Jordan Buckner (00:00)
My guest today is Smári, who is the founder of Norse Code. And it's a really great protein brand, which I'm excited to talk through today. But before this, Smári spent more than a decade building Smári Organics, which is an Icelandic style yogurt brand that reached national distribution in retailers like Whole Foods and more. Then COVID hit and the business unfortunately didn't survive, which we'll hear more about.

⁓ After more than 10 years of building that company, Smári found himself starting over but not starting from scratch because he was able to learn from all of those mistakes, wins, and heart lessons along the way. So I'm excited to talk with him about everything that he's learned and how he's building his business differently. Smári, welcome to the show.

Smári Ásmundsson (00:41)
Thank you much Jordan. I'm super excited to be here. Big fan of your show and then what you're doing and excited to dig in.

Jordan Buckner (00:47)
So as we're starting, give a little bit of an overview of what Norse code is today, the product to get started.

Smári Ásmundsson (00:54)
Absolutely. So North Code is a plant protein powder. We have two skews to date. We have chocolate and vanilla. Protein powder is a crowded space, but we have found a spot in the category where nobody is playing. We are going for relief buyers.

meaning that buyers that have given up on the category are about to give up the category. The best analogy is PCs versus Apple. Apple is a premium product that just works. so people that were given up on PCs, they don't ask about the price of an Apple, they just buy it and they stay as consumers for a very, very long time.

And that's what we have. We have a product that we have our own provider, a technology called Smooth Blend, so it mixes incredibly easily. We have prebiotic fibers, we have, you know, gut health is an asset of ours. So this is a functional product that tastes indulgent. The chocolate tastes like, you know, the powdered chocolate milk from my youth, Nesquik, back home in Iceland. The vanilla tastes like Haggans, you know, vanilla ice cream.

Jordan Buckner (01:58)
Absolutely love that. So, Smári, I'm really curious because you moved to the US from Iceland when you were 20 to go to college. You stayed, spent 15 years as an advertising photographer, and then decided to start a food company selling Icelandic-style yogurt. Take me back to that decision and what led you into the CPG food world.

Smári Ásmundsson (02:19)
Absolutely. So I was, uh, you know, I an advertising photographer, uh, I was living in Boston at the time doing high-end advertising work. My pictures were in like, whoa, crawling stone magazines like that. Billboards Nationwide 2008 I moved to Petaluma, is where I'm living now, 2009. It became a dad.

And I very quickly realized that I'm not even going to know my kid's name if I continue with the same career. I'm traveling two, three, four weeks out of the time. And I want to try to be a decent dad, you be a good dad. I was also becoming more and more passionate about food. Chobani was a rocket ship at the time and with a Greek yogurt. And I always thought I standing yogurt was even better than Greek yogurt. It's, it's

It's strained differently, so it's creamier, it's lower in sugar and it's higher in protein. And so I decided to kind of do a 180 with my life and start a food company.

Jordan Buckner (03:10)
So you did it because you wanted to spend more time, but as we know, food is also a very challenging business to get into and running it day to day. so tell me about some of the biggest challenges and also the successes of bringing an Icelandic yogurt brand to the market.

Smári Ásmundsson (03:27)
So I think for me personally, I had no experience in manufacturing food and in selling food. Like I have a branding and then marketing has always been kind of a, call it a hobby and it's becoming more of a, more than a hobby right now. So I talked to everybody that I could. Google was my best friend at the time. You you didn't have AI back then. So was kind of a different world, but it was just kind of like, I had no idea what needed to be done. And so I just made sure every day that I took one step forward.

and you know just kind of got closer and closer to it. I got connected with the right people. Whole Foods Nationwide was our first customer and so we you know grew quite fast in the beginning.

Jordan Buckner (04:07)
That's a really wild journey from doing that, like going from just creating the product to going to Whole Foods. What was that like? Were you ready for it? Did you have stumbling blocks and challenges that you were growing with them?

Smári Ásmundsson (04:19)
Yes, we were ready for it for sure, but yes, there were all kinds of stumbling blocks and challenges. This is inherently difficult and any overnight success that you see, there are at least 10 years in the making, right? And people don't really talk about the challenges, but inherently this is an incredibly challenging environment too.

to run a business or to create a business. then we had every challenge you could think of for sure.

Jordan Buckner (04:52)
So take me back to me around 2019, you were many years into growing the business. After that point of having nine, 10 years for the business, did you feel like you had a pretty good track record? Like you knew the path to grow, the business was doing well. What was that kind of year like, kind of just before COVID happened?

Smári Ásmundsson (05:11)
So 2019 actually, it had become apparent that being organic with the yogurt was our Achilles heel. Martins were incredibly tight. Retailers were dropping organic products to bring conventional product on space. And so we had to face a decision to either launch a conventional yogurt or go into something else. And we decided to launch a high protein coffee product.

that we launched in summer of 2019. And so we decided to get out of the yogurt business, launch a coffee product that was not organic, by the way. So better margins, better price point. We did really, really well second half of 2019. 2020, we bring on Nationwide Distribution, Nationwide Brokers, and we're starting to really scale this up fast.

