The best sweet treat you've never heard of
An interview with True Dates co-founder and CEO Jacob Motzfeldt.
Good morning everyone.
I started drafting this newsletter at 12:39 on Sunday night from a Boeing 777 bound for Zurich and am sending it from my hotel on the shores of Lake Constance, a place where the Swiss, German, and Austrian borders meet. I’ve wanted to come here ever since developing an interest in the $10,000-a-week medical resorts that the region is known for, which is basically what the healthcare system looks like for the uber-rich.
I’m not staying at such a resort and am also not actually on vacation (I’ll be making my way up to Berlin for the marathon this weekend), but lucky for me the real hack seems to be just being here: people are fit, happy, and like to sauna and skinny dip (at sunset with a beer). I imagine all of this is connected. Meanwhile your girl was out at the lake last night replenishing her glycogen stores with a döner kebab (so worth all the hype).
In today’s newsletter: An interview with True Dates co-founder and CEO Jacob Motzfeldt about the best sweet treat you've never heard of. I’m only running the interview today as I tinker with the format of the newsletter for later in the week.
Big news for anyone who loves a healthy sweet treat: True Dates are now available in Canada, and I have a feeling you’re about to start seeing them everywhere. I’ve been following this brand for a few months (I could write an entire newsletter around the brands I’ve stuffed into my carry on while on holiday) and when I found out they were launching in Canada I knew I had to get co-founder Jacob Motzfeldt on the phone.
First, some context: True Gum, a chewing gum start-up, became one of Denmark’s biggest entrepreneurial success stories after selling to Swedish consumer brands giant Humble Group for nearly $40 million in 2021. That deal set the stage for the launch of True Dates, a flavoured date brand that has exploded in popularity within a year of its launch, and is already stocked in more than 20,000 stores internationally.
Humans have been eating dried dates for thousands of years, but True Dates is the first company to reimagine them as a packaged snack food. What makes this story even more interesting is how the demand for genuinely healthy snacks in the era of Ozempic (another Danish invention) has left the world’s snack giants struggling to come up with similar solutions, and instead focusing on things like protein yogurt.
We’re here to talk about dates, but the company started with chewing gum. Can you walk us though that journey?
About eight years ago my friends and I went all in on this plastic-free chewing gum project. We quit our jobs, put our savings into the company that became True Gum, an about 18 months later were ready to to launch with 7-Eleven in Denmark. We grew quickly after that, but it was a national listing in Germany kickstarted our international expansion. We put most of our money into marketing to make sure that launch would be great, and it turned out great. Within two years we were in 10,000 stores and got into some other European markets as well, and that’s when Humble came to us with a great package for the company. They were acquiring brands to become a sustainable powerhouse and wanted us to be a part of it. It was a relatively short journey for us from generating the idea to selling the company, but it was the right decision for us.
I don’t many of us realize there are tiny plastic particles in our gum. How difficult of a problem was that to solve?
No one really understands how to make chewing gum. But if you spend three months on it in your home kitchen, you can get 70% of the way there. After that, it takes years of fine tuning to make it ready for retail. It took us, and I'm not lying, a thousand trials. We were constantly tweaking our dosages, ingredients, and processes. There were all sorts of setbacks and every time we came out stronger and a little better. After a year or two on the market, we were also able to invest in machinery to make a better gum.
Did launching in Denmark help your success?
7-Eleven is a particularly great retail partner in Denmark. We went to them with a prototype and they told us they believed in the concept and our ability to create the product. That verbal commitment gave us the motivation to keep going, and I think if an aspiring food entrepreneur in Canada can find a similar partner, then they’ve got something to build on. Denmark is also quite small, and consumers are progressive and open minded, so it’s a great market to test ideas and learn quickly. But you can’t become a big success in Denmark alone. You can learn here, then internationalize.
How did the team come up with the idea for True Dates?
What we did with True Gum was rethink the product and we wanted to rethink another product. We had been testing all sorts of things when someone started discussing if we could flavour dates. So we bought dates from the grocery store and tried putting some flavouring on them from our chewing gum factory, and that actually tasted quite good. We shared it with a few friends and we saw there was so much potential in it. It has been a lot of work to fine-tune the recipe, the process, but that’s how it started.
It’s rare to see people get excited enough about a snack to post it on social media. Why so you think they’re resonating so well?
Everyone knows what a date is. So this is a product you understand, but at the same time there's part of it you just don't understand. There's this surprise and excitement about the flavours. That’s essential. If it was a herb that people didn’t know, from a far away land, I think retailers would be afraid to list it. We’re seeing so much positive feedback for these dates and I believe we can do fantastic things with them.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.