252: Chitra Agrawal

28:44And I'm actually half North and half South Indian. So my mom is South Indian. And, you know, I developed that book after teaching cooking classes for years. And my kind of angle there was that I realized that a lot of people that were coming to my classes, you know, they didn't want to buy a ton of different spices, Right. So I kind of just whittled it down to a number of spices that you could use using the tempering technique or tadka that you could apply to rice. You could apply it to a dal or salad or yogurts. And so that's kind of the building blocks of of that book. And like I wanted my students to understand that technique and then apply it.

29:30And I guess my husband was basically my first student in a sense because he loves to cook. And he learned how to cook South Indian cooking from me. And he applied that tadka technique of frying asavetita, curry leaves, black asavetis. Oh, I love tempering. It's so great. And he applied it to popcorn. And he's from the Midwest. And so it's like that combo with nutritional yeast. I mean, it is amazing. and he um and so i put that in the book too but i wanted people to kind of understand that technique and then apply it yeah oh that's i mean it's the south indian cuisine like caroline cuisine in particular i just love it so much so beautiful oh yeah we went to caroline our honeymoon oh yeah it was amazing so do you but do you travel to india a bit yourself we haven't gone in a bit just because i i had um my kids so i have a three and a six-year-old but i want to take them definitely.

30:26But I would be going every year before that. And so I'm very close to the older generation in my family. And so I learned so much just cooking in their kitchens. And that's what I miss. I definitely want to go back. I'm sure you'll get this. Let me ask you this to close. Chithro, what is one way that you consider yourself like a tastemaker? I guess I would say that if I were to be a tastemaker in any realm, it would definitely be this idea of the fusion of Indian flavors with different cultures. And I think that that is what happened with Brooklyn Deli when I started just creating the brand is that I didn't get enough time to blog.

31:16and I wanted to find my way back. And so we have a blog and a recipe section on our website at Brooklyn Deli. And what it is, it is that perspective or that point of view where I'm taking a chars and then kind of putting them in these very unexpected ways. So you'll find like, you know, a penne vodka, but I'm using my roasted garlic a char in it or deviled eggs. And, you know, it also has an achar kind of like bend to it. But all of these kind of like very classic dishes, American dishes, but then kind of reimagined. And I feel like, I mean, that's my passion. It's really exciting. I feel like there's maybe a book there at some point.

32:05I feel like you're just talking it through. Yeah. Could be really exciting. Now that you're talking about it, we're talking about it. I'm like, maybe there is. There might be. Shithra Agrawal, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

32:26Aadha Patel, this is Taste. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Matt. Well, thanks for coming in, man. I found you at Pop-Up Grocer. You being Confusion Snacks, what you do, what I love. It's so impressive. That's right. I appreciate it. We connected on Instagram. I saw your post. Well, you know, we get sent a lot of new products, and honestly, there's many great products, but we just started chatting on Instagram, and I just wanted to have you in to hear about your story a little bit. And, you know, Confusion Snacks, it says a lot. You could go in many directions, but tell me exactly what do you mean by Confusion Snacks?

33:02Great question. So our slogan is cultural fusion inspired by cultural confusion. So what actually inspired that is after college, so I grew up in L.A. After college, I moved to Seattle for four years. So that was my first job there. And there I didn't have my South Asian community, mainly, which was my family or the family friends I grew up with. So not having that, I started feeling this not identity crisis, but guilt of feeling less Indian. The things I was eating, listening to, the language I spoke, festivities. It was kind of the Indian-American identity. The American side was definitely getting more attention.

33:36So I started feeling a little bit guilty about that and I started thinking about okay What are ways I could reconnect to my immigrant roots and food drinks is always a great way for us to connect to our own culture Or other people's culture and my mom and dad grew up drinking chai every morning So I was like, all right, let me bring that to seattle with me So I just started this daily habit of making chai And all my friends who are not Indian. I started sharing with them I was making these fresh chai blends and I was sharing with my co-workers and they would ask me questions about what's this spice?

