Sanaia Apple Sauce
Sanaia Apple Sauce is a company aiming to do to the apple sauce segment that Greek yogurt did for yogurt, make it hip and desirable again.
The entrepreneur claims that when most people think of apple sauce they think of baby or kids' food or something of old people. The idea for Sanaia is to make something flavorful and interesting in order to reignite interest in it. The entrepreneur with Sanaia has taken green apples and created six "island inspired" flavors. Some of these include guava, plain unsweetened apple, and ginger. She claims that now is the perfect time to relaunch apple sauce because more people than ever are looking for plant based foods.
The product comes in two types of packages, a glass jar to be sold on store shelves near existing canned and jared products, and a yogurt sized plastic package to be sold in the cold section for grab and go enjoyment. The jars are sold in four-packs by flavor for $16 per pack on Amazon Prime. They cost $1.03 per jar to create. The plastic yogurt-style cups cost $0.63 to produce, are sold for $1 per cup wholesale and expected to retail for $1.79 each.
However, much of this is theoretical. The company was only started in July (presumably of the previous year) and, thus far, the product has only been sold in the glass jars in a test market for six months, direct to consumer. The glass jar sales will begin selling on Amazon Prime in two weeks from when the episode was filmed. The entrepreneur claims the business can get 50% margins on every sale. She also said that she spent the previous forty-eight hours at a trade show and received "$35,000,000 in interest" but made no sales at the show.
When questioned about the price difference between Sanaia and existing apple sauce brands, the entrepreneur said: "I don't think a person who buys Mott's is our consumer."
The entrepreneur has invested $250,000 of her own money into the company and has set aside an additional $250,000 for continuing operations.
This deal aired on Episode 10.02.
Making A Deal
The entrepreneur maintains a "day job" as a recruiter for a large company and has not yet quit to work on Sanaia full time despite having invested the aforementioned $250,000 in it. However, she has hired a full time COO to manage operations and "has built a team" around the product.
The sharks were not impressed by this with almost all of them pushing her on why she had not jumped in with both feet. Barbara even went so far as to offer the asked for $150,000 for 75% of the company, a particularly sharky offer that failed to take into account even the money that had been invested.
It wasn't until the entrepreneur explained that she was supporting a significant part of her family with her salary that the sharks understood and Mark finally made the first real offer, $150,000 for 25% equity. Though this represented a bite of $400,000 off the original value, it still left the company valued at $600,000 and was much more realistic in the expectations that the entrepreneur would accept. And accept she did.