Who, What, Wix Podcast Episode 2: The Flavors of Focus Groups

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use from Wix.com this is who what Wix.

What's up all? Welcome to another episode of who what wix? I'm your co host DL and I'm here with Justin.

What's up, everybody?

So today we're bringing you a story about why it's important to be flexible as a small business owner.

And our guest on the episode is an impressively flexible small business owner. His name is Mike Rosenthal. He's the owner and founder of Jawea. They're a company making boutique non dairy ice cream with some really cool flavors like horchata and mango chili. This is not your basic vanilla vegan dessert. We talked to Mike about not only the changes he made as he grew joeah, but also the intense research that went into those changes.

Yeah, and it was a lot. As a small business owner, it can be easy to get lost in your own head. But Mike is a great example of why you should trust yourself, obviously, but not only yourself when making big decisions about changing your business. He did a ton of DIY market research to get where he is today.

And where he is today is pretty amazing. He started in restaurants and he's now selling Joaia in over 200 stores on the east coast. But Mike, as you're gonna hear, is a big believer in the pivot. He recognizes the moment when you've gotta shift and try something new. And he made some serious pivots with Chawaya. He's got tons of advice for how you can learn from his mistakes. So we're gonna head now to our conversation with Mike and we'll catch you guys afterwards. We're here in the studio with Mike Rosenthal. Mike, good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.

My pleasure. Good morning to you guys.

So what's going on in New York? What's up over there?

You know, just beautiful, beautiful out, just hanging out, enjoying all the tourists in town.

So let's start with the very basics of your company. Jowaya. Right. Can you tell everybody you know a little bit about you and what in the world is Jaweah?

Well, I'm crazy, so. Good intro.

Okay.

Decided to give up on a very good career in the wine business, where I got to travel and eat and do lots of fun stuff, and decided to quit all of that and start a dairy free frozen dessert company.

So that's what Chihuahua is, dairy free frozen desserts.

It is. They're coconut based ice creams inspired by my adventures.

Wait, that's awesome. So, Mike, I want to hear one, what are said adventures? And two, within those adventures, how important was dessert?

Yeah, My favorite thing to do is travel. And when I travel, I'll go see some architecture. I'll go, you know, do some touristy things. But mainly I just want to eat, and I want to eat, like, what the locals eat. So when I would go on these trips to places like Mexico and the Philippines and Thailand and Israel and all these places, I'd come back to New York or wherever I was living at the time and just make delicious food for my friends with flavors that I encountered on those trips.

So when eating one of these meals, how important do you think dessert is to a well balanced diet?

Good question.

Important question. It's funny, and I'm giving you the truth today. So I'm actually not a huge dessert guy, which is very unusual for someone that owns a dessert company. But when I decided to start my company and I knew I wanted to do something in food, I wanted to do something that I really deeply connected to because I knew from talking to other entrepreneurs that your business becomes your life. So I wanted my business and my life to be something I'm really passionate about. So I thought of my best and oldest food memory, and that was getting something from my Philadelphia brethren out there. They know what water ice is.

Water ice in Pennsylvania means one thing. It means Rita's.

It does.

There it is. All right.

For those who don't know, Rita's is a kind of like an Italian ice brand. It's very local to the northeast, specifically Pennsylvania. And it's very sweet, but it's very, like, delicious and unique flavors that they have there. And that's what I ate growing up. So the first day of summer, we'd always go to Rita's Water ice. And yes, I know water is ice, but that's what we call it.

That's what we call it.

So that was what really stood out to me as my oldest food memory. So I wanted to recreate that nostalgic memory and kind of build a business with the pillars of all these things that I'm really passionate about, so traveling. And also, I'm lactose intolerant. So I wanted to be able to do something that I could actually eat.

Interesting. Okay. All right, so listen, I want to dive a little bit more into that, but let's back up a little bit. I know today people can find joeah. People can find your Dessert in What, something like 200 stores in the New York City area?

Yes, sir. And growing.

Wow. But in your mind, you know, you mentioned you were working for a winery. You were working in the wine business. How did you go from there to opening your own business?

