MAVENS IN THE marketplace

Founder & CEO of reBLEND focuses on a multiple bottom line business

FROM LIGHTBULB MOMENT TO FIRST STEPS

• Why did you decide to start reBLEND? How did the idea for your business come about? I spent my entire career in the food world, working in R&D, sales, marketing, and innovation roles. While I was a grad student, I had an opportunity to see two clear problems:
  • Nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted each year. I talked to farmers, distributors and manufacturers about the challenge of food waste; at the time, nobody was really speaking about this global epidemic taking place. Unfortunately, during COVID-19, food waste has increased because demand cannot keep up with supply.
  • I was tired of seeing crummy snacks being marketed as healthy that were not actually fueling my body. I started to make smoothies for myself every morning to get the good stuff in, but my kitchen quickly became a war zone each morning, and my freezer was a booby trap with produce that I didn’t want to go bad falling out when I opened the door. I started reBLEND to finally make it easy to eat right.
• Did you know early on that you wanted to start your own business, or was your idea unexpected? Quite honestly, I didn’t attend Kellogg with the idea of starting a business, but building a better food system was at the crux of my career ambitions. My entry into the food world started at age 4, when I was rocking the neighborhood lemonade stand with items from my Easy-Bake oven. I have always loved the role of food in bringing people together–it is powerful platform for creativity and connection.
• What is the very first thing you recommend others do when they want to start a business? Get product out in the market. Reid Hoffman [a co-founder of LinkedIn] once said: If you aren’t embarrassed by your first product in the market, you waited too long to launch. If you wait for your product to be perfect, you are going to miss out on the market’s valuable feedback.
• What advice do you have about funding? Take advantage of pitch competitions and grant opportunities to secure as much as non-dilutive funding while you are in grad school. It will give you a runway until you have enough traction to raise capital.
  
  Also, some businesses may not need traditional funding sources–don’t immediately assume you need to raise funds externally.

GETTING GOING: THE HIGHS AND LOWS

• What are some specific examples of activities you do on a daily basis? One thing I do regularly is plan the next day and next week ahead. It is really overwhelming at times to wear so many hats and put out so many types of fires. It’s important for me to step back each night and prioritize what is most important to focus on for the upcoming days and weeks ahead.
• What were some of the challenges you faced starting your business? Were there moments you wanted to give up? My first year I was producing products while walking dogs to cover rent. I was self-producing product at a commercial kitchen during their off-hours from 6pm–6am. I was doing it all on my own, and it was lonely. Shouldering the ups and down and wins and losses is a taxing experience.
• What has been most exciting for you? Nothing gives me more energy than when I open my inbox and receive a customer email thanking me for creating reBLEND. I can’t begin to explain how powerful it is to receive photos and stories from friends, family, and complete strangers that discovered reBLEND! I have moms telling me this is the first time they aren’t fighting with their kids to eat fruits + veggies, a 90-year-old grandmother who is replacing her daily ice cream with reBLEND instead, and busy professionals saying that reBLEND is replacing their mindless 3 pm snacks. Positive reviews of the impact the product is having make the ups and downs worth it all.
• I know reBLEND has made donations related to COVID. Can you describe everything you are doing to make a social impact? reBLEND was built with the mission to be more than a product that just sits on the shelf. Impact is at the crux of who we are and what we do. We have looked at driving impact in a variety of ways:
  1. We work with an organization called JEDI [justice, equity, diversity and inclusion] that targets inequalities within the natural food space.
  Additionally, we have focused on three areas to extend our impact:
  1. We partner with distributors to offload excess produce and prevent thousands of pounds of produce from going to waste.
  2. We have donated product to frontline workers at hospitals around Denver.
  3. As a part of June’s Pride Month, we donated 10% of our June multi-pack sales to One Colorado, a statewide organization that advocates for LGBTQ individuals and families.

LEARNINGS ALONG THE WAY

• What are some things that the entrepreneurial process has taught you that you can't learn in the classroom? The importance of thinking on the go. Being capable of rapidly making a decision, committing to it and moving forward is a skill that you can learn about in a classroom, but really need hands-on experience to build.
• How has an MBA helped you in starting a business? There are three key ways the MBA has helped me:
  1. It gave me the space to build and fail. Kellogg offered a space where I could get feedback on areas to improve and gain confidence in my capabilities that I hadn’t realized before starting the program.
  2. My network continues to play an important role as a sounding board. The smart, talented colleagues and professors I met there are all still resources.
  3. My MBA provided access to pitch competitions and grant applications that gave me more runway in Year 1 to launch the product that I would not have had otherwise.
• What ONE piece of advice do you have for women who are considering starting a business? Don’t go out there trying to be an ‘entrepreneur’. Figure out a problem that really matters to you that you are confident you are uniquely capable of tackling. It’s difficult to work seven days a week, and there are a ton of real challenges, so I recommend coming at this from a deeper place. For me, that deeper place was solving something that I cared about that I didn’t see anyone else doing.
• What do you see as the essential qualities an entrepreneur needs to be successful? Passion, perseverance, and the willingness to listen to feedback. Understand that often you are not going to get it right the first time. Leaving a margin for improvement has allowed me to keep moving forward.

BOSS BRIEFS

• Are there any books that have influenced you? Raising the Bar by Gary Erickson, founder of Clif Bar, understands the importance of product-market fit and the approach to scaling a multiple bottom line business. There are so many tidbits that have helped me in launching reBLEND and thinking about the role business can have in our larger society.
• What do you do for fun when not being a boss? I like staying connected to friends and family–preferably with a good hike.
• Is there a song you listen to that always makes you crank the volume? For me, it is less about the song and more about the mood. I have three key playlists that I regularly shuffle through: happy, focus, sleep.