“Do you know that feeling,” asks Kent Arnold, founder of Mixed Up Nut Butter, “when you eat food and you're just like, you need to stop talking? It’s because you don't want to take away from the experience. I feel like that's kind of what we're after… Eating our product is a very different experience. It tastes like eating something that has depth and meaning to it.”
Arnold’s company would seem a perfect object for punny dad jokes. But the fact is that Arnold’s business had its genesis in his dad, and it was no joke.
“My dad used to eat one to two pounds of peanut butter a week,” Arnold says. “Then [wanting to eat something healthier] he discovered a mixed tree nut butter at a store near us in South Burlington, and he fell in love with it… But then, all of a sudden, they stopped carrying it…”
As it turned out, Arnold was “obsessed” with cooking: “I was known as the guy who cooks all the time, cooks for everyone. And I've spent all of my free time just watching cooking videos.”
So he said, “What’s in this nut butter, Dad? I’ll make it for you.” And his re-creation turned out to taste better than the stuff his dad had been buying. Which led his dad to suggest, “Hey, let's sell this online.” It was early 2020 and Arnold was about to graduate from UVM. “I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to start a business one day,” he recalls. His dad said this would be a good way to get his feet wet running a business. And then, when Covid hit two months later and his post-graduation job fell through, the nuts came into alignment…
By 2021, when public gatherings became possible again, Arnold started sharing his nut butters at events, getting in front of customers. By the end of 2021, Mixed Up was in 15-20 stores. A year later, that number had climbed to almost 200.
“Then we started to do more and more events,” Arnold says. “Over time, we're realizing that the more we can get in front of people, the deeper we're going to be able to go. In New England, you could spend all your time trying to get into new stores and getting discovered by new people, when in reality you still have work to do with the people that you just made one touchpoint with. And there's so much opportunity to go deeper with those relationships with those people, engaging with them further.
“I could spend all my time trying to get into more stores versus actually focusing on making those stores successful,” he says. “But, just because you get on a shelf, you're not connecting with the consumer at all. You're just getting placed on the shelf…. And 200 stores may sound like a lot, but it's really not. You can't build a business on that unless you have a really high-velocity product.”
So now Arnold sees his next, critical stage of growth to be working to improve per-store sales, through events and deeper interactions. In that respect, he particularly likes participating in the Burlington Farmers’ Market, because it is a great testing ground for new products. The day we visited his production facility (at the Vermont Food Venture Center in Hardwick), he was doing a short run of Strawberry Creemee, a luscious butter made with cashews, maple, and freeze-dried strawberries, to test out in Burlington.
“At the Burlington Farmer's Market,” he says, “the amount of returning customers we get is much higher than any other event we've done. And it's a local play. So that's why I'm like, ‘Alright, I'll do this 24-jar test to see what people think.’ And people love it because that's actually what keeps people coming back to me. So I see it as I'm investing in loyalty and also, if I make a really great product, it's going to build up some hype and some buzz. And that's going to be a marketing thing too… And so when people think of Mixed Up, they're going to think of exciting new flavors and the experiences they had when they were sharing this limited edition flavor, say, with their mom, who loves strawberries – the connection they had on that. So that's the reason why I'm doing stuff like this, because I want people to experience my product and brand in that way.”
And that gets to the educational challenge at the root of Arnold’s business: when most people think of nut butters, they think of peanut butter (not a nut, peanuts are a legume) or of monotonal single-nut butters like almond (thin, oily, tart) or cashew (creamy but not that tasty).
“I think people's standard for nut butter is just so low,” Arnold says. “And I feel like I've changed people's mind. ‘Oh, I don't like nut butter,’ people say. But I'm like, ‘You just need to try ours.’ I know, probably every brand says that. But ours is actually different: it's a combination of flavors, while most nut others are made from one type of nut… On top of that, we're using maple sugar, unrefined sugar. So that has its own special flavor. And we're not using flavorings of any kind.”
The end result are surprisingly robust, satisfying flavors in each of his concoctions, but also products that are good for you.
“I hope that I can help people live healthier lives,” Arnold says, “by giving them something that's healthy that they can truly enjoy.”
