After years spent in kitchens across the country, Chris Kirby was burnt out.
The restaurant lifestyle was demanding and all encompassing, and the 26-year-old found himself not doing much else besides working and going to the bars after a long shift.
“I kept waking up in the morning like, ‘Man, life has to be about more than this,'” Kirby, now 38, tells CNBC Make It.
Kirby decided that his life was in need of reinvention. He left his job, packed his bags and flew to from Austin to Maryland to move back in with his parents. He enrolled in a local community college with a plan.
“I was gonna humble myself, move back home, do what I needed to do to get into a school where I could finish my bachelor’s degree,” he said. “I went from the ‘Work hard, Play Harder’ lifestyle to waking up at 5 a.m. to study and build my vision.”
After a year, he was accepted to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. As part of his application, Kirby had highlighted his status as a non-traditional student — he would be enrolling as a mid-twenties undergrad — and explained that he hoped to use the school and his professors to help him fulfill his ambition of starting a business.
More than 10 years later, Kirby’s plan has paid off in spades. Ithaca Hummus is sold in more than 8,000 retailers in the US and has raked in more than $150 million in lifetime sales over the past decade.
Here’s how he turned Ithaca Hummus from a farmers market pitch to a household name.
Filling a ‘culinary gap’ with hummus
During his first visit to the Ithaca, New York university as an accepted student, Kirby scoped out the local farmers market and grocery stores to see if he could identify a “culinary gap” where he could plant his flag.
“By the time I arrived on campus, I already knew that hummus was the product and the farmers market was the place where I was going to launch it,” he said.
Starting a business on a budget wasn’t easy, but the relatively simple and affordable ingredients hummus called for made it achievable for someone with “no money” to spare.
Kirby bought a massive stick blender for $450 and spent a few hundred more on the 40-quart pots he needed to cook the chickpeas. He opted to squeeze his lemons by hand because an industrial juicer would’ve cost him $1,000.
All in all, he estimates that his startup costs were between $3,000 and $4,000 before he was able to make his first batch of hummus.
From there, he began the difficult process of juggling his schoolwork with his work on Ithaca Hummus.
Kirby did his best to schedule all his classes for early in the morning, which allowed him to leave school around 12 or 1 and spend the rest of the day making product. On the weekends, he’d lug his wares to the farmers market and work to get his hummus in front of as many customers as possible.
“I would sit in class and type up invoices in QuickBooks, just waiting for the minute when class was over so that I could dart out the door and make deliveries as quickly as possible,” he said. “I was maniacal about sales. ‘Sell more, sell more, sell more.’ It was all I thought about.”
Despite the fact that Kirby found himself working “way harder” than he ever did while he was in the restaurant world, there was one key difference that that kept him doing: he was working inside of his own vision instead of someone else’s.
“I got inspired thinking about how I could scale it up,” he said. “How could I take this thing that’s amazing when you have it at a farmer’s market or in a restaurant, but always just can’t quite clear the chasm into mass mainstream without losing its identity and becoming this fraction of a shell of what it actually was when it was started?”
Slow and steady growth
Ithaca Hummus’ flavors have helped the brand stand out from the competition.
Ithaca Hummus
By the time graduation rolled around, Kirby knew that Ithaca Hummus was here to stay.
He enlisted a co-packer to ramp up his production capabilities and slowly began expanding into grocery stores and restaurants in Upstate New York.
Selling a product with such a short shelf life limited how quickly Ithaca Hummus could expand, something that Kirby says actually helped the business become stronger in the long run. Rather than increasing Ithaca’s geographic footprint as much as possible, Kirby and his team focused on maximizing sales in their existing territory.
“It made me take it slow and really go deep instead of wide, which resulted in higher velocities and better sales,” he said. “I was able to have in-depth conversations and gain way more knowledge working with five Wegman’s locations than I ever would have trying to deal with 80 of them right out of the gate.”
Indeed, the brand’s reputation soon outpaced the company’s ability to keep up with demand.
“We’ve turned down customers, a lot of them over the years, because we knew we weren’t ready for them,” he said, listing Target, Walmart, Costco and Kroger as examples of retailers whose demand Ithaca Hummus wasn’t able to meet early on.
Kirby has resisted overtures from investors and venture capitalists who’ve wanted a piece of Ithaca Hummus, because the company is profitable and because he’s focused on long term success rather than short term gains.
“When you bring misaligned groups onto the cap table, that can threaten a lot of that,” he said. “Investors want to make money. That’s great. I want to make money, too. But I can do that. I have a business that will do that as long as I stay focused on the unit economics that drive profitability.”
Ithaca Hummus is on track to bring in more than $50 million in revenue this year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. The hummus comes in 10 flavors, with each 10-ounce square tub retailing for around $7.
Kirby isn’t shy about the ambitions he has for his hummus company.
“Our goal is to become the number one brand in our category,” he says. “If we keep making the right decisions one day at a time and doing the right thing on behalf of our consumers, I see no reason why we can’t get there with enough time.”
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