 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hi. Welcome to Seymour's World on ThinkTek Hawaii. I know it's been a long time. I've been away for almost six weeks. But I have to tell you, I really appreciate all those emails and texts and phone calls I get from our audience that say, where have you been? Are you OK? And all that stuff. As you can see, I'm fine. I spent the last three and a half weeks in Italy with our family. I went to actually do some work in Italy. Mr. IRS, are you listening? But I did visit a factory that absolutely is amazing. They are developing a weave in their material in clothing that is infrared. And the infrared is to help any type of trauma that you receive from your muscles. It's fascinating. And those of you who know me well know that I will always be looking for new things to do. And this is a product that we saw in Italy. We're bringing it to China at the end of October to get a production and manufacturing facility there. And then we're going to do a worldwide marketing effort. So those of you who exercise a lot, you're going to be seeing a new line. It's called ACAPI, you can look at it online, but it's not available anywhere except in Italy, but will be available shortly. So let me introduce my guest to you. As you know, after being in Italy, you could probably tell I've gained a pound or two because lots of pasta and lots of great food. And I am a foodie. I love to eat, and I love to eat well. But I'm learning to eat healthier. And one of the people who I think has really influenced me in the last few months, because I've gotten to know him well, is our guest, Lauren. Lauren, welcome to Seymour's World. Thanks for having me on. Lauren Shoup is an entrepreneur, probably the ultimate of entrepreneurs. Because when I went to visit you the first time and I went to see your factory and I went to see your business, I've never seen anybody who had so many fingers and so many pies doing so many things. And I said to you at that time, how can you do it all? And then my wife reminded me when I came home, she said, you're just like him. You're doing so many things all the time. And Lauren, I admire you for doing that because it's not easy. It's very difficult to manage your rental business, manage your food business, manage your retail business, manage a manufacturing business. So it is really, really amazing. So let's tell the audience a little bit about who you are, where you came from. Well, again, my name is Lauren Shoup. I was born and raised over on the big island of Hawaii. I was there, I finished high school there. And then I decided to go up to the mainland for a few years. So I spent like three years up in San Diego. But I just didn't feel right, you know, again, I was born and raised in Hawaii. My family's like fishing, so I was like fishing, doing a lot of like outdoors activities. And I played a lot of baseball and sports. But when I got to San Diego, it just sounds kind of weird. But it was the first time I ever had jeans. You know, I had to wear jeans because it was cold. No shorts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was all news to me. So that was a little different. And the plan was to go to school, but I ended up actually not going to school up there. I just really wanted to get out and like, you know, the entrepreneurial spirit. I just really wanted to get out, do my own thing. And I didn't know what I was going to do. But I just, I was like, you know, at the time, the school is not for me. I just want to get out and do something. And so anyways, you know, I just, I spent three years in San Diego and I decided like, well, if I really do want to do something, this isn't the place for me. So I got to go, you know, where do I want to go? So I ended up coming back to Oahu. So I've been here for seven years now. And yeah, it's been rocking ever since. You've done fantastic. I mean, when I look at your business and as a business consultant, I walk into every business I look at with a with eyes of what are they doing wrong? Yes, they're doing right, because obviously you're doing something right to be in business today and what you were doing wrong. And I couldn't find very much that you were doing. That's good. You are really taking a whole new product and bringing it to the marketplace where big, huge companies aren't able to do it. So I want to talk about breadfruit. Yes. Now, people don't know what breadfruit are. Maybe you could show people what it is. Yeah. So we got this guy here. It's a breadfruit here in Hawaii. We call it Ulu, but all over the world, they have different names for it. And there's just hundreds of different varieties. This guy here looks like it's a young mafalo variety. Could be a little mixture. It's hard to tell these days because everything's gotten really mixed up with, you know, jeans and whatnot. But I believe this is close to mafalo, maybe mixed with something else. But this