Adam Torres and Amy Zitelman discuss tahini.
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Show Notes:
Soom Foods is introducing dynamic tahini flavors to consumers. In this episode, Adam Torres and Amy Zitelman, Co-Founder & CEO at Soom Foods, explore Soom Foods and Amy’s plans to continue growing the brand.
About Soom Foods
Soom Foods is a sister-owned company that wants to bring the taste and versatility of the best tahini to your kitchen! Soom Tahini is a silky-smooth butter made from sesame seeds. It is commonly used in Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines but is so versatile you can use it to make any dish better!
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 Amy Zitelman, and she’s a co founder and CEO over at Sum Foods.
Amy, welcome to the show. Hi, Adam. Thanks for having me. Welcome. All right. , so good to have you on today. Definitely want to get into Sum Foods and the work that you’re doing here. And I guess , just to get us kicked off let, let’s start with the product. Like, like, how’d you get the idea for this?
Well, my middle sister, Jackie, has lived in Israel since 2008 when we graduated from high school. And her husband has been in the tahini or tahina industry in Israel For at this point, almost 20 years. So back when we got to know him, as I was graduating from college, we recognized how popular tahini, as we call it here in the States, was in Israeli and Middle Eastern markets.
And we embarked on a mission to make tahini more popular in the North American market. Okay, so when I looked at your website, the first thing I thought, like, I’ve been eating, I grew up in I mean, I grew up in Michigan, and right next to Dearborn, which is a large Middle Eastern population, so I grew up with tahini, I grew up eating a lot of Middle Eastern food, a lot of, I love it, I love it all.
I did not know there were things like chocolate spreads or snack bites. Did you invent that? Or is that an Israel? I’ve been to Israel once. But I don’t remember seeing like snack bites like that made. I, maybe I just didn’t see them, but I’m looking at tahini cherry chocolate. Did you invent that? Or is that like a thing worldwide?
And I just didn’t know. We did invent that, but it’s based off of very traditional flavor combinations that are Israeli and Middle Eastern friends and family introduced to us, which is the combination of dates and tahini, both ancient ingredients that have a lot of health benefits and are also very delicious.
So we, inspired by tahini, have been on , a journey also innovating tahini in order to present it as a more palatable and familiar Product for the American market. Since tahini itself as an ingredient, unlike you close to Dearborn or other people, mostly Americans with like hippie parents being familiar with tahini.
You know, usually when I embark on a conversation, my first question to somebody is, are you familiar with tahini? And a lot of people say no. So going back to your first question about the product itself, or anybody listening that is not familiar with tahini, it is an ingredient made from 100 percent roasted and ground sesame seeds.
It’s thicker than olive oil and thinner than peanut butter, but can be used in both savory and sweet recipes. And it’s delicious. I’ll throw that. I’ll add that to it. I’ll even one up you on that. It’s delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Those are the real pillars of, , tahini that inspire us to push on with our entrepreneurial journey.
And the chocolate spread. I’m like, what? I didn’t even know you could do with tahini. What’s going on with this? This looks amazing. It looks delicious. Have you tried halva before? I don’t think so, no. I don’t, Halva is a, it’s a popular Middle Eastern confection, also very popular in Turkey, in Lebanon, made with tahini and lots of sugar.
It’s almost like fudge, the fudge you’ll get at the shore or at the beach, but with a sesame base and really interesting and delicious flavor profile. So our chocolate spread is kind of a nod to spreadable halva, but really what inspired it was the fact that as consumers, we saw the interest in Nutella, but it didn’t align with the type of food that we wanted to eat.
You know, the first few ingredients of Nutella are palm oil and vegetable oil and sugar. And we wanted to provide a chocolate spread that would bring value, not just to our lives, but to who we know is our consumers lives. And so we wanted to make our version of Nutella with tahini as the base. The base, as opposed to hazelnuts.
Hmm. That, makes a lot of sense. And , I can see that completely now that you bring up that comparison , talk to me about the ingredients, cause you did mention the ingredients and like how you wanted to be aligned, like what went into the creation of this product and like packaging and otherwise, did you have, I know you mentioned that you had family , that were kind of , in this business or niche, did you have like a CPG or food background as well, or.
