Painter Sisters: Family Farms and Disrupting the Yogurt Industry

Guy Kawasaki:
Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. We're on a mission to make you remarkable, and today we're about to embark on a journey with two remarkable sisters. They are not only disrupting the yogurt industry, but also embodying the essence of the American dream.
Meet the dynamic duo, Hayley and Stephanie Painter. They are the entrepreneurs behind Painterland Sisters Yogurt. They hail from picturesque Painterland Farms in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania. These sisters have transformed their family's legacy farm into a thriving venture.
In their first full year of business, they are poised to surpass a projected 3.5 million dollars in revenue. Their products currently grace the shelves of over 2,000 stores in forty-nine states. If you've ever tried to get shelf space in a store, you understand what a remarkable accomplishment that is.
However, their success extends beyond the yogurt aisle. They have raised an impressive $825,000 through a Wefunder campaign. Two sisters who once ran barefoot on the Painterland Farms are creating a delicious bridge between consumers and American farmers.
Join me, Guy Kawasaki on remarkable People right now with the Painter sisters. I interviewed Sarah Frey, and she is the Pumpkin Queen of America. She sells more pumpkins than anybody out of Carbondale, Illinois or something. It was similar story. She grew up on a pumpkin farm. She took over the business at sixteen, and now she sells millions in millions of pumpkins.
Stephanie Painter:
I'm going to have to listen to that one.
Guy Kawasaki:
You would enjoy that.
Stephanie Painter:
That sounds like a woman after our own heart.
Hayley Painter:
I think I got a book about her and I've never read it, so I'll just have to listen to your podcast.
Guy Kawasaki:
Maybe I can introduce you to, and you can make pumpkin yogurt.
Stephanie Painter:
Pumpkin spice.
Hayley Painter:
Honestly, pumpkin spice yogurt has been on the docket every fall. When it comes around, people are like, "Hey, this is one thing you absolutely need."
Guy Kawasaki:
First question that I already know the answer to, but I want to ask you anyway, is, what's the origin of your company?
Stephanie Painter:
So first of all, I'm Stephanie Painter.
Hayley Painter:
I'm Hayley Painter.
Stephanie Painter:
We are fourth generation on our family's organic dairy and crop farm in northern Pennsylvania, in the rolling hills of northern Pennsylvania. We grew up barefoot, running around, free, connected with the animals, connected with the land, connected to our community, and of course connected to our farm and our farm family.
We basically always knew that we wanted to do something with our family farm to continue the great base that the generations before us have provided to us. And we didn't know what exactly we wanted to do. We just knew, hey, we want to connect the world to this farm, and we want the farm to be connected to the world.
We have something great here. And as we went to college, we saw the disconnection incredibly. People are totally disconnected to where the source of their food comes from, which is the American farmer.
We eat meals at least three times a day. If you're a lucky person, a fortunate person, especially in the United States, we need a farmer. And we realized the way that the story was constantly being told wasn't really fun to listen to.
So as millennial women farmers, we felt like we had an obligation to the general consumer and to the world to talk on behalf of the farmer. And so that's where we, there's a lot more to it, but we now have an organic Skyr yogurt.
And every cup of yogurt that we get into somebody's hands basically is a conduit to open up the conversation about sustainable agriculture, real dairy in our diet, and just being connected to the source of your food, which is the American farmer, and how important that is for your diet and for your family's health and the health of Mother Earth herself for generations to come.
Guy Kawasaki:
Something tells me you've answered that question before.
Stephanie Painter:
Oh my goodness. We were just actually speaking with the Secretary of Agriculture for USDA yesterday a little bit and said our story there. We say our story, we're set up at the Pennsylvania Farm Show right now, trying to give back to the community. And that's why Hayley's voice is a little coarse. I don't know, Hayley, how many times have you said that story in the last week?
Hayley Painter:
Oh, probably thousands.
Stephanie Painter:
But I think it's a good point because people, they connect with the story and that's what sells the yogurt, but it's not, yes, the yogurt is delicious, and when you have your first bite, you get a little hooked, but people connect to the story and that's really important when you're advocating for anything, but especially little old agriculture.
Guy Kawasaki:
Which one of you got the better grades in school?
Hayley Painter:
I'd say we both did pretty good comparatively to our brothers.
Stephanie Painter:
We definitely were the ones that were pushed to go to college. We were the first ones that graduated from college in our family and our extended families, and that was our long haul. They said, "Hey, you guys need to go to college."
And then we were like, "Okay, we'll go to college, but we're going to come back to the farm and we're going to figure out something that we can do with it as well." But I would say Hayley was always definitely better at a couple subjects than I was. And likewise. But you were better at math and science.
Hayley Painter:
I was good at organic chemistry, but I stunk at biology. Isn't that kind of funny? I took a marketing class for agriculture in school. I was good at that, but I wasn't good at philosophy. So it's a balance.
Stephanie Painter:
And I love philosophy and creative writing and that kind of stuff. But yeah, we're a good balance of each.
Guy Kawasaki:
And who was the better athlete?
