From IT to Nut Butter: How Nutural World Spread Its Way to Success | EP. #178

What does it take to turn a lifelong passion into a thriving business? On this 178th episode of the E-Comm Show, Andrew Maff interviews Mordechai Chachamu, Founder of Nutural World. His transition from the IT world to becoming a food entrepreneur at retirement age shows that it's never too late.

In this episode, you'll learn a few key strategies that took Nutural World from local farmers' markets to grocery shelves. From offering discounted products to gain long-term relationships to trying new ecommerce platforms to expand their reach. If you're an aspiring entrepreneur, this episode may inspire you to take the leap and follow your dreams.

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From IT to Nut Butter: How Nutural World Spread Its Way to Success

Andrew Maff and Mordechai Chachamu

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

Mordechai Chachamu

IT professional turned food entrepreneur at retirement age, Mordechai has founded Nutural World in 2014, producing his nut butters and spreads in the kitchen of his house in London, with a mission to make the tastiest and healthiest nut butters possible. Since then, the business has now grown to exceed £1m in sales and in addition to the UK market, Nutural World products can be found in most EU countries, USA, South Korea and Singapore. Winning in excess of 50 awards, it is little surprise that Nutural World products have many devoted and loyal customers, who are buying the products on a regular basis.

Andrew Maff  00:03

I had to leave the house because my wife just gave me an ultimatum. It's either the business or her, Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The E-Comm Show. As usual, I am your host, Andrew Maffttone, and today I am joined by the amazing Mordecai Chahamu, who is with Nutural World. Mordecai, how you doing, buddy? You ready for a

Mordecai Chahamu  01:15

good show? I'm very good. Thank you very much. And I'm doing amazing. Great.

Andrew Maff  01:19

I am super excited to have you on the show. I love talking about the CPG space. I am a huge fan of the product line, just in general, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to eat after we do this interview. But thank you so much for joining us. I always like to start these off pretty stereotypically and kind of give you the floor and tell us just a little bit about your background, how you got started, how you got moving with natural world, and then we'll take it from there. Okay,

Speaker 1  01:43

so I think that any buddy listening will probably not be able to see that, but anybody watching will certainly be able to see I'm not a spring chicken. I I basically started my adventures entrepreneur when I was supposed to retire, really. So I was a an IT person. I served in various roles in the IT world, from programmer, project manager to senior manager. And then I came across completely by coincidence, although my wife would probably dispute that. Of course, a product which at the time was so revolutionary, or I don't know how to it was like, oh my god, what is this? So the product was a macadamia butter. Now, everybody knows peanut butter, and a lot of people love peanut butter, but I have not heard 10 years ago about macadamia butter, and I suspect that many people to this day have not heard of macadamia butter. So I came across that video that showed how to make macadamia butter, and it was using a small utensil that you can put, you know, in your kitchen and make your own macadamia butter. And I thought, that's amazing. I want to try so, so I started to, I bought a machine. It was of eBay. It cost me 40 quid for the American audience. It's around $50 I don't know, but yeah. And then I just started making it. Now, obviously I did not dare start with macadamia because the ingredient is very expensive. So I started doing it with sunflower seeds, which are dirt cheap, relatively cheap. So this is how I started. And I basically I knew nothing about it, nothing whatsoever. I knew nothing about being an entrepreneur full stop. All I knew was computers. I knew them very well, but that helped me very little when it came to producing nut butters. So so with time, when once I had seen that I'm actually quite good at it and I know what I'm doing, I started to experiment with more and more product, and I developed a line of product, and then to see what would be the customer reaction, I applied to sell on the most famous street market in the UK, in Camden Town, and I was accepted, To my shock, and there I was sending my nut butters to many 1000s of tourists that came, and they also never saw nut butters in their life anyway, to make a really long story short, because that was like 10 years ago. So in 2017 the business has grown to such a such a size that was overtaking my house, because I did everything wrong, of course, and by that time, I had to resign my position, not do the two things at the same time. So I was an IT manager. I resigned, and I did that full, full time, and then I had. To leave the house because my wife just gave me an ultimatum. It's either the business or her, and the choice was even then clear. I prepare my wife, so let's go. So So I left. I left the house, and I leased a small production unit, and I never looked back. So to speak, the business has grown and grown and grown. It is an ever challenging environment. There is not a single day that I don't feel the stress and the joy of resolving issues which are usually coming, usually not already coming at the same time, or in close proximity, at least, and yeah, and now I would say we as a company are selling our products primarily via Amazon, but not only so. Just to sort of pat on my own back, if I may, not only we are selling all over the UK, but we are selling all over Europe. We have a distributor in South Korea. We sell in Amazon in the US and Walmart in the US, and we are now approaching Canada, that would be our next target to conquer. And the company has grown from virtually nothing, really, to over a million pounds in revenues, which is, you know, quite commendable, at least in my book, without any assistance from external investors or or anything. I didn't do crowdfunding and I did not have any angel investments, nothing. It was self funded, and then grew organically. Yeah, it's

