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This Father-Daughter Team Is Bringing The Dutch Stroopwafel To America

This article is more than 8 years old.

John Paino knows better than most how hard it is to teach Americans to love foreign foods. His first company, Nasoya, made and sold tofu long before the Asian protein staple became a household name stateside.

“Tofu was a tough sell,” the 64-year-old Paino says today. “After that, everything is easy.”

Now Paino has a new foreign food product that he thinks can be another national hit, along with a new partner: his 24-year-old daughter, Julia, a former associate at seed fund Vodia Ventures. Paino’s back in the startup game, something he never expected, with dreams of striking gold a second time. This go around, he’s bringing stroopwafels to the United States.

What is a stroopwafel? It’s a popular snack in the Netherlands, but few people in the U.S. are likely to have heard of it. A stroopwafel is essentially a sweet cookie treat made of two thin waffles fused with a caramel filling in the middle.

A Dutch friend of the Painos turned them on to stroopwafels in 2013, complaining that none of the previous American attempts had been satisfying. “We ordered every stroopwafel in the market,” says Julia Paino. “I’d call it a feast but it wasn’t much of one because they weren’t great. We figured we could develop one that was better.” They decided to make their own version, specifically designed for American tastes.

To do so, they’ve leaned heavily on John Paino’s more than 35 years of experience in the food business. Nasoya started in 1978 in a small converted dairy barn in Massachusetts, where he made the bean curd protein by hand. It took eight years to turn a profit, and Paino didn’t take a single vacation day for the first decade. But by 1993, Nasoya was shipping a million pounds of tofu per month, and he made a tidy sum selling the business to Hong Kong-based Vitasoy.

Even after, the food world kept calling to Paino. He dabbled in marketing for food businesses and then in 2005 started a side gig developing soy milk ricotta. Healthy tortilla chips and salsa came next, under his new Number 9 Organics brand. But Paino has modest ambitions for that line. “We’re not going to beat Frito Lay, so our goal is not to be number 1,” he says. “I wanted to have a strong regional brand, a retirement business.”

Stroopwafels, on the other hand, could be a bigger deal. With a master’s in selling unfamiliar foods to Americans, Paino knows the advantages of marketing a successful foreign product. “Find something unique to make, but not so unique the people won’t buy it,” he says. Stroopwafels are a proven commodity in the Netherlands, and staying out of existing competitive food markets helps sustain profit margins.

There’s an opportunity to define this category, and the Painos are grabbing for it. They called their product the Swoffle, modeling it after coffee and toffee. The logo and packaging was designed to position it as a high-end delicious treat. “We want Swoffle to be synonymous with stroopwafel,” says John Paino.

Production was more painful. The Painos wanted Swoffle to check all the right boxes for today’s market: organic, gluten free, non-GMO. That made sense from a marketing perspective, but going gluten free made it hard to manufacture a tasty product with a long shelf life. “It’s not easy to make something taste as good as a wheat cookie, that stays together, isn’t crumbly, isn’t too soft, and has the perfect feel,” says John Paino.

At the 20’ by 50’ test kitchen attached to his house, Paino worked through 300 to 400 recipes. At the beginning of 2014, he thought it was perfect. They sold a few batches to local coffee shops but  while the Swoffles tasted great when fresh, the caramel would harden and became unedible a week later. The Painos fixed that problem (current shelf life is one year), but then struggled with yield and breakage. Only at the beginning of this summer did they finally get the product right—just in time to start working on two new flavors: French vanilla and chocolate.

Individually-wrapped Swoffles are sold at a hefty recommend price of $1.99 each. Keeping that profit margin is key. “Lot of companies don’t mark up their product enough,” John Paino says. “Then they can’t fund their own growth, have to get capital and give up part of their company.” He also guides the young company toward distributors and product shows he knows will be successful.

Today, Swoffles are available only online and in Boston-area stores, but the Painos are reaching out to national distributors and specialty stores. They split the work: John manages the operations, while Julia focuses on business development and marketing. She left her venture capital job in July to work on Swoffle full time.

To John, this new venture is as much about his daughter as anything. “I’m here to guide Julia, and make sure we’re financially stable,” he says. “But she’s a fast learner and the driving force.”  He says he would have been happy without a second run at national success, but this opportunity was just too sweet to turn down.

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