't know what upcycling is. And you posed this question at the top. You know, it's what sparked me to leave kind of my prior career. What do they do with the leftover oats from making oat milk? That's that problem, solving that problem, that's upcycling. How do you take these leftovers and put them back into the consumer food system?

2:49Kara Goldin:And where did the name B-Sides come from? And what does it represent to you? So there are a couple of different answers to this question. The easiest one is what can we make with those oats besides oat milk is like the easiest thing for people to understand. In music, a B-side, those are all the tracks that didn't make it onto the official album. But that doesn't mean they're not good songs. They just didn't fit the vibe, right? So I use that approach with ingredients. And it's also kind of hearkening back to my background in the music business. So, so interesting. So your background, as you just mentioned, spans music, finance, and now food, when you thought about this idea and actually thought about leaving what you were doing in order to create a sustainable snack brand, did you think for a minute, maybe I shouldn't?

3:49No, is the short answer. You know, in hindsight, it's like, wow, this was really hard. If I knew how hard this was going to be. I don't know that I would have done this, but I also, you know, when you're an entrepreneur and you have a question that's nagging at you and you're trying to solve a problem, there's not really any other way out but through. You got to just like keep going. And so there wasn't really a discreet moment when I was like, you know, maybe I should hang it up and try something else. This was something that I had been wanting to solve for a long time.

4:19Kara Goldin:So you've said that the brand started with the question, what happens to the leftover oats from an oat milk production. You didn't have experience in this industry. What was the first step once you decided, I'm going to suss this out, whether or not it's actually a viable opportunity. What was the first thing that you did? Yeah, so I actually didn't start with oats. The first category that I started with was actually the leftover grain from brewing beer. So my first kind of interaction with upcycling was in 2014 or 2015. There was a chef named Dan Barber. He had started this. He's a chef here in New York.

5:00He has a restaurant called Blue Hill, and he does a lot of work around food waste. He had a pop-up that was basically a residency. Every night a new chef would come in, they would highlight kind of the offcuts or things that were typically overlooked or thrown out. And one of the courses in that meal was called spent grain bread. So it was bread baked with the leftover grains from brewing beer. And I remember trying it and thinking like, this is amazing. The story is incredible. It's totally circular and it's delicious. Like this is going to be a thing. That was in 2014, let's call it, right? Fast forward 10 years, like upcycling still hasn't really achieved escape velocity from a consumer perspective.

5:44And so for me, that was kind of a North Star that I knew about and wanted to attack. So the way that I started was just cold calling every microbrewery in the area and saying, hey, what do you do with your grain? Can I play around with it? And that, you know, one thing led to another. And now we've got better for you Cheetos.

6:05Kara Goldin:So funny. And then how did you ultimately get to oats? so the the really tricky part about upcycling is um these byproducts from manufacturing they're 100 edible they can be 100 delicious they're also incredibly difficult to work with so let's take the microbrewery case um when you're brewing beer the primary grain in what's called the grain bill is barley. And what that means is brewers will use a ton of barley and a little bit of oats, sometimes some rye, some wheat, depends on what beer they're making. And they basically steep all those grains in a bunch of hot water and they strain it out and the leftover liquid gets fermented, becomes beer.

6:52All of the leftover grain is now soaking wet and you have a very limited time window to process that grain into a shelf-stable flour before it starts going bad. So if you're doing this by hand, which I was, it's super labor-intensive to try and capture all that grain in the correct window and then get it to a place where it's ready to play around with. So for something like oat milk, oat milks are commercially produced in really big co-packing facilities. And there's a couple of companies that have gotten really good at the physical upcycling piece of it. So the everything I just mentioned, the capture of the product, rendering it into something usable.

7:39And, you know, it falls within a like a nutrient and kind of moisture band that's workable and predictable. So I ended up working in oats because that's the biggest kind of upcycled ingredient pool to pull from today. But like I said, this exists all over the food system, right? You've got leftover grains from brewing beer. You've got leftover grounds from coffee, press from juiceries. I mean, it's literally everywhere if you think about it.

8:11Kara Goldin:So interesting. So were you actually calling, you had mentioned calling breweries. I mean, how did you actually get to the leftover oats? Yeah, so this is a function of how upcycling as a sector has evolved over the last 10 years. So I mentioned that dinner that I went to, let's call that the start. That was like version 1.0 of upcycling, very small scale in a restaurant. there were over the next kind of 10 years, there were a couple of companies that raised a couple million bucks to get really good at the physical upcycling. And there were a couple of people like me who wanted to focus on a consumer facing product.

8:57Those original companies that got good at the upcycling, they were now sitting on a glut of basically raw materials that consumers didn't know what to do with and there wasn't really a playbook for. So rather than me reinventing the wheel on how to do the actual upcycling, I partnered with a couple of different upcycling companies to say, okay, you've got all this raw material that you're trying to move. I have a pretty good idea of how to work with this stuff. Let's work together. So you focus on the physical upcycling. I focus on the consumer-facing goods. And we can kind of innovate depending on where the market is going and what people like and what resonates most.

9:36So it's not me doing everything. It's me partnering up with the right players in the space to try to do everything.

