Plant-Powered Energy and Immunity Coffee that Tackles Food Waste with Paul Evers

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

Yeah, it's great. It's always fun to have new innovators that are coming into the space that have been around a little while, they can share their story. So today, I just love to introduce you to our audience for them to get to know you, and for me, to get to know you better. So let's get this started. Michelle, can you tell us all a little bit about you and The Greater Knead?

Yeah. So I started The Greater Knead back in 2012. I started because my sister and my grandfather were diagnosed with celiac disease. So at that point, I love baking, I really wanted to try to have my own business, and it was a perfect storm of, I had a problem to solve that really affected my family. So I set out on a mission, baking like crazy, and I came up with a formula for gluten free bagels that I knew my family missed and started getting it out there into the world because I knew that there were other people that were probably struggling just like my family. And now, we sell most of them on the east coast to retailers and food service. Although we are working on expanding across the country, we do ship online to every state. And we just launched a new line of soft pretzels, so we're really excited about that. And what makes us unique is that we're actually free from the top nine common allergens. So in addition to being gluten free, we're also free from dairy eggs, soy, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish and sesame.

Wow. Well, it's funny. When I was a kid, I used to love those hard pretzels. I don't know if you remember those. My mom was originally from Philadelphia, and so she liked those, I think they were called Grossman's, but maybe they weren't. I don't remember, maybe that's just because her last name was Grossman. But they were these really hard pretzels with the salt on them. I loved those. And then they also had the soft pretzels that you could get on the street, and I was a big fan of those. And now, I don't eat gluten, and I don't eat sugar, and I don't eat a hundred other things that go into these pretzels. And they were always a little bit sweet and kind of like that, so I missed eating those. I know that this is a big snacking item, and a lot of snacks do come with a lot of these allergens, whether it's the pretzels or the popcorn with the cheese and all those different things. So were you also affected by these allergens? Or was this solely for your grandfather and your siblings?

Yeah. So it started out for my grandfather and my sister. But throughout the last nine and a half years, I actually learned that I have a gluten and dairy intolerance. So I think through being a part of this industry and this healthy lifestyle, I naturally just started to eat gluten free, started feeling better. And then when I went to add it back into my diet, on occasion, I realized like, oh, okay, wait, I have a problem with this too. So it became super convenient when I realized that because I was like, well, at least I know where to get good bagels and good soft pretzels. So it definitely still affects me in a more personal way now, which I was not anticipating when I first started the company.

Yeah. Well, many times, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, start these companies that have a personal need, solving a personal problem. So it's great to be able to solve a problem, and then actually for yourself, be able to feel better by trying this and realizing that, well, maybe I do have an intolerance as well. And now, I get to enjoy the benefits of what I created for some other people that were beneficial, that found this as a benefit.

I definitely lucked out, for sure in what I do.

Well, I think more people have intolerances than they realize.

Yes, absolutely. I think that's what I found talking to more and more people, consumers of ours, like hearing their stories and their journeys of how they were diagnosed or figured out that they had an allergy or intolerance. It's definitely becoming more and more common for people to say like, oh, I don't feel good when I eat that type of ingredient, so they're starting to avoid them.

Well, I think that's very true. And I think more and more people are becoming aware, paying attention to it. And they're more in tune with their bodies. And so what you're doing is so amazing. Because now, people can actually have a really good product that tastes good, because taste is so important. And now, they can pay attention and not have to eat something just to fill that void. Because so many times, we want to cheat, so to speak, because it's not available. But now, you don't have to because more and more people are taking the time to create really great innovative products to solve these problems so that people that haven't tolerances can have stuff accessible to themselves.

Yep, exactly. We like to say we are like nostalgic food, recreate a top nine allergen phrase. So it's the things that you grew up eating, like the first story that came to your mind, it was a story of your childhood eating hard pretzels and soft pretzels and it's like, it can become so isolating when you have an allergy or intolerance and you just have to completely avoid that thing that evokes such powerful memories of growing up and connecting with food. A big part of every person's day is food, so it's definitely something that we're excited to be able to offer to those people who have felt isolated for a while.

And I definitely think the pretzel is nostalgic.

Yeah, absolutely.

It really is nostalgic. I mean, I think about growing up in New York, we think about the pretzels on the street, at the ballpark, the pretzels. In Philadelphia, it's the pretzels with the mustard, I think, that's how pretzel they're. I mean, I remember that from my mother, I did eat pretzels with a mustard. That was not my thing.

Yeah, that's definitely the thing that is like the Philly thing for sure.

That wasn't my thing. I just liked the pretzel. But again, I'm not from Philadelphia, I'm from New York so I didn't like the pretzels. But I like the soft hot pretzel. That was my thing. And I remember getting off the streets, I live in Marinette which is outside San Francisco, I can't tell you the last time I saw a vendor on the streets.

