FUNGTN BEER
Going from an idea to getting your product to market.
Fungtn (pronounced Function) is a vegan beer company with a difference. First, the beer actually contains no alcohol but it’s also a beer made from mushrooms.
This is an interview of two halves: because it is such an innovative product we spend the first 20 minutes talking about the product (and if that’s not your thing then feel free to skip ahead), but the product is relevant to the story because this interview covers how to go from just having an idea in your head to getting it to market. Fungtn was a pandemic lock-down start-up business, and the company’s founder Zoey used that time to take the product from idea to prototype, to then launching it out to the public.
Fungtn currently sell thousands of units a month, and you can buy Function beer across London through Planet Organic, you can pick it up from many local and online bottle shops, online retailers and in a number of pubs and venues. And Zoey achieved all this in pretty much just a year.
And, if you’re interested more in why a beer made from mushrooms might be a really great thing, feel free to order a case of Fungtn Beer yourself to drink whilst watching this session!
All sessions in this collection:
Scale-up: Fungtn Alcohol Free Beer
Fungtn was a pandemic lock-down start-up business, and the company’s founder Zoey Henderson used that time to take the product from idea to selling thousands of units a month in just one year. In this first episode of our scale-up series, Zoey tells us how she did it.
Scale-up: Better Nature Tempeh
Better Nature Tempeh hit their first 50 retailers within a couple of months of launching and were in 100 retailers within 6 months. In this second of our scaling up series, co-founder Chris King talks about how the company achieved such fast growth in their early years by embracing a testing culture.
Scale-up: Miami Burger
Miami’s founder Tom Bursnall didn’t originally launch Miami Burger to make money. However they soon won an exclusive one year deal with Morrisons supermarket and a listing in Holland & Barrett. In this third in our series of scaling-up interviews, Tom shares Miami Food’s story of how they broke into large retailers.
Key points from this session:
- Why creating a vegan product was important to Zoey.
- The idea behind making a beer from mushrooms, and will the beer get you high?!
- Zoey identified a consumer trend and a changing market, from her own experience in the industry.
- Small brands can piggyback on larger brands mainstreaming a product sector – such as alcohol-free beer.
- It’s important to develop a niche product that will also sell beyond its niche.
- Your ethics will help you win against the large brands in your marketplace.
- You don’t necessarily need to be able to make that product yourself to have a prototype created.
- Knowing when it’s the right time to take a product to market is important.
- Zoey first used a combination of the UK Government’s start-up loan scheme, self-funding and credit cards to launch the business.
- Building up contacts in the industry you are looking to launch into is important, as is building a network around you to put yourself in a position to receive opportunities.
- Having the right mindset is crucial: the entrepreneur journey is not a straight arrow, it’s like a wriggly knot.
- If you worry about the full journey you will never get the project off the ground.
- Every day do that one more bit of research; make that one more contact, join that one more group.
- You need to just get started as soon as possible – you only really learn about your product once it’s in the hands of potential consumers.
- A product made at scale in a commercial facility won’t be the same as a product you’ve made in your kitchen. You will also need to likely increase the shelf life (retailers need your product to last at least 6 months if not longer). So you might need to add a preservative or citrus juice, or do you have to sterilise it pasteurise it or filter it? All this will change the product.
- You might have great eco-packaging, but if that packaging is letting oxygen in then your product will go off in a couple of days so might not work at scale. Custom-made packaging will also have a minimum order quantity, meaning you might need to compromise on the packaging you want at the start.
- Manufacturers will need you to commit to minimum order quantities for your first run, and to pay up-front. If their minimum order is 20k products at £1 each, you need to find £20k to pay for your products before you even sell them.
- When you scale up (especially so with a food product) you need to learn a lot more about the legal requirements.
- Be prepared to make sacrifices when you first scale your brand. Then, once you have started making sales and can buy in larger quantities, then you can start reversing some of those sacrifices (such as the packaging you want etc).
- Having a strong and professional brand plays a huge part in getting picked up by stockists and retailers. Your product HAS to look amazing on a shelf because people will pick it up based on how it looks.
- Branding is especially important when selling online, when people can’t try and test your product first.
- The pandemic meant Fungtn had to launch completely upside down. Usually, Zoey would have focused on building momentum by hitting the festivals and working with bars first, then if you have some cash left you might build a website to sell to consumers. Fungtn had to do this backwards starting with the website selling direct to the public.
- Fungtn pitched to online retailers to get them to take up the product and used online platforms specifically aimed at bringing together retailers, venues and beverage manufacturers.
- Instagram was a crucial tool for finding new independent retailers, tagging them in your posts to get noticed by them and build familiarity before you contact them.
- Getting into retail is hard – buyers get inundated with emails every day from manufacturers and suppliers as well as having to look after the accounts they already have.
- There are a number of online pitch platforms for challenger brands, such as: Bread & Jam
- Cold emailing can work, as can finding buyers through LinkedIn, but be ready for it being tough! For every 20 emails that go out you might get one positive result back.
- You need to develop a hard skin for rejections.
- A lot of company social media accounts create a false picture of how success works. They hide the hard work and false starts.
- Don’t ask for something direct from a contact (such as investment, or getting listed etc). Instead, simply introduce your product and ask for their advice. They will like that you are not just approaching them for a sale and at worst you’ll got some great free advice and get yourself on their radar, at best they may offer to help.
- You have to be open to receiving. Sometimes Zoey will have 10 Zoom calls a day and think she’s got nothing out of any of the conversations until weeks later. Or she got something out of a call that she was not expecting, like an invite to display at a festival or a personal introduction to a pitching event.
- Use your shared vegan ethics to make connections that you couldn’t make in any other sector.
- You will build up an audience quicker if you can attract people across many different niches at once.
- Be open to finding an audience you didn’t expect to or didn’t set out to sell to; they may actually become your strongest audience.
- Being able to tell your story as a business founder is really important. People are going to buy into you as the founder first in the early days, then buy into your brand second.
- You don’t have to be the most confident speaker in the world. Once you get talking about something you know about and are passionate about then that confidence will come.
- It’s important to be able to say what your business is and what is unique about your brand in a sentence.
- Having a mission is really important to attract other people (not just customers) who share that mission.
- The ‘green pound’ is really strong right now, ‘vegan’ makes good business sense right now – both to founders and investors.
- Get your foundations right, know your figures and know your numbers. Then combine that with a powerful message and mission.