March 2020, COVID hits, sales went down 95%. And so we never recovered from that. And so we actually bumped on the business responsibly over the next couple of years after that. So bad timing.

Jordan Buckner (06:12)
Yeah, you know, I hear you because with my energy bar company, T-Square, as I was running, I felt like we were just hitting our stride at the beginning of 2020. We actually pivoted away from retail into food service, selling our energy bars, and primarily to corporate offices. And we were getting accounts where we were actually shipping pallets of energy bars to Washington State, to Silicon Valley, getting our bars into offices.

and then COVID hit, right? And the entire business just went away overnight with no semblance of when people might even be coming back to the office. So, I know kind of what I went through going through something similar at that time. For you, what was that experience like personally having to, you grew the business, you knew there were probably some challenges for the actual product mix, but you're pivoting and then COVID hits kind of blocking all that momentum. What was that like going through?

Smári Ásmundsson (07:02)
It was, you know, for sure it was devastating. But it was also, there was clarity, like the decline was so massive and...

There was no question like, I keep going with this, you know, because of the kind of exterior circumstances. So the only thing to do was, you know, to move forward and then figure out, how do I regroup and then how do I take everything that I've learned, you know, from this? And once we're out of this COVID environment, we're back to normal. How do I restart was kind of the only option.

Jordan Buckner (07:39)
You know, I think that's, I feel it's a good clarity moment, I think, for a lot of companies to realize, like, this is a very unfortunate but natural reset point to decide what's my conviction, do I continue going, can I continue going, or is it a chance to pivot and change into something else? I mean, as, as,

detrimental as it was to my business, T-Squares as well, it created the opportunity to start food bevy and what I'm doing now, which I absolutely love. you know, from that, definitely comes rebirth and you've gone through a similar experience in building Norse code from the work that you did. tell me with Norse code, what did you learn from your kind of first experience in the CPG brand that let you the building Norse code differently and what are some of those key decisions or the key ways of running the

business that are different from your yogurt brand.

Smári Ásmundsson (08:27)
Absolutely. So the yogurt, we started working on that in probably fall 2011. We launched in January 2013. We launched nationwide, brokers, distributors nationwide. This company, ⁓ I've been working on this for four years this May. It took two years just to develop the product and took a little bit of a time figuring out exactly what the product would be.

And then we launched the product and we're bootstrapped. And it's essentially me. ⁓ I have a guy who is a certified food scientist. He's in charge of formulation. Together we manufacture the product. So we self-manufacture. We control everything. We took two years selling at events like marathons, triathlons.

where we'd give people samples, we'd see the reaction as they tried the product. We talked to them about what works, what isn't working and make changes on our messaging and the product and just making sure we had solid product market fit. The of the biggest differences are yogurt is refrigerated, this is ambient. So much, easier. Yogurt has a 60, the shelf life is made to order. Our shelf life is much, longer for this.

⁓ yogurt is in plastic cups, like they're fragile. These are pouches that you can put in any very easy to ship, it's a much, higher value. Martins are significantly better for this product and for the yogurt. And so there's a lot of time spending, how do I design this business to maximize the chance of this being, not just surviving, but becoming a significant.

business and it's a crowded category but we found a spot that we think we can ⁓ make our room so to speak in there.

Jordan Buckner (10:10)
I mean, I love that because in some ways, right, like this product is almost the complete opposite of the yogurt business, but it's still based in your Icelandic heritage as well. And so it still comes from that same values point, just a different way of manifesting. And I think you're so smart in how you're thinking about designing the business, not just the product itself, because I found that a lot of people get into this space and you're like, oh, Chobani is big, like let's bring the

Atlantic form of yogurt without understanding how the industry works, the business model and all the decisions that come with it and what kind of business that means you have to have. Right? Because if you're selling a yogurt, you have to be a high volume, large business across many doors in order to get to a sustainable revenue figure. Versus if you're selling the protein powder, you can make a couple of bags, small, small scale sell those online.

direct to consumer and get to a point where you can become sustainable relatively quickly because the fixed costs are a lot lower for that business. And so I think that's one thing I always advise anyone getting into space to really take a look at is what's the business model that you're going after? are your decisions? What impact is it gonna have on the business model so that you can design the business that's right for you? Not saying that one's better or worse, but if

each of your decisions you make has an impact on the type of business that you're going to run and build.

Smári Ásmundsson (11:39)
Absolutely. And there's no one right way to do this right. mean, you know, there is, there's so many different ways. then, and I think, you know, one of my fears going into business, so to speak, from the creative fields was like, this is going to be boring, but this is so creative because you are creating something out of nothing. And you are every day you're making a decision. Like who are we?

How do we show up for the world? How do we communicate? How do we behave? All of these little decisions compound and make you into something. If you do it smartly, it makes you into a brand that people will hopefully lean towards or lean into.

