Sharing food is one of the most core aspects of human life. Food brings people together and makes them happy, a philosophy embodied and bottled by Cantina and their products. We spoke to Koosha and Miles, co-founders who’ve brought a bit of Buenos Aires flavour here to the UK, and talked about their journey as a start-up with no previous experience in the food industry, their love of South America culture, and above all, their passion for creating good, honest food.

• 

• 

Thank you for talking to us! So what is Cantina?

Cantina was born out of our shared love of South America — we met each other there during our year abroad in 2010. Asados (Spanish for barbecues) are a way of life there, and it was the food — namely the chimichurri — that laid the foundations of our friendship, and ultimately our business.

Taken from local slang for ‘bar and grill’, Cantina brings back memories of new adventures and good times, and is our way of making even the simplest of meals feel like an occasion. Our aim is for our chimichurri to bring people together by adding adventure & excitement to every meal.

We had our light bulb moment in 2016, hosting a Latin American barbecue for friends and family; everyone fell in love with it, and the pressure to make our homemade chimichurri into a commercial product was too much. And so, Cantina was born.

How long did it take from that idea to have a ready-to-eat product?

We spent two years developing our recipe, and this is largely due to our focus on the product we were trying to create, and our lack of food science expertise. We set ourselves the goal of creating a natural yet affordable, great-tasting product with branding that catches the eye which is supermarket ready.

Did you face many obstacles in that process?

To explain the highs and lows of this journey is impossible in 500 words, but picture this:

We first developed a product that tasted amazing and looked amazing. We then had to alter our recipe to ensure it had 12 months ambient shelf-life, while remaining natural. We then had to make it taste amazing and look amazing again. We then realised our product would be too expensive, so once again spent months altering the recipe, while maintaining our principals and focus on flavour. Once we had achieved this we went straight to the factory. After months of trial runs and scaling, we once again had to go back to the drawing board and work out how to minimise the issue of natural product separation, while keeping the product tasting amazing. Then we brought in our beer-bottle like packaging and had to once again go back and alter the production to ensure that the sauce flowed out successfully.

Finally after two years, we could say that we had achieved everything we wanted to with the product, and didn’t stray from our key principles! I think the long process has made us even more proud of the product, because we know just how hard we’ve worked to get it exactly right in every way.

How have you found working in food without a background in the industry?

Our key shortfall was our experience in food. We find a lot of people that want to venture into the food business, and have the expertise in food, but perhaps not business. We were the opposite to that. Koosha is a Chartered Accountant, whereas Miles has a strong background in branding and marketing. We entered this adventure largely due to our love for Chimichurri and our quest to get it into the British mainstream, but by no means did we have a background in food bar our love for it!

We wasted significant time and made many mistakes developing our products initially, and only after 1.5 years did we book a food scientist for the day to help progress our product development to make it supermarket safe. In hindsight, we should have identified this as a hole in our knowledge and accepted we needed to ask for help.

What would you tell yourself if you could, looking back on that?

If in your food business venture, you identify a weakness or feel uncomfortable in any aspect of running a business…get help! It will save you time and money in the long run.

• 

• 

What are some of the areas of your product you’re most proud of?

We offer a natural yet affordable, great-tasting product with branding that catches the eye and two personalities behind it.

Our product is made from only natural ingredients, is vegan society accredited and is gluten-free. With being a natural oil based sauce you face difficulties with natural separation between the oil and the herbs, which isn’t seen in every day products as they use unnatural binding agents. We have developed a manufacturing process that minimises this process, while maintaining the integrity of the product.

Our product is affordable in the sense that it is not pitched at the Artisan Market, but is priced at a point for the everyday shopper, looking for quality and satisfaction. A high percentage of our sauce is made from extra-virgin olive oil and fresh herbs, which made this task even harder to achieve.

• 

• 

What’s the feedback to your product been like so far?

We have had incredible feedback from all our in-store sampling sessions on the taste of our product, and have started to make waves in our ultimate goal to bring Chimichurri into the mainstream. People have said they’ve never tasted anything like it, and are shocked that there is such a versatile healthy condiment out there that they’ve never heard of.

What would you want the future of Cantina to look like?

We have recently secured our first wholesalers and believe that this will take our business and brand to the next level. Not only will it allow us to reach a greater range of stores, but also handle a lot of our logistics, freeing us up to concentrate on building the brand.

Towards the end of 2019, we will be running a crowd funding project to enable us to meet the increase in demand and associated costs to truly own our category. We want to become the first brand that comes to mind when Chimichurri is mentioned.

We hope to gain a listing with Ocado in the coming months and then begin to approach stores such as Waitrose/Sainsbury’s Future Brands in the new year. We also have a couple of great new products currently being developed!

Our mission, though, will always remain the same: To bring people together by adding adventure and excitement to everyday meals.

Talking to Cantina, their love for their brand is infectious, and it’s clear that passion has been the driving force getting them through every obstacle and up the steep learning curve of being a start-up. If you want to check them out, you can keep up with them on Instagram here, or go see their website here.

If you’d like to see what connections Forward Fooding could offer your start-up, feel free to get in touch with us at info@forwardfooding.com! You can also add your company to our FMCG trends section on our platform to get free visibility within our corporate and investors’ network here.

Forward Fooding is the world’s first collaborative platform for FoodTech Data Intelligence and Corporate Startup Collaboration. If you enjoyed this article, follow, clap or share and join us in our Food Revolution at ForwardFooding.com

This article has been written by Mathilde Redshaw