Believe it or not, we worked on this idea for 2.5 years before it FINALLY came to the market- and it didn't even start out looking like this.
The idea started at the Drexel food lab. The Drexel food lab works with various companies to do product development for them and helping allow students to get real world experience. I (Sheetal) was an active participant in the food lab when I was doing my Master's in Culinary arts and Science and was one day tasked to make a large batch of guacamole.
After peeling and pitting an entire case of avocados, I had a huge bowl of seeds and peels and a much smaller bowl of pulp. As someone studying food waste, I felt that there was definitely more to avocado seeds than being thrown away.
After completing a bunch of class projects on the avocado seed and finding out they are full of antioxidants and that they all get thrown away - I just knew there was an idea here.
The first batch of things I made included: A face mask, a face scrub, a hair conditioner, and a "loose leaf avocado tea". Out of everything that was made that day, the tea was the one that was most interesting to me.
Wanting to see if anyone else would think it was interesting, I signed up to showcase my idea at a science fair that was happening at Drexel and set up a stall to serve my tea. I stayed up all night filling my loose leaf tea into tea bags so that people would be able to try it easily. And after the event - people were curious, but not as excited as I expected them to be about such a ground-breaking idea (in my opinion).
So, I found another event and at the next one set up my station to serve pre-brewed avocado tea, and it got a better response than the first one. I knew that I was headed in the right direction, but still needed to make it better.
Another event and another format - switched up from a hot tea to an iced tea and this time - eureka! People were excited about the idea! They were coming back for seconds, asking for recipes, spending time talking with me at the table.
Feeling like events were the best way to figure out what the customer wanted and also to get feedback, Reveal was taste tested with over 700 customers before it finally went live. During this long journey, we convinced restaurants to save their seeds for us, I did my masters thesis on the avocado seed, Zuri joined the team, we built the business, learned how to scale it, we brainstormed branding and at every step of the way we tested - what people thought of our messaging, what questions they had, what were people missing?
We obviously have thousands of stories but we'll save those for another day!
We'd be happy to answer any questions, just leave a comment and we'll get back to you!