Friendlier Formula
When his son was one, former Gold Coast Titans player and serial-entrepreneur Selasi Berdie went looking for an exclusively plant-based infant formula. To his shock however, he found that there wasn’t an existing product on the market, leading him on a journey to creating a world first through his startup Sprout Organic. In this week’s episode Simon talks with Sel about the founding journey and the process of getting a new idea up and off the ground. Sel also shares about the industry’s strict regulatory frameworks and how him and his partner have gone about building a brand consumers can know and trust.
From a young age, Sel Berdie wanted to live a healthy life. Having majored in nutrition at University, and been signed with rugby league team the Gold Coast Titans, it was only time until his interest in protein brought him to plants. Uncovering their benefits and realising that they were just as good if not better than whey protein in some circumstances, he developed a vegan organic protein for one of Australia’s leading supplement stores Body Science.
But the genesis of Sprout Organic doesn’t begin there. The story mainly starts when Sel became a father and went looking for an exclusively plant-based infant formula, only to find out that there wasn’t any that currently existed on the market. Even if it looked ‘vegan’, there was always some kind of catch be it DHA and Omegas from fish, or other animal-derived vitamins and minerals.
Sel: “At that point I was pulling my hair out, struggling desperately to find a solution. I started making my own formula and then began thinking how many other parents could be going through this exact same process across the globe.”
It was at that moment that Sel realised maybe he could do something to help and founded Sprout Organic.
It was at that point that Sel began to talk more about the process of making a product at home and thinking about the long-term potential; essentially asking ‘Can this business work?’. He boiled it down to two key steps:
The need to identify how big the market is
The need to identify how many people you can help with your product
Both of which provided viable grounds for the founding of the startup.
Sel: “I just thought to myself I’m just 1 dad going through this… if all these people are having kids and if roughly 15-20% of the population by 2028 are going to be plant-based… what are they actually going to feed their kids?”
He even included those outside of the plant-based community in his consumer research, asking people what they thought of the idea and the product.
Sel: “They were all really positive about it which gave me the confidence to realise this is something we can do.”
Okay, it doesn’t just end at two; there was also a secret third step that he shared with us.
Sel: “Once you can prove there’s a market there, you also need to prove that it’s commercially viable and that it’s something that can be done. The laws around infant formula, most people will know, are really really strict.”
In order to go about this and make sure he could get his product on to the market in the future, Sel went straight to the Code that regulates the industry and made a list of the must-haves for a viable product, asking whether they could be achieved through plants.
Sel: “The answer was not only yes, but that it could be done really well with plants.
Sel: “The Code hadn’t caught up with what was going on in the plant-based or food technology space in general, so when I studied it more there was this huge gap that didn’t really state anything … you could have a formula from dairy, or one from soy … it didn’t say anything else.”
To make sure that he could still produce something within the regulatory frameworks, Sel consulted some legal bodies like FoodLegal in Melbourne.
Sel: “At the end of the day a child needs a said amount of carbohydrates, a said amount of fats, a said amount of proteins, and a set amount of vitamins and minerals. Essentially all foods can fit into that classification.”
We also spoke to Sel about the brand’s choice to have a portfolio of products versus the one, newly-launched infant formula.
Sel: “I was just going through the evolution process of a child as they grow up. My goal for the brand was that from the day the child was born to the time they were basically 15, we had something that could fit within their age and nutrition profile.”
This can be seen through their range, which currently holds 4 products: 2 snack bars and 2 formulas.
Sel: “The timing of each product’s release simply comes down to supply and demand; the supply and demand ratio of infant formula is by far the highest, so it was always our goal to get that done quickest. If we had our way we would have done it first… but there’s a lot that goes into it so we started with the snack range to give people an introduction to the brand and use that as a segue to provide education around coming next. We wanted to build trust”
Now the brand is working on refining their products, developing their range and continuing to meet consumer demand.
But as we mentioned earlier, things are not so straightforward when working in the infant industry space.
Sel: “Infant formulas are governed by the MAIF agreement (1992), which basically bans the marketing of infant formula … in any aspect. You’re not allowed to market or talk about your products. It was basically put in place because breastmilk is best, we all believe that … but there were companies back in the day that were coercing people to choose formula instead of breastfeeding.”
This has had repercussions for the way in which Sprout Organic are able to create a community and spread the word about the product.
Sel: “People just sometimes can’t breastfeed. There’s a large chunk of the population that just cannot do it, there’s also the large chunk of the population that don’t want to do it and that’s also fine. The problem though, if you can’t talk about your products, is that you can’t tell people why they should look towards a product like yours.”
Sel: “It does become a hard space to play in … so by being able to produce products that have the same ethos … it allows people to understand what our brand, what our community, what our mission and purpose is so that they understand what our infant formula is out to do without being able to advertise it.”
But despite these restrictions, Sel and his partner Jen have managed to create a community of parents who support their brand, with those who are not necessarily plant-based also looking to try their products.
Sel: “We never planned to be a brand or product range exclusively for people with the vegan or plant-based ethos. We viewed it as the best possible products we could produce; plant-based, not plant-based, whatever it may be. Our rationale for that is simply the aspect that you have no idea what allergies your baby will have … our theory was that if you could avoid going through that painful process … why wouldn’t you?”
Sel: “The way to do that was provide equal nutrition from an organic source, that just happened to be plant-based and avoids the common allergies.”
As a result, Sprout Organic’s product hosts a large number of certifications and appeals to people with different food preferences: plant-based, gluten-free and organic to name a few.
Sel: “It is extremely hard because you can’t advertise, you can’t talk about it, so what we’ve effectively had to do is almost let the ingredients and the products do the speaking for itself with a whole list of certifications that a lot of companies don’t have.”
Sel: “Having to go through certification process was painful, all of the work that goes into very very top standards before you’re able to launch to market is extremely tough so we’ve gone about it the hard way, but we’ve gone about it in a way that I feel is best to let people know you can trust this product [and that] we stand behind what we say.”
To learn more you can head to their website, or follow them on social media.