Nui
What do you do when you're on the trendy diet of the month or year or whatever and it bans you from eating any kind of sugar but... you know... it's snack time? You could, if Nui, a company from Anaheim, CA, has its way, eat their cookies instead, cookies baked to the standards of the keto/paleo/caveman diet thing.
The two entrepreneurs behind Nui are both adherents to the keto diet and created the original Nui cookie in their home kitchens "with almost no baking experience." They contain "healthy" ingredients like coconut oil[1], almond flower, and natural sweeteners. A consumer could chow down on the entire box and, according to entrepreneurs, be eating less sugar than a single normal cookie. The Nui cookies themselves contain only two grams of carbs and 140 calories per cookie and six grams of protein "per serving."
Thus far, all the sales of the cookie have been direct to consumer through their own site. However, the entrepreneurs state that they will be launching on Amazon within the same month that the episode was filmed. Additionally, they are partnering with a commercial copacker so as to not have to bake the cookies themselves as they have been sold out for three of the last six months.
So far for the year in which the deal was filmed, Nui has grossed $630,000 in sales and netted $35,000 in profit. Boxes of twenty cookies retail for $29.95 plus $4.95 in shipping and handling fees and cost between $11 and $13 to produce. Kevin stated that he didn't believe retail could be a viable strategy until they brought the cost down to under $6 a unit.
This deal aired on Episode 10.06.
Making A Deal
Mark Cuban quickly exited the deal because he felt that it was too close to the same space occupied by Alyssa's Healthy Cookies.[2]
Guest shark Alex Rodriguez had no such issues however. He jumped on board, playing hard on the idea that like the entrepreneurs, he was the child of immigrants and that they should accept his $300,000 for 25% offer. This was certainly the most shark-y offer on the table and represented a bite of over 50%. But, Arod is Arod and he very casually dropped the fact that Jennifer Lopez had a cookie problem, and the entrepreneurs went for it, bringing the underappreciated-in-his-time baseball player onboard as a partner.
Notes
- ↑ Everyone likes to tout coconut oil as being healthy because... coconuts! But the consensus as to whether their oil is healthy is still very much an open question. According to a researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health, coconut oil "contains high amounts of saturated fatty acids and said that it poses a greater risk to heart health than lard." Of course, people on the whole keto/paleo thing probably think this is a good thing....
- ↑ Alyssa's Healthy Cookies never appeared on Shark Tank and yet Mark and the producers do not seem shy about mentioning it, not just in this episode but also in the twelfth episode of Season Nine with a short summary of how it's done since partnering with him.