34:04How do you brew it? And I just really enjoyed just sharing a little bit of that. Yeah. And it helped me kind of connect back to my roots. So chai, let's go to that. What exactly is the blend that you're saying? And when you say chai, you mean like the tea blend, the chai, the spices that are going into the tea. Correct. Yes. So it's black tea, cardamom, ginger, elychee. So, I mean, there's no such thing as authentic chai, to be honest. There is chai tea latte at Starbucks. But there's also, if you go to every household in India, people will make it differently. So it depends on how you grew up and what your taste buds like.

34:36Yeah. So people, I mean, chai is delicious, especially when it's homemade and made by a friend. What were you seeing? What were you thinking? And how did the spark for entrepreneurship begin? Because clearly that's what you are. Yeah. So with chai, I was just making fresh chai blends. So I made an original chai blend. And then the fusion aspect actually came up because my best friend was from France. So he was teaching me everything about espresso. So we started importing espresso from France and I was making original, dirty and filthy chai blends. So like one shot and two shot of espressos. So that's where that fusion narrative started to kind of come about.

35:11That's where it originated. And then the entrepreneurial actually, so Confusion Snacks is number nine. Yeah. Yeah. And that's so cool that you admit that because a lot of folks will come in and be like, yeah, this is like my first idea. This is number nine for you. This is number nine. Let's go there. I love it. My first one was actually in high school. I started an apparel company called Paradox Apparel. So it was I'm from LA. So streetwear was really popular at the time. So I was trying to create my own and started learning how to design. I started on PowerPoint for a long time. And then as I got into college, got introduced to tech.

35:42I was engineering background. So I started to like mobile app startups in college, you know, and everything I did, I approached it like this was going to be my business for life. Yeah. So the intensity was there. And I always thought this would be the next big thing. All passion. Lots of passion. All passion, like this obsession. And I think going through those processes, I think Winston Churchill has a quote, which is like success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Right. And that's kind of how I saw it is when I look back, I just learned so many things, whether it was soft skills or hard skills about developing that toolkit that kind of set me up to prepare myself for Confusion Smacks, despite Confusion Smacks being my first time getting to food and beverage.

36:22So CBG, this is your first time in that space. Correct. Did any of those other eight, did they hit? Did you exit, so to speak? Did you sell any of these companies? No. So honestly, they didn't go nowhere. Great. But what actually ended up happening is just kind of through that process, just learning a lot. Right. So a lot of them was focused on tech. But kind of I was trying to solve a problem. I wasn't really following a passion per se. I got really excited about, oh, this would be a cool problem to solve. Is there a business case behind it? Let me run after it. But by the time Confusion Snacks came around, it started with a passion that says, is there a business behind this?

36:57And I think that difference helped. No, definitely. You're very seasoned and you've seen the failure. And that Churchill quote I've heard before, it just really sticks with you because that is media is the same way. You know, you fail and fail and fail until you don't. Right. But CPG is a brand new business for you in many ways, it sounds like. What's that like? What's that world like compared to like tech and other startup spaces? What I really enjoy about CPG is that if you have an idea, you can bring it to life. You can go in your kitchen and you can start experimenting off the bat and then figure out how do I want to bring this vision I have in my head and bring it to like real life, make it tangible.

37:33Tech was a little bit complicated because like I'm not a software engineer. So if I had an idea like bringing it to life, I had to rely on someone else to do it for me. Right. So I did enjoy that. I had that kind of ownership of bringing it to life. But the main thing is the CPG community is super supportive. Like I just cold called a bunch of people and just reached out being like, how do you get started? Or kind of coming with intention being like, hey, I'm at this phase in this process. Like I have this so-and-so question. Can you help me with this? And I kind of related to the rock climbing or skateboarding community.

38:04They're all like very collaborative. And I feel like CPGs is another one of those. Yeah. I mean, I get to meet many in the business and I agree. Very open-hearted. It's less cynical than you'd think. And just people who love food. And we'll get to Confusion Snacks and to the three popcorns that you've released so far. Again, I love them. But tell me about L.A. growing up. What's food like in your household? Are there restaurants you're going to? Just what's that like? Yeah. So growing up, a lot of food was Indian. So when I was 10 months, we moved to India for four years. And my mom's whole side, which is like she's one of 11.

