Founder Feature: Bar Bruhis of Boostcous

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1:05the number one question people ask us when they find out that it's protein kusus is like how do you add protein in there and it's all natural like we just use three ingredients chickpeas lentils and peas and we're not infusing it with anything there's no xanthan gum there's no filler so like the product speaks for itself and so it felt great to like get that recognition regardless of like how it was featured. Hey everybody, this is Caitlin Bricker, Managing Editor at Startup CPG. We are back with another founder feature. Today I'm sitting down with Barb Ruhis, founder of Booscoos, the world's first better for you couscous with 18 grams of protein and 11 grams of fiber.

1:43Barb was born in Israel, grew up eating couscous and spent two years formulating a version that actually tastes good and has benefits. And he's doing it using just three simple ingredients. Chickpeas, lentils, and peas with zero fillers or xanthan gum. He comes from a DTC and SaaS background and launched direct-to-consumer to prove product market first, hitting 10 ,000 Shopify orders in six months. We're diving into his immigrant mentality and why he built such a strong network early, his genius post-purchase survey question that got him a call with a Costco buyer, why he's now in Lever's Locavores and pitching Whole Foods in Walmart, and what he's learned from his first trade show at Summer Fancy Food.

2:25We hear from founders on this podcast every week. If you're a brand and want to get new opportunities right in your inbox, text CPG to 833-605-7002. That's 833-605-7002. And we'll get you hooked up. As always, enjoy.

2:48Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Barb Brujas, founder of Bouskus. Barb, welcome to the show. Yeah, stoked to be here. Thanks for having me, Caitlin. I am psyched to have you here. You and I both know protein is everywhere. It's on everybody's minds. It's on everybody's plates, hopefully. But you are doing something different than I've seen anybody doing in this space, which is a pretty unique accomplishment. So before we go any deeper, can you tell us what Bouskus is? Yeah, so Bouscous is the world's first better for you couscous.

3:23And it has 18 grams of protein, 11 grams of fiber per serving. And yeah, we're really excited to share a little bit more. It's so interesting hearing you say the world's first better for you couscous because you would think a couscous is already better for you since it's essentially a single ingredient product. But what you have done, I just had leftovers for lunch. It's great as leftovers. And I had it for dinner. what you have done has been something like I said it's unlike anything I've seen before in this space I just gotta know more so my first question for you is why couscous yeah I think like just back to the world's first too I feel like I saw a slack message from you or something at one point where like everyone says it's LinkedIn or LinkedIn yeah it's like everyone says world's first but we're like actually the first better for you couscous so I sometimes am hesitant to say that just because I feel like it's overdone.

4:19But yeah, I appreciate you trying the product and that's awesome. You had some for dinner and leftovers. Yeah, so I was born in Israel. That's where the name bar comes from and lived there until I was eight. And yeah, grew up eating couscous. I've always loved like how quick and easy it is to make, like just even a regular couscous, it cooks in five minutes. It's really versatile. You can eat it hot or cold, either in a salad, cold or like hot. I use it as a rice replacement. Put your stir fry on top of it, It just soaks up that entire dish's flavor. And I just always loved everything about it.

4:51And as I got older, I like kept coming back to it as like a recovery meal. I live out in Colorado and do a ton of like mountain biking and skiing and all these activities that kind of require you to have like good nutrition after. And yeah, and I just kind of realized that there wasn't like a better for you option out there. Like I'd go to the couscous aisle and see literally like no one has done anything in that aisle while at the same time like one all over in the pasta it's like some incredible businesses right like bonza goodles brammy so many incredible businesses have made like a better for you pasta so yeah got it the idea of like hey can we do something that's better for you on the couscous out and it took two years to formulate it and yeah we launched six months ago and here we are okay you launched six months ago but what did this process look like for you from inception from the concept that you had for Bouscous to today?

5:45One of the most common questions we get asked is like, is couscous a grain? And it's actually not a grain. It's just semolina flour and water, right? So essentially pasta. So the way we started was, hey, can we infuse protein into this like pasta? You know, maybe we started with like pea protein. We started with pumpkin seed protein and we're just doing like experiments in the kitchen. And like there's probably like 100 plus batches that we tried and every single one I'd get like so stoked on and I'd try it and it didn't taste good or hurt my stomach. And I'd like trick myself into thinking that was like, OK.

6:21And then I'd like let my girlfriend or a friend try it and they'd be like, no, this sucks. True friends. Yeah, true friends. Yeah. And then, yeah, we essentially like, OK, is anyone else doing this? We found that like actually in Italy, there is a small manufacturer that's doing protein couscous. And like right away, it was like, OK, someone else is actually doing this. This is proof. And like, can we get some samples? We got samples, talk to them. And we were actually on track to like white label their product and private label it. And then Trump tariffs hit last year. And then that entire like model just didn't work.

6:54Like we would have had to charge like$10 per box. I was like, no one's going to buy that. So then we went back to essentially like, can we use a co-man in the U.S. and do this? And we eventually found a co-man that was willing to work with us and was willing to kind of work on a minimum order quantity with us and just kind of like sent it and said, OK, like me and my co-founder each put in a little bit of money. And we said, OK, like if we lose this money, like we're OK with it, essentially like burning this money. But this is the only amount of money we're willing to put in. And we're going to like see if there's product market fit.

7:28So, yeah, that's how we got to having a product. In your process now, you've just recently come from D to C to trying to get on store shelves. Am I correct in saying that? Yeah, exactly. So we launched technically it was like the end of November, but I just say December because it was like pretty much the end of November. November, like after Thanksgiving kind of thing. So we launched in December. That's about six and a half months ago. So my background is also in direct to consumer, mostly on the software side of things. And I knew right away that I wanted to start in direct to consumer, one, to prove if there's product market fit, can we acquire customers profitably there?

8:06And two, to learn from the customer. Like retail is amazing. And at the end of the day, this product, it's insane. We just crossed 10 ,000 orders on our Shopify store. It's no way should that be possible, right? I personally like don't think that I would buy six boxes of couscous online, but obviously 10 ,000 people have done that. So like that's product market fit. I did. Yeah, you did as well. Yeah. Thanks for the support. But like at the end of the day, couscous is like a retail pantry staple. Like you go, you find a recipe, you go buy a box, put in your pantry, maybe buy two boxes. So the problem with retail for me early on is you're not connected to that consumer.

8:44So you don't get that feedback, right? Who is your customer? What do they like? What do they not like? What direction do they want to see you in? What do they resonate with? And so, yeah, I knew I wanted to start and direct a consumer so that we could very quickly learn from our consumer, iterate really quickly. And in that way, once we're on shelf, we already know what's working and have good confidence there, be velocity there too. I have so many things I want to touch on with you. First, I just want to ask, you have this background in DTC, which I would love to talk about and love to touch on.

9:17But before we do that, can you just tell us what it looked like to start from the absolute bottom floor with this brand? What did you put in place to help set yourself up for success from platforms to advertising to where you are today? So yeah, in terms of e-commerce, I personally think that you have to be on Shopify. There's other platforms out there, but Shopify just makes it so easy and they're like affordable for new brands. And then in terms of customer acquisition, like if you're just getting started, you got to just focus on meta. We played around with others like Google and there's Snap, whatever.

9:52There's like a million other things. But like if you are going from zero to one, your audience, your future customer lives either on Facebook or Instagram. And so, yeah, that's how we got started. The cool thing about meta in recent years is that you can literally spy on anyone. Like you can just go to the Facebook ads library and you can just go look at whatever brand you want to look at and you can see what ads they're running. And to start, I just started with static ads. Static is essentially just going to be like an image. And I just looked to see like, hey, what are these brands that I like respect and look up to?

10:28What static ads are they using? and I just recreated them that similar format for Booscoose, like not stealing anything from them. Just obviously these are brands that spend millions of dollars a month and if they figured it out, it's going to work for us too. And so yeah, started with static ads and then moved into more video ads and like our top performing ad is something that I shot and edited and so on and so forth. Yeah, those Shopify meta, we use Klaviyo for email and we use Aaliyah for a pop-up. To get started, I think you should just start with like minimum costs. Like I'm a firm believer that you can use Canva or like even now with AI, like you can use ChatGPT image generator, Gemini's image generator, feed it an input, feed it your product, get an output of an ad, upload it to Meta.

11:20But you should not be spending a lot of money up front. You should be grinding and trying to do it as frugally as possible. So those are platforms that I use. And did you have a pre-sale or pre-orders before you actually went live or did you just full send, launch your product into the world D2C? Yeah. So I think when we were launching, I had this grand plan of like, I'm going to reach out to all these creators and like do this big launch strategy. And then eventually I was like, whatever, like there's thousands of CPG brands out there. If this product is good enough, it will stand out. And so we didn't do a pre-sale or anything.

11:57you know i was working on the idea for like call it a year and a half to two years and boostgoose.com i bought that domain right away because that name is like also a big part of the brand and for a year and a half or two years like while we were working on the ideation it was just a splash like landing page of here's what we want to build if you're interested give me your email you know i would just casually be talking to someone like oh what do you do and i'm like i do this but i'm actually passionate about this and they're like oh what's it called and they're like oh boostgoose.com I'm like, put your email in.