Andrew Maff  06:48

incredibly impressive, respectfully, at a man of your age who's about to retire, and then jumps into this and then, let alone, jumps into it, taking something that was almost a hobby, and then turning it into a business that you're now doing. As you said, over a million pounds annually. It's amazing. One of the things I'm always very curious about, right? Like, because you you did the market you mentioned in the UK, you mentioned was one of the biggest markets in the UK. That one, right? Was the first place you kind of went and tested it out,

Speaker 1  07:17

right? Yeah. You mean farmers markets. Yeah, the

Andrew Maff  07:21

farmers market. Yes, that was Camden tower. So how did you make the jump from the farmers markets into obviously, now you're available online. You're available, as you already mentioned, a bunch of retail stores like that. Jump I find, especially for CPG brands, to be very challenging. How did you What was that process like? How'd you go from farmers markets to elsewhere?

Speaker 1  07:45

Well, if your pardon me, being whimsical, I would say very slowly, it doesn't happen overnight. So I learned a lot of things, I would say the hard way, and I'll go through that, I think, quite succinctly, if, if I can, so the when you are producing an artisan product, produce like my, like mine, the first point of call is to go to specialty food shops. You know, there are vegetarian, vegan, organic stuff, you know, those stuck up, people that and and I went to quite a lot of exhibitions that were aiming to cater for those people and for the shops that cater for those people. And I was quite successful. I quite successful. But what I learned with the time is that that success is short lived. And what I mean by that is that those people are really looking for the next interesting stuff to bring to their shop for their customers, and after a while, you stop being new and exciting by definition, that's how the world works. You know, once you get used to something, is no longer exciting. So there were quite a lot of job that would place quite a lot of orders with me initially, and then it would pat you down and it with time, it would grind to a hold and I would never hear from them again. One could argue that I should have done a better job at following up and phoning them and all this stuff to say, how are you and do you happen to need my product? But I, perhaps naively, was thinking that if my products are doing well, it'll be in the interest to call me so for me to go through. And I did try to call several times seven, and I was really given a short shift, you know, like, basically stop bothering me so, and that is one reason, the other one is that I was a long. Wolf. In this place I was doing everything, everything, production, distribution, packaging, marketing, sales, you name it. It was all on my shoulders. So there is that much I can do. So, so, so I did not do that and and with so I tried the online route. And at first I was selling on eBay, and it was okay ish, but it wasn't like a breakthrough and and I remember that I was considering eBay versus Amazon initially, and eBay looked so much more inviting, simple, straightforward, the listing, the whole lot was like, easy peasy, and Amazon was cumbersome. And I thought, Okay, I can't live with it. I'll do Ebay. I did eBay, and I did it for, I don't know, month, and it was selling. But first of all, you have to renew your listing every month and all this, you know, admin stuff. And then I thought, and this is I put it as a credit to me, I thought, hold on. If that doesn't work, maybe I should review my decision of the time. And I went to Amazon and I listed some products, and by God, the sales were phenomenal. But I thought, hold on a second, that looks good. So I listed all my products on Amazon, and the sales just went through the roof. And it was so good that I was invited by Amazon vendor to participate in their vendor program. So now I was doing hybrid I was also selling as a seller and also as a vendor on Amazon. And once those everything took off, I thought, okay, maybe I should go to other markets as well Amazon. Now I know the drill. I know how to publish, I know how to perfect the listing. I know how to advertise. I I've learned. It took me a while, but I'm pretty good at studying stuff, so I learned it. So I thought, I'll go for Europe, you know? And and then, and that was before the dreaded Brexit. So it was easy at the time. So I went for Europe and and in the same way, I started to develop. And after a long time, I went for United States, which was another challenge. Somebody from South Korea wanted to this be a distributor for my product. So I went for that. And so it is. I would say, if I have to give like a lesson or what I've learned is, when one door closes, there is another window or there is another door, you just have to look for it, identify it, and try it. It may not open, but when this one is not open, then try another one, because there is another one. There is, you know, yeah. Now, when I say that, it also obviously relies on what you are doing, like you can't sell ice to the Eskimos and expect to be very successful, however much you may try, but in my case, I'm sending stuff which is healthy. It's extremely tasty. I mean, we have won in the UK more than 40 great taste awards for our product and others that are not as known or important and and people once, a lot of people, not everybody. Of course, you cannot meet everybody's taste. But a lot of people, once they try the product, they say, This is amazing. I like it. And they buy again and again and again. So I even get emails from customers in Europe where, because of the difficulties after Brexit, we are not able to keep up the replenishment on Amazon at the pace that we would have liked. So they're saying Mordecai, and they find, they get, they find me online. They email me personally to say, Oh, we are devoted to your cashew butter. When do you think you might have it in France and and I have to say, Oh, I'm very sorry, but it will take two three weeks. And I say, but hey, since our nut butters have a three years shelf life, you buy several, you know, you will not be left without anything next time