is breadfruit. So the whole thing is edible. You can eat it at all stages. This is a little underripe, so I would like it to be more ripe for our products like the chips and their ulu hummus. But this has grown all over the world, like all around the tropics, like South Pacific, obviously here in Hawaii, they have Jamaica, Puerto Rico. And the thing is a lot of these places are already eating it in vast amounts. But here in Hawaii, I mean, we know about it, but people in America, they're probably oblivious to it, you know, and it's. So you are bringing a brand new product to the marketplace. Yeah. Yeah. And the first time we tasted this was at our house. And you came for dinner one night and you brought us the hummus and you brought us the chips and there were six of us or eight of us at the time. And I could not believe how delicious the flavor was. Not just the hummus you make. We'll talk about that. But tell us about how you make the chips. Yeah. So these chips, so I take the ulu raw. We have a, I used to do it by hand with a meat slicer. Never want to do that again. That was way, way too much work. We actually have a picture of that, don't we? I think, well, anyway, we might have one. Oh, that's yeah, that's the mixture. That's the hummus guy. But yeah, this one was made with a different machine where I will. I recently bought it, but basically you put the product in there and you cut it in this triangle shape and it just cuts it. So it spits out these chips and then we actually cook it or fry it in coconut oil. So this is cooked in coconut oil. And all we do is add a little garlic salt to it. And that's it. It's very, very simple. How healthy is it? Well, I mean, coconut oil has a lot of good fats for you. Breadfruit itself is very fibrous, so it helps to slow your digestion. So it's not going to spike your blood sugar levels, like, say, like a potato would like a white potato or like rice calories. Calories, moderate. I mean, again, it's good food. It has a lot of natural minerals in it. So it's just overall it's a better product than, like, let's say, like a rice has a lot more nutrients than rice would or a potato. I'm learning as I'm going through a change in my diet that calories are not the most important. No, I'm not worried about the calorie amount. What's in the calorie that counts? You know, it's like, like alcohol, they call it empty calories, right? There's not minerals and. But with breadfruit, we're finding not only does it taste much, much better than a potato chip doesn't leave that salty taste. Yeah, well, that's that's, I mean, that's our man. In fact, I mean, you can make it taste however you want, I guess. But that's just the way that we do it. I feel like a light, light salt. And like I said, we use coconut oil, which I've tried the other oil. So it's not I just pick coconut oil because it was good. It was also because it tasted better, too. So it has like buttery flavor. The chips are only at farmers markets. So we do like KCC every Saturday morning. We do Kailua on Sundays, Kailua on Thursdays, when we're at Mall Wednesday, Sunday. So the chips right now, well, the problem with the chips is we can only make them seasonally because I want the fresh fruit and breadfruit is seasonal. So that's one issue we have with the breadfruit products. So I could spend a lot of money and do a lot of stuff to make it have it all year round, but I were just not there right now. So this is a seasonal item. So there is like maybe four months out of the year. I just won't have chips and people are not very happy about that. You know, we talked about that from my consulting point of view. How do we make it where you could bring this to market? And it's available through the convenient store market, for instance, through the supermarket chains, even on Amazon. You know, that kind of stuff. And obviously lack of the product availability becomes the weakest part of your business. Yes, yes. And it's something that we're going to attack or I'm trying to help you realize a way to move forward, right? Yeah. And I think that's very, very important. And here, for those of you who do not live in Hawaii, who are watching this from the mainland or in Europe or in Asia, Hawaii has a huge, huge community of native Hawaiian people and they own acres and acres, thousands of acres of land. And what Lauren is doing and what I'm encouraging him to do is to basically work with the Hawaiian community to begin a breadfruit processing center, meaning let them grow the breadfruit, let them process it. You guarantee that you'll buy all of their product that they can make. And then you can make that product available for the supermarket chains, regular retail, etc. Do you like that idea? Yeah, that's definitely one of the ideas. Again, I want everyone to make money, too. So I don't want to feel like over just stealing the land from the farmers and then they don't get paid. I want everyone