YouSaid · the spoken record

Seth Tibbott

lines on the record: 61
first: 2019-06-03
most recent: 2019-06-03
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

“Yeah, it's a good question. Certainly luck and timing come into play. I was lucky enough to jump on this jet stream of natural foods that was just starting up in the 1980s and 90s and then helping blaze a trail for other meat alternative companies that come on now. But a lot of it, you know, is just persistence and hard work and trying to be less stupid.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tempe is roughly 10 to 15 percent of sales, but it's really outpacing some of our other products in growth right now. So we're just doubling. Yeah, I just looked this morning at the new incubator which we're building. It's going to double our tempeh capacity. So we're pretty excited about that. I just may have been about four decades early on the tempeh thing.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's alone. We haven't sold equity yet. We'd like to Keep our equity so that we can keep the mission at the center of our lives and so that nobody can tell us what we can do or can't do. Yeah.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, to be in this business has been a joy and a great feeling in my life, and it's taken me places that still I'm able to travel around the world. I'm able to work with nonprofit groups like VGANURI that are just getting going over here. I can't think of a better dream at this point in my life. I just feel like the luckiest guy in the world. We have just borrowed some money from ethical investor that we really feel pretty, but it's a loan.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. What we're seeing right now is the mainstreaming of plant based foods, and we're in 27,000 plus stores worldwide. It's really a friendly world for plant-based foods now. We love to see all great tasting vegan companies succeed, partly because we're altruists and we're a mission-driven company and we want to see plant-based foods grow. All over the world But there's a business reason too, which is that it's easier for us to place products in a category that's hot”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right in there. You know, it was really a new world for me. And people that wouldn't talk to us about Tempeh were now clamoring for Tofurki. And it took us, Toferki took us from being a regional West Coast distribution to a... National distribut”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, when we do, and at the end of the year, and having enough money to give some nice bonuses and pay off a lot of debt.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, right about then it became really profitable because we brought the production of the Toferki in-house. We were buying it from a manufacturer, a co-manufacturer. And then when we brought it in-house and we started making sausage and deli slices, and we went to these same buyers and said, hey, would you like deli slices? And we found that the Tofurki and this new recipe sliced really well.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was like our bully pulpit kind of. Really, then Thanksgiving rolled around. The trees would turn gold and brown. Here would come the Tofurki, and here would come the media to us. And so we had millions”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, just from the first response to the Toferki, it just felt so different than anything I had felt before marketing Tempe that I really felt like this is going to really turn around at some point. And it really did. And you're right that a lot of the media exposure from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times at one point I had to put the Washington Post on hold to talk to the New York Times. It was just crazy.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a lot of it was what they'd call a paper loss, but it was still loss. We weren't really making money, but we were paying the light bills and paying employees. But at the end of the day, and we were borrowing money where needed. But most of the money that was being borrowed was for investment into equipment and things like that.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was more like the write on. Because, you know, up to that point, our marketing and then all of the natural food marketing wasn't very whimsical or funny or fun. And this was like... Fun, but it was also in the early days people kind of took offense to it a little bit because you were taking on an iconic American Meal and a holiday, and everything Bringing a Toferki to a dinner was always controversial. Yeah.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meat of He had figured out how to extrude these roasts of stuffing in the middle and they would have satan on the outside. And we tried it and we thought it's good, but I wonder what it would be like if we added tofu to it. And so we added tofu”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the third year in 1997, a friend of mine who had had a failed Satan company called Meat of Wheat came to me and he said,”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first thing that was ever sold online was a pepperoni pizza. In 1994, the first food was sold online. So this is 1996.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, no, the second year we were a tofu maker and Hans had a baked tofu, which baked out some of the sponginess out of the tofu. And it didn't look so pretty plated, so it was still a problem. That was the year that we actually went online and sold 300 of these online. You know that Toferki was one of the first frozen products ever to be sold on the internet.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“PCC up in Seattle was another one that embraced it. They put in a Toferki hotline. They were getting so many orders and they were going crazy for”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People said, Oh my God, I've been waiting 20 years for this product. And it was just so heartening to right away feel like finally I can see my way through this.