Adam Torres and Aron Pobereskin discuss Best Behavior Cereal.
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Show Notes:
Best Behavior Cereal is creating cereal for high performing adults. In this episode, Adam Torres and Aron Pobereskin, Co-Founder of Best Behavior Cereal, explore how Best Behavior Cereal was founded and the delicious flavors they have brought into the marketplace.
About Best Behavior Cereal
Best Behavior is a brand designed by adults, for adults – for lovers of real food, late night snackers, and morning coffee fiends alike. This might be the best cereal you have ever had. Our busy lives can lead us to prioritize work, fun, and family over ourselves, and when we catch a break, convenience is key. That’s why they created Best Behavior with a mission to craft the ultimate convenience foods: the kind that can be savored while delivering on nutrition and freeing us from culinary compromise
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Aaron Pobereskid, and he is the co founder over at Best Behavior Cereal.
Aaron, welcome to the show. Adam, thanks for having me. You know, this is so exciting, and especially for The co founder of a brand that’s only about 3 weeks old. Man, Aaron, well let me tell you something. when I found out I got to talk about Cereal on the show, I’ve done almost 7, 000, I’m over 6, 000 going during 7, 000 episodes, and man, this is the first time I got to talk about Cereal, which I love Cereal, so, man, I’m excited.
I gotta, I gotta ask you, did you think you were gonna be in the Cereal business? Where’d this start? No, I never, I never expected this this started is far, far, far away from a shelf stable food and might even sound paradoxical to you. My career is. As then as a chef I began cooking and and what are now Michelin star restaurant in Chicago when I was 15, 16 years old and I didn’t stop until the pandemic.
So you know, that might seem like an. An odd transition into cereal, but food was in you though, from the beginning, like you were always thinking about flavors and food that actually makes me feel better about the flavors. Cause I haven’t tried this yet. So go continue. Like, if you tell me that that now, I’m like, oh, this actually tastes good too.
Other than the amazing design. Go ahead. Please. You know, you bring up a great segue here to the store behind the brand is that I always think about flavors and food. And, yeah, you can’t help it with with your, you’re like, don’t play if it doesn’t taste right. You’re not putting that on my name. I don’t care if it sells no way.
And you know what? That’s more challenging than you think, because taste is subjective and so arriving at the right flavor profiles, the right balance between sugar, between, you know, premium ingredients, you know, and then how that translates your tongue is has been. A difficult initiative to go forth with, but you know, where, where that started was just focus every single day, 12 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week as a chef.
On crafting amazing experiences for other people. You know, that where I come from. I come from the busy, bustling restaurants of New York, Chicago, L. A. as far as Copenhagen where chefs are dedicated to their craft, where they’re dedicated to the, the notion of taste, taste, taste refine, improve, do better, do better for the guests every single night.
But these chefs, and I’m one of them, go home after a 14, 15, 16 hour shift tired, drained, all their energy went somewhere else during the day, not towards themselves, and getting off the train, as I often would in Brooklyn at 2 o’clock in the morning, I was not going to go home and nurture myself with a meal.
I was too tired. wasn’t energy more likely. It was slice from from artichokes, but seals pizza on 5th Avenue in Brooklyn, or it was a bowl of cereal, sugary, carb, heavy, cereal. Garf down over the sink over the garbage can collapsing into bed and so best behavior didn’t start with. Being on my best behavior, it started with it was really not not prioritizing my own health.
And this is before the advent of and popularity of better for you cereal. So it was sugar and carbs. And when it came around to my career and product development, and the opportunity to build something. Of my own with with my partners, my employer, red bud brand, which is advisory and venture capital studio that that helps entrepreneurs and pre revenue businesses accelerate and grow when it came to that.
We thought, well, I’m not alone as a chef. It’s not just chefs that don’t have time. To take care of themselves my partner is an operating partner of a venture capital firm and he operates as a fractional CEO 3 or 4 different businesses has 3 or 4 different full time jobs. And he’s got part time commitments as advisor as a board member, full time commitments as a dad.
