#51 From marketing to milk (with Bastien Eymery @ Lilk)

This week Dan and Dara catch up with Bastien Eymery on his journey from data science, to growth marketer to plant-based milk founder! They discuss what it took to develop the recipe, how it got into shops, and all the data and analysis to it to make it a success.

Find Lilk on their website https://bit.ly/3RLNW3H and on Instagram https://bit.ly/3D8s6Dt.

Read about Lilk’s win at The Grocer’s New Product Awards https://bit.ly/3B4MtyW.

Join Bastien and Lilk at the London Coffee Festival on 20-23 April 2023 to witness their new exciting launch https://bit.ly/3x8pQZc.

In other news, Dan recovers from ‘the vid’, Dara visits the emerald isle and Bastien addresses his sart-up bod!

Follow Measurelab on LinkedIn – https://bit.ly/3Ka513y.

Intro music composed by the amazing Confidential – https://spoti.fi/3JnEdg6.

If you’re like what we’re doing here, please show some support and leave a rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever really.

Let us know what you think and fill out the form https://bit.ly/3MNtPzl, or email podcast@measurelab.co.uk to drop Dan and Dara a message directly.

Quote of the episode from Bastien: “There’s nothing like a sexy graph!”

Quote of the episode from Dara: “If you start feeling like you’re not stupid anymore, you’re probably getting complacent.”

Quote of the episode from Dan: “I’ve not heard of startup bod before, that’s a new one to me, but it sounds really fun.”

Transcript

[00:00:00] Dara: Hello, and welcome back to The Measure Pod, a podcast for people in the analytics world to talk about surprise, surprise, all things analytics. I’m Dara, I’m MD at Measurelab.

[00:00:24] Daniel: And I’m Dan, I’m a consultant here at Measurelab.

[00:00:27] Dara: This week, we’re very happy to be joined by a Measurelab friend and former client. Bastien Eymery. So we’ve worked with Bastien a couple of times in the past. I’m not going to steal your thunder Bastien, I’m going to hand this over to you to do a bit more of an introduction to yourself. And usually what we do is get people to just give a little bit of a summary of their journey into, we usually say analytics, but I know your roles have been more broad than that. So what’s your kind of journey been like to bring you up to the point where you’re joining us here on the show today?

[00:00:56] Bastien: Hi Dara, and hi Daniel it’s been a while. First thing I want to say, Dara, I’ve noticed Daniel’s been sipping on a glass of milk and you’re not sipping on anything. So what’s that about?

[00:01:05] Dara: Well, I’ve got a glass of water and as some of our listeners will know, Dan’s usually drinking beer. So it’s a very special occasion that he’s drinking a glass of milk, but it’s not just any milk Bastien is it?

[00:01:14] Bastien: That’s right, yeah it’s something you can make beautiful cocktails with, milk based cocktails with. Thanks for having me, it’s a real pleasure to be here. We’ve worked together before of course, you know, really on sort of hardcore tech and data stuff. And yeah, it’s a little bit different to what I do these days. So, you know, I’m still hoping there’s a cool sort of analytics spin we can put on top of it.

[00:01:33] Dara: Definitely so what is it that you’re doing now then?

[00:01:35] Bastien: I’m the founder of a plant milk brand called Lilk. It’s not a super original name, but it kind of sticks with people. So yeah, it’s very different to the kind of stuff that we’ve worked together before. Just as a bit of background, I started off as a scientist, as a mathematician and data scientist and then as I progressed through my career, I’ve kind of moved further and further into the dark side of business. Into sort of being an analyst in a marketing team, then an actual marketer, then sort of leading marketing teams and growth teams in various businesses, and now I’m a full on entrepreneur. So I feel like as I’m getting older and moving more and more outside of academia and more into capitalism, so there you go.

