 For centuries, Vikings have been eating skier, a thick, creamy yogurt as a source of energy to defeat their opponents and survive in some of the harshest climates known to man. Skier is full of protein, flavor, and tradition. This is why the world's strongest man, Halfthor Bjornsson and Terry Crews both eat it to supplement their workout regiments. The Unar McDonald's partner with Halfthor, Terry, and Dylan Sprouse introduce Thors Skier to the rest of the world. While this may seem like a random collection of celebrities, they're all very much in touch with their Icelandic culture, and funny enough, Terry actually means Thor in Old Norse language. In today's episode, we chat with the co-founder of Thors Skier, Unar, about why going into Walmart was a mistake, the decision to make Terry Crews a co-founder instead of an ambassador, and how he honed his salesmanship by convincing diners in his restaurant to try fermented shark. Alright, welcome to the podcast. On today's show, we're with the founder of... I'm gonna butcher this. Thors Skier? Yeah, you got it. Thors, you say it. How do you say it? With the Icelandic accent, it's Thors Skier. Alright, we're with Unar. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you. What made you want to start? What made you want to start this thing? I'm used to serving Americans Icelandic food in Iceland, and I had always wanted to do something in the US, COVID hit, and I had to turn down my restaurants in Reykjavik. Your restaurants that you had in Iceland? Yeah, yeah. While Donald Trump closed the borders, so no tourists to Iceland. Yeah. And so are you saying you want to thank Donald Trump for your entrepreneurial success? No! Is that what you're saying? No, no, no, no, no. That everything happens for a reason, and that's how I started. I said I'm gonna go to America and make Icelandic yogurt, which was the most, I would say, distance idea I could have gotten. Yeah. It was so far away. Let's start simple. What makes the yogurt different than what people are used to in America with the Greek yogurt, Chabani, really introducing that? What makes it a little bit different? The Greek skir is much higher in protein, and our product is much lower in sugar. What does skir mean? Is that just a word for yogurt? No, it's actually almost a cheese. Okay. I sound so stupid. No, no. So we ultra filter the milk, and it makes it very well with the smooth and thick, and you can even, you know, spread it on a bagel. It's as thick as a... It's like a cream cheese type thing. Yeah, almost. But it's super healthy, full of probiotics also. So in Iceland, if you think about the yogurt, that's skir. Everybody are gonna say, you know, people eat skir only. And then when you came here, what was your first step in starting to get this off the ground? I mean, during COVID, in the beginning of this journey, I just started to stalk people on LinkedIn. Okay. I just sent out messages like... What would you say to them? I was just... I'm from Iceland. I already have a product. It's ready. I'm... I did everything. To get capital or just like to make anything like... Just to make the business case. Okay. You know, I found the distributor. I sold the first product to a retailer before it was ready. And so what's coming of these conversations from LinkedIn? What's happening? What dots are you connecting? Yeah. Where are you living? I think LinkedIn is a very powerful tool. I'm much more powerful than I ever would have thought. Someone told me that in Iceland. You should check out LinkedIn and I was like, I'll check it out. I connected to retailers, distributors, some of my people who work for me today. Just amazing how it works. Yeah. And so what was your first... Where did you set up shop? Like, did you just have like a little kitchen? Where were you making the product? So I accidentally... I'm sorry about my Icelandic English, there was another guy from Iceland, which I got to know a week after I got the idea. And he had just put up the first Icelandic skier factory in America, which is a very special way, you know, the whole machinery and the method of making skier is very Icelandic. Developed by Icelandic farmers and a Swedish company decades ago. And he had cracked that code to make skier in America, like skier in Iceland. Where was it? Where did he do it? In Pennsylvania. He just came home to Iceland during COVID. And I was like, OK, now I can do it. And what was he planning on doing? Just creating skier? Or does he want to do... Yeah. Not like... OK. He was going to do his own brand, but then we just figured out, you know, he's professional in making the product. It's super good at it. And I'm very good in making a brand. OK. At least I think so. Sure, sure. So far, so good. By virtue of you being here, that's probably true. Thank you. Yeah. You guys partner up, and now you're doing all the sales, marketing side of it, branding side of it. At what point do you meet up with Thor, Thor