Stephanie Painter:
Oh, okay. So we describe everything. We're very competitive. We grew up on a farm, all fierce elbows just get stuff done kind of mentality. If a bull's running at you, don't be scared. Just deal with it. And so yeah, we've been very competitive. We can't answer that or we'll get into a sisterly quarrel afterwards, but we were both really good.
Hayley Painter:
We did basketball together and we looked very similar on the court. She was five and I was four, and we would go and dog people, high defense and constantly running around. That was our strategy. And so sometimes the referee would give me her points and sometimes they would give her my fouls.
And so, it's funny because now that we're doing a business together, that same basketball mentality, like how you'd outrun the competitors, you just keep hustling. We did attack, attack and if you get someone's fouls, you just go with it.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, and I think another cool part about basketball is our coach, he made a defense just for Hayley and I and it was called Organized Chaos, and that's literally, I brought that up at the beginning when we were speaking, but that's how we run things.
We just go all in. We have a great team that can help us manage what we're doing. But it's really, I think a little bit of entrepreneurship anyways is just always organized chaos, just figuring out when to pivot and how to deal with things.
Guy Kawasaki:
And what, pray tell did your brother or brothers do in the midst of all this chaos?
Hayley Painter:
Our brothers did basketball with us, so it was like four of us always doing everything together. They always wanted to stay on the farm. They loved the equipment, the crop farming aspect of it, and then fell in love with the cows versus we fell in love with the cows first, to be honest with you, I completely stink at driving equipment.
Stephanie was great at it. And so they farm full time on Painterland Farms, which is our fourth generation farm. So they allow us to be able to have this nutrient-dense milk to put into our yogurts, and then we can tell their stories and our story and use it to sell this yogurt. But really we both have the same mission. How do we sustain this farm? So we really work symbiotically together in that way.
Guy Kawasaki:
So can you describe your farm, because those of us in tech, I think our understanding of a farm is basically whatever Kevin Costner did on Yellowstone. Is your life like Yellowstone where you're driving a Bentley, but you got 10,000 heads of cattle and you got a foreman named Rip and he's shooting people and killing the wolves. What's life on a farm today?
Hayley Painter:
I think we can both answer that. Stephanie, go first.
Stephanie Painter:
Okay. There's some similarities to that, but there's definitely not some. But when you come to the peacefulness and how much the farmer loves the land and fights for the land and fights for the animals and the soil and teaches people about the importance of it and just the sheer beauty, and you can see the piece when you're watching that in some scenes and there's a lot of scenes that you don't see the piece in, but that is part, that shows the connection to the farmer with their land.
And that shows the connection to the farmer with their communities and with their animals. So that is very similar to our family's farm in that way. What we're representing is a small family farm, small to medium scale family farms because that's what we know because that's what we are, and how we could do that well. But Hayley, yeah, you take it from there.
Hayley Painter:
I'll paint you the picture of Painterland. Painterland is in Northern PA, which is a very rural part of our country, rural part of Pennsylvania and upstate New York area. These hills are so rolling, people don't think of it like that, but imagine Vermont. I know it's crazy. Imagine Vermont.
And so, our farm sits on top of a hill, but it's still in a valley because there's just tremendous hills around it. So we grew up hiking those hills, going to bring the cows in, going to feed the baby calves their bottle of milk, hanging out with our cousins barefoot, playing in mud if you will.
Stephanie Painter:
Mud mixed with a little bit of something else. But we didn't care. We were just farm kids. We were just outside all the time. We were helping our family all the time with the work that needed to be done. That was family time.
We didn't watch very much TV because there was no time for that. It was working. And I think that's one of the reasons why we also decided that we wanted to do something else with the farm, but not milk the cows.
Hayley Painter:
One thing about farmers is it's opposite of what you said, like driving a Bentley. I still drive, I'm just now not able to. But a car with the exhaust that's off and it's totally beat up. Farmers, there's some farmers that are really struggling in our country, but they're so rich with that ability to connect with all those things Stephanie was talking about.
And so, we really have that mission. How do we keep rich in the way of, not money, but that fortune of living on a farm and having community. And so in order to sustain that lifestyle, we really needed to find a way to create our own market for our family's milk and the milk in our area.
Guy Kawasaki:
How many acres is it? How many heads of cattle do you have?
Hayley Painter:
We have quite a few acres, but a lot of these acres are tree lands and rivers and hills. And we milk around 400 cows, but we have around a thousand head total because we raise the little babies up and it takes them about four years to be mature. So we have a bunch of different age cattle on the farm. We also have a bunch of sheep and pigs and goats and things like that too for fun.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, when you have a farm, you just collect animals, people drop off cats and dogs, and I have this sheep if you want it, and pigs and chickens, and that's how it is. They know you'll take care of that animal.
Guy Kawasaki:
And in these modern times, what's it like? Are you up at 4:00 AM and you're milking cows, but the cows all have RFID tags, so you know where each cow is and you're applying AI to milking. What's it like? Because telling you all I know about cows is Yellowstone.