38:40So we used to go there every year for three months. So it kind of split a little bit between the two. So a lot of food we had growing up was Indian. but a lot of snacking. So I know we'll talk about this, but chaat. So chaat is basically like Indian tapas. So we would have a lot of snacks and then maybe have a meal with that. Absolutely. Chaat is like foundational. As you heard earlier in this interview, in this episode, we talked about chaat with Chitra. And it's definitely such a foundational element to Indian cooking. Exactly. Yeah. And it's like in these tapas style dishes, like we have this chaat masala.

39:11So growing up, it was a lot of snacking foods. It was always, you know, when people come over, like have the chaat or whatever snacks out. and then we'll eat. But there was also, we also were really exposed, like, Indo-Chinese is a big fusion in India, as you probably know. So I think going to India and seeing that fusion kind of inspired us to come back home and, like, mess around in the kitchen. Both my mom and dad were always curious in the kitchen. That's cool. I think last week we had, like, saffron rice with, like, Chinese stir fry. Oh, that's cool. So, like, just random things we'll just try out.

39:40Yeah. I think I always saw my mom doing that growing up, and she always allowed me to participate. She always invited me to the kitchen to see, And then as I got older, I was like, oh, I want to try that. That's cool. There was a real open. Sometimes some households aren't that open about the kitchen, especially with gender dynamics being where they are, you know. But that's great to hear. So you grew up in the San Fernando Valley in L.A. What are restaurants like out there for you in your Northridge and around that area where you grew up? Yeah, I think we grew up a lot of Thai food. We love Thai food.

40:09Also, it's a little bit similar to like Indian food. but there's like lum kanad is a thai restaurant in the valley that we absolutely love um there's chelada which is in malibu it's like this family run like little um shack with thai food um but uh yeah i think just a lot of thai food i'm trying to think about other things yeah no that sounds great i mean thai food in north hollywood thai food out in the west side there's i mean it's a wonderful thai community in los angeles i love that all right so you land on popcorn so you got these three popcorns, black truffle masala, mint chat popcorn, and chili chat, those three flavors.

40:45How do you figure out, when do you figure out that popcorn is how you want to deliver these flavors? I think, so the goal from day one was to kind of share and celebrate our culture, but also to make something that could become a pantry staple. I didn't want something that was only for South Asians, but also something that was accessible to people outside our community, but it wasn't in this box of ethnic or specialty snacks. So actually, you know, it kind of lent to my own experiences. Growing up, my dad made masala popcorn all the time. Every Saturday, Bollywood movie night, masala popcorn. And as we got older, I got introduced to black truffle.

41:19I was putting black truffle in everything, things that shouldn't have black truffle. But eventually, it made its way into my dad's recipe. And I was like, okay, this is a fusion narrative I want to tell. And kind of like 20-20 hindsight is the accessibility factor is, I feel like there's two axes, right, when starting CPG. One axis is flavor profile and the other one is form factor. So I think if you like we thought about this, like we tested Indian form factors, right? Things that are not popcorn. And then I think there was an education piece on educating on flavor profile and form factor. And that just created another barrier to entry.

41:51So popcorn, as big as it is in America, just became a really accessible way to kind of share these flavors with the world, with America, like the Western world especially. And kind of that was a thought process behind it. and then expanding. Yeah, it's cool to hear about form factors as part of your logic because it's such an important part. You know, you have these flavors that are so traditional to you, but you need to deliver them. And it seems popcorn is like a lower calorie. Everyone eats it at some point in their day, you know. I feel like everyone's snacking all the time. Were there other form factors that you consider that didn't work out as well?