9:45Kara Goldin:So interesting. So reinvention is such a big part of your story. I totally get it. I came from tech many years ago, and what I loved most about walking into this new industry was the learning, right? Instead of climbing, I was actually down in the mud and trying to figure out how do I actually do something this exciting. I'd love to hear kind of your realization when you jumped into this not only totally new industry for you, but also an industry that is still in its infancy in many ways. yeah so it can be quite overwhelming i mean i'm sure you know this having founded and kind of grown a cpg company there it's a complex business whether you know you you realize it from the outside looking in or not and then adding on another layer of complexity which is like this supply chain quirk uh it can become very quickly overwhelming and the mantra that i try to live by is like, just solve the problem in front of you that day.

10:57Because if you if you try to like back solve for something that's going to happen three months from now, like, you're never going to accomplish what you're setting out to accomplish. So, you know, just to, I guess, make that a more material answer. Last week, I was dealing with, funny enough, supply chain issues and trying to forecast what to do about things like tariffs, and how do I figure out how to get all of the raw material to one place in a window of time, get it processed and then get it back across the border. I manufacture everything in Canada without getting kind of dinged by tariffs when we don't actually know what's happening with the tariffs.

11:34Right. So it's it's literally just rolling up your sleeves and saying, OK, what can I solve today that needs to get done today? And just, you know, repeating that every day for forever.

11:45Kara Goldin:Totally agree with you. I think it's it's I always talk about it as like the whack-a-ball, right? You're trying to put out the fires and then continue to grow the business as you go and stay focused. But focus is so hard, right? Especially when you don't know what's going to be in front of you many days, especially in those early days, whether it's dealing with the product or supply chain or maybe the brand or customer service or maybe fundraising, depending on what your vision is on that, or distribution. How do you focus on what to do next, especially when I would imagine you have a very small team?

12:31Kara Goldin:That is, you're kind of wearing a lot of hats. Yeah, it's, you know, jack of all trades, master of none is kind of how I think about it. But look, so, you know, I, B-Sides and the Crunch Puffs, which I just launched this year, that was the distillation of three to four years of kind of exploratory work. What I did was I started very, very broad. And then I just started narrowing kind of the scope of focus as I, as I iterated. And I did this exactly how you're not supposed to do it. So like typically an entrepreneur, they identify a gap in the market and they try to create a product or service to fill the gap.

13:14Upcycling by its very nature does not do that. I identified a supply chain quirk and then shoehorned a consumer product using that supply chain quirk. And because I had no background in food or Bev or brand building or anything with like the physical goods space, I just tried to figure out, okay, where is there any white space in this area? right? I actually started, you know, we started the conversation about how did I get into upcycling and like, what was the first category? So my first product was not this snack puff. It was actually a super premium pastry line. I created like plays on Oreos, Little Debbie's oatmeal cream pies, pop tarts.

14:00And, you know, I, what I wanted to do was try to figure out, okay, how do consumers react to this kind of product, this kind of messaging, this kind of pricing, how I'm presenting the brand, and then just try to take those little bits of feedback and do a little bit better next time, a little bit better the time after that, etc, etc, etc. So the look and feel and face of the brand that's public today, that actually just launched in earnest in August. These snack puffs, I took to market in January, but the brand identity the way that I was messaging, positioning, just the visual identity, completely different than what it is today.

14:41So I just keep iterating as I go along. And it's really difficult to do, by the way, in consumer because you have to, you know, basically pick a lane and then grow on top of that lane. You can't just play jazz the whole time.

14:54Kara Goldin:Definitely. How do you know that you're on the right track with B-Sides. It's such a great tasting product. But there's so much work to get done, right? You've got to launch it. Once you figure out your go-to-market strategy, you have to figure out whether it's, you know, if it's digital, you have to figure out how do I get the word out. If it's on store shelves, you also have to figure out how to get the word out. But But what has been kind of how do you figure out the KPIs and sort of the, you know, how do you measure success on this? Yeah, with great difficulty. I'll let you know when I actually figure it out.

15:40Look, so typically when launching a consumer good, and this is especially true in Food and Bev, you kind of have to just try a couple of things and see what sticks. So as I just mentioned, I launched, let's call it version 1.0 of this product back in January. All of my messaging was around sustainability. It was about, you know, pounds of CO2 emissions avoided and, you know, gallons of water avoided. And, you know, it took it took us what we've been talking for call it 10, 15 minutes. It took me 15 minutes to explain what upcycling is. And when you're dealing in consumer, like you do not have that time frame to educate a customer on a nascent product category.

16:27They make impulse decisions in seven seconds. Right. Like you have to be able to deliver what a customer wants and needs at that moment right then and there. And so, you know, to your point about like, how do I set KPIs? How do I, how do I pick which metrics? I, everybody kind of knows to do, well, we got to go on social media. We got to run paid ads. You got to do PR. And like, you know, I think, yes, all of those things are true, but everybody is also doing all of those things. So what you got to do is actually figure out like, who is the target customer for this kind of product? And how do you speak to that customer?

