Michael Kanter of Eliot’s Adult Nut Butter takes a totally new spin on nut butters with his innovative and bold flavors. How would this play out with online customers who may not have tasted Eliot’s flavors before? Micheal shares his experiences selling via Amazon.com.

TRANSCRIPT:

Jennifer: Michael, thank you so much for joining us today.

Michael: Thanks so much for having me.

Jennifer: So now the first thing that comes to mind when hearing the name of your company is, and I imagine this is the same for most people, what makes your peanut butter adult? How did you come up with that piece of it?

Michael: So the quick and short would be that we’re doing grownup savory flavors of nut butter and as I was trying come up with the names of the company, Elliot’s Grownup Flavors, while already Elliot’s Grownup Nut Butters a bit verbose so condensing it down to adults seemed to be a good way to convey the idea ’cause when you look at our jar, we’re doing just grownup flavors that are meant for adults like Spicy Thai Peanut Butter, Honey Chipotle Peanut Butters. We’ve got seven different SKUs and so I thought there was kind of a hole in the market of targeting the more grownup, sophisticated adult palette.

Jennifer: You know it’s one of those things it’s funny because when I was looking at your products, it’s one of those moments when you’re almost like, “Oh my goodness, why hasn’t anybody actually gone in after this hole in this market before?” Because for so long we’ve just so calmly associated nut butters with kids and then maybe the adults will like the ones that the kids like. So how did you, I mean, how did you get started? What’s your background? Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to developing these flavors and realizing that there was that hole in the market?

Michael: So my background was an aspiring chef working my way up the restaurants for a good five years in Brooklyn, Seattle and Portland and my goal had always been to open my own restaurant. And I slowly realized that while I liked food, super passionate, always fully passionate about food, food systems, all of that, that a restaurant might not be the place for me. So anyways, I take a step back in the kitchen, I literally was thinking about creating software or app idea and I was literally sitting at my computer eating a bag of, like, spicy cashews and I started thinking, “Ya know, this is one of my favorite snacks,” tamari almonds, curry cashews, I love these by the handful, so why not as a nut butter?

Michael: So I went downstairs, turned on the food processor, [inaudible 00:02:15] nut butter, tasted it, and was like, “Wow, great by the handful, great as a spread.” I had friends and family try it, did a little experimenting, but I also started digging in to do some research to see if this was a good idea, ’cause while I was sitting at my computer, I looked and ya know, there really was nobody doing this concept. So either it meant that this was a terrible idea, that there’s no market for it, or that this was something that was untapped, that needed to be looked at, and one of the things I found out, which sort of goes back to the name, is in the US, about two-thirds of the peanut butter in the country is actually consumed by adults.

Michael: I think when I found that number, or found, ya know, looking at the statistics and then as I’ve grown the business and talked to people, it just seems like adults, we grew up as kids eating peanut butter, but it’s just a great comfort food. But we’ve also seen it across all sorts of categories where,