Painter Sisters: Family Farms and Disrupting the Yogurt Industry

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Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable, people. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. And today, we're about to embark on a journey with two remarkable sisters. They are not only disrupting the yogurt industry, but also embodying the essence of the American dream. Meet the dynamic duo Hailey and Stephanie Painter. They are the entrepreneurs behind Painterland Sisters Yogurt. They hail from picturesque Painterland Farms and the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. These sisters have transformed their family's legacy farm into a thriving venture. In their first full year of business, they are poised to Surpass A projected $3.5 million in revenue. Their products currently grace the shelves of over 2,000 stores in 49 states. If you ever try to get shelf space in a store, you understand what a remarkable accomplishment that is. However, their success extends beyond the yogurt aisle. They have raised an impressive $825,000 through a funder campaign. Two sisters who once ran barefoot on the Painted Land Farms are creating a delicious bridge between consumers and American farmers. Join me, Guy Kawasaki, on Remarkable People. Right now with the Painter Sisters. I interviewed Sarah Fry, and she is the pumpkin queen of America. She sells more pumpkins than anybody out of Carbondale, Illinois or something. And kind of a similar story. She. She grew up on a pumpkin farm. She took over the business at 16, and now she sells millions and millions of pumpkins.

I'm gonna have to listen to that one.

You.

You would enjoy that woman.

After.

I think I got a book about her and I've never read it, so I'll just have to listen to your podcast version.

Yeah, maybe I can introduce you to. And you can make pumpkin yogurt.

Pumpkin spice.

Honestly, Pumpkin spice yogurt has been on the docket every fall. When it comes around, people are like, hey, this is one thing you absolutely need.

First question that I already know the answer to, but I want to ask you anyway is, what's the origin of your company?

So, first of all, I'm Stephanie Painter. I'm Hailey Painter, and we are fourth generation on our family's organic dairy and crop farm in northern Pennsylvania in the rolling hills of northern Pennsylvania. We grew up barefoot, running around free, connected with the animals, connected with the land, connected to our community, and, of course, connected to our farm and our farm family. We basically always knew that we wanted to do something with our family farm to continue the great base that the generations before us had provided to us. And we didn't know what exactly we wanted to do. We just knew, hey, we want to connect the world to this farm, and we want the farm to be connected to the world. We have something great here. And as we went to college, we saw the disconnection. Incredibly, like, people are totally disconnected to where the source of their food comes from, which is the American farmer. We eat meals at least three times a day. If you're a lucky person, a fortunate person, especially in the United States, we need a farmer. And we realized the way that the story was constantly being told wasn't really fun to listen to. So as millennial women farmers, we felt like we had an obligation to the general consumer and to the world to talk on behalf of the farmer. And so that's where we. There's a lot more to it, but we now have an organic Skyr yogurt, and every cup of yogurt that we get into somebody's hands basically is a conduit to open up the conversation about sustainable agriculture, real dairy in our diet, and just being connected to the source of your food, which is the American farmer, and how important that is for your diet and for your family's health and the health of Mother Earth herself for generations to come.

Something tells me you've answered that question before.

Oh, my goodness. We were just actually speaking with the Secretary of Agriculture for USDA yesterday a little bit and said, our story there. We say our story. We're set up at the Pennsylvania Farm show right now, trying to give back to the community. And that's why Haley's voice is a little coarse. I don't know, Haley, how many times have you said that story? But I think it's a good point, because people, they connect with the story, and that's what sells. The yogurt. It's not. Yes, the yogurt is delicious, and when you have your first bite, you get a little hooked, but people connect to the story, and that's really important when you're advocating for anything but especially little old agriculture.

Which one of you got the better grades in school?

I'd say we both did pretty good, comparatively to our brothers. Okay.

We definitely were the ones that were pushed to go to college. Like, we were the first ones that graduated from college, like, in our family, I guess, in our extended families. And that was our long haul. They said, hey, you guys need to go to college. And then we were like, okay, well, we'll go to college, but we're gonna come back to the farm, and we're gonna figure out something that we can do with it as well. But I would say Haley was always definitely better at a couple subjects than I was and likewise. But you were better at, like, math and business and. Or math.

And I was good at organic chemistry, but I stunk at biology. Isn't that kind of funny? I took a marketing agriculture in school. I was good at that, but I wasn't good at, like, philosophy. So it's a balance.

And I love philosophy and creative writing and that kind of stuff, and. But, yeah, we're a good balance of each other.

And who was the better athlete.

Oh, okay. So we describe everything. We're very competitive. We grew up on a farm. All, like, fierce elbows, like, just get stuff done kind of mentality. If a bull's running at you, like, don't be scared. Just, like, deal with it. And so, yeah, we've very competitive. We can't answer that, or we'll get into a sisterly quarrel afterwards.