I know. It's so crazy how different it is.

And I haven't been to New York in a couple of years, and I'm wondering through COVID.

They're still out there. I just went to New York, they're there. Yeah. It's not as frequent. You're not seeing it like every other block, but the street vendors are definitely still there serving up some food. I was just there like two weeks ago. So it was nice to see that some of that's coming to be back to normal.

Okay, coz I'm thinking about the hotdog vendors, and I'm thinking about the pretzels. I'm thinking about all those guys that you see--

They were there. There's like the hot like toasted nuts and all of that good stuff. Like they were out there serving, and they had pretty well in line. So I think people are missing that experience.

Okay, that's great to hear. I'm super excited to hear that. So yeah, at this point, you're an entrepreneur, and you've had a lot of success. You've gone from going from store to store, that beginning entrepreneur when you first had to pedal it and you had to bring it on doors. I'd love to hear a little bit about that journey, maybe, and hear where you were back then to where you've come now, and maybe a little bit about what, maybe some of your greatest fears were back then. Because right now, just to tell you, some of the people listening are fellow entrepreneurs that maybe just have an idea. And some of them are other entrepreneurs that have had great success. So we want to be able to share some of the stories from other entrepreneurs, like yourselves, on the show so that other people can be inspired as well.

Yeah, definitely. I love sharing the story, and it's always a nice journey for me to look back. Because I sometimes forget where I came from, the things that we did way back when and how we're growing the business out today. But when I first started, it was just me. I hired my first employee maybe six months. And at that time, we were just making bagels, we hand rolled bagels. It was like Monday, we can roll the bagels. Tuesday, we went out into the streets of Philly, we started to try to find bagel shops to sell them. Wednesdays, it was delivering. Thursday's like repeat the process. And it was just this very slow hustle and organic like one shop at a time and telling those successes to the next bagel shop. Hey, well, this bagel shop down the street is carrying it, you should too. And that worked. It worked as a strategy very early on. We started seeing a lot, me and this first employee, which I think made a big difference, but it was not just me. And I got my first facility about eight months in where I was renting a kitchen space. And it literally like it was about that type of story for the first three or four years, just building slowly but surely upon one excess over the other and sharing that with the other retailers or other bagel shops. And today, we have a bigger team of people. So now, there are 11 people in the company, some of those are production staff. We are more automated than we used to be so we can make more products. But it's kind of the same recipe for success. It's like, here's what we've built, and here's why you should be a part of this as well. And here's the successes that we've had. But I think early on to talk about the fears that I had. I think it was the fear of failure, and I kept this one quote on my desk for a very long time that was like, fear of error is the death of success. I did have a big fear of making errors, and I think just reminding myself of that quote that I would need to push past it. That really, really helped. And I think it was just also knowing that there's always a solution to every problem and that problems do exist, it's just an opportunity to find another way to do something.

I think also making errors is part of growing pains. It's part of learning. If we don't make mistakes and we don't go through the journey, we don't learn as much. I find that if I don't do it myself and I don't figure it out, and I don't go through the process, I can't figure out how to do better, how to do it right.

I agree. Yeah.

I mean, it's all part of the process. If I just outsource it all, I don't really understand the journey, and I can't figure out the best possible solution.

Yeah. It's funny that you say, you use the word outsource. Because very early on, especially in the foods industry, using an outsourced co manufacturer is a very popular thing to do. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I knew that for me, I wasn't sure how to automate it, how to make sure that we had the integrity to know that it didn't have any allergens and things like that. And so I thought I can't give this in good faith to someone else, because I don't know these things yet so I made it my mission to make our own products do it all ourselves first. And then we got to a point where we were doing it all ourselves, and we found a manufacturer that we could outsource it to and we decided that, you know what? We kind of like this journey of doing it our own way to our own set of standards and not compromising and having the control over that. I feel like if I didn't look at it that way as like, okay, we're gonna make tons of mistakes, because we don't know, well, I've never been a food manufacturer before. So there was tons of fear around doing it incorrectly. But I think, yeah, looking at it from that perspective that you mentioned, this is going to be a learning experience, and it's going to be really valuable to help build us and get us to the next level. And it definitely, it was. But I think mentally getting okay with that, I think it's hard as a first time entrepreneurs getting okay with making mistakes.