We have a food background, and my family also has a robust entrepreneurial background. So I think it kind of runs in the blood. My grandfather on my father’s side owned a restaurant in Washington, D. C., and my grandfather on my mother’s side was a butcher here in the Philadelphia area. So, you know, we have always been entrepreneurial in food, but we never had a product a packaged product.
How excited are they? How excited and cool is this for them to be like, wait a minute, you’re putting tahini? This looks like a peanut butter thing. Like what? How? They must be so proud. That’s amazing. How do they? We always laugh that if either of our grandparents, our grandfathers were still living, how excited they would be.
And also very confused because it was probably an ingredient that they were less familiar with. It’s the jiffy of the tahini, right? Like the Middle East. Exactly, exactly. I mean, tahini is as ubiquitous as peanut butter or ketchup in the American market. And it is absolutely it is an incredibly versatile ingredient, but it’s an ingredient in the US market, the North American market that needs a lot of consumer education.
So going back to that ideation for the chocolate spread, we know tahini is a versatile ingredient. We see restaurants, a large portion of our revenue and our strategy comes from selling tahini to restaurants, are using it to make cookies and brownies and,, a variety of sweet flavors. And so how do we portray that to a U.
S. consumers? We wanted to develop sweet products. So not only does it give us a new channel for acquiring customers that might not be ready to buy tahini yet, but it also contributes to the consumer education of tahini’s versatility. So it’s been a win win for a variety of reasons. Yeah, it’s great. , and talk a little bit, just maybe about, first off, I love, I love the website and for everybody that’s listening to this, so it’s soomfoods.
com. That’s S O O M foods. com. And there’s all kinds of recipes on here. Appetizers, sauces, dips, breakfast, lunch, dinner, desserts, snacks. I mean, this is pretty robust, like talk a little bit. Well, , what went into this, like thinking about , what kind of dishes and what kind of flavors that you wanted to present so that to start introducing this to the American market and just broader market, like what went into this?
Well, it took years, almost over a decade, you know, of of working with tahini and seeing what resonates with consumers, you know, types of recipes that they tend to really love. But from the beginning, we recognize that there were other culinary professionals, either restaurant chefs or bloggers and influencers that could contribute to our, our, Mission of consumer education that it didn’t need to reside solely on ourselves.
My sisters and I, or our small team to develop these recipes. So from a very early stage, we reached out to food bloggers and food influencers at this point, since that platform has changed so dramatically and they were developing recipes that they were inspired by or new resonated with their followers.
So a lot of the recipes that you see in our website have been made in partnership. With other food professionals and photographed by professional food photographers because like our position in the tahini market, we are not the sole experts on tahini, nor did we invent or discover tahini, right? We really see ourselves as a link in this global kind of shared.
Share graciousness of a great ingredient. So we love to highlight other people and partner with other people to help develop these recipes. And what we hope it does is become a platform that is easily searchable. Right? If you have tahini at home, and you’re thinking of, I need something for breakfast, but that helps you come up breakfast ideas, or maybe you’re at home and you see that you have chicken and broccoli and tahini in the pantry, , what are some recipes that you can use those those ingredients in to make cooking a little easier and more pleasant.
Or if you want a cocktail and you see this delicious chocolate coffee cocktail, what? Like, I didn’t even know that, like, this is my mind is blown. I thought I knew something about tahini and then I went every, that’s why I like podcasting right here, Amy. That’s amazing. And that’s really what keeps us going.
And so inspired in the very challenging entrepreneurial journey is how inspiring and how motivating the ingredient is itself. You know, once you have tahini and understand how you can use it, when you think about it as a substitute for fat. Like that baseline of olive oil to peanut butter. Have you put peanut butter in a smoothie before?
Have you put olive oil on your vegetables before? You know, that is where it really shows the range of tahini as an ingredient. I love it. a, it’s a great story. , one that I’m happy to bring my audience. , so talk to me , about the rollout and the plan to continue to
, spread the word about Zoom.
Some foods about, yeah, of course, the tahini, the various products you have that are tahini like talk about the rollout and what’s next for the company. Yeah, well, consumer sales is actually a fraction of our business, a very large percentage over 50 percent of our business still comes from selling Tahini to restaurants, small manufacturers and small food chains across the country.