We did basketball together, and we looked very similar on the court. She was five, and I was four, and we would go and dog people and high defense. Right. And constantly running around like, that was our strategy. And so sometimes the referee would give me her points, and sometimes they would give her my fouls. And so it's funny, because now that we're doing a business together, that same basketball mentality, like how we. You'd outrun the competitors. You just keep hustling. You attack, attack, attack. And if you get someone's fouls, you just go with it.

Yeah. And I think another cool part about basketball is our coach. He made a defense just for Haley and I, and it was called organized chaos. And that's literally. I kind of brought that up at the beginning when we were speaking. But we. That's how we run things. We just do. You go all in. We have a great team, and that can help us manage what we're doing. But it's really. I think a little bit of entrepreneurship anyways, is just always organized chaos. Just figuring out when to pivot and how to deal with things.

And what, pray tell, did your brother or Brothers do in the midst of all this chaos.

They, our brothers did basketball with us. So it was like four of us always doing everything together. They always wanted to stay on the farm. They loved the equipment, the crop farming aspect of it, and then fell in love with the cows versus we fell in love with the cows first. To be honest with you, I completely stink at driving equipment. Stephanie was great at it. And so they farm full time on Painterland Farms, which is our fourth generation farm. So they allow us to be able to have this nutrient dense milk to put into our yogurts and then we can tell their stories and our story and use it to sell this yogurt. But really we both have the same mission, like how sustain this farm. So we really work symbiotically together in that way.

So can you describe your farm? Because those of us in tech, I think our understanding of a farm is basically whatever Kevin Costner did on Yellowstone. Is your life like Yellowstone where, you know, you're driving a Bentley but you got 10,000 her heads of cattle and you got a foreman named Rip and he's like shooting people and killing the wolves. What's life on a farm?

I think we can both answer that.

Yeah.

Okay.

There's some similarities to that, but there's like definitely not some. But when you come to the like the peacefulness and how much the farmer loves the land and fights for the land and fights for the animals and the soil and teaches people about the importance of it and just the sheer beauty. And you can see the peace when you're watching that in some scenes. And there's a lot of scenes that you don't see the peace in. But that is part that shows a connection to the farmer with their land communities, and that shows the connection to the farmer with their communities and with their animals. So that is very similar to our family's farm in that way. What we're representing is a small family farm, small to medium scale family farms, because that's what we know, because that's what we are and how we could do that.

Well, but Haley, I'll paint you the picture of Painterland. Painterland is in northern pa, which is a very rural part of our country. Rural part of Pennsylvania and upstairs state New York area. These hills are so rolling. People don't think of it like that. But imagine Vermont. I know, it's crazy. Imagine Vermont. And so our farm sits on top of a hill, but it's still in a valley because there's just tremendous hills around it. So we grew up hiking those Hills going to bring the cows in, going to feed the baby calves, their bottle of milk. Hanging out with our cousins, barefoot, playing in mud, if you will.

Mud mixed with a little bit of something else. But we didn't care. We were just farm kids. We were just outside all the time. We were helping our family all the time with the work that needed to be done. That was family time. We didn't watch very much TV because there was no time for that. It was working. And I think that's one of the reasons why we also decided that we wanted to do something else with the farm but not milk the cows. We were up milking cows and we.

Were like, one thing about farmers is it's opposite of what you said, like driving a Bentley. We. I still drive. I'm just like now not able to. But like a car with the exhaust that's off and like it's totally beat up. Like farmers. There's some farmers that are really struggling in our country, but they're so rich with that ability to connect with all those things Stephanie was talking about. And so we really have that mission. How do we keep rich in the way of not money, but like that, like fortune of living on a farm and having community. And so in order to sustain that lifestyle, we really needed to find a way to create our own market for our family's milk and the milk in our area.

And like, how many acres is it? How many heads of cattle do you have?

We have quite a few acres, but a lot of these acres are tree lands and rivers and hills. And we milk around 400 cows, but we have around a thousand head total because we raise the little babies up and it takes them about four years to be mature. So we have a bunch of different age cattle on the farm. We also have a bunch of sheep and pigs and goats and things like that too, for fun.

Yeah. When you have a farm, you just collect animals. People drop off cats and dogs. And I have this sheep. Do you want it? And pigs and chickens and it's just, that's how it is. And they know you'll take care of that animal.

And in these modern times, what's it like? Are you up at 4am and you're like milking cows? But the cows all have RFID tags, so you know where each cow is and there's like you're applying AI to milking. And you know what's it like? Because I'm telling you, all I know about cows is Yellowstone.

Yeah, it's so different on each farm. My biggest piece of advice is to know your farmer. So specifically, on our farm we graze cattle and so we have these huge hills that people can't live on that we can't grow other crops on to provide for human consumption or anything. You just let the cattle roam free on it. They fertilize it. It helps keep the soil healthy. Every morning the family gets up, we don't as much anymore. We're getting up early to sell yogurt so that they can keep milking the cows and we get to hang out with them, we get to work with them.