[00:02:12] Bastien: But yeah, what happened was I took a job in early 2020 in February and that was in travel tech. So we were going to buy all these different companies and merge them into this thing. And that was not a really good idea to do this at that time right. The whole world was about to go into lockdown in March as we know. And so, yeah, that job vanished and I found myself at home spending loads of time just drinking tea and coffee and Netflix and a lot. And I’d been on my personal journey towards being fully plant based for a while and been progressing on that journey. Part of that was replacing dairy milk and I tried all the different plant milks out there, all of them under the sun and I didn’t really fall in love with any per se. And also I’m a bit of a coffee snob so I really cherished the taste of my carefully selected single origin guatemalan bean, and I don’t want the taste of coconut when I drink my coffee, you know, not always anyway. So that was the idea, the idea was to sort of, just to think about how we could come up with something that accompanies the taste of coffee better, and just let the taste of the coffee shine essentially. And from there we sort of experimented with more stuff, that’s how it all started.

[00:03:16] Daniel: Well, you’re definitely putting us to shame because me and Dara have both been on a plant-based journey for many years, and neither of us have started our own plant milk range.

[00:03:23] Bastien: It’s only a matter of time.

[00:03:24] Dara: And I have to say looking at Dan’s reaction, sipping the milk. I think he actually looks like he’s enjoying it more than the beer he usually drinks, that’s quite a testimonial.

[00:03:33] Daniel: That’s blasphemous Dara, that’s blasphemous. No, I am normally drinking a beer, but I’m on the tail end of coming out of COVID and so I’ve been off the beer for a little while, so having a nice, cool, refreshing glass of milk that tastes great. We’re not sponsored, we’re not endorsed in any way, but it is good. I went and bought myself some of the Lilk which you can get in, where can you get it Bastien?

[00:03:54] Bastien: You could get it in Ocado. So we launched in Ocado in January and recently launched in Holland and Barrett as well as a few stores in Waitrose. Not everywhere yet, hopefully we’ll expand that. So yeah, I think you’ve got one near you don’t you Daniel?

[00:04:07] Daniel: I tried my luck and swung past, just to see, just because I knew we were doing this talk today and I wanted to show you that I’ve tried it, but yeah it is really good. It’s been many a year since I’ve even dared to have a glass of milk, you know, plant based or otherwise. So yeah, it’s nice to, nice to be able to have one, so yeah, thanks.

[00:04:21] Bastien: Yeah so again, the idea was to try and go away from the traditional single ingredient model by blending different ingredients together, that was our intention. And so we started experimenting at home and tried hundreds of combinations. I’m not making it up, we tried all the ingredients out there. We were very interested in ingredients like these sort of ancient grains and seeds that are super drought resistant, you know, very relevant to the sort of summer we’ve just had right. And you know, things like hemp, very nutritious, all of that. So we tried dozens and dozens, hundreds of combinations, but most of them didn’t work at all. So there were loads of failed experiments, frankenstein monsters at the end of the experiments. But some of them did work and a couple of them, we were really really happy with as they were.

[00:05:05] Bastien: So we just enrolled the help of some food scientists and started doing a mass undertaking, a huge analysis of the supply chain. You know, how could we get this stuff sustainably? How could we make sure that we minimise our emission as part of the full supply chain, the sort of cradle to store supply chain and yeah, we had some promising results, won a couple of awards. Got to pitch to Ocado and two weeks later we get an invite from the buyer saying, yep, let’s do it I’m going to list you, which we weren’t ready for, we were like really. So that was nice and after that, you know, initially did all of this without a ton of money, just family and friends. Eventually it got a bit more success and decided that actually you can’t do this on a tiny budget like we had and we needed to expand and yeah, did a little funding round and off went.

[00:05:50] Dara: Amazing, so impressive. And I’m kind of torn between which line of questioning to go down because I want to ask both about the business and probably try and tie analytics into that. But also I’m really interested in the product, which I shamefully haven’t tried yet, but I am going to rectify that soon. You mentioned that you tried lots of different blends. So is the resulting product a secret formula or is it more available?

