Founder Feature: Ariel Altman and Ronny Berger of Figa Foods

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1:42We really tried to just speak to as many people as we could that we knew in Brazil. We got connected to researchers and chocolate like executives and chefs and lawyers and like chocolate makers. And everyone that we spoke to basically said, good luck. You're never going to make this taste good and you're never going to figure out the supply chain. And it wasn't until we met our chocolate maker. And I'll never forget the first conversation that we had with her. She was like, this is the future of chocolate. I've always wanted to work with Kupuasu. we're going to make this taste good. Hey everybody, this is Caitlin Bricker, editor at Startup CPG.

2:24We are back with another founder feature. Ever wonder what a chocolate bar would taste like if it was made from a Brazilian super fruit instead of good old cacao? Well, today we're talking with Arielle Altman and Ronnie Berger, co-founders of Figa Foods. They're life partners who became business partners after discovering Kupuasu. Say it with me. cupuaçu cupuaçu is brazil's national fruit that most brazilians don't even know about using just three ingredients they've created bars that might not even make you miss your favorite cacao based bar from getting told good luck you'll never make this taste good to landing food network and bon appetit coverage pre-launch figa has lessons many founders may want to take notes on i've become completely obsessed with these bars so fair warning this conversation might make you immediately place an order.

3:14Enjoy.

3:18Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Arielle Altman and Ronnie Berger, co-founders of Figa Foods. Arielle, Ronnie, welcome to the show. Thank you. This is so fun. We're so excited to be here. I am so happy to have you here. Your product is such a standout product for me. It's easily become one of my favorite things on the market. You're just doing everything so well, so right. It's so delicious. I am so stoked to have you here and talk about your products and introduce everyone to Figa. Love it. We're so excited to be here too. It's definitely a challenge to not want to eat our bars all the time.

3:57And every time we crave it and want it, we need to remind ourselves we need to sell them. I've said this before, but I love a founder who gets high on their own supply. That's a really good sign. my personal stash keeps dwindling and i'm like okay john my husband where the hell my figa bars go but it's fine i don't mind sharing don't worry we do have a lot in our apartment so so cool all right so anybody who's listening right now and doesn't know what figa is arielle want to walk us through what figa is i would love to and i can even start with the name because some people think that it's figs.

4:35It's not about figs. So I'm American. Ronnie's Brazilian. And our whole goal with Figa Foods is to make Brazilian superfoods really fun and accessible and interesting for the modern American palate. And to fazer Figa, and if anyone's watching me, you'll see I'm crossing my fingers, to fazer Figa means to bring in good luck or ward off bad energy, almost like the Brazilian symbol for an evil eye. And when we were brainstorming what we wanted our company to be and what we wanted it to feel like. The name Figa Foods just really felt special and important and really just real to us. I remember coming back from a yoga class one day, walking in the door and I said to Ronnie, I'm like, we're doing Figa Foods.

5:16It's calling to me. I just feel like that's the right name. But as you were mentioning, we make bars that are kind of like chocolate reimagined instead of using the cocoa beans, which you're going to find in your typical chocolate bars, we use the seeds of a Brazilian superfood that's related to cacao called cupuaçu. So cupuaçu and cacao are actually in the same larger family. So very similar to how apples are to pears or oranges are to tangerines, cupuaçu is to cacao. And what we do is we take the seeds of the cupuaçu fruit and take them through a very similar process to how cocoa beans turn into chocolate.

5:57And what you get at the end is our bars, which are super creamy, like a milk chocolate, but then really complex and fruity and tropical and very similar to like what you'll find in a very high end craft chocolate bar. And what's also really cool about our bars is they're only three ingredients. So it's just kupuasu, sweetened with dates, and then a little bit of cocoa butter, which actually gives it the nice texture and snap that you find from maybe your favorite chocolate bar. We have three different flavors. So the first is our pure bar. so just the three ingredients. The second is our salty bar so those three ingredients plus sea salt flakes blended in which was the favorite of the farmer's market this weekend and then our last is the fruity which I think is Ronnie and I's like secret favorite even though we love all of them because the fruity is really unique because we actually take the pulp of the kupuasu fruit which kind of tastes like a tropical sour patch but it's completely clean and natural and we actually put it on top of the bar.

6:54So my dad calls it a raisinette. I think it's a much better, cooler version of a raisinette, but for the 60, 70 year old crowd, that's what it seems to remind them of. And the other thing that I'll say that I think make what we're doing pretty special is we, cupuaçu is the national fruit of Brazil, but it's often kind of seen as this afterthought crop. Many Brazilians probably know cupuaçu, maybe have tried it in a dessert. The main use for The cupowasu now is in desserts, but also the cosmetic industry uses the seeds. If you've ever bought a Rode lip gloss from Healy Bieber or use body cream from Sol de Janeiro, you've actually experienced cupowasu, but in a cosmetic form because the seeds are pressed for the oil because they're super high in antioxidants and great for moisture absorption.

