176 - From Startup to Success: A Journey of Entrepreneurship, Growth, and Listening with Chiwis' Sarah Goodman

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Sarah Goodman, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of an interesting company called Chiwiz, which can be found at chiwiz.com. Sia, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

You have a really interesting background. Why don't you start off with giving us a little bit about your backstory?

Sure. I have always been an entrepreneur. I went to school for a few different things, but after each tranche of schooling, I started a business. Chewy's is actually my fourth. I started a business in the music industry working with independent musicians for like tour publicity and radio publicity and management, things like that. And then I went back to school and studied nutrition and started a business in nutrition, talking to people about food and doing a lot of stuff in that industry. And then I ended up helping co-found a consumer health tech company, and that's where I worked. And I ended up running that company as the CEO for 7 years. And it was awesome. It's still around. That's where I learned almost everything that helped create Chewy's and, and mold Chewy's to be as like a less bumpier road, I guess. But about 8 months before I actually left that, or made the decision to leave that tech company, I was doing research on evenings and weekends about the food business and to see if a snack that I loved making for outdoor adventures like hiking and camping and backcountry activities could be something that would work in the retail market. And so Chiwi, I founded Chiwi's, I guess ideation phase was late, 2020 and then launched into retail store shelves in Canada in February of 2021.

So Chewies, what kind of a product is it?

So it started out with this product I made all the time that people— I made probably for the past decade, but people would always see them when I brought them out on hikes and things and say, oh, I've never seen this before. I would buy it and make it for my— or I'd buy it for my kids. I would buy it in a store and I didn't think anything of it because I was, you running a tech company, but it's super simple. And as a nutritionist, I made it because it was kiwi chips. So I'd slice kiwis, skin on, everything super thin and dry them until they were crispy. But, you know, usually you see dried fruit, it's very like squishy and the flavor is really muted. But the way that I did it, it kept the color really bright and the flavor really bright. And so I was hearing these comments from people all the time. And then when I decided I wanted to do something else and I was obviously just going to start another company because I just I'm not going to work for someone else. Never, never was in the cards. I started doing competitive analysis and research if it existed in the world. And then before diving in, really learning how the food business works and margins and who takes what and what, you know, how to be potentially successful. And when I felt confident, I dove in.

How do you, how do you start from zero? And penetrate the food market that is so huge and so many different options and getting onto the grocery store shelves and all that? How do you do that?

Well, I, there's a, I talk to so many people from the food entrepreneur side to sales brokers and retailers and distributors before, like while I was learning. And I, a lot of the times people will go and start selling at a farmer's market and getting people to get feedback that way. That was never something I wanted to do. One, I want my weekends, and two, I thought it was a fairly straightforward product. I think like if you were the first ever kombucha maker, you have to educate people about what that is. No one's just going to grab it off a shelf. But, you know, this is a single ingredient product. What was actually— so it started out with the Kiwi Chips that are just plain kiwi, and then I launched it with Kiwi Chips that had kiwi chips, pineapple chips, and coconut together. Oh. And so those two, I think that a lot of the story here, I say often it was a lot of good timing and luck, I think, to start out. When I was doing that research, I did a course on how to get your product on food shelves, and a natural food distributor in British Columbia was presenting, and I reached out to him just as email after, and I said, hey man, like, this is the story, this is the product. I haven't launched yet, and I know how this works. It's— I'll get us into 100 stores. And then once we've proved ourselves, would it be cool if I reached out to you? And he was like, it is very evident that you come from a marketing and like product background. People don't usually have a bag that looks like this. We'll just take— he's like, I've never seen anything like it. I'll take it immediately without trying it. So that was like one stroke of good luck. And then I said to him, okay, I'm going to— I'm making them out of this tiny kitchen, commercial kitchen that I'm renting. Let's start slow using an internal sales team that he had. And 2 days later he said, well, Whole Foods is in. And I was like, oh God. So they were our first retailer. And now, under 3 years later, we're across Canada, still in Whole Foods, but also in Costco in California and Hawaii. And we just got our acceptance into a few anchor accounts in California to be moving our products into the west of the states. And I've gone from having the two Kiwi Chip SKUs, flavors, to 8 that are behind me. So I knew that if someone was allergic to kiwi or didn't like kiwi, it's, you know, it's a sweet and sour kind of taste, I still wanted them to buy our product. So we launched Mango Chips, Pineapple Chips, and Orange Chips. And then just a month and a half ago for the holiday, well, in time for the holiday, we launched our first ever flavored products. We have a white chocolate, dark chocolate, and milk chocolate drizzled orange chip.

