Rotten: Sickeningly delicious gummy worms with less sugar and zero-waste packaging!
- KLS
- Jul 3
- 11 min read
For the 197th feature of our "Together Talks" campaign, we collaborated with Rotten and Founder, Michael Fisher. Synthetic dye-free, packed with prebiotics, and 60% less sugar. Most gummies flood you with 23 grams of sugar per 30 gram serving, but ours doesn't. Staying in the single digits, our game-changing formula never exceeds 9 grams of sugar. We took candy and made it even better with the help of PhD scientists and 1000s of product testers. Premium ingredients mean premium taste! We added 4g of gut-friendly prebiotic fiber per serving to help support digestive health. Plus, with 2g protein per serving, Rotten is an all around, better for you snack.
"Together Talks" feature # 197: Rotten presented by KLS - Your Trusted Shipping Solutions In The USA
What separates you from your competition? What have been the biggest challenges? Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business? How have you dealt with being the face of the company?
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur? What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?
Story of how it was created?
Rotten is a better for you candy company. We have a line of gummy candy that is low in sugar, packed with prebiotic fiber for gut and digestive health, and is synthetic dye-free. I started the company simply just because it was a product I was looking for and couldn't find.
I grew up eating a ton of gummy candy, especially sour gummies, and I think it's similar with a lot of other people. As you start getting older, and you become more aware of what you're eating, how it's impacting you, your energy, how you feel, how you look, all those things, you start to reevaluate. I also remember reading an article about, what added sugar was doing to all of our diets at the time. I cut out soda at that point and really cut back on candy, but missed it. Candy was this super fun indulgence and often coincided with these fun moments, whether it was watching a movie with friends or going on a road trip or even just snacking and taking a break from whatever I was doing in the afternoon. And I really missed that.
I went out and tried some of the zero to low sugar options out there and didn't love the products. Everything felt healthy. It's kind of what I'll say, it felt like a big compromise from regular candy. The other piece was the branding also felt healthy to me, which kind of took away from those fun, indulgent moments when I young. What I was eating felt kind of a diet or healthy branded. That was the moment where I went out and wanted to start and build something that met some of my needs and ended up talking with a lot of other people.
Part of the early process with Rotten was holding focus groups and interviewing people. I was trying to figure out how they thought about healthy snacking, To understand how they thought about candy, branding, what they liked, what they didn't like, and found a lot of kind of similarities with other people in what I felt too.
What separates you from your competition?
We really think about ourselves as playing in the broader candy category. We are competing against all other candy brands, not just against other brands that maybe are also better for you or healthier. That really just reflects who our shopper is. 70% of our customers report never having purchased another better for you candy brand before. We're very much just attracting this person, this consumer who may have been purchasing conventional candy before and has stopped. One actually super interesting statistic is that more than a third of non-Chocolate candy consumers, the category we play in with, report purchasing less candy in the last year. The number one reason they report doing that is health and diet concerns. Not price concerns, but the number one reason people are purchasing less in our category is due to health and diet. There's a big need for products that can bring those people back to the category and help them feel better about purchasing more candy.
What have been the biggest challenges?
Before Rotten, I was working on the growth marketing side at an early stage E-commerce company. We were selling home health supplies in the family caregiver space, like adult diapers, nutrition shakes. It is huge market. The e-com world was so much fun. I was one of the first employees at that company. We scaled a bunch and raised some venture capital. I really wanted to kind of go out and do my own thing after that experience. That led me to Rotten, but I did not have prior CPG, food and beverage, or manufacturing experience. I had the D2C experience and background that I brought in. We launched Rotten as a direct-to-consumer brand. We still have a large direct-to-consumer channel. But everything else has been a big bump. It has been a fun learning curve.
Goals for upcoming year + Next phase of the company?
Our big focus for the next 12 months is really expanding in retail. A vast majority of candy sales happen in retail, not online. Candy is an impulsive category. People generally want to be buying candy one bag at a time, all things that really support retail as the best channel for candy. While online is growing very quickly in the candy category, we're building a retail brand. The main feedback we get from consumers is "where can I find you in store, I wish I could shop you on my weekly grocery run." Expanding into retail started about six months ago, is the focus for the next 12 months.
What were your concerns to transition to starting your own business?
Early on, I started talking to people in the space, some I had just cold DM'd on LinkedIn and asking friends of friends, who knew anyone kind of in the food and bev space or specifically in candy as well. I got a sense early on how long the process might be and how much production runs might cost based on minimums in the gummy space. I gave myself a sense if I want to do this, what's it going to take to launch this. That was daunting. That was scary because the answer was, it's going to take a lot of time and it's going to take a lot of money.
My mindset early on was how can I have conviction that there's a need for this out in the world. I'm talking to other people that I think are aligning with that same conviction, but how can I get some other kind of data points that show that people want this before really diving in and doing it. That actually led me to launch a Kickstarter campaign, which at the time, we hadn't finished formulating the product. We had a rough kind of profile of our nutritionals and ingredients and we had done early branding. We had our brand identity and our packaging mockups and all that. It was very much a rough MVP of what this was, how we were putting ourselves, what the product profile was going to look like, what the product was, which was gummy worms at the time. It still ended up being our first product.
But doing that was a way for me to put something out there and see if people would buy in and give me a little more conviction on whether to move forward. Ultimately it was super successful. We ended up raising almost four times our goal and got funded in four hours. We definitely got confirmation that this was something. Our thing was something people out there thought was cool, they were excited about, they were going to put money behind it.
How have you dealt with being the face of the company?
