YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Norton

lines on the record: 78
first: 2023-10-23
most recent: 2023-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Mark would FedEx me a package of different ketchup samples to taste halfway around the world. And it was about this time when we started thinking about like incorporating the business.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So we go to Wickenden Pub and we end up writing for him like a couple of page word document of the annals of what we had done. And we sort of bulleted out like, well, what would be next? Like you could explore what would be a manufacturer that could make this for us, right? Like how would we go about getting our first customers, you know, the sort of the next steps that we kind of, we left it with him temporarily.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Businesses in the world. And we thought, okay, that's really interesting. This person has the understanding and the resources and the network. And like we were total noobs in this space, like Mark and I didn't know anything about the food business. And also, very importantly, Wynne was a junior and we were seniors, right? So we were leaving and he had another year in college that he could kind of work on this and carry it forward.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that's how we met Wynn Bennett, who he shared with us that his family is part of a very large agricultural business called Cargill, which is actually one of the biggest privately owned...”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know exactly what prompted this, but we used fake letterhead for the law firm Skadnarps. We wrote a letter to the Brown Daily Herald, the campus newspaper, accusing them of stealing Sir Kensington's recipe as a way to get the newspaper's attention after this party. And we happened to be both friends with the editor-in-chief of the paper, and she basically responded being like, ha, that's funny and weird. And also we could write a story about this. And then I got a phone call from someone who had read that article and he said, hey, you might not know me, but I know you because we're in a class together. I don't talk that much. You talk all the time. And my family's in the food business. And I think what you're doing is really interesting, like maybe I could carry this forward so it doesn't wrap up. Can we meet?”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We never thought this would be a viable business because everybody starting companies around us, if they were starting companies, it was like Facebook and social networks, right? Like we didn't think that a physical products business was like a viable startup idea I was friendly with one of the founders of Airbnb that was at RISD right down the hill. But again, that was a technology-enabled business, not a tomato concentrate-enabled business.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, a couple hundred bucks, right? And then Whatever we invested in the inventory and renting the restaurant for a night, we basically just made back and broke even on the ticket sales and the ketchup sales.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And And then the next goal for us was okay. Well, how would we actually sell these jars? And we thought, well, let's go to that same group of people, maybe a bigger group of people, and throw another ketchup tasting party. And along with buying a ticket to the party, you would get two jars of ketchup. And for that, we did that in a restaurant in downtown Providence, and we hired a friend of mine who was a DJ and put together this event.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, yeah, a high end European preserve, not something that just should be indiscriminately squeezed in high quantities, but Teaspoon doled out delicately and savored. For some reason, we thought it would be cool to use a square jar. You know, we basically, again, started like Googling and we found a glass manufacturer in Springfield, Massachusetts, probably 150 miles away.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We saw that there were two recipes that rose to the top, one which we would then call our classic ketchup and one that we would then call our spiced ketchup.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we wanted people to tell us what they liked and kind of by accident we developed a community fan base. And so traditional companies, right, consumer food companies would host a focus group. And we said, Well, why don't we throw a tasting party? And so we designed these invitations that said Sir Kensington invites you to a ketchup tasting and we slip them in people's college mailboxes and we said jacket required as the dress code. And that's how we first got people introduced to the idea.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we learned pretty quickly was that when ketchup is reducing and the steam is coming off, there will be air bubbles that form in the ketchup and they'll essentially pop and they'll spray the tomato all over the kitchen and they'll spray it all over you too. And it's hitting our skin and burning us. And we start dubbing those Kensington kisses. By the end of our prototyping process, we had the entire interior of my kitchen with cut up trash bags so that the walls wouldn't get stained and the cabinets wouldn't get stained. I was wearing sunglasses as we were reducing this ketchup.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neither of us had true culinary chops, right? We didn't have culinary training. And so that was what began the process was Googling and looking for cookbook recipes for what's in ketchup and then creating variations of those catch-ups.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the power of industry for you. And in that moment, he thought, well, let me create my own catch-up. And he shook some tomatoes and some organic raw sugar and whipped up right there Kensington's ketchup for Kathleen the Great to try in this Kobe beef. And of course she, you know, took a bite and loved it.