Hayley Painter:
Yeah, it's so different on each farm. My biggest piece of advice is to know your farmer. So specifically on our farm, we graze cattle. And so we have these huge hills that people can't live on, that we can't grow other crops on to provide for human consumption or anything.
You just let the cattle roam free on it, they fertilize it, it helps keep the soil healthy. Every morning the family gets up, we don't as much anymore. We're getting up early to sell yogurt so that they can keep milking the cows and we get to hang out with them. We get to work with them for our fun time.
Guy Kawasaki:
Your brothers are milking the cows.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, we're behind a computer now pretty much.
Hayley Painter:
Or on sales calls and events, we'll help on our days off and we'll feed calves and drive in the tractors with them. But their day usually starts around 5:30 in the morning. They'll start with a cup of coffee, bring the cows in, milk the cows, and feed the calves and feed the cows.
And then they all come in for a big breakfast around 10:00 AM. And this breakfast is like a five course meal. It is never breakfast food, first of all, it is like meat, potato, veggies, pies, and most of the stuff comes from the land, the gardens that we grew in the summertime and things like that.
And then after that, the day really begins and all the project starts, whether they're building a new barn or going to chop corn or plant soybeans. We don't really do soybeans. We do wheat and things like that.
Stephanie Painter:
Sorghum.
Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, we do a lot of hay.
Hayley Painter:
Our cattle, they're all diversified, so they all look so different because our biggest thing is having a healthy cow so that they can live a long life and they can hike those hills. So we don't get the most amount of milk, but we have a really healthy animal so that we have more nutrients in their milk.
Stephanie Painter:
And that's what makes our yogurt different as well. The main ingredient in our yogurt is the milk. And we know exactly how the animals are being treated on our farm and how the soil's being treated. And when you treat the soil, like my sister said, it basically intakes to the animal and then their output is better quality milk.
So, you're getting more nutrients in the cup of yogurt because we know every detail of that cow's diet. And not to mention, that's the other thing we educate a lot on. We have little cute flyers and printouts of regenerative agriculture and how we need grazing animals to combat the environment crisis that we're all in right now and what that means to people and why it's important for people to understand this.
Hayley Painter:
We source from other farms around our area that do things very similarly. They usually feed them from those pastures and grow their own feed for them. And it really builds up that community and that pride by doing that so that the farmers grow together.
Guy Kawasaki:
Before I forget, one of our guests in the past was a woman named Temple Grandin.
Hayley Painter:
You had the honor of speaking with Temple Grandin? Oh my goodness.
Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah. Yeah, she's been a guest. She was a great guest.
Hayley Painter:
Yeah, I can imagine.
Guy Kawasaki:
So you know her.
Hayley Painter:
I do. I fangirl over Temple Grandin.
Guy Kawasaki:
Can you just walk us through, so now let's pretend that the cow has come in, your brother has milked it, and now the milk is in this can. So from that can to my table, how does it become yogurt?
Hayley Painter:
Well, that is a very good question. How do you get the cow from the pasture to the yogurt? First of all, we don't use cans anymore.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay.
Hayley Painter:
The cows, they sleep outside at night. They'll drive a little side by side and bring them in because they're pretty far spread out. We have a small border collie that walks behind them.
They know it's time to milk, and the cows start coming to the barn before we do, they see the sunrise and they're like, oh, I can't wait to go get milked. Because if all the ladies out there who are listening, you know, you want to breastfeed your baby, that's the same with the cows. They're like, all right, we need to get up, get milked.
Stephanie Painter:
So the cows get brought into the barn and they have accessibility to the barn, but they're primarily grazing, they're grazing outside. They come in, they get milked. It goes to basically a tank, a bulk tank, and then truck driver comes, picks it up, all refrigerated, all tested to make sure there's no contaminants.
Milk is very finicky. We have to make sure it's very timed out. As soon as those cows get milked, there's a specific time that it needs to get cooled down and tested, all that good stuff. And then it goes from a truck in northern Pennsylvania to our co-packer in central Pennsylvania. The co-packer takes it in. We add lactase enzyme because our product is lactose-free.
And that's really important because 68 percent of people have some sort of lactose sensitivity, and we want people, all people to enjoy real dairy. We're combating right now basically a plant-based dairy, which it's not dairy because dairy comes from a lactating mammal, and I've never seen a nipple on an almond.
Guy Kawasaki:
I bet that's the first time you used that joke.
Stephanie Painter:
I really want to take a video of somebody trying to milk an almond. Right now. One day that'll happen for our marketing. We also add different cultures.
Hayley Painter:
So it goes to the creamery. And at the creamery, we pasteurize it because all milk has to be pasteurized that goes into yogurt so that everyone is healthy and all the bad bacteria is gone, if there is any, which typically there's not. And then we send it to the yogurt culturing tanks where the yogurt gets cultured, which is pretty cool.
You add the lactase enzyme and then you send it to the ultra-filtration machine, which actually filters out water. All of the other things in the milk stays in there, and then it goes to the cupper, and all this warm cultured yogurt goes into these cups and it's so thin you can drink it.
