The Ingredient Marketing Podcast
We talk to food and beverage ingredient suppliers and manufacturers about B2B marketing, and about finding new ways to drive awareness, interest, and demand for their ingredients.
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The Ingredient Marketing Podcast
From Farm to Table: Revolutionizing Pulse Ingredients (Ep. 5)
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In this episode, Jake speaks with Chris Orms, founder and CEO of Montana Pure Protein, a pulse ingredient company specializing in lentil and chickpea products. Chris shares his journey from a family farm in Montana to creating innovative and nutritious plant-based ingredients. He discusses the unique advantages of pulse ingredients, the challenges of scaling a commercial ingredient business, and the importance of building relationships with small food companies. Listeners will learn about the different product offerings, including lentil flours and extruded snacks, and gain insights into the complexities of the food product development cycle. Whether you're an ingredient supplier or a food developer, this episode is packed with valuable information on navigating the competitive landscape of the food industry.
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Welcome to the Ingredient Marketing Podcast, the show for food and beverage ingredient suppliers and manufacturers focused on driving awareness, interest, and demand. Each episode, our host, Jake Oliver, talks with ingredient brands and industry experts about what's actually working in B2B ingredient marketing today. Let's get into it.
SPEAKER_02Well, many of our listeners are ingredient suppliers, but today's conversation will also resonate with anyone building ingredient-backed products or trying to scale a commercial ingredient business. I'm joined by Chris Orms, founder and CEO of Montana Pure Protein, a pulse ingredient company with commercial offerings like lentil ingredients and extruded formats and additional categories coming soon. Chris, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Okay, so uh to open up for people meeting you for the first time, what is Montana Pure Protein and what problem are you solving in the market today?
SPEAKER_01So, Montana Pure Protein, you know, we're a small kind of upstart uh ingredient company that really grew out of uh, you know, confluence of events like everything. Essentially, part of it was our family farm. We ended up with a bunch of lentils, and part of it was my circumstances, uh selling a company, an oil and gas tech company, and moving on to something else. And so uh we, you know, we know Montana is uh the number one pulse growing state in the United States, and um we've been gifted by God uh dry line farming that supports that. And we thought, you know, hey, instead of shipping all of these products out on rail cars for pennies a pound, let's let's do something different. And so we proceeded to take the lentils that uh we had in our own bins and uh make some prototype material, do some work up at Montana State University Food Product Development Lab, analyzing all the metrics and then using it in applications, and made some commercial ingredients and started getting out there talking to people about you know the quality of the ingredients that lentils and other legumes, chickpeas all pro can provide for really consumers that want to eat healthy and more nutritious food.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. Thank you. Can you just for anybody who's not following, what is exactly a pulsed ingredient?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, pulsed is a kind of a colloquial term for really legumes or beans, like soybeans, chickpeas, peas, black beans, they all fall under that lentils, and so they're high in protein and high in uh resistant starch typically, so you get the benefits from that, a very good amino acid profile, and so they're uh a real healthy, healthy uh product and really translates into being a healthy ingredient.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. And I'm sure you're wearing many hats, but right now, what is your your role day-to-day looking like? Are you more focused on commercial growth, growth operations, partnerships? What's your focus lately been?
SPEAKER_01Because my background is not in food, but more in there's a CFO and and uh entrepreneurship. Uh we started off with the idea like not we're it's not builded and they will come. So my main job is really to make sure that we can produce the the right ingredients, but it's gotta get sold. And the food ingredient business is tough. You know, so anybody out there is in it will understand that it's competitive and food product development cycles are pretty long. People don't change their ingredient uh, you know, configuration if they have a successful product. So getting in a new food product gets you know, you're on an 18 to 24 month cycle and you gotta be working in and getting kind of ahead of that. So I would say everything has to be done, but to really get rolling, you gotta get, you gotta sell stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Okay. So, you know, looking at your website here, which anybody can can find, uh, MontanaPure.us is the URL. I always find it interesting how brands approach, not just in this industry, but in general, targeting multiple audiences and prioritizing maybe different business models with one home page and one navigation, right? And so in your case, looking at your website, you have shop in the navigation, and underneath shop, you have lentil chickpeas categories, and then you have commercial, also splitting out lentil extruded, which is another category, and then chickpea coming soon. And then you have a drop down here of understanding ingredients, right? Where you have a page that speaks about consumer, and then about commercial. So can you talk us through how you think about your core offerings and what you're doing today, B2C versus B2B?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, our our our main effort is B2B. And that's because there's larger volumes and less paperwork. Well, we have we have offered small consumer bags because we wanted to test that. And it's a pretty good real business from the standpoint of people love the product. However, anyone knows, like uh, you know, if you have a bag of flour in your kitchen, it's probably uh not going to get all used immediately. So we do a little bit of that, but primarily it's B2B, and we're talking to food developers and we're making sample products and we're showing them off at trade shows and really trying to support the food companies. And just to add to that, we are really focused on small food companies. Yeah, small meaning under a billion in sales, probably spending 300 billion on ingredients a year. And we're looking for we'd like they'd like pallet delivery, pallet deliveries, not truckloads, you know, pallets two to two thousand pounds and truckloads fifty thousand pounds. So we're really trying to work with those smaller companies to to help them conserve their capital and be as successful as they can and grow and scale until they need truckloads.