[00:06:12] Bastien: So we did the research project. My business partner Emily who’s also my life partner Emily now has a background in science as well, she’s a researcher in behavioural science. And so our approach was very scientific and we did loads and loads of testing. We owned the IP to the recipe, we worked with a co-packing manufacturer who does it for us. So the IP is ours, anyone can go and do their, you know their own product, I guess, but you’d be surprised the amount of grains and ingredients that are available out there and you have to pick, and they were very different. So sort of UK grown oat, for example, tastes slightly different to a Spanish oat. And it’s the same in other countries, same thing with the rice you know, whether you get it from Asia, whether you get it from Europe, we get most of ours from Europe by the way, you get sort of different taste profiles coming through. So there’s hundreds of ingredients even just for an oat or a grain of rice. So the exact one at the exact sugar level or the exact extraction process, etc. is obviously proprietary to us. But you know it’s not rocket science, you can just go and try stuff if you’ve got the appetite for it.

[00:07:10] Dara: I’m assuming from what you said that the kind of original proof of concept started in your home kitchen, kind of experimenting and just trying all these different combinations at home before you then refine the process. So how far away is the final product from those initial proof of concepts you were cooking up in your kitchen?

[00:07:24] Bastien: So we were quite scared, right. Because we cooked up some good initial, you know, samples at home and we were really keen that we wanted the product to taste just like that, but you’d never know how it was going to come out of the factory right? It could be very different but we didn’t have the money to go and do trials. It cost like thousands of pounds for each single trial, this is what people typically do. So we didn’t do that, we just decided to print all of the packaging, there’s 150,000 of them and just go straight into production. Our manufacturing partner was a bit shocked and strongly advised us against doing that.

[00:07:58] Bastien: But the truth is we just didn’t have the budget to do otherwise. So we just went for it, bullishly into the unknown. So, you know, we were quite scared. But luckily it was really good straight away and we didn’t have to make any changes to the recipe. I feel like we front loaded a lot of the research ourselves in the kitchen and it did translate quite well into manufacturing. So yeah, it’s pretty much the same thing.

[00:08:18] Dara: Amazing. I got nervous thinking about that moment when the samples arrived, scared on your behalf, but obviously it worked out which must have been a huge relief to you.

[00:08:27] Bastien: Yeah, for sure. It was a massive relief and also you can get blinkered, right? You can get tunnel vision as a founder. You just like your own stuff, but how’s everybody else going to respond. So we loads of blind testing with our friends and people we just met, met out in the street almost. So we did loads of tests like that, and also we got some good feedback from, you know, the buyers out there and won the grocer new product award, which is like the biggest sort of illustrious award that you can win in this industry for product development and innovation ahead of huge companies like Alpro. So that gave us the proof to decide this was a winner. This had legs, we can do something with that.

[00:09:02] Dara: So bringing it back a little bit to the kind of business side of things. Previously a lot of your experience was working with growing existing businesses. So what was the transition like to doing it for your own business and how prepared did you feel, like how much of your previous experience was transferable into setting up Lilk?

[00:09:18] Bastien: Yeah, I think the first thing to mention is that obviously we launched earlier this year in January, but really the project took a lot longer to get off the ground right. You’ve got to do all this stuff before then, and so that was pretty much bootstrapped and it was from 7:00 AM in the morning to 9:00 AM and then from 5:00 PM in the evening to 10:00 PM every single day of the week and weekends. So I feel like, you know, you’re kind of doing these two jobs and it was quite difficult to sort of manage both worlds for a long time. But luckily we had some people helping us so they made it a bit gentler. So that’s the first thing to say, then the transition was, I guess, great to just have one job that’s nice. In terms of the transition, in terms of the discipline, I guess I was really concerned with growth before. And I guess as a business owner, I’m still concerned with growth, right? I’m in a growth mode, I’m seeking investors, I’m trying to please them. I’m trying to make sure that the company is on the right track to success.