17:06A lot of people, I think this is especially true in food for first time founders, you ask them, who's the target customer? And, you know, a common answer is anybody with a mouth. The problem with that strategy is if you're trying to be everything to everybody, you end up being nothing and like dying on the vine because you're doing a, what's basically a me too strategy, you have to get as granular as the target customer is a 27 year old creative professional who is probably a woman living in an urban area, whether that's in the Northeast or the North Pacific Northwest. She goes to yoga in the mornings.

17:43She shops at Whole Foods. Sometimes she'll buy stuff on Amazon. That information informs how you message the product. And so you can then iterate from there. But if you're being everything to everybody, the data you get back is so muddy, you can't do anything with it.

18:01Kara Goldin:Yeah, that is so, so, so true. So you launched digital, digitally, initially. And was there anything that was most surprising in launch that maybe a consumer responded to? Or maybe they actually told you that you're off, you're off, you're not on the right track with them. Yeah, 100%. Reading internet troll comments is like, you know, its own type of own type of therapy, I guess. So yeah, look, it's the hard part is actually parsing the signal from the noise, because you're gonna have people who just don't like your product. That's just true. Not every product is for everybody. And that's kind of the beauty of the world that we live in is that there is so much choice that not every product has to be everything to everybody.

18:58So if that's true, then how do you know when you get negative feedback, which negative feedback to listen to? And for me, it was, okay, we get one comment around flavor or texture, that's not really meaningful. But if I start getting a lot of hurting around, we like this flavor, or we don't like this flavor. Now that's something that, you know, I can, I can kind of get behind and understand. The other thing that's really difficult, particularly something like upcycling is, you know, it is, it is a product that is not going to be for everybody. There is a unique kind of flavor and texture to it.

19:36I have dialed it into, you know, I'm a, I'm a notorious doom snacker. I used to just crush bags of Doritos, Cheetos, eat it like anything with like the Eidos family. That was me. So I try to dial in flavor and texture as close as I possibly could while hitting all the nutritional kind of macros that I was going for. And, um, you know, it works for me and it doesn't work for everybody, but the people who it does work for, they come back and they buy the product again and they buy it again and they leave reviews and they give referrals. Those are the people you should be listening to, not the people who are like, I hated this product.

20:13That's not helpful.

20:14Kara Goldin:Yeah, it's so, so true. Do you have one flavor, one skew that is the kind of runaway hero? Yeah, you know, not yet. I have a feeling. So right now I launched with three flavors, right? I've got cheddar, I've got ranch, and I've got jalapeno. Those three flavors are pretty distinct from one another. Cheddar is like when somebody thinks of a snack puff, they think about Cheetos. It's a classic. Ranch is kind of a weird one because I made that as like my homage to the Doritos Cooler Ranch flavor. It was my favorite snack as a kid. And then the jalapeno one, there was a lot of feedback around like I want spicy and I want salt and vinegar.

21:02And I was like, let's just cut the difference and do one that does both. And unfortunately, I don't have a runaway hit yet. Everybody kind of, you ask 100 different people, you're going to get basically 30 people love cheddar, 30 people love ranch, 30 people love jalapeno. So I'm just going to have to, you know, keep going until I get a runaway hit.

21:21Kara Goldin:I love it. So last question, if you could put one message on a billboard describing the purpose and impact you're hoping to achieve with B-Sides, what would it say? Yeah. So the slogan, the billboard is long live snack time. One of the reasons that we started this conversation talking about upcycling sustainability. The thing is, sustainability is not a category driver in snacks. That is one of the more difficult lessons that I've learned. But the goals of sustainability are to achieve a specific outcome. And those outcomes are along those vectors that we've mentioned, right? Carbon reduction or food waste reduction.

22:05But if it's not a category driver, you've got a message to people along something that is, because if they buy the product, they ultimately solve for the thing you're trying to solve for, which are all the downstream environmental effects. For me, that slogan, long live snack time, in this A &A, there's so much. To your point, it's so competitive. The space is just everybody yelling about how they're the better for you brand with a shorter, cleaner ingredient list. The way that I approach this is, look, consumers today are smart. They take nutrition as table stakes. They just want something that tastes good and solves for what I'm solving for, the 3 p.m.

22:46snack slump. So long live snack time. You can envision being a kid wearing a cape, you know, crushing that bag of Doritos. And by you doing that, just itching that 3 p.m. scratch, You're also solving all of those environmental and nutritional things that I, you know, prioritize for the brand, even though it's not a category driver.

23:04Kara Goldin:I love it. Well, Yusuf, thank you so much for joining us today. And your journey is so inspiring. B-Sides is proof that purpose-driven brands can be delicious and commercially successful all at the same time while doing good. and for everyone listening, check out enjoybsides.com, correct? That's the... Correct. All right. And follow them on all social channels and as always, don't forget to share this episode and leave a quick review. Thank you again, Yusef. Really appreciate all you're doing and again, good luck with everything. Thanks so much, Kara. Thanks again for listening to The Kara Golden Show.

23:47Kara Goldin:If you would, please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit. And of course, feel free to subscribe so you don't miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Golden. I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building Hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening and goodbye for now.