to feel like it's all a part. We're all in one big group, you know, kind of pushing the breadfruit thing. But again, I think the breadfruit product could be worldwide. So I feel like it could be a really big, big industry, plus with all the gluten-free things going on right now, which this product is gluten-free. So there's a big market for it. So yes, so if we, you know, use that land, have, you know, the native Hawaiian people and just people of Hawaii in general, like, work on it, we can grow their products. And it's agroforestry, too, which means you could have like a breadfruit tree with like a cow underneath it or you can grow other things, too. It doesn't have to be just breadfruit. Right, because it grows on a tree. I have to tell you, I went on a trip to the mainland. I think you remember I went up to Whistler, British Columbia. And I brought 10 bags of these with me and everybody couldn't believe it. You know, they thought it was actually artificial stuff. They didn't believe that it was really a very, very simple product. It wasn't like a potato chip that goes through a huge bunch of processing. Whatever they put in it, we still don't know. Yours is absolute natural breadfruit. Yeah, it's kind of funny because people say, like, oh, do you add like colorings? Did you add preservatives? I'm like, I don't even know how to use that stuff. Like, I mean, that's my response. It's like, what is that? Where do I even buy that? Like, I don't know. Who do I call? Like, I'm not interested at all. But I'm just saying like, I don't know what that is. You know, I'm just making stuff that tastes good. And like, my whole thing has been very simple. Like, even, again, we'll talk about the hummus later, but even the hummus is a very simple product. Like, let's talk about the hummus. OK, let's talk about the hummus. It is delicious, absolutely delicious. Thank you, yeah. First of all, how did you get the recipe? And now you're processing it, and that you're selling also in the farmer's markets, right? Yeah, I mean, we're in over 40 stores across what now. We're on Kauai, obviously, Oahu and Maui, and probably soon to be Big Island, plus along with the farmer's market. So we're in a lot of different sales avenues or places right now. But I'll just say from the beginning, one is I was just walking through a store one day about five years ago, just looking at stuff, you know, just checking things out, who's making what, what's going on. And, you know, I go to the, you know, salsa hummus section. I'm like, OK, there's, you know, a local salsa there. And, OK, you got a local guacamole. And where's the local hummus? You know, like, I'm not saying it has to be like with local products. I'm just saying someone in Hawaii making hummus that's sold in a store like a safe way. And no one was doing it. Yeah, using garbanzo beans. Yeah, yeah, forget the, you know, at this point, forget the Ulu thing. I'm just like, no one's making garbanzo bean hummus here in Hawaii. I'm like, that's just crazy. Like, what, no, they used to trend item right now. It's, you know, people are interested in it. So I'm like, I can do it. So that was my first thought, you know. Hold that thought. You can see why I call him the ultimate entrepreneur, don't you? Yeah, yeah, so I was like, well, I can do it. You know, so I probably that day, you know, I went to the store, I bought just garbanzo beans and I have no chef background, no cooking background. I'm just buying stuff, you know, look on the internet. Recipes, you know, it was okay. And then I, like I said, would do farmers' marks. Okay, I got to make it local, right? So I'm like, okay, local Okinawan sweet potatoes. I was making local mushrooms, local peppers, and just making hummus. But I would just give the friends and family, like, hey, do you like this? Is it too spicy? You know, sweet, like, what's going on? But it worked, and people really liked it. But I just never, like, pulled the trigger on making it a company because I know what it takes to make a company. So I was like, well, it's pretty involved. So I have to really, you know, devote my time to it if I really want to do it. So I just never pulled the trigger. And I've always wanted to do products with breadfruit, too. Like, for them, again, it's like an up and coming item. It's very sustainable fiber. You know, it's a lot of good aspects about breadfruit. So I was just one day, I went to this breadfruit get together, per se, is this farm. And then from my take, the guy was like, hey, we got a bunch of breadfruit. You know, come buy it. You know, that's kind of like my take on that meeting. And this lady from the Big Island, she has a great thing going on. It's that Ulu co-op over on the Big Island. So they have a cooperative. All these farmers bring their Ulu over there and then they process it. But their idea is to sell more like schools like institutions. But when you started to make this, when you started to make, I mean, you have different flavors. You have all this kind of stuff. So what you see here, yeah. It's incredible, Lord. I mean, not only did we taste it, but I've had other people taste it, you know, on the mainland. And everybody wants to know, why can't we make this in the mainland? Why can't we go forward with it? We're going to answer that question after we take our break. But just before we take the break, I want people to understand that this hummus is absolutely pure breadfruit, right? 