42:25I'm just curious about your iterations. Yeah, so rice puffs, so we call it mumra. So we tried with rice puffs, very popular, also in those Indian snacks. We tried makna, pop lotus water lily seeds. We tried matia, which is kind of like a crisp. I don't know how to describe it, but we tried a bunch of different things. And then I think we ultimately came to this conclusion that those are cool, but I think we just need to build a little bit more brand equity by making it accessible and then branching out. So you've got these popcorns and you've got these, you know, you're doing them in your kitchen.

42:58So what's the next step? because, you know, right now I know you've got distribution, you know, you can talk about it. I know that at least you have it at Erwan. We'll talk about that. You have it at Pop-Up Grocery. You can buy it online. How do you get to that phase? Do you have to raise a lot of capital? Do you have a lot of investors? How does that work? Yeah, so I think I wanted to bootstrap. So we launched just a year ago. May 6th was like our one-year month. Wow, congrats, one year. Most don't get it out of that first year, so that's great. Yeah, I mean, one step at a time, but I knew I wanted to bootstrap the business.

43:26So my whole idea is let me build a solid foundation, get it to a good cash flow state, and then kind of consider outside funding. The way we started was finally getting out of my room, which was doing a soft launch with his family and friends. So we did that last February. And that was just getting feedback on the packaging, the branding, the flavor profiles, et cetera. We got some good feedback from that. But the reception was strong enough. And we asked people to pay, like purchase it if you'd like to see do people want to pay for this. Reception was good. So we did an official launch in May of last year and we started with e-commerce.

43:58So nationwide e-commerce and then just local farmers markets in the San Fernando Valley. Oh, cool. So your farmers markets and then e-com, are you like leveraging social, doing some paid social? How are you getting people to actually come to your site? Yeah. So we haven't done any paid acquisition actually. Nice. Congrats. And this is kind of kind of the bootstrapping phase. Like there's some limitations, but it causes also like ruthless prioritization of where do you want to spend your money? So what we really focus on is building that cult of early adopters and kind of building that community and leveraging them to, like, inspire word of mouth was the idea.

44:29So we invited people, if you liked it, kind of review and start that conversation, kind of like what we had on Instagram. That's my favorite part, just talking to customers from that table for other people. So it's been all organic. But, yeah, we basically did farmer's markets. And then I was naive. I've heard about Air One growing up in L.A. So one month into launching, I was like, let me just apply online to Air One. not knowing what was going to happen. And I was actually in New York that September, and we got an email saying they approved all three of our SKUs. Wow. So it was like— That's all it is.

44:58You submit the SKUs, and they do a tasting. Essentially, we've had the woman who made the choice on our— we've had her interview. We interviewed her for a Monday interview, and it seems like there's a process. Yeah. So there's like an online application, and then they ask you to send samples in. So they send samples in, and what's cool is Air One still actually tastes everything. Yeah. which is a really neat part of it. But it's a lot of persistence, too, because they get so many applications. You really have to be persistent and follow up with them. So we did that, and they're like, hey, we don't know where the samples went.

45:30Can you send other samples again? So we sent another box, and quickly right after that, we got that approval in September. What do you think the clinching flavor was? What's the flavor that people like the most? I think the black truffle masala. Yeah. Just knowing the type of products I have, everyone, I think that one was probably. the one that got great. Yeah, I mean, I like the mint personally. That's my favorite. I like mint a lot. Mint is hard to deliver in a snack form. It's cool. Yeah. I really like that. That's definitely our most surprising flavor. Yeah. I agree fully. So sorry, back to your story.

45:59So Erwan's like, let's go. And then how does it work from there? Yeah. So they require, at this point, they're big enough where they require you to go through a distributor. So they had basically an onboarding thing saying like, hey, here's like the slotting fee to enter per SKU. And then you need to get through a distributor and then let's get rock and rolling we'll buy from them so i had no idea what a distributor was how to do pricing at wholesale i don't know any of that so i remember the first thing i did is i called my mom i was like now what like what do we do from here so i literally just spent like the next 48 72 hours just like studying online about yeah you were on youtube yeah i was on youtube obviously i mean that's what everyone does youtube podcast like whatever i get my hands on i was like all right i just need to study this space and kind of yeah figure it out so um and also it was manufacturing at scale at this point we're still in our commercial kitchen just fulfilling you know things for farmers markets or online orders now it's like all right how do we actually scale this up and like what type of money do i need to scale this up um so arrow on that first order was our biggest order we've had that to that point um because we shipped one pallet with a product which is like oh my god like that's a lot sent them one pallet so you had to create one pallet do they pay you in advance for that no so depending on the distributor you go with There's a consignment model, which is like you send them product.