There are so many people who grew up, go throughout their daily lives and their focus is on work. And on family, when they get a chance on fun, what comes last yourself? Are you gonna make time to cook dinner or cook breakfast? Are you gonna make time to go on a run? Are you gonna make time to lift some weight to the gym?
We’re always juggling our priorities and convenience is key. we thought, okay. Cereal just has this amazing opportunity to serve that need for convenience beyond just breakfast with your camera off during a zoom call at noon meetings all day long in the car, you know, on the way to the gym. So you have something in your stomach before you’re lifting weights, you know, for breakfast with kids, you know, getting your day started.
Serial is convenient. Generally, it’s pleasing to consume. We get a lot of research behind it crunching on something relieve stress. But the brands that we have available, and some of them are even, you know you know, leaders in better for you, they’re kind of radicals. They’ll say, you know, better for you means no sugar whatsoever.
It means the lowest net car possible. And the compromise is the eating experience. The textures diminished flavor is not a priority. lot of cereal brands and beyond will pander to you. This is gonna be delicious. This is gonna taste good. We decided right away. We’re not gonna do that on our box. Not verbally.
We’ll put an image on it. Photorealistic image of food that says to you. That message is to you between the line. This will be delicious and we leave it to you to decide, but we wanted more balance. We wanted an eating experience a convenient one without compromise. And then we enter the, you know, the brand new category as we see it.
Of adult, and so this is the conversation we were having when contemplating this brand and founding it. We know cereal is convenient. We know people you know, hold it dear to themselves and it can be a solution for those pinches in your day where you need something to sustain you and you can’t get away.
We know that need exists. We know a need exists for nutrition. Well, how about pleasure to and how about evolution of lifestyle and taste? We look at the serial category. And it’s really a massive decline. A lot of consumers that were acquired. By the post, the general mills, the Kellogg’s of the world, they’re lost when they grow up and they grow out of their childish habits and grow into.
New habits, new interests, education, art, architecture, design, business health. None of those things are aligned with blueberry blast at a splash of milk and a cartoon rabbit on a box. None of them. So we thought, is there room for an adult cereal? Is there a market for it? Our data tells us, yes, our data tells us that all those, you know, serial leaders drop off, they make better choices.
And then later in life, much later in life as parents, they might return to granola, which is a different category altogether. We’re talking about, you know, extruded puffs, crunchy, flavorful stuff. They move might move on to granola. They might move on to you know, oats or other things with different benefits.
Now, in that largely declining category, there is a very, very, very small subset of it. That’s on the rise. And those are the magic spoon 3 wishes Catalina crunches who do a phenomenal job in responding to. The early definition of better for you, you’ll get your fiber, you’ll get your protein, but I don’t think you get the pleasure of the eating experience as well.
And so this is where we, we differentiated a little more and started to define what that product is and what we came up with. It’s best behavior in 3 flavors. talk to me about the flavors in the flavor profile. they look amazing. I was like, yeah, these are definitely adult flavors, but not in a bad way.
Thank you. Well, you know, flavors is tricky to, we want to be approachable to more people than we want to be interesting to them, but we want to speak to adults. That’s the target. And so we looked at what are the most popular, flavor profiles and cereal, while they’re really easy to distinguish walking down the aisle, chocolate or cocoa is a huge one.
We were not going to not do a chocolate syrup. We were not going to not do a fruity cereal. And then the final major category, I would call it pastry or cinnamon. and I think every serial eater you talk to is going to say, going to tell you about their favorite flavor and it’s going to fall into one of those buckets.
So we thought, how do we work with the approachability? And the data and the clear desire expressed by consumers for these profiles, but elevate them and make them just interesting enough to be to be approachable and exciting and not weird. And when we thought about cocoa 1st, and foremost, and I’ve been pushing for this for day 1, it took some convincing for the rest.
I thought, well, what what do we often do? Like, I’m the stuff here. I know. Go ahead. You know, what my parents fed me when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn. Was coffee chip. I don’t know what they actually call it. Remember, but an ice cream and I always thought, okay, this is an adult drink coffee adults like coffee with chocolate.