We love that part of it. And then the foil goes over top of it. It goes into the refrigerator. Twenty-four hours later, the yogurt is solid, and it's thick and creamy. We can even put it upside down like a Dairy Queen.
Stephanie Painter:
And that's what really makes our yogurt different is that piece, basically, it's a very thick, creamy yogurt. We don't add any protein powders to it because the protein in the process that we utilize, the protein stays in there. We want things to be in its purest form.
When you eat, if you just think about the way that it was put here, if you try not to touch it as much from that point, then you're getting the best product. You know what I mean? And so that's what we try to do. We do not put protein powders back into our yogurt. That leaves the grittiness that you see in other yogurt. Also, it's frankensteining food. We want pure food here.
So after the yogurt's made, a truck picks it up, it takes it to our cold storage facility. And from the cold storage facility, we have orders coming in from national natural distributors as well as local distributors because it's really important to us to make sure that we get this yogurt into the nooks and crannies of the world because we're from the nooks and crannies of the world.
And so we want to make sure everyone has accessibility. Even the rural depressed areas where we're from, they have that, even in the bigger cities, they have them in the Bodegas where they can get a real food from a real farmer. So then it's distributed. We're in forty-nine of the fifty states.
Guy Kawasaki:
What exactly is Icelandic style?
Hayley Painter:
Yeah, Icelandic style yogurt. When yogurt was being founded, each area in our world created different types of ways to preserve milk. So cheeses came about, yogurts came about, and they had all these different cultures to do that. And with the different cultures you add, it creates different styles of yogurt and cheese.
And so in Iceland, they had these cultures that would make the yogurt thicker, and then they would strain it, so it would make it extra thick, and it's a little more tart. It leaves the product higher in protein and lower in sugar naturally. So it's similar to Greek, but it's even higher in that protein.
And Iceland, in the nineties, they created that ultra-filtration. So it's this new technology to strain out the whey, but it filters it. And so it maintains all the whey protein in the yogurt and we are able to just have water that comes out, leaving all the nutrients left into the yogurt.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have a question, wearing my marketing hat. So I looked at your label, and I have to say that it's hard to figure out for me as a marketing person, what do you want your customer to go into a store and ask for?
So is it, I want yogurt from Painterland Sisters, I want Skyr. I want Icelandic Provisions. Which term do I use to get what you make? Because if I wanted a Macintosh, I'd say it's made by Apple. It's called a Macintosh. I don't have to explain. It's Skyr Icelandic Provisions from Apple. What's the key term here?
Hayley Painter:
I would say if someone goes in the yogurt aisle and says, "I want the best yogurt," they would just point them to Painterland Sisters.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, that's the marketing answer. Now give me the real answer.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, I think it comes from different angles, and that's what we're really trying to get at. We want to be known for the purest, most premium farmer-owned product. So it's like when they go in, and if it's just their psychology thinking, if they know our product, that's what we want to give them.
But it's really not about Painterland Sisters. It's about just a premium yogurt. Let's give them a premium yogurt, a lot in one package. Let's give them a high protein, 6 percent milk fat, a lactose-free premium yogurt.
Hayley Painter:
Natural.
Stephanie Painter:
Natural. And that's what we really try to push on all of our social media and all of our, when we're working with different retailers, this is a woman-owned premium product that's really good for your house.
Guy Kawasaki:
I hate to burst your bubble, but when I'm in Whole Foods, I'm not going through this whole dissertation about what kind of yogurt I want.
Guy Kawasaki:
What one word would I ask for your yogurt? What one word is your brand?
Hayley Painter:
Feminine is our brand Painterland Sisters. Yeah. People usually just look for Painterland right now. But then once they get in our product, they eat it consistently, then they feel like they joined the sisterhood. So then they'll go in thinking with that mindset.
Guy Kawasaki:
In a perfect world, people would walk into their store and say, "I want Painterland Sister yogurt."
Hayley Painter:
Yep.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, got it, got it. Now, I have a dumb question, but a serious one. My family consumes a lot of yogurt because we make a lot of smoothies and a lot of acai bowls. And one of the things that makes me feel guilty every time we buy yogurt is the largest container we can get is a quart plastic.
And I know every time we buy that, we're adding to plastic in the world. So is there no other way to buy yogurt than in this plastic that's going to be around for the next 50,000 years floating on the Pacific Ocean?
Stephanie Painter:
We have looked under rocks for the most sustainable container for our yogurt. And there's a couple problems when thinking about this. One, we literally started growing hemp on our family farm because we wanted to make our own cups. This is a real deal that we really tried to dig under. We're like, "We'll grow hemp. We'll make hemp plastic.
Everything will be from the farm, including the container. Because why would you take this premium yogurt and put it in a container that's not as premium as it is?" You know what I mean? And so we went down this rabbit hole tremendously because it is so important. And one, if we go with maybe a cardboard, it just doesn't function correctly with this yogurt.
Hayley Painter:
It's saggy and leaks.
Stephanie Painter:
Okay, if you leave your ice cream container out for too long, what kind of happens to it? It gets all mushy and stuff. We look at that, and then the taste gets weird too. It starts tasting a little bit like cardboard.
