Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.
Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/654717
Building a Market—Then a Factory By early 2014, Kuo felt ready to launch Serious Cheesy Puffs. "I knew there was a market for it," he says. "Handcrafted cheese puffs that aren't Cheetos? An easy sell." Further setting them apart, he made them half an inch wide and about four inches long, much bigger than conventional cheese puff brands. For packaging, he bought paper bags at retail and hand- stamped the label, then spent a month making sales calls to retailers in the Portland area. Food co-ops and New Seasons, a high-end, local chain of grocery stores, agreed to try them out. He featured the snacks at farmers markets and continued to grow the brand through word-of-mouth. Friends who helped Kuo out with store demos reported how customers would take a cheese puff sample, bite into it, and walk away. Typically, they'd slow down, turn back and say, 'Whoa! What is this?' "People were surprised by how good they were," he says. "Aside from the packaging, our products resonated with people right away because they're easily understood and well known. There was very little innovation in that category before." Building a facility, a 1,000-square-foot "micro cheesy puffery," as Kuo calls it, took the better part of 2014. After expenditures, there was a net loss the first year. By 2015, the company was cash- f low positive, he says, doing almost a quarter-million in revenue. With just five employees, all manufacturing, baking, seasoning, packaging, and shipping is done in-house. Three f lavors of Serious Cheesy Puffs—Sriracha and Cheddar, Asiago Black Pepper, and Blue Cheese Jalapeño—are sold in about 120 stores across the country and 200 to 300 in Japan and China. An international bro- ker handles sales abroad but otherwise Kuo and his team have been distributing the products themselves. That may change soon since Kuo was approached by various interested brokers and distributors at the 2016 Winter Fancy Food Show, his first time exhibiting. More than 800 bags of his Serious Cheesy Puffs were snatched up by attendees, plus he got extra atten- tion as the victor of the show's first Shelf Showdown: A Specialty Food Pitch Competition. He says he mostly winged his speech and was so exhausted from lack of sleep that it was all a blur. Back in Portland, Kuo, now 35, continues to tinker and tweak his cheese puffs. Two introductory f lavors, Maple Bacon and IPA, didn't work out and have been discontinued. "The IPA was fun and grabbed people's attention," he says, "and it was designed to eat along with beer. But it got hoppy and bitter so I got rid of it." The maple-bacon f lavor required dehydrated maple syrup, smoked sea salt, smoked cheese powder, and hand-trimmed, actual bacon. "I had to cut off all the fat since you can't dehydrate it, bake it and turn it into a powder to use like a spice," he says. "It was expensive and time-consuming. One day I said, 'You know what? I don't want to do that anymore.'" Fuller Foods is fast outgrowing its facility and Kuo is looking for investors to help him move to one that's triple or quadruple in size. Bags of cheese puffs don't weigh a lot, he says, but they're bulky, and he needs more physical space to store them. He has a running list of 20 f lavor ideas in his head, including something vegan, but not all are practical or easily accomplished. "I live, breathe, and think cheese puffs all day," he says. He's dreaming up advertising schemes like making branded beer cozies, printing the company logo on one side and on the other a cheese- themed joke, such as 'When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?' Working 60 to 80 hours a week—and sometimes even 100 hours—means he doesn't have the free time to do much else. "I'm still trying to have a life, biking, mountain climbing, seeing friends, dating. But imagine going on a date and being asked, 'So, what do you do for work? 'Uh, I make cheese puffs.'" Actually, Kuo sees cheese puffs as just the start. His goal is to grow Fuller Foods into a larger company with a more extensive product portfolio and sell at major retailers worldwide. He says he never really meant to found a company and would have been fine working for someone else if he'd been offered a job without having to go through the interview process. "If I were to look back, I guess it fits," he says. "If someone's going to start a business like this, it's me." Fuller Foods won the Winter Fancy Food Show's frst Shelf Showdown: A Specialty Food Pitch Competition. PHOTO: SPECIALTY FOOD ASSOCIATION SPRING 2016 91 Julie Besonen is food editor for Paper magazine and a restaurant columnist for nycgo.com.