How we started Cerup without knowing anything about food

Greg attaching the very first label to the very first bottle of Marshmallow Cerup off the factory line. It was still warm.

Is it a long way from AI to Breakfast Cereal?

In 2020, I moved to a new house just outside Elko, Nevada. I didn't know at the time that I would soon be wrapping up a seven-year stint at one of the early vendors in the AI space. DataRobot, one of the pioneers in automated machine learning, heralded the rise of the citizen data scientist and the era of universal AI. Little did we know back in 2015 that most of the hype around this technology was just that -- hype. In 2020, a series of completely unexpected and impossible to predict events that included the pandemic, the development of the most accurate COVID forecasting system in the world, the ouster of our CEO, and the some pretty radical organizational headwinds (to put it mildly) left my psyche (and the company) in need of some pretty radical changes.

By 2021, I'd spent the last year of my life working with the smartest and best group of engineers, strategists, and consultants on the planet, and over the course of a single week, my usually busy calendar became completely empty (completely empty) and my entire team reassigned. I was very literally alone. After two weeks of literally nothing to do, I took the hint and resigned.

Over the course of the next year, I made lots of changes in my life. I found it pretty intolerable to relax. Relaxing gave me the uncomfortable feeling of wasting my life, so I pretty quickly started finding things to do with myself. Many of them were home improvement type projects. Whenever I'm out of things to do, that's my fallback -- fix something at the house. So I erected a workshop in my backyard. I put up a fence. I had a big, wide, flat, glorious driveway poured in the front of my house. Little did I know that the contractor that poured that driveway, Andrew, would quickly become my best friend and that we would soon be embarking on a journey that would take us around the world. The journey to create Cerup.

The Origin of the Idea: Syrup for Cereal

There are at least two kinds of people in the world: People who are constantly looking for the next big idea, and people who think that ideas are cheap and that execution is all that matters. The first person is the Thinker. The Thinker is constantly coming up with new ideas, evaluating them and ultimately deciding that they're bad ideas (or sitting on them until lightning strikes). The second person is the Doer. The Doer hears an idea and immediately thinks about how to make that idea into a reality. The Doer looks at the Thinker with pity and irritation because they see all the lost potential in all the dismissed ideas. The Thinker, on the other hand, looks at the Doer with fear and incredulity. The idea of wasting time, effort, and money on an idea that might not be a good idea goes against everything they believe in.

Peering into a small mixer making a test batch of Peanut Butter Cerup.

Perhaps that's an oversimplification, but it works for me and Andrew. Andrew is a Thinker. I'm a Doer. One day, after we'd been hanging out all day, Andrew called me over to his truck and grabbed a scrap of paper and a pen and scribbled out one word. He looked around furtively as he handed it to me, as if it contained nuclear launch codes or, more accurately, the coordinates to buried treasure. I looked down at the scrap of paper with five letter written on it: "CERUP." Of course, I had no idea what it meant, but it didn't take long for him to explain to me that it was a portmanteau of Cereal and Syrup. Andrew wanted to make syrup for cereal.

It turns out that Andrew and I had a shared experience from our childhoods. Neither of our mothers would buy us the "good" cereal. We always ended up with plain Cheerios or plain corn flakes or plain raisin bran. Always plain. Paradoxically, though, our moms would let us pour sugar or honey on it. That seems to be a near universal experience for American kids. Pouring (an absurdly large amount of) sugar on a bowl of cheerios and gobbling it up, only to be left with a heavenly mixture of undissolved sugar and gloriously sweetened milk at the bottom of the bowl.

That was the inspiration for Cerup.

At the time, I thought the idea was just odd. It took a while for me to realize that this wasn't just a passing idea for Andrew. This was an absolute obsession. I was one of only a few people with whom he'd shared his idea, and he honestly, genuinely wanted to know what I thought about trying to make it a reality.

I didn't have anything else better to do, so we decided to give it a go.

The view near our production facility in Tequisqiapan, Mexico.

We needed a lot of help to put Cerup on Your breakfast table

It didn't take long for us to realize that we didn't actually have any idea how to formulate flavored syrups, and it turned out that there was was a near complete absence of similar products on the market. Go ahead and try to find a banana cream syrup anywhere on the internet -- let alone one that is formulated to make your breakfast cereal delicious.

Now, I've never been accused on having an abundance of humility. It's not really a part of my character. In fact, believing that I can do just about anything is part of my charm. I have laid tiles, repaired roofs, changed out my brakes, done first aid, dug a drainage ditch, and framed an office -- not because anyone showed me how or because I went to school for it, but because, at the end of the day, those things just aren't all that complicated. Besides, YouTube can teach you just about everything you need to know about just about anything you might want to know about.

Formulating Cerup, though, definitely seemed like something that was beyond our capabilities. We knew that standing in the kitchen trying to figure out how to make syrups would take forever and likely wouldn't translate to the scaled up production of Cerup. So I turned to Google. Never before in the history of food science has SEO been so important. As it happened, the first search result was for a company called Food Scientist For Hire. The name of the company was a bit "on the nose," but since I was, in fact, looking to hire a food scientist, I went with it.

We were fortunate that the owners, Nick and Lisanne, were terrific, and excited by the idea of Cerup. We agreed to work together and that began a collaboration that would last for the next year as we sought to formulate a recipe for Cerup that matched what was in our heads.

Greg, Nick, and Lisanne standing next to the big mixer as it prepares our first test batch of Cerup.

Along the way, we brought on board some new team members to help us with everything from branding to manufacturing to marketing to sales and distribution. I still have the feeling that we don't really know what we're doing, but we certainly have come a long way over the last year. We still have a lot to learn about marketing and SEO and the wholesale food business, but we are definitely learning. If there's interest, I'm happy to continue telling the story of how we took Cerup from an idea to physical bottles, and (hopefully) how we will take those bottles to lots of cereal aisles across America in 2023.

I'm not sure if this post will resonate with anyone, but I get the impression that there are a lot of Thinkers out there that are secretly Doers. They just lack the confidence to take a risk on an idea. So far we've spent about $200,000 on getting Cerup to this point. We could certainly have done it more cheaply, but we were optimizing more for speed than efficiency. In 2 years we may look back and say, "well, that was a fun way to go broke." In fact, I make that joke regularly these days.

I'm of the opinion, though, that the best investment that you can make is an investment in yourself and your ideas and your passions. So, now that the world is returning to normal after COVID (is it, though?), and people are realizing that going into the office only to spend 8+ hours in a cubicle doing work that they don't really care about for the benefit of someone they'll probably never meet -- maybe now is a good time to step out and try something as crazy as putting flavored syrup on your breakfast cereal. Maybe there's a good reason nobody has ever tried it before. But more likely, maybe it's a delicious way to make your breakfast fun and interesting. Either way, it's going to be an interesting year. Keep your eyes peeled for Cerup in your local cereal aisle!

Let me know if you want to read more about how we continued to build the company. Happy to keep telling the story!