That's an interesting question. I'm someone who doesn't love the spotlight. I think early on, before Rotten launched, my hope was to be a total behind-the-scenes founder. We built out this whole brand universe, and as part of the Rotten universe, there's actually a fictional brand founder named Dr. Rotten. My thought was let's build up Dr. Rotten as this fictional awesome character, it doesn't need to be about me. I don't want anything to be about me. I didn't want to be mentioned in articles even.
And it's definitely flipped, not because I wanted to, but because I've just seen what resonates with people and what works. People want to know who the real person is behind the company. Whether it's through building in public on LinkedIn and posting learnings that I've had from the few years in this industry, or whether it's doing podcasts and interviews. I've even recorded ads that we're going to use on Instagram and Facebook and TikTok and, drive people to our website. I've had to step up into those roles because that's what's best for the company.
What have you learned since becoming an entrepreneur?
There's probably two things and honestly, they're advice a lot of people get, but I don't think they really hit home for me until being in this. The first being product, product, product. Having an incredible product that people love is the most important thing you can do. Don't do other things until you have that. Nothing else can save you from a mediocre product.
I'd say the other piece is get something out there sooner. Get the product out there. Which, in some ways, feels like maybe it contradicts having the product be amazing. But I think my learning was no amount of internal testing, even with us, we had the group of Kickstarter backers that we were sending product to and getting feedback from, iterating all that. Even with all of that, we still launched with a product that was not incredible. Nothing can replicate the learnings you're going to get from having actual product out there that you're selling.
I think just going into it, knowing I'm going to launch something not amazing. But I know I'm going into it eyes wide open. The goal is to just get it out there, get feedback and improve it as quickly as I can to get it to the point where the product's amazing. Again, I think it's all stuff you hear people say, but I definitely did not internalize it until I was kind of in it.
What aspect of entrepreneurship do you appreciate the most?
There's a very gratifying feeling seeing a physical product I created out in the world. One question sometimes people ask me is, what's been one of the highlights of the whole experience, and this kind of coincides with that. It is walking into a store and seeing our product on the shelf, there's something just very deeply gratifying about that. Understanding this fully came out of my mind and my effort.
Was there a moment when you felt traction with the product and company?
I think the Kickstarter would be that early one. That was really the first moment. We put something out there and asked people to buy it.
I think another moment would be launching our product direct to consumer and having a couple of retailers reach out directly to us, seeing the product and be interested in it. It felt like, we're breaking through the noise. People see the product, see the brand, and think that it's something unique and exciting. Those felt like early signs that, maybe we were onto something.
What is your why?
I think the customer feedback we get and people's responses, "oh my god, this is so incredible. Thank you for making this." That drives me to get it out there to more people. The other thing is I'm super excited about so many innovations we're working on. it will continue to really expand the space and be, for lack of a better word, super innovative.
Do you have a moment that brings you the most joy?
Seeing the product on shelf would be one.
Another one would be, the other one you say is most commonly said, is after the first manufacturing run. I think a lot of founders experienced this, but we had such a long journey to get the product manufactured. I think it took two and a half years from start to getting that first commercial batch out there. We went through such a long period of time where I had serious doubts whether this thing I worked on, the formula, the branding, the packaging, everything was ever even going to get made commercially. Would it ever be put out there because there was such little manufacturing supply at the time.
Our product was a little unique to manufacturer and we're a small new startup. It was very hard finding the right manufacturing partner. That moment of, "Wow, okay, we did it. It's out there" was validating. There were just a lot of moments during those first two and a half years where the doubt in my mind was, is this ever going to actually see the light of day? Is it just this project I worked on and no one's ever even going to get to have it. It's not going to exist.
All I wanted at that point, my big wish was , even if nothing else works at least I want to have this manufacturing out there. I want to cross that start line even. That was exciting. I felt like a really big accomplishment to even get there, which again, it's funny because it's really, truly the starting point of everything.
Piece of Advice
My big piece of advice, and it's something I've embraced more, I'd say, over the last six or eight months, but it is just share more.
I think for a while, it was hard for me to see how that could apply to me. I'm not the type of founder that wants to record TikTok videos and build in public through video format on TikTok. That's just not natural to me. I think I felt hesitant for how to do that. I'm not on Twitter or X, so I'm not building in public there. Ultimately, finding the place that made sense for me to do it that felt natural has been LinkedIn doing posts, that's been helpful.
It just opens up so many doors because I'm just sharing what we're doing. It's reaching people who are interested in what we're doing and might have an opportunity for us or want to partner in some way. It's another avenue to get visibility out there and share the story. I think finding a way that felt natural to me for building in public was the key to that.
Community Callout
Andrea Hernandez - Snaxshot: She's the first person that found Rotten and has just been a huge supporter. She totally gets the early stage founder of how everything can feel like it's going wrong and no one understands. It can feel like nobody else believes in what you're doing or believes that it's the right thing. She's been an awesome, now a friend to me and just super excited about Rotten. She can bring me back to feeling positive about things when maybe I'm not.
He's become one of my advisors and Andrea is actually the one who connected us. He similarly is just a super positive attitude. We chat frequently and he's been in my shoes as a founder and entrepreneur multiple times before. I think it just helps me get a new perspective on things that maybe feel like they're these huge issues at the time. He reminds me everything's going to be okay. I think as a solo founder, sometimes those people that help with kind of the mindset are sometimes even more important than the tactical just because it is just me.
In Closing
KLS wants to thank Rotten and Founder, Michael Fisher, for today's "Together Talks" feature. Follow along for their journey with their social handles below!
Comments