[00:10:15] Bastien: And so a lot of it was transferable. I think the industry experiences is what I was lacking and I still lack. I feel very ignorant and stupid all of the time, but through our investors and through people we’ve partnered with we’ve got access to a wider network now where we can just go and pick up the phone and ask stupid questions. And one thing I found in this industry is that this is an industry that is full of people who are extremely helpful, extremely generous with their time, their advice, their contacts and this is something I’ve not really come across like that before even competitors will help you out for no reason other than just to be nice. And that’s something I didn’t expect going into this, you get networks of food entrepreneurs. There’s these closed Facebook groups, like the food hub, for example, where you can just ask any question, how do I transform this raw material into this one? How do I find this machine to do this thing? And, you know, in a matter of minutes, you’ll have an answer usually, and this is just people just donating their time and their knowledge very generously. So that was the bit that was lacking, but I feel like we’ve made some progress and we’re not as stupid as we were just a few months ago, but we’re still plenty stupid.

[00:11:17] Dara: I think that never goes away as a business owner does it? If you start feeling like you’re not stupid anymore, you’re probably getting complacent.

[00:11:24] Bastien: Yeah, for sure. The other side in terms of sort of the transferability of what I was doing is that I’ve got a very techy approach to things. So I’ve got an optimisation streak that hasn’t died down. You know, that flame is still very much there. So all our systems are very automated, connected when an order comes in, you know, there’s no manual work involved whatsoever into producing a PO and sending it out to the factory, it’s all you know, sort of automatically generated. So this is very much something I’ve taken and it’s quite unique to the way we’re set up here and yeah, heavily borrowed from that sort of well and the work I’ve done with you and Daniel before.

[00:11:57] Daniel: So bringing it back a little bit to the tech stack and the analytics side of things Bastien. So maybe if you can talk to us a bit about the tech that you’re using as much as you’re willing to divulge of course. I know you’ve got a website, but obviously you must sell obviously directly to stores and the manufacturing side. So what kind of technologies are you using? And I suppose, how is it all built together?

[00:12:15] Bastien: Yeah so the sort of text stack is still quite simple. We’ve got a Shopify custom built website with sort of Google Analytics integrated in there. On top of that, you get all the usual sort of Facebook catalogues, etc. to connect the inventory to the various ad platforms, so that’s all pretty standard and it works quite well. In terms of the inventory management and things like that, there are softwares that do this, you know, Unleashed is one of them, for example, but we decided to just build our own stuff. So we’ve just coded the inventory management and stock management and, you know, expiry date management tool ourselves. And then on top of that, we have various systems where we speak to the various retailers and all of these things are fairly well integrated. And then when an order comes in or when something happens and you have to take action, you get various alerts that are just triggered.

[00:13:05] Bastien: So this is kind of a little system that we built. But it’s very likely that we will, you know, seek to improve this and build, build it on top of a more solid foundation. And then for the CRM, we’ve got the, just the sort of HubSpot setup. And so that’s what we use for, you know, to keep all that sort of data, and it integrates quite well into the rest of the Google Platforms, such as Gmail, etc. So when it comes to, you know, growing the business and measuring the results, looking at open rates and all that kinda stuff, this is all integrated via HubSpot, it does a lot of heavy lifting for you.

[00:13:37] Daniel: That’s great, so just out of curiosity, you said you’ve got a website, but you’ve also got different ways of placing orders with yourselves. How much comes through the website would you say as a percentage and how important is the website and the tech I suppose that side for the business at the moment.

[00:13:48] Bastien: So the website is very much just a front at the moment. Obviously you can go and buy stuff and you get deliveries, and it works and it’s functional. But we haven’t really focused our efforts on the direct to customer side of things, not because we don’t want to, just because we’ve had success on retail and therefore that’s what we’ve optimised. The current website, the way that it’s built, I think we built in like three days, so it was quite a lean effort and it does a job, but it’s about to be relaunched. We were kind of evolving our brand a little bit, growing it, maturing it. So from October onwards, we’re going to be relaunching a lot of this stack, just because we’re going to start focusing on DTC a lot more. DTC is great right? You get sort of less cyclical, more ongoing revenues and it’s less subject to, you know, the crisis, like the one we’re living right now with the cost of living, which is a huge threat to the business and most businesses in our sector. So having like a loyal customer base that you can engage with, that you, you know, possessing all that data as a data controller, all that is obviously very, very valuable. It’s good also in a pitch deck to an investor. So it’s definitely an area we need to invest a lot more in, but we haven’t done that much with yet. So yeah, you can definitely look forward to some updates in the coming months.