100% zero beans. 100% breadfruit. There's no beans in it whatsoever. What about the health? I mean, there's olive oil in it. There's tahini. So the fats come from like good places. It's not, I'm just, you know, it's good food. Again, we're not concerned about calories. It's just good food. It's wholesome food. Like someone hands you a potato or someone hands you the, it's just food, you know, you just eat the food. Well, I have to tell our audience that you can't taste it, but I know my mouth is watering. As soon as this episode is over, we're going to be opening this up and letting the crew taste it as well. It is so, so good. We have to take a short break and then we're going to come back with Lawrence Shoe and what I call the ultimate entrepreneur. How did he end up making this? How did he come up with this flavoring? How can we go forward with this? How can we bring it to the mainland? How can you, whether you're in Austria or in Japan or in Los Angeles or New York, have some of this? So we will get back to it in one minute. I'm Seymour Kazimurski on Seymour's World with Lawrence Shoe. Think Tech Hawaii, be back in a minute. Aloha, I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday, Aloha. I'm Jay Fiedel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and Me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on Think Tech, Aloha. Welcome back to Seymour's World at Think Tech Hawaii. I'm speaking faster because I only have a few more minutes with a wonderful guest, Lawrence Shoe from Ulu Manau. And Lawrence is the developer, the producer, the manufacturer, the head thinker. He does everything with breadfruit. And I'm excited because it's such a healthy product. Now, we're gonna bring up some pictures right now. And if you could explain what we're showing, what is this? So that is a mixer that I got. And that's the hummus right there. We're making it. So that's basically a final product. So that is our turmeric hummus. So that's all breadfruit again, with like tahini, olive oil. No matter, there's nothing in there. The only preservative I use was lemon juice. And then I recently started using citric acid, which is a natural preservative. That's it. So we have a short shelf life. It's only like two, three weeks. So I don't use any preservatives. Okay, very good. Let's look at the next one. Yeah, so this is real quick. Another company I had was Oahu Foodub, I'm a co-owner. And we started this out of necessity. We needed this to do our products. But we rented out to other local farmers market people, the catering people, people that manufacture food like cookies and poi. And how many tenants do you have at this location? Probably 12 to 15, something in that neighborhood. So not only does he make his own product and do everything himself, sales, marketing, accounting, all that kind of stuff, but on top of that, he's a landlord to 12 to 15 other tenants. Like living with a bunch of roommates, that's the way I put it. Let's see the next one. Yeah, so again, it's a more kitchen space. Yeah, so this is our newest, so we have like this, we call this kitchen three. So we have three main kitchens. Then we have other ones that are owned by people as their space. This is our newest kitchen, kitchen three. Let's look at the next one. And that's the breadfruit. So that's perfect. So like you can see, I don't know how good you can tell on camera, but that picture right there is a perfect ma'a fall of breadfruit that I'm gonna use for hummus. That could not be a better fruit to me. When I see that, I'm just like, oh, that's perfect right there. Okay, cool. And that's a lot more of it right there. So that comes from a farm up in Mililani. That's probably about a thousand pounds right there. Then we process that, cook it, steam it, and then we actually freeze it. So we can have it all year long, as I said, at seasonal. So we're gonna wash it, cut it, steam it, and freeze it. And we have one more photograph. And that's the Lulu chips. So again, mea coconut oil, a bit of garlic salt on there. Real simple, couple ingredients. Fabulous. I think that's our last photo. Am I correct? Yes, okay. So let's go back now, Lauren, and talk about the entrepreneurial side. What I like to see about how much money you can make, when are you gonna become the Elon Musk of the breadfruit business? Can this go forward? Can you make it on the mainland, for instance? Is there enough