And when you talk about chocolate, you’re, you’re talking about notes of coffee. We talk about coffee, you’re tasting and pulling out notes of coffee. I think I said that right it was like, What is the trend that’s been on the rise for, like, the past? 10 or 15 years, Americans, Millennials and, Gen X, those are our target markets in urban areas, slightly higher income.
They love their daily coffee. They love going, down the street. I go down to build a mill in my neighborhood of Silver Lake, California every day. And I’m having a cortado or I’m having you know, a dirty chai latte other people are ordering mochas and it dawned on me. Okay. Like, mocha is such a fun, approachable, delicious flavor.
And all it is, is coffee. And chocolate and a little bit of cream. We actually use butter powder for richness. And so that’s our first premium flavors. May I read to you a little blurb we put on the back of the box? Please. Please. Okay. I thought this would be fun. It’s not off the cuff. This is planned.
Mocha latte has an aroma that is all about luxury. This luscious blend of rich, dark chocolate with hints of espresso has a satisfying long lasting crunch that will make you want to come back for more. That’s what we’re talking about and it’s a little bit colorful language, but it’s what it’s meant to convey.
This is sophisticated and it’s approachable the data and we’re always informed by data tells us it should do. Well, the other flavors, they are blueberry buttermilk. That’s our fruit cereal. When we thought about what blueberry tastes like. That was a fun experience because fun exercise, because really, blueberries are kind of nondescript.
They’re and we experienced in a different context. Like, a fresh blueberry might be slightly sweet, slightly acidic, maybe a little graphy doesn’t have tons of aroma, which is an enormous component of flavor. And you learn that as a chef, you learn that when you cook blueberries and you stew them down, they become more floral when you then fill them into a pie crust or a tart shell.
So, Now, there’s a connotation of butter, maybe vanilla, maybe lemon. And so, these, you know, two representations of blueberries that everybody, I think, knows well are blueberry pie or muffin or pancake, cooked, stewed, baked, and then fresh. Well, we put that together for our dream of what blueberry flavor is.
So, starting with the base of gray, dried, fresh blueberries, which lend the blueberry buttermilk cereal a really beautiful. I think periwinkle color, which many people upon 1st observation think is artificial. It’s not. It’s real blueberries. We support that with with a few plant based chemical components in a natural flavor system.
We’re not shy about this. They’re naturally occurring. There’s nothing wrong with them. We use the chemical you find in roses and lavender, and it makes fruits taste phenomenal and gives them. You do the aroma of flowers. We have that component. We use something called trans to hex and all, which is.
Found in the under right stage of fruits that lens freshness and so on blueberry buttermilk on top of the tangy richness of buttermilk and. And the butter powder, you have real blueberries. In a juxtaposed flavor profiles. Cooked stewed, floral, aromatic, sweet, and. Grassy, green, acidic. In one man, you’re making me hungry over here is what you’re doing.
I hope so. I looked at your Instagram as well. And I’m like, man, you’re making me. So, for anybody listening, I don’t care what anybody says. Like, I’ve never heard of a chef talk about cereal like this. I’m like, oh, my gosh. It’s the Michelin star experience of eating cereal. I’m in I sure hope so. I sure hope so.
If you do look on the Instagram, you know, you’ll see that taste is not always so refined, more about fun and pleasure. That’s the focus of of my life now. And it’s what I hope to convey and our team hopes to convey through. Throughout food products, best behavior, starting with cereal, I’m confident we’re going to extend more along the same lines of, you know, concise ingredient panels.
Balance nutrition, but starting with the eating experience, starting with data to prove that there’s a business here. It’s not just we think this is cool on a whim. Let’s start. Let’s start a brand. You know, not that everyone does, but we want it to be really intentional here. That last flavor, by the way.
Cinnamon brioche is our answer to cinnamon toast crunch. It is Ceylon cinnamon, the softer bark of the Ceylon cinnamon tree in Mexico. It’s called Canela. That’s where I fell in love with that type of cinnamon. It’s different than cassia, the hard curly bark, which comes from a different tree. Also true cinnamon, but it’s more of a red hot.