And honestly, if we could, we would start our own, and maybe in the future we will do this. Because we were trying to do both of these things at the same time, the most sustainable container for yogurt that we could possibly have. But at this point, we just do a lot of reviews if there's something more sustainable out there for us to put yogurt in.
Hayley Painter:
And we feel like the container we do have is the more sustainable option on the shelves comparatively, so it's reused plastic. And then we can reduce the amount of plastic because we have a paper label around it.
So that strengthens the plastic walls. If we didn't have that paper foil, then we wouldn't be able to use that. So we're able to use just a sheer amount of plastic compared to the amounts we would use for another container.
Stephanie Painter:
If anybody that's listening to this, if they know of any great more sustainable packaging, shoot it our way because we're always open to that. And I think that's something really important about business and about my sister and I in general, is we're always very open to pivoting and to doing something better.
Hayley Painter:
Did you know that the labels are coloring pages?
Guy Kawasaki:
No.
Hayley Painter:
We had this lady, I went to her knitting club the other day to talk to her about investing into Painterland Sisters. So that was fun. But she brought out all of the yogurt she's been consuming for three months. She keeps all of the labels, and she had a stack so big.
So I recommended she brings it into the local elementary school so that they can all color it and hang them up. So that's a way we can reutilize them a little bit to create some art out of it. And then she takes the plastic containers and makes starters for her veggies, but there's only so much plastic you can utilize for that kind of stuff.
Guy Kawasaki:
I think one of the most remarkable things about your business is that in less than a year, or in a year, you're on a three and a half million dollar run rate in forty-nine states in 2,000 stores. I interviewed the woman who started Hint, the flavored water, and she told the story about how she got into Whole Foods locally because she made friends with someone in the store and he convinced his manager to put Hint in.
I want to know how you opened your first account, and then how in the world did you get to 2,000 stores? Because when I go to Whole Foods, there's about sixteen yogurt brands. It's not clear to me the world needs the seventeenth brand. So how did you pull this off?
Hayley Painter:
The first sale is different than the first real big sale. So we can tell you both stories. So our first sale is, oh, we got yogurt. We got a sprint on. I'll tell that one and Stephanie can tell the other one. It started with farming. We had 14,000 yogurts, and that was our small batch.
And we're like, how are we going to sell this stuff? So we had two months to try to sell it until our next batch was made, and we ran around to the agriculture community and we met a local distributor that distributes only farmer stuff door to door in our northern PA area. So we started with them.
And then the second one we started with at the same time is we have an Amish friend who we connected with to try to do different things within the past, like maybe make some other dairy products.
It didn't end up working, but we had all this yogurt and he's, "Hey, I have a cold storage facility in Lancaster County." We're like, "Okay, we're not making money on this yogurt. Can we store it there?" And he said, "Yeah, I'll let you store it for the first time. We want to give you a start."
Stephanie Painter:
That actually is powered by a generator because he is Amish.
Hayley Painter:
Yeah.
Stephanie Painter:
You know what I mean? So we're dealing with our first cold storage totally generated with the generator.
Hayley Painter:
But how wild was that? So then we're storing it here, and we're like, oh, now how are we going to get it out? Because this small little distributor up North's not going to do it.
And so, Jake and Stephanie and I would drive in our little broken down car, we'd go to New York City, and we'd go to Philadelphia, and we'd go around Lancaster County trying to get sales, and we ended up meeting a company called John F. Martin, which is a Mennonite meat and cheese distributor.
And they were like, "Oh, we don't typically do this kind of stuff, but we really love your passion. We'll give your yogurt a try." And so they were technically our first sales, and we hand-labeled the first 60,000 yogurts with them.
Stephanie Painter:
Because now we started this company really during COVID, and so the supply chain was all monkeyed up.
Hayley Painter:
Crazy.
Stephanie Painter:
And so we were supposed to have the labels beforehand and on the cups, and they're like, "Oh, yeah, it's going to be another two months." And we're like, oh my gosh, we already have milk committed. We already have everything scheduled.
We already have our sales committed, all this stuff. And so we're like, I guess we literally asked all of our cousins, the farm crew, anyone we knew, and this is where community comes into it. And community, you'll see that everywhere in our story. And we were hand-labeling 60,000 yogurts, pick and packing them, getting them shipped off.
So, our first sale, like Hayley said, we went into this board meeting and we were so nervous. We were like, oh my goodness gracious. It's all older men and we're just trying to sell this on this very feminine looking yogurt, something totally different than what they're doing, and it's at least double the price of the yogurt they're selling now.
Hayley Painter:
They sell mostly conventional products, and we're an organic brand.
Stephanie Painter:
And we're Skyr, and no one knows how to pronounce it, they're like, "What's Skyr?" And we're like, "Like a skier on a slope." And we're explaining not only why this is different, but what this is. And so anyways, we go and we're so nervous, and then we just tell our story and it becomes the bestselling yogurt for them in a month.
And so they're distributing to local mom and pop shops, small chains, and really great little shops that sometimes get overlooked by the bigger distributors. And then we built a loyal following that way. But within a month of starting that, we got notification that we got into Giant, which is a 300 store chain here in Pennsylvania. We partnered with them as basically like a local advocate.