Your brothers are milking the co?

Yeah, we're behind a computer now pretty.

Much, or on sales calls and events. We'll help on our days off and we'll feed calves and drive in the tractors with them. But their day usually starts around 5:30 in the morning. They'll start with a cup of coffee, bring the cows in, milk the cows and feed the calves and feed the cows and then they all come in for a big breakfast around 10am and this breakfast is like a five course meal. It is never breakfast food. First of all, it is like meat, potatoes, veggies, pies. Most of the stuff comes from the land, like the gardens that we grew in the summertime, some things like that. And then after that the day really begins and all the project starts. Whether they're building a new barn or going to chop corn or plant soybeans. We don't really do soybeans. We do wheat and things like that.

Sorghum. Wow. Yeah, we do a lot of hay.

Our cattle, they're all diversified so they all look so different. Because our biggest thing is having a healthy cow so that they can live a long life and they can hike those hills. And so we don't get the most amount of milk, but we have a really healthy animal so that we have more nutrients in their milk.

And that's what makes our yogurt different as well. So it's of course the main ingredient in our yogurt is the milk and we know exactly how the animals are being treated on our farm and how the soil is being treated. When you treat the soil, right, like my sister said, it basically intakes to the animal and then their output is better quality milk. So you're getting more nutrients in the cup of yogurt because we know every detail of that cow's diet. And not to mention, that's the other thing we educate a lot on. We have like little cute flyers and printouts of regenerative agriculture and how we need Grazing animals to combat the environment crisis that we're all in right now and what that means to people and why it's important for people to understand this.

We source from other farms around our area that do things very similarly. They usually feed them from those pastures and grow their own feed for them. And it really builds up that community and that pride by doing that so that the farmers grow together.

Before I forget, one of our guests in the past was a woman named Temple Grandin.

You had the honor of speaking with Temple Grandin? Oh, my goodness.

Yeah. Yeah, she's been a guest. She was a great guest.

Yeah, I can imagine.

So you know her?

I fangirl over Temple Grandin.

Can you just walk us through? So now let's pretend that the cow has come in, your brother has milked, and now the milk is in this can. So from that can to my table, how does it become yogurt?

That is a very good question. How do you get the cow from the pasture to the yogurt? First of all, we don't use cans anymore, okay? So the cows, they sleep outside at night. They'll drive a little side by side and bring them in because they're pretty far spread out. We have a small border collie that walks behind them. They know it's time to milk, and the cows start coming to the barn before we do. They see the sun rise, and they're like, oh, I can't wait to go get milked. Because, you know, if all the ladies out there who are listening, you know, you want to breastfeed your baby. That's the same with the cows. They're like, all right, we need to get up, get milked.

So the cows get brought into the barn. They have accessibility to the barn, but they're primarily grazing. You know, they're grazing outside. They come in, they get milked. It goes to basically a tank, a bulk tank. And then truck driver comes, picks it up, all refrigerated, all tested to make sure there's no contaminants. Milk is very finicky. We have to make sure it's very timed out. As soon as those cows get milked, there's a specific time that it needs to get cooled down and tested, all that good stuff. And then it goes from a truck in northern Pennsylvania to our co packer in central Pennsylvania. The co packer takes it in. We add lactase enzyme because our product is lactose free. And that's really important because 68% of people have some sort of lactose sensit. And we want People, all people. To enjoy real dairy, we're combating right now basically, like plant based dairy, which it's not dairy because dairy comes from a lactating mammal. And I've never seen a nipple on an almond. But regardless, I bet that's the first.

Time you use that joke.

I really want to take a video of somebody trying to milk an almond right now. One day that'll happen. For our marketing. Yeah. So it gets. We also add different cultures. Yeah.

So it goes to the creamery and at the creamery we pasteurize it because all milk has to be pasteurized. That goes into yogurt so that everyone is healthy and all the bad bacteria is gone, if there is any, which typically there's not. And then we send it to the yogurt culturing tanks where the yogurt gets cultured, which is pretty cool. You add the lactase enzyme and then you send it to the ultra filtration machine, which is. Which actually filters out water. All of the other things in the milk stays in there. And then it goes to the cupper and all this warm cultured yogurt goes into these cups. And it's so thin you can drink it. We love that part of it. And then the foil goes over top of it, goes into the refrigerator. 24 hours later, the yogurt is solid and it's thick and creamy. We can even put it upside down like a Dairy Queen.