breadfruit around? Let's talk about that issue. Okay, so I think, to sum it up, I always wanna support Hawaii. You know, I'm born and raised here. I wanna live here forever. This is my place. But that being said, there is breadfruit in other places, like South Pacific, like I said, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, places like that. So I think it would be worth the idea to explore those places for making breadfruit a bigger product. Like I said, if I wanna walk into a store in Minnesota and pull off a breadfruit item from the shelf, I might be like, instead of a meatball made with a meat, you can make it out of breadfruit or something like that. Much healthier, honestly. Yeah, so it could be like a meat substitute. But I wanna be able to walk into Chicago, or place Chicago, and buy a breadfruit product. How are you gonna do that? Okay, so, oi. Okay, go ahead. That's all right. So I believe we could get started with trees that are already planted, already made, that we could set up processing facilities in these places like South Pacific, Costa Rica, things like that, process the fruit there with cheaper labor. And these people are familiar with the fruit, they eat it themselves at home. So they know how to handle it, cut it, deal with it. And then we could ship the frozen product, either fully packaged or just into raw state, wherever we wanna go. We wanna process in California, perfect. We have the frozen product, raw frozen product. You ship it to California, and then you can put it in the containers, label it, and then ship it out from there. So basically we need to make the raw product somewhere, and then you can make the finished product, like labeled in that part somewhere else. Which is done with many products around the world, obviously. The idea that I like is that we are, we create a new industry for Hawaii. Because as we all know that Hawaii is really dependent on tourism and the military, those are the two basic, and everything else is tiny and picky you, and we've already lost sugar. Pineapple, macadamia nuts are on their way down. So we need to bring more industry to Hawaii. And to do that, breadfruit is a perfect example. This is something where you can have farms that are growing breadfruit in different stages. So you have year-round breadfruit in California. They're doing, Noel Inca's doing studies, so UH is doing studies right now to figure that out. So I don't have the answer for that, but that's what they're doing today. So they're planting trees all over the place and having people like you and me record the data. So we have people in the field, it's just, you know, it's us, people at your backyard, but at different elevations and different places on the island, west side, dry side, high, low. So they can find out, okay, well, this tree produced all year round, this tree produced once a year, maybe this and twice a year. So where is the sweet spot or where can we plant the low, maybe at a low elevation? It goes in the summer and then the high elevation is winter, I don't know. Let me ask you a couple of business questions. What do you feel the market potential is for this product? I mean, I couldn't put a number on it, but it basically, as you can see, like jackfruit is huge right now. It's the meat substitute and like it acts as like a pooled pork product. I don't know the numbers on it potentially, but hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, I'm sure it's well over like, at least a 250 million probably. So you feel that bread food can also achieve that kind of status because of its health benefit and because it's easy to process as well? It's easy to process and you get a lot of product from a fruit, like it's hard to understand, but this is all food right here. I mean, this is two pounds of food. I can make two pounds of product or more. It's crazy that someone hasn't really done this before. It's kind of surprising. And this tree grows in like sand and it grows in harsher climates. Like it can grow. It doesn't need specific areas. It doesn't need to be like, oh, are you OK today plant? It just grows. So I see the potential is pretty huge as far as the gluten free thing is going on, all this healthy eating is going on, which I don't see stopping anytime soon. But this could tack on to that train and be easily over $100 million product. Well, it's so funny you say that because we looked at coconut water about 15, 20 years ago. Somebody came to me with the idea. They said, see, what do you think of this investment I want to invest in? I think it was coming from South America at the time, something like that. And I said, coconut water, eh, I don't think so. And of course, look at it today. Coca-Cola just bought a coconut water processing facility for $460 million. So we know that if you have an innovative product, and Lauren, I'm telling you this from the consulting point of view, no charge, if you have an innovative