Hey, we're partnering with a local farmer, Giant came to our family farm, took videos, basically showcasing the farmer and why Giant is helping connect people to their food. So, in July, just a couple months after we launched with John F. Martin, we were in 300 stores.
Hayley Painter:
Then we got into Central Market, found us on LinkedIn. And that was a huge honor. We're like, there's this guy from Central Market who wants our products in Texas? What? We thought we were going to be a regional brand, we thought we'd be able to sell enough of our yogurt in Pennsylvania. And we quickly realized that 60,000 yogurts a week, people in Pennsylvania can't just up and start eating. And so we're like, all right, we got to sell it to Texas.
Stephanie Painter:
And the funny thing is, we had a lot of milk, and we have to take the milk in trucker tank loads down to the facility. They only want to do, their MOQs are really crazy. And so we're just working with this supply and demand and what do we do with this? And we just wanted a little farm store.
So then the Central Market came on at the same time, and then Natural Grocers gives us a call up, and we pitched it to them. We're pitching it through anywhere we can find it. We're getting on LinkedIn, we're getting on, we started hiring a broker service. We had no idea what that meant.
Hayley Painter:
We started shipping out our hand-labeled yogurts everywhere. We're like, we're just gonna get them out.
Stephanie Painter:
We literally, in my garage, we just had these samples. We hand labeled them and we just sent them anywhere we could send them, anyone that had a lead on anything. We just went crazy and sent yogurts.
We had all this cute little marketing stuff that was different, showing pictures of our farm, showing videos of our farm, anything that we could do to tell the story and get that story in front of these buyers, that's what we were doing. Natural Grocers just calls us up and she's, "We want you in all of our stores." And we're like, "Oh my goodness, we don't even know if we have distribution for that."
Hayley Painter:
She says, "We want you in within a month."
Stephanie Painter:
And we're like, okay, cool. So we're going to be a national brand. We just launched a couple months ago and we're figuring out brokers and the retail world and promotions and all this crazy stuff. It's a whole different language, but it is so hard. 90 percent of the food on the store shelves is owned by ten companies nationwide.
Stephanie Painter:
And so here we are essentially these two farm girls that just want to sell some milk, but we have a lot of milk and we have to sell it all over the country now. And now we have to figure this big logistical battle out.
Anyways, we've hired some great, we started out with some fractional people and now we've hired a great internal team. But after that, Sprouts picked us up within a couple months after launching with Natural Grocers, and that really got us coast to coast with 400 stores, Sprouts.
Now we're hiring our brokers to be not only as our distribution is across the country, we need to saturate all of that, those distribution hubs across the country. Now we need a national broker team. So now we hire a national broker team and now then Whole Foods, Mid-Atlantic picked us up. Mom's Organics.
Hayley Painter:
Kimberton Whole Foods.
Stephanie Painter:
Kimberton Whole Foods, really great. We were focusing on saturating the natural channel. And because that is a buyer that is more apt to just look at a shelf and you were like, "I'm not going to be going in and thinking I want the most premium product, I want this, I want that."
But we have strategically made sure we're saturating the natural channel. So it's more people that have that in their mind when they're going to the store instead of conventional.
Guy Kawasaki:
Geez, I also know the founder of Lauren's, I know Lauren's, and I know Hint and I know Fry, and now I know you. So I'm cornering the food podcasting market. And let's just say that I'm a little hesitant to publish this interview because everybody's going to listen to this and say, "Oh, it's so easy to start a food company."
Hayley Painter:
Let me tell you.
Stephanie Painter:
And it is absolutely not.
Hayley Painter:
99 percent of food brands, new food brands go out of business. 99 percent. If we would've knew that before we sold our first yogurt, I don't know if we would've sold it.
Stephanie Painter:
And I think it's really about, again, not leading with the yogurt sales, but leading with the education on the farm and what makes this an actual national necessity to have real farm fresh products on the store shelves that people can access without going five miles up a dirt road on their Sunday day off, which just doesn't happen anymore.
People are busy. People want convenient stuff, and we're just telling that story. And we do not have a huge marketing budget. We had to figure all this out. We just hit a million dollars in crowdfunding last night at the Pennsylvania Farm Show, and my sister has been, I've been pregnant.
She's been running around literally the entire East Coast just pitching to people and asking for investment because we know that what we're doing is very mission-oriented and we didn't want to give that vision up for anyone else to come in.
And so that's why we went with crowdfunding. But it's been wild and we've just been pivoting. We're farm girls. We didn't have a choice. We had to wake up and we had to work. And that's what we're doing now and being optimistic.
Guy Kawasaki:
And God forbid, did you ever think of going on Shark Tank?
Hayley Painter:
Oh, we'd love to. That'd be fun.
Stephanie Painter:
People have been telling us that almost every single day. Besides, are you twins? Are you going to go on Shark Tank?
Guy Kawasaki:
I know people who have been on Shark Tank. I can give you some of the what really happens.
