In this current column, The Digest, Entrepreneur.com News Director Stephen J. Bronner speaks with food entrepreneurs and executives to see what it took to get their products into customers’ mouths.
Amanda Klane and Drew Harrington became friends in kindergarten. About two decades later, they would team up to create Yassoa frozen Greek yogurt company that is expected to become a $100 million-plus brand by next year.
But in 2009, the two men, both former athletes who eat a lot of Greek yogurt because of its high protein content, struggled to understand the science behind their food transformation idea: creating a frozen Greek yogurt that didn’t only tasted good, but also had a good flavor. enough consistency to stay on a stick.
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“We had to figure out how to freeze Greek yogurt and make it taste like ice cream,” Klane said. “If you put a cup of Greek yogurt in the freezer, it turns into an ice cube. The texture will be rock hard. So we had to do a lot.”
Even though Harrington and Klane both had business backgrounds — he co-founded a company that created an inflatable beer pong product called Poolside Pong, and she worked for her father’s food brokerage company – one thing immediately became clear: it was not about food. scientists and lacked the skills required to realize their vision.
“At first we were trying to make it ourselves, and it tasted horrible,” Harrington said. “We tasted samples to our friends and family, and they were polite enough to tell us how bad it tasted. We knew at that point we couldn’t do it alone.”
So Klane and Harrington, both in their early 20s at the time, enrolled in a ice class at Penn Statebut to save money he only did so under the Harrington name.
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“We figured with ‘Drew,’ we could both sneak into the conference with the same name,” Harrington said. It worked. Yet Harrington and Klane, now 33 and 32, came away feeling like this challenge was still too big to tackle alone. So they enlisted the help of food scientists and graduate students from the University of Nebraska to solve it. About 40 to 50 iterations later, each taking about a week to ship to Harrington and Klane’s headquarters in Massachusetts for taste testing, Yasso in late 2010 finally had a product to market. Retailers jumped at the chance to stock the product, Klane said (and his industry connections helped get him in the door).
Image credit: Courtesy of Yasso
“We knew we had a product that everyone was going to be looking for, because everyone loves ice cream and everyone wants to be able to eat it every day,” she said. “We came into the market at the right time. People knew about Greek yogurt. Health and wellness was hot, and it fit perfectly with retailers’ offerings. It was something that no one knew about. no one else proposed.”
Yasso is now in more than 17,000 stores across the United States. The company was funded by friends and family until 2013, when Yasso secured a $4 million investment from friends and family. Group of raptors. In 2017, Massachusetts-based private equity firm Castanea Partners invested in the business. Yasso recently launched chocolate and vanilla swirl bars, fudge brownie pints as well as its first seasonal flavors. A line for children will be launched in 2019.
So what do Harrington and Klane attribute their success to? On the one hand, the product itself was difficult to develop, and Harrington said they chose to introduce new things first (i.e. ice cream on a stick) because it It’s a more difficult product because fewer manufacturers can accommodate this format. Then it was about showing retailers and consumers how the product is different. Harrington and Klane also spent time creating packaging that differentiated Yasso from its fierce frozen competitors.
“We have taken a disciplined approach to the question: how can we stand out from our competitors and do things differently?” Harrington said. “Seven years later, many copycat brands have imitated our packaging.”
Yet from the start, Klane and Harrington decided to follow the lead of a company they admired: Ben & Jerry’s.
“The reason we view Ben & Jerry’s as a role model for us is that they have brought a lot of fun, excitement and innovation to the category through their flavors, brand voice and their positioning,” Harrington said. “We think Yasso is the new era of this generation of fun, but above all better for you, desserts. We’re doing the best of both worlds.”