Wow.

So they're really good. And, and with one of the reasons that I use kiwi and all the skin and everything in the beginning is because more than 60% of the nutrients live in the skin.

Mm-hmm.

Um, the fiber and antioxidants. And also it's, you know, reducing food waste. There's no need to throw it out. And also what a pain to cut, to scoop. You can't make a kiwi chip without scooping it out. Um, and so that kind of started the more, you know, environmental side of the business and trying to look for, um, using upcycled fruits, like ugly fruits. And after that initial— when Whole Foods came on and I was in this kitchen for 16 hours a day, I was slicing kiwis by hand on a mandolin. Oh, like— and I thought to myself, imagine Whole Foods across Canada or into the States wanted 10,000 cases. I would never be able to do that. This is a stupid business idea. And I— COVID was pretty early on and I used it to my advantage and I said, Whole Foods distributor, you know what, I gotta pause for a second. I just need to figure something out. And they were like, yeah, pandemic. Like everyone was just like, I don't know what's going on. And I spent 5 months finding co-manufacturers that can make the product better than I could using upcycled fruits and in a scalable model. And that's why we've been able to grow 4x year over year and into all these stores and work with Costco and sort of—

You're not doing your own manufacturing?

No, we have a facility here in Squamish where we were doing a lot of the packaging for Canada and bringing in our chips in bulk, uh, because often— I'm not sure if it's the same in the States, but if you're a local product, it's a lot easier to get into certain retailers because you have that local spin. And as long as we were doing the packaging, we could have that. And so we used it to our advantage. And now we've moved a lot of it to California, where a lot of our chips are made anyway. And so a lot of that is there. And then we use our facility for R&D and e-commerce and meetings and, you know, it's down the road from my house and it's very nice to have for the team. Thank you.

So are you sourcing your fruit from California mostly?

From California for maybe 50% and then we're always looking at other options too. Like what if someone shut down? We can't just only rely on them. So having other options, our pineapple comes from Mexico, but we're also looking at a manufacturer in Colombia. Same with our mango, you know, It's, it's always searching and just having insurance policies.

Wow.

And if we have to make it, we like, I've done every single role in this business. We can, but we don't want to. Uh, and it would take like millions of dollars of dehydrators, like rooms full of dehydrators to make chips at the scale of what we're doing.

Right, right. It makes, it seems to make so much sense to outsource that.

Well, I was told early on, uh, by some of like food industry veterans who are now on my advisory board, that if, if the infrastructure exists and another group has the, the manufacturing ability, the certifications, which is a huge thing, you can't go into Costco if you're making something out of a tiny little kitchen. If they have all of that, the team, then why reinvent the wheel? Use them.

Right. And why, and why expend all that capital?

Yeah. And so, and with me too, I've been really transparent with my team and investors and everybody about like the goal. I would like to grow this to a certain size and then sell it. And it's more about brand awareness and not building, uh, you know, tons of infrastructure here. We've, we thought about it, like really did, but it just doesn't make sense. Right.

So here you are, you're 3 years into the project. It sounds like it's growing like crazy. Um, what gets you excited and gets you out of bed in the morning?