12:26And when we launch, I'll email it to you. So I think we got like 500 or 600 emails through that. And then, yeah, once we launched, Andrea from Snackshot tweeted it. And that got like 100 ,000 impressions. And a New York Times reporter posted about it. And none of that was planned. But we got some virality around it. But none of that is scalable or repeatable. But it's nice to have that first sales bump. And then, yeah, we just kept growing from there. It is really exciting to see that organic discovery, like with Snackshot and Andrea and in other places, too, because it doesn't feel like it's planted.

13:01It doesn't feel like a force, like it's something that you're meant to discover. Totally. Or a force to discover. It feels like something that you are meant to discover. For sure. Like somebody's found this. They think it's so cool. They're sharing it. They're organically talking about it. What did that feel like to you to get that recognition and be like, oh, my God, I'm featured. Look at this. Yeah, it's kind of funny. Like, I've been following Andrea for so long, like all those Nate Rosen, like all those food, like shout out to all of them. They're like incredible. They like subscribe to their newsletter and they post such great content.

13:37The funny thing is that like when Andrea posted it, it was not like a whack, but it was more of like, hey, like this protein thing is overdone. Like, I think everyone sees that. I think in general, the protein trend, like anytime there is a trend, there's going to be like too much of something. I'm not saying that like I've just seen like some products where it's like, oh, like does protein really need to be in that? Like a shot? Yeah. Anyway, so like Andrea posted it kind of as like, oh, and now we have protein couscous kind of thing. And like a lot of the comments were kind of around that as well.

14:09But it was a good lesson of like any eyeball is a good eyeball and any press is good press. And at the end of the day, we do like our product. The number one question people ask us when they find out that it's protein couscous is like, how do you add protein in there? And it's all natural. Like we just use three ingredients, chickpeas, lentils and peas, and we're not infusing it with anything. There's no xanthan gum. There's no filler. So like the product speaks for itself. And so it felt great to like get that recognition regardless of like how it was featured. It's like, oh, they're putting protein in couscous.

14:40But now it's like, oh, they're putting protein in couscous. And now I want that. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was great. And shout out to Andrea. She's amazing. Yeah, it's cool to see creators like Andrea, Nate from Express Checkout, Kelly Bennett. We have Tyler from BIPOC CPG. I mean, the list is endless. And the really fun thing about being in this community is that these people are scouting products and this is like a fun thing for them to do. I am one of those people. I love discovering new products and be like, damn, have you seen this? Look at the branding. And then when you get to see how it actually tastes and experience the product, it's like, oh, my God.

15:21100%. But I feel like part of the charm behind Bouscous is like you have this very confident personality about you. You and I have only met, I think, twice in person now. And we're talking as if we've known each other for years. And I think that that carries on into your products, too. Like it's a single SKU and it is a confident product. You're like, hey, look at me. I'm good at what I do. And I need to know more. Like, let's peel back the layers. You mentioned that you have this background in D2C. I think it's going to be really enlightening for the audience to know more about you and why you have become so good at what you're doing and why Booscoos has taken off like it has.

16:04Yeah. Yeah. And I think all growth is relative. I think we're happy with our growth, but it's like there's companies are growing even faster than us and there's companies that grow like slower than us. We're happy where we are. I think for me, I like background is definitely like a piece of the equation. So I've always been entrepreneurial. Actually, I was born in Israel, moved to Buffalo, came from like nothing. My dad actually like when we moved, like didn't have enough money to buy a house and couldn't get a mortgage because we're like immigrants without like a checking account. and like was lucky enough to like his first job that he got in Buffalo, like the person that hired him essentially loaned him the money and took it out of his paycheck.

16:43So like I come from this like immigrant mentality and immigrant mindset, I think that like, work hard, have good ethics, create a good product and like don't try to cheat your way around it and just like, be a good human and good soul and like treat everyone with kindness no matter who they are, like what their beliefs are. And so I think that's like a core part of it. And yeah, In college, I started a company that like failed. And then like, I ended up being like one of the first hires at the first email capture tool for Shopify in 2015. And back then Shopify was super small, like no one was really using it and just kind of kept building in that space.

17:19And like, I think really early on in my career, I always knew that like your network is your net worth. And like one of my first mentors was the guy that hired me in Austin. His name's Noah Kagan. And he's like popular, like creator and all that. And like, I just always saw like how he had such an incredible network. And I just wanted to keep building that. And so, yeah, like throughout my entire career, I always wanted to connect with the people that were doing it and like crushing it. And yeah, most recently I left No in March, but I kind of helped get off the ground. This company called NoCommerce, which is the premier post-purchase survey tool for e-commerce brands.

