#08 – Going Pound for Pound with Co-Founder & CEO of Grain4Grain, Yoni Medhin — How to Use Farmer’s Markets to Shape a Pitch & Sustainable Pancakes to Feed Families in San Antonio

Yoni Medhin, the CEO and Co-Founder of Grain4Grain, has a passion for finding out how to turn wonders out of what people normally consider waste.  And, with the help of his Co-Founder, Matt Mechtly, the two recently founded Grain4Grain a startup based in San Antonio, Texas that takes the spent grain, the primary waste product from the beer brewing process, dries it, and turns it into a low carb high protein flour.

The name, Grain4Grain comes from the fact that for every pound of flour they sell, they donate a pound to help feed San Antonio area families in need. To date, these two have been responsible for feeding over 650 families in the San Antonio area as well as diverting 4200 pounds of the spent barely grain from landfills.

In this episode of the Grow Ensemble Podcast, Yoni tells the origin story of Grain4Grain and his own personal appetite for social entrepreneurship, giving back and sustainability.

Listen in to our conversation for a few takeaways: 

• How Yoni and his partner have utilized a local farmer’s market to refine their pitch and target market in the early days of the business. 
• How Grain4Grain built partnerships with local breweries and repurposed the primary waste product from their beer brewing process to create a pancake mix that’s low carb, high protein and delicious!

Episode Links:

• Yoni Medhin — https://www.linkedin.com/in/yonatan-medhin [0:00:23]
• Grain4Grain — https://www.grain4grain.com/ [0:00:27]
• Denver Rescue Mission — https://www.denverrescuemission.org [0:05:35]
• Kodiak Cakes — https://kodiakcakes.com/ [0:10:48]
• Hill Country Daily Bread — http://hillcountrydailybread.com/ [0:11:43]
• Freetail Brewing — https://www.freetailbrewing.com/ [0:31:30]
• Grain4Grain Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/grain4grain/ [0:37:20]

Show Topics:

• A little about Yoni and Grain4Grain’s process. [0:02:14]
• Yoni’s interest and appetite for socially impactful work. [0:03:26]
• The critical moment in catalyzing Yoni’s path. [0:05:25]
• A history of sales, engineering and innovative ideas. [0:07:58]
• Day to day work at Grain4Grain and building the business. [0:09:56]
• Decisions moving forward on what is most important. [0:12:06]
• How Grain4Grain views marketing and recharging the batteries. [0:14:26]
• Grabbing potential customers’ attention in order to inform them. [0:17:58]
• Conversion rates and the high turnover of new customers. [0:19:29]
• The hierarchy of Grain4Grain’s customers’ needs and pitching according to these. [0:20:56]
• Grain4Grain’s recipe for the pancake mix and how they use spent barley. [0:24:05]
• The inspiration behind reusing waste from the brewing industry. [0:26:50]
• Reaching out to breweries and securing waste from them. [0:30:12]
• Grain4Grain’s upcoming third donation drop-off! [0:32:10]
• Looking forward to the rest of the year for the business. [0:34:28]
• How to reach out and meet with the founders! [0:36:10]
• And much more!

Tweetables:

• “For us and for me personally this is something that is true to my heart of a company that intimately gives back.” —  Yoni Medhin [0:04:28]

• “I made it as a part of our mission to focus on giving back to the community something that is valuable.” —  Yoni Medhin [0:06:58]

• “When it is just you and you have limited resources you have to think about how every dollar is being spent and what is the return from that dollar.” —  Yoni Medhin [0:13:51]