In flavor, and we balance the cinnamon with even more butter and tones of vanilla. And so that that’s the product. That’s the product and where it came from and how we put it together. Just premium ingredients. Great nutrition. By the way, we use real sugar. I want to make that clear. Also, we use a little bit being best behavior is you are the adult you decide what’s good for you.
Your mom’s not with spring in your year anymore. Yeah, mind your manners and eat healthy and have dinner before dessert. We actually encourage you to eat best behavior as a dessert too. Got a little bit of sugar, 6 grams in a serving, but 12 grams of protein, 6 of fiber, you know, those premium ingredients we talked about and each skew, each flavor is kind of riddled with very, very, very fine grain flour salt.
So you might not even consciously recognize it, but you could snack on this like popcorn. In front of the TV. It’s great on top of whipped cream. It enhances sweetness from other, other accompaniments, accoutrements adds texture, it’s really a multi, multi use case cereal. What’s been the response so far?
I know, I know in terms of sales, you’re pretty new getting in there. So that’s not what I mean, but I know, I mean, in terms of like, when you finally got to the end product, it’s in the box, obviously, like you’ve done a ton of testing. And I’m sure all of your friends have tried this. Like what’s been the response?
You know, response has been overwhelmingly positive, but it’s also been mixed positivity comes in different ways. Oh, it’s sweeter than I normally eat, but there’s not too much sugar. Oh, it’s less sweet. I normally eat it, but I can kind of taste a little protein. or the feedback is phenomenal and, we have to decipher that feedback and try to figure out what to do with it when we launched at. Natural products expo West, the biggest trade show nationally, for consumer package goods of which we are 1, we thought we might go through 1500 samples and in 3 days that we had a booth at the end of day 1, we got through 1200.
At the end of 3 days, myself and our team, reckon had personally. Interacted with. to 5000 individuals between 3 of us. Oh, my God. were you a little tired? Maybe just a little when you got on that plane heading back or wherever you’re heading back to. I was always taught as a chef not to complain.
So I won’t use the word tired in a sentence. But had to recover my voice each day. Okay. Give myself a pep talk make sure that make sure that everybody who felt they were everyone was coming up to the booth felt like they were the 1st, 1 being talked to and that’s quite an investment of energy.
And it can be hard to keep up with. I think the team did a great job. I hope I made some good impressions, but we found, you know, a lot of novices walking the floor who loved it. I heckled a lot of them. I think shameless promotion with good intention is the hallmark of an entrepreneur or salesperson.
And if anyone made eye contact, I would scream out something to, like, something to them, like. Hey, you can’t look and not touch it. Come over here. . Come try some cereals. Everyone be like, oh, we had so much eat. I’m like, I’m gonna make you the 1 puff challenge. Come eat 1 puff. The 1 challenge. I love it.
Everybody has room for like, a puff of cereal lot of them, you know, again, people who are just interested in food, but even more so buyers, brokers, retailers. And so you know, we missed what are the national resets. It’s when all the big guys, the whole foods, the targets, put new products on the shelf.
We missed it for June. We’re shooting for January. We’re in talks with all those retailers. Our approach is not direct to consumer. It is available on our website. I’ll talk about it later. We started that for friends and family only. It’s really taken off in a way that. It’s probably not good for our businesses bottom line, but use for, like, you know, introductions.
Yeah, but our approach is retail. We’re meant to be on the shelf again, a database decision coming out of the pandemic. Retails on the rise and direct to consumer is not some of the leaders again, and what we do the magic spoons and 3 wishes started direct to consumer built massive fan bases before they hit the shelf.
And I think that’s the luxury that’s not afforded to us right now. So we’re being intentional about this. We’ll launch in Los Angeles at the 28 Gelson. Locations here and a couple one offs, like farm shop in Brentwood, Santa Monica. And we are in talk with the big guys and I gotta tell you, it’s uncomfortable sometimes because it’s a 3 week old product that I am deeply in love with and I have to have my team talk me off a cliff sometimes because we’ll get some feedback, which is we love the positioning.
We love the brand and the artwork, the flavor names, everything about it, the language to copy the website. We think this will look great on our shelf. The price points good, but then they’ll say the flavor is not quite what we expected and I’ve got to take a deep breath and realize a leader. An entrepreneur has to be able to pivot and.
