Episode 226: How a Bar Bet Turned into 500 Stores with Co-Founder of Snacklins Samy Kobrosly

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind.

I'm Larry Weddell. And before we get started, if you.

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I am here today with Sammy and did I say that right?

You nailed it, brother. You nailed it, man.

I am here with Sammy Cobrasley and we're going to talk about winning. And Sammy has just gotten a crash course here over the last few years about how you navigate the confusing, overwhelming odds against breaking out of the mass of people who want to do something big and they actually do something big. Yeah, yeah, you got to navigate yourself through the fire there, you know, after you get the big idea. So Sammy, your company, you're a co founder of Snacklands as I understand it, correct?

See it right behind me on the wall.

Absolutely. And you're in your warehouse, your factory right now. So anybody hears any noise, that's because Sammy's working and your company is plant based crisp snacks. And you got a. I don't know, how long have you been doing that? From the time you got ideal.

Yeah, honestly, it was a bar bet that's just gotten really out of hand since then. About five years ago, a buddy of mine bet me at the bar to make a vegan pork rind. And so I went home and I was like, all right, let me see if I can figure this out. But what we end up having wasn't just this like plant based chicharron, you know what I mean? It was like crunchy, salty, delicious snack. And everything just kind of snowballed since then. But yeah, it was a barbette about five years ago.

Obviously you selected the correct barbette to pursue. We won't get into some of the other bar bets that were on the table and Lord knows where that would have led you. But you selected the correct one to pursue and by, let's see, was it 2019 or so a couple years ago? Couple three years ago. You were on. You got enough to where you were on Shark tank. You got 250,000 for 5% equity and 5% of advisory shares. Then you exploded to 1.8 million in sales. Your operating costs are low. You're rated in one of the top food trends of 2019 by Whole Foods. You're not only in Whole Foods. You're rated as one of the top trends and sold at Amazon, Walmart, Thrive, Market 711 in LA and probably more places breaking out all the time. But congratulations, Sammy. That's incredible.

Thank you. Yeah, like we said. So I think when you talk about winning, you know, for us it was, it was this barbette to make a vegan pork rind. Right. But we were making them people, we were putting them in like little bags. We were selling at some local stores, breweries, and we started to see that we were selling a lot. And we're like, well, why are we selling a lot? Because it, you know, you know, it can't be this vegan pork rind. Like, what else is there? You know, what is the reason behind that? And that's kind of how we, you know, we fall into that plant crisp. Like, we realized that people were buying snack ones because it was a delicious snack that had simple ingredients. You know what I mean? It was mushrooms, onions, yuca. It was, you know, healthy. It was low in calories, it was low in sodium. Like they could eat the whole bag and it's 90 calories. And so, you know, we've kind of listened to that audience. You know, we listen to, we listen to our customers and, you know, we've pivoted and kind of moved towards them and, you know, and really focused and flourished because of that.

Yeah, as opposed to eating the whole bag and it's a thousand calories, you know, exactly.

Like, I've never been, I tell people this. Like, I've never been one and they're like, the serving size is eight chips. Like, I give them the middle finger and I walk on. You know what I mean? Like, I've never eaten eight chips in my life. I've never only had two Oreos. So, like, I don't want to hear these serving size things. And so, you know, that's how we, that's, that was the mentality behind snack ones. Like, you eat that whole bag, like that single serving size, it's filling, it's the exact same size as all the other competitors out there. And it's a filling bag of chips and it's delicious, first and foremost.

Yeah. And so how did you, I mean, did you have a background in food preparation and the food world?

Somewhat. And somewhat. No. I actually, my prior job before this was I was a radio morning show host for a pop station in Washington DC.

Is that right?

Shout out Hot 995. Yes. I worked there from like 20 till whatever. But while I was doing that, I befriended a lot of people in the restaurant industry. And you kind of realize that, you know, people in the restaurant industry, they work at three and they work till late. If you work a morning show, you work from 3am and you're off by noon. So we all had that noon to three time off. I end up hanging out with a lot of restaurant folks because of that. Because everyone else was at a real job, you know, except for them. They weren't. They weren't going yet. They're like, I don't go to my real job for another three hours.

Yeah.