[00:14:58] Dara: Bit specific Bastien, but just on the cost of living crisis that you mentioned, are you noticing any trends in the market in general, a decrease in demand for alternative milks?

[00:15:07] Bastien: Definitely, I think we had some huge bump of growth during COVID right, 30 to 40% growth. And that has adjusted a little bit afterwards, so that’s decreased a little bit. It’s still going to be a growth channel. It’s still going to be a category that is continuing to grow, there’s more room for growth. But there’s definitely a bit of a slowdown as a result of the cost of living crisis. There’s some terrible news coming out of the industry. Even just today with one of the big wholesalers that you know sells to all these health shops called Tree of Life that went under and you know you can probably expect more of the same, the inflation is really difficult to manage. And so that’s likely going to be affecting both the appetite from end customers, you know, the shoppers, but it’s also going to be causing all sorts of disruption in terms of running business as usual. So our costs have increased massively, we’ve done some cost engineering and we’ve been more lucky than some, there’s some products that have really, really struggled as a result of the supply chain crisis that’s been worsened by the gas prices being high, but also, you know, the war in Ukraine, which is obviously a terrible human tragedy, but it’s obviously also affecting business here.

[00:16:09] Bastien: So when you look at the inflation figure, they say it’s like 10.4% or something. That’s not the full picture, there’s a lot of middle men in there, producers, retailers that are absorbing a lot of the inflation and isn’t yet being completely represented in the inflation figure. I think the CEO of BrewDog recently did a post about this and said that the figure is probably closer to 22%, I think he is probably correct. So I think yeah, there’s more pain to come for sure.

[00:16:34] Dara: And I’m going to jump in here because I’m amazed Dan hasn’t asked you this yet, but are you using GA4 on the website?

[00:16:40] Bastien: So no, because up until recently, Shopify didn’t have a great GA4 support, but I think that’s changed now. I think they’ve got better and they’ve got apps and things that you can deploy. But up until recently they had poor GA4 integration and also I’m a little bit allergic to GA4 just because I found the transition difficult to deal with. But I’ve learned recently that Daniel scored a perfect mark is that right? In his GA4 exam. So maybe there is a way, I don’t know.

[00:17:08] Daniel: Yeah, well if I can do anyone can for sure. But yeah, I jumped on the bandwagon, posted my score because you know, I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff. Coming from the GAIQ (Google Analytics Individual Qualification) world to the previous Universal Analytics one, which I swear they deliberately got some questions wrong in there to make sure no one ever got a hundred percent. I was more surprised than anyone that I actually got a hundred percent, because I just expected there to be like a duff answer, and just so that everyone gets 98%, but yeah.

[00:17:31] Bastien: Well, congratulations anyway, I definitely wouldn’t have got a hundred. I think GA4 makes total sense the way that the data is set up, you know, it’s proper. Before it was very approximative, it didn’t make a ton of sense from a data architecture perspective. So I really like that, it is just data that you can model, right, that you can look at in specific ways. But I haven’t done the work, I haven’t done the homework, I haven’t spent the hours unlearning everything I knew from the old UA (Universal Analytics) and into the GA (Google Analytics) world and GA4 world. And when I tried, I failed miserably, but I only tried for a couple of weeks and then gave up because I had other things to do, but I very much want to try again, so, you know I’m not giving up yet.

[00:18:11] Daniel: This is actually a really interesting point Bastien, not the GA4 side, but you’re a guy that maybe understands the value of a tool like Google Analytics, maybe more so than other founders for startups today. And so I’m just wondering, where does a tool like Google Analytics or web analytics or this kind of marketing analytics stack. Realistically, where does that sit in your list of priorities as running a business?