Stephanie Painter:
Oh yeah. We've heard from some of those brands as well.
Guy Kawasaki:
So have you made the trip to the Holy Land, IE Bentonville?
Hayley Painter:
Where is Bentonville?
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh my God. Bentonville, Arkansas is the headquarters of Walmart.
Stephanie Painter:
That makes sense.
Hayley Painter:
We have not, that's not really in our scope at the moment. We're looking more for if we had a perfect cross arrows, and yes, I'd love to speak loudly about this, we would go for Whole Foods National.
Stephanie Painter:
Because that's our buyer. We don't want to focus on what's not necessarily for us at the moment. We want to focus on the natural channel. And then as we continue to grow, then we look outwards and more regional, conventional, but we're very specific with how we want to be perceived.
Guy Kawasaki:
And so your dream account right now would be Whole Foods National?
Hayley Painter:
Whole Foods, Wegmans, and all of those stores that look like those in regional areas.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, we absolutely love what the MCG accounts like the National Co-op Grocers, like the co-op stores, any of the very regional natural stores like Huckleberries and Nugget, those kind of stores that they bring so much, they bring an experience when you go shopping. And when you're eating our yogurt, we want to give you an experience.
We want you to be on a story with us. And even if it's just one time out of the thousand yogurts you eat of Painterland Sisters, that's how we can educate people on agriculture. And so yeah, we are optimists and we're positive and we lead with that with the hard-pressed aggression from working on the farm and just getting stuff done. So yeah, that's us.
Guy Kawasaki:
Do you have any great stories about making pitches for sales or for money to older men and they mistake you for the receptionist and tell you to go get coffee or something like that? You got any great stories like that?
Stephanie Painter:
We have so many. First of all, people call us when they want to just put us in our place. People feel like they have to do that sometimes. Hey, don't dream too big, your girls. And literally say girls, like we're saying, oh, that's cute that you're doing that little girls. We battled a lot with that at the beginning as we were explaining our dreams and explaining what we're going to do. And we got, okay, that's cute little girls. That's fine.
Hayley Painter:
We hired a VP of sales. He's a guy from California, he's awesome. So VP of sales, they go to our big trade shows. We set up with our fancy booth. Stephanie and I are there. We love to wear floral dresses and stick out. We're so happy and energetic. We greet everyone like, oh, have you heard of us? Oh, what stores are you in?
And many times would walk right by us, and our sales guy would be behind us, and they'd be like, "Oh, are you the owner of the company?" Or, "Oh, are you their dad?" So one, they would just think we were ambassadors there to look pretty.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah, ambassador Showgirls models hired to get people to the booth. We're like, "No, we're the owners. We're the ones that built the business plan and got the funding and figured out how to do this with our team."
Hayley Painter:
Our sales guy every time would be like, "Yeah, that's fine, but they're who you need to talk to. They're my bosses." So he is very supportive of it, but it's just bizarre how many times that happened.
Stephanie Painter:
Or we've gotten a lot of questions. When you do have children, do you know what your capacity is? I don't think you understand that you can't really do this. And I have three kids now. I have a six-year-old, a two-year-old, and a three-month-old, and we are really doing this. I do have to shut off my camera sometimes when I need to breastfeed, but that is what it is.
And I think that's what's different about Hayley and I. We understand that there's a world where this is how a business looks and this is how you handle business.
But then there's also a world where you can bring your authentic true self into that structure and marry who you are and how you handle things and your authenticity and basically that thing that's making this work, whatever it is, okay, now we have this great structure. This is how we handle business. This is our processes and our SOPs and our quality assurance, all that stuff married with this is just us.
Hayley Painter:
We weren't great with boundaries because we never really had them growing up on the farm. So we're like, why not?
Stephanie Painter:
We're free, we're free.
Hayley Painter:
Let's just go try it.
Stephanie Painter:
Let's run around and just do it and we'll figure it out as we go and build great plans and hire great people.
Guy Kawasaki:
When I interviewed Sarah Fry, the Pumpkin Queen of America, she told a story that when she was eight or nine years old, her and her father were driving in the pickup truck and they came across this big snapping turtle, which apparently is dangerous. Me being from Hawaii, I have no idea.
And her father made her go out and face that turtle and grab it and throw it in the back of the pickup truck so they could eat it. And decades later, she tells me this story and she said, that story taught me to get over my fears and go for it. Go it. And she says that story helped her break into Walmart because she overcome her fear of snapping turtles so she can overcome her fear of Walmart.
Stephanie Painter:
And that's very important, just being fearless in your approach. And yeah, you might get turned down, but you're not going to know unless you shoot your shot and try and growing up on the farm every single day was one of those lessons, Hey Stephanie, get in the tractor and there's a hill that's literally facing down like a roller coaster, get in the tractor and basically rake the hay up.
And I'm like, dad, I don't really know how to drive this. And he's like, you'll figure it out. This is the basics. He gives me a one second thing and I'm like, I can't do it. He see you later, Steph, and then I do it. You know what I mean? And that's how we grew up. Hey, hold that gate, make sure do this, get the cow in there and just do it. Just figure it out.