Jordan Buckner (12:20)
Yeah, and I think it really shows up because I read in one of your posts you shared, your Amazon repeat purchase rate is around 43%, which is incredibly strong. And what do you think is driving that level of customer retention?

Smári Ásmundsson (12:33)
I think it is the best product in the space and it took us two years to develop. Me and Matt, we're both very much Taipei and we're never happy.

And it had been two years and I was like, dude, we've got to get this out here. And then neither of us was sure we had something that was really, really good. We both liked it. So we did a double blind study with 89 people and it was us against Golden Wave, which is the top protein powder on Amazon, and then Organe, which is the top plant protein on Amazon.

And out of every nine people, five preferred Norse coat, two preferred Orgain, two preferred Golden Way. And so we were like, OK, we got a winner. We got to put this out there. so I think it is, number one, it's a product that just works. You don't have to think about it. It's effortless. It's delicious and it makes you feel good. And so it's kind of easy to continue buying it again.

Jordan Buckner (13:26)
I love that. As you think about expansion and distribution channels, what's your thought in terms of how long you'll continue to focus on D to C as your primary growth driver versus expanding into retail? Because with your yogurts, you're in thousands of shelves. And so how are you thinking about that expansion differently in the blend between direct to consumer and retail?

Smári Ásmundsson (13:49)
So direct to consumer is very, very high margin, right? And you can pay within five days versus retail, you get paid less and you get paid much, much lower. Retail is where you're gonna scale. And so kind of as time progresses, D2C will be lesser and lesser as a part of the business, because we're gonna scale this business really in retail. We've been bootstrapped up until now, we just started our first external fundraising round.

And so we're starting to go a little bit into retail now. We have all the products in the pipeline that we're working on, but retail is just the first, or D2C is just the first step for us because we're building a business that is as capital efficient as possible. And so it becomes a matter of balancing scale with capital efficiency in how we think about retail versus D2C.

Jordan Buckner (14:36)
No, I think that makes a lot of sense. And so, as you're doing that, you're starting to scale advertising spend, broader retailers can grow up, you're just gonna build out a team. What infrastructure are you thinking that you'll need in place before you can make all that come to fruition? I know you're looking to raise money right now, so if anyone listening is interested or knows someone is, definitely reach out to Smári, but what kind of infrastructure are you starting to build to get ready for that scale?

Smári Ásmundsson (15:01)
So we are designing this company to be super lean. We'll have, there's gonna be three of us in the beginning and we can scale ⁓ quite a bit, particularly with the use of AI and outside contractors. There's a lot we can do with not a lot of ⁓ overhead. We have our own manufacturing facility that is gonna...

we can fully be there for the next couple of years or so. And then at that point, we can make a decision whether to use co-packers as well or expand on manufacturing facilities. we're in a good place to scale responsibly. The point is not to scale super fast in the beginning. This point is to scale...

little bit slower in the beginning but accelerate as we get more learnings and we see okay this is working we can go a little bit faster and faster.

Jordan Buckner (15:49)
I think that's really exciting. I'm kind of curious in terms of how you see the vision and growth, what's your goal for the company? looking for something that is going to, I think it does have lot of potential, especially being in this protein space, to really take advantage and grow as large as you can and hopefully one day have a larger company maybe buy you out. Are you looking into growing it into a sustainable product?

the little business? Has your outlook changed just in terms of how like what the business can become and how you want to get there?

Smári Ásmundsson (16:21)
No, I think the outlook has stayed consistent. We see this becoming a significant player, not just in the US space, but we'd be interested in expanding outside of the US. So we're definitely designing this to become a major player in the space.

Jordan Buckner (16:39)
I think that's really exciting and definitely has the opportunity to do so. So for founders listening today who are in the early stages of building their CPG brand, what are the lessons that you learned the hard way that you would like to share that might save them years of mistakes? You have to go through it yourself for a lot of these, but any key lessons that now you've taken away from your journey so far?

Smári Ásmundsson (17:01)
I think, you know, a lot of people kind of keep their dreams close to their chest because they think people are going to steal them. I don't think anybody's going to do that because it's so hard. Like talk to everybody, tell everybody what you're trying to do. The more you talk about it.

the more you kind of pounce all into it yourself and you never know who can be able to help you. So I think that's the and you'll need the support as well. So increase your network, tell everybody, you know, this is what I'm working on, this is what I'm trying to do. Can you help? What do you think?

Jordan Buckner (17:36)
I love that, Smári. Thanks so much for being on and sharing your journey of building Smári Organics and Norse code. I think there's so many valuable lessons that founders have. They are listening to this. And if you are interested in knowing anyone who's interested in being part of Smári's vision and you want to get on board, feel free to reach out. We'll put info in the show notes to help build the next phase of the company. Smári, thanks for being on.

Smári Ásmundsson (17:59)
Thanks so much, really appreciate it. Great chat.