That's what really makes our yogurt different, is that piece. Basically, it's a very thick, creamy yogurt. We don't add any protein powders to it because the protein in the process that we utilize the protein stays in there. We want things to be in its purest form. When you eat, if you just think about the way that it was put here, if you try not to touch it as much from that point, then you're getting the best product. You know what I mean? And so that's what we try to do. We do not put protein powders back into our Y yogurt. That leaves the grittiness that you see in other yogurt. Also, it's frankensteining food. We want pure food here. So after the yogurt's made, a truck picks it up, it takes it to our cold storage facility. And from the cold storage facility, we have orders coming in from national natural distributors as well as local distributors. Because it's really important to us to make sure that we get this yogurt into the nooks and crannies of the world because we're from the nooks and crannies of the world. And so we want to make sure everyone has accessibility. Even the rural depressed areas, like where we're from, they have that even in the bigger cities, like they have them in the bodegas where they can get a real food from a real farmer. So then it's distributed. We're in 49 of the 50 states.

What exactly is Icelandic style?

Yeah, so Icelandic style yogurt, like when yogurt was being founded, each area in our world created different types of ways to preserve milk. So cheeses came about, yogurts came about, and they had all these different cultures to do that. And with the different cultures you add, it creates different styles of yogurt and cheese. And so in Iceland they had these cultures that would make the yogurt thicker and then they would strain it so it would make it extra thick and it's a little more tart. It leaves the product higher in protein and lower in sugar naturally. So it's similar to Greek, but it's even higher in that protein. And in ICELAND in the 90s, they created that ultra filtration. So it's this new technology to strain out the whey, but it filters it and so it maintains all the whey protein in the yogurt. We are able to just have water that comes out, leaving all the nutrients left into the yogurt.

I have a question wearing my marketing hat. Okay, so I looked at your label and I have to say that it's hard to figure out for me as a marketing person what you want your customer to go into a store and ask for. So is it I want yogurt from Painterland Sisters, I want skier, I want Icelandic provisions. Which term do I use to get what you make? Because if I wanted a Macintosh, I say it's made by Apple, it's called a Macintosh. I don't have to explain. It's skyr Icelandic provisions from Apple. What's the key term here?

I would say if someone goes in the yogurt aisle and says, I want the best yogurt, they would just point them to Painterland Sisters.

Okay, that's the marketing answer. Now give me the real answer.

Yeah, well, I think it comes from different angles and that's what we're really trying to get at. We want to be known for the purest, most premium farmer owned product. So it's like when they go in and if it's just their psychology thinking, if they know our product, that's what we want to give them but it's really not about Painterland Sisters. It's about just a premium yogurt. Let's give them a premium yogurt, like a lot in one package. Let's give them a high protein, 6% milk fat, lactose free, natural premium yogurt. Natural. And that's what we really try to push on, you know, all of our social media and all of our. When we're working with different retailers. Like, this is a woman owned premium product that's really good for your health.

You know, I hate to burst your bubble, but when I'm in Whole Foods, I'm not going through this whole dissertation about what kind of yogurt I want. In a perfect world, one word. Would I ask for your yogurt? What? What one word? Is your brand?

Is our brand Painterland Sisters?

Yeah.

People usually, I think that we're Painterland right now. But then our. Once they get in our product, like they eat it consistently, then they feel like they join the sisterhood. So then they're like, then they'll go in thinking with that mindset.

In a perfect world, people would walk into their store and say, I want Painterland Sister yogurt.

Yep.

Okay. Got it, Got it. Now I have a dumb question, but a serious one. My family consumes a lot of yogurt because we make a lot of smoothies and a lot of acai bowls. And one of the things that makes me feel guilty every time we buy yogurt is the largest container we can get is a quart plastic. And I know every time we buy that, we're adding to plastic in the world. So is there no other way to buy yogurt that in this plastic that's going to be around for the next 50,000 years floating on the Pacific Ocean?

We have looked under rocks for the most sustainable container for our yogurt. And there's a couple problems when thinking about this one. We literally started growing hemp on our family farm because we wanted to make our own cups. This is a real deal that we really tried to dig under. Like, we're like, we'll grow hemp, we'll make hemp plastic. Everything will be from the farm, including the container. Because why would you take this premium yogurt and put it in a container that's not as premium as it is? You know what I mean? And so we went down this rabbit hole tremendously because it is so important. And one, if we go with maybe like a cardboard, it just doesn't function correctly with this yogurt. Right.

It's soggy and leaks.

Yeah, it's kind of like, okay, if you leave your ice cream container out for too long, what kind of happens to it? It gets all mushy and stuff. We looked at that. And then the taste gets weird too. It starts tasting a little bit like cardboard. And honestly, like, if we could, we would start our own. And maybe in the future we will do this because we were trying to do both of these things at the same time. The most sustainable container for yogurt that we could possibly have. But at this point, we just do a lot of reviews if there's something more sustainable out there for us to put yogurt in.