I believe in you. And our parents instilled a belief in us and our abilities that we could conquer and figure things out. And that is a driving force in what we're doing today because it is so scary. When we gave our first pitch to the Mennonite distributor, like I was saying, we were in there and we were like, oh, we don't know.
This is so scary. And now we're just, every single day as we face our fears, we just learn everyone is who they are and we are who we are, and all we can do is our best, just like everyone else is doing. And there's no need to be scared or feel anything differently than who we are.
Guy Kawasaki:
Madisun is from Nebraska, so she's your kindred spirit.
Stephanie Painter:
Yes, you are.
Hayley Painter:
We almost named the yogurt Kindred Spirits.
Guy Kawasaki:
Oh, huh.
Stephanie Painter:
That was a really hard time figuring out, we actually hired somebody to help us with the yogurt name. What are we going to do? We didn't even know what we were going to do. And we ended up on Painterland Sisters, which is something that we knew before we even paid someone to help us figure it out.
But we were trying to get all the market research, trying to do all the things, and then we're like, we are Painterland Sisters. This is who we are. This is what we are. So we just went with that, even though there was probably something that would've been easier.
Guy Kawasaki:
I have to say that Painterland Sisters or Painter Sisters, I think is a great name. A great name.
Stephanie Painter:
Yeah. Thank you.
Guy Kawasaki:
Painter Sisters is associated with such positivity in my mind that Pointer, Painter, they're both so positive.
Stephanie Painter:
We appreciate that. And as Sisters, just everything that we try to do is, it's family-based, but it's not just that. It's to tap into our community and say, "Hey, listen, you're a sister too." We're just trying to live this life and eat healthy yogurt and be nice to Mother Earth. Be nice to Mother Earth, eat healthy food.
Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, I give you the floor, pitch your yogurt to all my listeners, why they should go especially into Whole Foods and demand Painterland Sisters yogurt.
Stephanie Painter:
All right, so Painter Land Sisters is a certified woman-owned, mother-owned, so we will not give our kids what we wouldn't want you to give your kids. We are a completely transparent farmer-owned right from the direct source of your food product.
We're 6 percent milk fat, extra creamy, defiantly dreamy, milk fat is actually better for your energy than carbs are. So eat all that good fat. We're dairy farmers. We love all that good fat. It has billions of probiotics as well as incredibly high protein.
So, sixteen to twenty-one grams of protein, and that's 100 percent natural. We do not add protein powder back into our yogurt. We do not like Frankenstein food. We like food as originally as it came from the source.
So not only do we know where this milk comes from, but we know how the animals are being treated and what they're eating, and that translates into a very nutrient dense product, something that you can just grab and go be transparent and confident with what you're eating.
This product will not only help your body, it'll help the bodies of your children and future generations because with this yogurt, you're taking care of Mother Earth herself.
Hayley Painter:
Our organic Skyr yogurt is found nationwide in every state but Alaska. If you want to find yogurt near you, you just go to our website, PainterlandSisters.com, and you can see the mom and pop stores, the big Sprout stores and all in between that you can find our product on. And yes, when you get that yogurt, you will be able to color the back of the yogurt page. I was going to say, you'll become a sister.
Stephanie Painter:
You'll become a sister, join the sisterhood.
Hayley Painter:
And maybe you'll want to be a sister with us.
Guy Kawasaki:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I swear you can order it from Amazon.
Stephanie Painter:
No way, Jose. We have tried to ship yogurt and we have not mastered that skill yet. One day, if anyone's listening and they know how to ship yogurt to somebody's front door without it getting weird because yogurt can't be too hot or too cold, and if it's shaken too much, it's so finicky.
Oh, and my gosh. And I forgot to say it's lactose free because 68 percent of people have some sort of lactose sensitivity, and we want people to eat real dairy and enjoy real dairy.
Guy Kawasaki:
I'm going to give you a little bit of homework no matter where you live, go into your market and ask for Painterland Sister yogurt, and if they don't have it, insist that they stock it and give it really great shelf space. There's a lot to love about the Painter sisters. I hope you'll take their message to heart. It's about entrepreneurship and it's about growth and grit and grace.
Oh, what a great tricolon and alliteration. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Painter Sisters. I just love that name. I have very positive feelings about the Pointer sisters, so the Painter sisters. I mean, how could I not have them on this podcast?
Anyway, thank you very much, Painter sisters, and thank you very much to the Remarkable People team, Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez, sound design wizards, Madisun and Tessa Nuismer, the Nuismer sisters.
Unlike the Painter sisters, Madisun is the co-author of our book and also the producer of this podcast. Tessa, Tessa is our researcher and transcript perfecter, along with Luis Magaña, Alexis Nishimura and Fallon Yates. That's the Remarkable People team.
And speaking of growth, grit, and grace, Madisun and I have published this book, it's called Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. It basically takes all the knowledge that we gained from over 200 remarkable people, plus a few decades of work in Silicon Valley. And this is a tactical and practical book about how to make a difference and be remarkable. Please check it out. Until next week, this is Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. Mahalo and aloha.