Podcast
Episodio 5: Cecina de setas de Pan
Podcast
Episodio 5: Cecina de setas de Pan
La tendencia de los alimentos naturales no se detiene, así que hoy nos complace escuchar al fundador de Pan's Mushroom Jerky reflexionar sobre cómo ampliar y mejorar su negocio.
Presentadores
Hoy me acompaña Michael Pan, de Portland, Oregón. Es el creador de Pan's Mushroom Jerky, un snack vegetal alternativo a las cecinas de carne tradicionales. Desde la adopción de un enfoque muy novedoso para el desarrollo de productos, hasta el cultivo de sabores y texturas deseados, Michael ha sido capaz de escalar su producción y mejorar las mediciones de su proceso de una manera fascinante. Escuchemos lo que tiene que decir en Water In Food
Transcripción
Zachary Cartwright (00:00):
I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is Water In Food.
Michael Pan (00:03):
You know, our challenge is how to do that in the right way with the funding we have. And we felt good about our process, but we didn't feel 100% really secure about everything we were doing. We want to make sure we deliver consistency to people, the knowledge of the isotherm and really integrating our water activity meter into our process. It just gave us so much more confidence in what we were delivering to the customers.
Zachary Cartwright (00:26):
Water has been called the luck of the planet by Daniel Boorstin, and its impact and significance are evident everywhere in the foods that we eat every year, billions of dollars are spent by food manufacturers to move water in and out of food products. As a food scientist, I am on a mission to understand how this can be done better. Today, I'm joined by Michael Pan in Portland, Oregon. He is the creator of Pan's Mushroom Jerky, a plant-based alternative snack to traditional meat jerkies. From taking a very novel approach for product development, to cultivating desired tastes and textures, Michael has been able to scale his production and improve his process measurements in a fascinating way. Let's hear what he has to say on water in food.
Zachary Cartwright (01:09):
Hi, Michael, how are you doing good?
Michael Pan (01:10):
Good, thanks, how are you?
Zachary Cartwright (01:12):
I'm great. Thank you for joining us. I'm really excited to talk about your product. This is one of my favorite products. It's a great snack food. So let's jump straight into it. You and your company is known for its mushroom jerky. Tell me about that and where this idea came from.
Michael Pan (01:29):
Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, thanks for having me on. It really means a lot. As a startup and emerging company, it's fantastic to be able to have an opportunity to talk about where we started and how we've gotten here. So thank you for that. And yeah, I mean basically, some context about myself. So my mom is actually, she's from Peru, and my dad's born and raised in a small fishing village in Malaysia. And so when he was 14, he ended up immigrating to the US and worked as... Well, he didn't know any English and managed to work his way all the way through to college. And I'm actually born and raised in Mississippi. And I know I certainly sound like it, but yeah, and while I absolutely loved growing up in Mississippi, I always felt disconnected from my family heritage.
Michael Pan (02:21):
And so I loved visiting extended family, and just learning as much as I could about my culture. And during one of these visits to Malaysia, there was a bowl of food on the table. I reached in to try it, I actually think it was pork, I thought it was pork. And I was like, oh, this is a really good, what is this? But I was really confused because my cousin or my family they're vegetarian Buddhists, so it didn't make sense. And I quickly learned that what I was eating was a mushroom. And so I found out that as he'd been making this snack for himself, for his family, for friends, and selling it locally and as vegetarians, they had trouble finding foods that not only really tasted good, but also finding foods that had a really satisfying textures. And they found the mushrooms were satisfying and also very healthy.
Michael Pan (03:07):
And so this opened my eyes to this amazing culture that use innovative foods and ingredients to mimic the taste and texture of meat. And so when I found that out, I fell in love with the products, I fell in love with history. And yeah, at that point I just knew our family had the snack that had to be shared with other people in the rest of the world. And that's when I actually decided to launch Pan's Mushroom Jerky back in 2008, actually believe it or not. But yeah, that's how we started.
Zachary Cartwright (03:34):
And from what I've heard online and from all my colleagues, we love this product. Tell me a little bit about that R&D process and what it really took to nail those flavors and get the texture that you want.