himself, Big Mountain Man? Yeah. I actually, we met many years ago when we were working in the nightlife industry. OK. He was always throwing me out, you know, of the club. Now, he worked in the nightclub and myself also. Back in Iceland. Back in Iceland. Is he one of the biggest people there? I mean, he's quite big, that's for sure. There's a big, like, strong man society in Iceland also, which I think is quite unique for a country. It's the Viking blood. It's the Viking blood. We've had a couple of world's strongest men coming from an island with 300,000 people. So it has to be the skier. Yeah. OK. I like that. And so you meet them and what happens? You go. I told him to come down to my restaurant before COVID happened and meet me just for a soup. And I asked him, why isn't the world's strongest man doing his own skier? It's a good question. It's a... It's a big opportunity. Yeah. And he was in Game of Thrones too, right? Yeah. At the time. Yeah. I mean, he was sold on it at the spot. He told me, though, afterwards that he wasn't sure if it would be a reality, you know, with me getting all the way, but he believed in me. And soon as, you know, he was committed to this project, I was like, OK, I've got him with me. Yeah. I've got a... I mean, it's a great idea. And this is going to go all the way. I know that. And I doubt if he wouldn't have believed in me, I wouldn't have gotten that far because there was a huge kind of, you know, drive for me. Yeah. At some point, are you guys fundraising or are you just funding it yourself? Or where's the capital coming from to sort of get off the ground? Yeah. So we did this actually for very, very little money in the beginning. There's a guy, which is our chairman today, called Dion Ferrier. He believed in this mission from day one also. He was a customer in my restaurant. Yeah. Wow. I told him about this idea while he was eating and stuff like that. And then he came back two days later and he's like, I like your idea. I've always wanted to do this. He's half Icelandic, half British. He got stuck with me, poor man, since then. He kept me going for the first year and obviously other individual investors in Iceland, which have supported the project to the state. That's pretty amazing. So when you think about yourself, right, so you had restaurants in Iceland, to some extent, people can really, they can see it. They can say, oh, we know how he does things by virtue of being in a place that you've created. What else? What skill set do you attribute where you are today to? Your personal skill set. You sound crazy enough to believe in anything. Yeah, I do. That's a part of it, which is amazing. If I believe in the idea, I'm all the way. Yeah. That's just how it is. I'm not coming up. And then you also seem like it's a party that's crazy enough to get other people to believe in it, too. Which is awesome. Yeah. It's a salesmanship, but there's a part of it where there's a story component to it. I'll tell you a story actually from a restaurant, which I think what you're saying is completely correct because if you believe in the idea, you can sell anybody the idea. That's my motto at least. If I believe in it. If you're convinced. Yeah, convinced. If I'm not convinced myself, I'm not going to sell it. And when I had full restaurant in Iceland of American tourists eating Icelandic lamb soup and just enjoying their meal, I sometimes would come out and say, hey, guys, I've got the worst thing ever to give you guys to try. And everybody said, like, what? I wouldn't give it to my worst enemy, you know, nobody's going to want that. I brought the fermented shark, which is, by the way, you know, it's fermented shark. It's an Icelandic thing. Oh my God. And, you know, even with the, you know, because I could sell them that to eat it, even though I told them that I wouldn't give it to my worst enemy, everybody tried it. It's quite of a, you know, it's a salesmanship. By the way, I'm intrigued now. Is it good? It's like, what, what does it taste like? They say it in English acquired, acquired taste, I mean, I wouldn't give it to my worst enemy. You were being serious in that. That's fascinating. I'll have to try that. My sister loves this, my grandfather loves this. It's very different. We, the old kinds of weird stuff in Iceland, to be honest, we, I mean, everything was fermented just like skier. And so going back to America, what was like the first store? So you're in Pennsylvania, you're probably spending a lot of time on the east coast. It sounds like, so are you targeting the east coast retailers? My first retailer was Earthfare, that's Florida. I didn't have a ready product at that time. I just had the flavors ready. So just mixed, mixed the flavors with a very like yogurt and sent them a sample and they loved it. And then price point wise, at some point, Shabbani introduces this to America and then everybody gets involved. Dan and, I mean, even if you go to the grocery