I actually think that going through that journey, being on that journey, and making those mistakes, and making those choices, making informed choices as you're making the wrong ones, and making the right ones, and going through that whole process was one of my greatest experiences in making the right choices. It was like the greatest learning I had to get where I am today, so to speak. It allowed me to gather all the information to trust myself enough to make those choices. Because if I was to just say, oh, sure, you go do it, your choice A, B and C, these are three companies, and I don't know anything so I'm just gonna trust one of them. You're saying these people know better than I do, and very rightfully so they do. They know how to do it. But by taking that information and sort of going through the process in some of these things, I've enabled myself to make more informed choices. And that's really what this platform is, trying to get other people to not necessarily do everything themselves, but to have access to the information so not everybody is going to become a co packer. Not everybody becomes a manufacturer. But maybe they'll learn from you and from all these other people, that through your journey, you've decided A, B or C. And now, they'll take that information and be able to make a more informed choice. That's really what it's all about. It's about being an expert in everything. It's about making more informed choices.

Yeah. I like the way that you put it because that's exactly how to summarize it for sure.

So given all of that, what advice do you have for fellow entrepreneurs or new entrepreneurs who want to become an entrepreneur after your experience and what you've gone through in this journey so far to date?

Yeah. I kind of touched on it a little bit. I think it's getting back to this idea of problem solving because you have to learn really quickly how to just adapt and see another solution. If you get presented with a problem and you can't see past it, like you are the one person in that company that needs to just see past it when everybody else may see a huge roadblock and they might be telling you why it can't be done, and why you should give up, or why you're gonna run out of money, or it's not gonna work, or people don't like it, whatever, all of those things. You have to be that one person to just say, no, this can be done, we're gonna figure it out. And maybe it's gonna look a little different, and we're gonna have to make changes, we have to be flexible. So I think it's just always knowing that there is a solution and you're gonna find it, you just have to keep sticking with it. You stay around long enough and things start to fall into place is kind of how it goes. But you gotta stick it out long enough to get there.

It's true. I know so many people, they think that people are overnight successes because they haven't followed the journey necessarily or right on. They're like, they read about, wow, that company happened overnight. But they haven't heard about the last 15 years that they've been doing research and development, and they've been in the lab and all these other things. They just think it happened. They were an overnight success.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's really interesting how many stories you feel that that's the cas. And with that said, I'm curious, if you could go back and do one thing differently through your journey? What would it have been?

Trust myself more. It took me a long time to trust myself, and I made a lot of stuff. My journey has been sort of more of a zigzag than I think it needed to be if I would have just trusted myself that I do know what I'm doing, even when I don't know everything that I have a good gut sense and that I can be confident. That it's okay if I don't know everything, but I can trust myself enough to get to the right decision quicker. I think a lot of things just come back to me not trusting myself enough and giving myself credit for what I've built, and knowing that like, just because somebody has more years than me, or has a degree, or appears to be so much smarter, that still doesn't mean that I don't know the answers either.

Yeah. I think a lot of that comes with experience too. And sometimes, I need to pinch myself that you've accomplished a lot. And you look back and you're like, wow, I did that. I always have to look back at the year. Like, what did you do this year? What were your accomplishments this year? And sometimes, you don't realize quite how much you've accomplished. BAck in this year, we had COVID and still, look how much you've accomplished. I'm sure. And it's amazing. And sometimes, we just have to take stock of it.

Yeah. I think we're always so busy moving on to the next thing. Just reflect back and give yourself credit for what you've done, and there's always more to do. There's always more success that you want. But giving yourself credit and a pat on the back, sometimes I think, I was somebody that always lacked confidence in like, could I really do it? It took me longer to take the leap of faith because I just didn't have faith in myself. And I think that's one thing, if I can tell the younger Michelle, just trust yourself. You can do this, you're gonna get there and just believe in yourself.

And how do you define success for yourself?

It definitely used to be way different than it is now. I think now, I look at success as any forward progress, learning from your mistakes and just growing from that. And whether that is personally, I don't tie all success to revenue anymore because it's a really dangerous game that you can get into. And I was super revenue, revenue, revenue driven. There's more than just revenue that makes a business successful and they're still like the bottom line in the profitability, and what are your gross margins. There's so much more that goes into it. It's a really vicious cycle if all you focus on is revenue, but I wanted that like sexy revenue number that I had in my head. Like this company got to this amount within five years, I'm going to do that too. And then you just become short sighted, all the other things that are important in building success. So I would say all those little pieces achieving every single one of those. Hiring more employees and finding the right people, getting more machinery, all of that to me is those little building blocks of success. And so I'm starting to give my self, my team and my company more credit for being successful. Sometimes, it's hard thing for me to say like we are successful because you just feel like success is only maybe revenue or profitability driven, but it's just so much more than that.

Well, what shifted for you that shifted your definition of success?

