The Online-Offline Path to Health: Shinta Nurfauzia of Lemonilo

With 73% of deaths in Indonesia caused by non-communicable diseases such as stroke, heart disease & diabetes; co-founder of next-generation healthy food company Lemonilo, Shinta Nurfauzia, describes her mission as using technology to make a healthy lifestyle accessible to everyone. Lemonilo often launches a new product exclusively online, crowd-sourcing feedback from its e-commerce customers, and only then subsequently releasing the perfected product to its 200,000 offline points-of-sales all over Indonesia.

(Podcast website | Transkrip Bahasa Indonesia)

Transcript

ALAN  0:12  
Welcome to the 35th episode of Season Two of the Indo Tekno podcast. Selamat datang, semuanya! I'm Alan Hellawell, Founder of tech consultancy Gizmo Advisors, and Venture Partner at Alpha JWC  Ventures. Now, according to a report by Food Industry Asia (FIA), and research firm IGD, almost all consumers in Indonesia (or 99%) are interested in improving their diets and a majority of them (roughly 89%) are keen to have products reformulated, provided the taste is not compromised. In fact, in the wake of the COVID 19 outbreak, the category to see the greatest spending increases amongst Indonesian consumers has been health products at 77% according to an August report by PwC. We are very pleased to invite onto the Indo Tekno podcast today, a leader in this movement, Bu Shinta Nurfauzia, co founder and co CEO of leading healthy foods brand Lemonilo. Thank you for joining us today. Bu Shinta.

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  1:17  
Hi, Alan. Happy to be here after quite some time since the last we that we talked.

ALAN  1:23  
Great. Well, now Shinta, your entrepreneurial journey started quite a while ago. Please tell us specifically about "The Pancake Company", and "ComeBAGtome".

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  1:34  
Sure. It's been so long since I last talked about it. But The Pancake Company was an interesting story. I started the Pancake Company back when I was in junior high at the end of elementary school I think. It continued until I was in senior high school. I started it as something that I sold to my friends and family. And then I opened during music festivals for teens. And "ComeBAGtome" is the same. This is something that initially was built for friends and family. And I started in social media, expanding it with a couple of friends. And finally I stopped it because I was too busy with school and everything else. But it was the first encounter that I had with entrepreneurship.

ALAN  2:27  
And it was a very early one. Super impressed. Now Shinta, if I were simply to look at your education and first few jobs, I would have predicted that you would have become a leading corporate lawyer in the Jakarta area. But you are not. What happened?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  2:42  
You're totally right. I actually graduated from a law school in Indonesia. And later on, I did my Master of Laws in the United States. But then I decided that this is not something I want to pursue. The reason that I wanted to take law school was because I believed that law would be the sector that could get me closer to my dream. And my dream is, as cliched as it may sound, to make an impact. And at that time, as with any teenager, I was confused with what I wanted to do in life. And my family had experience in law. My mother graduated from law school, but she also did business. So I was always hesitating between business and law. But I ended up being in law school at the end. And after I did lawyering for about five plus years, I decided that this is not something for me. And while I was confused with my journey in life, I decided that now it's time to take some time off and do a Master's degree. So I did my Master's degree because I was so confused with what I wanted to do in life, as I already had some experience with ComeBAGtome and The Pancake Company. But then it was that moment during my Master's degree when I met Johannes and Ronald, that got me to have the courage to start Consula and later on Lemonilo. 