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He thought who's insuring the insurance companies. And it turned out at the time no one had thought of that before. And so he started insuring insurance companies. And of course from that, he made a fortune, but his true love of condimenteering shone through when he was hosting a salon back in England at his manor house. And at the time, this particular one, he was hosting Catherine the Great of Russia, as well as the Emperor of Japan, who had brought a very special sample of Kobe beef, Catherine the Great, said, oh, I'd love to try this with some ketchup. Mackenzie, do you have any ketchup? And he went into the kitchen to look for ketchup, and he realized the only thing he had had had high fructose corn syrup in it, which of course you can't actually serve to a czaris of Russia.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sir Kensington went to Cambridge undergrad, Oxford for graduate school, and then he, in service of the Queen, transferred to Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. But at the time he wrote a treatise on Ionian chutneys and other spiced sauces from the region. The condimenteering was his true love, but for practical reasons, he also went into finance and invented reinsurance.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were totally sure we were not going to cause Scott and Mark's catch up. Like to us, that was totally boring. We wanted to come up with something that was so radically interesting and different and was a world that people could inhabit. Okay, how can we create a jar of something that's like an object and you can imagine an entire film set around that object? You can imagine an entire cast of characters at a dinner party surrounding that object.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we were just having fun, right? I mean, we're looking backwards now, like we were just riffing. We were just having fun. So we're not sitting there with a bunch of spreadsheets thinking, okay, well, exactly how do we position this so that the modern consumer purchases at a higher velocity? We're just like creating this character of Sir Kensington's and like yelling at each other and like spilling ketchup all over my apartment.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We said, okay, what would it look like to be the exact opposite of Heinz? Like, how could we be dramatically different from any other ketchup that's come before? Well, okay, if most ketchup comes in plastic, then we should be glass. If most ketchup is squeezing, well, let's use the language of a European preserve and have a wide mouth jar and be scooping. And if most ketchup is Americana and synonymous with the roadside diner and fast food, then what's kind of the cultural opposite of that ketchup is kind of English. So let's make it English.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It was a recognition that people have tried and failed to introduce other ketchups to compete with Heinz. Yeah. Of course, they differentiated based on the ingredients and the flavor, but every other ketchup out there would copy Heinz, the market leader on the packaging, the materials, the brand positioning. It looked like a copycat, right? It was Heinz, but less so.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely this article was in the air and it had come out a couple of years prior. This excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell. But one of the first things we did actually, Mark and I was reread this article.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There had been no innovation in ketchup in 70 years, and every other category of culture and of food had change. And so really it was, we saw this open space as an invitation to create something.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was beautiful about this is we had this wonderful time bound experiment our second semester senior year. We both had jobs that we knew we were going to. And I think that's what started the momentum at the beginning was not even having these big expectations for like changing the world. And so in the middle of that crepe lunch, what he said was we should make it like we should actually make the ketchup with our own two hands.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm like, what? Go over my ketchup. Like, I don't know about that. Americans don't even know what's in ketchup. It's sort of this commodity product. It's totally dominated by Heinz. And he's like, well, exactly think about it. There's 10 different types of mustards, right? There's like Dijon mustard and spicy brown mustard and yellow mustard, but there's only one type of ketchup. Like, why not? Why not create something with that's better with better ingredients?”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Brown has a very long winter break, and it was in January that I went down to visit a very good friend of mine. High school at USC, and we were in his old car, we're listening to Afrobeat. We had our shirts off. And at this point, I was T-Aing a class in entrepreneurship at Brown. And so he said, dude, I have to tell you about something. I have an idea that's going to be huge. And I kind of looked at him and I'm like, oh, give me a break. I hear ideas all the time. I grade papers and final projects in entrepreneurship. What do you got for me? And he goes gourmet ketchup.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think what was interesting about our friendship was we didn't really like party together so much. I mean, we probably did a little bit, but I think a lot of our meetings, you know, were lunches where we would discuss ideas definitely talk about kind of our career plans. And it was more almost like we were sort of co-conspirators.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But we first met, Mark and I first met in a financial institutions class where I felt really behind. Would put his hand up whenever question was asked and knew all the answers to the questions. And my first recollection of Mark was, oh, wow, this guy is really sharp.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2011, 2012, 2013, we were only catch up. It's super hard to sell terrestrials. You know, grocery stores are saying, okay, what do we do with that? People would ask us, you know, are you going to go into other condiments? Are you going to make mustard? Are you going to make mayonnaise? And we said, oh, you know, the market structure isn't quite there. We just have to keep cracking this nut. If we”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT