We were lucky to catch up with Amanda Sanchez recently and have shared our conversation below.
Amanda, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
The origins of Olla begin on a dusty trail in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Several years ago, my uncle passed away before he had the opportunity to fulfill his dream of completing the infamous John Muir Trail in the Sierra Nevadas. My mom, Christine, longed to honor his wish and asked me if I wanted to join her on the trail and scatter her brother’s ashes. We had little to no backpacking experience prior this, but ended up following in love with it! This trip sparked the tradition of backpacking 1-2 weeks each summer and thoroughly propelled us into the world of backpacking and hiking.
In the beginning of our backpacking careers, we took the safe route and purchased pre-made, freeze dried meals to make our trip planning easier. Each trip we gained more experience, and consequently, became more confident in ourselves as hikers. Christine began to experiment with creating the meals as she came to better intimately know what backpacker’s want to eat when they are starving and exhausted. The bottom line is that when you are hungry and at the end of your rope, you do not want bland food or food that is difficult to prepare. Overtime, she perfected the ingredients of our favorite meals, the dehydration process, portion sizes, and crafted more and more meals. Our backpacking team would eventually pay Christine to meal plan for them because of how much more tasty her food was compared to the store-bought meals. Lastly, we were confident that her meals would never leave us immediately hungry afterwards due to being prepared with poor quality ingredients.
The standard rice and beans quickly became my husband and I’s favorite meals as we gravitated towards comfort food after a long day of grueling hiking. Even after we left the trail, we would request rice and bean care packages because they were the perfect meal to throw together during the busyness of the week. We would take them with us skiing, on road trips, tailgates, and would eventually begin to share them with friends. Finally, I wondered why not monetize them? We had already tested them on the trail and and with friends, essentially giving us an already proven product.
The confidence of having a product that had already been tested by the most picky of critics, grouchy hikers, was enough to affirm our business decision. We jumped into Olla similarly to how we jumped into the John Muir Trail, with zeal and little to no experience. We were excited to share Christine’s authentic Mexican freeze dried rice and beans with the customers and believed wholeheartedly in our products. We had tried other rice and beans on the market and were repeatedly disappointed by the lack of flavor. We were filling a gap in the market that had not provided amazing tasting, high quality Mexican-style rice and beans like Olla did.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Christine’s background in nutrition has been a driving force behind starting Olla. Her passion for holistic health and clean food is what originally inspired her to make our meals. She was tired of the empty calories and poor nutritional value that was commonplace in the backpacker foods market and the high price tag that came with high quality foods. I came to understand the value of high quality food as I pushed my body in the mountains and quickly came on board with her vision of creating a brand around incredible tasting, healthy food. With my degree in business administration and professional background in supply chain and customer service, I felt prepared to start a business. In sum, I would manage the business and Christine would handle the cooking.
Since Olla was our first business, we did not want to overwhelm ourselves with a huge vision and instead chose to focus on two main products, rice and beans. These two items had routinely proven themselves to be a crowd favorite among our backpacking group and friends, which is why we were driven to choose these two items out of all of the meals that Christine had created. The decision to focus on them has enabled us to perfect the recipes and encouraged us to be creative. Since starting with just plain pinto beans and Spanish rice, we have since added cilantro lime rice, black beans with red bell pepper, pintos beans with nopales, and ranchero cowboy beans. I am proud of our choice to stay focused on these two food groups, rather than let ourselves become too excited with our ideas and spread ourselves too thin. In the future, we would love to expand our food options, but for now, we want to stick with what we know best because we do not want to deliver products that are anything but excellent.
While Olla’s beginnings are rooted in backpacking, our hope is that they would not just be seen as camper food. These meals were created with the needs of a backpacker in mind, including; long-term shelf life, ease of preparation, taste, quality, and nutrition. All of these needs are just as valuable to the typical consumer. Our goal is to make the consumer more comfortable and familiar with freeze dried foods, so that they may eventually see them not only as long-term shelf stable foods, but also as a tool to meal prep with during the week. Our products are versatile and can be kept as emergency food due to being freeze dried, however, our hope is that they will not set on the customer’s shelves for ten years and will instead be enjoyed weekly. The long term vision of Olla is to craft freeze-dried, staple foods that the everyday person can keep stored in their pantry and rely on when they they are busy, camping, or just don’t feel like cooking!
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Starting Olla has been one of the biggest challenges I have taken on in my adult life and has required more resilience than some of the largest peaks I have summited. In my day to day life, I work professionally in the supply chain of a large semiconductor company, and consequently, an apt in foreseeing potential issues in logistics. When I was first considering starting Olla, I ran through multiple financial scenarios and finally decided to pursue Olla only after several months of running simulations. I pride myself on being able to find potential weak points in planning and strategies, however, Olla shattered this notion of myself once I quickly realized that I had severely overshot how many products could be produced per freeze dryer.
My entire forecast and pricing strategy had been based on units made per freeze dryer and I had calculated this key metric incorrectly. Deflated and disappointed in myself, I pondered how I could have been so wrong and why I did not spend more time understanding the freeze drying process. I could not go back and was reaping the consequences of my poor planning, and now had to decide how I wanted to move forward. Should I sell the freeze dryers and scrap Olla all together? Was there anything that we could do get us out of this hole?
Christine and I surveyed our options and decided to focus on how we could improve the cycle time of the freeze dryer. We began to dive into the technology and science behind the freeze drying process and became our own subject matter experts. We watched hours of Youtube, got on the phone with manufacturers of our machines, and continued to push forward. We ran tests and tried a variety of experiments by playing with the conditions, such as lowering the temperature of the room the machines were in, freezing the food beforehand, separating the food components. With each test, we recorded the results and slowly began to understand what changes worked or did not work. Diligence and perseverance has kept us in the game and our cycle times have been improved as a result.
Hurdles and seemingly impossible summits are inevitable to any small business owner and must be taken in stride. I have learned that the key to starting a business is being adaptable because there are always going to be unforeseen issues out of your control, no matter how much you plan. When we face our next obstacle, I am positive that we will face it with more confidence because I know that we now have experience on our side because we chose to push on.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Our vision for Olla was for it to be a truly local business at the heart of the community in Columbia, TN. In order to build our reputation locally, it was really important for us to be face to face with the customer and to interact with the local community. Our main means of achieving this has been by attending the farmers markets in the area, including First Fridays, Mule Town flea market, and North Bedford.
A challenge with Olla has been getting past the perception of freeze dried as being “astronaut food” or “prepper food.” At first, some customers have mistakenly thought that we are selling coffee or candies because of the bags that the rice and beans come in and are typically surprised when we correct them. The farmer’s markets have been very valuable because it enables us to hand out samples and explain what freeze dried foods are. Not only have we been able to get the customer’s excited about the convenience and incredible taste of freeze dried foods, but we also have created repeat customers. As the customer’s get to know us when they see us each week, they have become loyal and search for us when they can.
Incredible products are very important to a successful business, however, I would also argue that customer connection with the brand and business’s story are vital when launching a new business. Customers are more likely to purchase from a business that they have an emotional connection with, and for this reason, I believe that our participation in the farmer’s markets has been the main reason behind the success of our positive reputation.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://ollafoods.us/
- Instagram: ollafoods.us
- Facebook: ollafoods.us
- Linkedin: olla-freeze-dried-foods