product and you decide to manufacture or produce this product, it could take over. You could really do extremely well. To the point where you can't do it by yourself, you'll need food brokerages, you'll need manufacturing facilities in different countries around the world. But that's easy once you've proven that the product does work, that people love it. And I can tell you from the people that have tested it in our family in both Canada and in the USA, it is an amazing product. Thank you. You've got something. Thank you. Now what else you have here? What is this here? Can we show that? Yeah, so again, the way I got started with all this food product, again, I'm not a foodie either. And I think that's a good thing because I don't fancy things up or say I don't like or crave going to really nice restaurants and like, oh, they use this oil and this saffron thing. I'm like, I don't want food. So I feel like that's where our products shine is because it's very simple stuff. So people all across the world can like, it's not just a Hawaiian taste. You've got to live here to like this flavor. This is like anyone across the world could like this stuff. But anyways, I kind of got started through this selling products at the farmers market. I'm from the Big Island, so I bring over Big Island products like jams, jellies. I was selling those. It went really well. And then other people from the Big Island hit me up, hey, Lauren, can you sell our stuff too? Because Big Island is a limited market and Oahu is going to grow their market. So Ahua Loa Farms is one of those companies that I've been working with for about five years. So I bring their stuff here and then I sell it at farmer's markets. Do you package this? I don't know. No, I just get it in the box. I just get the product and then I represent them at farmer's markets and places like Whole Foods and Tamurra's and things like that. So I'm a product rep along with actually selling the product. And that's just another hat that you're wearing. There's another one, yeah. So let's see, how many hats are we talking about? Yeah, actually, this year, I closed two entities. I closed a Lee E. Seafood Company and I closed Farm to Market Hawaii. So I'm trying to console it. So I don't have two entities now, which is nice. And a lot easier to handle. A lot, yes, the tax is easier. Besides the 15 tenants that you have that you have to manage as well. I really admire you for that. I think at your age, why not? Even at my age, I'm all over the place with the stuff that I do. It's fun. I think it's also very, very important to realize you're not going to be successful in everything that you do. No, I haven't. And anything that you fail at has to be looked at as a lesson rather than a failure. And once you realize that fact, then you're still willing to take risks because otherwise you'll end up not wanting to take risks because you're afraid of failure. Fear of failure is the worst, worst thing for a business owner. No, I've done it all. I mean, I failed. I did the food truck thing. I've done a fish business. I've never wanted to do fish again. It was really hard to deal with. So yeah, I've lost money and time and effort and equipment. And I haven't done it all, but I've done a lot in a short period of time and I want to stick with something like this. I have to say, Lauren, we only have a couple of minutes, so I'm going to open this up. Please do. Because I want people to realize how delicious this is. Absolutely. It's just one of those things that I can't believe. So here, I'm going to do this in front of you people out there and I'm sorry that you can't taste it with me, but this is amazing. This has garlic in it. It has a little bit of garlic salt, coconut oil and breadfruit. Three ingredients and it's buttery, it's crunchy and you just want more. Yeah. And it's not guilty. You don't have to feel guilty about eating it either. It is delicious. Absolutely delicious. So I'm sorry to say you can't join me, but that's too bad for you. If you want some, contact me or contact Lauren. You can ship this all over the place. We can. It's on our website, sorry, another business. Hawaiian FarmersMarket.com. You can find the mac nuts, the chips and a bunch of other small locally made products that you ship flat rate anywhere in the US for 13 bucks or for free. So you can find them on their HawaiianFarmersMarket.com. Lauren, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on our show. Thank you. Because I'd love to see young entrepreneurs develop their line, develop their product, get out into the marketplace, make mistakes. Yeah. But at the same time, you are going to do it with this. Congratulations. Thank you very much. Pleasure to see you and thank you for coming to Seymour's World. Yeah. To all of you, we'll see you in a couple of weeks where we'll be back and I have another very surprising guest for you next time on Seymour's World. Aloha.