Food Entrepreneur BETHESDA, MD. — Since launching Issei Mochi Gummies in September 2022, founder and chief executive officer Mika Shino’s home was like a warehouse. Boxes and product were everywhere, creating no separation from home and work, Shino said.

“Boxes were literally in front of our TV,” she said. “I have two young boys, and they couldn’t even play in their own house.”

Shino knew she needed space for offices, creativity, R&D and to run trials for her product — a gummy candy formulated with tapioca syrup, modified tapioca starch, sweet rice flour and cane sugar. The gummies, which come in such flavors as strawberry, mango, sour watermelon, peach, yuzu, tangerine and vanilla, were born out of a desire to feed her children candy that was not filled with artificial ingredients and would showcase Shino’s Japanese heritage.

“Mochi cakes in Japan come in many forms,” Shino said. “We call our gummies mochi gummies because we are using sweet rice flour, mochi gome, as used in many traditional mochi cakes together with tapioca, but also because we are creating the same mochi texture as traditional mochi cakes.”

Shino received the keys to a facility in Bethesda, Md., two weeks ago and aims to be operational in four to five months, she said.

“The new facility will start with mainly R&D and small batch production for limited flavors, which we can launch online to test out the market,” Shino said.

The search for a new facility was not easy.

“We’re new, so building owners weren’t ready to put a bet on us yet,” she said. “We were turned down for four different spaces. We didn’t have a track record of (leasing) commercial space.”

Dave Sislen, president of Bristol Capital Corp., took a chance on the company and rented Issei Mochi Gummies a facility.

“He saw the vision of our company,” Shino said.

The company currently works with a co-manufacturer and will continue to do so after it has moved into its new space. Working with a co-manufacturer, however, has its limitations Shino said, which also was a push for the new facility.

“There’s always new things that we want to try,” she said. “Mochi is a very sensitive, delicate matter, there’s always room for improvement. For that you really need to do a lot of trials, tests and flavor enhancements. We wanted to make it (the facility) a big enough space to produce ourselves. Every co-man is its own business, they need a minimum and if you want to test out a flavor, you can’t do 3,000 lbs of a test.”

mochi gummiesPhoto: Issei Mochi Gummies

The company’s online customer base also has been a deciding factor for a new facility.

“We did a lot of exclusive releases and we were very quickly able to assess what was popular and what was not,” Shino said. “We really wanted to do a lot more innovation in terms of texture and flavor. To do that you need to have your own space.”

The company’s Baltimore facility also is its backup plan, Shino said.

“We will be scaling and will need production on both coasts,” she said. “The first thing I learned after launching is you need redundancy for everything — vendors, facilities, manufacturing — because anything can happen. And it will save transport costs to be able to produce in multiple locations.”

Issei Mochi Gummies launched with Whole Foods in approximately 190 stores in four regions with its first prototype. Whole Foods gave the company six to seven months to find its co-manufacturing space and finalize its product, Shino said, noting, “the retailer saw the vision and potential.”

After launching, the company struggled to find a co-manufacturer due to its tapioca rice-based product.

“I was able to submit samples to Whole Foods via a small family-owned chocolate factory who agreed to do a small batch prototype for me,” she said. “I was able to get a deal with Whole Foods based on these prototypes and was not expecting to get such a big deal to launch with them.

“In order to quickly find a co-man, we did trials in several places and none of them worked out. No one knew how to handle rice starch, which is denser and more gluey than gluten. We went to many facilities and spoke with close to a hundred factories who all turned us down.”

One co-manufacturer saw the potential in Issei Mochi Gummies and brought the company into its operations.

“They did not have any appropriate equipment for our products,” Shino said. “But they had space to let us bring in some of our own basic cookers and allowed us to hand-make, hand-slab and hand-cut 3,000 lbs of mochi gummies for our first order to Whole Foods.”

After the company’s first run with the co-manufacturer, custom equipment was ordered, which allowed Issei to scale and automate, Shino said. She said the decision came “after months of testing, failing, having to dump bad batches and thinking we would go under because every trial is so expensive and we were running out of money.”

Food scientists worked to figure out the company’s formulation, which either came out too soft and lumpy or too hard to cut in the beginning, Shino noted. Food scientists and rice starch specialists finally cracked the company’s formulation with more R&D after almost a year of trials, which the company was able to finance through a personal loan and family and friend fundraising.

“None (food scientists) that we spoke to had ever worked on anything like our product,” she said. “So we really had to ideate and create from scratch and test over and over.”

Shino said the company’s organic growth, availability in approximately 3,400 stores, winning the 2024 Most Innovative New Product Award, the Small Business Innovator award at Sweets & Snacks Expo for its dark chocolate covered strawberry mochi gummies in May, a Walmart Open Call “golden ticket” in 2023, being nimble and friends and family fundraising has been a part of its success thus far.

“I’ve been very careful with our growth,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons why we haven’t rented office space. I tried to eliminate all the costs that I could so I didn’t have to go out and do any fundraising. We’ve hired a sales person, a graphic designer and my husband just came on. I didn’t have the knowledge (of the industry) but I think this also has given us opportunities because I didn’t have the standard way of doing things and was able to save up a lot of costs.

“I think we’re in a place now where we’ve proven the concept. It was very hard to have people believe in something when you haven’t proven the need or demand and sales. I decided to have my own company; I wanted to do it my way in the beginning and that was really important to me.” 

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