Yousuf Ahmed of B-SIDES: Sustainability and Upcycling in the Food Industry

What if yesterday’s leftovers could become tomorrow’s best-sellers? In this episode of The New Pantry, we explore the power of food upcycling with Yousuf Ahmed, founder of B-SIDES Snacks. Discover how Yousuf is transforming food waste into crave-worthy, flavor-forward snacks while cutting environmental impact. From the challenges of scaling an upcycled food brand to the wins that fuel momentum, this conversation reveals how upcycling is reshaping the food industry and driving a more sustainable future.

Transcript

Yousuf (00:12)
Hey, Jillian, how are you? I'm good, thanks.

Jillian (00:13)
Good, how are you?

Good. Hey, thanks so much for being here. Welcome to the new pantry.

Yousuf (00:19)
⁓ I really appreciate you having me. I love what you do here.

Jillian (00:23)
I would love for you to share with our listeners just a little bit about yourself and also about your company B-Sides.

Yousuf (00:30)
So my name is Youssef. I am a CPG founder by accident. So I started B-Sides, which is an upcycled snack puff company. The official story is in January of 2021, I think the 10 years prior to that was a very circuitous route to get to making snack puffs. Basically, I spent a decade in financial services.

The first half of that was in the music business. I was a business manager for a number of different Grammy award winning writers, artists, producers, band members based both in the US and abroad. Super fascinating business for a young single guy living in New York. But you work investment banking hours for non-investment banking pay. And like a good millennial, I quit and traveled around the world and ran out of money.

Came back to New York, got a job as a dog walker, met my then girlfriend, now wife, who convinced me to go to business school. Went to Carnegie Mellon, switched over into private banking at Goldman Sachs, covered a bunch of very successful, very wealthy entrepreneurs, a lot of them in the sustainability space. And one of the things I noticed was a lot of the sustainability stuff was just like rubber stamping. It wasn't actually like creating real impact. And I wanted to figure out why that was and, you know,

COVID hits I've been managing other people's money for a decade and I wanted to do something totally different. So here we are selling upcycled snack buffs.

Jillian (02:01)
It's incredible. Well, congratulations. tell us about some of that early days, right, when you started to think about the life cycle of oats and how B-Sides came to be.

Yousuf (02:04)
Thank you, I appreciate that.

Yeah, so funny enough, I came to oats later in my journey on upcycling. When I actually, when I started this whole thing, I didn't even know the phrase upcycling. I just knew that there were basically holes in the food production supply chain. The leftover oats from making oat milk is a great example of it, but they exist everywhere. So if you think about the leftover, you know, press from making juice or

grounds from making coffee or grains from brewing beer distilling alcohol like they literally just exist ⁓ all over the place and my introduction to what I now know to be called upcycling was actually ⁓ in 2014 I was at a pop-up by chef Dan Barber ⁓ one of the courses that he had at a dinner that I attended was spent grain bread so it was a loaf of bread made with the leftover grains from brewing beer and I just remember thinking like this is amazing

Like it was delicious. The circular story was super compelling. And I was just thinking like, isn't this more of a thing? And so I like waited and watched on the sidelines for years and it just never kind of caught on. So I was like, okay, I'm going go try and figure this out for myself. And you you fast forward to where I am today. The punchline is that there are a couple of companies who got really good at the physical upcycling. like finding those dislocations in supply chain.

collecting the byproducts, rendering them able to be useful and then putting them out into the world. But the thing is like consumers don't really know what upcycling is still and there's no product that really caught on. So the whole reason I made snack puffs is like everybody knows what a snack puff is. Everybody, you know, has a fond memory of eating Cheetos and the leftover oats from making oat milk actually work really well in a kind of puff situation. So I just

tied all that together and made a snack puff fly.