7:37but um you know no one is making chocolate quote unquote or what we call the figa bar out of the seeds of the cupua su in the u.s um you we did when we started on this journey try bars made out of cupua su in brazil from small batch makers they were all pretty bad i'm not gonna lie they kind of tasted like rotten really cheap like hanukkah gelt if anyone's ever had that or really cheap like old chocolate and what's interesting about cupua su in general and i could probably talk about this for a long time so if we want to switch that's okay it grows next to cacao and bananas and coconuts and acai so all these other plants that we americans all love and eat and enjoy from brazil but no one really knows about cupua su and the farms that we work with often don't even harvest their cupua su or don't have use for it if they are harvesting it they're selling it at a much lower price to the cosmetic industry.

8:35So what we're able to do is pay our farmers a much higher price for something that they would normally throw away or be, again, sold at a much lower price. So we're able to what we call like upcycle the seeds and give new life to something that would go to waste. So many good things in there that I want to touch on. So many good things. I will say fruity is my personal favorite. That's the one that I gravitate towards because your bars were my first ever experience with cupuaçu. I had never heard of it before and when I tasted it my mind was just blown. So to be able to actually see the fruit and then obviously have it mixed into the bar, very very cool experience.

9:15Ronnie, I am very interested to hear your perspective because you're from Brazil. What was your first experience with cupuaçu? I think it was exactly the first experience we had with Figa. I don't think I had cupuaçu before that cupuaçu is the national fruit of brazil as ariel said but i didn't know that and i'm sure that if you ask 10 brazilians i think that seven or eight of them are gonna say the same they did not know it's a national fruit of brazil and probably the same eight or nine are gonna say i never tried it um it's very popular in the north and the northeast so the fruit is originally from the amazon but it's not that popular in the southeast which is where i i am from.

9:55And even in the North and Northeast, the Pope is really common. They use it for juices and smoothies and ice cream and things like that. And as Ariel said, they don't use the seeds for pretty much anything other than some use cases in the cosmetic industry or even like animal food. So it's kind of embarrassing for me to say as a Brazilian, but my first experience with it was with Tiga food. That's actually really cool. And I think that adds like another exciting layer to the brand that not only are you introducing a product to many people that they probably never heard of, but you're also introducing this fruit that people have probably never heard of, but you're having that experience simultaneously with your consumer and you're able to enjoy it together.

10:37So Ariel, I got to know, what was your first experience with Kukuwasu? How were you introduced to it? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the kind of starting point of why Ronnie and I wanted to do this was because every time I went to Brazil, I was always so inspired by all the amazing natural superfoods that existed. And I come from, my dad was an entrepreneur and had a small business. I've been obsessed with food and health and wellness my entire life and always had this dream of starting something. And I've had in the past did like superfood nut butters before they were a thing. And I would bring them into my work team and everyone would be like, this is gross.

11:16I tried to do healthy ice cream and all that to be said, I started to do more research on Brazilian superfoods. And it literally was from like asking AI in a Google search where I came across cupuaçu and the fact that it could be a chocolate alternative. And I love dark chocolate. I always have a stash of like fancy dark chocolate bars everywhere I travel. I love always buying new, interesting chocolate makers, creations. and we literally found it on Google. And then we found a video on YouTube of this woman in the Amazon. We actually posted about it on Instagram, basically taking the seeds of the kupua sioux fruit and hand grinding them and turning them into what looked like a chocolate bar.

11:56And there was like roosters in the background of her video. I don't even think she had like full-time electricity. And we both looked at each other and we were like, if this woman can do it, like we can do this. Like let's figure this out. So that was my first experience with Pupuasu. I did a lot of research on it before I actually even got to try it. And then we really tried to just speak to as many people as we could that we knew in Brazil. And it's funny, you know, Brazil is a really big country, but I feel like it's a very small world in a lot of ways. And we got connected to researchers and chocolate like executives and chefs and lawyers and like chocolate makers.

12:34And everyone that we spoke to basically said, good luck. You're never going to make this taste good and you're never going to figure out the supply chain. And it wasn't until we met our chocolate maker that we're working with now. Her name is Louisa Abram. She's amazing. She actually has her own chocolate line. She's in places like Erwan because she works with local indigenous communities on the Amazon River and harvests wild cacao. But she also does R &D and recipe development and manufacturing for small brands in Brazil. She does also like the chocolate behind Bacio de Latte, which is a huge ice cream brand in Brazil.

