Package design is everything.

Nik Ingersöll spends a lot of time thinking about ugly bananas.

The Co-Founder & CMO of Barnana, one of the fastest growing food startups selling snacks made from imperfect and misshapen bananas. Ingersöll is responsible for the brand’s birth, branding and marketing strategy. In other words, he gets people stoked about snacks that are hard to describe and strange to look at. He has been recognized for many of his efforts for bold packaging and quirky guerilla marketing tactics, including a Barnana Car.

On this episode, Taste Radio interviews Ingersöll about how Barnana has won the hearts and minds of consumers. He has done this by using a unique style that is hell bent on grabbing their attention from the first time they come into contact with Barnana.

“[When] that consumer is going to see that product for the very first time, they’re going to see the front of the package,” he said. “And if you don’t capture that, nothing else matters. Because they’ll never pick it up, they’ll never put it in the cart.”

Ingersöll also talks about how Barnana determines what to include on front of packaging. He explained his perspective that brands have to take risks to move the market. He also talked about how he balances internal feedback about design from investors, board members and co-workers.

Spoiler alert, most of it doesn’t matter.

Clip of my discussion on @entrepreneur live about where I think the importance lays between a company’s mission vs. their products for food entrepreneurs.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see food entrepreneurs make are founders becoming super romantic about their mission of giving back, building wells, their specialized nutrients, etc. etc. and not focusing on taste. This is a critical mistake. Taste simply must come first.

Without focusing on the taste of your product, your mission will end in failure. Because if your product tastes like shit then no one will buy it. If no one buys it, then there is no mission because you’re out of business.

No matter how healthy your product is or how giving your mission is – it simply does not matter if no one eats what you make. I see this mistake repeated every year at #ExpoWest like clockwork.

Focus on taste first, then focus on your brand ‘s social story. That way both will succeed.

Mission is important. After all, Barnana is a B Corporation, upcycles bananas, builds water wells in the Amazon Rainforest, only makes organic products and has sustainability as a core tenant of ours.

However, if that is all that you are focused on you will go bankrupt.

The worst way to make your mission succeed in food is to focus on it too much.

The scale at which your sales can reach propels the mission to crazy heights.

My generation, the Millennial generation, of entrepreneurs are wooed by social causes.

This is amazing in many ways, but also creates the pitfall of only caring about that.

We chat with Nik Ingersöll, co-founder & CMO of Barnana, to hear his incredible story of growing up on a farm in rural Nebraska with no money to moving to California for college and eventually launching the line of organic healthy snacks that has everyone going bananas.

We also talk branding, fundraising, and scaling a successful product in today’s competitive CPG space!

I decided to take this Monday morning to brain vomit some random things I’ve learned over the last few years running my high growth snack startup? : Put in the hard work, acquire lots of skills, fail a bunch, take risks, don’t care about others’ perceptions, keep moving, do good things, make great products, never compromise on taste, keep your brand promise, don’t be scared, create meaningful jobs, make friends, over invest in design, brand rules all, be mindful of group think, manage escalation of commitment, grow as a human, keep your body healthy, treat your employees better than the market, take smart money from smart people, be ruthless on cash flow, be real, fuck the haters, hire culture=skill, get good at cap tables, employ tons of empathy, only work with A+ suppliers, own everything you do, learn what alignment is and optimize towards it over agreement, make friends, have fun, you’ll have high highs and low lows, pick your investors and advisors wisely, put in the hours, have relentless ownership over everything you do, brokers won’t deliver, you will need to make big sacrifices for your company to explode, PR is expensive, be generous, the higher you ascend the less people there are, give things away for free, amazon is powerful, brick and mortar retail is expensive, the cash turn around cycles suck, admire meritocracy, crush the competition, default aggressive, have a plan, lead, do something that adds to the overall human experience in a positive way & that’s all for today. @barnana

Salomondrin : A crew of fast car driving dudes that do fun things. After a ridiculous ride with these guys, I couldn’t help but post it up. We took a ride in our banana car around West Los Angeles and had some fun, check it out.