Yes. So I worked for the Gala Winery, which is the largest winery in the world. And I had a couple different roles with them, mostly in the sales and management area. And I was. My role with the winery was to work specifically with restaurants and with salespeople that sell to restaurants. So I was surrounded by food every day. And I got to a really close snapshot of what the trends are and what people are doing and what people are looking for. And after consulting with thousands of restaurants, I got an idea about the difference between people who I thought were going to be successful in the food and beverage business and people that weren't. And most of the people that ended up being successful that I consulted with were those that were ahead of the trends and people that focused on things that weren't going anywhere. Like health.

Sure. Health will always be an issue.

So, yeah, to answer your question, so I was doing that working for the winery. And anytime I was stressed out or unhappy with working for the man, I would cook meals. I would cook dinners for my friends, and that made me really happy. And the meals I would cook for my friends would be these things that international flavors that people would come over, I cook for them, and they'd be really happy and then talk about my trips and my adventures. And they started to request some of the desserts I was making. So I made more of them. And it actually started with an avocado lime sorbet, which was really good. It's legit. I'm bringing it back one day. I'm hoping sooner than later. It was a very, like, soul searching type of moment where I tried to say, you know, I'm working a great job for a great company. I just wasn't happy.

So when did that tipping point happen where you said, this isn't my hobby, I'm gonna make this my business?

Well, with the winery, I was up for a promotion, which was gonna be the state manager for New York. And I got passed up on that promotion. I tried for it. I interviewed for it. I got passed up for someone a couple years junior to me, and the natural inclination would be to be really angry or really annoyed or upset. And I was relieved. And to me, that was a 100% decision. So I knew at that point that this wasn't what I was meant to be doing the winery wasn't what I was meant to be doing. And I really just looked inside and said, what am I most happy? Like, when am I most happy? And what can I bring to the market that's out there that will make other people happy?

Can you give us those first few, like, action items that you did to launch, to start to get. To get things in motion?

Yeah. I have a really good friend of mine. He actually used to be a customer of mine in the wine business in Chicago and became a good friend of mine, and he actually was unbelievably generous and said, hey, if you really want to start this business, I'll fly out to New York. I'll help you pack up your stuff. We'll u haul it from New York to Chicago. You can live with me in my extra bedroom, and you can work out of the kitchen because he used to run a Mexican restaurant group. And you can work out of the kitchen in there and develop your flavors.

Wow. I think everybody needs a friend like that. That's amazing.

Yes. Yeah. He has a true place in my heart, in my business, for sure. And so I did that. I moved out to Chicago, and I spent about eight to nine hours a day for an entire year in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant where, no, I didn't learn Spanish, but I did learn how to curse in Spanish.

That's important.

And that was really the start. It actually started as a sorbet company. So because I'm lactose intolerant and the whole Rita's water rice connection, I wanted to do artisanal sorbets. But I ended up pivoting that concept because Chicago is cold. As Yael, you probably know that. I sure do pretty well. And it was interesting because I made a bunch of interesting sorbets, like the avocado lime, like a lemon cilantro. Did some really cool stuff. But in the winters in Chicago, nobody wanted icy sorbets, even if they were delicious. But I made this one sorbet for the Mexican restaurant, which was based off a drink in Mexico made from cinnamon and rice. And it's called horchata.

Horchata, sure.

Yeah. And I use coconut as the base instead of just using fruit and water and sugar. And the really interesting thing was people loved horchata, and they bought it in the winter.

Right. Something about the flavoring feels warm, even if the actual food item is cold, has that smell.

Exactly. And the fact that it wasn't an icy product, it was more creamy. People didn't view it. People didn't care that it was cold out. It was more of a comfort food. And I learned that people didn't see the coconut based flavors as. As sorbet. They saw them as dairy free ice creams. So that was really an aha moment where I made a couple more coconut based ice creams. And when I decided to develop the brand to be sold in retail stores and not just restaurants, I wanted to really focus the concept. And now all I do is the coconut based. And now it's over. That became Joeah Frozen desserts as we know it.

