Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - B-Sides: Flavor, Sustainability & Profit with Yousuf Ahmed

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Right About Now with Ryan AlfordJoin media personality and marketing expert Ryan Alford as he dives into dynamic conversations with top entrepreneurs, marketers, and influencers. "Right About Now" brings you actionable insights on business, marketing, and personal branding, helping you stay ahead in today's fast-paced digital world. Whether it's exploring how character and charisma can make millions or unveiling the strategies behind viral success, Ryan delivers a fresh perspective with every episode. Perfect for anyone looking to elevate their business game and unlock their full potential.Resources:Right About Now NewsletterFree Podcast Monetization CourseJoin The NetworkFollow Us On InstagramSubscribe To Our Youtube ChannelVibe Science MediaSUMMARYIn this episode of "Right About Now," host Ryan Alford interviews Yousuf Ahmed, founder of B-Sides, a sustainable snack brand. Yousuf shares his journey from Goldman Sachs to food entrepreneurship, focusing on upcycling food byproducts into tasty snacks. The discussion covers product development challenges, branding inspired by 80s/90s music, and strategies for scaling the business. Yousuf emphasizes balancing great taste with sustainability and profitability, highlighting the importance of authenticity and operational efficiency. The episode offers insights into building a purpose-driven brand and navigating the complexities of the modern snack industry.TAKEAWAYSTransition from investment banking to food entrepreneurshipBackground in the music industry and its influence on career choicesConcept of upcycling in the food industry and its sustainability benefitsChallenges in product development using upcycled ingredientsImportance of balancing taste and sustainability in consumer productsMarketing strategies for authentic promotion of sustainable snacksTarget audience for sustainable snack products and their preferencesOmnichannel distribution strategy for reaching consumersVertical integration in manufacturing to improve profit marginsInsights on consumer awareness and cultural references in brandingSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Plus no hidden fees or equipment charges. Call 1833 Verizon to switch today. Price guarantee applies to base monthly rate only for new and existing my home customers. Most businesses are just focused on whatever the end product is that they're making. And so trying to convince them, hey, you've got this byproduct. Why don't you invest more money to figure out what to do with the byproduct is just a really tough sell. It took me a while to figure this out because I tried doing like pizza, bagels, all sorts of

stuff. And I was like, oh, this stuff is terrible. And then I started baking cookies doing plays on Pop-Tarts. And that's when everything clicked where I was like, oh, instead of me trying to like shoot more in this ingredient in a direction I wanted to take it, why not like pay attention the ingredient and formulate a product around that. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month.

Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash and checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up guys? Welcome to Write About Now. your number one marketing and business show on Apple Podcasts. I'm Ryan off with your host. We thank you for listening, watching.

Hopefully you're over there on YouTube. Start to blow up there. And, of course, social media. You can consume the show wherever you want to, the short, the long, in the middle. But you're going to want the whole story today. Because, again, we like to bring you all the insights of what's happening now. We could talk about next year. We talked about last year.

It was right about now. That's why we've got the founder. He's the king of crunch of Beas. besides. What's up, Yusuf? Hey, Ryan. How you doing? Good. Yusuf Ahmed, the King of Crunch. I've already given him a name because he's a disruptor. He's, you know, from Goldman Sox to the King of Crunch. I mean, you got quite the story out there. Oh, yeah. You know, I'm a curious guy. I feel like if you're going to try to take a swing in this world, you got to do everything that you can't. I like everything about this package when it hit our desk goes like, okay.

We've got snacks. I'm a snack guy. Snacks. We got crunchy things like tasty flavors. Besides, I got the music play there. You know, so growing up in a very musical family, I love the brand, sustainable. We checked a lot of boxes, Yusuf, in things that seem interesting and disruptive, but also cool. Yeah, you know, I wanted to kind of throw everything against the wall. I thought that there are a couple of different ways that I could approach building a brand. And, you know, you hit them all in the head, right?

Delicious stuff that also happens to be good for you, good for the planet. You know, what more could you want? Exactly. And look, you're right down the road. South Carolina is where we're in Greenville, South Carolina. Born and raised in Atlanta? Was that, did I hear that? Born and raised in Atlanta.

Yeah, born and raised in Atlanta went to undergrad at UGA. Oh, well, I won't hold that against you, but, you know, I'm a Clemson guy. I don't know how much you're into the, you guys. You got to be a college football guy, right? If you went to Georgia. You know, it's so funny. I tried. I tried really hard, but I just, I couldn't get into it.

I was, you know, I, we're talking about the music background. I started my career in the music business, actually, in Athens, a huge music town. And so I spent most of my time at the recording studio there, not at Sanford Stadium. Music, I mean, Goldman Sox. Like, what got you to B-Sides? Let's give a little bit of that founder story of, you know, what got you into all this? If you look backwards, you can kind of connect the dots pretty easily.

So I'm the son of a couple of immigrants who, like, did not want me to work in restaurants or work in food, but, you know, food culture was kind of always top of mind for kind of. I'm used to base both in the U.S. and abroad. And the business manager handles everything with regards to the money, both on the personal and the professional side. So you get kind of a holistic picture of how the business works, how artistry works, how these people kind of function in their everyday lives. And for a young, single guy living in New York City in his early 20s, like it was a dream, but it's also like you're working investment banking hours for

not even close to investment banking pay. So I kind of hung up that apron and like a good millennial, you know, quit my job, traveled around the world, ran out of money, came back to New York, got a job as a dog walker and applied to business school. And then I switched over into investment management. So that's how I went to Goldman Sachs. So I spent the next five years managing money for the top, top 1% of this country. So I was a private wealth manager that basically means if you had 10 million bucks or more of investable assets, you were qualified to become a Goldman Sachs private wealth client. So that category is mostly entrepreneurs. And I did a lot of work in venture capital. And that's the financial side. And then I want to I wanted to basically spend 10 years managing other people's money. And I wanted to do something entirely different. So I took the food out of the back pocket and said, okay, how can I plant a flag here?

And that's essentially how I got to this company. The whole millennial journey there. You got chasing the superstars and managing their money and their problems. And their problems. Yeah. And there are many. Any name dropping you can do? Yeah.

So my biggest clients at the time were Arcade Fire, Cut Copy, GoTia, The Scissors Sisters, Vanessa Carlton, Hot Chip. So it's kind of a broad cross-section of different genres. Some of the artists had heydays, you know, in years prior, but we're still living on residuals. Some of them were just coming into the forefront. And it was a fascinating time because, so this is like 2010, 2011. Spotify really, like it had just started to percolate, but it hadn't changed. kind of a music business entirely. So there was tons of money to be made in the old model, and we were just transitioning into this new kind of streaming model. So lots of personalities,

lots of personality management, you know, part therapist, part accountant. It was always fun. Was it the name? I mean, obviously your own guy, I mean, probably impressed by that, like, but obviously getting to flex your kind of business management, you know, muscle. I mean, was it like the chase of, you know, the buzz of working with celebrity artists, but also getting to do the business out of what you like? Was it the combination of the two? Yeah, it was both. My very first job in the music business was at a recording studio.

I wanted to go to where the artists were. So that was like the natural kind of, okay, every artist has to record an album. Let's go do that. And then it was like, to become a recording engineer, you have to be a special kind of masochist that I just was not. And I wanted to, you know, in your words, kind of flex the business muscle of it and figure out how this, like I said, the music business was in flux back then. And I really wanted to figure out like where the money was going, how to help artists capitalize on different things. So the allure of business management was the peak behind the curtain and, you know, sitting on the same side of the table as a lot of these artists. Yeah, the names are, you know, they make the job, gives it a sense of cachet. There are plenty of artists that you have probably never heard of that I also worked with who also need help, you know. But it's the bigger the artist, kind of the bigger of the personality, and that can start

to become grading over time. Yeah. I'll use the word for you, ego. Your word, not mine. Yeah, I know. You didn't say that. You enjoyed every moment of it. But I've just heard that some of them have egos.

Definitely. It's a fascinating business. And that could be another episode for another day. talking about the evolution of that, the music business. But why the hell do you want to become an entrepreneur, man? I mean, managing other people's money sounds awesome sometimes. I own five companies now. And, you know, it's, I love it.