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we did, you know, but once again, it was the co-ops that rallied to embrace the concept. And people loved it. I mean, we put self-addressed stamp postcards in every Toferki that year. We sold 818.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought I would buy those, and I really liked it. But I always loved the name Topurky. A lot of people were against the name, but at that point I was ready to change something because I had been trying to play it straight as a businessman and make it look like a hippie didn't get within 10 feet of this food. Then Toferkey, I mean, was more whimsical and fun, and I just thought it was more me. I wasn't getting anywhere by pretending to be a businessman, so why not just”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I didn't invent the name Toferki, right? In 1981, when I was delivering Tempe around Portland, there was a Tofer Ki sandwich, T-O-F-U-R-K-E-Y, and it was being made by King Harvest, local sandwich maker here in Portland.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then there was a tub of gravy that once again Hans had created a nutritional yeast gravy. And then there was these eight tempeh drums. We thought that there was going to be eight vegetarians sitting around.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's good. And so And Sue had been working on a burger at that point that we had rejected because it tasted like Thanksgiving. And we thought, hmm, I wonder if we make these into not burger shapes, but drumettes. And so we made them into tempeh drumettes.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Hans and Rhonda Roebel run the higher taste, which is a great sandwich company, and it's been in business since the early 1980s. And Hans, especially anything he touches, turns to gold. He's like one of the best chefs that I've ever met. And he was in 1994. I was delivering Tempe to him, and he was making it was around Thanksgiving these stuffed tofu roasts that he had been working on. And he was selling them about to 25 or 50 a year. And they were a dome of tofu with stuffing in the middle. And I was always looking for something to eat at Thanksgiving. And we had tried all these stuff pumpkins that kind of collapsed in the oven. Gluten-roast that were too tough to cut with a chainsaw. So we were failing, and then I saw with Hans this is like something”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah. But he had a bigger heart than a business sense. And he was always loaning me money and I would be paying it back, not always on time, but we paid it back.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had to find a new space, and there was an old tortilla factor And we rented out 5,000 square feet of this 26,000 square foot building, and I borrowed the 160,000 dollars from Bob.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, towards the end of the Hewsom run, the school district had sold the building to a guy who turned out to be a crook and did jail time, but then it fell into the local firehouse. So it's now the firehouse a few. So it was a great deal.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, it's funny because right now people ask Sue, they go, did he make you sign a prenup? And she goes, The one that needed the prenup. He lived in a tree.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had some existential nausea. Time to time About that. You know, I did feel like a failure in the business sense, but I felt like the mission sense, you know, seeing this Tempe business grow and seeing people eating more and more of the product, it was satisfying. And I was involved in local activism in the eco-world. I had a very fulfilling life. a period towards the end of that where I was really starting to wonder whether it was ever going to take off and I was looking for ways out”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. And then I could go work for them for $1,000 a month. And I thought about it long and hard. It took me about nine months to decide whether I'm going to take this or not. And went through a lot of those questions at that time. And the end of the line, I just said, I'm growing and I'm going to stick with this. So I kept the business. I turned down the big money.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the thought came up. Actually, in 1986, I had an offer to sell the Tempeh business to a local tofu company, and they offered me $25,000 for the business.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it had a wood stove, so it was insulated, and it was very warm and cozy in the winter. It had three levels. It had 11 foot by 16 foot ground floor, and then a sleeping loft above that and a little cupola up on the top. And it was kind of the first tiny house. And the treehouse was on a Frisbee golf course. So I'm living on a golf course, American Dream”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I don't have a place to live, and one of my employees, Amber Ezick, had a piece of land right outside Hewsom, and she offered to rent me four trees for $25 a month.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we need a space for our clown business to build props, huh? And I was like, I think I can provide you that space. Yeah. And they were, people were like, you're going to rent to these clowns. I'm like, You had me at Ace in Space.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one day, I'm sitting there in my office and I look outside, and here comes this purple truck, and it's got a yellow umbrella on the top, and it pulls up, and these two guys get out, and they come in and they go, my name is Ace, and this is space, and we're clowns. And I'm like, okay And they said, and we tune pianos when the clown business is soft.