Jillian (04:07)
really cool. As you mentioned, there might not be an understanding right now in terms of what is upcycling. what would your dictionary definition be

Yousuf (04:16)
Yeah, mean, the way that I phrased it is all of the byproducts from food manufacturing, they usually go to waste but are still totally nutritious and edible. How do you take those and put them back into the consumer food system? That's upcycling. And the way that I used to phrase what we use in our snack puffs is

If you ever ever wonder what they do with the leftover oats for making oat milk, well, we wanted to figure out what we could make with those oats besides oat milk. And so we have the Crunch Bluff.

Jillian (04:50)
That's very cool. And what have you seen from the response

Yousuf (04:53)
It depends on who the... So first off, trying to identify, and I think you've actually done this really well, Jillian, who is your target market? Typically, find a... An entrepreneur will find a gap and they'll try to create a product or service that fills that gap. And I did not do that. I went and found a bunch of holes in a supply chain and then...

backed into a consumer product because in my view, that was the only way to really mainstream filling those supply chain holes. So like to answer your question directly about like, you know, talking to consumers and what's their impression of it. I have tried marketing this product and upcycling generally a couple of different ways. I've tried going just super hard at sustainability and, you know, spoiler alert, that's not really a category driver in

consumer food. I tried going at just like it's good snack puff and that's really what's kind of caught on and the wow factor from the upcycling actually comes after people try it and they're like, yeah, this is a great product. And then I tell them, what would you say if I told you this is made from the leftovers that were gonna get thrown out? And like that's where their mind gets blown and gets unlocked. But the real takeaway, like lesson there is

You got to bury upcycling because you need consumers to just try it and you don't want them thinking that they're eating something that is lesser than or, you know, trash basically, which is what those oats would have been. So trying to figure out how to nail the messaging around it is basically what I think is the secret sauce, which is like, don't talk about upcycling at all until the consumer asks.

Jillian (06:29)
That's fascinating. You've mentioned in the past that one of the things that brings people to your product is not only the texture, but also flavor.

Yousuf (06:36)
mean, so the interesting thing, particularly in snacks is, you know, so there's this thing about revealed preferences and stated preferences. So like a stated preferences, no, you can't go to a consumer and say like, here, this is poison. Will you eat this? Right. But like, that's kind of what a Cheeto is. And I love Cheetos. I love snacking. I love, I will sit at the pantry and just crush every conceivable snack there is.

not really caring that it's not organic or any of the other attributes. So that's a stated preference. People will say they want to eat better for you, but then their actions actually suggest something different. So revealed preference is when you tap into what their actual behavior is. so what I've found is instead of

trying to say like, hey, this is better for you. Hey, like this is, you should actually be eating this kind of thing. What I've really leaned in on is how do I just make the flavor stand out on its own? And the big takeaway is that health is negotiable, but flavor is not. So if a consumer is messaged a product that looks and sounds like a health first product, they're gonna assume it doesn't taste good.

My CrunchBuffs, top nine allergen free, totally vegan. And if I just say those two things alone, people are like, okay, it probably tastes like garbage. Like I'm not gonna eat a vegan product. But like what people don't know is technology around seasoning and kind of texture has come so far that you would never know that it was a vegan product. It literally tastes like a Cheeto.

And so just trying to lean into like, nope, this is not ⁓ a better for you alternative. This is just a good snack and all the other stuff is table stakes. That's actually what's resonated most with consumers.

Jillian (08:33)
so what misconception do you think people have about healthy snacks that you'd like to rewrite?

Yousuf (08:40)
I think that it's not even around kind of healthy snacks. just think that so many consumers today are just bombarded on a day-to-day basis with all this different conflicting messaging. Like, no, I'm the better for you snack. No, my ingredient label is cleaner or shorter. Or no, this ingredient is bad for you. But actually the other ingredient is not good for you.

I think consumers are frankly, we're like at over saturation of this, like particularly around protein, right? Like everybody is trying to angle around protein and that's great. Like I think that we should have more nutrient density in our packaged foods. The number of calories that Americans get from packaged foods has only increased and the world is catching up to those stats. Like those aren't, those trends aren't reversing. So I think trying to meet consumers where they are on instead of just like,

just lecturing at people on why you're the better for you alternative. Just treat it as like, no, like nobody should be competing in this space if they aren't using clean ingredients or a better for you kind of puff. Like what are you even doing on shelf today ⁓ if you're not doing those things? So instead refocusing on the fun aspects of it, right? Like snacking should be fun. Snacking is a kind of a release. People do it when they're, you know, between things or looking for a little bit of a pick me up.

So like trying to reintroduce fun into snacking is the whole goal of the brand.

And it's really hard to do because, and I'm sure you, you've experienced this yourself, like developing a product, you're so close to the product and how much work goes into every detail and ingredient sourcing. So all you want to do is like shout out about all these ingredients that you spent so much time like developing, but like to the consumer, it just is a sea of sameness and noise that is really hard to break through on. And particularly around something like upcycling, like some consumers actually, it turns them off. So.

That's why all of my branding, all of my messaging, it hearkens back to a time like 80s, 90s when food was not about, it was all about flavor and not about nutrition. know, treating the, like updating all of that to today's kind of consumer is the whole goal.

Jillian (10:47)
That makes sense. just noticed you have some new packaging. It looks great.

Yousuf (10:51)
Thank you. very much appreciate it. A lot of love went into it. I'm really excited to kind of put this out into the world.

Jillian (10:57)
I love the colors. It has a lot of great energy behind it.

Yousuf (11:01)
Yeah, mean, how do you tell somebody something tastes good? know, like without them trying it, like you've gotta put it in bright colors and explosive imagery.

Jillian (11:05)
Great.

It kind of makes me think about the role of consumer education Maybe education is still important, but there's not as much time to really break through as there was previously. What are your thoughts on that?

Yousuf (11:22)
Yeah, I wrestled with this so much because I'm the kind of consumer who will go deep on a product. I love to learn about how the founders or developers of the product, why they made the choices that they did and what motivated them. And I'll spend hours researching a very simple, high-velocity, low-cost product like a snack. So one of the most difficult lessons to learn is like,

not all consumers are like me and trying to take myself out of the consumer mindset is just, it's really, really hard. It sounds simple. It is not simple. And so, you know, when I think about like educating a consumer for, a category like snacks, which is a very, it should be a low kind of, people should just be able to grab it off the shelf, open the bag, eat it right then, and move on with their day, right? Like maybe they don't even think twice about the snack that they just ate. So,

If that's kind of the consumer behavior, which by and large like it is, it's really hard to educate them about, well, this saves food from going to waste. And it's actually more nutritional because they processed all this good stuff out. Again, trying to treat that stuff as table stakes. if it's a consumer who really resonates with, wow, that was a good snack, let me inquire further, they have a wealth of kind of information that they'll have access to. But I'm not going to berate them when they're just

you trying to fill that three p ⁓ kind of snack desire

Jillian (12:47)
That makes a ton of sense. So what was your journey like when you started, when you had the idea, you started with that concept How did you navigate finding your manufacturing partner and actually bringing it to shelf today?

Yousuf (13:01)
I did, I think I'm a case study and everything not to do. So again, I did not have a background in food or packaged food. So I had no network to tap. was just kind of using my own intuition, instincts, just, you know, Google and a lot of stuff. I actually didn't start with Crunch Puffs. And at the top of our conversation, I basically said like,

you know, the official stories that I started this company in 2021, I didn't launch these puffs until basically this year. It was December of 2024. So between 2021 and 2024, I launched what I call a pilot brand. It's called Mixtape. And I basically wanted to take a bunch of ingredients, again, that I now know to be called upcycled ingredients, but I didn't know that back then, and try to figure out like, where can these ingredients really shine?

