We recently connected with Alvaro Oliveira and Marina Lopes and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Alvaro and Marina, thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission is:

“Providing practicality to people’s lives at any moment of the day, positively surprising with the versatility that our products offer, always delivering an extremely tasty and pleasant experience for everyone, which is guaranteed above all by the high-quality guidance from the selection of ingredients, going through the whole process until the final product.”

We came with this idea thinking on provide something easy to get ready to eat, very versatile and practical, not just to on the way to make at home, but how to store and have on your hands for any kind of circumstances.

On top of it, our main guidance is the quality. We would like to provide something good, with high quality and healthier as possible, so we came with something that could have these two things reflected on our ingredients and process.

So, we only use – for all what is possible – only natural and organic ingredients. Our products are frozen through a “blast freezer process”, which is the most efficient way to freeze food and make them safe to consume, which allow us to not add any kind of preservatives on our products, and on top of everything, lock in the taste and nutrition of the foods for optimum quality for consumers.

The both products – Cheese Bread and Mini Churros – can be consumed as breakfast, snack, lunch, side of something else, and so many other things.
Once you have them at your freezer and some inspected visit shows up, in a matter of minutes you can serve something really tasty, and easy to make.
If you are going to watch a game at some one’s house, bring them a bag of Cheese Bread and Mini Churros and you will have the perfect savory snack and dessert.

So, that is how our mission was driven and once we are both from Brazil, we have decided to bring to USA these two delights so popular in our country.

Alvaro, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

We are both (me and my wife Marina) from Brazil and we are living in USA since 2015. We came to support part of my family which were here, going through a rough time. The original plan was stay for some time – maybe about 1 year – just enough to help them out then probably go back to Brazil, but to make a long story short, here we are.

During this time, I have worked on a business our family already have here and Marina started to dedicate herself to things she already liked, but didn’t have time to do when we were in Brazil – Food.

She took classes for all kind of things related with food. Starting with food pictures, food styling and then going trough food preparation. She learned how to do Gluten Free breads, plant based food and took different classes at Institute of Culinary in NYC.
Then when we already have decided to make this a business, she got her Food Management Process certificate (Food Protection Manager, approved by MDARD and Safe Food Program in Michigan.

So we new that we would like to do something related with food, but still didn’t know what specifically.

Going through all kind of researches we decided we would like to do something simple, but that could be fit from to the most basic to the highest sofiscated moments.

We have decide our mission would be to provide practicality to people’s lives at any moment of the day, positively surprising with the versatility that our products offer, always delivering an extremely tasty and pleasant experience for everyone, which is guaranteed above all by the high-quality guidance from the selection of ingredients, going through the whole process until the final product packaged on the freezer.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Defiantly resilience is more than a word, but needs to be the main guidance for whoever wants to start a new business. A lot of things will goes right and on the end you will be succussed, but it only happens if you have the resilience to go trough the moments when the things are not going right and straight.
And trust me, so many things are going to happen way different than you planned or expected.
You will need to be 100% committed and available for your new business, because you never will know when something unexpected will happen.
We went trough a big remodel, which involves City Hall whit so many different traders, Fire Departments, State Departments, etc.
During the construction period we had part of the renovation done in violation of one of the codes and after everything was ready, with only the final inspection missing, we had to undo and redo everything again.
This involved 3 traders and a lot of time, material and money that was not foreseen in the original budget.
Our business was about to start – after almost 1 year working on the remodel , and we had a huge step back.
That is the moment you need to keep you calm. make a good replan, talk with your traders and reset everything.
And of course, we are pointing only one case here. It happens all the time and don’t e fooled thinking that after you get tis done and open your business this type of thing will never happen again. They will, and you will need to reset again and move forward.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

As everything in life, you need to start crawling, then you are going to walk and then in some moment you will be able to run and try to learn how run faster and faster.

This happens with your equipments, tools, process, and materials.

The main point is to be open to talk with all kind of person, listen everybody whom is envolved some how on the business and do a lot of researchs – constantly.

We started buyng our supplies at normal grocery stores, some of them in 2lbs bag or even less. To get in the point to be supplied by a big suplier, when you have a brand wich is not really well knowed, it demands a lot of emails, calls, person visits, etc. – dedication.

The same happen with tolls, equipments, and everything else.

Manufacturing your own product can be challenging from all points of view, but makes you stay close to your main asset – the quality of your product.
It is a constantly learning process, and you need to be open for that.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.flavoreatfoods.com
• Instagram: @flavoreatfoods
• Facebook: flavoreatfoods