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there were a couple of strategies, but one was the postmaster of the town had given me an apartment to rent free. She said, we just need somebody to live there. And so I was living rent free, and I was thinking, how am I going to make money and turn this thing around? And I said, I've got three classrooms that I can rent out. And so one classroom I rented out to my friends who had a graphic art business, and they were good payers. I had the other classroom I rented out to a mom and pop wooden fruit basket company that were making fruit boxes. And then I had this one more classroom, and I'm like, what am I going to do with this or classroom? I couldn't find a rent. This is a poor part of Click Attack County.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, okay, no, right, you know, I've always felt like a little misfit in the business world, so still do in a lot of ways.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were skeptical, but they were open to the presentation, and I made tempeh salad and I cooked up some tempeh sort of strips and I fed it to them and then the conversation turned to, well, how much could you afford for rent if we did rent this to you? Which was the conversation I was dreading? Because I didn't have much money So I said, How about $150 a month? It was just like silence. And nobody said anything for a minute. And then this one woman who was kind of like really enjoying the tempe”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and it had two big, huge stainless steel sinks. It had stainless steel tables, hood. And it even had two storerooms that were just the right size for a Tempeh incubator. It was just sitting there and it was the first sale sign on it. And so I called up the superintendent and he was saying, yes, we really want to sell this, but as we spoke, he was thinking we haven't had anybody offering on it, so maybe we would rent it to you. So I said, could you put me on the docket for the school board meeting? And so he was nice enough to do that. And so my brother Bob came out and we cooked up some tempeh. For the local school board.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I needed a bigger space now. We were grossing like thirteen hundred dollars a month at that point. And so I started looking outside the Portland metropolitan area and I went up to Hewsom, which is about 70 miles from here east of here, small little town. And I looked in the window of a school building. There was an old vacant school building out there. And I looked in the window and there was this perfect tempeh kitchen. It was like the...”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, so in April of 1981, a distributor called Applegate Natural Foods Out here in Tiger called up and said, We need you to make us a thousand pounds of tempeh a week And I was making like 100 pounds a night on a good night. And a lot of it was coming out bad and I was composting it in my garden much to the light of the local rufous sighted Tohey population.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't mention that. Should have, but they And then finally, one of the teachers said, well, you can always fall back on teaching.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in Forest Grove, substitute teaching to make some money. And I went into the last day of teaching I announced to the lunchroom of teachers that, you know, I'm going to start making tempeh. And it was just like, oh my God, silence. Yeah. They were like,”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. And not only were people saying what is tempeh, but people were telling me, you know, this is a pretty bad idea. I was teaching at the school.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And she goes, You know how to make tempeh, you know about tempeh? And I said, Yeah, I can make you some. And she said, really? And so she ordered two pounds. And she said, but it's got to be good, tempeh. And if it is, I'll order more and I'll sell it to all my friends. So I went there and I made that tempeh. I brought it back. She liked it. And she ordered ten more pounds. And because of that, I felt like this is a good sign. So I went to the local co-op Force Grove and asked if they would rent me their kitchen at night. And they said, yeah, we can rent it out to you for $25 a month. So it was like great. So at December 1, 1980, I sent in my stamped envelope to the state of Oregon and registered Turtle Island soy dairy.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, my girlfriend Kim and I moved into a house in Manning, Oregon, which is on the way to the coast on Highway 26 right down the street was this restaurant called the Java Restaurant, and it was right in Manning, which is a town of about 50 people. Was the only Indonesian restaurant 100 yards from my house, and I was, this is a sign. And so I got to go down and meet him. So I met this woman, Aina, and she was the proprietor of it. And I said, it doesn't look like you have tempeh on the menu”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I was giving it to the cooks at the retreat center who would cook it. There's a very talented cook. And so the retreat groups loved it. And it was little income from my pocket. Five pounds of tempeh would bring in seven dollars.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. So I started making tempeh for friends and family and there were retreat groups that would come out so they wanted some tempeh and I got an old refrigerator and I strung Christmas tree lights up inside.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you incubate it for 24 hours or so at 88 degrees, and it binds the beans together into this thick cake that's about the texture of like a paperback book almost, and you can slice it.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the way you make it is you take the haul off, which makes the bean split into two pieces, two cotyledons. You cook the beans, and you dry the beans and inoculate them with rhizopus oligosporus, which is a member of the mold family.”
2019-06-03 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Live Episode! Tofurky: Seth Tibbott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT