To start a business in the most regulated corner of the food industry, Frank Dekker says you need one thing above all: be naive. Because if you knew the war zone waiting for you, you'd never begin.

In this episode of Tomorrow's Bites, we sit down with Frank Dekker, founder of Pure Goat, to trace how a father who quit his dairy-industry job a month after having his son built an organic goat-milk infant formula that will hit 6 million euros in revenue this year. This is not a clean success story. It's the one where he sold his house, faced bankruptcy before he'd sold a full batch, and lost everything he put into the Middle East in six months.

Frank knew what went into the formula he was feeding his own baby. He didn't like it. So he found the smartest person he could, stripped a standard formula down to its bones, and rebuilt it: goat instead of cow, organic, milk fat kept in instead of swapped for palm oil, omega from algae instead of the eyeball of a fish sold off as fishery waste.

In this conversation, Frank reveals what those seven years actually cost:

• Why he had to promise farmers and factories more than he could deliver, and how he lived for five years with people telling him he'd broken those promises
• The 15 factories that said no, and the one man in Austria, Stefan, whose single yes unlocked the whole business
• Why his first production run cost 400,000 to 500,000 euros, sold only 150,000 in year one, and left him staring at a batch he might have to destroy
• The customer he assumed he had, wealthy aware parents, and who actually turned out to buy
• Why a declining birth rate is his biggest opportunity, not his biggest threat
• The one thing regulation forbids him from saying about his own product, even with the words "in my opinion" attached
• And why he refuses to expand into any category other than goat: he wants to be the goat of the goats

And much more...

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😊 The Guest: Frank Dekker⁠

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