Joanne Hollander learned from the mistakes of her first venture, teaching herself business skills before opening dessert company SoYummi Foods
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In the kitchen of her home, Joanne Hollander, founder and president of SoYummi Foods, shows where it all started and the things she used to produce her snack-dessert mousse made with organic soy beans. |
Ingredients for a successful business: a dash of angel money from a friend; a healthy lump of learning from your mistakes and a full cup of tenacity.
Once a highly successful jewelry designer whose company took a nosedive, Joanne Hollander is determined to do it right in business this time around.
The Montrealer has taken a recipe she perfected in her kitchen to the shelves of major grocery chains. Her soy-based, dessert-snack mousse - SoYummi - just knocked off the Pillsbury Doughboy to earn a major industry award in Canada, leaving Hollander poised to move into new markets.
Tucked away at the end of a leafy lane in Westmount, decorated in soothing whites, Hollander's apartment is a little oasis of calm.
But her life as an entrepreneur has been anything but smooth.
"I made every mistake in business that I could make," Hollander said with a laugh. "And every mistake was very expensive."
Hollander's first crack at business was as a jewelry designer. In the 1970s, she landed at the San Francisco Art Institute, soaking up counterculture and hanging out with world-famous potter Peter Voulkos.
At 22, Hollander started making her own jewelry. By 25, she had a small factory in Montreal and was selling to Cartier and Bloomingdale's.
But by her own admission, Hollander knew little about business. She sealed deals with a handshake, trusting people who seemed eager to help her.
Some of these advisers gave her bum advice about marketing her creations and others turned out to be downright dishonest, including a polisher who absconded with $30,000 worth of jewelry.
Hollander was also hit with bad luck: she lost a large sum when Birks, for which she'd designed a special collection, went bankrupt.
By 1997, Joanne Hollander Designs Inc. was on its last legs. "That was my bottoming-out year," Hollander said.
Losing her jewelry business was what she calls her "rude awakening" to the fact that she needed to know more about money. Over the next two years, Hollander regrouped. Friends took her in to help her over the hump financially. (Her marriage had ended much earlier and another relationship had collapsed.)
She took a job in a boutique selling men's suits. "That was tough on the ego," Hollander said of the experience.
In her spare time, she embarked on a self-taught, crash course in business basics, completing the Canadian Investment Funds course.
An accomplished vegetarian chef, she also retreated to her kitchen to revive a project she'd started in the early 1980s: when Hollander discovered her infant son was lactose intolerant, she set out to find things to feed him and started experimenting with a soy-based, lactose-free mousse.
She even approached dairy-product distributors about marketing the product.
"But in those days, nobody had any clue what soy was all about," Hollander said. "The consciousness of the consumer wasn't ready to accept soy."
By the late 1990s, that had changed. Word was out about the benefits of soy, organics were going more mainstream and the whole issue of genetically modified foods was on the agenda.
By 1999, Hollander had worn out a bevy of blenders perfecting her soy mousse and was ready to make her product on a bigger scale.
She trekked out to St. Hyacinthe, home of the Food Research and Development Centre, part of the research branch of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
The federally funded centre supports the R&D of food- and beverage-processing companies by letting them use its equipment and offering technical and other support.
When Hollander burned her first batch of mousse in the big steampot at the centre, she realized she needed a technical food adviser and hooked up with Roland Degani.
She also needed some seed money to get through the crucial R&D stage. A longtime Montreal friend, Max Druker, a business consultant and bankruptcy trustee, advanced some funds.
The three became partners in a newly formed company, SoYummi Foods Inc.
In 2001, another key partner came on board. Interinvest Corp., an international investment-fund management company chaired by Hans Black, a Montreal high-school acquaintance of Hollander's, became an equity partner.
Hollander also hired a marketing consultant, Alain Bracchi, to work with distributor Produits Liberté Inc., to get the product into stores.
This time, out with the verbal agreements. Hollander signed written employment and shareholder contracts.
As for finding the right partners, Hollander said she still uses her intuition. "But I back it up with my own private research, which is a big change."
SoYummi hit the market in March 2002. It is now sold in 614 independent and chain stores in Quebec and Ottawa, including Loblaws, IGA, Metro and some Provigo outlets.
In May, SoYummi carried off the prize in the best bakery and dessert category at an awards event sponsored by the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors, beating out heavy-hitters like General Mills Canada Corp., maker of Pillsbury products.
SoYummi, packaged in little shallow cups, comes in four flavours - lime, raspberry, chocolate and coconut-banana. It is lactose-free, contains no genetically modified organisms and is made from organically grown soy beans.
Hollander said the purity of the product was essential and was one reason she tinkered with her mixture for so long. "For me, the quality of product really creates the excellence and integrity of the company," she said.
As it turns out, SoYummi is hitting the market at a time consumers are keenly concerned about what they eat.
"Soy-based products have experienced a 16-to-20-per-cent growth over the past five years," Bracchi said.
He said target consumers for SoYummi include women using soy to manage symptoms of menopause, baby-boomers with a renewed interest in diet and young, urban professionals with no kids, who account for 30 per cent of the market for high-end products.
Dr. Hans Black, who trained as a medical doctor, said his interest in what soy products were doing in the market attracted him to SoYummi.
Along with the taste of the product. "A lot of soy or tofu-based products don't taste very good, but this one did," Hans said. (His favourite flavour is coconut-banana.)
These days, Hollander is constantly on the go, supervising production at St. Hyacinthe and working on a new line of products to be on the market soon.
Production at the plant is doubling, from 20,000 to 40,000 cups per day. There are plans to break into Ontario soon and New England next year. (Hollander won't reveal sales figures.)
Having toughed out the school of hard knocks in business, Hollander advises other woman entrepreneurs to learn the financial basics.
"I think that many women, when they don't know something, they'll just check out because it's too complicated," she said.
Finding a way to manage stress is also essential. A long-time practitioner of transcendental meditation, Hollander said she couldn't manage without the deep rest it provides and the tenacity it has taught her.
And despite advice to the contrary, Hollander has resisted adopting a tougher persona for the rough-and-tumble world of business and another for her personal life. She prefers to work at marrying her creativity and hard-won business savvy.
"The marriage of these two creates the driving force and success of a company," Hollander said.
On the Web: www.soyummi.ca
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Lime Flavour Tops in Taste Test
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A taste test of SoYummi's four flavours of desserts rated the lime version the best and coconut-banana second. But the raspberry and chocolate received thumbs down from five Gazette tasters and all panelists said they had no intention of buying any of the products in future.
Chief complaint was the lack of natural flavour and, in most cases, the perceptable taste of soybeans - the product's principal ingredient. Called a mousse, the dessert is more of a firm custard, we agreed. Even the claims that the product is low-fat and 77 per cent organic would not persuade the tasters to try them again.
"Lime is good ,for sure," said business reporter Nicolas Van Praet. "Refreshing" and a pleasant green colour, said editorial assistants Ani Cioffi and Michelle Sarrazin.
The coconut-banana flavour had an aftertaste to business reporter Andy Riga. "But it's not coconut or banana. I need coffee," he said. Copy editor Jessica Howard called this flavour "soapy".
Van Praet and Howard found the chocolate flavour tasted of tofu. "Sugary-spongy ... it feels like I'm eating a health food," Van Praet said. More and better chocolate might improve that version, we all agreed. The same was true of raspberry, which tasted "chemical" to Cioffi.
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