Founder Stories: Aaron Gatti, Brami

Jordan Buckner: [00:00:00] Have you turned an ancient Italian superfood into a modern snack brand that stands out in the crowded market? Aaron Gatti, who's the founder and CEO of Brami, set out to do just that. Inspired by the Mediterranean diet and its Italian roots, Aaron discovered the lupini bean, a protein packed, fiber rich legume with incredible health benefits.

But while lupini beans were popular in Europe, they were virtually unknown in the U. S. So in this episode, Aaron shares how he built Brami from the ground up, from introducing an entirely new category American consumers scale and cross retail, Amazon direct to consumer, and then also launching their do pasta product, we'll get into the early lessons of launching unfamiliar product, breaking into major retailers and what it looks like to launch into a new category, Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Gatti: Thank you for having me happy to be here. 

Jordan Buckner: Of course. So I love for you to give just a quick overview of the early days of. Launching Brami, what led you to start the product and get it into market? 

Aaron Gatti: Yeah. So I grew up spending a lot of time as a kid with [00:01:00] my grandparents in Italy who took me on and in the summers when I was out of school and my parents had to do something with me and grew up.

Loving Lupini beans, not even knowing what they were, but it was just like an addicting salty snack, kind of like olives or edamame. And actually it was my wife who sort of made me think twice about it later in life. I introduced them to her and she made the comment, Oh my God, it's like an Italian edamame.

How do I not know about this? I'm always looking for high protein snacks and I had never thought about it that way. Exactly right. And so it was this kind of aha moment. And then it was really her idea. She then shortly after that said, well, what if we make this like accessible and ready to eat snack packs with different flavors?

And so she, my wife actually had the idea of Brami which was useful for me later because it's so hard to build the CPG business that. She was never able to fully complain because it was [00:02:00] her, I guess 

Jordan Buckner: she got you into 

it. I love that. There'll be a lot of people I met. It's usually one person has the idea and there's significant other is like, are you sure about it in this case? She's like, 

Aaron Gatti: right. And they're right to ask that question. I know. I, yeah, my setup was a little different. And so I don't have those questions. 

Jordan Buckner: Educating consumers, like getting the product onto shelf for the first time and having to teach people what what the beans are.

Aaron Gatti: Yeah, I mean, I, transparently totally underestimated what it takes. And I, in retrospect. If you wanted to pick one of the hardest things to do, it would be start a CPG business without millions in the bank already. With a product that nobody's ever heard of before that's kind of hard to explain.

That's unlike any other snack anybody's had before because it's not dry and crunchy. And retailers don't know where to put it. But I like, I checked all the boxes of making my life difficult, not to [00:03:00] mention nobody in the world could manufacture a shelf stable, ready to eat pickled product pickled lupini beans, certainly, which is, it's a very particular kind of process.

It's like a batch process. You have to. Soak them and sprout them for 10 days essentially, and then pickle them after , and then have the ability to pouch them. And , it's a very unique process. So it doesn't fit into easily into supply chains. And then, yeah, I mean, I, didn't appreciate until later how.

It's not easy to get consumers to change habits and sort of understand something that is quite unique. The advantage I had was that it has unparalleled nutritionals. I mean, there is. No crop grown on the planet that has nearly the same density of protein and fiber, which are the two key macronutrients everybody's looking for than lupini beans.

I mean, it checks so many diet boxes and one of the reasons I actually [00:04:00] decided to do it was that I personally struggle every day at like 3, 4 p. m. I'm like ravenous. I need a snack, but I know. If I snack the wrong way, even if it's a better for you snack, it's still going to have calories, carbs, fat, sugar, which are not necessarily a problem.

But you know, at 4 PM is probably not the best idea. And so, but you know, carrots and celery are boring. And it's just like, I struggled every day with like, what do I snack on? That's like actually going to satisfy my hunger without ruining my diet. And lupini beans solve that issue that millions of Americans experience every single day.

Unlike anything else in the grocery store. And so, you know, I had that going for me, but everything else was really hard. 

Jordan Buckner: Well, and I think in listening to your story, it really resonates because I can completely understand how you're looking at. the taste and the flavor and like, all right, these are delicious.

You're looking at the, even the form factor, right? Like a pouch with ready to eat beans, like people are familiar [00:05:00] with beans, even if they're not familiar with the lupini they're used to buying products in pouches. They have all these great macro ingredients, like, yeah, we have to teach them about what the lupini is, but they love all these other things.