SPEAKER_02Right. Awesome. So do you see the shop functionality, the e-commerce side of the website with the small D to C bags? Do you see that as something that long term you keep part of your website, kind of keep that business model where it's at, even though your, you know, your focus is more so on the commercial side, or do you think at some point you would no longer have the need for that e-commerce side of your website?
SPEAKER_01I would say right now that it's definitely taking a backseat. It also involves some regulatory steps when you start taking a wholesale product and repackaging it into smaller products. And the smaller you get, the more costly the marketing gets per pound. And so you uh you start uh creating gurgles for yourself.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that makes sense. So under commercial here, so you you split lentil and extr extruded. And what's the simplest way to explain the difference between these offerings and the role that those those ingredients are serving?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I mean, essentially, you know, a a direct ingredient is like a flour, so a protein concentrate or a starchier flour extrude product is something like you would have like a snack, an extruded snack. That's a crisp or a puff. We have relationships where uh that we can work with to deliver deliver uh those in form, so a crisp or a puff. Because those vendors that uh do that make those products, they're typically, you know, for instance, uh an extruder can take easily 500 pounds just to get it up and running, just for the startup. So if you think about 500 pounds of ingredient going in, that's a lot of four ounce bags, right? You know, typical snack bag would be about four ounces. So we uh we're we're able to uh really help people get the total quantity they need down by pooling customers' orders together. So we might have three, we might do a production run where it's gonna go out to three different people so we can get their total volume that they're taking down rather than them getting dumped, you know, a hundred thousand bags of a a product they want to test on them, they end up getting, you know, five thousand or ten thousand bags.
SPEAKER_02Right. Okay. So the the lentil, the flour ingredients are definitely your your primary growth engine because of the extruded formats right now. And then the chickpea uh coming soon. What's driving that move? Is it market opportunity? Is it customer pull that you're getting? Go ahead.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I would definitely say it's the market. Chickpeas is a very marketable product. And the reason we would do it is because it will fit right into our manufacturing supply chain. And my and it's part of the lineup in Montana. You know, most growers here, yeah, I would say run a five-crop rotation. So, and if you're growing lentils, you're probably growing chickpeas in one of those rotations as well. We really focus on trying to source all of our material from friends and family. We want to be able to take take the any pulse crop that they're growing, be able to offload it into ingredients if we can. And uh, I mean, that's one of the big things for us is like we want this to be friends and family and do something great for for people, our neighbors and us in in the realm of not shipping it off at 20 cents a pound.
SPEAKER_02I love that part of your your mission and part of your story, I think it comes across on the website. And another important story that a lot of ingredient suppliers are focused on telling is the the RD and the formulation and kind of working with you to develop new products side of this. So is that the case with a lot of the relationships that you have? Are you playing kind of a consultation role in helping with the product development side of it? What is what is that side of the relationship look like?
SPEAKER_01I would say that from the standpoint of extruding, we were that that's a big category uh in a lot of products are using that process. And we were super fortunate when we started up at the food product development lab, uh, they had a young guy who was getting his his PhD and he spent two years working with our products in the extrusion lab up there. And so we have a lot of experience that we can bring to people who are gonna, you know, want to make a snacker of crisps. We actually have data on how it works. We can get you kind of jump started. Everyone is gonna have their own specific formulations that they want to target, but we can kind of help jump you forward in the process with relationship to our ingredients. And then on the other side, it's really I would say a big category of use cases in baked products, like cookies and brownies. And we just worked with a vendor who wanted to make wants to make a cake donut for their donut operations, and we made a super healthy cake donut using all pulse non-grain, non-GMO ingredients, and they're getting ready to launch that into their stores. And so it's uh yeah, we like to create demo demo products to give people the like everybody, you know, to give people a taste of of what it uh what it can be, and then they run with their own specific, unique, I guess, kind of customer tested, market tested uh flavoring and style and texturization. Right.
SPEAKER_02Very cool. Can you let me know when the donut uh product is is ready?
SPEAKER_01Because I'm very interested in that. Our our first test is usually like our grandkids. So it's like we have eight grandkids and they're not uh shy about spitting something out that doesn't uh doesn't meet their approval and they ate those things up and nice.