store today, there's like six, seven different kinds of yogurt and they're all competing on price to some extent. And so where did you want to be price point wise, given the extremes of the competition? I wanted just to be on a competitive price. My mission was to feed, you know, I mean, in one cup of this is five times more milk than a regular yogurt. So it's super thick and it's filling. And for people on budget, the retail price is $199, which is comparable to other brands. Yeah, that's right in the middle, I would say, yeah. But it's like a meal. Totally, okay. Two dollar meal is a very good, you know, good price for people who can't afford maybe a very expensive. And on the marketing side, how did you go about just getting the word out to get people to try this thing? Before I had the product ready. I got Huffle on a campaign and I made him like a farmer. He was just like, meditating in the field. Did you think of this or did you have like a creative? Okay. This is your vision. Yeah. Our team is all like very creative. Awesome. It's a marketing oriented and my background is filmmaking, actually. I've done that since I was 15. So yeah, we easy to execute campaigns and so on. We have our own studio and it's quite easy for us to execute. Was it commercials or was it just like videos for social media? Videos for Instagram, which we gained like thousands of followers the first day when we released it. And most of it were American farmers. That was quite funny. Everybody thought Huffle or Thor was making his own farm. It was quite cool. And at that point, are you just on the East Coast in Florida? Yeah. We just actually last year expanded to the West a little bit. Okay. And then after this campaign, you're seeing the sales go off, what are you seeing in the market? Yeah. This is before we had the product ready. Sure. So we made a small fan. So you got the hype. Yeah. The hype. The product itself has just, it's a very good product. And I can say it with like confidence. Which one of these should I try? I would go for vanilla. I'm not used to compare my children to each other, but the vanilla is very good. The vanilla? Yeah. Try it out, man. Oh, it looks good. Do I have to mix it? No. Just see how. So it's not like the other yogurts per se. Other yogurts, you would see this full of yogurts. Yeah. Yeah. So that's what you're talking about. When you uncap it or take the foil off, there's usually lower yoga on that one. There's not. Yeah. This has traveled, you know, across America. This is 17 grams protein. That's really good. Yeah. Thank you. It's really creamy. Yeah. And it's only 2 percent. It's milk fat, actually. Wow. All right. I mean, I'm sold. That's really good. Thank you, man. That's really good. Makes you strong. I hope so. I need to get stronger, so this will be good. Let's go back to your plant, though. So I was an engineer a long time ago. And the last project I worked on was actually Chibani. Oh, wow. And they were building a plant in New York, like upstate New York. And at the time, it was chaos. Like they were just selling so much that this plant was, I mean, it was like, imagine all of us in this room get together and we're like, we're making yogurt now. It's like buckets, hoses, nothing's like to code yet, you know what I'm saying? So it's kind of chaotic. And they were building this huge plant because, you know, they had gotten sort of national attention and they were just scaling. From your side of it, was the plant that you guys started with enough? Yeah. So, good night, who's working with me? When he started up a few years ago, he had problems with finding a facility to produce his product, which would be able to produce X amount at that, you know, the start-up stage. So he saw a gap in the market of opening a mid-sized plant, which could scale with the brand. So he was genius on doing that. Yeah, that's really smart. Yeah. Very risky also, by the way. Yeah. Maybe he saw there's enough people, maybe not necessarily this, but other products that could have used the same equipment. Yeah. I think the answer to this is, if you make a quality good product, it's going to go well. That's, you know, it's same with the restaurants. People say, oh, it was a bad location for my restaurant. But my theory is like, if you have fantastic good food to offer, people will find your location. You say, so this is something I believe in all the time. So when I got into real estate development, people would always say like, oh, where are you buying the buildings or whatever? And I'm like, I don't spend any time finding a building. I find all the time finding the product, the creator of the product. And if that product is really amazing, you can put them anywhere. And some people don't believe me. But every location I think we've ever made, like if I took you there before we ended up buying the building, you would call me crazy. Why are we doing this? Why are we in this part of town? And then