Simple Mills

“It's someone who works for a consulting firm, but gets sponsored by the consulting firm to leave for six months. And so it's a really affordable way to get great talent.”

“Since I started the company, I did always see expanding into other areas, but the investment thesis was largely based around being the next Betty Crocker.”

“So I came up with this plan where we would go to every Whole Foods region, and we would email them the day before and say, I'm going to be in your regional office. I'm going to bring you baked muffins. Please, please, please meet with me for five minutes. I ca…”

“At first, I wanted to name it Simple Foods, and I went out and searched the domain name for that, and it was 3000 dollars, and I couldn't afford that. So I was like, okay, what's better than Simple Foods, and came up with Simple Mills, and the domain name for …”

“We make a lot of decisions that large food companies wouldn't. Like you take, for example, Natural flavors. Like, we don't use natural flavors, and it kills our margins in places. That's a decision that it's hard to make for a large food company because they d…”

“I watch a lot of other students who try to start companies while they're in business school not succeed, and I think part of it is they try to do everything well, and you just kind of have to choose at some point and say, this is going to be my number one”

“We thought about cereal, but we ended up going into crackers actually after I took our Cake mix home, and for whatever reason, decided to make crackers out of it and put it in my oven. And I brought them in the next day, and all of us sat around and said that'…”

“So it couldn't just be this product that tasted good for fill-in-the-blank, good for paleo, good for gluten-free, and needed to be something that tasted good. Good. Full stop.”

“I think the one piece of market research that I did do is I watched the turns of almond flour at my local Whole Foods store. So I watched that it was almost always sold out. And so I could tell people were buying it.”

“Actually, it played to my advantage because I came in with just a complete naive view on how you bake something, and so I would just put these things together and see if they worked versus saying, you can't make a baked good out of almonds.”

“If we had done that deal, I wouldn't own the business today. It was very fortunate that it fell through.”

“I think it was more focused on the retail path, but a few months later, a influencer, what's now called an influencer, discovered the product and wrote about it on her Facebook page, which just kind of astounded me, and we sold out of the product in probably a…”

“And my parents mortgaged the house to give me that money. They pulled 200,000 dollars, and they're not wealthy.”

“I couldn't afford a mixer, which, It costs 2000 dollars, so I had defined this idea to put all of the powders into these food grade barrels, and then I would roll them back and forth across the countertop to mix them together.”

“It was just muffins. It was still muffins for probably the first- Four to five years of the business.”

“And then they placed their first PO three months later. And that PO is something like two cases of muffin mix, which would be 12 units.”

“I mean, before it was all said and done, I put all my savings, which was about 70,000 dollars in it. I sold my car.”

“Full stop. It was probably something like 50 to a hundred units a day, and Martha White was number two.”

“I think across the first six months of manufacturing the product, I probably only spent 200 dollars on the kitchen.”

“And when you talk about all those things, it scares people off. Like, people think it's not gonna taste good.”

“Today we are the number one largest natural cracker, cookie, and baking mix brand in the natural channel”

“Finding a manufacturer who's willing to blend together flowers is a lot easier than finding a manufacturer who's willing to make a cracker out of an alternative ingredient. And so it's kind of starting at a place that's a little bit easier and then moving to t…”

“I definitely had to do some very creative things on my own side to fund the business. So selling my car and maxing out credit cards and crazy things like that.”

“I also want to share that just this month, Simple Mills announced plans to be acquired by Flowers Foods for almost eight hundred million dollars. Caitlin will continue to lead the brand, and if the name of that company, Flower Foods, sounds familiar, it's beca…”