Andrew Maff  14:45

it's the pros of having a really quality product is people will do whatever it takes to buy it. You know, it makes the marketing a lot easier. At what point did you start to lean in on obviously, I know you've got your own website and you sell product there as well. At what point did you. Were doing that,

Speaker 1  15:00

I would say, almost from the beginning, because that was like easy. I went for the WooCommerce route, and somebody, a friend of mine, did the website for me. It was then revised two years ago, and it felt completely revamped, and, I think, much nicer. But I recently did a statistics. And I think in the first year of operation, I had five sales on the website. And now we have around 300 or no, sorry, 600 I remember 600 in 2024 but in the US alone, just to give an example, we are selling more than 1000 jars per month at the moment. So what? What we are selling in a year on our website? We do more than that in a month on Amazon, US and Amazon UK. Needless to say we sell much more, I don't know, two, 3000 months what?

Andrew Maff  16:05

What is your so you're on, as you mentioned, like all the different Amazon marketplaces, you're on your own website, you're in retail. What's, what's the marketing approach? What do you do to kind of get the word out? I mean, you've got a you've clearly got a great product that sells itself once someone tries it. But how do you get people to actually try it? What's that marketing approach like?

Speaker 1  16:25

That's exactly what I'm trying to do everywhere. So for example, if I can, I would say the first time that you buy a product, for me, half a price. I don't care if I'm not making any money on the first time that you buy my product, I just want you to try it. And this is my my main aim is to increase as much as possible the new two brand percentage in anything that I do. This is, this is my sort of mantra. I want new to brand people to try my product, because if say, my repeat buyers is 70% that's amazing. That's amazing. So after for every new 10 people, seven will become regular buyers. So the every new 10, I get seven regulars, and then they buy from me really like regularly. A lot of them do Subscribe and Save or anything because it's food and if they like it, and if it's tasty and it is, and if it's healthy, which it is, most of our products, by the way, are single ingredient. I don't add anything. So my almond butter is 100% almond etc. So it's, it's, it ticks all the boxes I would say that people are looking for. It's tasty, it's vegan. It has no added sugar, no added salt, no added oil, of course, no palm oil. And, you know, and for the Jewish people out there, it's even kosher. So, so

Andrew Maff  18:05

how are you so you mentioned that, you know, like, for the first time, purchasers, you're totally fine giving up that 50% for them to try it, which makes a ton of sense. How do you get that messaging out? Like, is your what's your marketing? Like, is it mostly advertising? Are you leaning in on social media? Like, what's that work?