And we feel like the container we do have is the more sustainable option on the shelves comparatively. So it's reused plastic. And then we can reduce the amount of plastic because we have a paper label around it, so that strengthens the plastic walls. If we didn't have that paper foil, then we won't be able to use that. So we're able to use just a sheer amount of plastic compared to the amounts we would use.

Okay.

For another container.

So if anybody that's listening to this, if they know of any great more sustainable packaging, we'd shoot it our way because we're always open to that. And I think that's something really important about business and about my sister and I in general is we're always very open to pivoting and to doing something better.

Did you know that the labels are coloring pages?

No.

So then we had this lady, I went to her knitting club the other day to talk to her about investing into Painterland Sisters. So that was fun. But she brought out all of the yogurt she's been consuming for three months. She keeps all of the labels and she had a stack so big, so I recommended she brings it into the local elementary school so they can all color it and hang them up. So that's a way we can like reutilize them a little bit to create some art out of it. And then she takes the plastic containers and makes starters for her veggies. But I mean, there's only so much plastic you can utilize for that kind of stuff.

I think one of the most remarkable things about your business is that in less than a year or in a year, you're on a three and a half million dollar run rate in 49 states and 2,000 stores. I interviewed the woman who started Hint the Flavored Water and she told the story about how she got into Whole Foods locally because she made Friends with someone in the store, and he convinced his manager to put hint in. I want to know how you opened your first account. And then how in the world did you get to 2,000 stores? Because when I go to Whole foods, there's about 16 yogurt brands. It's not clear to me the world needs the 17th brand. So how did you pull this off?

Yeah, the first sale is different than the first real big sale. So we can tell you both stories. So our first sale is like, oh, we got yogurt. We got a spot sprint on. I'll tell that one. And Stephanie can tell the other one. It started with farming. We had 14,000 yogurts, and that was our small batch. And we're like, how are we going to sell this stuff? So we had two months to try to sell it until our next batch was made. And we ran around to the agriculture community and we met a local distributor that distributes only farmers stuff door to door in our northern PA area. So we started with them. And then the second one we started with at the same time is we have an Amish friend who we connected with to try to do different things with in the past, like maybe make some other dairy products. It didn't end up working, but we had all this yogurt. And he's like, hey, I have a cold storage facility in Lancaster County. We're like, okay, we're not making money on this yogurt. Can we store it there? And he's like, yeah, I'll let you store it for the first time. We want to give you a start at that.

Astrid is powered by a generator because he is Amish.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? So we're dealing with our first cold storage totally generated by.

Yeah, how wild was that? So then we're storing it here, and we're like, oh, now how are we going to get it out? Because this small little distributor up north's not going to do it. And so Jake and Stephanie and I would drive in our little broken down car. We'd go to New York City and we'd go to Philadelphia, and we'd go around Lancaster county trying to get sales. And we ended up meeting a company called John F. Martin, which is a Mennonite meat and cheese distributor. And they were like, oh, we don't typically do this kind of stuff, but we really love your passion. We'll give your yogurt a try. And so they were technically our first sales. And we hand labeled the first 60,000 yogurts with them because now we Started.

This company really during COVID And so the supply chain was all monkeyed up. And so you're supposed to have the labels beforehand and on the cups. And they're like, oh, yeah, it's gonna be like, yeah. And we're like, oh, my gosh, we already have milk committed. We already have everything scheduled. We already have our sales committed, all this stuff. And so we're like, well, I guess we literally asked all of our cousins, the farm crew, anyone we knew. And this is where community comes into it. And community, you'll see that everywhere in our story. And we were hand labeling 60,000 yogurts pick and packing them, getting them shipped off. And. Yeah, so our first sale, like Haley said, we went into this board meeting and we were so nervous. We were like, oh, my goodness gracious, it's all older men. And we're just trying to sell this on this very feminine looking yogurt. Something totally different than what they're doing. And it's at least double the price of the yogurt they're selling on the market.

They sold most of the conventional products. And we're an organic brand.

And we're skier, and no one knows how to pronounce it. They're like, what's skier? And we're like, like a skier, like on a slope. And we're explaining, like, not only why this is different, but like what this is. And so anyways, we go and we're so nervous, and then we just tell our story and it becomes the best selling yogurt for them in a month. And so they're distributing to local mom and pop shops, small, small chains and really great little shops that sometimes get overlooked by the bigger distributors. And then we built a loyal following that way. But within a month of starting that, we got notification that we got into Giant, which is a 300 store chain here in Pennsylvania. We partnered with them as basically like a local advocate. Hey, we're partnering with a local farmer. Giant came to our family farm, took videos basically showcasing the farmer and why people, like, why Giant is helping connect people to their food. So in July, just a couple months after we launched with John F. Martin, we were in 300 stores. And then we had to figure out.

Market found us on LinkedIn. And that was like a huge honor. We're like, there's this guy from Central Market who wants our products in Texas.