So while you were in the kitchen of your friend's Mexican restaurant, were you. I mean, were you just like a mad scientist, throwing flavors together? Like, what was the process for you?

Oh, yeah, I pretty much spent my life savings on things like coconut, mango, all different types of sugars. I would spend hours and hours a day, during the day just working on recipes, which now I realize was probably not the best use of my time. But I spent so much time getting these recipes down to the t. I mean, by every little thing, every little ingredient, and I was making really small batches on these tabletop ice cream machines. I had three of them that a buddy of mine gave me. And to do production for more people, you have to use different equipment than these little. I mean, I make a gallon of ice cream in an hour, which is not very smart for business. Yeah.

Not really effective if you're trying to turn over tables at a restaurant.

Nah, exactly. And the other element to that is I sold my car to be able to afford to do this. So I could only sell to restaurants that I could walk to from the restaurant.

In Chicago.

In Chicago, Right.

So in the winter, you're not walking very far.

No, but don't feel bad because it was actually, I thought there was a little bit of romance to it.

Now, when you were the flavors that you were creating, they were going out to customers in the restaurant, correct?

Yes.

So did you use that experience? I mean, you had like a focus group every night in the restaurant. Did you, like, get feedback? Did you ask them, like, how did you, you know, sort of sharpen your skills through. Through being in the restaurant?

Oh, yeah. I grilled customers all the time. Yeah, it was really cool. And the funny thing was I would go out and talk to them. But the. The most telling was if I was going to do a trio of sorbets and ice creams, the most telling was I would go out towards the end of the meal and see what was missing. You know, if people ate all of the horchata, but none of the avocado. That told me something. And I would ask people a lot of questions, and it became known as, like, if someone ordered it, I was probably in the kitchen anyway, so I would come out and hand deliver it and just tell them what it was all about. Because the restaurant pretty much got a sorbet and ice cream chef for free, so they wanted to utilize that.

Yeah.

It was actually pretty cool, too, because we got some press from it and I was able to. I was on the morning show in Chicago, so I got to do a sorbet show for you and me in the morning about two years ago. It was pretty awesome.

Young man squatting in a Mexican restaurant.

I know. Little do they know.

Can you share with us some of your experimental flavors that we'll never see in stores?

I used to do. So I did a raspberry hibiscus sorbet.

That sounds delicious.

Yeah.

Probably my favorite flavor that I produced was a white chocolate pink peppercorn.

That sounds good.

Sounds intense.

So it was so cool. It was.

Yeah. Were there any flavors that just totally fell flat? They just totally failed?

Yes. Anything with grapefruit, I was. I just messed it up completely. I tried to do a bunch of different grapefruit flavors, but something about the acidity in the grapefruit just didn't work. And I had to add sugar to complement it, and it was too sweet. And I don't want anything to do with grapefruit ever. So.

So the world of dairy free desserts. I mean, I remember growing up and my parents would bring home something called Tofutti.

Tofuti.

Tofoodi. Right. And that was dairy free ice cream.

Yeah.

So when you were entering this. This market, were you looking at it as like, this is something that already exists and I'm just gonna be a new part of it, or were you thinking, like, nope, I'm gonna reinvent. I'm reinventing this market?

Yeah. I think the sexier thing to do is say, I'm come up with something completely new and completely different. I'm going to own that market space. What I wanted to do is I didn't really have that desire to just come up with something outrageously new. My thing was just to take what was already out there and put my spin on it and just try and bring a part of myself to the world, if you will. So there's other coconut based ice creams that are out there, but I think the way that Jawea's products are, the way that I'm Crafting the product is, it's in its own really unique set and it has a lot of different elements that make it that way. One of the main ones is it's healthy. It's actually about half the sugar of regular ice cream and about a third less calories. And compared to the other dairy free ice creams out there, it's less sugar and less calories than those as well.