17:57And essentially what that means is just like a survey tool where you can ask, like, how'd you hear about us? Things like that. And we use it very heavily. I can share some like use cases. But yeah, through that, I was able to connect with like the entire Grooms team, which they just exited for 1.2 billion. The IQ Bar team, Oats Overnight, Everyday Dose, like all of these incredible, incredible brands. And then I actually like started an event out of that full circle moment. And I was like, okay, I have these connections. I really much value human connection, especially in like this age of AI. Like I obviously use it, but like, I think you can't supplement human connection.

18:38And I live just outside of Aspen in this town called Carbonell. I love skiing. And so I actually ended up starting this event business called D2Ski.com. And we got these sponsors and flew out like the biggest brands in the world to Aspen. I was able to connect with them. And this past year, like in that world of like SaaS, there's just so much money. And one of the sponsors like let us use their private jet to fly out people from New York to Aspen. And so through that, I was like able to just connect with literally the brightest minds in CPG. And yet all those people are now advisors to me. Like when I have a question, I can just like text them.

19:15And like I have a co-founder, too, who's amazing. He's one of my best friends. but like yeah all this leads into the success that we have today is like again I think your network is your net worth I think that's really good advice because you just never know where you're gonna end up in life and being able to fall back on that network that you've built and then even just like you're saying if you need to shoot somebody a text and say hey I'm stuck on this or I could really use some help with this then you have these people who are ready to catch you when you're gonna fall I guess you could say 100 % yeah it's so helpful like even this past week, I shot a cold email to Costco and they responded.

19:53And like, I can share like what that email is because other people should steal this strategy too. But like, yes, please tell us. Yeah. So I genuinely believe that every brand should start on direct to consumer because if you can, if you're perishable, obviously you can't do that. But if you can start on direct to consumer, you can learn so much about your customers and you should run a post purchase survey. And the one question you should ask is what retail stores would you like to see like your brand boost goose in and i now have 45 of our customers answer that post purchase survey which is like always surprising to people and now i have a list of our top 10 retailers and i literally just costco's number one like i don't need to make that up our consumer wants to see us in costco and i just screenshot of that and said hey our customer we had 2 000 people say that they want to see us in costco like what can we do about that and i got on a call with a buyer like three days later.

20:47Now it sounds like we might like that's obviously still very early stages, but we're trying to do some sort of like roadshow with them. So yeah, we'll see. It's just that easy. Yeah. Just take a screenshot. Send an email. Amazing. Can you just repeat the question that you would hope that all these brands are asking in their post-consumer survey? Yeah, I think you can word it like different ways. I think the way I have it worded is what retail stores would you like to see your brand like ours is Boost Goose in? And I think what I have is I have a list of like 15 stores and then like an option for other as well.

21:20So like we get like some super small like co-op or mom and pop like one store retailer that like someone in Oklahoma wants us to be in. And it's great. Now I reach out to that person too. But like it is incredible deal flow for the retail side of things. It's such a smart question to ask and it immediately gives your brand legs and then you can go back to those customers and say, hey, we're making it happen. You can find us in real life. Here you go. Exactly. Yeah. Close the loop. That's the most important part. So as a brand that's been mostly D2C. Did you hear that? That's opportunity knocking.

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23:01You now have been making some IRL appearances. I've seen you twice now. First time was at Lever's Locavor at our Denver grocery run. It's the first time we ever did an event like that. It was a public event versus a private event. So and I think 20 other brands were sampling on the floor. And you, just like many of the other brands there, a majority of the brands were not yet in retail doors. You are not yet in Lever's. So this was a first instance for Lever's to try your product. and also a first instance for all of these customers who are already Libris customers to try our products. And you have some pretty cool news to share about that experience too.

23:42So tell us what your experience was like at that event and then the outcome of it too. So yeah, shout out Startup CPG. All the events you guys do are incredible and either free or super cheap for brands. And if you're listening, you should get involved ASAP, especially as an early brand. but yeah the experience was incredible that was the first time we ever sampled boost goose to like the open public just because we've always been direct to consumer we'd never like actually made product and like given it out so it was on the boost goose side a really good learning to like how do we sample this thing and since leavers made some adjustments and then yeah it was incredible to get the feedback from customers i think the best part was that we actually had a lot of people that already knew us and had seen ads for us.

24:33It's working. And wanted to like try the product. And so we like converted customers right there and then, which was great. And then, yeah, obviously like connecting with the Leavers team was great. And now we're actually in Leavers. We're on shelf there. So if you're in Denver, go buy some. And that experience is actually kind of funny because we like, I'd emailed Ray, who's like the buyer, and he like sent us all these forms. And then I didn't even fill out the forms and they bought it through FAIR. And it turns out they just onboarded onto FAIR and are like buying through there, which is incredible.