What?

We thought we were gonna be a regional brand. We thought we'd be able to sell enough of our yogurt in Pennsylvania. And we quickly realized that 60,000 yogurts a week. People in Pennsylvania can't just up and start eating. And so we're like, all right, we gotta sell it to Texas.

And the funny thing is like, we just, we had a lot of milk and we have to take the milk in trucker tank loads down to the facility. They only want to do, you know, their moqs are really crazy. And so we're just working with this supply and demand and what do we do with this? And we just wanted a little farm store. So then in the central market came on at the same time. And then natural grocers gives us a call up and we pitched it to them. Like we're pitching it through anywhere we can find it. Like, we're getting on LinkedIn. We're getting on. We started hiring a broker service. We had no idea what that meant.

We started shipping out our hand labeled yogurts everywhere. We're like, we're just get them out.

Literally in my garage we just had these samples. We hand labeled them and we just sent them anywhere we could send them. Anyone that had a lead on anything, we just went crazy and sent yogurts. We had all this cute little marketing stuff that was different. Showing pictures of our farm, showing videos of our farm. Anything that we could do to tell the story and get that story in front of these buyers. That's what we were doing. Natural grocers calls us up and she's, we want you in all of our stores. And we're like, oh my goodness. We don't even know if we have distribution for that.

And we want you in within a month.

Yeah. And we're like, okay, cool. So we're gonna be a national brand. We just launched a couple months ago and we're figuring out brokers and the retail world and promotions and all this crazy stuff. It's a whole different language. It is so hard to. 90% of the food on the store shelves is owned by 10 companies nationwide. And so here we are, essentially these two farm girls that just want to sell some milk. But we have a lot of milk and we have to sell it all over the country now. Now we have to figure this big logistical battle out. Anyways. We've hired some great. We started out with some fractional people and now we've hired a great internal team. But after that, sprouts picked us up within a couple months after launching with Natural Grocers. And that really got us coast to coast with 400 stores. Sprouts now we're hiring our brokers to be not Only as our distribution is across the country, we need to saturate all of that. Those distribution hubs across the country. Now we need a national broker team. So now we hire national broker team. And now. Yeah. And then Whole Foods Mid Atlantic picked us up. Mom's Organics, Kimberton, Whole Foods. Kimberton Whole Foods. Really great focusing on saturating the natural channel, because that is a buyer that is more apt to just look at a shelf. And you were like, I'm not gonna be going in and thinking, I want the most premium product. I want this, I want that. But we have strategically made sure we're saturating the natural channel. So it's more people that have that in their mind when they're going to the store instead of conventional.

Sheesh. You know, I also know the founder of Lauren's Cookies, and I know Lawrence, and I know hint, and I know Fry. And now I know you. So I'm cornering the food podcasting market. And let's just say that I'm a little hesitant to publish this interview because everybody's gonna listen to this and say, oh, it's so easy to start a food company.

Let me tell you.

Absolutely not.

99 of food food brands, new food brands, go out of business. Yeah, 99. If we would have knew that before we sold our first yogurt, I don't know if we would have sold it. Yeah.

And I think it's really about, again, not leading with the yogurt sales, but leading with the education on the farm. And what makes this an actual national necessity to have real farm fresh products on the store shelves that people can access without going five miles up a dirt road on their Sunday day off, which just doesn't happen anymore. People are busy. People want convenient stuff, and we're just telling that story. And we do not have a huge marketing budget. Like, we had to figure all this out. Like, we just hit a million dollars in crowdfunding last night at the Pennsylvania Farm Show. And my sister has been. I've been pregnant. She's been running around literally the entire east coast, just pitching to people and asking for investment, because we know that what we're doing is very mission oriented, and we didn't want to give that vision up for anyone else to come in. And so that's why we went with crowdfunding. But it's been wild, and we just been pivoting. We're farm girls. We didn't have a choice. We had to wake up, and we had to work. And that's what we're doing now.

And God forbid, Did you ever think of going on Shark Tank?

Oh, we'd love to. That'd be fun.

People have been telling us that almost every single day. Besides, are you twins? Are you gonna go on Shark Tank?

I know people who have been on Shark Tank. I can give you some of the what really happens.

Oh, yeah, we've heard. We've heard some of those brands as well.

Up next on Remarkable People.

Just being fearless in your approach and like, yeah, you might get turned down, but you're not gonna know unless you shoot your shot and try and growing up on the farm every single day was one of those lessons. Hey, Stephanie, get in the tractor. And there's a hill that's literally facing down like a roller coaster. Get in the tractor and basically rake the hay up. And I'm like, dad, I don't really know how to drive this. And he's like, you'll figure it out. This is the basics. He gives me, like a one second thing, and I'm like, I can't do it. He'll see you later, Steph. And then I do it. You know what I mean? And that's how we grew up.