ALAN  4:16  
Thanks for that backstory. So you started Lemonilo if I'm not mistaken at the beginning of 2015. Can you tell us more about the company's "origin story"?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  4:28  
So when I was doing my Master's degree, I met Johannes. And during my time there, we did a few competitions, business competitions. And then we thought: "Hey, this is fun. This is something that we could do together". And so we talked. And then we decided to create a company together. And then we got introduced to Ronald through a friend. And then finally the three of us talked over Skype at that time, because Ronald was already in Jakarta. And then we talked about what kind of sector that we are interested in. The three of us had the same interest in terms of creating impact and making contribution to Indonesia. We know that we want to do it through business. We are pretty sector-agnostic. But personally, I'm always interested in health, because I believe health is something that is quite problematic in Indonesia. A lot of people in Indonesia do not do healthy lifestyle. And we are impacted by non-communicable diseases like diabetes, or heart disease. In fact, we are the top ranked in the world in terms of those diseases as the reason of our mortality rate. So we thought, "Hey, you know what, let's just create something in health". But back then in 2015, what we wanted to do at first was to create a doctor's directory, like Zocdoc in the United States. So we created Consula. That was actually our first company together. After around a year, we decided that this is not something that we want to pursue. And we pivoted from taking care of sick people, to taking care of healthy people. Because we thought, "You know what? What is problematic in Indonesia is the healthy lifestyle." Because we can say that everybody in Indonesia knows that we have to live healthily. But then if we take a look into the typical Indonesian diet, it's super high in cholesterol, sodium, sugar, preservatives. In fact, our traditional food, for example is high in calorie, and has all the things that you are not supposed to eat every day. So we thought, what does it mean? What does this typical Indonesian diet mean for our society? And it turns out that in Indonesia, if we take a look into January to March 2019 alone, the government had spent around USD400 million only to cover the non-communicable diseases such as stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. And this Indonesian diet, this decision of the country to live unhealthily, has resulted in a national problem. So this is why we created Lemonilo, which is a consumer goods company, enabled by tech that create a healthy everyday food 

ALAN  7:36  
So Bu Shinta, maybe tell us about your target demographic.

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  7:39  
Our target demographic is moms and kids, particularly Millennial Moms. Right now millennial moms have around one or two kids, and are in our 30s. But really, right now, almost everybody in Indonesia thankfully already knows Lemonilo. So we were also surprised after the survey that we did with Nielsen that we have expanded the target demographic of the company to even younger people and also older people. Because when you are targeting moms, moms are the decision makers that bring food to everybody in that family. So we're thankful for that.

ALAN  8:23  
Thanks for that Shinta. Now, what are our top three products currently?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  8:27  
The top three products by category are: 1) our instant noodle, 2) our snack and also 3) our condiments. If we're talking about SKU's (stock keeping units), the top tree are all of our instant noodles, which include the mie goreng (noodle dish) flavour, the curry ayam (or curry chicken), and also the chicken onion or ayam bawang.

ALAN  8:51  
Fantastic. And Shinta, what specifically is "Wiranilo".

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  8:55  
Wiranilo is our new reseller programme. Wiranilo was created with the idea that most of our community have asked us through our social media and email how to sell Lemonilo stuff, and whether they can sell Lemonilo products to their friends and families. And we see this as an opportunity to empower our community, which mostly consists of moms and students, to not only become Lemonilo fans, but also to become our brand ambassadors and introduce our products to their friends and families and communities.

ALAN  9:36  
Fantastic. And so would we describe this almost as an agent network of ours? 

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  9:40  
Yeah. Correct. Totally. 

ALAN  9:43  
Fantastic. That's been a very strong area of growth in e-commerce in general. Now Bu Shinta, we state: "We apply technology, not only to bring a better lifestyle experience to our customers, but also to empower SMEs to improve their products, qualities and scale". How exactly does Lemonilo apply technology as part of its value proposition?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  10:08  
As I mentioned, Lemonilo is a consumer tech company. And what does it mean? I think different from most of the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies in Indonesia, what we do when we first launch our products, we launch everything online. Launching everything online, specifically through our platform, has helped us to get real insights from our online community. And by launching that product, and getting data from the purchase, we also get to send our consumers surveys, and know what they are thinking about our products. So if you purchase our products through the Lemonilo platform, you will get from time-to-time surveys asking: "What do you think about the flavour? What do you think about the price? What do you think that we can improve? What do you think about the sweetness?" All those detailed questions. And if you answer that question, you can get vouchers, for example. So we send this survey from time-to-time, and it becomes our insights to improve our products. Only when our products are successful online, do we push and scale up this product offline. Because as for grocery in Indonesia, most of the purchase happens offline. And by launching our products online, it allows us to work with SMEs. What do I mean by SME's? It's smaller scale factories. And this smaller scale factory will be exposed to the way Lemonilo works, and the possibility to scale up the product together with us.