Oh, it's all exciting, honestly. It's like just, we're just riding a wave for— and one of the things too, there's been a lot of opportunities, especially this past year in 2023. A lot of things that were like flying at our face, we're like, yes, okay, pivot, yes, we'll do this. But now next year we have like, or in 2024, we have a really organized like structure of how we want things to work, where we want to go in, and what we want to see come out of it. And anything else is icing on the cake. And if we have the bandwidth and like mental health is such an important thing, we don't want to burn out. We want to be having fun. And I want everybody who's been involved with Chewies to have learned and grown and leave whenever, you know, if we hit that goal point. If we don't, everybody is like better off in the end. So I think like it's just fun. It's just a fun— like going from tech to this. Like, I raised money in tech. Oh, what a pain. Like, it was so awful. And then when I raised money for Chewies, I expected it to be the same experience, and it was just so different because it's a consumable and it's easy to understand and people get it and there's traction. And yeah, so it's also like, there's a lot of— we get coverage and we have people reaching out and telling us that, like, that's not going to happen forever, that people are like, oh, you're doing so great, we love this. So it's like relishing in that and being grateful that, you know, people want to talk to me. I bet in a few years someone will want to talk to you.

And you live, you live in, I think you were telling me that where you live in, up in BC, British Columbia, you're in one of the greatest outdoor areas of the world.

Yeah, I think that like being, I've burnt out in past roles and it's so important for me to be able to like go outside and do a hike. And we're just lucky to be in an area where we are, where We can step outside the door and go mountain biking within 5 minutes and, you know, we go paddleboarding, all those things. That's not something that's often around. It also gets dark here at 4:30, so the Peloton helps as well.

I saw it there in the back. Yeah. But I think you're close to Whistler or Blackcomb, so you get to do snowboarding or skiing.

And everybody gets a pass to Whistler or Blackcomb who works for TWE.

Is that right? That's part of the benefits, huh?

Yeah.

Wow. Good for you. Maybe I'll come to work with you. Yeah.

So what is it? What is it you think?

I mean, we talked, we've sort of alluded to this, Sarah, but what do you, what is it you think that's unique about you that you bring to all of this that makes, has made the business so successful?

I think that my past experience in tech totally brought a different mindset to the food business. It's just often a very slow moving, slow growth. Industry. And when people were like, oh no, you can't do this, I'm like, ah, I'm going to try. Like, and growing at 4, like 4x year over year is not something that's quite like common in food. But I think that there's been some really successful British Columbia companies like Smart Sweets and some others that, you know, grew really fast, exited high. And so it's not unheard of, but I just, I do things at a different pace, I think, and I just have expectations that are maybe a little bit different, and it's worked out so far. We'll see how it goes.

The sense that I get is that, is that you're really disciplined and you're persistent and you're smart. Oh, you're not doing dumb stuff. I mean, you really— that's the sense that I'm picking up. Would that, does that resonate?

I, I, I don't know if I'm smart. I'm definitely determined and I have very goal-oriented. And when I, when I see something, I, I'm not just gonna do it, do things with a rash decision. I do a lot of research and make sure it's the right choice, even like with the packaging. So when I was doing that, like research on evenings and weekends, I got this package design made up on 99designs, which is like a, a competition, graphic design competition site where you can pay $100 to get a logo done. You can do package design, you can do lots of stuff. And I got this bag design that I thought was so cool done. I thought it was just the best bag ever. And one of a really good tip that I got from a consultant I had worked with early on was take the bag and put it on, go to Whole Foods and put it on the shelf where you think you'd be. Take a bunch of pictures. You'll see exactly what's wrong with it.. And so I did that. And I also, I got a bunch of the bags printed in China and sent to me, and I would make the product, the kiwi chips, put them in the bag, heat seal them, and then take them on hikes and bring them out of my bag. And people would be like, oh, what's that? And I'd say, oh, I bought it at Whole Foods, and get their real, um, their real feedback and not me, just them, them feeling bad for me to, to, if I brought it out like a Tupperware. Um, and I learned so much with that where, you know, that was like months of consumer research and then ended up with this bag design, which, you know, is the template for every single thing we've done. And we got— even in the beginning, like, we got so— I got so much feedback that this looked like a venture-backed big company. It was just me. That was the goal. Like, that was the plan. I wanted it to look like it was a bigger company than it is. And, you know, if I had just said, okay, I'm going to go into the store, I'm going to put whatever's there, I'll learn as I go like that. Wouldn't have worked because it also has to feel like a, a high-value product and look like it. And it's like knowing your customer and all those things. It's not just something that I, it's like, yeah, common sense, but I wasn't just gonna be like, no, I know the best thing. I don't. I'm gonna figure it out and do it hopefully the right way. You're never gonna do everything the right way. I have made, definitely made mistakes, but, you know, I, I think that I'm just a little bit cautious. But also a little bit crazy.

