Brentwood dietitian, husband push for bigger place in market

By CAROL STUART
For Brentwood Home Page
When Brentwood registered dietitian Carilu Robinson’s husband came home from the little league ball field with a health-food investment opportunity, she wanted to make sure the products were something she could approve.

She not only wholeheartedly backed the Monkey Brains oatmeal and now Monkey Bars granola invented by former Quaker Oats marketing man Chris Barroll of Franklin. But Robinson’s been helping for two years to try to get the products for “kids and immature adults” on store shelves, and is finally starting to see the uphill battle by a startup company pay off.

The Monkey Brains oatmeal was part of the first event of First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" health campaign at a military commissary.

The Monkey Bars got a four-day taste test in the Brentwood Costco earlier this month, leading Costco to give the low-sugar, low-sodium products another demo at the Nashville West Costco April 29-May 1 in efforts to get in the wholesale club nationwide.

The Monkey Brains oatmeal also has been accepted into all 125 commissaries on U.S. military bases as part of the Let’s Move initiative by First Lady Michelle Obama, while the Monkey Bars were presented last week. And the products are in over 1,500 groceries across the nation including 500 Food Lions, Kroger’s stores in Cincinnati and Denver, SuperTargets as of recently, and Whole Foods in Brentwood and Green Hills.

“I call it monkey business sometimes. There’s a lot of middlemen and different avenues to get your product into somewhere; it's unbelievable,” Robinson said.

“… It's sad in a way because there are a lot of people like us who have very healthy products that would like to be on the shelf at your major grocery store, but the process, the cost and the advertising cost to do that, you don't have. So it's really a grassroots effort, and now that I see this other side of things, now I know why there aren't healthier foods in the stores.”

Barroll, the only person drawing a salary for the company, created the oatmeal and then granola bars after feeling the products he was developing and marketing were actually unhealthy despite the reputation of Quaker Oats. The Chewy Bar from the Pepsico-owned brand is the No. 1 bar in the nation, Robinson said.

Carilu Robinson

“You've got a huge Pepsico company you're competing with, who’s already got a huge market,” Robinson said. “I mean the bar market is a $5 billion industry. Here we are a little company trying to break into that, yet we're ‘real food.’ We're the good stuff.

“So I can see now why obesity is the rise, and diabetes -- it's cheap food out there. Even though we're trying to align our product as cheaply as possible, the cost of getting it into the store is hard.”

Ironically, though, the Monkey Bars are manufactured by the Standard Candy Co. in Nashville – maker of Music City’s famous Goo Goo candy bar.

Ingredient list should be real food and short

Robinson said one of the main keys to healthy or “real food” is a short list of ingredients.  She always tells clients and her children to eat an orange or banana because it’s doesn’t have an ingredient.

The Monkey Bars have only 9 grams of sugar, no additives, no fake color dyes, no preservatives, no high fructose corn syrup and are low in sodium. They are made with 100 percent whole-grain rolled oats, have 4g protein and 3g fiber, and include a “pre-biotic” called NutraFlora that aids in digestion.

On the Web: www.monkey-brains.com

The bars come in four flavors: Strawberry Vanilla, Banana Peanut Butter Chocolate, Blueberry Vanilla and Chocolate Chip.

“The ingredient list must be small; it must be actual real food ingredients,” Robinson said. “Like our oatmeal is just whole-grain rolled oats. It's got ground cane sugar, it's got the fructan which is the NutraFlora pre-biotic fibers, it has sea salt, some Vitamin C for preserving, and that's it.”

The oatmeal, also with just enough sugar for taste, comes in Maple Brown Sugar, Strawberry, Blueberry and Raspberry.

Robinson says kids eat so much junk food these days that their digestive system slows down. A lot of attention is given to pro-biotics right now, she says, but pre-biotics actually helps the body produce its own pro-biotics and regulate the balance of friendly bacteria.

As a dietitian, Robinson said she recently received a beautiful advertisement for another company’s new cereal bar being promoted as healthy – it has 35 grams of sugar, she said.

Former Quaker executive left job to launch healthy brand

Barroll, whose title at Quaker Oats was marketing manager of innovation, would work with research & development, food design and packaging to create new brands and products. Before starting his own venture in mid-2006, he was with Pepsico for four years and Colgate-Palmolive five years prior.