Michael Pan (03:46):
Yeah, it's funny. I actually don't have a food background at all. My background is actually in engineering. So luckily, from some of that experience where you always have to figure things out, and iterate, and test, I was able to leverage some of that experience. But in addition, I was lucky I had a base family recipe that I was able to start from. And while that was great, I had to put in a lot of work to make it a product of my own, and update ingredients to the standards that I wanted. And at the time actually, my family is vegetarian, so they actually had egg whites in it. I didn't want that. I wanted more, a completely vegan and plant-based.
Michael Pan (04:30):
So I spent a lot of time, like a lot of people, Googling and just trying to understand what people use instead of things like eggs or whatever we were using, just to find out what kind of ingredients would be best, and would still keep that taste and texture we wanted. So to answer your question, I didn't go out and... I didn't have the bandwidth to go find the best food scientists in the world. I had to learn it myself, and just self-taught, and just a ton of iterations and cooking. So.
Zachary Cartwright (05:03):
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. So no food science background, no culinary background. So you just must be a really determined person. But that's good for all of us who are consuming your product. What other challenges did you face as you went from your family kitchen to going to large scale production, and dealing with things like shipping, and packaging, and all these other hurdles that you must have come across.
Michael Pan (05:30):
Yeah. You know, it's funny, I tell people all the time when we were starting off, I'm like, hey, this, you have a great idea. Sounds awesome. Actually executing and doing it is a whole, obviously another thing. I was very happy when we nailed down our recipe, nailed down kind of the basics of how we wanted to make this, but yes, scaling and figuring out how to actually get it out to market was a whole different story. In a very similar fashion, I never built a food company, never built something from scratch like that. And I just had to learn as I went. But luckily this food community in the Northwest, and we're in Portland, Oregon, there's a lot of people that are very willing to help. Whether it's, how do you create an account on ups.com, all the way to, hey, we have some 3PL's that we think could be a good fit for you.
Michael Pan (06:20):
There's someone, I feel like, that you can always reach out to around here that'll help in those facets. So it was a combination of being willing to learn it and make mistakes, and then continue evolving after I'd learned what not to do. And also just trying to leverage and build a network here in the Northwest to use their experience, and learn from their mistakes that they've had as well. But yeah, it's very challenging and we're still in the middle of how do we scale our business. And I think every stage we're learning right now is great. We got out of the shared kitchen situation. Fantastic. You have to kind of think ahead three to four to six months. All right, well, we've hit this certain sales and volume, great. How do we get to the next tier?
Michael Pan (07:05):
And I'm now learning that we're always chasing. Since we are bootstrapped, it's challenging to get too far ahead. So that's something we're definitely still figuring out a bit, but we're happy to say that we did move from a shared kitchen situation to our own facility, a 4,000 square facility, which isn't huge, but it's our own and we were able to do that after about a year and a half after launching, so.
Zachary Cartwright (07:32):
Well, congrats. That's awesome. Just, step-by-step, it's great to be a part of this and get to watch you. And I agree with you. It seems like people in our area, in the Pacific Northwest, are always willing to lend a hand and to help you get where you're trying to go. You know, this podcast is about water in food. So I want to hear about the water in this mushroom jerky, and what kind of challenges you were faced with, and when you decided to bring water activity into the equation.
Michael Pan (08:05):
Yeah. I mean, it's something that it's kind of interesting. I feel like we were flying blind a little bit in terms of how much water activity we had. And while I think we didn't have the funds necessary to go and invest too heavily in that side of things, we were small enough, which honestly allowed us to figure out what worked for us to get our water activity down to a certain level. As you can imagine in the jerky category, and I think even meat producers, meat jerkies of any kind of dried goods, always struggles with that. And our situation was, we had to do a little off of taste and feel versus actually knowing a number, and it was very, very challenging. Luckily we did have a couple of key points where we did with people like the food innovation center to help us get a baseline of where we're at with the current processes.
Michael Pan (09:02):
So they really helped us just to make sure that okay, for the most part, if we do this, we think we're here. And once we got the ball rolling and started getting more sales, and making larger batches, we really just justified, and also were able to get the funds we needed to actually start investing further. And that's obviously when we reached out to you guys, and tried to figure out how do we actually start having more controls in place to test per batch? How do we make sure that we ensure that our processes are meeting our water activity expectations? And we couldn't be happier with how that worked out with you guys.
Zachary Cartwright (09:38):
And then beyond water activity, were isotherms also a part of your process? And what insight did those give you into your product?
