Miami almond milk company is helping Americans ditch the dairy
Conventional wisdom says to stick with what you know best — especially when starting your own business.
For Tony Jimenez, the founder of JOI, a nut-based milk product company, that meant his own health. Jimenez and his family had a history of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and he had been making his own plant-based milks for about a decade.
Around 2015, as he was completing an MBA in design strategy at the California College of the Arts, he and several future JOI co-founders decided there was a business opportunity in creating a product for those who were moving toward a “plant based lifestyle.”
The milk market in particular was ripe for disruption, Jimenez said.
“It was dominated by two brands...that were actually giving you a lot of water, gums, additives, emulsifiers, that sort of thing,” he said. “That’s what the world knew as almond milk.”
Meanwhile, there was a niche market of other home cooks like Jimenez who understood that store-bought products weren’t always up to snuff but might not have the time or resources to properly make their own brew.
In stepped JOI, which is also an acronym for Just One Ingredient. In this case, the ingredient is either almond, or cashew. JOI has what Jimenez describes as a “cookie-dough” consistency, and a shelf-life of 18 months.
Jimenez describes JOI as “the world’s most sustainable almond milk product,” and among the most nutritional, with 7-times the amount of protein and 5-times the amount of fiber as regular milk. Jimenez says JOI has “figured out a way to masticate and blend almonds so they don’t cook themselves” — something he says otherwise results in an inferior product.
“We can maintain the raw state of that nut without having itself chemically altered due to exposure to heat,” he said.
To do so, Jimenez said, “We use 100% of the nut. Other companies...throw away 40% of their raw material.”
JOI is a thoroughly Miami story. Jimenez, a graduate of Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, is married to Melissa Medina, daughter of tech and real estate entrepreneur Manny Medina. Jimenez also serves as managing director of Medina Capital, which invests in cybersecurity and software. Although that company plays no role in JOI, JOI’s seed funding round of more than $2 million has included investments from family and friends, Jimenez said. Prior to launch and the seed round, the compan” bootstrapped” the operation for almost three years by investing from personal savings among the co-founders.
The company also touts its diversity.
“We are proud to be both minority and female owned,” Jimenez said. Fifty-percent of its team is composed of women, who are all either Hispanic or Asian.
Jimenez and other company leaders run the firm out of TheVenture.City’s co-working space in Little Havana. Seven of the company’s eight employees are based in Miami.
Other investors include Armando “Pitbull” Perez and Marco Borges, the Miami-based best-selling author of “22 Days Nutrition” and also a JOI board member. In an interview, Borges notes dairy consumption has been in decline for many years in the U.S. As health findings have evolved, experts now believe dairy need not play the essential role it once did in the American diet.
“Eating a well-balanced diet that includes plenty of green leafy vegetables and nuts can better help you get the calcium and protein you need rather than relying too much on dairy,” Vasanti Malik, nutrition research scientist with the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a note last year.
JOI started selling to food service providers in Sept. 2018; it has since expanded to providers and 25 states, and has customers in all 50. It expects revenues of $5 million by the end of 2020. It became profitable in March.
JOI has also begun making the rounds of food blogs. Last month, BonAppetit.com healthyish blog featured JOI as the nut milk “you’ll never run out of.”
“Compared to buying those blocky containers of alt milk at the store, I save an average of $7—plus I cut down on packaging and minimize the space it takes to ship,” wrote Aliza Abarbanel, adding the packaging, “it’s perfectly suited to be reused as a salad dressing or overnight oats container.”
“Every Sunday, I take down my blender to set myself up for the week ahead. I don’t know what the world, or my grocery store, will look like in a month, but I know I’ll have nut milk in the fridge,” she wrote.
Joi is also expanding its reach through a new partnership between Walmart and ecommerce website Shopify, where it has a storefront.
“We believe that this partnership will significantly benefit an early stage brand like ours to expand our sales channel through the world’s largest retailer,” Jimenez said in an email. “The threshold for us to sell at WalMart before was just unattainable, but this partnership empowers us to leverage our Shopify platform and reach WalMart’s millions of customers immediately.”
Hector Gutierrez, JOI’s CEO, says the company considers itself a digital-first brand. Much of its marketing spend is used to micro-target potential consumers on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the trend of online, direct-to-consumer purchases , Gutierrez said.
“Basically there was a ton of food service business that was humming, then was brought to a screeching halt,” he said. “So for a time we lost 100% of that revenue, but the direct-to-consumer revenue just skyrocketed, and it ended up overtaking the loss in business-to-business and actually increased total revenue.”
You won’t find JOI in a grocery store. That’s by design.
“The traditional grocer distribution model is broken,” Jimenez said. Brokers and other middle men push up costs, making a presence in a store aisle too expensive to create a return.
“This way, we have the ability to control the relationship with the customer in a more effective and efficient way. We can drop-ship to them directly.”
JOI has two consumers in mind: One is what it calls a family’s “chief health officer”— think Mom— who’s in charge of keeping the brood in shape. The second is 25 to 45 year-olds with disposable income; these sustainability conscious consumers are interested in high-quality, environmentally friendly ingredients as part of a larger lifestyle awareness.
“We’re like a Swiss army knife — there are possibilities,” Jimenez said. “People realize they can horde this stuff, just put it in their pantry, use it in a million different things, family recipes, or use every single day.”
This story was originally published June 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