[00:18:32] Bastien: So a huge part of the business is around convincing people that your brand has legs, that people want your product and that this is going somewhere and you have to convince investors, you have to convince buyers, the good people at Sainsbury’s, I’m going to tell them why they should stock us and not someone else right. And in making this case, you have to justify why your product has the right to exist on their shelf. And so using the full spread of analytics and data that’s out there needs to be utilised to be able to make that case successfully. This includes your current rate of sale, how you’re doing with other retailers. This could include your customer growth, the people who are sharing their details with you, and you have a relationship with, how they engage on the various platforms that you have. And also the sort of increase in traffic that you’re getting and how you tie this back to specific moments, to specific locations, you know, are you generating a buzz in areas where they have stores for example, can you reveal this in a deck?

[00:19:29] Bastien: So a lot of the job of the sort of commercial work is around making that case with those retailers. And so in order to do that, using the sort of Google stack, using GA (Google Analytics), using geo stuff, using engagement data from other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera is hugely, hugely influential in making that case yeah, for sure.

[00:19:53] Dara: It’s a hard question to answer, but do you think your background gives you a bit of an edge over maybe some other people are trying to get into similar markets, but are maybe coming from a product background rather than coming from a kind of growth and optimisation and analytics background.

[00:20:06] Bastien: I think so, I think nothing beats a really, really nifty data visualisation does it? You know, there’s nothing like a sexy graph I think. So I definitely think it gives me a bit of an edge, I’m used to creating these reports on the daily basis and so, yeah there’s definitely an edge for us growth marketers in that space and the entrepreneur space, because we’re able to quickly put together a case for why, you know, people should give us money or a space on their shelf. Yeah, I think that’s definitely an asset.

[00:20:33] Daniel: Sorry, going back to one of the first things you said Bastien around just doing your user research and supply chain analysis and all of the wonderful things that comes with creating a plant-based milk product and putting it into stores. Were you surprised with the amount of data or lack of data or plethora of data available in each of these systems? Like when you entered into doing kind of customer research or stock chain analysis, what was your views on, I suppose, the state of data in those areas of business?

[00:21:00] Bastien: Yeah I was quite shocked that there wasn’t more available, more data, more information, not only just readily available, but kind of open source and out there, you know, for consumption. It feels like that should be democratised a bit more, at the moment if you want to get your hands on that data on that research, you know it’s £5,000 here and there from various research companies and it’s hugely expensive. And when you’re a small startup with not a lot of money, you can’t really spend that money, but there is a cheat, right? So here is a cheat, you can get a British library entry, a membership, and a lot of these reports are available over there. So you could show up to the British library, which is amazing space by the way, everyone should go every so often. And there’s a ton of information available there and you can sort of download it and semi legitly use it for commercial purposes if you’re not too obvious about it.

[00:21:49] Bastien: So I found that very, very useful as an exercise, but yeah, there should be databases out there to help us do that. It’s improving, it’s developing and at the moment you’ve got some companies who specialise in that sort of analysis. So we work with a company called My Emissions, for example which is able to analyse, to use a lot of open publication, but also correlate a lot of private databases around travel route, around the CO2 emissions for each and every single raw material that we may want to use and they’re able to put together models to help us optimise all of that stuff. So yeah, they’ve been really, really helpful in trying to plug these data gaps. So there are solutions, they’re bit roundabout sometimes, but there are solutions to these data gaps and of course you can just conduct your own survey. So we did a lot of surveying of other brands, we did a lot of surveys of customers as well to sort of collect their preferences. So it could be as simple as setting up shop near a Waitrose and asking people what they like and then representing this back into the buyers base. So yeah, there’s a lot of data gaps, but there are ways to plug them.

[00:22:50] Daniel: Well that’s interesting itself. So like survey data is, I suppose the equivalent is us doing popups on websites, asking for feedback on new designs and, you know, there’s a lot of parity, whether it’s sourced manually or whether it’s digitally sourced, but the analysis of that is really interesting. How did you even approach or start approaching bits of paper that you’ve collected in front of a store to, I suppose, pitch decks to other supermarkets? What does that process kind of look like?

