[00:00:00] Luke Colson: Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I am supremely honored to be sitting down with Luke Colson and Jonathan Siegel, the co-founders of Vibes Candy. Luke, it's great to see you. It's good to see you too, Ray. Thanks for having us on. Yeah. Jonathan, how are you?
[00:00:14] Jonathan Siegel: I'm doing great. It's a Friday. Lovely vibes are in the air.
[00:00:18] Luke Colson: Yeah, I love the way you put that because we are all about the vibes today. Vibes Candy, a fantastic brand that is playing in a space that is quite hot right now in CPG. That is better for you, Candy. Let's kick things off with the origin story. Jonathan, tell us about how Vibes was created and what you saw as an opportunity to innovate in this space.
[00:00:39] Jonathan Siegel: So quick story, my hometown Venice Beach, California, less than three years ago, I'm in a Whole Foods grabbing a little grab-and-go sandwich at the checkout line. In front of me was a surfer and a skateboarder, and they were grabbing a Smart Sweets from the rack, and they were both kind of grabbed it, they looked at it, looked at the back of the ingredients and then put it back on the shelf and one of the guys was like shaking his head. So I'm just making a conversation. I'm like, hey man, you're not feeling it. He goes, no man, I wish there was like a really cool, delicious, healthy snack that tastes really, really good. And immediately that's where the idea came into my head. I blazed out with my sandwich, went to the candy aisle and started looking at all the different competitors that were there. And that's where the journey started. Luke and I met in Venice Beach right after that, amazing co-founder, we realized that the world. At the end of the day, they also eat Skittles and red dye and all these artificial ingredients. And what we noticed that a lot of the competitors at the time didn't really have flashy, cool branding. The packaging were very kind of like matte, nothing really inspiring and aspirational. And we decided that there was a really opportunity to create a delicious product that was actually cool. So lastly, we think of Vibes as not a healthy candy that tastes good. It's a delicious candy that's cool and happens to be healthy.
[00:02:25] Luke Colson: Luke, I love your packaging. It is fantastic. It definitely stands out among the other healthy, better for you candy brands out there. But let's talk about the better for you aspects. What is in the candy? What makes it special? What gives people permission to eat it and eat a lot of it?
[00:02:44] Vibes Candy: You're quite right. We are in a very kind of hot space right now. For us, it's about calories. It's about low sugar. And it's about ingredients that aren't on the back of all your regular candies that are, quite frankly, terrible for you. So we set about right from the get go, Jonathan and I, figuring out how to make a candy that tastes like a candy. What we don't want, and to Jonathan's point, is a lot of the other candies or the best of you candies, they don't taste great. So we're very, very taste first. We've also got a little sprinkle of some nice ingredients, a little extra ingredient in each of our current four flavours. So we've got some Chamomile in the Sour Watermelon, Sour Watermelon Chill we call it. We've got some MCT Coconut Oil in the Sour Blue Raspberry Boost. we've got some elderberry in the cherry and we've got some amla fruit or gooseberry in the strawberry and these are just little sprinklings but not enough to make us a supplement we never wanted to be a supplement we always wanted to be in nutrition we always wanted to Vibes Candy but just a little bit of an additional offering as well as taking out high sugar as well as making sure we had a good content of fiber in there High fiber is a big hot topic right now. People are clambering for a good snack that fills you up. So a pouch of vibes is going to really hit the spot.
[00:04:05] Luke Colson: Well, if I'm a retail buyer hearing all this, I'm definitely interested. I'm thinking, okay, great packaging, great flavor, better for you ingredients, a functional component. It's a no brainer, but it's not always that easy. Jonathan, talk about the retail strategy and how you guys went about getting on shelf.