If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. So have you made the trip to the Holy Land, I. E? Bentonville.

Where is Bentonville?

Oh, my God. Bentonville, Arkansas, is the headquarters of Walmart.

Oh.

We have not. That's not really in our scope at the moment. We're. We're looking more for. If we had a perfect cross arrows. And yes, I'd love to speak loudly about this, we would go for Whole Foods national.

Because that's our buyer. Right. We don't want to focus on what's not necessarily for us at the moment. We want to focus on the natural channel because. And then, you know, as we continue to grow, then we look outwards and more regional, conventional. But we're very specific with how we want to be perceived.

And so your dream account right now would be Whole Foods National, Whole Foods.

Wegmans, and all of those stores that look like those in regional areas.

Yeah, we love. We absolutely love what the NCG accounts like, the National Co Op Grocers, like the Co Op stores, any of the, like, very regional natural stores like Huckleberries and Nugget, those kind of stores that they bring so much. They bring in a kitchen experience when you go shopping and when you're eating our yogurt, we want to give you an experience. We want you to be on a story with us. And even if it's just one time out of the thousand yogurts you eat of Painterland Sisters, that's how we can educate people on agriculture. And so yeah, we are, we're optimists and we're positive and we lead with that, with the hard pressed aggression from working on the farm and just getting stuff done. So that's. Yeah, that's us.

Do you have any great stories about making pitches for sales or for money to older men and they mistake you for the receptionist and tell you to go get coffee or something like that? You got any great stories like that?

We have so many. First of all, people call us like when they want to just put us in our place. People feel like they have to do that sometimes. Hey, don't dream too big. You're, you know, you're just your girls and literally say girls. Like we're saying, oh, that's cute that you're doing that. Little girls. We battled a lot with that at the beginning as we were explaining our dreams and explaining what we're going to do. And we got, okay, that's cute, little girls, that's fine.

We hired a VP of sales. He's a guy from California, he's awesome. So VP of sales, they go to our big trade shows we set up with our fancy booths. Stephanie and I are there. We love to wear floral dresses and stick out right. We're so happy and energetic. We greet everyone like, oh, like, have.

You heard of us?

Oh, what stores are you in? And many times would walk right by us and our sales guy would be behind us and they'd be like, oh, are you the owner of the company? Or oh, are you their dad? So one, they would just think we were like ambassadors there to like, yeah.

Ambassadors show girls, models hired to like get people to the booth. We're like, no, we're the owners. We're the ones that built the business plan and got the funding and figured out how to do this.

Our sales guy every time would be like, yeah, that's fine, but they're who you need to talk to. They're my bosses. So he's like, very supportive of it. But it's just bizarre how many times that happened.

We've gotten a lot of questions, like, when you do have children, do you know what your capacity is? I don't think you understand that you can't really do this. And I Have three kids now. I have a six year old, a two year old and a three month old and we are really doing this. I do have to shut off my camera sometimes when I need to breastfeed, but that is what it is. And I think that's what's different about Hailey and I. Like, we understand that there's a world where this is how a business looks and this is how you handle business. But then there's also a world where you can bring your authentic, true self into that structure and marry who you are and how you handle things and your authenticity. And basically like that thing that's making this work, whatever it is, okay, now we have this great structure. This is how we handle business. This is our processes and our sops and our quality assurance. All that stuff. Married with, this is just us.

We weren't great with boundaries because we never really had them growing up on the farm. So we're like, why not? Why not? Let's just go try it.

Let's run around and just do it and we'll figure it out as we go and build great plans and hire great people.

When I interviewed Sarah Fry, the Pumpkin queen of America, she told a story that when she was 8 or 9 years old, her and her father were driving in the pickup truck and they came across this big snapping turtle, which apparently is dangerous. Me being from Hawaii, I have no idea. And her father made her go out and face that turtle and grab it and throw it in the back of the pickup truck so they could eat it. And decades later, she tells me this story and she said that story taught me to get over my fears and go for it, go for it. And she says that story helped her break into Walmart because she overcome her fear of snapping turtles, so she can overcome her fear of Walmart.

And yeah, and that's very important, just being fearless in your approach. And like, yeah, you might get turned down, but you're not gonna know unless you shoot your shot and try. And growing up on the farm every single day was one of those lessons. Hey, Stephanie, get in the tractor. And there's a hill that's literally facing down like a roller coaster. Get in the tractor and basically rake the hay up. And I'm like, dad, I don't really know how to drive this. And he's like, you'll figure it out. This is the basics. He gives me like a one second thing, and I'm like, I can't do it. He's see you later, Steph. And then I do it. You know what I mean, and that's how we grew up. Hey, hold that gate. Make sure do this. Get the cow in there and just do it. Just figure it out. I believe in you. And our parents instilled a belief in us and our abilities that we could conquer and figure things out. And that is a driving force in what we're doing today because it is so scary. Like, when we gave our first pitch to the Mennonite distributor, like I was saying, we were in there and we were like, oh, we don't know. This is so scary. And now we're just. Every single day, as we, like, face our fears, we just learn, like, everyone is who they are and we are who we are, and all we can do is our best, just like everyone else is doing. And there's no need to be scared or feel anything differently than who we are.

