We recently connected with Sari Kern and have shared our conversation below.

Sari, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission at Zen Stax is to balance indulgence and nutrition, and streamline food preparation, freeing up our customers’ time for what they love, rather than being tied down by dishes.

The journey began with my passion for creating plant-based, superfood-packed pancakes for my kids. Experimenting with unique flavors sourced from the orchard in my parents’ backyard, I extended this culinary delight to friends and family. The recurring question, “Why not start a pancake company?” was constantly at the back of my mind.

Having a business school background, I understood the importance of a distinctive value proposition beyond just selling pancakes or offering another pancake mix in a crowded market. The breakthrough came one night in January 2022, during my 20th week of pregnancy with my third child. I recognized a gap in the market for families seeking a healthy batter with no convenient solutions available. The vision crystallized – a wet batter that customers could effortlessly pour and flip, saving valuable time in the morning. Time better spent sharing a meal with family rather than dealing with the hassle of ingredient retrieval, mixing, measuring, and cleanup. Adding superfoods to the batter elevated our pancakes beyond a mere carb and sugar vessel, turning them into a balanced breakfast option.

Zen Stax is a family venture, crafted with the involvement of my boys – Kai, Bodhi, and Jaxon, who proudly hold the titles of Chief Tasting Officers. Unlike my previous data consulting company, Zen Stax enables us to work together, fostering a unique family dynamic. Kai, in addition to being a top salesman, is learning valuable lessons in business, profitability, marketing, math, and various other essential concepts and skills through our journey with Zen Stax.

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?

My professional journey has been both diverse and exhilarating. I started my career as a professional SCUBA diver right out of college. Eventually, with I decided to follow in the steps of my mom, who is an ER nurse, and started nursing school. While in school, I worked as a professional poker player. I worked in ER and trauma as a nurse throughout LA and was eventually recruited to run an ER & ICU in some dodgy parts of LA. I worked in healthcare leadership for a while focusing on strategy, operations, profitability and staffing matrices for various start-ups. During this time I had my first kid and started business school when he was a year old as I had fallen in love with the business side of everything I was doing. I eventually started my own data strategy consulting firm (Alpha Data Strategies). This was my full-time job when I dreamed up Zen Stax.

My profound love for Hawai’i, though I am not native to the islands, is infused into the Zen Stax brand. Embracing a vegan lifestyle, my family and I embody Hawaiian ideals by caring for our malama (land), being pono (cultivating peace and harmony), and practicing kokua (selflessly helping others).

Most of my free time is spent exercising, playing with my kids, husband, and two Australian Shepherds, and donating my time to various philanthropic causes.

I am on the board and the chair of the Development Committee for Aviva Family & Children’s Services (www.aviva.org), I serve on the board of Reef Check (www.reefcheck.org), and I am an ACT member of the Anti-Defamation League.

This journey has led me dream up Zen Stax, which is gourmet, plant-based, superfood-packed pancake batter.

Zen Stax balances indulgence and nutrition as well as helping with life balance by providing families with a wet pancake batter that is also nutritionally packed.

We sell a frozen, wet batter in a pouch, ready to pour-and-flip, so you can sleep in and make pancakes.
Our product is incredibly delicious, easy to make, and loaded with nutrition. We freeze it since we don’t use any preservatives, and customers have the freedom to make it when they want (it lasts over a year frozen).

The future has proven to be health-conscious convenience products and that is exactly what we offer. (Plus it’s vegan, but most of our customers don’t even know about that part).

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

It’s funny, because my entire personal and professional life has been about pivoting. But instead, I am going to share a story of when we had to make a huge shift at Zen Stax.

Being environmentally conscious, when I started Zen Stax, we sold the product in glass jars. It was elegant, avoided plastics, and provided customers with the option of repurposing the jars at home, or returning them for a credit on their next purchase. While our sales grew, and we were disinfecting jars for reuse, I noticed that more and more jars were breaking. I started looking for alternative packaging and doing research on environmental impacts of product packaging.

I was shocked to learn that most glass is not actually recycled, but sitting in landfills (there is a really fascinating article by greatforest.com). Then I started considering the amount of water required to clean out our jars in between use. Delving in deeper, I thought about all of the wasted food when a jar breaks, and how much more fossil fuel it takes to transport heavy glass jars compared to other lighter packaging.

That is when I started experimenting with the spouted pouches we use now. They are light, rarely break, and super-customer-friendly. It’s not the “be-all, end-all” for us (we would love to eventually invest in something compostable or biodegradable), but it was a step in the right direction.

Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?

When I was playing poker for a living, I really looked up to Annie Duke. She is a brilliant poker player who has found a lot of similarities between the card game and business. I highly recommend her book, “Thinking in Bets.”

She speaks of a concept called “resulting” which really resonates with me, especially because of my background in data analytics. “Resulting” is where we judge a decision by its outcome. For example, you invest $350K in a huge marketing campaign, but it did not grow your business the way you had hoped and you think “that was a terrible idea.” But what were the other factors? Did the economy crash? Did a new competitor start a big marketing campaign at the exact same time? Were you marketing a product that wasn’t profitable? There are so many variables that will impact a business decision and action and it is important to judge actions not based on the result, but on the quality of the decision you had at the time.

I did one of those big food fairs my first year in business. I invested about $2100 in the fair, hoping to bring in about $4,000. It was a well-known company, I had asked vendors at previous events how they had done, and $4,000 seemed like a reasonable and conservative assumption. Well, I lost a ton of money on that event. Was it a bad idea to try it? I don’t think so. I did not know that the new venue would not be attractive to the crowd and hard to find. I did not know that the weather would be so incredibly hot that weekend. And I didn’t know that there would be so many other food events planned that weekend. Instead of overwhelming feeling of regret and “I shouldn’t have done that fair,” I follow Annie Duke’s lead and add the experience to my list of data points.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.zen-stax.com
• Instagram: @zenstax @leggedmermaid @sarikernmba
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ZenStaxBatter/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/smkern/