Michael Pan (09:46):
Yeah. I mean, that's something that luckily your group helped us with. I have no experience in isotherms at all, nor did I really know what that was, to be honest with you. And it wasn't until after meeting with you on just really talking through all our steps and what challenges we were facing, and you guys shed the light on what I was missing out on. And so I think there's a difference between how we were, which was we're making a product and just shipping it out. And we felt good about what we were making, we had great feedback, but when you hit a certain scale and that's where we're at now is, we want to make sure we deliver consistency to people. And the isotherm and the meters that you guys provided us really just helped us nail down actual steps in our process, to make our production processes easier and more consistent. And so I learned a lot, I'm still learning, and yeah, that's been a very huge benefit for us.
Zachary Cartwright (10:52):
Yeah. There's always more to learn. Even me in my position, I'm constantly learning. There's so many unique products like yours that we deal with. And so for me, it's enjoyable because it's a discovery process for myself as well. So what would you say are the most immediate benefits that you had once you started using water activity and isotherms in your process?
Michael Pan (11:15):
I would say honestly, almost a peace of mind in a broad sense. We, like I said before, we were, I think the best way to put it is we were flying blind a bit. We felt good about our process, but we didn't feel 100% really secure about everything we were doing. And then every so often we found that we were just getting inconsistent batches. And luckily with the knowledge of the isotherm, and really integrating our water activity meter into our process, it just gave us so much more confidence in what we were delivering to the customers. And we did have some batches that would unfortunately spoil and go bad earlier than we expected. And we had to find that out the hard way. And luckily we weren't huge at that point, but now we feel much more confident when we ship a batch out that it's within our standards of how long it should last on the shelf. And we're seeing that benefit now.
Zachary Cartwright (12:15):
Yeah, there's definitely a huge cost associated whenever you have those types of issues. And so this is the hope for any business that we work with at Meter, is helping to reduce the amount of rework or batches that have to be called back. But for you, what are the next steps for your business? And what's the future hold for yourself and for your company?
Michael Pan (12:38):
Yeah, no, we're excited. I think we've gotten out of this mode of... I would say out of the proof of concept mode, out of launch, essentially, and we're at the very beginning of... which is exciting... very beginning of how do we scale the business. And, luckily we're in a very exciting category, in plant-based, and jerky itself has flat-lined a bit in terms of meat, but the plant-based jerky set is growing tremendously. And so we see huge opportunity to capture that market. And not only that, we're seeing obviously vegan and plant-based vegetarian has evolved from just a niche kind of lifestyle, and it's now really about people who are becoming more aware of all the benefits of reducing meat in general. So whether that's because of health concerns, safety, animal welfare, people are starting to realize the impact of reducing their meat intake.
Michael Pan (13:39):
And we're happy to try to ride that wave. So our next steps are how to capture that market. How do we capture those people, and enable them to live that lifestyle where they don't have to always grab a meat jerky, and they can see the benefits of not only reducing their meat, but also adding mushrooms to their diet on a daily basis. And our challenge is how to do that in the right way with the funding we have, and a daily challenge, as you can imagine, but we're excited about it. And especially given the crazy year that everyone's had with COVID, we're very lucky to be able to be operating and still growing.
Zachary Cartwright (14:16):
And are you investigating any other foods besides mushrooms for your jerky, or just sticking to mushrooms for now?
Michael Pan (14:22):
Sticking to mushrooms for now. I think we have enough market to cover for the time being, and mushrooms are just amazing, it's almost a thing. It's not just food it's that people consider them almost living things as well. And we're excited to obviously continue building our current products out, but we have some other exciting things we have in the works to utilize mushrooms for other products. But we have some things to do first.
Zachary Cartwright (14:52):
There's always more to do. Are you using a certain type of mushroom, or are you using a mixture of mushrooms, or what's that process look like?
Michael Pan (14:59):
Yeah, we are using shiitake mushrooms, and we've tried... What's amazing, obviously there's so many types of mushrooms out there for all different types of benefits. Whether it's reishi, lion's mane, and those are fantastic mushrooms. Because of our use case of just trying to get a jerky-like texture, we have found that shiitakes nail that more than any other mushroom for our process and our recipe. We've tried other mushrooms to do it, and it just fell short of what we wanted. While there are health benefits to all those other types, we just couldn't quite get it the same texture that we wanted. So shiitakes have been the main fungi from day one.
Zachary Cartwright (15:46):
So you got your mushroom picked out. How did you decide on your flavors, and what current flavors are available, and also, which is your favorite flavor?