ALAN  11:48  
Understood. So in many ways, you could say it begins as a digitally native product. And you use feedback from your online customers to possibly refine it, and then you bring it offline. Is that often the case?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  12:01  
That is often the case. And it's actually the case for our most successful products. This becomes our model in all of our products.

ALAN  12:11  
Fascinating. So that's kind of an "O2O", online-to-offline consumertech model. Fascinating. Now, Shinta quoting some other language from the website, we also state that: "We team up with various partners, from SMEs to mass scale corporations in our quest to provide solution-oriented products to ensure a healthy lifestyle." How exactly does the SME come into play in this case?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  12:36  
Yes, when we first create our product, some of the products really need customization. And to do this customization, it's easier for us to work with smaller scale companies, in this case SMEs. Because this type of companies still accept customization and also lower volume commitments. But then if we just directly jump into working with bigger factories, usually it involves high-volume commitments. And these bigger factories sometimes do not want to do customization, if we don't have this high volume commitment. So this is what I mean by launching online first. We do various customizations together with our SME partners. And when we can go with higher volume commitments, we always work together with these SME partners, empowering them to also increase their capacity. So the beauty of this model is actually these assembly partners could go along with us and tag along with us. And if we are successful in scaling up their product, they are also going to be able to scale up their factory and their capacity.

ALAN  13:56  
Fascinating. So there's more than just one dimension to our mission. We're not only encouraging our compatriots toward a healthier lifestyle, we're also trying to work with that long tail SME to help them grow and increase their impact.

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  14:12  
Yes. It's my personal happiness when I see that our SME partners right now are able to not only increase their capacity, but also their quality. It's quite difficult to be chosen as our partner, because we have very, very high standards. Although we work with not very many SMEs compared to the likes of e-commerce, it's a deeper commitment, I think, in a sense, because it's not just one-off, but they could grow together with us.

ALAN  14:43  
Fantastic. Now Shinta, are there any facts and figures relating to the state of health or fitness in Indonesia; whether it's obesity rates, incidence of disease, etc, that motivates you to achieve evermore in the category?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  14:59  
If we're talking about about NCD's, or non-communicable diseases, in Indonesia that involves stroke, heart disease, diabetes. Actually 73% of deaths in Indonesia are caused by NCD's. If you take a look into the current conditions, 90% of COVID-19 deaths in Indonesia are caused by comorbidities. Those comorbidities include stroke, heart disease, and diabetes. So this is why I think it's very urgent for us together to change the way we consume things and do our activities in order to be a healthier nation.

ALAN  15:38  
Those are some interesting facts and figures. How important is marketing message to Lemonilo? And how have you arrived at today's positioning?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  15:47  
Marketing message is, of course, very important for any company, including Lemonilo. For Lemonilo, the marketing is a bit complicated. Why do I say "complicated"? Because in Indonesia, healthy lifestyle is not something natural. So the first step that we have to take in our marketing is to educate the market about the importance of a healthy lifestyle. If you take a look into our marketing messages, almost 60% of it is actually about health education, and 40% or less about hard selling. So if we do content in social media, for example, of course we talk about the hard selling part, the promotion, the discount, the new products. But we also talk about what does it mean to be healthy? Why these ingredients are bad for you? Why these ingredients are good for you? What does it mean to eat healthy? And all that stuff, the activities that we have to do in order to be healthy, education. And even in built-in select popular sitcoms are cinetrons in Indonesia, we do not just talk about "purchase our product! Purchase or product!" But we also talk about what is the problem, what is the solution, and why Lemonilo products could be come a part of that solution. So yeah, marketing message is very important for us. It's important through our marketing message that we could educate the market, but also about being honest. We never say for example, that you have to eat Lemonilo product only in order to be healthy. What we always say is that "These are the facts if you want to be healthy". And if you need an instant food, the best one out there is honestly Lemonilo product because of the clean ingredients that we have, and the better processes that we have

ALAN  17:46  
Understood. So clearly, there's a major educational element to the impact we want to have on Indonesian society. Now I wanted to come back to your earlier references to COVID-19. How has the onset of the pandemic impacted Lemonilo?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  18:02  
Again, COVID-19 has become a real challenge in the entire world, including in Indonesia. Just a few months ago, we got the new Delta wave and our cases spiked to the point that we had never experienced before. And the economy of Indonesia shut down for a moment at that time during this Delta wave. There's a report that said the mobility of this country was held back around 30%. And that created huge economic loss. For the FMCG market, a lot of FMCG companies, FMCG categories also experienced some decrease. But we are very hopeful that Indonesia growth will return. And in matter of fact, once the pandemic could be controlled, the economy will resume.

