We recently connected with Eric Weninger and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Eric, thanks for joining us today. Can you recount a story of an unexpected problem you’ve faced along the way?
I started bringing salted maple syrup out of the kitchen and onto big adventures & endurance races in the late 2000s. At the time I was using little flip-top plastic bottles, which were not ideal but better than fragile glass, and the maple was way more delicious & digestible than commercial gels so I made due. We started maple farming in 2011, and I immediately began researching the equipment necessary to fill flexible pouches. The equipment was very complex and expensive, so it was financially way out of reach as we tried to get our fledgling farm to support itself. In 2020 we put all our resources into developing our Maple Energy pouches, and worked with a co-manufacturer & supplier that had an expertise in packaging. The concept was to bring Maple Energy into the backcountry & on big adventures, so the pouches had to be rugged. We tested prototypes by sending them on adventures with friends all over the US; bikepacking, trail running, backcountry skiing, whitewater paddling, backpacking, etc. We received very good feedback about durability on pouch material and cap style, so we moved forward with production. In spring of 2021 we filled 75,000 pouches with 2 years of our farms maple syrup production, and launched Embark Maple Energy to the world!
One week later I was volunteering at a trail day, and found elderberry maple leaking in my lunch box. Puzzled, I examined the pouch and discover the material we had received from the manufacturer was not what we had tested nor ordered, and was missing the “high strength” layer! No-one in the supply chain took responsibility (this was 2021) and we were left to navigate this on our own. We did not feel comfortable selling less-than-rugged pouches to folks we knew were going to take them on their big adventures, risking a sticky packaging failure. We had put every drop of maple syrup we had harvested for two years into these pouches, not to mention leveraged our farm to fund production. We literally bet the farm, Bree was 6 months pregnant with Sylvan (our son) and after all that investment we didn’t have a product we could sell to support ourselves and our employees.
One suggestion was to “reclaim” the Maple Energy by cutting the pouches open and pouring them out, but this would have been incredibly wasteful in every account. We decided to hit the road with our “delicate” pouches, volunteer at every endurance event in the Midwest that would welcome us, and hand out our “prototype” pouches as samples. We were able to then tell the story of our farm, the packaging disaster, and give a sample-with-a-disclaimer that we’re working on rugged pouches. Over the next two years we built strong connections with cyclists & runners, race directors and shop owners while we worked on a second production run. In late 2022 we were able to get through a second production run with the rugged packaging, and finally have a product we felt good selling.
Eric, 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?
I got into endurance mountain biking in the late 2000s as a mental health outlet. I was transitioning to a desk job that kept me indoors a lot more than ever, in a city with less access to adventure than I had ever experienced. I still hadn’t made the connection between outdoor physical activity and feeling good, but knew something had to change in my day-to-day life.
I needed more purpose working outside, and started putting together business plans to start a small farm. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but had and still have a strong connection to my grandparent’s farm that I visited as a kid. Bree & I met right when I was trying to figure this stuff out, and we planned and started a maple syrup farm together in 2011. Her lifelong passion has been good food, was managing a local food coop, and grew up on a small organic farm. She quit her full-time job in 2015 to grow our first product line, B&E’s Trees Bourbon Barrel Aged Maple Syrup, and get the farm on stable footing so I could join her a few years later.
I quit my full-time job right as the 2017 maple season was kicking off. I had been dreaming and planning of this for almost 10 years, and it finally was happening. We weren’t yet financially sustainable, but we were on our way. When the pandemic hit we were on the cusp of financial stability, upending much of the work we had done growing retailers and customers. Our sales dropped by 50%, so we had to do something different.
Like a lot of people, we were going outdoors to find some sense of normalcy in 2020. This felt like the right time to re-visit the Maple Energy idea I had when endurance racing & adventuring in the late 2000s. We leveraged every resource available to us and scrapped together enough capital and equipment to get through our first production run.
Embark Maple Energy is organic maple syrup from our Wisconsin farm, with a pinch of sea salt. This provides the energy & nutrition you’d find in commercial energy gels, but is WAY more delicious & digestible. We package it in 320 calorie, 3 oz resealable pouches. The cap means you can have as much or little at one time as you like, and there is no sticky mess when you’re done. This is also more than 3-times the size of commercial gels, which is significant during endurance activities as nothing comes close to how well Embark works. We also developed the recipes so they can be multi-use; straight from the pouch for energy, mix in water for a hydration aid, or celebrate the day with camp cooking/cocktails!
We’ve volunteered at a lot of grassroots cycling & running ultra races, so people know us from showing up to support them at these hard events. We’re very energetic and dress as foxes at aid stations sharing “Good Energy” along with our Maple Energy. We run a checkpoint at the Arrowhead 135 Winter Ultra, where temperatures dip into the -40s. Events like this are about a community of people attempting something really difficult, often navigating something bigger than the race itself. We celebrate simply being out there, giving it your all regardless of how fast you are or what place you get. There are a lot of analogies between life and ultra races, and our approach to both is “community over competition.” We’re all doing this life thing together, so lets support each-other as we navigate our paths to being our best selves.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We’re a very small company with minimal financial resources. The foundation of our marketing has been to volunteer at cycling & running events, and personally show up to meet people, tell our story, and share a product sample. This started as a need when we were navigating our packaging disaster, but over the years has grown into part of our brand identity and reputation. Our logo is a fox, and to elevate the playfulness of being outside we started dressing up as foxes ourselves, led by myself. We didn’t buy professionally made costumes, instead we made them out of red long-underwear onesies with a homemade pin on tail, as well as ears attached to our hats and/or helmets. You can’t miss Embark at any event as we’re almost always the only underpants foxes around! People will try a sample during a race, enjoy it and remember the Good Energy from the silly fox. It’s all around a very fun way for folks to try our product while also experiencing who we are.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We often joke that we’ve never had two years in a row where we’ve been able to just focus on optimization. It feels like every year some event causes us to step back and look at what is happening, reevaluate our plan and then change direction. To some degree I think that’s how businesses evolve. The largest pivot we made was during 2020, when everything line up to develop and launch Embark Maple Energy. We had been very active expanding how people were using maple syrup by leaning into the culinary & cocktail scene, but our real passions remained outside. Working and playing outdoors made us feel more complete, and we wanted to help more people get outdoors and pursue happier versions of themselves. A lot of visioning went into what Embark could be, and honestly it was as much about the life we wanted to live and how we wanted to participate in the world as it was about pivoting our business. We were putting everything into running a small business, so we wanted it in turn to put as much Good Energy into the world as we could. We’re almost four years into the Embark pivot, and while we’re still working towards being financially sustainable, we feel really good about the path we’re on because of the people we’ve met along the way.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.embarkmaple.com/
- Instagram: embarkmaple
- Facebook: embarkmaple
- Other: [email protected]
Image Credits
Brandie Myhre Embark Maple