And I wouldn't go back. But at the same time, was it just you wanted to do your own thing? I think you just phrased it perfectly, right? Like, you love it and you wouldn't go back. Once you kind of scratch the itch, there's no going back. Look, so a couple of different things. One, I'm a super curious person. I think to be an investor, a successful investor, you have to have a sense of curiosity.

And private wealth management, so the way that Goldman Sachs' model worked is here's a phone, here's a computer, go build a book of business. So it was quite entrepreneurial in that regard, right? Like I could go prospect across every sector and, you know, you're just cold calling, dialing for dollars. The dollars just happen to be like very big in size. But to become fluent in the language that a certain sector uses and how that sector is organized with regards to access to capital or how these entrepreneurs themselves became very successful and then getting to the table of the entrepreneur and meeting them and learning about their journey and their goals, all of that was so captivating to me. And it kind of just, I just kept taking it one step further, right?

I basically said, okay, I think I figured out what traits are common to a lot of these successful entrepreneurs. I think I know how the deck is stacked with regards to fundraising. I have a pretty good network here. What's the sector that I really want to take on that I'm really interested in? And food and in particular, upcycling, which I'm sure we're going to touch on at some point. It was a question that nod on me for, man, like over a decade before I actually like decided to plant my flag and say, okay, I'm going to figure this out. And that's, That's how I got into it. Now I can't imagine not doing it.

If you're watching, we do have the goodness here, which I'm going to be taking my first sampling here shortly as we get used to talking about the product. But I tell you what, food innovation, like you had me a food. Then, I mean, innovating, you know, like something like a cheese pot. When I first got this package, I was thinking like back to it. I was a kid, you know, like that was like my first favorite snack was the cheese doodle. I think that's what they were called. But they called cheese doodles or Cheetos, but not just small Cheetos, it's their big round ones. I know exactly what you mean.

Totally. I used to love that stuff too, man. That's why I started on puffs. I feel like every American has this childhood memory, whether it's at summer camp or on road trips or whatever. And you got Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, basically anything from the Edo family, salty, and just, you know, I'm the biggest doom snacker that there is. I'll stand at the pantry and just crush anything that's in there. And so for me, when I wanted to get into food, I knew savory snacks was going to be part of the equation just because I loved them so much. And I wanted to figure out how can we kind of push the boundaries in a admittedly overcrowded hypercompetitive space?

Upcycling. That was the first. You mentioned it a second ago. I want you to talk about product development and what you've learned. But definitely want to go down that upcycling. I mean, I had not heard that term. Now I think I understand it, but explain to me sort of product development and what the hell upcycling is.

You know, to be fair to you and all your listeners, I, uh, upcycling is something that I didn't even know. That was like the catch-all phrase for the sector. And this is something that I had spent a lot of time thinking about until I really rolled up my sleeves and just got, you know, my hands dirty with this stuff. So upcycling in a nutshell is taking buy products from food manufacturing and putting them back into the consumer food system. The easiest kind of example that I tell people is, like, you ever wonder what they do with the leftover oats for making oat milk?

And the answer is usually they get thrown out. And I wanted to figure out what else could we make with those oats besides oat milk. And the crunch puff that you're holding is powered in part by the leftover oats for make an oat milk. And this kind of example, like, exists all throughout the food system. If you think about the leftover grounds from, you know, brewing coffee or the leftover pulp from juice presses or, you know, the leftover grains from brewing beer and distilling alcohol, there are ingredients to be recaptured all throughout the food system. It's literally just back-solving for a supply chain problem. That's essentially what upcycling is. You consider yourself like, I can see use of like in the kitchen.

Like, were you in the kitchen? I mean, literally like in the laboratory kitchen, like coming up with these cheese puff formulations. Yeah, so that's a good question. I didn't actually start with the puff. Like the puff that you're seeing now is a culmination of a lot of different work. The first category that I worked in was actually with the leftover grains from brewing beer. So it's called spent grain. And so I used to live around the corner from a brewery.

They had distribution not throughout the entire state of Pennsylvania. It's kind of local. every month they were putting out 10,000 pounds of spent grain. So multiply that by every microbrewery. Don't even account for the big boys, right? That's a whole different category. And then every microbrewery throughout the United States and just the broader kind of world, it becomes mind-boggling how much of this stuff actually gets thrown out.