“From that job, I realized that there was nothing truly healthy for kids,” Barroll said. “I knew enough about what kind of product we would launch, what kind of product I had to develop to do my job well. I knew my company, I knew my brand. Quaker is largely marketed as wholesome, but if you read the actual nutrition panel the products lack substance.

“So Quaker foods and snacks are not what a dietitian would call healthy. … They're fine, I mean it's not like a chocolate bar, but you can't find me a true dietitian that's going to say, ‘Feed your kids Quaker Dipps granola bars’. …  I wanted to launch something a dietitian would say is healthy, and I knew I couldn't do that at Quaker.”

The Monkey Brains team was invited to demo its Monkey Bars at the Costco in Nashville West after exeding expectations at the Brentwood Costco for four days.

Nashville resident Jack Slinger, who also had experience in the food industry, ended up meeting Barroll and investing in the Monkey Brains business. Slinger pitched the investment opportunity to Robinson’s husband Mike during youth baseball season at the Harpeth Hills church fields.

Little did Barroll know that would hook him up with a dietitian as an investor. All three families (Chris and Hetti-Marie Barroll, Jack and Lisa Slinger and the Robinsons) have been involved as business partners since January ’09, and original investor Mark Button is still involved in part.  

“When my husband came home and started talking to me about this product, I was very skeptical at first, because there's lot of food out there that's not real food,” Robinson said. “… I said, ‘Mike I've really got to take a look at this, talk to the food scientists and really find out what this product is about, and actually get to know Chris too a little bit more. . . . Well, he was right on the money.”

Robinson also said kids had to like it – and keep asking for it – not just wanting it in the store and then hating it when they got home. “When my kids tried it, they really liked it,” she said.

Barroll also is responsible for the big Monkey cartoon on the front to get children interested in the healthy products.

3 1/2 years invested in breaking into Costco stores

Robinson invites any local residents to take a short trip to West Meade to try and to buy the bars during the Costco demonstration at the Charlotte Pike store. If the Monkey Bars do well there, the company will get another shot in Chattanooga, then possibly a regional placement on the quest toward a national spot.

“We've been trying to get into Costco, as an example, for 3 1/2 years,” Barroll said. “And we have had sales brokers help us, we have done a whole lot of talking, a lot of work and ultimately we have to go it alone, part ways with our sales brokerage, and pick up the phone and cold-call Costco regions.

“It is extremely difficult because everybody is calling them, and they have to divide their limited time between their existing vendors who are some of the largest companies in the world and all the other companies. Somehow you just have to persist to convince them, or let the products convince them, to give you a chance.”

The Monkey Brains bootcamp: all headed to the Nashville West Costco April 29-May 1.

At Brentwood, the group sold $2,000 worth of Monkey Bars per day –or about 200 units of 20-pack boxes daily. “So we did really well. The target that they wanted us to hit was a very high target, but we beat it by about 35 percent,” Barroll said.

The company got Monkey Bars into the local Whole Foods stores after the Robinson’s daughter and boyfriend manned a kiosk at The Mall at Green Hills and the health-foods grocer started getting requests for the product.

Target just started taking the products in their Super Centers, but they may not yet be in Tennessee. The company has shelf space at such places as Associated Groceries in Utah, Roundy’s in Wisconsin, HEB in Texas, and the Kroger stores in Cincinnati and its King Supers markets in Denver. Some stores put the bar with regular snack/cereal bars and others in organic/health – it’s usually up to the store manager, Robinson said.

Slinger helped get the oatmeal placed in the armed services commissaries through a connection, and Barroll went to the first Let’s Move event held, at the Pentagon Commissary in Ft. Myers, Fla. The military, however, offers a very small profit margin due to the low prices at the Px.  

The Monkey Brains brain trust has a small 9x9 headquarters in upstairs space in downtown Franklin above Mellow Mushroom plus warehouse space. Sometimes they take their pickup trucks to load products from the warehouse before packaging and shipping out smaller orders.

Robinson’s been so busy with the business that she says she’s neglected her dietitian website, www.nutritionpeace.com.

“This is the first time I've ever been involved in a food product,” Robinson said. “I've always talked about food, educated about food, but have never done anything in this industry.”