[00:23:12] Bastien: So as far as I’m concerned, that process involves delegating this entirely to Emily who’s our resident behavioural scientist and that was her previous life doing complex research at UCL, you know in the fields of smoking cessation and things like that. So as far as I’m concerned, it was quite easy but actually putting together the survey in a way that would be completely unbiased and would allow us to get critical mass quite quickly and statistical significance fairly quickly that was I’m sure very difficult and yeah, a lot of effort and time was put into it, but it wasn’t my effort in time, so it’s quite easy for me.

[00:23:50] Dara: So Bastian, I appreciate you’re not going to be able to kind of share too much, but broadly speaking what are the plans for Lilk? What’s next?

[00:23:57] Bastien: So we’ve got some new launches coming up, 2023 is definitely going to be our year. I’m sure no one’s said or thought that before and it’s gone wrong, I’m sticking to it. We’ve got some really exciting developments. I’ve recently hired our chief creative, a friend of mine Charlotte who has quit her high flying, creative agency career to take a giant pay cut and come work for us. So that was good and so she’s kind of been able to take over all the marketing, the creative, etc. So we’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming in that space. And we’ve got a, yeah, a new product that we’re launching in early next year I’m not going to tell you too much, but it’s probably enough to let you know that it’s going to be launching at the London Coffee Festival, so there’s a connection there, you work it out yourself. But yeah, potentially a killer product that’s going to really put us on the map. So I feel like there’s a bit of a relaunch going on in the works, we’re also in talks with a few other major retailers and hopefully some of those will bear fruits in the near future. But I think I want to go back to this ultra sustainable research, I think I want to go back to these grains, because I really think that more needs to be done in the field of crop diversity right?

[00:25:03] Bastien: I think it’s 80% of the world’s crop is just four grains and two of them are the ones that we use pretty much. So can there be more diversity leading to better nutrition, a better taste profile, but also more sustainability. That’s something I’m really interested in. So yeah, I think we’re really interested in doing more in that field and keep really seeing exciting new products. We’re selling, you know, in the UK almost exclusively, we also have some partners in South Korea at the moment. So potentially we’re going to expand in Asia as well and in Europe, so potentially some geo growth there. So the UK market is very competitive, there’s still some growth, but it’s ultra competitive, but in places like France, Germany, and Spain, etc. it’s in its infancy there’s potentially more growth there, and then the rest of the world of course.

[00:25:49] Dara: Amazing, it’s really, really exciting Bastien, excited on your behalf and look forward to kind of continuing to see the brand grow. And yes, I have no excuses now, I need to go out and get myself some Lilk. Watching Dan drink it throughout this has made me very jealous. Yeah, we wish you continued success with the brand and have no doubt you’ll continue to do great things with it. You said you’ve listened to the show before, so this shouldn’t surprise you. We do a little bit at the end where we talk about what we’ve been doing outside of work, just to wind down. So we’re going to put you on the spot. You’re probably very busy, it sounds like you’ve got lots on your plate with work, do you manage to find any time outside of work and if so, what have you been doing?

[00:26:26] Bastien: It was very difficult for the first year and a half leading to the launch and now to really find time to do anything but work and just burn out and hate it. But outside of work, yeah, I think I definitely have my start-up bod on at the moment. So I’m not the fittest I’ve ever been and so I think I need to really get back into all the good stuff I used to like such as playing basketball and running and all that kind of stuff. I’ve got a new bike, so I need to get on that and make sure it’s all happening there. So I think that’s the first thing I need to sort of reclaim that aspect of my life, which has been completely on hold in favour of working and Deliveroo for two years. Yeah, that would be a good start.

[00:27:02] Daniel: I’ve not heard of startup bod before, that’s a new one to me, but it sounds really fun.

[00:27:07] Bastien: It’s basically a dad bod, but worse. The other thing as well, Daniel and I share an interest in Star Trek and it sounds silly, but I’ve not really had time to watch TV. So I’ve recently been getting back into the Picard and the Discovery, I’ve just started season four of Discovery. And it’s really, it’s really good. So yeah, I was doing that last night actually, watching TV, it’s kind of weird, but I like it, it’s nice to be able to do these things again. Travelling obviously is something that hasn’t been available to a lot of us for a long time and especially with a startup on the side, on top of lockdown, so that’s something I’m looking to do more.