And I didn't start with the leftovers from making oat milk ⁓ because, and I can get to this a little bit later, what was most accessible to me then were, you know, there's tons of craft breweries, micro breweries around the country. And I lived around the corner from a brewery who it's by all, all metrics, a very small distribution footprint. It's like Western Pennsylvania is kind of there like Pittsburgh. That's basically it. On a monthly basis, they were throwing out

10,000 pounds of wet grain. That's like one microbrewery in one small town in the country. There are thousands of these, right? So it really boggles the mind. I was like, okay, cool. Let me call these guys. Let me see if I can play around with their grain and let me try and figure out what to do with it. And so I actually launched a pastry line. It was not better for you. It was very indulgent.

very much kind of premium positioning. And I got great feedback on all of those products, but like I couldn't scale it because to do a premium pastry line, you've got to have like cold chains. So these things had to be frozen, shipped frozen. Nobody knew it was like a play on an Oreo and a play on a pop tart and a play on a little Debbie's oatmeal cream pie. Like nobody understood the concept of going to the refrigerator case to get an Oreo. Like that didn't

compute for people. And so I actually had to like fold that product line because I was like, there's no way I can scale this profitably without people paying like $20 for a cookie sandwich. So once I figured out the supply chain, once I figured out where the market kind of was, I then just cold called a bunch of manufacturers and there are different kind of ⁓

ways to work with these types of ingredients. So to make a snack puff, it's called extrusion. Happy to go into that if you want. I found an outfit in Canada that basically does soup to nuts research and development all the way to retail runs. And I found them in 2022. I've been working with them ever since. They are the most invaluable partner to me. I've done hundreds of formulations around getting the texture and flavor correct.

⁓ They worked with me on minimums. Yeah, happy to go deep on any of that because I just put a lot on the table there.

Jillian (16:12)
You mentioned hundreds of rounds of iterations from a formulation perspective. What was that like?

Yousuf (16:19)
So an extruder is basically the way that you make a snack puff is it's actually the same way that you make pasta. It just happens at higher temperature and with higher water. So you sit next to this giant, I call it a pasta machine, because that's basically what it is. You make this flour, you inject it through this thing, it gets superheated and puffs. You can't make it at home. Like it just doesn't work that way. You can't get the pressure, temperature, et cetera.

⁓ So you basically have kind of a set of ingredients, a couple of ideas in mind, right? Like shape, size, texture, ingredient blend, like nutritional aspects you want to hit, right? Fiber, protein, et cetera. And you set this thing up and you're running like hundreds of pounds of blend to try to dial in like, we need more of this texture, less of the kind of

you know, grainy texture. We need more of this, less of that. And so you're just running formulations on a daily basis, trying to taste stuff as it comes off the line. And it's really weird because like, you know, it's made in a windowless room and you're in there for eight hours tasting. Like at the end of the day, you're like, what did I even, like, I don't even know what the differences are between any of these formulations. like,

Fortunately, you know, the manufacturing partner that I had, like they're really good at trying to dial in. Like if you can tell them, like, this is what I'm looking for, they'll get pretty close. But it was literally like 2 % more of this flour and 5 % less water or, you know, changing the temperature in the oven by one degree. So like that's literally what it was. And then once I thought I had something that was worth putting out into the market, I commercialized like the smallest amount that I could.

put it in every channel that I could and was like, tell me what you like, tell me what you don't like, how can I make it better? So it was painful, is the one word answer to your question.

Jillian (18:14)
So much work, so much heart that goes into putting a product out into the marketplace What was the feedback like when you started putting it on channels Like did people give you the hard feedback that you needed?

Yousuf (18:24)
yeah.

So it's so funny. Like I almost, the natural kind of first reaction that you do is like, let me just go give this to friends and family. They're actually the worst people because they won't tell you what they really think. Or, you know, I don't know if you've gotten this in kind of your line before Jillian, but like, you know, you can tell when somebody really likes a product. They'll eat it and there's like this gut.

reaction that they can't even control where you're like boom I got them like I know that they like that and they're not just saying that they liked it. For me it was I tried to not get feedback from my friends and family like I wanted to get it close and then like directionally correct green lights from the friends and family but then I just went and put it into a micro retail footprint in New York City and I put it on Amazon and I put it on

direct to consumer via my website and I ran some ads and I just really tried to aggressively incentivize people to give feedback. So it was like, you you need kind of social proof for other people to want to buy and the way that I did it was like, you know, I will give you $5 off your next order. Like just tell me what you like and if you didn't like it, like just respond an email. It comes directly to me. Tell me what you didn't like. And

Jillian (19:48)
you

Yousuf (19:48)
I also

ran a bunch of PR. like, you know, I'm sending product to editors who deal with, you know, hundreds of other snack brands, just like mine, maybe not just like mine, but like, you know, it's their job to kind of the cream rises to the crop. They want to write about products that are interesting and good. And quite frankly, this is where I actually ran into some issues with my total sustainability kind of footprint. So.

