A few weeks back I got an intriguing email: "I'm a 19 year old studying food science in Melbourne, and I would love the opportunity to work with Bite Society; as an intern, volunteer, or whatever other role you might have. ...I'm vegan and passionate about helping others; people, animals, the environment. I've done some research into your mission and what you guys are doing, and I'd really love to be a part of it" So I met up for coffee with Danika to chat about her background and the project and what might be interesting for her to get...
Earlier this week I dropped off some new prototypes, and while I was waiting in the lobby of her building, I saw this brilliant "worry monster" display... How it works is that you write down your worry on a piece of paper and "feed" it to the monster, rather than letting it eat you up keeping it to yourself. Got me thinking about all the stress of running a small business, and all the worries that come up. There are tons, especially in the early days when you're struggling to find a product-market fit, and make things work with tough time...
Mixed feelings reading this article about a company (Thank You) I've admired as a great example as a "doing good" company..On one hand, they've managed to raise millions over the years for charity, which is very impressive and has done a large amount of good in the world (and also influenced many people with their message)But on the other hand, spending less than half their profit on charity last year (meant to be 100%), large expenses on travel & entertainment, high office and salary costs (including not disclosing executive pay) despite being positioned as an open organization was a bit of...
So lately we've started first few outreach to different media, in an attempt to try to get the Bite Society name and mission known. We figure getting covered will not only help with attracting interest from potential partners (especially looking for international distributors) but as importantly, start to get our learnings and story out to the industry and hoepfully to reach other vegan founders / to be. Which is kind of the bigger goal of the project. So was very happy to see this great article published by Food Navigator Asia, one of the learning news and analysis sites in...
Over the last few months we've helped with advice to several founders for their vegan startups, as well as donating stock to various non profits & mission organizations. So thought it would be a good time to add a dedicated webpage to explain the ways we can help:https://bitesociety.com/pages/helping-each-other This is actually the real goal of the BITE project in the long term, so feels great to get it up and running, and build it out as we learn and grow 🌱 ps - if you're thinking of your own vegan project and we can support with advice in any way, do...
Dropped off some donated choc bloks to Emma from the Animal Liberation Victoria team this morning 🌱They'll be including them in their goodie bag for their big Vegala - Exclusively Vegan Cocktail Party, which is shaping up to be an amazing event... If you're in Melbourne on Oct 26th, want to support a great cause and have a brilliant night grab your tickets hereLovely to meet Emma, Noah, Eric from the team, who get a lot done with very little... got to love that spirit!It's interesting about how we think about donations to non profits and mission aligned charities. On...
So now the flavor test is complete, in parallel to locking things down with the copacker (checking ingredients, verifying pricing etc) we need to get a new SKU design ASAP.
Decided in the interests of time and consistency to keep the current layout and elements, and mostly use colors and text changes to try to convey the different flavor (plus a little graphical flourish with jumbo's hair)We've now put it out for comment to our community... we'll see what potential changes may come up soon!
Results are in.... aaaand we have a winner! To recap, we compared 3 new flavors (strawberry, peanut butter and salted caramel) vs the original, in anonymous "self serve" written poll. Not exactly a fair test as the original is production quality (better finish and texture) vs much rougher prototypes, but still accurate way to compare the 3 flavors. Anyway enough small talk... ....the winner is... SALTED CARAMEL ! 😍 Even being a prototype it slightly beat out the production original, with strawberry coming in next then peanut butter. Have to admit it was a huge relief, had been worried that we...
In this coming batch, we're planning to include our first bulk stock for balls and bloks, so we can supply to food service and bulk shops...Today I took a look at the first test from the copacker for our bloks. Originally there were only going to be 4 bloks per bulk pack, but that didn't seem to make much sense in terms of reducing packaging...Asked why so low and the copacker was worried about the chocolate rubbing / marking in transit but we agreed that we would try out a larger 1kg amount with a lot more bloks and multiple...
Yesterday the new flavoured prototypes of our choc balls arrived for testing!We have a strawberry, peanut butter and salted caramel flavor to get "blind" feedback on, which I'm trying to get done by the weekend. This has come together really quickly triggered by a series of events...- our first batch of balls are running out- so we need to lock in next production asap (long leadtimes)- so it's the only window to introduce new flavors (as we do large runs to keep costs down, we can't do small batches)- but first we need to test themAm as excited as I...