[00:27:42] Dara: Well I would normally ask you next, Dan, but just because Bastien mentioned travel, I’ll get mine out of the way. So I went over to Ireland for a long weekend, not last week, but the week before. I hadn’t seen my family since December so it was nice to catch up with everybody and it was my dad’s birthday so I had a bit of a heavy night on the Saturday celebrating his birthday, but amazingly he was fine the next day and I wasn’t, so I don’t know what his secret is, more practice.

[00:28:05] Bastien: Yeah what is that? Do you think he’s got a trick?

[00:28:07] Daniel: Practice, practice.

[00:28:08] Dara: Yeah more practice I think. I’m a bit rusty I think, you were talking about needing to exercise, I need to exercise my drinking muscles I think.

[00:28:16] Bastien: I think I need to do that as well. I used to be able to just go out after work for a few pints and be fine, these days you give me a half pint, I feel a bit hazy the next day, it’s terrible.

[00:28:24] Dara: I’m the same, yeah. So what about you, Dan? What have you been doing?

[00:28:27] Daniel: As I mentioned at the beginning, I’ve just come out the back of having COVID and this is actually the first time I’ve had it, so I’ve managed to avoid it this entire time and for whatever reason caught it last weekend just gone. So yeah, I’m on the mend, I’m at the other side, still got a bit of a cough, but I’m all good now in terms of virus free, but I’ve got other kind of lingering, annoying symptoms prevailing. But with that time that I had last week where I was trying to work, but I was working intermittently here and there. I managed to re-watch a bunch of TV. So I rewatched the entire Foundation series again, which is on Apple TV+, I caught up with the last series of Star Trek Discovery as you were saying Bastien, series four and genuinely really good TV show. And the last one is I watched the new Sandman TV show on Netflix and what an amazing TV show. I never read the comics, although I’m a fan of them just because of what they are and how it looks, but the imagery and the acting, it’s just an amazing TV show. If you ever get an opportunity Dara, it should go on your to watch list. I know both quite fans of watching Netflix stuff, this should be on the list.

[00:29:26] Dara: It’s on the list, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it, but it’s a long list, so I’ll get to it eventually. Okay, one more question for you Bastien which is just where can people find out more about you and I guess maybe more importantly about Lilk.

[00:29:41] Bastien: So they can find out more on our websites on lilk.co and they can also find us in store in Holland & Barrett, nationally, in Ocado and also Waitrose and a few other sort of select cafes and stuff. We’re doing a lot more with cafes these days, so you can find us there and if your local cafe doesn’t stock us yet, please get in touch and let us know and we’ll have a word with them. And obviously on our socials @its_lilk on Instagram and yeah, just feel free to just pop me an email or ask any question and we’ll be happy to come back to you.

[00:30:14] Dara: Brilliant, and Dan, a little reminder for our listeners where they can find more about you or get in touch with you.

[00:30:20] Daniel: Yeah, LinkedIn and Twitter, the standard places, and also my website danalytics.co.uk.

[00:30:24] Dara: And for me, Linkedin is probably the best. Okay that’s it from us for this week, as always you can hear more from me and Dan talking about GA4 and other things analytics related. You can find all of our previous episodes in our archive at measurelab.co.uk/podcast, or you can just use whatever app you’re using to listen to this now to find any of our previous episodes.

[00:30:46] Daniel: And if you want to suggest a topic or someone we should be speaking to about the world of data and analytics you can get in touch with us via an email podcast@measurelab.co.uk, or there’s a Google Form in the show notes. So just swipe on your app and click the link and let us know what you think.

[00:31:00] Dara: Our theme music is from Confidential, you can find a link to their music in our show notes. I’ve been Dara, joined by Dan and Bastien. So on behalf of all of us, thanks for listening and see you next time.