95 percent of people might say, this is amazing. We love everything about it. But if the 5 percent who don’t are the ones who have the power to put it on the shelf and who really represent the consumer well, then we’ve got to figure out what to do with that. Yeah, so I love it. This is it. It’s a great journey.
I love it. And this is just, I’m smiling ear to ear over here. Cause I can’t wait to go by. I’ll be walking in Gelson’s and I’m like, Oh, there goes Aaron cereal. I’m like, once I see that, man, I’m going to take a big picture. I’m posting that. It’s going to be fun. I’m going to circle back to this interview.
We’re going to do some media around it because this is going to be fun. Cause I, I love it. I mean, I’m just a, I’m a fan of, obviously I’m a fan of entrepreneurship. If you’ve been watching or listening to this show for a long time, you know that, But I love it to see like, this is how innovation happens.
This is how, I mean, if it wasn’t for pioneers like you and the food and CPG and all these other spaces, like, man, who knows what we’d be eating right now? Still, I need you out there making sure that this kind of stuff gets on the shelf so that I’m not like, you know, I’m not eating something I’m not supposed to be, I need to be on my best behavior.
Absolutely. And you mentioned one of my favorite words, which is innovation. Gosh, it is so hard to innovate. You’ve got to have a unique proposition. You’ve also got to convince people who are skeptical that it’s the right one. And you have to change the way you, you look at it and think about it.
Sometimes you gotta bring in other voices, but also defend what makes it special. And it’s just such a big challenge. I think a lot of entrepreneurs deal with who I would encourage just to stick to their beliefs, but to always bring in other voices and make good business decisions that aren’t affected by emotion.
It’s something that I’m struggling with. Sometimes as are we all that’s called being an entrepreneur. It’s okay. Absolutely. There’s a chef who’s, I just want to get this one thing out there because. There’s a chef I admired when I was 15 and started cooking. That’s Ferran Adria at El Bulli in Rosales in Spain, and one of the leaders in global gastronomy and modernized dining, he used to love to say, creativity is never copying.
Yeah. I have that voice in my head every single day. It’s so hard to create something new, but if you can create just one piece of something that’s existing, that is new. And stand by it and push it forward that’s innovation to. that’s what we try to do here and hopefully that’s.
An inspiring quote for someone else and not just a silly thing. I keep in the back of my head. we’re always thinking about creativity is never copying. Amazing. So, and I think that’s a great way to end it. Aaron. So creativity is never copying. That being said, if somebody’s listening to this or watching this, and they want to learn more about about best behavior, they want to follow along.
Follow the journey or heck. I think you said it’s even available on the website right now for a certain amount of time. If they even want to pick up a box and then try it to be introduced to the product. How do people do that? How do they do it? They go to best behavior, cereal. com to the product page.
I highly recommend the variety pack where you get one of each flavor. And if you like one more than the other, you can come back and choose just that. We’re at best behavior, cereal on Instagram. And anyone who wants to get in touch can fill out the form on the website, direct message us my personal contact information on the website.
I feel comfortable enough saying that here. If you reach out the best behavior, the other guy on the end of the phone is gonna be me and on the end of the email is me. And it’s also my co founder, our CEO. A niche who has a wonderful business mind and really really drove our, our data based decision making which is, which is a strategy he’s employed in past businesses.
That that’s gonna help us out here a lot. So, I want to give him the call out because he was able to make it today and he’s a wonderful, wonderful person to, to lead this brand into its early life. That’s what I’m talking about. for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the website and all that good stuff on the, in the in the show notes.
So you can just click on the links and head right on over and speaking to the audience. If this is your first time with Mission Matters we’re all, this is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new entrepreneurs and new stories. So if you haven’t hit the subscribe button yet, highly encouraged.
Get that subscribe. button smashed so you don’t miss any of the upcoming episodes because we got a whole lot more coming up and we don’t want you to miss a thing. And Aaron, again, this has been so much fun. I can’t wait to pick up a box myself when I’m in Gelson’s and it’s on the shelf. So thank you so much.
Adam, thank you. What a pleasure.
