For Immediate Release
11/09/2022
Consumers discover innovative food products created by Black and Women owned brands.
Chicago — 11/09/2022 — NakiNoku introduces sample boxes of sauces, rubs and innovative food products, enabling consumers to support Black and Women-owned brands through food sampling.
“As a society, we have to find cost effective new ways for consumers to discover new tastes and flavors, while reducing food waste and supporting minority and women owned businesses,” said Tonny Thomas, CEO & Co-founder at NakiNoku.
Finding your perfect match
Every consumer has individual taste preferences, and only by tasting a variety of brands can a consumer find the one that matches their unique taste preference. As we head into a possible recession, consumers demand accessible sampling experiences.
Nakinoku is committed to delivering a quality sampling experience, introducing new and innovative food products and helping consumers discover new tastes and flavors. This is done at a very small cost, while reducing food waste and supporting minority and Women-owned businesses. NakiNoku features these founders and their stories of creating innovative food, such as a BBQ sauce with a recipe dating back to the Civil War, a chocolate-based BBQ sauce and a garbanzo-based butter (a nut butter alternative).
All sample boxes are available on NakiNoku’s website, priced around $9.99 for six samples, including shipping.
Making an impact
NakiNoku was founded as a result of the barriers faced by the co-founders in getting their previous business onto retail shelves. Their previous food startup called “Serangoon Market” sold Thai curry skillet sauces and was sold at a local retail chain. “We enjoyed being face to face with our customers and seeing their joy in tasting our food, but in-person sampling just wasn’t sustainable and coupons would wreck our margins” said Merly Thomas, co-founder. So the founders decided to create a better way to sample direct to consumer. Without sampling, brands on retail shelves are competing on the attractiveness of packaging, which means the brand with the most money and packaging prowess wins.
“I like supporting local brands” said Joslin, a customer of NakiNoku. NakiNoku is presenting small local brands who are minority and Women-owned owned to consumers and enabling them to taste the passion these founders had in starting their brands. Without hometown support, these brands face uncertain futures. Nielsen estimates that only 30% of around 30,000 new products achieved success over two years in grocery retail (*2). This disproportionately affects small minority and Women-owned owned brands.
Research shows that while the top 20 US food companies had a 24% failure rate, the bottom 20,000 companies (the small and medium sized brands) had a failure rate of 88% (*2). CBS notes that Black-owned businesses are over twice as likely to fail, and economic statistics show that Women-owned owned business remain smaller than their male owned counterparts. A root cause is lack of access to markets and lack of access to funding. NakiNoku is addressing the access to market by introducing consumers to small Black and Women-owned owned brands which can drive retail adoption.
“This was probably the only way I would have tried these brands and flavors,” said Lance H, a customer of NakiNoku. The brands that participate in the Black-owned and Women-owned sampler boxes are not accessible through other sampling programs – as NakiNoku is the only sampling program offering small batch sample manufacturing in addition to distribution.
Sample boxes are available now for ordering at www.nakinoku.com.
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The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
For more information, press only:
Tonny Thomas
877-590-6254
info@nakinoku.com
For more information on the sample boxes:
https://www.nakinoku.com
*2 Inez Blackburn; Speed to Market –Capitalizing on Demand; U Connect 08; University of Toronto & MTI Market Techniques & Innovations Inc. 2008