SPEAKER_02So typically in your target audience at these these CPGs and the product developers, the food manufacturers, who are you trying to speak to at these companies? Is it procurement that you want to have conversations with? Is it RD? Is it innovation brand um kind of within those companies? Hearing that it's smaller, maybe mid-sized companies, more maybe it's more people higher up that you're having conversations with. Um can you expand on that a little bit?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, there's really like I would say two two two two vectors up. And one is if you're established, we just want to get on your ingredient supplier list. So especially if you're already using some kind of lentil or pulse product, you know, flour type product, it's like let's just get on the approved supplier list. And so anybody who's in the company, they can type in, they're typing in their the what they're looking for, and we pop up the second is really meeting with people who are designing food who are thinking about a product, we would fit in into the target category set. We want to meet them and then give them a sample, let them taste it for themselves, and talk to them about the characteristics and all the non-GMO, kind of gluten-free, domestically sourced, only mechanically processed. That's one of the things our products are only mechanically processed. A lot of protein out there, plant-based protein, is uh sourced as an isolate, which is a very pure, 80% pure kind of plus protein, but it's highly rinsed, washed, and repeated to get that protein content up. We use only mechanical processing, so there's no solvents or anything used. It's just strictly grinding, milling, and air classification to get it. So if those are things people want to avoid, our protein contents over 50 and it's uh hasn't been washed through solvents at all.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. And I was gonna ask a great segue to my next question. What do you see as major differentiators between yourself and maybe your direct, your direct competitors?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think that's one, you know, is is that we only mechanically process you know, I think another one is I can take you like the first material that we commercialized, I could have seeded it and cut it myself. So we could take you to the to the field where a lot of our ingredients come from. So I think those those two things differentiate us. And then as well as really trying to be a solution for smaller quantity orders, less than truckload, I guess, type orders.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And I I think most of those points do come through again on the website. Okay, so just a couple questions for you about your growth. How has Montana Pure grown to this point? What's really driven that momentum? Has it been mostly word of mouth, trade shows? Have you invested any in any marketing that's been effective for you? How have you gotten to this point?
SPEAKER_01Well, I would say, you know, again, we're still in really, I would say, the startup phase. And so the growth that we're having is come from outreach, and that outreach has really kind of been blossomed at a big one is Expo West down in Southern California. I can't, I really can't say enough about how great an event that is for meeting people who are interested in these types of products. IFT is another good one, and it's a little more technically oriented from the standpoint of food science, but it's a big and you can meet a lot of people there. Another group that is great for is uh naturally. So there's a trade association that is based in different cities, so like naturally boulder is the first one. There's naturally Austin, naturally San Diego, and so that's really a kind of uh association of really food entrepreneurs making natural food. So people who want to find people with like minds should really think about that as an opportunity to go and talk about what they're doing, what they have, and where they want to go, and find people who will be interested and and very helpful and supportive.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And yeah, the success that you're having at the at the events is it is fantastic. So when did you build this website and have you invested in any digital marketing, any SEO or advertising online?
SPEAKER_01We really have not. So the website, because my background on I would say we didn't try to start the company and make a big bang. We wanted to put one foot in front of the other, see where we got taken, and then as we understand the market better, understand how to market the products better, then we start, quite frankly, investing more capital into the company. And that's the point we're at right now. When we started and we we put our website up, it's been about two years, and uh it turned out real well on a really tiny budget. And so, but it's at the point where now we're we're uh we're considering like, okay, it's probably time to think about an evolution. And some of that could be SEO adding some of that, but I I honestly feel like there's no substitute for really just grinding it out, meeting people, talking face to face, or you know, even like this and getting to know them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and digital is tough in this space because you're trying to have conversations with a very specific type of person. I'm at a very niche marketing, so it takes somebody who knows what they're doing to really be successful, and you could you could lose a good bit of money fast, right, with digital if you invest in that and and don't know what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01I will say this I was pretty stunned. We talked to Amazon, I got as somebody who was an expert on Amazon, and I was quite frankly shocked at the amount of monthly spend some companies have. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Okay, Chris. Well, this was great for listeners who want to learn more. Where should they go and aside from MontanaPure dot us to chat with you? And is there anything else that you want to share with our listeners today?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, they could ping me up on LinkedIn or uh we have also have us an Instagram. Yeah, anything they see, they can reach out to me. I guess the info on our website comes right to me, so that would be perfect too. Very good.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Well, if you're listening, whether you're an ingredient supplier or team developing uh better for you products, hope this episode gave you a clearer way to think about product lanes, audience focus, and where marketing should actually concentrate. Just thank you again for coming on. Hope everybody has a great rest of your day. Thank you. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00That's it for today's episode of the Ingredient Marketing Podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to subscribe for more insights on marketing, food, and beverage ingredients. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.