later it's like, oh, wow, like it's a destination. People go. And so I can't agree with you more. And for people listening that are maybe struggling to, let's say, optimize their business from a profit standpoint. If you have a good product, just bring in a CFO, bring in a COO, and you're good. Because a good product with a little fine tuning can make a lot of money. And so, yeah, all the attention has to go to the product. I couldn't agree more with that. Yeah. I think I've done some failures, obviously, throughout my startups. And being that grown up in your head to take the decision of hiring a CFO or hiring an operation person and just drop the ego, you're not going to do everything yourself. Yeah. It's a huge step. I'm convinced the best team has a creative and then a quant. And then just someone who's just brutally there moving everything forward. I think if you have three of those things, you're golden. And you pick your spot, but don't do two of those things yourself. You know who you are. When did you get to the West Coast? We just started to attend expos and so on in the beginning days. And the first retailers knocked on the door right away. And that might have been the first. And I'm not going to say the word worst, but as an Icelander that might have been a mistake for me to jump on right away. That was Walmart. They were the first retailer to kind of. Why do you say it was like a mistake? I just think, you know, when I talk to other retailers today, I'm in such a bad, what do you call it, negotiation, position. First of all, and I just wasn't ready for Walmart, I think Walmart was too big of a game. Yeah. They're huge. Yeah. To start up. Too eager. Yeah, too eager. Yeah. Are you still with Walmart or no? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So that kind of worked out for you. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to, you know, it's not, it was a bad step for me in the beginning. So I'm going to drop out there and come back maybe next year. I think that's, it was, I didn't take the right steps. I should have done that in the later stages. You mean like you didn't negotiate the right fees or was it just like a volume thing? Both, a mixture of both. I mean, when you go into Walmart, you just need to, you know, prepare very well, marketing-wise and funding-wise. Yeah. That's a big thing also. And I didn't prepare myself for that step. And where's the business today? We're in 2,000 stores across the country, you know, and we're growing, we just launched Stop and Shop and we're in giant and many other chains. Yeah. And I believe, you know, we're going to go into some other big, big retailers in the next coming months. Yeah. Are you trying to innovate in any way? Are you getting a lot of pressure? We're in LA. And so obviously everyone's in LA on this nut milk thing. Yeah. And so, or do you get pressure to try to make this a dairy-free product? Yeah. Is there any interest in doing that? Can you achieve that? Yeah. So. Do you care? You could say no. You might not care. No, I don't care. I don't care. I'm being honest. I think skier is skier. And if I'm going to do something vegetarian or vegan, then I'll just make something vegetarian and vegan. But I'm not going to change skier to a vegetarian alternative. It's just not a vegetarian. The Vikings ate this, you know. The Vikings didn't eat anything green, I think. They just ate like, they did skull with their skulls of enemies and you know, they were quite not vegan. That's true. Yeah. But I'm not a, I love vegan products. How about different flavors? Are these the three flavors? So we have strawberry, vanilla, and plain. And blueberry was sold out in Lassence. Okay. But we are launching also key lime, coconut. Oh, nice. And key lime, coconut, and coffee this year. And we're changing the formula also to no added sugar. And where are you launching the key lime just for me personally? You'll see it here on the West Coast. Okay. You'll find always the stores in our store locator. Okay. Online. What is your top market? Like where are you selling the most across the country? Taxes. Wow. It's a big market for us. And that's where I did kind of the first kind of marketing stunts. And we had just lines in the supermarkets waiting for me to meet Hafthor, you know. So you had him come to the location. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hafthor is a founder and the other guys are founders also. Yeah. Dylan, he helped me, helped the graphic designers with the kind of ideas of the cup, the, the look of it. And, you know, they've been involved in this from day one. If he's on a TV show, is this part of his writer that he has to have 100 of these? I don't think so. It's his green room. I hope so. That's a good idea though. It would make sense. I just saw that you got Terry Cruz. Yeah, he just joined us. The old spice guy, right? He was, what was that crazy commercial? I think it was old spice. Yeah. He just joined. So how did you get Terry? What led to that? Why did you think he was the right fit? So the right fit and what led to that is the same as with Hafthor and Dylan. And same as I said with the story with believing in it. This is not the product that they just got in their hand and they should smile and sell. They got involved with it for a reason. And Dylan came to Iceland and met me there. You know, he was wearing the Thor summer on the snack and he was making a wagging meat already. And when I was traveling to the U.S. for the first time, Terry went to Iceland and he posted on social media that he loves skier and he's going to bring it to America. So I was like, whoa. That's awesome. Maybe I'll stalk him also. Yeah. And I messaged him. On Instagram? Yeah. And what did he say? He never replied. So what did you do? His attorney came to me six months later and said, Terry is interested in meeting you guys. He's looking for an opportunity in skier. He loves it. And so he came to us basically. Yeah. But we wanted him. Yeah, of course, of course. And what's the vision there from your perspective? What's the vision of how he can help the company for you guys? I mean, first of all, if you're a believer in a product, you can sell it. Yeah. If he's a believer in the product, then he can sell it. And if there's anybody who can sell it, that's him. He's pretty good at that. He's in a much better shape than I am. He's in really good shape, which helps a lot. He's amazing in the shape. It's crazy. But the marketing, obviously, it's a huge factor in it. And the believement in the product, that's what takes the boxes for me. Anywhere he goes, if he speaks about it, that's great for the brand, obviously. It's invaluable. But he's a co-founder also. How did you guys negotiate that? And so making him a co-founder kind of late in the game? That was just something we basically thought was the right thing to do. I know everybody are talking about the ambassador game. It's the trending thing. But I don't think he's an ambassador in my eyes. He's more of a owner. And if he wants to be the businessman, Terry, that's fine by me. I don't mind if he would do a thousand commercials or none. And same with the other guys. That's just how I look at these things. I think, I hope my English is correct here. But I think it will just sell itself with having the improvement of these guys. These guys have worked ages to build a reputation, to build a brand, and build basically believers. If they believe in a product, people will believe in them. That's what I think, at least. There's so many people I can talk to about this that someone just look at it like they get really in the weeds about equity. And I think what I'm hearing from you is your business model is product focus, but it's almost like family focused. And it's like, you're not forcing anyone to come to the table. It's just a function of like, if they believe in it, then they're going to be convinced to be a part of it. You don't have to convince them. It's almost like how I would treat people I work with. It's like, I don't want to tell you what to do. You should find a way. That's so interesting. And you're okay taking, I hate to call it a risk on this individual, but you're okay. You're comfortable sort of trusting the individual to do what's right. Yeah, and same with Huffthor, same with Dylan, same with myself. I believe in slow growth. I've done businesses which got like kind of the big push, and they just fly the ass fast down. So I don't know how to explain this in English, but I think, you know... I'll say it in Icelandic, I'll translate. No, like lyrics. I'll sing it. No, I think we are here on one mission, all of us together. And we're going to build a super brand in Skir, and also just educating the families of America that this is a healthy staple of the Icelandic diet that belongs in every home in America. And that's why they're doing this with me. Because they love the product and know it's a fantastic product. It speaks their muscles. What's next? So I think you hired, when did Terry come on board in December? Yeah, yeah. And so what's next? What are you working on this year? Who are you trying to get? Yeah, we... If anyone? Yeah, we're working on, are you talking about retail or like... All of it. Retail, marketing. Yeah. What sort of when you go to sleep at night, what are the things that you're working on keep you up a little bit? I'm trying to... just between me and you. I'm trying to involve a little AI project into this Skir yogurt. How do you do that? I have a great idea, I think, which I'm convincing everybody in my team and in the company that it's the correct thing to do. And that's like automatic skir bars. And they make you the skir smoothies and stuff like that. And I'm gonna try to plant into gyms. So when you walk out of the gym, you can just choose skir, which is high protein, probiotic, you can choose how much stuff that you want, and it just mixes it and it's ready for you to drink after you finish. I love that idea. Thank you. So it's like, we just did a podcast with a guy who had like this mini, it was a mini little soft sort of machine. So small machine on the wall, but you could install it at your house basically. And you push it and ice cream comes out. But in this setting, it's like, is that how it is? You see it like a small little thing, small but like refrigerated. It's got the skir inside. And so you just push and it just comes out. That's fascinating. And you want to be in the gyms. What gym are you gonna try to get in a specific gym? Yeah, I'm actually working on this right now. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but I think I'm allowed. We are working on locations where LA Fitness is. So that would be, you know, I'm just gonna start with the smaller, high foot traffic places and test it out, see how it goes. Because in Iceland, skir bars are everywhere. So we have drive-through skir bars. We have sit-down skir bars. The kids go and have a bowl of skir with like all the toppings. And it's beautiful like Akai. And it looks like they're just eating a great ice cream, but they're having something healthy, good and healthy for them. So that's kind of the mission. It's huge in Iceland. That's a great idea. Yeah, so basically you're just bringing that here. Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully people catch on to it. You should do it in LA. You should do like a location in LA maybe. All right, so you got new flavors coming. That's one. You got this gym idea, which I like a lot. Thank you. Skir on the go. What else? New retailers hopefully coming up. We just presented with Albertsons companies and then Publix. So I hope that's going to be a good luck for us. We are growing extremely fast in all of our chains. It's quite of an amazing journey, to be honest. And we're entering also the food service space. So I did the National Restaurant Association Expo last month. I flew in like Icelandic chefs. Did a 360 bar. One was skir bars. And the other side was the test kitchen. And I was teaching all the retailers, no the restaurateurs in the U.S. how to make things with skir. So for example, one franchise is going to change all their hummus and their tisigi sauce to a skir based sauce because it's healthy. It's healthier. And it probably congeals differently. And when you say food services, you could also, I assume, could be like college campuses. Yeah, we're for sale in UCLA. Yeah, UCLA. Yeah, you can buy there. But yeah, also just for hospitals, for kids schools. Yeah. What do you call that? Elementary schools. Elementary schools and stuff like that. Yeah, daycare. And we were teaching them how to make the bowls. If you want to make ready-made bowls for hotels. So I think there's a one large hotel chain here in the U.S. who's going to change their breakfast ready to go eat bowls. I love it. And funding-wise, are you guys in good shape? Are you raising capital or are you... Aren't you always raising capital when you're... In this game, yeah. The CPG game, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're definitely always racing. Okay. We have a fund on board called Sage Hill. Sage Hill. It's their young guys full of the same energy as myself, believed in the mission. I really, really, really was happy when I met them because they were not like these guys in the suits. But like I could see their... Normal guys. Yeah. I mean, when I'm running my restaurant, I clean the toilets. Yeah. You know, just to show everybody else that I do the same. Yeah. They're just like, I could see that on the ground doing the same as their entrepreneurs. Yeah. They know the game. Yeah. I think it's super important to have someone with you. That's great. And then big picture. Do you want to sell it? Do you want to go public? Where do you see it? What's like your mission here? You kind of put an Iceland on your back in some way, too, which is, I would say, a broader mission. Really cool. A movement. Yeah. I mean, I try to think in a day, every day, and everything I do. But I mean, long-term vision, if somebody would knock on the door and say, hey, I want to buy your brand and make it even bigger, that would probably just be a trophy. But I'm not in it only for the money. I'm very mission oriented. Yeah, mission driven. Mission driven, yeah. Yeah. I love it. But yeah, if that would happen, wouldn't everybody think about it, you know? Of course. Thanks, Unar. I appreciate you coming on the podcast, brother. Thank you. And I hope my Icelandic English was OK. Oh, it's great. You're doing great. Thank you so much for the support and making it to the end of the episode. If you haven't already, please do review and share the episode with your friends. If you never want to miss a beat on all things entrepreneurship, make sure to follow us on socials for daily content. See you next Tuesday for another great episode.