Pistaki-asking the Founders
Sitting down with Fran Volt and Nico Buffo, the powerhouses behind a brand new nut butter company, Pistakio.
Hey! It’s Anja here this week! Anna is in and out of WiFi reach, so I’ll be hopping in for this blast.
As someone who loves new brands, particularly ones with forward-facing founders, I fell in love with Pistakio the second I tried it a few months back at a Snaxshot event in Los Angeles.
Pistakio is a silky-smooth pistachio spread founded by two recent graduates of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Francine (Fran) Volt and Nicola (Nico) Buffo met as freshmen on the tennis team but only began exploring the idea of entrepreneurship as the result of a collaborative capstone project.
Their first idea was actually for a pistachio-based mayo that they sold at pop-ups around Savannah, Georgia. That idea eventually morphed into Pistakio, the idea that led to their post-grad move to Portland, Oregon to pursue the business full-time.
Without further ado, let’s hear it straight from Fran and Nico – the powerhouse behind Pistakio.
The Interview
Anja: Hi! Thank you both so much for taking the time to meet with us today. To get us started, I’d love to hear a bit about how each of you met, your backgrounds, and how you kind of fell into this entrepreneurial journey together.
Fran: We met in college. I was studying interior design and graphic design, and Nico was studying social strategy, management, and marketing. We knew we wanted to do something related to food post-grad. I’d gone to culinary school in Italy for a year during COVID, and had this inspiration and background of Italian food and its foundations, and Nico is Italian. So, with all of that tied together, it was a no-brainer.
But why pistachios? Well, we were always making stuff that had pistachios in them – but we quickly realized we were kind of… alone. We never saw any products in the U.S. that really used pistachios. They were always just eaten as a snack on their own. There were no spreads using it, and even pistachio milk was very, very new.
Nico: Pistachios are very, very versatile, and just so untapped. Our idea was essentially just to bring them to life in a new and innovative way, not just as a snack. So our first mission with that was to make a savory pistachio spread to show people that pistachios can be used in so many ways. And what better way than infusing pistachios into, say, a mayo? We launched the pistachio mayo back in college and sold that for about three months. Everyone loved it, and we quickly realized that there was a real demand for it. People wanted to have pistachio spreads in their cupboards, in their fridges. So we decided to move to Portland in August of last year to really launch it, because we thought we would be a better market here – there’s a great food scene, people are more open-minded, versus down in the south.
Fran: [Laughs] Not many CPG brands start out of Savannah, Georgia.
Nico: We soft-launched in December of last year, and then fully launched online in April of this year.
Anja: Amazing! I love your guys’ story. But correct me if I'm wrong – did the spread transition from a mayo, to more of a sweet spread?
Nico: You’re correct. After trying, we realized it was very hard to make the mayo in a traditional commercial kitchen without some of the bigger machinery we didn’t have access to, or a lot of very expensive tests. We eventually got to a point where we realized we either wouldn’t do anything, or we had to try and pivot. We also had a final “exam” for a class that involved pitching to a local grocery chain, New Seasons.
When we decided to pivot from the mayo, the pitch was two weeks away to the day. We didn’t want to go there and waste the opportunity of pitching the grocery store, so we decided to tell our story – how we started with this savory spread that had real demand, but we’d also made this sweet spread before at the farmer’s market that people loved as well.
The sweet spread is also easier to explain – it's easier to connect with as a consumer because people know it as something similar to a peanut butter or a Nutella.
We chatted about the recipe, but we already knew from previous experience that people were going to like it. It's something that's a little different than the Italian pistachio cream that I grew up with. And personally, I also think it's better because it's less sweet and less Nutella-like – it's more of an in-between with Nutella and peanut butter.
Fran: So pretty much in the two weeks leading up to the pitch, we had a lot to get done – we had to get our formula approved and tests done. The day of our pitch, we were finishing our production run at 12. We literally practiced the pitch in the car. I’d written it two days beforehand after watching Shark Tank episodes, but we hadn’t really had the chance to practice.
Nico: But we got it! They said it was “one of the best pitches they’d heard,” too. They said it was very Shark Tank, and we were like “Hmm, we wonder why.” [Laughs]
Anja: That’s really funny. I know I first tried the product back in March – and since then I’ve seen a few influencers on my feed post it which is really exciting. What’s been the recipe you’ve seen someone come up with so far?