And just befriending a bunch of like chefs and restaurateurs. I started staging, like, you know, just, I just want to come in and learn is what I'd ask him, you know, and I'd come in and help out for a couple days, chopping stuff up and helping out, you know. And over the years, you know, I've worked or staged at everything from dive bars to Michelin, you know, to restaurants in the Michelin guide. I worked at a bakery forever. Like, I loved my bakery job. It was probably my favorite job of all time. Just, I made a crap ton of bread all the time. And I just, you know, I think that, yeah, I developed this, you know, I developed this reputation in the area amongst. Amongst friends that was kind of making weird stuff and always experimenting and, you know, being into that. And so I think that that mix, just the timing of. Oh, wow. One of these crazy experiments. I made, like, people actually like it, you know, it wasn't that I made it thinking, I'm going to start a company. We made it just for awesome to have it. And then our friend that owned a brewery was like, yo, dude, these are great. Can you come by this weekend and just like sell them to people at the brewery? Like, it would be huge. We'll give you a free beer. And we're like, that's awesome. So we took the free beer. You know what I mean? Like, we just jumped at that opportunity. We're like, okay. While we were there that weekend, someone that owns a. That owns a local grocery store here in D.C. called Glen's Garden Market, they just approached us and they said, hey, these are great guys. And if you guys actually like put these in real bag, got yourself a logo, like figured out a name, like put nutrition facts on it, like, people would buy these vegan pork rinds. This is a great idea. And that's what kind of stirred us into doing that. You know, we started off with that one store, you know, so we went from free beer to selling one store as a side hustle. And sooner or later, you know, After a year or so, that, that's. I was, I was running out of my job every day just so I could work on snacklets, you know, and I was cutting down on my time working just so I could help out with snacklets. And then, you know, slowly my side hustle became, you know, the real job. And, you know, since then, we know we've grown. Like, I'm right now, you can't see it from, from my angle, but there's a 10,000 square foot manufacturing facility back there, you know, so from starting off with making it in my apartment, you know, for my friends, like, you know, for my friends. Pretty awesome to know that you got, you know, 20 people back there working right now just making a ton of chips, a ton of snacks.

Well, it's staggering because of the short timeline, short time frame that it happened.

Yeah. And I think part of it also is like, you know, that we took control of that manufacturing. I think a lot of people there are, I guess, entrepreneurs, whatever they are, like, a lot of people are looking for a shortcut, you know, and so if they made something delicious, they go, well, who can make this for me? Right? Who can make it for me cheaper than I'm making it now? Where we said, well, we don't want to be held accountable for that. We don't want to be giving up our, you know, those profit margins. You don't want to even be like just the fluidity that we have, like the nimbleness that we have to be able to jump in to do something new. Yeah, you have to. We have to have our own manufacturing facility for that. And so, you know, invest in that manufacturing facility really helped us because it's not about us trying to source and find new things. Like, we already know where all that is. All we have to do is make more snacks.

Yeah. And the idea to take that approach, how did you come to that conclusion or why did you know that was the right way to move rather than follow the way other people go?

I was going to say, in hindsight, it's actually pretty funny because it was clearly the right move and it's been our. The best move that we've ever made is holding our own manufacturing and especially owning like the ip, you know, the IP manufacturing. So all the manufacturing that kind of makes us special. Like we do that in house, you know, no one else sees that. No one else knows what we're doing. And that was honestly, it wasn't that I had some grand scheme to one day do that. It was out of necessity. It was the fact that we reached out to all these other people that manufactured snacks and said, hey, can you make our snacks? And they go, oh, no, you guys use fresh vegetables. No, sorry, we can't. You know, and it was that necessity trying to find somebody that could make my recipe, to take my recipe and just execute on a larger scale that no one could. And so that led me to, you know, that led me to the Internet. And from the Internet, I went to China. You know what I mean? Like, and so, like, the Internet led me to China and I just was looking at machines and looking at all these pieces, and I ended up traveling around to different cities in China my first time, going to a bunch of manufacturing facilities, looking at what they were doing, looking at the things kind of piecemealing a bunch of different pieces together. You know, let's get. Let's get some machines.

Let's get this straight. Let's get this straight. Here you are starting this thing up from a barbette, and in a short period of time, you're touring factories and meeting people in China.

I was literally just on, like, Alibaba, reaching out to everyone I could, and they'd be like, oh, where you at? Oh, okay, cool. And I was just like, setting up. I knew I wanted to check out these, like, five factories, and I just had to figure out how to get there. So I remember flying into Beijing. I had a bunch of random train tickets, a bunch of random hotel reservations, and all I knew was that I'd be in this city for 24 hours just so that I could possibly have that two hour meeting or three hour meeting with that manufacturer, you know? And I don't know, it is a little bit crazy, I guess, but at the time, it just seemed so. It seemed like that's what you have to do. Like, that's the only thing I know what to do. Like, that's the only way I can do it. Like, what else am I going to do?