Yeah. So I imagine that when, when you went from restaurants to retail, you know, in restaurants you're on a menu and you don't really need to think so much about, about the branding because you're just, you're part of the presentation of the restaurant. But when you move to retail, you have to think about packaging and the logo and all of these things. So, so first I want to know, like, when did you, when did you decide, okay, it's time to go out of the kitchen and to get into stores?

It was, I was able to get a couple restaurants to put the Joaah name on their menus, but most restaurants don't want to do that. So for me it was like I had a couple restaurants that were selling my ice cream, but it wasn't safe because they could just drop it at any time.

So you went from, you know, eight hours a day making ice cream and then in the evenings stalking customers as they were eating your ice cream.

Yep.

And then there were so few hours left in the day to do branding, more market research, creating your website. So once you were at that point in your business, how did you balance everything?

I did it all alongside of each other. So I worked a little bit on design and packaging and I made a lot of mistakes. You know, I had a bunch of my friends design logos for me and I trademarked the name of a brand which I no longer use. And you could say I wasted a lot of money, which I tend to look in the mirror and say I wasted a lot of money. But looking back, it was, it was a learning experience. And now I can move forward and know not to repeat those mistakes.

I want to, I want to dive into some of these decisions. So first, the name Jowaya may be hard to pronounce. We spell it J A W E A. How did you come to that name?

Originally the name was Sorbet Smith, which I was thinking of a blacksmith, something handcrafted, artisanal. But when it sounds like the name

of a little bit of a mouthful

of an old gangster or something.

Yeah, yeah, man.

Then I ran into Sore Basement.

Well, when I said it quickly Because I tend to mumble. People thought I was saying sore basement, which gave them the picture of me making sorbet in my basement.

Yeah, not as appealing. That's delicious.

No, probably not. So I. And plus, the product that was doing really well was people didn't view it as sorbet, so I knew I needed to change it. And I did some focus groups with the help of some friends and really trying to do some soul searching. And what I really stand for, what's authentic to who I am, but the real authentic part of what I love about food is the adventurous element of it.

Okay.

And the fact that it brings people together. So I was thinking, okay, let me come up with a name that sounds exotic, sounds natural, but has some subtle nod to adventure without being over obvious. So I came up with the idea of Sacajawea, who is the Native American guide for Lewis and Clark when they were exploring the Louisiana Purchase. See, you didn't know I was dropping a little American history knowledge on you guys. And I kind of liked the fact that not a lot of people can pronounce it.

Okay.

Which goes against, you know, studied marketing at Penn State. And it goes against everything that we learned in college. And people want to be able to pronounce and spell the name of your brand. And I think targeting millennial consumers, people love knowing something that nobody else knows. And if someone knows how to pronounce Jerwea like you guys, now you'll be able to educate other people about it.

So it's like your little secret.

Exactly.

You discovered the band before anybody, before they were on the radio.

Yeah. Nothing better than that.

So in some of these focus groups running these ideas for names and for sort of the imagery, what kind of feedback did you get on Joaya that told you this is definitely the one.

Yeah. So I literally wrote the word on a piece of paper, and I would walk around to a couple hundred people, and I'd ask two questions. The first question was, how do you pronounce this? And about 75% of them pronounced it the way I was hoping they were going to pronounce it. Either Jawea or Jawea. Either way, I'm good. And the other thing was, what word do you associate with this word? And I had everything all over the board. But I calculated what were the most common word associations. The number one was exotic, number two was natural, and number three was smooth.

I mean, how important do you think it is for somebody starting out to just take those ideas that they're generating that are running around in their heads. And just ask people, just ask people, what do you think about this?

I think what people say is really important. What they do is more important. So it was more important for me to see which ice cream or sorbet that they finished versus if they liked it or not. Because people are always going to say they like it. Your friends and family are always going to tell you that you're doing a great job.

So now that your product is in retail and you don't have access to your customers, how are you still engaging with customers and doing sort of a new version of a focus group?