Fran: There are so many. I love coffee or ice cream with Pistakio. Like, it's probably one of my all-time favorite things to use with it. I’ve seen people bake with it, and everything I’ve seen looks so good. We did a brand collaboration with an ice cream shop here in Portland and made a pint together. and that was also amazing – it had strawberries, one of my favorite things to eat with the Pistakio.
Nico: I feel like the coolest thing is seeing how creative people are getting with it. The reason why we started this it's because we wanted to show off how versatile Pistakio is, and how you can use it for so many different things. We’ve had people coming to us and saying how they use Pistakio to make things like barbecue sauces a “peanut sauce.” They’re just combinations I wouldn’t have dreamed up on my own, but are so cool to see come to life in others’ minds.
Anja: And then on a similar note, what's a dream brand collaboration, or co-branded SKU?
Fran: It'd be really, really cool to do like a Fishwife with pistachios, salmon. tinned fish. Or some sort of oil. That'd be good. Or Little Sesame – like a hummus with pistachios. There are so many different avenues.
Anja: Do you have any words of advice to either yourself, a year ago or maybe to someone who's a year behind you on their entrepreneurial journey?
Fran: Yeah. I feel like when we started, we didn't take advantage of the CPG community and how much people want to help. In college, we were taking advantage of our peers and our professors, but they didn't have the knowledge of the industry that we really needed. But to be fair, when we started out, we didn't even really know that we were building a brand. It was just kind of a project and then it eventually turned into a real business. I wish we had done more and reached out to people and made some connections in the space from the very beginning before launching. We could have avoided a lot of confusion on what to do and what to avoid.
Nico: On a more positive note though, something that I feel like I'm so grateful we did, and I would recommend anyone to do is just start.
When we started, my professor literally told me that if we didn’t do this as our capstone project, and if we didn’t open an Instagram account and start posting something that I’d literally have to take an extra year. I’m sure he was kidding, but that still pushed me, and I feel like that was like the best thing that could ever happen to us. Even if we didn't know what we were doing, it was still great I think to just be trying to figure stuff out. And the content wasn’t great. We were shooting in a dorm room and the light was honestly very, very bad. But we were still doing something – like we learned so much just doing and trying different things.
Anja: What would you say has been the biggest win so far?
Fran: A big high was definitely getting into New Seasons. And just going to the store shelf and seeing our products for the first time. It felt kind of unreal. Those shelves were next to Nutella, which is like what I grew up with. That was kind of mind-boggling in a way.
Anja: That must have been so rewarding. And what about now? Walk me through like a day in each of your lives doing this along with balancing other jobs and responsibilities.
Fran: We make a lot of Day-In-Our-Life vlogs on our socials because we want to take people through what it's like. We do have other jobs, and to be honest, it kind of sucks. I mean, we don't work 9-5s, thankfully. We have day jobs that we kind of just use to pay the bills, but it's a lot of day-to-day tasks. We would obviously love to be more on the visionary side and build the brand as much as we can.
But it’s tiring. We do everything. We're packing all the orders, and shipping all the orders. Even this morning before this chat, we were in production. And then I feel like we're just running around and trying to schedule time for meetings and getting advice and helping people out as much as we can. But it's really difficult to find the time to build a brand.
Nico: But in regards to schedule, every day is different. Two days a week, we have production. And then for a few days, we work at our day jobs. We know we have production on Monday and Tuesday, we know we have our day jobs on other days, usually Saturdays, we have demos. And then we try to schedule everything around all of that.
But hopefully, we can go full-time on Pistakio someday soon, so we can truly make it the priority… which to be fair, is already the priority.
Anja: Is there anything else you both wanted to touch on, that you feel like you want to stress a bit more?
Fran: One thing that we don't stress enough, even on our socials and everything, is that we are really trying to make pistachios a more accessible staple ingredient. And it's hard because it's also a commodity and it's an expensive ingredient. But we’re trying to find ways to bring them to the everyday household, and not just for a special occasion. This is something that you can actually put on any meal since it's so versatile. Unfortunately, our price point doesn't really reflect that right now, but as we grow, we hope it’ll be more reflected.
If you enjoyed this interview, please follow Pistakio on Instagram and TikTok, and maybe just consider ordering a jar for yourselves! Since this interview, Fran and Nico launched version 2.0 of their spread, at a lower price point, more pistachios, and less sugar.
Here are a couple great examples of how best to use the spread in the kitchen:
On Focaccia:
In Matcha:
