Dear ShroomEater,
I wanted to personally send you a brief update on Four Sigma Foods (or as we call it FSF) matters at the end of our second full fiscal year.
As you know, we founded FSF about 1.5 years ago. At the time we had, and still have, a few base values we believe in and decided not compromise with no matter what.
Doing good. That’s why making our DIY charity projects in Cambodia and Russia. That’s why helping people with nutrition. They will not change the world, but it’s a start.
Education. That’s why all the free educational material such as ebooks and videos. We want to help people with the holistic lifestyle change and not only push our own products.
Green mindset. We want to be as ecological as possible, hence choosing the less wasteful means of production and material, and focusing on the (super)foods that follow the 80/20 principle. The human is supposed to help the society, and the society the world…not the other way around.
Now everything doesn’t come with a snap of fingers, especially with a company with restricted financial resources like ours, but knowing the goal and making sure that the boat is sailing the right direction is the key. Especially if the whole point is the journey and not the destination.
FSF’s fiscal year 2013 is now over and it’s time to look back and see the major learning points of the year. If I had to sum it all up with one sentence, that would be ‘still trying out what works and what not’. It doesn’t sound so fancy, but it’s very accurate. The last year, again, was pretty much testing things. We tested to hire people, we tested new products, we tested new partners, and tested to many other things. Obviously most of the so-called tests didn’t work as we thought and hoped, but now we are that much more experienced. The problem of being a pioneer is that no one has never really done what you have done, so unless you are an almighty, trial and error is part of your everyday life. We have accepted and fully embrace that fact. The other option of being a “me too” is not our thing either.
FSF Instants have been a huge success so far. I’m not talking only about the sales figures here, but the actual feedback we have gotten from our customers. The amount of positive comments we have gotten from our customers has been mind-blowing. With the same breath I must say that we are aware that there are still plenty of room for improvements, hence doing small incremental improvements to our existing product lines is something we have done time after time since our first product launch, and we will be doing that in the future as well. We also will launch completely new product lines next year. It’s time to innovate again.
To give you a roughly idea what we have done so far I have put together some numbers of FSF. Over one million sachets of Instants have enriched life of the users in 37 countries. Currently our products can be found from 295 resellers in 16 countries. The core FSF Team has grown to 8 members, and the entire FSF Team has educated people in person in stores altogether over 1,100 hours. During the last year we have launched 2 new FSF Instants and 11 other products. Our Facebook group has grown over 230% from the last year. Even though sometimes I can get caught up with all the things we want to fix next, it’s good to occasionally stop and think of all the cool stuff that has happened in the last 18 months.
It would have been a funny moment, if 10 years ago my present me would have told my past me that in 2013 you’re selling mushroom beverages to people all over the world. Well, despite the possible shock reaction of lil’ Mikko in 2003, I’m super grateful everything that we have in place for you today.
I hope you have enjoyed following our journey so far! If there’s one thing I can tell you now, it’s that ‘this is just the start’.
Fungally yours,
Mikko Revonniemi
