What's A Lupini Bean? A Superfood Entrepreneur Shares His Tips For Selling An Unfamiliar Product

Aaron Gatti first got introduced to lupini beans as a kid during his frequent visits to see his father’s family in Italy. “I didn’t know even what they were, just that I couldn’t stop eating them,” he told me.

But it wasn’t until three years ago, when he introduced his wife, Alenna, to the meaty yellow beans during an Italian vacation, that the entrepreneurial wheels started turning. Alenna, a vegetarian who works in business development at a creative agency, immediately saw something there. “She flipped over them and said, ‘it’s like an Italian edamame, except it’s not soy and you don’t have to heat them up,’” Gatti recalls her saying. “And she said, ‘what if you made them in different flavors?’”

Gatti then returned home to his job as entrepreneur-in-residence at Lerer Hippeau Ventures, a pre-seed venture capital fund. Gatti, who was working on a Bitcoin startup at the time, gave Ben Lerer, one of the partners, some lupini beans to taste and told him about the idea. After devouring them in short order, Lerer’s verdict was swift: Forget Bitcoin and focus on the beans.

Gatti, now 35, did just that. He went home to his Brooklyn kitchen to test out recipes for what he would eventually dub BRAMI, after the second-person conjugation of an ancient Italian verb that means “to yearn for.”

“For my wife and me, it represents the feeling we have toward the beans and Italian food and culture in general,” says Gatti. “We also just wanted a word that would work as the colloquial name of this creation of ours.”

The venture firm initially incubated BRAMI with a $400,000 pre-seed investment. Then, in August 2016, BRAMI closed on $1.5 million in seed funding in a round led by Lerer Hippeau, AccelFoods, an accelerator program for new food brands, and Enlightened Capital.

In Italy, grandmothers typically prepared lupini beans before the Christmas holidays, setting them to soak for two weeks to eliminate their natural bitterness. Gatti began experimenting with his own process, which involves soaking the beans and marinating them in a flavored brine for a more intensely pickled taste – without the artificial preservatives and excessive salt found in the jarred lupinis from Italy.

Typically, Italians slip the beans out of their shells before swallowing them, but Gatti found a way to make the shells soft enough to eat the whole thing. (There's still a nice crunch). And, following his wife’s advice, he introduced four flavors: sea salt, chili lime, garlic and herb and hot pepper.

To be sure, BRAMI is just a baby brand, but it has already been accepted into five Whole Foods regions. Sales are still modest but they’re growing at a fast pace, considering that in January 2016 Gatti was peddling them by himself without a distributor. (Gatti asked me not to release his numbers for competitive reasons.)

Here are five tips, gleaned from my chat with Gatti, about how to make an unfamiliar new food product stand out.

1. Find a compelling story. Gatti spent weeks researching the history of lupini beans, their nutritional content and the rather unique role they played in the Roman Empire, as a food that sustained soldiers during long marches. “There’s a famous story of a famine in Naples, where they all resorted to eating lupini beans,” says Gatti. The beans have the highest protein density of any plant, says Gatti. A quick web check pulls up a nutrition website called HealthAliciosness.com, which ranks it  No. 1 among beans for its protein content. At 1 gram of protein for every 7.4 calories, it beats out both tofu and edamame, according to the website.
2. Invest in catchy packaging. Getting the customer’s attention is half the battle with an unfamiliar product, says Gatti. BRAMI sells its beans in 5.3-ounce pouches (five servings) that don’t require refrigeration until they’re opened.  (A smaller, 35-calorie, one-serving snack pack, will be released early next year). The whimsical cartoonish drawing on the front depicts a bean in Roman battle garb. The bean-warrior’s body also serves as a window to glimpse the beans inside. Even if you’ve never heard of lupini beforehand, the package gives you a quick education in its nutritional benefits and its rich history--with a dose of humor.
3. Seek out strategic off-shelf locations. Getting onto store shelves is important, but it’s easy to get lost among all the kale chips and other good-for-you snack foods, since people aren’t actually looking for your product. Even more important, says Gatti, is getting placed in those “off-shelf” locations, particularly near the checkout counter and at the ends of aisles.  In the beginning, they were very hands-on, seeking out every opportunity to get exposure. Another good spot for BRAMI is next to the salad bar. (The Gattis frequently throw BRAMI beans on top of their salads for extra protein, and they figure others might take the hint.)
4. Capitalize on market trends. BRAMI beans may still be unfamiliar to most American consumers, but when the packages get good display, they pretty much sell themselves–even when they don’t offer samples, Gatti says. He thinks that’s because BRAMI hit the market at the right time, when interest in plant-based proteins was already soaring and more people were experimenting with meat alternatives. “This is the perfect time for this,” he says. “People are caring about what they put in their body more and lots of people are becoming aware of the downsides of eating too much animal protein. Plant protein has become a very big story."
5. Don’t overthink it and stay focused on your goals. "I've invested everything I have into this, and it’s an expensive industry. I’m a small fish, and it is scary,” Gatti admits. The good news? The biggest barrier to entry for would-be competitors is that it’s “such a pain in the butt” to prepare lupini beans. His dream is to make BRAMI the go-to healthy protein snack, one that will rival meat jerky. “I’m focusing on what I’m doing right now that gets me to where I want to be," he says.