And I can see a lot of founders go through that similar journey. I went through it myself with my product. I launched TeaSquares of not fully appreciating how changing people's behavior is really complicated because, as you said, I'm sure few people are eating beans as a snack cold in the afternoon. And really, like, that's the behavior that you're you're changing.

So I'm curious, like, is. Was that the biggest hurdle or what did you learn from working with customers? 

Aaron Gatti: Yeah. And it's actually even more straightforward than that, which is people aren't used to snacks that aren't dry and crunchy, like , you, people eat olives in like appetizer type settings, but in terms of just snacking, like afternoon, hunger, salty snacking, it's all dry and crunchy.

And one of the big. Unlocks [00:06:00] that came, you know, way later and I wish I had sort of gotten right earlier was when Whole Foods moved us from functional snacking or to be fair cut us from functional snacking and then added us back to the shelf stable veggie like prepared bean, canned bean And that was our breakthrough on the bean line, because I mean, what's also unique about Lupini Beans is there, we discovered along the way, we thought, okay, This is an unrivaled healthy snack, but actually what we were discovering on, on Instagram, et cetera, was that people were using it just as much as a salad or bowl topper as they were a snack.

In fact, you know, the classic use cases is you pour half onto a salad as like a fresh, easy, flavorful. Differentiated high protein, high fiber addition to your salad or bowl. And then you save the other half of the bag for snacking later. At least in terms of the retail multi [00:07:00] serve pack that we sell.

and so, yeah, so , we discovered that use case as we were going, And then we were lucky that Whole Foods sort of had this insight and offered us to get into the bean aisle, which in the early days we were hesitant, we were reticent to do because, you know, snacking was the hot category when we started and, you know, it's more appealing from a founder point of view.

But we found way better success in beans a, because of what I was just talking about, but also because. Of the issue we're talking about before of people are just used to dry, crunchy snacks. So we were a little bit out of place in functional snacking, not to mention it was an incredibly competitive and crowded space, especially at that time.

So yeah 

Jordan Buckner: I mean, that's a really tough because. On one hand, you're right. Like a lot of times you'll go into a product with a specific use case in mind and then consumers out in the world tell you like, no, no, we're actually using it this way. And then there's like this weird decision that you have to make on, [00:08:00] like, how do you talk about it and position it sometimes?

Brands have to change their product deal with TeaSquares. They're essentially bite size energy bars, and we had a whole messaging around helping you stay focused and alert. We had tea powder inside for natural caffeine without the ending. But when we surveyed our customers, we actually found that 50 percent of them didn't buy them for the energy benefits at all.

And they didn't even know if it Made the difference or not, but they just love that crunchy texture and the flavor and sort of like, huh, all of our messaging is geared towards this energy use case. But whether people just want another crunchy snack with fun flavors, right? And it was like a big turn point.

We have to decide which way that we go. 

Aaron Gatti: I think , that's such a key insight here, you know, in CPG, it's not like software where you can just throw out an MVP and test it very easily. And so it's hard. Sometimes you do have to just make your best guess and go for it and learn along the way. But. I would highly advise people starting things out of the gate , to [00:09:00] try as best as possible to get as much data as possible.

If you can learn those things first, just on DTC or whatever it is, before you develop your retail strategy, you'll be in a way better place. Because once you get into retail, that's a hard game. So, you know, as much as possible, you want learnings first. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, that's so key because as you make that analogy with software, if you want to make a change, and you have the technical skills, you can do that in a day, you know, a week at the most.

But in CPG, you have existing inventory that's sitting there, you have maybe You brought 20, 000, you know, packaging units for each flavor that you have to go through before you make a change. So there's a lot of complexity in moving that along. In terms of the beans business, you were growing that for a number of years.

I think it's been almost 10 years that you started that business. I guess, is it really to the overall business of where you going to be a kind of snacking Lupini being company or what other kind of products or categories were [00:10:00] you looking at in terms of the future of the company?

Aaron Gatti: Yeah. I mean, When I got my original funding and decided to give up my career and make this leap, I with , the idea was like, this is this untapped, powerful, macronutrient dense, natural resource that we could really build all kinds of product lines off of but Let's do sort of a modern, innovative take on the traditional use case at first and get, you know, familiarize America with the sort of traditional use case in a sort of more accessible modern way and then sort of build from there.