Speaker 1  18:21

I have tried everything. I tried Google. I've tried social media, and everything was a flop, with the exception of Amazon. And the reason for that is very simple. It's the intention of the user when somebody is typing, let's say they do almond butter on Google. I have no idea what they are after. Do they want to know how to make it themselves? Do they want to know the nutritional value? What is it that they are after? I have no idea. But if somebody goes to Amazon and types almond butter, they want to buy simple, straightforward. So my the results that I get from advertising on Amazon are very, very good, very, very good and well worth the money. I would say that's

Andrew Maff  19:14

good. I made a great case study for Amazon. I may be, but maybe

Speaker 1  19:18

that a lot of the stuff that you find on Amazon is really a one time purchase. You know, in the vast majority of cases, food is a sort of exception to the rule. You know, from the I don't know how many millions and millions of products are out there, the seller does not expect you to come again. They just want to grab you once, and you know, like TV or maybe memory card. But even then a memory card you bought one, there is nothing, nothing holding you back from buying another one next time, you would not have any sentiments toward Toshiba or. Or whatever you know, because their memory card in the first place makes no difference with me. It's different. So So I think one should not take my approach as a blueprint for how to advertise. It is really horses for courses. You need to know what you're trying to achieve. So one thing that Amazon has done recently, or relatively recently, they introduced brand specific marketing. And in the brand specific marketing, you could say, I want to target cart abandoners. Cart abandoners, by definition, exactly the people that I want to catch, because they have already seen my product. They put it in the cart. They decided not to buy so they so they didn't try it. So I would be very happy to tempt them with a discount, you know what? And it will only they that would see the discount, because the cart abandoners are clearly defined the group of people, literally defined by name. You know who they are, so they only they would see that advertisement of mine, or that promotion of mine. For me, this is God sent in terms of the being able to target the right population.

Andrew Maff  21:17

Yeah, hey, focusing middle of funnel is the easiest way to focus on conversion and bring in revenue. It makes a ton of sense. And obviously, what you've built is pretty impressive. I obviously, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. I don't want to take up too much more in time. I know you're very busy. I would love to give you the opportunity to let us know, let everyone know where they can find out more about you, and, of course, more about natural world. Sorry, what is your question? Where? Where can everybody find out more about you and more about natural world?

Speaker 1  21:43

Well, first of all, I think it's really important that I emphasize the spelling of the website the company. It's a pun, really, and I did not appreciate it. It will be completely lost in translation for any other language, but in English, it works well. So natural world is spelled n u t, u r, a l, which is an obvious combination of not n u t with natural which is where I am. So nuturalworld.com is my website, and I think on all the main or European American and certainly UK it's not included in the EU, then one can find my store, which I highly recommend one's visit, because that will give the whole, I would say, a broad range of products that we make. So obviously we make nut butters, but unusually, we have a smooth and crunchy version for a lot of stuff, which is not usual, like pistachio butter. We have smooth pistachio butter and crunchy pistachio butter. And also we have started in the last 12 months or so to sell roasted nuts, and they are amazing. And what sets them apart is that they are without salt, which is first of all, not very healthy. But we believe that the taste of our roasting and the nuts that we buy is so good that you would not miss the salt. And again, we are doing extremely well in the UK, and we hope to replicate it everywhere else. I think that's in a nutshell,

Andrew Maff  23:31

nice. I really appreciate that more guy, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us. Obviously, everyone that tuned in. Thank you as well. Please make sure you do the usual thing, rate review, subscribe all that fun stuff on whichever podcast platform you prefer, or head over to the ecommshow.com to check out all of our previous episodes. But as usual, thank you all for joining us, and we'll see you next time. Have a good

Narrator  23:56

Thank you for tuning in to The E-Comm Show head over to theecommshow.com to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or on the BlueTuskr YouTube channel. The E-Comm Show is brought to you by BlueTuskr, a full service digital marketing company specifically for e-commerce sellers looking to accelerate their growth. Go to bluetuskr.com Now for more information. Make sure to tune in next week for another amazing episode of The E-Comm Show.