47:13Once they sell it, then they'll pay you. Or there is like the typical wholesale model. So the one that they recommended, which was friendlier to smaller businesses, was a consignment model. So you ship products and based on the sell through, you get paid based on when it's sold. Okay. I've heard about this. So Erwin, and they have a pretty good dashboard and you can actually follow your analytics like pretty quick, like week to week, right? Correct. Week to week. And they give you all the data, not just on your brand, but also how you rank in your category for the other people. Oh, my God. You must look at that dashboard a lot.

47:41You don't want to get too wrapped up. But Asha Pops, for example, is one brand that started in Era One as well. And they've been aspiration to us of what's possible for us at Era One too. But, I mean, kind of the bootstrap aspect of it is they approved all three SKUs. We only launched with Black Truffle Masala. Even until today, it's only Black Truffle Masala. So you really, you just, you did that first pallet of only Black Truffle. You send it to your distributor. They pay you at a, they're paying you as you're selling it. So how do you get the capital to make that pallet? You just had to find that money.

48:14Yeah. So bootstrapping is just tapping into my savings right now. Yep. Yep. Right. And the thing is like, I had to make a decision of do I, two things. One is, do I have the capital to invest in all three? Cause it's not just the product, the distribution, the storage. It's also the slotting fees that they have. Right. Oh yeah. Which could be pretty big at this stage right now. So then I had to make a decision of like, okay, I think I'm going to start with the flagship skew that things to do well. And I think that was black truffle masala. And then the other aspect of it is we don't want to like launch with all three and get excited and fall flat or inflates because there was like a reliability aspect, right?

48:46Reliability comes from like quality, cost and volume. If we launched a chili chat and mint chat and the customers were excited, then we would be scrambling to figure out, okay, now how do we get this much production every month to them? Yeah. So it's kind of you just had to make these decisions of like and sometimes you're wrong, honestly. Sometimes you're wrong, but we just had to make decision of like what's going to be your focus right now. What do we have the capital for? And just like go all in and win at the strategy and then iterate. So, Arit, what's the sell through? How are you looking?

49:11Are you launching Erewhon? And what happens next? Yeah. So, we launched with our large bags. So, a little bit of shift happened the last three months, which is we had the large family size bags. We shipped to smaller bags, the one that pop up for sure. The large bags, I shipped a pallet. So, I was like, okay, maybe this will last them a while. I didn't know what to expect. I'll get my data in the first one to three months. within 11 days they already bought 55 percent of the pallet wow so now i was like man we had to make another pallet so this is the locations in calabasas in like in santa monica slash venice yeah so they actually launch you in all eight locations oh eight liquid now they just opened clover city so now nine but when we started what's really nice about them is they launch you in all other stores cool that's great yeah that's kind of how the first month went so we did our large bags and then we were iterating at that point through how do we generate sell through velocity and also at what price point so the product market fit from up to then was people like our product they like the branding but now the price was that last piece we had to figure out right and honestly it's a bit challenging because we could really cut the price but there's no cash flow coming in to fund the next pallet so it's a little bit of you need the margin to be at an exact place to get that capital to do the next pallet I mean it's like pallet to pallet it sounds like exactly Exactly.

50:28Palette to palette. And you don't like you don't want discovery buyers. So like people that maybe like, oh, that's cool. Let me buy it once, but it's too expensive to buy again. So honestly, we were iterating and still are iterating through like, what is that price point to get that first customer? But have them become a repeat and loyal customer to buy it again. So that was actually the intention behind moving to the smaller bags became more price accessible. We saw success with that pop up brochure. So like, all right, why don't we bring that into Erwan? So we actually are not doing any large bags anymore, bringing small bags.