I think when I got to that point where I felt like I should be in a certain spot and I wasn't there, and I had a really hard time. Like a good solid couple months of just being really doubt about that. And like, maybe I don't know what I'm doing. And just all this self doubt started to creep in. I had to take a hard look at like, maybe my definition of success was wrong. I'm hearing other people telling me that, well, look at what you've accomplished from this. Your first order was three bagels, like that was it? That's all he wanted was three bagels. And now, we're selling hundreds of thousands of bagels. And it's like, why can I take a minute to see that? So it was probably a couple years ago only, like maybe just right before COVID that I started to really turn the corner. And I'm glad that I did because COVID was certainly a humbling experience for every business owner. I think you do have to find ways to find the definition of success more than just dollars in your pocket, and so that's been helpful, for sure. But it took me getting down, pretty down about everything to really see that there was another way to look at stuff.

And how did COVID affect your business?

I can't complain. It definitely stunted our growth, but it didn't take us too far backwards. So we were on track to grow by 20% year over year, that's kind of been our rate. We've kind of stayed stagnant. We saw a huge drop in our food service business, which is like our bagel shops and our cafes that we sell to, but we saw a huge increase on our website. So it just kind of like flip flopped where our revenue was coming from. So it was tough, it was definitely more of like a mental, hard time than it was to our bottom line. So we were fortunate that we maintained ourselves. I was still disappointed because we had tons of growth planned. But out of COVID, we came to a brand new product. We came up with the soft pretzels during COVID. I don't know that I would have done that if I didn't have the time during COVID because I had a lot of time on my hands working from home. And so I was like, okay, I'm either gonna crawl up into a ball and cry about everything that's going on and all the uncertainty, because there were certainly some months that were tougher than other months where you're like, is it all over? And then the next month, we're okay, we live to fight another day. But I took that time and I said, I'm going to get into the kitchen, and I'm going to experiment. And we're going to launch a new product throughout this. And if our websites are doing really well, we're going to put on our website and sell something new. And that's how we're going to grow. And so that's what came out of it. So I think overall, I can't look back and complain. But I think it's sort of that idea of problem solving. I was able to get through it because we just kept trying to find a way to survive.

Wow. Well, that's very inspiring. And COVID was hard for a lot of people. I think they saw there were a lot of different ways people would hurt and help their business, depending on the kind of business they had. And I'm glad to see that you were able to make that shift, that you were able to innovate. I'm curious, so for the future of The Greater Knead, what do we see in the next few years with The Greater Knead? Or are we going to see some more skews?

I have lots of plans. What we're really working on now is focusing, we're growing our team. We're really focusing on those two core products, the bagels and the pretzels, and working on growing those across the country. And then after that, in about two years or so, we may start to play around with some new products. But we realize that we have so much room to grow and expand with just what we do, and really try to just kind of focus. We have a small team, we're still working on scaling and expanding with machinery. So I think it really brings a deep focus on just getting our already proven products selling on the East Coast across the country to more people. That's kind of where I see us spending most of our time over the next few years.

Well, and will you be expanding to the West Coast?

Absolutely. That is on the list. It is in the works as we speak.

Don’t forget about us out here.

Yeah, it's definitely not. No, like we realize, like we've got to start to get our product out there in a bigger way. And I finally feel confident enough in ourselves, our brand, and our products to do that in a bigger way than we did before.

So if anyone is listening or watching the video, videocast, and would like to get their hands on your product, what's the best way to be able to access The Greater Knead.

So the best way is to go to our website, which is The Greater Knead, and Knead is of course a pun, because I love a good pun, and that is K-N-E-A-D. So thegreaterknead.com And then we have a store locator. You can request a store if we don't have one near you, which is a cool feature that we added, and then you can also get products shipped directly to your door on the website as well.

Okay. So people that are out here on the west coast, midwest, elsewhere in the world or in the continental US that want to get product and they don't have a store near them can get it on your website?

Yes, they can get it on the website, and they can request a store which will help us determine what stores you'd like to see us in so that we can work really hard to get into those retailers.

Wonderful. Okay, great. So I want to thank you so much for joining me today here on Essential Ingredients.

Thank you for having me.

I'm so pleased to be able to share your story with our audience here on Essential Ingredients. And it was so great to get to learn more about The Greater Knead and learn about what's going on with you, and excited to see what you have coming down the pipeline. So thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you, Justine, I appreciate it.

And if they want to find you, it's at thegreaterknead.com?

Yep.

Okay, wonderful. And can they follow you on Instagram and anywhere else on social?

Yeah, on Instagram, we're at Gluten Free Bagel. And Facebook, it's The Greater Knead as well.

Wonderful. Well, thanks again. And I want to thank my guests for listening and tuning in. And as always, we're on Spotify and iTunes. And again, we're powered by NextGenChef, so thanks again for joining in.