And we really did think of it as. A Lupini bean brand and company. and, you know, it turned out to be a lot harder to do that first step than we had imagined. But along the way, it sort of occurred to me that. You know, not, I mean, not only is educating around an ingredient, especially unique ingredient, not necessarily the easiest thing to [00:11:00] do, but it also doesn't resonate with consumers as a brand as strongly as sort of I would think it would.

and funnily enough, we, you know, a few years ago, Rethought the brand and reposition the brand actually to align with the original seed of Brami, which I would say was when growing up at my grandparents farmhouse in Italy, eating. Vegetables out of my grandmother's garden and oil pressed from her olive trees and pasta rolled by hand and all this incredible food made from simple quality ingredients.

 I just felt this magic and guilt pleasure around food when I was there that I always wanted to package up and so we repositioned the brand as like redefining or transcending the sort of Americanized Italian food as that is viewed as a guilty pleasure and really allowing people to feel that kind of free quality food feeling , that they might feel if they go to Italy in their everyday lives in [00:12:00] America.

And that was the thought process we had , when we went to create. the pasta and this has always been my dream since I was a little kid and we just sort of realigned it now to match that and it was always sort of along that line, , but it was much more Lupini focused, whereas now it's really just better for you, delicious Italian.

Jordan Buckner: Yeah. And I love that. I think the. Authentic story behind you and your experiences and being in the share that emotional experience of simple ingredients with family plays a long way, and you just mentioned it briefly. But in 2022, you launched the pasta line. Tell me about the pasta line and what led to you launching into a new category.

Aaron Gatti: Yeah, I mean, I had a lot of experience under my belt after grappling with the beans, which are doing great, by the way, is just, you know, a much harder and more difficult path than expected with the pasta. I was able to set it up better and I had a fantastic, advisor , who helped me analyze all the sort of possible categories where we could help bring my vision [00:13:00] of.

Allowing people to feel good eating delicious Italian food generally and where we might be able to leverage the power of the lupini bean in a large existing category where there's white space rather than trying to create a category out of nothing again like we were doing. With the lupini beans and, and so we, we kind of explored different categories, but we just saw this gaping hole in the pasta market that we were uniquely suited to fill because of the nature of the lupini bean and, you know, I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but the.

The story of pasta basically is pasta used to be pasta and, you know, there was, there was imported pasta and then there was you know, economy pasta, and then America was trained to feel guilty about eating pasta and gluten became the enemy. And then, you know, you had the rise of gluten free, better for you all.

Pastas, which were really the [00:14:00] only growth engine for the pasta category pre COVID. But the reality is that the taste, texture, and value are the three core attributes that the mass pasta consumer cares about. And so there was always going to be a limit To the total addressable market there because the satisfaction levels on these alt pastas in terms of taste, texture and value versus traditional pasta were just not there and knowing how nutrient dense the lupini bean is, the fact that it's very easy to digest that It has like a umami, almost eggy flavor to it.

And a golden color. It really is like the perfect ingredient to add to an authentic Italian Durham wheat pasta, you know, like a high, a top shelf Italian pasta to try to give consumers. Everything they want. And so we, this is sort of entering like the third, the next, the Renaissance of pasta, where you can have your nutrition and [00:15:00] eat it too.

You know, everybody wants the taste, texture, and value of traditional pasta, but without the, you know, with the better for you aspect. And thanks to lupini being, we're able to do both. And then other things we noticed was that like. Gluten free sort of got tied up in better for you pasta, but actually when we looked at the category and the data and consumer surveys gluten free was way down the list and as like number seven like 13 or 14 percent of pasta shoppers we found were looking for gluten free, but you know, 70 percent cared about taste, 50 percent cared about texture.

and so it was almost like a. the answer to the guilt that people were saddled with in pasta was not actually giving consumers what they want. And we're seeing now that it's not just Brami, like there's this move towards towards just making authentic pasta or, you know, wheat pasta better for you.

But we're the, we're the only ones that I'm aware of that are [00:16:00] doing it with like. Two simple ingredients that an Italian grandmother would recognize and approve of. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, yeah, I love that. And, you know, on the gluten free movement, I always say there are two parts of that movement. There are people who were newly aware of having celiac or sensitivity to gluten.

Which were like they're in strong, but the smaller percentage. And then there's the other group, which is much larger, who I believe we're really using gluten free as a corollary to low carb. And that's essentially, you know, something that's always been in the background of diet movements of having low carbs.

So you're right. It wasn't about specifically being gluten free. It's about how can I get other macros so I can feel good about eating my pasta instead of feeling guilty about it. 