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Move up, you know, yeah, reminds me of like Phil Knight with Nike. You know, he was a track, track guy and used track shoes. And he knew the Japanese had great shoes, but they didn't sell them in the United States. And so he had this great idea, I'm gonna get these shoes. In fact, I've got a friend who knew him when he worked in the back of a big department store there and in the little athletic section and sold shoes, you know, and he knew him before and he's living with his parents and he gets a suit. He buys a suit and gets. Makes a trip to Japan and tours all of the factories there in his suit. Like, you know, I want to represent you in the United States. And he found one that would do it. And that's how the whole thing started, you know.

But it's like what you got to do. And honestly, like, it's not that we went to China. I mean it's almost like that Phil Knight approach. He knew like, well, the people that are making the best athletic shoes are in Japan, right? I looked and there was companies that make the same machinery I wanted to here. But when you start to break it down in the components, you realize, wait, these are all coming from someone else. You know, who is that someone else? And it was doing that research that led me to that, those kind of. That, that someone else, that person, that's. Who's the people that are making all the components that they're assembling in Germany. You know, who are the people that are this. Because I knew that I couldn't have something that was pre made. Like I didn't have lot of space, I wasn't gonna have a lot of space. I didn't have a lot of a budget, right. So I knew I needed something that could fit my budget and also could fit the space I had. And so I figured I might as well go to the people that are, that are making it from the get go for them. And I can have them customize it myself, I can have them do this myself and I could kind of do all that myself, you know. And you know, it was, it was not a necessity. But now since then, you know, I love going back. We have amazing partners over there that we work with. And you know, I.

Well, it sounds to me now, Sammy, like you had a full time job. You started this and it was a part time job, eventually became full time. But it was. But what I'm hearing is that is you came full time and you saw, you know, we need things, we need to figure stuff out. We're never going to go anywhere unless we get this in place. This in place and the other. And your full time job became how can we expand, you know, and so you, because you kept, you kept the other stuff going, making the snacklings and distributing and stuff like that, that was still going on while you were doing all this other investigation and getting other things lined up. Is that right?

I mean, yeah, you got to talk. I mean we were in 500 stores before we stopped like actually hand making everything, you know what I mean? Like we were hand doing the entire process. So like it started off with me going home. I would start making snacklings and I would just make, make, make, make, make a bunch of stuff, get it all ready to go, go to bed at 2am, wake up at 6am, crank out some more, go to my job, you know, And I was doing that. By the time we got to a point that I was like, I need help, right? Hired Sylvia, who's, you know, she's our employee number two. Like her and I, baby, we've killed it, right? And Sylvia, we brought her on, she needed a part time job. In the evening we go, great, I give you some hours. And I was, you know, I was helping her out. I was leaving serving tables at a restaurant just so I could make enough money so that I could pay her for the hours she had plus have some cash left over so that I could do stuff. And then, you know, we'd go back during the daytime again. During the daytime I'd be doing deliveries, I'd be finishing up labeling, I'd be kind of working on the business side of it. Evening came, Sylvia would start making snacks again. I would serve tables, save that money from the table so I could pay her her salary and still have a little bit left over so I could kind of get to the next day, you know. And it was that, that constant. And it's not like it's. And there's nothing wrong with people that are that think it all out beforehand and actually build the facility. First and foremost, I want to make this product. So if I want to make this, I want to do this. We just never planned on it, you know, and we kind of slow rolled our way into that. And by doing so, you know, we were hand making everything. And so yeah, there was a time that I looked and I go, Silvia, we've got two people here working full time and we're only making this much. Like we can never make enough money to build this into like a real company or like ever make enough snacks. We have to find ways to do more and to do more without it being so labor intensive, you know, like. Yeah, so we saw and you know, we look by like we've got a room full of machines in the back, but we still have the exact same people that have been working on us for years. You know what I mean? So as efficiencies increased, it's not that we got rid of our team. No, no, no. We now can make more with the same people that we had, you know, where a lot of people looked at it as well, I can make more. So now I need less people. We said, no, no, we can now use those people and make even more than we did beforehand. Right. With these efficiencies in place.