And that has been really instrumental, not only in the foundation of our business and our revenue and our growth, but also in the credibility of our brand and that contribution to the consumer education, right? If you. Go into a restaurant, and you see a tahini chocolate chip cookie on the menu. Hopefully you have that same experience that you just had on our website, like, Wow, tahini and a cookie?
I never thought of that before. And then you see tahini on a blog or something of the likes. And so the food service side of our business has been really instrumental. And helping us to grow the category and acquire customers. But alongside of that, we all know, and probably picture a food business being in every grocery store across the country.
I know that that was my sisters in my dream when we started the company, but going into retail is really challenging. So early on, we had our tahini available on Amazon. Because of the fact that we had national distribution and representation of soon to Haney from restaurants. So if somebody mentioned us in an article, like in food and wine, or bone out the seed, very graciously chefs would mention that they’re using soon to Haney customers all across the country could buy the and it’s hard to get people to check out on your website, but on Amazon, that’s been really instrumental for us.
And lastly, when coven hit and consumer adoption of new ingredients. Really accelerated our growth into homes, both online and in the grocery stores that we were in. That’s when we knew it was time to invest into the brand, into the CPG, the consumer side of the business in order to best position us for our growth into retail.
So since 2021 or so, we rebranded, we brought on the right team members, and now we’ve been growing into these retail channels. We’ll be finishing up the year in almost 4, 000 doors across the country, which has been a great compliment in terms of, you know, accomplishing our overall mission. That’s amazing.
And , what shelf space, like what aisle is this in? So people , can check it out. And by the way, so they can check it out, so they can look and so that they can tell their local grocer, why don’t they have it if they’re looking. Also, also very good point. And one that I appreciate tremendously. In the natural channel, we’re primarily in the nut butter section.
My sisters and I worked really hard to get tahini out of the international aisle and into the nut butter section, because we saw it as a great substitute for peanut butters, almond butters, cashew butters, and the like. However, we’ve been slowly reaching more and more conventional stores like Publix. And it really depends where those stores merchandise tahini.
So. You know, putting our ego aside, and what our original intention was, was to make tahini more like peanut butter. We also recognize that the grocery stores understand their consumers best. So, in a store like Publix, for instance, we are in that international aisle, in the kosher section. And that’s been a tremendous learning opportunity as well.
So, the best thing to do is to ask your local clerk or grocery store manager where they sell the tahini. Hopefully, Zoom will be in that set. And we’ve come a long way, because back when I started Zoom 12 years ago, and I would ask a store clerk, you know, where do you sell your tahini? They had no idea what tahini was.
What are you talking about? What is that? We don’t sell that at the store. Right. I could see that. You’ve got it. You’ve got it. Oh, that’s amazing. You’re right. I would be looking. That’s what I was thinking of. I’m like, oh, I want to go check it out. See where I could find it. So I got to look at either the tahini section or I got to go to the peanut butter section.
One of those two and check it out and find it. So this is great. And then I also see like just looking through this year, I feel like there’s a community component to this as well. Like I see you have shirts, a cookbook a lot of other things that you’re doing just to reinforce the brand and the community component of this overall.
Like,, can you speak on that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it’s always been important for us to stay connected to our customers because we recognize that there was an accomplishment in having body, having somebody buy tahini once, but it was a true accomplishment to have somebody buy it again. , anybody try something 1, but the question is whether they’ll use up that jar.
And then buy it. Oh, that’s so true. Yeah, that’s so true. Really work to, you know, build community primarily on Facebook, because that is where our consumers mostly are, especially for this tahini product. But we’ve also been active on Instagram and other social media sites for a while, and we really appreciate leaning into and supporting those partners I was talking about, whether it’s the chefs at restaurants.
Restaurants or the bloggers. You know, we’ve been working with many of these people now for over a decade, and it’s that personal relationship that I think differentiates us because tahini at the end of the day is a commodity, but we all recognize that there are brands there that take commodities into more of a personal sphere as a brand.
Hmm. , who made the cookbook? It looks delicious. . Thank you. I wrote that cookbook with a, did you? Okay. Cookbook author. That’s amazing. Go ahead. A local cookbook author from the Philly community engaged with us one day and asked, are you interested in writing a cookbook? And we said, no, we’re not chefs and we’re not cookbook authors.