Aaron Gatti: Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. I don't know how much time you want to spend on that, but you know, To some degree, people who think they're intolerant to gluten are actually intolerant to wheat, just like the other aspects of wheat. But, you know, including glyphosate, which it turns out is not just a [00:17:00] wheat problem but it was just , most closely associated with wheat. And so that was part of the reason why sort of gluten free And gluten intolerance and sort of got lumped together and,, in some cases, if that's true, then, you know, going gluten free, you know, is a logical choice with pasta is a little bit of a unique situation because, you know, with it, with Italian pasta, they don't have a glyphosate problem And actually Durham wheat is incredibly nutrient dense.

And so you're replacing. Like a nutrient dense flower with some of these alt flowers that may be gluten free, but are not very nutrient dense. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think there's still a lot of research that needs to be done or really studied to for people to understand the nuances. There's a lot there.

I'm curious to know, right? You've been, you were launching and running the beans business for. What six, seven years before you launched the pasta business. So like piece of the cake, right? [00:18:00] You've launched your product before. Is the second one just as easy or 

just as hard? 

Aaron Gatti: I mean, in some ways, definitely easier.

You know, I set myself up for success better the second time around. But the challenges are always there. And in some cases they're bigger. But yeah, I, as a whole, definitely easier the second time around. 

Jordan Buckner: What were some of those things that you did to set yourself up for success?

Aaron Gatti: Really thinking through our positioning. That's another thing that's very hard to do when you're bootstrapping and in the early days is really do the research ahead. I mean, kind of like what we were talking about before. I didn't necessarily do as much consumer research as maybe you would need to do to get things right in general, , but it's because we had done so much of the consumer research already, like we understood the dynamics of the pasta market and how we could answer consumer needs.

Better than anything that was out there already. And so we just knew what we had to do to deliver. [00:19:00] Consumer satisfaction in this large existing market. And yeah, we just thought it through and did our research and then, yeah. And then I did the product testing. There was certainly some of that too, but we did more research and understood our positioning in the market and set ourselves up for success better. There's less explaining to do on the pasta too. And it would, the pasta is just easier because you don't actually need to know what the lupini bean is with the pasta because you know that it's not, you know, fake. it's a bean. of course, you know, as you get to know the power of the lupini bean, it gets even better, but you can just see, it's just, you know, our pasta is two simple ingredients with.

More protein, more fiber and fewer carbs. People understand that with the beans were literally selling the bean. So you have to know what it is more. 

Jordan Buckner: Yeah, I think that's a big difference. I mean, as you referenced before, by 10 years ago, there's that big movement towards making the hero, the ingredient, I think a single ingredient, the hero of a lot of brands, and we've seen a lot of.

Companies [00:20:00] move away from that, not because the ingredient isn't important, but the consumers are more interested in other parts of the brand and the storytelling and what the ingredient actually does for them, which is, you know, exciting. So my want to ask, what's your biggest piece of advice for founders who are launching, you know, a new category and in CPG based on your experiences?

Aaron Gatti: Well, be prepared for a big hill to climb, first of all, don't underestimate the journey out of the gate as much as possible, prepare yourself, like do the research, even if it's scrappy, test before you go to market as much as possible, take some pressure off of yourself and just see if you can get, okay.

a production run done and then learn and test online first before going to retail. Make sure your margin is strong enough, you understand your supply chain, You work with us, you know, a manufacturing partner that is flexible enough to work [00:21:00] with you out of the gate, but has some room to grow with you.

And yeah, I mean, I'm kind of lean on this message since this has been the theme of this podcast and there's certainly other things to talk about too, but take your time To get it all right first, you know, knowing that you can't take forever and there's only so much you can do sometimes.

But once you're sort of in retail, things are going to get difficult. And so, you know, being prepared and getting it all right first is super important. Like just trying not to get over your skis too quickly. Once, you know and sort of make sure that you're really list looking at the data and you're not sort of over you know, looking at it through rose tinted glasses or not 

Jordan Buckner: looking at it at all because you don't like what you're going to see, or, you know, is true.

Aaron Gatti: Yeah, you really have to be so honest with yourself. Like, don't go further until it, the data is really telling you that you have it. And that's not an easy thing to do in any way, but that would be a big lesson. [00:22:00] And of course you, can fight through it and make it like, you know, where Lupini being velocities were never.

Bad, but they were just never so good that my life was easy or the trajectory was easy. And there were a lot of things we had to work through in the meantime. And it's very hard to do as an early founder, starting something for the first time, but as much as possible try to take some pressure off yourself and get things right.

and then be honest with yourself along the way. Again, And make sure you have the resources you need for each 

Jordan Buckner: step. 

I love that. Aaron, thanks so much for being on today, sharing your journey and some advice and tips for founders. Appreciate you being on. 

Aaron Gatti: Thank you so much.