13:12But we got introduced to her from, again, a crazy connection. Ronnie's uncle's wife, brother, no joke. This is like I'm not kidding. had a restaurant and Louisa was like training as the pastry chef like 15 years ago and we randomly got connected to her and I'll never forget the first conversation that we had with her she was like this is the future of chocolate I've always wanted to work with coupe wasu we're gonna make this taste good and kind of from there it was like just figuring it out as we go and testing different recipes testing different ratios testing different roasting profiles machinery and really like just having people bring stuff back from us from Brazil, sitting at our table, giving friends samples, numbering all the samples, and then also giving it to really prominent chefs because I felt like it was really important for not just us to think it tasted really good, but really get expert opinion.

14:07So I brought it to the pastry chef at 11 Madison Park. I brought it to the pastry chefs at Google. I brought it to the pastry chefs who do R &D at Jose Andres' restaurant groups to really get their feedback on how could this work in a recipe? Does this taste good to you? And that really shaped the recipe that we're at today, which we're so excited about and recently debuted. So, so cool. There's just so much to be discussed when it comes to Kupuasu and your journeys. And I would love to just take a quick pause and understand, A, I have two big questions. A, how did you guys meet? And then B, tell us a little bit about your background.

14:49So who wants to go first and tell us how you guys met? Oh, man. I mean, this is hilarious. No pressure. No, not at all. We met on Hinge. Ronnie and I are getting married. September 6th. It is now July 21st. So we are business partners and life partners. And it's also, you know, kind of how I mentioned the world is so small. Ronnie grew up in Sao Paulo. I grew up in New York, Ronnie actually grew up with a very close friend of mine from my corporate job in Brazil. They literally, when Ronnie and I first met, he started sending me pictures of my very close friend who I went to go visit in Brazil a year prior to Ronnie and us even meeting because she has my job, but me in Brazil.

15:27And so that I knew Ronnie wasn't a serial killer. We love that. Thank you. Yes. So that's actually how we met. But in terms of my background, I've been in big tech for the last 10 years and kind of various different roles from ad sales to business development to partnerships and kind of have always seen how to make unsexy messages cool and interesting using creators, using interesting video formats. And that has always really inspired me to think beyond how do you tell a story or how do you tell a message? And yeah, that's and I would say like there's always been this thread of health and wellness throughout my entire life.

16:12My dad had a pharmacy growing up, but like not the normal pharmacy vibe that you would think like I was taking Echinacea, you know, when I was like five or six years old, like we were taking probiotics in the 90s before anyone knew about gut health. So I've always kind of looked at health and wellness through a really different lens. I think that also has inspired me to start this and get to where we are, because even if you look at the back of beautifully made, beautifully sourced high end chocolate bars, there's lecithins in them or even chocolate bars or sweets that are claiming to be healthy, quote unquote.

16:45quote, there's weird sugar alcohols or like weird things that you can't pronounce. And I knew that whatever I wanted to dedicate my time and energy to had to be good for you and had to be something that is going to help your health, not make it worse. So anyway, Ronnie, I'm going to turn it to you. My background is in finance. So I did banking for almost 10 years and then more recently moved to tax, dealing finance. So pretty much Excel spreadsheets are my comfort zone. I'm like deep diving into numbers all day long. And it's funny because when we started this journey, of course, we started a business together because we're life partners, right?

17:25But we often say this to ourselves that if we were to go out and look for business partners out in the world, right, they would pretty much, my ideal business partner would be pretty much someone very similar to Ariel. And I I think she would say the same thing, right? So I'm finance. I'm in the numbers. I do all the Brazilian side of the operation, you know, relationship with farmers, stakeholders, labs, and everything in Brazil. She does all the marketing and sales part here. So I think it's very, like, complementary. And we talk about this all the time, like, very similar things that you look for in a business partner, you look for in a life partner, which is the sense of, like, blind trust in some ways, you know, ability to communicate and this idea of also laughing and having fun at things that maybe are really stressful and hard.

18:12And I think, you know, one thing that we always say to each other is like, we're not going to have all the answers or like we know things are going to get hard, but we also know that we will figure it out. And I think just knowing that we will figure it out is what gets us through some of these really complicated problems that we're trying to solve. We also always laugh. We're like, we really should have done something easier.

18:33But and you're building a supply chain from scratch and you're introducing a brand new ingredient. It's hard, but it's also so exciting and fun at the same time because it's also what almost sells it for us because we're so unique and because no one has kupuasu on their shelves and because no one knows what it is. In some ways, it's hard, but then in a lot of ways, it makes it easier. I also think that it's also easier from a routine point of view because sometimes we're like having dinner and then at 9 p.m. something related to the business pops up, right? And it's so easy to go and tackle it together as opposed to working with a business partner that's like not their life partner and then you'll have to call them.