Amazing.

Well, you know, this show is called Listening with Leaders. Uh, my background is as a lawyer turned peacemaker, and I believe that listening is a foundational skill of life. And what I'm always interested in with my guests is finding out, finding out your take on listening.

Well, one of the things I get asked a lot is like, and what's the biggest tip I would give to like younger entrepreneurs? And it is finding people who have been in your shoes and done what you want to do and listening to them and taking feedback and, and not being headstrong and being malleable. And I'm so lucky to have a really good group of people around me that are, you know, from, from different industries, but that I can talk to and listen to and take feedback from because it's a lonely experience being an entrepreneur a lot of the time when you're— even when you have a co-founder, it's still, it's different and you need to be able to have people that aren't like your, your partner or your friend. They don't get it. So have like listening to others and having a sounding board. And I just think that that's like made a huge, it's made a huge difference for, for me. So, and then also listening to my team, like my team, they, everybody has like a small piece of equity. We are all like, we're all going towards the same goal and we all wanna do the same thing. And their opinion matters a ton to me too. It's not like, oh, that Sarah's my boss and I'm gonna do what she says. I, everybody has a say and it could be like from my director of brand to a part-time packing team member.

Mm-hmm.

You know, like Everybody, everybody's voice counts a lot. And yeah.

Are you still, are you still doing all the packing and packaging at your location?

We are moving that all over to California in the new year. Yeah.

Getting too big.

Yeah.

That's a good—

Yeah.

And we're moving, we're starting to have more retailers in the West Coast of the States and looking at the cost to do it here, hiring, scheduling, all of those types of things compared to the cost to do it there and even ship pallets down here for our Canadian customers, it's like negligible. So what will give us more time to work on what really matters, which is that brand awareness and growth piece. It's not having an operation to manage, which is like a whole other business basically.

Whereabouts in California?

Northern California.

Okay. I live in the exact center of the state. I'm just kidding.

Oh yeah.

I live just south.

We, we went, when we did our Costco launch in California in the summer, we, we flew into San Francisco, went to go see some of our manufacturing partners, went to go see our new packaging partner, and we drove from Northern California to Southern California for going to like Huntington Beach and LA. And it was during the, we timed it so perfectly. We were there for the hurricane and the earthquake. And for us, we were like driving into it. It was just like a regular, a regular drive for us here in British Columbia.

Yeah, it was pretty weird. The hurricane missed us, but slammed parts of Southern California for sure.

Yeah.

So you've seen, you've seen people who can listen well, and I'm sure you've seen people who don't listen very well. What do you, what do you think the difference is between a really great listener and somebody you really doesn't know how to listen?

I think just being like hard-headed and not being willing to take criticism is tough, or thinking that you know everything and not being open to other people's opinions or ideas. But I haven't really come across people like— I haven't come across a lot of bad listeners, to be honest. Maybe it's because people right now care what I have to say, but— and might want to learn, but I, I don't, I haven't really come across that. I did in tech though, a lot of like hardheaded—

Tell me about that.

Male tech leaders. I don't know, it like, that was a different time too. There was lots of money around and people were just raising so much cash and like, I know everything and I'm the best. And I, my company never had enough money. Like we were always kind of hand to mouth. So I was just watching and being like, okay, you know, things are, things are different now. But in tech, I think all over the, like all over the map, not, not just in Canada, but also we were, that was a very different role. I kind of felt more like a fraud in that industry because, you know, I was working, I'm not a coder, I was working on a health product, I'm not a doctor, but I was very good at developing a product and things people see and the brand and talking about it and making people excited about something that might be more boring, but it wasn't me, you know? This is so easy to talk about because like it is me and I'm selling to like I am the core customer. And I think it's more authentic.