The initial feedback that I got was like almost uniformly positive. Like I was genuinely surprised by how much people liked the product. Over time, it started to taper off. And then I actually got like review bombed on Amazon where like one star review awful. And what I realized was happening was like I was packaging all this stuff in compostable pouches. So the moisture barrier started to degrade on those pouches, which I was like,

wait a second, what's happening? So I started opening a bunch of pouches and I realized like, oh no, like the shelf life on this thing in these pouches just does not work. Like it's just affecting the product and I don't want anybody to have a negative experience on their first pass at this. So again, a long-winded answer to your question of like, what was the feedback? Good at first, not good at the end, but I learned kind of from that and fixed that on this next run.

Jillian (21:13)
And then was there interesting data around the repeat purchase that happened with that $5 off coupon as well too? Any insights there?

Yousuf (21:22)
Yeah, a little peek behind the curtain for just CPG or Snack founders generally, your target is 30 % organic reorder rate. And so you want basically one in three of every customer that you get to come back and buy another one. And I basically exceeded that for using the

incentivizing people to leave reviews and buy more. But then also kind of in the retail footprint, know, different bodegas, I had no money to do sampling or, you know, real kind of in real life marketing pushes or anything like that. So it was just like organic, how much were these grocery stores rebuying? And it basically hit that 30 % threshold. So that's, those are just like the hard metrics. And that's basically what I was

hold from people who I trust. Like if you can hit this just naturally, then you've got something on your hands.

Jillian (22:24)
amazing that that you had a close eye on those metrics

Yousuf (22:28)
Yeah, mean,

you know, gotta look for green lights where you can find them.

Jillian (22:32)
Yeah, absolutely. If someone's trying your product for the first time, what do you hope that they feel or experience or think? what do you hope their first impression is?

Yousuf (22:41)
I mean, joy. having a, again, I'm a big doom snacker. eat tons of Doritos, Cheetos, Fritos, basically the whole Eto's family. And like, I'm perhaps very different from a modern kind of 35 year old male consumer in today's day and age who are like a little more ingredient focused than I might be.

want to make better kind of eating choices. Not that I make bad ones, but when people go down a doom snacking spiral, they'll just go for anything and reach. And what I want people to take away is snacking can still be joyful without getting preached at or lectured to. And so if somebody feels joy from the product just at first pass, it's like they feel like a kid again at summer camp. That's the whole goal.

Jillian (23:30)
I love that. I love that you're bringing that energy into your product and also into the world.

Yousuf (23:36)
Yeah, I think if everybody just snacked a little more and didn't feel so shamed by their snacking choices, we'd all be happier people.

Jillian (23:46)
I agree. So that's a lot for you to be managing, on a day to day basis, What's your personal system for keeping your energy up day after day?

Yousuf (23:56)
Yeah, so, you know, I love food. I think anybody who starts working in food, they do it because they love it. And when I say I love it, like, I think about it all the time. So in my previous life, desk job, whatever, making cold calls to multi-millionaires while I was at Goldman Sachs, like, you know, at the back of my head, was like, so when should I cook for dinner? Like, am I, should I try this new pizza recipe? Like, that seemed really interesting. What's at the market? So I cook. I try to dedicate.

at least 45 minutes to an hour every day, cooking for myself. I love cooking for my toddler, even though she doesn't always love everything that I cook. So that's number one is still just keeping food front and center as an intellectual curiosity and a source of joy to reuse a theme. And then to decompress, I try to go for a run at least twice a week. That sounds so like...