Yeah, so we still do tastings in grocery stores. We do a lot of them, actually. A lot of the whole foods and the fairways of the world Union markets, places like that, that are these places where people want to taste new products. So I do them myself. I have a couple people on staff that do them with me. And we track everything. We track how many pints were sold during the demo, any feedback if there was a favorite flavor. And I think the most telling, which is really easy when it comes to retail products is what sells in stores. That's a pretty good determination of what people want is what they're willing to buy. But the cool thing, the interesting thing about my category of dairy free ice cream is we did surveys of millennials in New York and said, are you willing to purchase dairy free ice cream? 80% of those people said they are willing to purchase it, but they need to taste it first.

So how do you think you take that specific product and target a much

broader audience with ice cream in general. People talk a lot about guilt when it comes to ice cream. They'll talk about, oh, I feel really guilty after I eat it.

Yeah, true.

And there's really these two sides of the spectrum right now. There's, I'm not gonna use the names cause maybe they'll sue me. But let's say it starts with an H and rhymes with schmagen dazs. So say you eat a pint of that mystery brand. You're probably going to be really happy and really comforted while you're eating it. But you might feel lethargic and you might feel guilty afterward. And then there's the other side of the spectrum where there are some what I refer to as diet ice creams out there that are made with things like milk protein concentrate, pea protein, who the hell knows what else is in there. And they are lower sugar, a quarter of the calories, whatever their unique selling propositions are. And you eat it but you. And you don't feel guilty, but you don't feel comforted. So what I'm trying to do with Joya is be in the middle of that spectrum where you don't feel guilty because it's not this high sugar, high fat, creamy thing that makes you feel lethargic, but it's delicious and it's better for you than traditional ice cream. And it doesn't have the finish and the aftertaste of diet ice creams because there's no artificial sweeteners in Joya.

When you're a retail product in a grocery store, you walk down the aisle and there are, you're not the only one. You know, there are thousands and thousands of products. So how do you convey everything that you just told us in the way

your product looks right in your brand? You can't put a sign that says, like, you won't be so full you want to die and it doesn't taste bad afterwards. By Joelia.

Yeah, I mean, it's really difficult, right? It's really difficult to represent everything about the brand in one little snapshot because realistically, if you're walking by the grocery store, even if you stop, you have maybe two to three seconds. So you have to try and just give off a feeling enough where people will pick up the product and maybe read about it or look at the nutrition facts. So on the package of Joao, they're very bright colors for the flavor. So everything from turquoise to I do a mango chili flavor that has a gradient of like orange to red. So hopefully that's drawing draws people in. And then the actual, there's some subtleties to the packaging where it's supposed to look kind of like a sunrise in the back to give people a feeling of this is something lighter, something healthier than what you're used to. And then there's the icons of vegan dairy free, gluten free and soy free on there. So I think to answer your question, the design is really important and it's something that I'm not an expert on. It's something kind of we're continuing to get better and better on. But I think it really comes down to how do we convey that. And I think it's happening naturally. If you look at the trends in food in general, people are becoming more and more knowledgeable about food. So you look at things like people aren't counting points as much and people are like, you look at the sales of something like Diet Coke, it's just plummeting. So people want real ingredients, real Products that just aren't as bad for you as the ones that they're used to eating.

Yeah, people are certainly more invested in understanding what's inside of their food.

Exactly. And nowadays with a smartphone, even while you're shopping, you can look up new products and get more information about them. So I want to know, as you were building your website, how did you go into it using it not only as an online store, which I know you have, but, but also as a marketing and educational tool to help people commit to buying.

People really go to the website to research because if they just want to see some cool pictures or see how many other people like it, they're going to go to Instagram or Facebook. So for me, it was having the information of not only what ingredients are in there, but why am I using those ingredients. And if there's something that you don't know what it is, it explains what that is. So giving them that information and throwing some cool pictures in there too.

So. So Mike, additionally on your website, besides sort of grabbing your attention and giving you the story, both your bio and the story of the company, you can also. You have an online store on the website. Yeah, you can buy your products online. So how, I mean, how much of your business comes from online? How much is that growing?