That's got to be a lot more satisfying.

Yeah. And it's like, it's just, it's fun and people like it. And it's just, I think us as a brand and our company culture and our product, it's all like around the same values of like just like no bullshit. Like there's no junk added to it. You can trust what we're saying. You can trust when you grab a bag of our products that you can feel good about eating it and feeding it to your family. And like all of our— so our tagline that we trademarked is sweet but not too sweet. And it's like, so it's, it's so perfect for who we are and like what our product is as well.

So where do you see yourself going in the next 5 years?

Um, it depends, honestly. I've been trying to be more conservative about projections and really focus on profitability. This, this year is our first profitable year, which is awesome as a third year in a business.

Good for you.

Yeah. Um, but I think I would rather have slower growth and more profitability and more control over the business. But the thing is, right, Like what I said this to my team early summer, I said, listen, we have these big goals. I don't want us all to like just go insane. So maybe let's just focus on keeping things steady and profitability. And the next morning Costco California reached out and they're like, we're in. And I was like, never mind everyone, this is gonna be a stress, this is gonna be a very stressful summer. Those kind of things can pop up. Costco Japan reached out after that. We're shipping them some ocean containers of product. Early in the new year. I know it's wild. And so that comes up and you're like, I can't not do it.

Right.

And we know how to work with Costco and they're a good partner, but it's not— that's not a reliable business because they can do in and outs. You want to focus on your core business and what's working in stores and your velocity levels, like how many bags are moving through the store every week. And so I think this year we're being more organized. We want to focus more on specific numbers that will either help us help sell us into more of our target retailers, or if we need to raise money from like the right people, then we have that data to back it up. But I think over the next 5 years, like definitely we're always innovating. So we have a few new products that are going to come out next year. There's lots of other stuff that I'd love to do with the brand that I think would really fit, but it's, it's one of my— I had an advisory board meeting yesterday and one of the like goals for 2024 was to not pay attention to bright shiny objects or not be swayed by any object. So like I'm trying to be more constrained. Yeah, a little bit. But I don't know, like it, we, this company could keep growing, we could keep growing fairly quickly and somebody could take notice. It could grow and be really great and I could continue to grow the team and learn, you know, going from a first year was $125,000 in revenue to over $2 million this year. Like, You know, I'm learning too on how to build a company of this size and run one. So it's a lot of like learning for all of us. Like even my number 2, she started as a marketing manager and she's now the director of brand. A month and a half ago, she was a food scientist tempering chocolate. So we had to figure out how to make this high quality chocolate because you have to do a very specific process. It's not like when you have hydrogenated oils and palm oil in chocolate, it's easy. You could literally microwave it and it would be fine. But with this high quality chocolate, you know, when you open a chocolate bar sometimes and it's dusty, it looks dusty. Yeah, it's because it wasn't tempered right and, uh, it kind of looks bad. But, you know, like, we're all doing all these things, we're all learning. I, I really just want to still be having fun, whatever I'm doing. And, and I really love— I really do love helping other entrepreneurs now that I've kind of gone through some things. So that's another, another one I would just continue to keep wanting to try to help as many people as I can.

Good for you. One more question. I'll let you go.

No, no.

What, what's one thing about yourself, Sarah, that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us?

Well, you touched on where I live, but I snowboard probably like 40 to 50 days a year.

Korean.

I often, I read, I read 50 to 100 books a year, but I often, read fiction just to get my mind clicked off. But I do love a good memoir and I've been, I've, there's a few business books that I like, but yeah, maybe those. I have a, I have a dog named Linda.

I see, I see. Beautiful dog.

Yeah, her name's Linda and there's another one named Nora out there. So big dog family. Yeah, just trying to do our best over here in the mountains.

Good for you.

Sounds like a great life.

It sounds like a wonderful life with a lot of success. Congratulations.

Oh, thanks. It's fun. I hope it keeps being fun. And yeah, I'm really happy with how it's gone so far.

Well, great. Thank you so much.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you on the next show.