remedial, but it's like, you know, it's my time. It's very kind of personal. I, it helps me like disconnect and just, get so much inspiration from just, just running and like, get the craziest ideas and like, if I go into a run thinking like, my God, how am I, like, I'm so stressed out. don't know if XYZ is going to work. Like this disaster came up. I always find that at the end of the run. I'm like, no, I got this. I can handle it. And so trying to like,

It's becoming harder and harder with kids with you know, just with this company But like trying to fit that in it does it pays so many dividends. So those are those are my two hacks You know, I don't I don't know that works for everybody. It definitely works for me

Jillian (25:32)
I Is there a recipe right now that you're excited about

Yousuf (25:35)
man, yeah, so it's late summer in New York City. So peppers, tomatoes, stone fruits are like littering the market right now. And my daughter, her favorite food is pizza. And so ⁓ like I have an uni oven and we're about to go spend a week out in the Hamptons. And we got like a house out there and we're gonna.

I'm packing up, know, between like the pack and play and my 60 pound Labradoodle, like I'm bringing my uni oven. so trying to figure out like what I'm going to put on that pizza, whether it's like cream and corn and shishito peppers, or just like burrata and tomato and doing a stone fruit salad. that, that's kind of what, you know, I like to get inspired by the market, which sounds so cheesy, but it's so true. Like you get, basically don't have to do anything. Like just get out of the way of the ingredients and like, you're good to go.

Jillian (26:28)
Seems like a creative outlet for you as well too. If you think forward about five years from now, what do you think is happening not only for your business, but also for yourself?

Yousuf (26:38)
Well, five years from now, know, Toddler is going to be having a lot more opinions than she has now, which is great. We'll probably have a, God willing, we'll have a second kid. Hopefully not a third kid. I mean, I would be open to it maybe, but I just, think we have so much going on. Well, you know, but five years from now, we'll see what happens. You know, my wife and I will probably not live in the city anymore, just too much with a growing family.

But we'll be closer to family, I hope, and spending a lot more time with family. And on the business side, I think five-year plans are great. Aim high and shoot for the stars kind of thing. I have learned from the last five years that none of the plans actually bear out the way you want. I frankly just think that success is survival, and I would love to be doing what I'm doing five years from now. I would love

uh, you know, to expand the product line, to get more feedback, to do more interesting things and upcycling. But I think just having people buy what I do, like what I do and allowing me to continue along that journey, like that's success in my mind.

Jillian (27:44)
I love that. What would you say to somebody who has a dream that they've been thinking about and they haven't made the plunge? What would you tell them?

Yousuf (27:53)
I certainly would not tell people to do what I did and just like quit cold turkey and dive in with both feet. Like that is absolutely not the way to do it in my opinion. But you know, the only way you're going to know for sure is to at least try, right? So if you can carve out 30 minutes a day, an hour a day, two hours a day and just start like legging in, right? You don't have to dive in, but just like one foot at a time into the water and then slowly go down the steps.

You're always going to wonder and there's never going to be a quote unquote right time. So just try it, know, do it and make sure, you know, if you have a partner like I do, make sure you're totally open and honest with them about what's going on and make sure you have their support. I have the most supportive wife in the world. That's the only reason I'm still around doing this. And, you know, just don't be afraid because it's really, really hard. And I don't think everybody kind of knows that.

objectively but like you have to you have to give it everything you've got you know I wake up every morning and I'm like okay sir I'll have some more and it's just like problems every day they are trying to solve just like one foot in front of the other solve the problem in front of you

Jillian (29:01)
Is there anything that we did not talk about that you want to share with our listeners?

Yousuf (29:06)
Let's see, you know, when are we going to do our collab, Jillian? When are we going to have ⁓ the crossover from B-Sides? ⁓ No, I think we covered everything. You were a wonderful host. I really appreciate you having me.

Jillian (29:10)
it.

Thank you so much for being here and I know we'll be in touch soon.

Jillian (29:25)
Thanks for listening to the new pantry. Until next time, take care of one another.