Madison is from Nebraska, so she's your kindred spirit.

She's like, yes, you are.

We almost named the yogurt kindred spirits.

Oh, that was a really hard time figuring out. We actually hired somebody to help us with the yogurt game. Like, what are we gonna do? We didn't even know what we were gonna do. And we ended up on Painterland Sisters, which is something that we knew before we even paid someone to help us figure it out. But we were, like, trying to get all the market research, trying to do all the things, and then we're like, we are Painterland Sisters. This is who we are. This is what we are. So we just went with that. Even though there was probably something that would have been.

I have to say that Painterland Sisters, or Painter Sisters, I think, is a great name. A great name.

Yeah. Thank you.

Pointer Sisters is associated with such positivity in my mind, that Pointer, Painter, it. They're. They're both so positive.

Well, we appreciate that. And the sister is just everything that we try to do is. It's family based. But it's not just that. It's to tap into our community and say, hey, listen, you're a sister, too. We're just trying to live this life and eat healthy yogurt and, you know, be nice to Mother Earth. Be nice to Mother Earth. Eat healthy food.

Okay, I give you the floor. Pitch your yogurt to all my listeners. Why they should go especially into Whole Foods and demand Painterland Sisters yogurt.

Do that one stuff.

All right, so Painterland Sisters is a certified woman owned, mother owned. So we will not give our kids what we wouldn't want you to give your kids. We are A completely transparent farmer owned right from the direct source of your food product. We're 6% milk fat. Extra creamy, defiantly dreamy. Milk fat is actually better for your energy than carbs are. So eat all that good fat. We're dairy farmers. We love all that good fat. It has billions of probiotics as well as incredibly high protein. So 16 to 21 grams of protein, and that's 100% natural. We do not add protein powder back into our yogurt. We do not like Frankenstein food. We like food as originally as it came from the source. So not only do we know where this milk comes from, but we know how the animals are being treated and what they're eating. And. And that translates into a very nutrient dense product, something that you can just grab and go. Be transparent and confident with what you're eating. This product will not only help your body, it'll help the bodies of your children and future generations. Because with this yogurt, you're taking care of Mother Earth herself.

Our organic Scare yogurt is found nationwide in every state but Alaska. If you want to find out a yogurt near you, you just go to our website, painterlandsisters.com and you can see the mom and pop stores, the big sprout stores, and all in between that you can find our product on. And yes, when you get that yogurt, you will be able to color the back of the yogurt page. I was gonna say, you will become a sister.

You will become a sister.

Join the sisterhood and maybe you'll wanna be a sister with us.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but I swear you can order it from Amazon.

No way, Jose. We have tried to ship yogurt and we have not mastered that skill yet. One day, if anyone's listening and they know how to ship yogurt to somebody's front door without it getting weird. Because yogurt can't be too hot or too cold and if it's shaking too much, it's just. It's so finicky. Oh, my gosh. And I forgot to say it's lactose free because 68% of people have some sort of lactose sensitivity. And we want people to eat real dairy and enjoy real dairy.

I'm gonna give you a little bit of homework. No matter where you live, go into your market and ask for Painterland sister yogurt. And if they don't have it, insist that they stock it and give it really great shelf space. There's a lot to love about The Painter Sisters. I hope you'll take their message to heart. It's about entrepreneurship and it's about growth and grit and grace. Oh, what a great tricolon and alliteration. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Painter Sisters. I just love that name. I have very positive feelings about the Pointer Sisters. So the Painter Sisters. I mean, how could I not have them on this podcast? Anyway, thank you very much, Painter Sisters. And thank you very much to the Remarkable People team, Jeff C. And Shannon Hernandez, sound design wizards Madison and Tessa Knysmer. The Knysemer Sisters. Unlike the Painter Sisters, Madison is the co author of our book and also the producer of this podcast, Tessa. Tessa is our researcher and transcript perfector along with Louise McGanna, Alexis Nishimura, and Fallon Yates. That's the Remarkable People People team. And speaking of growth, grit and grace, Madison and I have published this book. It's called Think remarkable. Nine paths to transform your life and make a difference. It basically takes all the knowledge that we gained from over 200 remarkable people, plus a few decades of work in Silicon Valley. And this is a tactical and practical book about how to make a difference and be remarkable. Please check it out. Until next week. This is Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Mahalo and aloha. This is Remarkable People.