50:55And then at one point with the large bags, we got to a point where we're doing like about 200 a week. Wow. Which is like a good starting point, but where we need to get is probably like 2X, 3X that. So now it's like, let's do that with these small bags. Yeah, and so they're not that small, though. It's a thing. Like when you say small bags, I want to give the listener a real sense. How many ounces is that bag? So it's 2.1 ounces. So because it's mushroom popcorn, it's close to nine cups of popcorn. Yeah, it's a lot. It feels like more significant than like it's not like a snack bag from like a vending machine.

51:26It's like more than that. It's bigger than that. Yeah. And I think that just comes from me growing up because like my mom was never able to buy the single pack. She's like, this kid eats way too much. There was no way. So I just knew I just needed to pack something in. And also like our brand ethos is like celebrate our culture and be loud and proud, but also family and community centric. So it was a bag that you could open up and we could share it together. There was enough for both of us. So that was kind of the idea. I really, really, it's great just hearing the story and the bootstrap nature.

51:58What are these slotting fees? What do they make you pay? So it's about like between$2 ,500 and$3 ,000 per SKU. Yeah. Listener, let that sink in. So you're a brand new business. You have to pay the store to slot you in$3 ,000 per SKU. That's not insignificant. There's a lot of products in the store. Grocery stores are doing okay with just the slotting fees. Plus, of course, they make money on the product. And they make money on the product. That's correct. So they have like a margin target that they have. Each retailer is different. So if we did all three SKUs, I've been close to like 10K. So that's what we're like, all right, let's dial it back.

52:33Do one, do three, get it on the shelf. You're at 55%. You're 11 days in. You're feeling good. Are you feeling good? I guess I'm going to flip it. Are you feeling good at that point? I think Erewhon has been a great partner for us. Yeah. Right? Just because it's a great incubation ground. And their whole idea is first mover advantage. They want to find what could be the next big thing and bring it in-house. But with Erewhon, just getting in is not enough, to be completely honest. You have to be top three in your category. This is my mindset. So it's like I'd rather be number one in 10 stores than number 10 in 100 stores type of thing.

53:06Okay. So where do we go from here? What's the next phase that we're in? You're in Pop-Up Grocery. You're at Erewhon. You're on direct-to-consumer. Are there any other retail channels? I'm not saying. Yeah. So we're in Boba guys. We're in all 23 Boba guys. Right. Those guys are great. Yeah. Andrew, shout. Yeah. Great partnership. And they're also like our stories aligned too, which was really exciting. And then, so our focus is people ask like, when are you going to get into Whole Foods and whatnot? So I'm intentionally actually not focused on big retailer. I think with also me being in LA, going in the store, doing demos, that helps.

53:39So we're focused on like the four big mid-market retailers. It's Erwan, Mother's, Slassen's, and Bristol Farms. Jimbo's is probably number five. closer south. I mean, more down south. But it's kind of using that to, one, get the product out there, build volume to take that next step function. But it's really about building a profitable and reliable ops engine. Getting out of the commercial kitchen is the next phase, to answer your question, and get a co-man. Yeah. And do you think it'll work with co-packers? Yeah. We're actually in conversation with one right now. So hoping it works out. But that will basically, one, help build that reliable, right, cost, quality, volume, but also give me time to kind of go into stores, do demos and focus on sell through.

54:18Yeah. Not actually making the popcorn. Yeah. At this point you're very involved in that as well. Yeah. I mean, my mom, my poor mom, my bringer, like I need to retire her. And are you just renting space and making out of a prep kitchen? Yeah. A commercial kitchen. They have so many of those. So, um, we just make all the product out of there, but then with the co-packer it's so kind of back to the same thing. It's the challenge is with bootstrapping is CPG is a capital step function, right? It's like every time you hit a threshold and more sales come in it's not like you go in a linear path is you had to order like 10 ,000 more units in the next is like 50 so now right now honestly this whole week has been like what type of cash do I need to take this next step and how am I going to finance that and it's a little tougher now I would imagine financing if you're going to like public banks or public money or you're doing VC it's not as easy right it's not yeah cost of capital is really high right now yeah so trying to bootstrap as much as we can so we'll see how much ramen I have to eat to do that.

