Meet the Maker Interview: Charlene Li, Founder of EATABLE

Meet Charlene, the Canadian Co-founder of Eatable, premium popcorn infused with wine and spirits and crafted with natural ingredients.

Can you tell us a little bit about your business, EATABLE, and how you got started?

Back in 2017, we were living in Boston, and I had a fantastic gig working at a Boston real estate startup. While there, my husband Vince found his way into a food incubator program called Commonwealth Kitchen. We've always had a passion for food and entertaining. So, naturally, he found this community, got creative and learned the ins and outs of running a food business from start to finish.

At the end of that intensive program, there was a pitch competition where he got to present a food product in front of a panel of judges and buyers. He made a scotch whiskey-infused caramel popcorn we called “Whisky On The Pops” - we've actually been making this popcorn for years for parties, barbecues, and whenever we had people over.

Vince ended up placing in the Top 2 and suddenly we thought, "This idea actually might have legs." It was a light bulb moment. We decided to pack our bags and move back to Toronto, where we're both from, to be closer to our families. I quit my startup job shortly afterwards, joined him in this new venture, and we decided to see if we could turn this into a bonafide business. 

In the beginning, people thought we were crazy. They were asking, "You’re making popcorn now… Can you actually make a living with that?" And we honestly thought we were crazy too. We were newish parents and newly unemployed. At the time, my son was almost two years old, and we just thought "It's now or never. What do we have to lose? We can always go back to our jobs later if things don’t work out." 

So, after we moved back, we worked on our initial flavours for almost a year before we filled up our garage with 10 skids of shipping boxes, set up our website, and started doing our first orders literally from our kitchen, on the stovetop and in our oven. All those cliche startup stories you hear of people working from their garage… that literally was us.

Alcohol and popcorn is such an unlikely pairing. It's very innovative, so what inspired it’s creation?

When we were trying to brainstorm flavours, we were inspired by the food combinations what we like to eat anyway—our favourite drink in one hand, and munchies in the other. Sometimes you really want that sweet indulgence, but not so sweet that you feel sick after eating a couple of kernels. 

We thought, "Why not just put a unique little spin on flavours that people are used to already, like caramel corn, but with a slightly boozy kick?" One very popular flavour is “Pop the Champagne” - champagne infused sugar crystals sprinkled on top of Belgian white chocolate covered kettle corn. So it's classic flavours that a lot of people already love and are used to, and we're just adding that little punch of something exciting, making it a grown-up snack.

One of the backbones of our flavour creation has been to stick with natural ingredients because REAL ingredients make a huge difference in the taste. We knew that it was a challenge from day one because many packaged snacks have artificial ingredients to extend the shelf life.

When we were doing our recipe development, we found a commercial kitchen space close to where we were living, run by Paris trained pastry chefs, and we worked alongside them. They helped coach us on working with chocolate and the proper temperatures. And everything was just so much harder than we thought it was. Before we even launched our actual initial recipes, it took almost a year of tinkering and perfecting.

We had them taste it, our family and friends taste it and we even put it in front of chefs and even Sommeliers to ensure that flavour and texture were good. I think people were super excited about the idea because nobody had seen that specific combination before.

You see cordials, and alcohol-inspired gummies already in the market. But nobody had tried to do it with popcorn before. Vince is the master chef here, but the challenge of working with popcorn is that it’s a very fickle food that’s very susceptible to moisture. It was just finding a unique way to do the infusion. We launched with three flavours, and now we've got five and plenty more in the works.

What does a typical day look like in business if you have one?

In a start-up, everyone does a little bit of everything! I am usually the one that works on the financial, marketing, admin, and sales side of things. Vince is our “Master Chef” - He's the technical and product expert, and the one overseeing all the production and operations.

Very early on into our business, our customers would often ask which brick-and-mortar stores they could find our product at. And that helped us realize we had to find a way to be more accessible to customers offline instead of just online. After all, as a food business, people are still used to going into their grocery stores and picking up a bag.

That's when we started separating our roles so that we could operate more efficiently. I'm usually dealing with customers on a day-to-day basis. Right now, we've got a team of five working – we are lean and mighty! These days, I mostly work from home while caring for 2 youg kids, and Vince is at our office full-time or in the back of the house, making and cranking out products with the rest of our team. We're both involved in a lot, but I would say the most challenging thing about corporate life versus entrepreneurial life is your day doesn't end at 5:00 pm. 

For us, we started this to live life on our terms. Being parents, we wanted a way where we could work towards striking that right balance of work-life and family life. Because our prior corporate jobs were so demanding in terms of the hours, perhaps starting your own business could afford us, not now, but down the line, flexibility to carve out our own schedule. We've got two kids now, so our family is our number one motivation for this. 

I'm hoping that by turning this business into something bigger than ourselves; we can set an example for our kids that they can craft the kind of life they want.  Now with online business and remote working, there are new ways of working that didn’t exist years ago. And it's okay if you studied something in school and you are not actually doing what you studied… These days, so many of us are not anyway!

You talked a little bit about giving back. I saw on your website that actually a portion of every online sale gets donated to Second Harvest, so I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about that.

For sure. Being in a food manufacturing business, we see firsthand how much waste there is, whether that is excess production, which we try really tightly to control. But as we learned more about the food industry we’ve learned there is, sadly, a LOT of food waste that exists.

And at the same time, there's a lot of people out there that are in need as well. As a food business, we wanted to find a way to give back to the community so that every dollar we would put in has some tangible benefit. We came across Second Harvest Canada - They take excess food from various sources, like grocery stores and manufacturing facilities and re-divert it back into the community via multiple hubs that will coordinate getting that food to people in need. 

Every dollar that gets donated to this organization results in two meals going to someone in need. We found it very easy to quantify the amount of impact that we would be making. As an eCommerce business, we wanted to find a way to give back and allow our customers to give back, so we donate a portion of every online sale to Second Harvest. We also have an option at our checkout where anyone who wants to round up the purchase and donate a dollar and give two meals to someone in need which doubles our impact. We've only been part of it for less than two months but we've probably already contributed over 2,000 meals since then. We've been so pleasantly surprised that most people who end up ordering online do end up donating as well. Our customer base is super generous, and I've been so filled with gratitude just to see that happening in front of our eyes. That makes me happy that we're providing a way that people can enjoy a great product while also easily contributing to a great cause.

Well, switching gears, we have to go back to flavour because I'm curious. What's your favourite flavour and why?

Oh, man. You're asking me to pick between my children or something! I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Whisky On The Pops because that was our original flavour - We call it “the OG”. I can't tell you how much popcorn we both ate before we came up with an ideal flavour balance for that, so I will always think fondly of it.

But I will say our number one selling flavour right now is “Pop The Champagne”, which was the champagne-infused sugar crystals sprinkled on top of the Belgian white chocolate. The sugar crystals are popping candy - it literally POPs in your mouth. So when you eat the popcorn, you feel these little popping, tingling sensations. I love that one because it gives you that extra sensory experience when you're eating it.

We've got five flavours now, Whisky On The Pops, Pop the Champagne, our third one is a Peanut Butter, and Merlot infused jelly, so that one is a blend of two different types of kernels. Then we followed up with Pop the Salt and Tequila, a follow-up to our whisky's original caramel flavour. And we also had a popping peach Bellini, a light, crisp peach wine-infused candy with a splash of Prosecco.

Any new flavours in the works?

A lot of people have been asking us for a savoury flavour. I'm personally super excited about this because this is one of my favourite cocktails, but we've got a Caesar flavour coming. We did a show last year, where we collaborated with Foodism magazine and Smirnoff for this limited-edition Caesar flavour popcorn alongside a Caesar bar at their booth.

The challenge with food is always balancing people's expectations and lots of people's different tastes because what tastes good to me may not sit as well with you. We're always listening to feedback from people who try our product because we always want to improve.

How has partnering with Chocolate Soup impacted your business?

The importance of sleep! It sounds so cheesy, honestly, but just because both of us are parents and we've got two young kids. I used to be an A-type personality who was “go, go, go” all the time. If I was doing something, I had to get it done. I will burn the midnight oil to do it. And I think this year, with the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, and just being so limited in the things you could do and the social interactions you can have, it really took a toll on our mental health and wellbeing.

It made us question why we were doing certain things. This year, we learned to be more kind to ourselves. It's the first time that I can even remember, for as long as I've been alive, where the whole world has been just as confused as you are. I think, as a business owner, you often look around you, and envy somebody else who seems to have their stuff figured out. You're always battling this whole self-confidence thing, and everything is in your mind. This year, I feel like it got amplified tenfold just because of all of the complexities in our world.

I learned that it's okay to not have all the answers right now. That was honestly causing me a lot of stress during the pandemic because I felt like as a mom, as a business owner, I needed to have everything figured out. I needed to have a backup plan. And all this unpredictability just made it hard for us to plan anything. A business owner, I’m always putting our customers first. As a mom, I'm always putting my kids first. At this time, I have learned to be aware of what I need, and it’s ok to ask for help and time for myself when I need it.

Okay. What does the future look like for Eatable?

I'm super grateful for the momentum that we've had in two short years since our launch. There's so much more that we want to do. One is working on creating new flavours, so we now have a professional chef on the team-in-house, creating unique flavours. That's been super exciting.

And we also want to grow our retail presence to amplify EATABLE’s brand awareness. But, of course, retail is becoming quite a challenging landscape now, so we're treading carefully. In 2020, we became available across Canada at Saks OFF 5th and at Indigo stores.

It's so surreal - When you go in and see our product on a shelf, it's just such an incredible experience. I still can't believe it. I have people telling us "Hey, I saw EATABLE popcorn on the shelf." And they're sending me photos, posting it on social media. And I'll never get tired of seeing it—I still don't think it has hit me yet.

I think that even just figuring out how to operate within the new normal will be a priority for us next year, and keeping things safe while continuing to grow. We want to expand our team. Again, in this environment, hiring is a challenge. It's not just about getting people to help, but it's getting the right people.

We are learning a lot in this process, too, because I find that, as an entrepreneur, you're used to doing things yourself and then feeling like you're the best person to do the job all the time, which is not true! In building our team, we want to make sure that we're creating an environment where people are comfortable coming to work, and people are excited to grow with us. We’re just getting started, so we’re excited and optimistic for what’s to come!

A big thank you to Charlene for sharing her story in our Meet the Maker series. You can follow along her business journey on Instagram!

P.S. — To learn more about including Eatable products in your next Chocolate Soup employee recognition gift box order, please contact us at [email protected].