So I literally just launched the online store. So for me it's an experience because ice cream is really hard to ship because we do it through dry ice and it's really expensive to ship. But we just started it and now you can buy joeah anywhere in the country, anywhere in the US on the east coast, if you want five or six pints, you can buy that. On the west coast it's a 10 pint minimum and I ship it directly to your door. So it ships out on Mondays, it gets there Wednesdays usually. And you can buy it. Just go to the website, you can purchase it and we'll send it to you.

So how I want to know both for restaurants and for stores. Okay, how does the pitch process work? I mean, do you just go in and ask for the manager? Like, what do you do?

Yeah, that's pretty much it. Just show up and don't take no for an answer. And if they're not there, you come back when you're there. But when it gets to a larger scale, there's, you know, for some of these grocery chains with, you know, 10, 1500 stores, they work. They don't really work on the store level. So you have to make an appointment with the corporate and what I just Started getting into is trade shows where these guys specifically come to look for new and different products. So I'm continuing to do those restaurants a little bit different restaurants, they're willing to take a shot, take a chance on new product. It's not that hard to get it in, but most of the time it's not going to stick unless it just goes crazy.

So with all of the market research you've done in your particular industry, we, we're learning a lot about how to make a pivot. But for small business owners, they may never have done this kind of thing before. So what advice do you have for someone who hasn't run a focus group or had the training that you've had?

Yeah, I think, you know, this is really difficult and obviously it depends on the business. But I would just say don't just trust what your friends and family say. Like if you want to do a focus group, ask your friends to introduce you to people that you don't know before. Try and take your ego and yourself out of it and be willing to pivot the concept. Because. Just because I wanted to do an artisanal sorbet company called Sorbet Smith in Chicago selling to restaurants, and now it's Joeah coconut based Dairy Free Frozen Desserts in New York selling to retail stores. And I love it. So there's nothing wrong with pivoting the business to make it make it better.

So when you're approaching a focus group and you're thinking of making a pivot for your business, what do you think? I mean, for any business owner, what do you think is the number one most important question to ask?

Number one is how does this make you feel? Because people in that environment most of the time, they make decisions with their emotions first and the logic second. So they say, oh, this looks really cool. This makes me feel really cool. Let me pick it up and then look to see if the logical side of my brain approves that.

So Justin and I have talked to a lot of small business owners and often have learned more from their failures than their successes. So you're in good company if you failed. And we'd love to learn some experience where you bombed.

Yeah, I'm glad you said that because it's. Starting a business is very, very difficult financially, personally, mostly emotionally, because when things go wrong, it's just, you know, it's your fault. Right?

I mean, you're the, you're the only one.

For me, I had a lot of failures. I continue to have failures. And the important thing not to get All Tony Robbins on you guys. But the important thing is not to say that we're not going to fail. It's just to understand that there's a reason why you failed, and there's a way to adjust in the future. So now, if I'm looking for, say, a sugar supplier, I'm not going to just have one sugar supplier. I'll find three sugar suppliers and have them ready to go in case something were to happen. But to answer your question, as an example of some things that didn't necessarily go right, let's see. I have a long list of these. One of them, when I was in Chicago trying to get back to New York to work with a retail factory, I sent a couple thousand dollars worth of coconut and sugar and mango and things to the factory, which I won't name, and flew out there, flew out to New York to do this test production run. It was about 150 gallons of product, so maybe 5 to $10,000 of ingredients. And it didn't work. The coconut fat separated because it was too cold in the storage, and we had to throw out everything. So I had just flown out everything, all of it.

Wow.

I kept a couple pints. The coconut, which was supposed to be creamy and delicious, it looked like yellow snow when we produced it because all the coconut fat separated.

Oh, that's appealing.

Yeah. Not the flavor profile I'm going for. So that was a complete nightmare. I had to fly back, kind of tail between my legs and completely redo it. So it took me about a month or so to get back on track. And I sent all the ingredients out again, another $10,000 or so. Keep in mind, I didn't have money flowing like crazy, so $10,000 is a lot of money. So I did that again, sent all the ingredients out, booked my travel, and got out there. And when I got there, they said, we can't produce for you because our factory shut down. And the reason was.