55:11I mean, I love it. I mean, and this is number nine and I feel like, uh, you feel good where you're at right now. Yeah. I'm honestly really happy. Like the best part of it is like, no matter how hard the day is, I'm always really happy just cause seeing people's reactions are like, this is what I wanted to do. I signed up for this. So it's, I love it. Um, when you're popping the corn, how does that work? And I really like, this is like one of the first questions I didn't ask you at the top. Like, I always wonder like how big are these machines that are popping the corn. So we use a pot. So it's literally like how you'd make it in your home kitchen.

55:43But big. It's a 32 quart pot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we could make about one pot. We'll make about 10 bags at a time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So and we actually iterate. So that first soft launch, we started with like butter. I know too much about popcorn. No, no. You have a follow up about popcorn. Go all day about popcorn. So we start with butterfly popcorn, which is your movie theater popcorn. And then the feedback we got is like, hey, the masala is actually hitting our throat. It's not sticking on the lots of popcorn. So we're like, okay, let's try mushroom popcorn. Okay, that's what it's called. That was my question.

56:12It's called mushroom. It's like gumball popcorn is what I thought about. It's mushroom popcorn. I like that name better, actually. But I know it's that premium. It's like the expensive popcorn. It is. So it pops like a ball, which is why it's called mushroom. There's no mushrooms in it. Full disclosure. But actually popping mushroom popcorn is a lot harder than butterfly just because as the personality is own. The hole is much thicker, which means the temperature and agitation has to be really on point. Otherwise you burn it or it half pops. So, but we try to figure it out. A lot of YouTube videos to figure this out.

56:44And then we just started experimenting with it and the masala was sticking a lot better. Got it to customers. They were happier with the feedback. So we stuck with mushroom popcorn. Yeah. It's a great choice. I think of it as like the kind of premium popcorn that I'd expect. Yeah. I could go all day. This is so great that you're here and And this is such a year just on your journey. Again, how do we buy your popcorn? We know the retail channels, but you can go online and buy your popcorn too? Yes. So ConfusionSnacks.com. We do full D2C nationwide. And then you can find us in LA in Erewhon. We'll be launching soon in Lassen's as well.

57:18And then Pop-Up Grocery in New York. Yeah. It's so great. Now, what's the future then? I mean, you're thinking about popcorn now. There's got to be more categories. and thinking about the accesses that we just discussed, what are you thinking about? Yeah, so actually we kept the name Confusion Snacks cultural neutral for a purpose, right? It's not like any South Asian or Indian name specifically. I think there's a bunch of cool narratives to be told. I'm starting with the South Asian American narrative because that's what I know. But there's Korean American, right? There's Chinese American, Thai American, African American.

57:52So I think the long-term vision is to kind of bring these narratives in-house. And what would be cool, Like my idea is me not doing it, but finding people in those populations to help me do it. That really, that's extremely cool. I feel like you can help incubate ideas because you have such a grasp of what you need to do as a founder yourself. I like that. Yeah. And I think then first we'll probably, outside of popcorn, we've done oven roasted peanuts in the same flavor profiles. All right. The chai blends I want to bring back. We have masala soda. So there's some things within just the South.

58:25There's a lot of opportunity still within our vertical. And as we build that engine, then it will be easier to say, like, hey, let's try Thai American or whatever it is that we're excited about and build that vertical. Man, I cannot wait to keep seeing your company evolve. Adip Patel, thank you for joining. Thank you so much, Matt. I appreciate it.

58:47This is Taste is hosted by Eliza Abarbanel and me, Matt Rodbar. The show is produced by Shalia Harris and Pat Stango and edited by Clayton Gumbert. Theme music by Steve Rydell. Visit Taste Online at tastecooking.com and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for updates on all cool things that are happening.