[00:04:23] Jonathan Siegel: Very good question. We have a fantastic partner, his name is Scott, and he's the head of our biz dev. And he literally, along with Luke and I, for the past year and a half, before we got a broker and before we got Sprouts and other large independent distributors and chains, we went from store to store, state to state, 50 states, from Puerto Rico to Hawaii to Maine and everywhere in between, knocked on the stores, talked to managers, grocery people, customers, and they tasted it. The feedback was phenomenal. And we started going into local stores, getting word of mouth. which was our strategy going along and building it up. And that's where some of the brokers and distributors found out about us. And that's how we got into innovation with Sprouts initially. Now we're nationwide. We're also very, very big on social media. We did a lot of activations, obviously in the surf, skate, snow community, which is our voice, our ethos. Ray is all about Southern California lifestyle, eating, drinking well, wellness. It's part of who we are being in that community. And just lastly, which we're really, really proud of, if you think about it, one of the last truly American culture is the SoCal surfskate snow community. And that's exported and imported around the world. You know, you could be in Amsterdam, you can be in London, you can be in Bangkok and everything cultures, you know, people kind of dress the same, but the uniqueness about Southern California and the aspirational way of life is really important to our brand, especially with our social impact and charitable partner, which we're so proud to be involved with. This was one of the first things that Luke and I wanted to do was to give back. And we're very big ocean people, marine life. And we partnered with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, which was started by Hannah Barnard. And she's an amazing woman, amazing Jedi for turtle conservation and Hawaii's coastline restoration, even before the fires and even before all the weather elements. So part of our proceeds for vibes on all of our flavors goes back to the Hawaii Wildlife Fund, which is super exciting. And we're so proud of our partnership.
[00:06:41] Luke Colson: That's fantastic. In addition to all the traction you're having in brick and mortar retail, you're also picking up quite a bit of steam on e-commerce, specifically with Walmart. Talk about how you got involved with that chain.
[00:06:53] Vibes Candy: So we were, again, just word of mouth. Some stuff is through our brokers. A lot of stuff is, as Jonathan Siegel, through ourselves and Scott, who is just incredible at getting the word out there. And Walmart came to us. And then they asked us if we wanted to start with e-commerce, see how we do with, you know, the idea being we go into stores. So, yeah, we just launched on Walmart literally a week ago and things are going great. So we have all of our four main flavors on there. And then subsequently, we're doing great on Amazon Prime, which we've been on for quite a while now. And we have just a constant stream of sales through Amazon Prime, which is great. We've just launched our TikTok shop and that's going great guns. That's new, of course. That is the Wild West, by the way. Anyone who can tell you and same with our Instagram, we've managed to go on 1000s and 1000s of followers on Instagram. And we're continuing to grow that. So walmart.com is really just the beginning. We also have a great partnership with good eggs.com who just continue to reorder and reorder. Also fair.com, which is a wholesale website, which we're now on people are purchasing for their independent stores as well. So that's just the beginning, the very tip of the iceberg for us pretty exciting stuff, though.
[00:08:04] Luke Colson: Very exciting. And it's also very exciting to innovate with new flavors and new products as well, which you are going full steam ahead on that front as well. Jonathan, how do you think about innovation from a flavor perspective? And, you know, given the fact that you also use functional ingredients, how does that also factor into your new product development strategy?
[00:08:23] Jonathan Siegel: Super important. We did a lot of market research. We did a lot of consulting groups, a lot of young kids. Again, when I mentioned earlier about, you know, what Gen Z and millennials are looking for in terms of snacks and fruit snacks and healthy and options like that. The first thing was important for them was flavor. And then obviously in the candy gummy space was texture. Some people don't like it too soft. Some people like it really hard, like a hairball. you can't please everybody, but we found our quote-unquote sweet spot, which people really love the consistency. It's kind of like a fruit snack, but a little hardness to it. And then in terms of the flavors, obviously we started with the most popular flavors doing our research and questionnaires like that. And we're very excited about our new flavors that we're going to be launching. We're doing our first spicy, sour, And we have some really great flavors coming up in the pipeline. And when people ask about what differentiates vibes with some of your competitors, we like to say that we're bringing dimensional flavor and innovation to the candy aisle, but also to the homes of parents and kids and tweens and teens and everyone in between. And we're always thinking about the holistic spiritual wellness part of the product, of the flavor, which is the most important thing, obviously the health part. But at the end of the day, people want to have fun and it's candy. I learned to walk from my mom bribed me with M&M's out of the stroller. She lured me with plain M&M's and everybody has their own story about their favorite candies and that's what Luke and I wanted to create, a really rich flavor and a story that's truthful and proud of where we come from.
[00:10:10] Luke Colson: Well, you already have a consumer in me. I remember the first time I saw Vibes on Shelf, it was in a convenience store in La Jolla. And I was like, what is this? This is really cool. Great packaging. It was the chamomile and sour variety that you have. And I was like, wow, I hope I get a chance to talk to the founders at some point. And here we are on Taste Radio chatting about Vibes Candy. Vibes Candy is the website. Definitely check it out, folks. Jonathan, Luke, this has been so great. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thanks, Ray. Great to meet you. You as well.