And so when I started this whole path, I wanted to figure out, okay, like, what am I actually dealing with here? Like, what does this ingredient look like? What does it smell like, taste like? How can I work with it? How can I get the health department to let me work with it? How do I then scale this? And so the cheese puff is kind of the epilogue of that journey.

I actually started with a super premium line of baked goods. So if you think about breweries, like, I don't know if you're a beer drinker. When I drink beer, I love salty, savory snacks, right? Like, I'll eat pizza at breweries. I'll eat pretzels. I'll eat, you know, crunchy chips. Yeah, boo. Exactly, Southern Boy. That's kind of where my mind went originally, but the problem with that is spent grain. Most of the grains that are left over from brewing beer, 90% of it is barley. And barley, malted barley especially, works terribly in savory products. This is something that like Jewish deli owners have known for a really long time. The malted milkshake or malted milk bars are confections for a reason. Malt works exceptionally well in confectionary products.

So it took me a while to figure this out because I tried doing like pizza, bagels, all sorts of stuff. And I was like, God, all this stuff is terrible. And then I started, you know, baking cookies, doing plays on Pop-Tarts. And that's when everything clicked where I was like, oh, instead of me trying to like shoehorn this ingredient in a direction I wanted to take it, why not like pay attention to the ingredient and formulate a product around that. And so, yeah, the first product category I worked on was, you know, high-end takes on Oreos and Pop-Tarts and Lil Debbie's oatmeal cream pies, which totally. different from, you know, bro and beer, but that's how we ended up there. Why do you think food waste hasn't been tackled more aggressively by legacy brands? This is the sad reality of just the way that kind of our food systems have developed.

It's just not part of their business model. When, let's take, you know, oat milk producers, right? If you take a company like Oatley that produces millions of gallons of oat milk on an annual basis, everything they do is around bringing oat milk to market. So all of their unit economics, all of their costing strategies, all of their production is around that end product. It has nothing to do with the byproduct. That's actually cost to do in business. We have this thing that we produced out. We got to throw it away that's just built into the bottom line. And there's not a lot of incentive to get those companies to reorient around, you know, we call it byproduct valorization. Like what do you do with all these leftovers? And so while there is ample opportunity to create additional revenue streams, most businesses are just focused on whatever the end product is that they're making. And so trying to convince them, hey, you've got this byproduct.

Why don't you invest more money to figure out what to do with the buy product is just a really tough sell. Yeah. So you just went straight for the solution, I guess, of the buy product and then become part of your core business model, correct? Yep. Exactly. How do you balance the whole sustainability with great taste, with upcycling, I mean, a lot of balls to juggle there? Yeah, you know, it's an excellent question because it's something that I've wrestled with for years and continue to wrestle with. And I, you know, I always think I'm getting closer and

closer to that answer. The fact of the matter is consumers, everybody is noble until they get to the cash register. and ultimately it's about flavor and convenience. That's just like the sad reality of humanity. If you asked 100 people, nobody's going to say, screw the environment. But when you really get down to brass tax, trying to change consumer behavior is not a good business strategy.

So to your point about flavor and product, I started with let's make a really good product and let's fold sustainability into that really good product. So that way you don't have to ask a whole lot of the consumer, right? Like, you snack, I snack, everybody snacks to some degree. Here's just another really good snack. Why don't you eat that snack? And, oh, by the way, all this other sustainable stuff went to power that snack.

It's not really, you know, it's kind of like if you think about sustainability, the whole goal is a set of outcomes, right? Like lowering carbon, you know, emissions or reducing plastic waste or whatever. It's a set of outcomes. Now, if you can achieve those same outcomes without having, you know, beat the consumer over the head with, hey, pay more for this because we've done all these things. Like, haven't you accomplished the same goals? So, like, the way that I view sustainability is like just fold it into the business model, make a good product, create branding that resonates with people. And it takes care of itself.

Yeah, smart. I think two people get a little too caught up in that you're right, consumer behavior is very difficult. And more importantly, very expensive. Very expensive. Very expensive. A lot of people have failed in that, either running out of money or running out of the ability to change consumer behavior. And, you know, I'll ask this not being too presumptive, but you kind of answered it with how you balanced, you know, all of those three things.