And like all of our approach, you know, when we find somebody that can ask us, you know, you always like to start with a big no, like, no, no, always, no, it makes life a lot easier. You want free money? No. What? What? Yeah, I just said no. Go ahead. I can’t help it. It took us eight years to even sell anything besides really tahini.
I mean, the chocolate has been there, but our like real core is really on one thing. And I think when you’re able to say no, the yeses are so much more impactful. And that is exactly what happened with the cookbook. We said no, and we didn’t say yes until we knew it was right. We wrote a great cookbook, similar to the style of the website with tahini recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert.
And it’s been a tremendous asset for the company, for the brand and for our commitment to consumer education. I’d love to send you one actually. Yeah yeah, definitely. I’m in on that for sure. , My friends know that the one thing that I do have ego on is my cooking and that’s because it’s not that good.
So, you know. They don’t have the heart to tell me that I’m not as good as I think I am, but if they listen to this, I know. It’s okay. Keep on lying to me. It’s okay. Well, tahini is that special ingredient that really makes everything better. Oh! To give you a new tool in your arsenal, . Oh man. That sounds amazing.
And I, I, , you did mention something that I, I just wanna like pull back out of your last comments and that is, you, you had the first product for eight years and, and made sure that that was perfected. Did I hear that correctly? ’cause that’s big, like a lot. Is that correct? That’s correct. We had a little bit of a detour with a line of products.
They were refrigerated tahini dips that were way too early and way too expensive to successfully scale. And that distracted us for about 10 months in 2015. So it was a really hard lesson for us. And to learn, we wasted a lot of time and a lot of capital, but it also gave us that great realization that allowed us to say no to everything else and say, we have enough to do with just tahini.
Let’s focus on that and see where it can get us. Yeah, that’s great. I and I just bring , that little piece out. Cause I knew there was a back story. I just had a feeling there was, I should say. And for like many of the entrepreneurs that are listening to this big entrepreneurial audience, and it can be it can be tough sometimes for them to, , stay focused, stay on that, on that one thing, like you said, and and to perfect that before adding maybe some additional things.
So , I just love bringing that out because I’m like, can I, can we become good at one thing first? Right. Can we get really good at one? And before we start, you know, spreading ourselves. We’re not thin necessarily, but you know, spreading ourselves out. I’m just trying to make a tahini pun, but it’s not coming to me, Amy.
I’m trying real hard over here. You’re doing an awesome job. I’m trying real hard on the tahini spread. Spread ourselves thin, nothing. Okay. It’s fine.
Well, I’m taking what you’re laying down. I think we’ll all get it. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Well, Amy, I just have to say this has been so much fun having you on the show today, getting to know more about Soom Foods, about the platform, about these just everything that you’re doing here.
It’s great. I’m just so excited. And I can speak for also my grandparents as well. If they were around, they would get a kick out of this. They’d be like, what? Tahinu’s looks like my I think it’s amazing. I know your family’s got to be I’m so proud. And what’s fun is I can see like just packaging, everything else, the way that you’re going about this.
It’s going to be exciting. One day I’m going to be going through the aisle and I’m going to be like, what? Look at this. And it’s, it can be a household thing here, just like anything else. And it starts somewhere. And in my opinion, at least for myself, it started with Zoom and Zoom Foods and me having this realization.
So thank you for again, coming on the show. If somebody wants to learn more, follow the SumFood journey, whether it’s on social media, website, otherwise, how do they do that? We’re pretty buttoned up. We are SumFoods across all channels, whether that’s Instagram, Facebook, our website, SumFoods. com. Thanks for highlighting that before.
LinkedIn, Pinterest, if you have any tahini at home and have any questions on how to use it. You will find some answers through any channel you’re most comfortable with. Amazing. And for the audience, just so you know we’ll put all the links and all that good stuff in the show notes per usual. So you can just click on the links and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters or engaging in an episode, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs, executives, and really having them share their journey. Their mission, the reason behind why they do what they do, like what gets them fired up in the morning and motivated to go out there and make it happen.
If that sounds interesting or fun or exciting to you, we welcome you. Hit that subscribe button. We have many more mission based individuals coming up the line. We don’t want you to miss a thing. This is a daily show. So each and every day, We are releasing new content for you. So again, hit that subscribe button.
So you get the notifications and Amy, again, thank you so much for coming to the show. It’s been so much fun having you on. Appreciate it. Thank you, Adam.