Right. And what. It's great to have the master's program and the business degrees and there's nothing wrong with that, however. And it's nothing wrong with having plenty of funding coming out of the gate. But a lot of times you don't. All the time you don't know what you don't know. And when you start, a lot of times you think you're smarter than you are. When you have degrees and, you know, you have the formal training and this, that the other, you feel like you're a little bit smarter than everybody else, a little bit freer to spend all that cash. If you got a lot of rich friends who give you a lot of money and a lot of people tell me that if they'd had the money early on, they would have made spend it on the wrong things and it was good for them that they had to work their way up. Because I'd submit to you, you learned what you needed to know during that process from. Because you're thinking about it all the time, you're working around the clock and you got that subconscious genius, instinctive creative mind working on solving problems and looking for solutions. And you're discovering things when you leave your job. You go out, you're doing this and you learn things that you could not learn any other way, but that prepped you to. When you got in front of people in China, they knew this guy was the real deal, he's going somewhere. Because you had created that energy, that vibe, that instinct, that experience. And winners can smell winners. And if you did not have that, if you'd just fallen out of bed the first week out of putting the Cracklands idea together and the first trip to the beer company and then gone to China, they were probably not giving you the time of day. But.

Well, I think it's also, it's. It's the respect you gain from taking the time to learn the craft, right? And a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people say, I have this idea, I want to make these granola bars that are keto this and I want to do it. I go, all right, well, hold on, let's back it up. A, have you made granola bars in the past? Like, do you make granola bars? Like, did you work in food beforehand? Or just like an idea? Like, B, like, what do you know about food manufacturing? And I realized that. That, like when I was there those first two years when we were just hand making everything, I spent a lot of time just trying to learn and learn as much as possible so that when I do walk in, I mean, John, John, our operations director here, him and I, he's my age, so we're both young, in our early 30s, right? Mid-30s. And. And when we walk down to a factory, we can sit there and talk to someone who's been working for every major CPG brand you can imagine for the past 50 years, you know, 40 years. And when they start talking about machines when they're walking down the production line, they know that we're not just some marketing guy. Like, they go, oh, these guys actually know about the machines. Like, they see us inspecting the machines, and that's what I'm into. Like, I want. I have to learn all that because I don't want to just be someone who goes, oh, well, I have a guy for that. Like, no, I want to be just as good as my guy for that. So that way, when I speak to my guy for that, he's not just pulling one over on me. I'm not there sticking it as this. Like, I actually know what I'm talking about. And so when I walk in these situations, I can speak from a voice of authority because they go, hey, he may have not been doing it for 40 years like me, but he's been deep into it for the past four or five years, right? And he definitely has learned what, you know, what. What he needs to know. And so I can talk to these guys. And I was like, dude, what kind of machine does they go, oh, man, that's called an equilibrator, brother. And I was like, yeah, like, I would never know that, right? They at least told me, as opposed to just like some Joe Schmo. Because they go, hey, man, we've seen you. We've seen you trying to learn. And like, yeah, straight up, like Kevin Blessey, our CEO like he is, you know, he's the reason for a lot of our, you know, for a lot of our most recent success, you know, because his guidance and his leadership has left me so that I can do what, what I am great at. And that is make snacks. And all I want to do is make snacks. Like, I don't. And that's what you need. I'm not some, you know, I'm not the kind of entrepreneur that says, oh, after this I'm going to go start a car company and then after this I'm going to do this. I got this tech platform and they want to start a for profit school. Like, no, no, no, no. I want to know everything about snacks. I want to work in snacks. Like, I truly love snacks. And I just happen to be lucky enough that my snack idea is, has led me to the place I'm in now where I can work with all these great people. But I love making snacks and I do everything I can to learn more about snacks and at that raw, stupidest way. That's where I attribute a lot of my success to.

Thanks so much, Sammy. This has been fantastic. Get into the first phase of your thinking and your approach and it just strips away the whole thing of objections, of barriers to entry into the business world that most people have. I don't have this. I don't have a lot of money, don't have a lot of education. I don't have a lot of insider contacts and things like that, but I.

Got a lot of blisters and cuts, baby, and that's all that matters.

Well, thanks so much, Sammy. Can't wait till the next time. Thanks for taking your time.

Absolutely, man. Great talking to you.

If you enjoyed what you've heard and are dead serious about finding out for yourself exactly how this works in the real world, I've taken the most valuable business lessons I've learned over 40 years and put them into something for you to watch. Go to whiteellawinning.com webinar now in order to move up as fast as possible. I'm Larry Wydell and I run the Million Dollar Mastermind. Go, go, go.