Michael Pan (15:57):
Oh, man. They're all like my children. It's always a tough choice for me. Yeah. So we have four flavors today, and the way we developed them was a combination of trying to figure out what works best with their process, a bit what's somewhat easily manufacturable. We didn't want to add ingredients or flavors that made it very challenging. I think some flavors may be more sticky for instance, or something, and that presents some challenges when producing. But we wanted a wide variety that, obviously to push the pallette. But also we understand that mushroom jerky is a very new concept that's a bit weird to some people. So we leaned on using approachable flavors, and one of them being an apple barbecue. It's a very approachable flavor for a lot of people who don't quite know what to expect.
Michael Pan (16:47):
It's just simple, sweet, and smoky. We also have a salt and pepper, which you can put salt and pepper on almost anything and with the right amount, it can make any meal really, really tasty. So that's just a basic flavor that I think it's approachable. And then we have our zesty Thai, which actually is my favorite. It's the first one we developed. Love Thai food, like a lot of people. And we tried to find the right balance of how spicy is too spicy. We didn't want to get too spicy, but we wanted a bit of a spice to come out. And so we were very lucky to, I think, nail that flavor and that's been my favorite, and it's actually our best selling flavor.
Michael Pan (17:25):
And then lastly, we have an original flavor, which pretty much has the most umami and shiitake mushroom flavor that comes out. Very simple ingredients that there's only five ingredients, and it's really just the people who love mushrooms would like that flavor typically the most, because it just has more of the shiitake mushroom flavor that comes out.
Zachary Cartwright (17:45):
And someone listening to this podcast, where can they find Pan's Mushroom Jerky?
Michael Pan (17:51):
Yeah. So if obviously online, you can find us on Amazon. Our website is mushroomjerky.com, pretty simple. You can also find us on Thrive market as well. And on the retail side, we are at Whole Foods in the Pacific Northwest, and in the California, Southern California area. And as well as New Seasons, Market of Choice, and a lot of the co-ops around the area as well. But we do ship to a number of, if you're listening on the East coast, for instance, we are at Mom's Market, Midwest we're at Hy-Vee, for instance. We're also at Natural Grocers. So we have some scattered retailers around the country, mostly on the natural side of things, but we're working on obviously getting more retail presence at the moment as well. So we've got an exciting 2021 coming up.
Zachary Cartwright (18:36):
And then my last question for you is, if someone is out there listening and they're in the same shoes as you, or maybe a few steps behind you, and they're working on a new novel product, what advice would you give to that person?
Michael Pan (18:49):
Wow. One piece of advice. I don't know if I could give one piece of advice. No, no. I would say, I think it's important to... I think I would say two things. Number one, I had, again, no background in food, so I had to leverage what I could learn on the internet, but also obviously leverage whoever I could meet. And I was trying to be as aggressive as I could to meet other food manufacturers, and learn from them, which is great. And I think the flip side is I think everyone always has an opinion on what you should do. I think it's important to realize that you have to have a gut instinct as well and navigate what makes sense for you and your product, and your strengths and weaknesses.
Michael Pan (19:33):
There's not a one size fits all. In my opinion, it highly depends on how competitive your category is, your price point, and how good the product is and stacks up to others. And there's just a lot of factors, and also obviously financing as well, how you're financially backed. You may not be able to do things that other people found success in. So I think I've seen a lot in myself where I've had to resist, where I feel like I'm chasing what other people have done versus what really makes sense for me.
Michael Pan (19:59):
And the other thing for me is I'm always big on taking iterative steps that I'm willing to learn and fail from. And my goal is, I'm going to learn as I go a little bit and not every situation or everything I do is going to be just a success. And so I try to manage the risk and be open to failing if needed, but more importantly, learn from that and then use that to take that next step forward and just keep pushing forward. Because if you think it's always going to be smooth, it's definitely not. And so you just have to be willing to take those failures and learn from it, and use it to propel you forward. That's it. That was my two things.
Zachary Cartwright (20:37):
Great. Well, I want to thank you again, Michael, for your time. And for being on this podcast. I'm excited to see where your company goes, and to taste the future products that you're working on now. So thanks again for being on Water In Food.
Michael Pan (20:52):
Thanks for having me.
Zachary Cartwright (20:53):
I'm Zachary Cartwright. This is Water In Food. Find this podcast on Apple, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