ALAN  18:58  
We can all hope so. Now Shinta, maybe a more personal question. Would you mind sharing how you balance motherhood with entrepreneurship? I gather that you are the mother of a very healthy little boy. And I believe you have another one on the way. So what advice would you have for other aspiring mother-entrepreneurs?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  19:17  
Alan, very interesting question. Sometimes, like every mother in the world, I also don't know how I did it. I just do it one bite at a time. But I think the most important thing is to know that you are not alone in this journey. Whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you are a working mom. Whether you are a stay-at-home mom, I think it's important for women and mothers to know that you are not alone and you shouldn't be alone. If you ever feel alone, you should seek help. And you should find companions to go through this journey. I'm lucky that I have a great support system that could go along with me in this "mompreneurship" journey. I also have great partners. And being a leader, but also a woman who has kids, I think it gives me a unique perspective. And it made me realise that I'm in a unique position to really create a model for others, not only for individuals, but also for other companies, how we should enable women to work, but also to become a mom. But even during the bad days, it's still very difficult of course, because you could never predict what will happen with kids. What do they want: sometimes you're in the middle of a meeting, and the "little boss" would like to join the meeting. But I think we are also in a condition where people now understand and are more understanding than ever. So every time I have a meeting, and then sometimes my kids want to join the meeting, usually we just laugh. It's just a part of life. And we need to be able to accept that this thing happened, and it's normal.

ALAN  21:09  
It's great to hear that your colleagues and companies around the technology ecosystem are becoming increasingly accommodating and supportive of what is a unique challenge that frankly, I've never had to go through. So, my hat off to you. Now Bu Shinta, what have been some of the most powerful partnerships that we have formed at Lemonilo. 

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  21:27  
We have had a lot of partners accompany us through this journey, and enable us to be in this position. First is of course the SME partners. Some are no longer SMEs, actually. And we're very happy with that. They have become a bigger company. And we also have distribution partners that distribute all our instant noodles to more than 200,000 points-of-sales all over Indonesia. Also, the most important relationship and partnership that I have is of course, so we're "Lemonians", which is the people who work at Lemonilo in this boat together with all the co-founders.

ALAN  22:08  
Gotcha. So, many different categories of partners that comprise our success. Can you tell us about some of the future directions for Lemonilo?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  22:17  
So right now in Indonesia, Lemonilo is quite well known as the brand for healthy instant noodles. We are launching more products. And we are seeing Lemonilo moving into a flagship brand, a flagship brand of a lot of products. Now in Indonesians know "Chimi", our healthy snacks. And we are going to launch more and more products in the coming months. And second of all, Lemonilo is also planning to expand to other countries, and there are many more exciting things to come.

ALAN  22:55  
So Shinta, there must be something that keeps you awake at night. What are you worried most about as a steward of the business?

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  23:01  
Honestly, every day is different. But I think 90% of it would be about Lemonilo, because I'm blessed as a person to have very supportive family, and a very beautiful child. So I get to have my brain filled with everything. One is lately during the Delta wave, I've been thinking, of course, about the impact of this pandemic to Lemonilo. And what are the products that we need to develop? Because we know people's needs are changing with the pandemic, and how Lemonilo could be in a position to provide something that could be beneficial for society.

ALAN  23:47  
That makes eminent sense, and you're clearly in a very important position to affect that kind of change. Bu Shinta, we really appreciate you sharing with our audience your personal journey, along with the story of Lemonilo and its mission to deliver our fellow Indonesians to healthier habits and a better lifestyle in general. Thanks so much for joining us today. 

SHINTA NURFAUZIA  24:06  
Thank you, Alan. It's a pleasure to be here. 

ALAN  24:10  
Great, but we hope our listeners have enjoyed today's episode. As always, please consider sharing any feedback that you have about the Indo Tekno podcast with us. Terima kasih telah mendengarkan. Sampai jumpa lagi!