19:12Maybe they disconnected for the day. You know, we are right there living together almost 24-7. We'll be right back. A few years back when I ran a beverage company, we had to launch using those plastic sleeves to put our designs on the cans. But they looked bad. The sleeves get stretched out. They don't cover the full can and overall they just look and feel low quality. Lucky for you, digital can printing technology has come so far over the last few years that now you can launch your beverage brand or new SKUs with a fully printed look and it's at similar pricing to those plastic sleeves. Our friends at CanWorks, which is the largest U.S.-based digital can printer, are happy to work with our community at very low minimums, even one pallet.

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20:04So I think it's really cool that you two have not only found partners for life and each other, but you are also able to apply everything to your business. It seems like you're having a lot of fun. I love how your dad even was brought into this, Ariel. I wish I got the chance to talk to him at Fancy Food because you had me cracking up at that video that you posted on your Instagram. I must have watched it 50 times and every time it just got better. I mean, he also did go through an interview process to be our unpaid intern for the time. And he now knows how to say koupouasu and sometimes gets to stand behind us and talk.

20:41But I will say like seeing my dad his whole life be so passionate about what he did and have a small business and see the amount of grit and perseverance and passion that it takes to be successful definitely always inspired me throughout my career and he always said like his work never felt like a job and that's how I always have tried to live my life and I'm grateful that I got to learn from him even though some of his sales tips are a little outdated but you know it's good I'll take it. I love that. Ronnie how about you how has your family reacted to you working with Kupuasu and creating a Kupuasu bar line?

21:17Yeah honestly in the beginning I don't think any of them took it very seriously they were like yeah you're gonna what like pretend you're making chocolate and you are the brazilian willy wonka yeah like let's see where it goes right and i think it was only when we like went to fancy food and they saw that it was becoming like a tangible business with some press coverage and sales and actual numbers and you know all of that that they said oh wow you're really doing this so they've been very supportive like my mom goes back and forth to brazil she She lives in Florida. So we always ask her to like, can you bring this sample to someone there?

21:50Can you bring back a new package design that we need to bring to the US? So they've been very, very supportive. But I feel like it became, they only started taking us seriously, like recently when we started action. I'm sure they were probably pretty impressed to see you. Refresh my memory, but we are only, what, three weeks out of Fancy Food right now, a month out of Fancy Food. You got press coverage just for anybody who's listening who wasn't there at Fancy Food. Figo won the free booth, the free tabletop that we gave out to be in the startup CPG section. This was your debut. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you got coverage from Food Network, named as one of the editor's top 10 brands out of 2 ,000 plus exhibitors.

22:33And you also got coverage from Bon Appetit. Yeah, it was crazy. So is it still a joke or is this for you? No, I don't think it's a joke anymore, but kind of similar to Ronnie. I remember telling my family and even my 85 year old grandma being like, what? What are you doing? Like, I don't understand. Like, what is going on? Because, you know, both Ronnie and I have had very serious like corporate careers for the last 10 to, in Ronnie's case, almost 15 years and doing something. It's like, yeah, we're going to Brazil to like go in the middle of nowhere and meet farmers and like, you know, make sure that they're growing their crops in the right way.

23:09And everyone's like, what are you doing? Like, I don't understand. And I think it's been so fun to have also just so much love and support from our family, our friends, our co-workers. And it's felt like a village. Totally. I mean, as an outsider looking in, it feels like not only are you getting the validation from each other, working as business partners and life partners, you're now getting the validation from your family and the public, the press. Everybody is validating your brand. Yeah. So what does it feel like to be in this moment right now where you said, hey, we're going to start this brand.

23:45We're going to introduce Kupuasu. We're going to launch the brand. We're going to go to Fancy Food and then see your name in publications like that. What does it feel like? I mean, I guess now you're saying it feels like really, really real. I think like what was also really cool about Fancy Food and even just a lot of the pop-ups that we're doing now is people who are trying our bars. and then they're sending their friends over to like go try and buy. Like even at the farmer's market this weekend, multiple people were like, oh, my friend sent me here. My mom sent me here. You know, it feels amazing.

24:17I mean, it feels like very much like people really catching on to the things that we've been so excited about over the last year plus. And I don't know. I think we're just really trying to enjoy the ride and be present. And like as anyone in CPG or anyone that starts their own business knows, there's so many highs and lows. And like, how can you bottle up this excitement and remind yourself that when it's really hard and you barely slept and things feel like everything's about to crumble, that we know like we're here for a reason and that people really love it. So I think trying to remind myself nothing is permanent for good or for bad and like really enjoying this moment.

24:59And I don't know, it feels crazy. Like, I don't like I really didn't think about it as much until you were saying this to us right now. I don't know, Ronnie, how do you feel? For me, it's that confident boost that we spoke last time, right? And we keep getting more of it. So we were at the farmer's market this Saturday, last weekend. And we had like people that when we were there like two or three weeks ago, they got one bar. They came back and got four just because we were not there the week in between. Right. So they wanted to make sure they got enough bars restocked so they could enjoy them.