Holidays + 2024 New Year Thank You

As holidays tend to do, they have had Jason and me (and our families) reflecting on the year with a lens of gratitude. I wanted to send a note to everyone that has been involved with Pinch this past year and share how grateful we are for you.

In 2016, I got a small group of friends together to help with a personal project. I had been taking fiber every day for over a decade, as had my friends as a result of my evangelism. While the next line sounds so cliché, I wanted a higher quality option that was all natural and that didn’t have so much sugar in it and it simply did not exist anywhere. Our initial plan was to make [very] small batches for ourselves. 

We spent months researching and networking, understanding what drove ingredient quality, and attempting to make our own mixes in my Santa Monica apartment. Our goal was to make a batch big enough so that we would each have enough to last a few months. 

We experimented with TONS of iterations - we had tasting notes, spreadsheets/flip charts, and many many many taste-testing sessions. 100% of them were terrible. 

There were two options: go back to what we were taking before, or be forced to actually make this into a company and hire professionals to help make the product for us. We pulled together enough of our own savings to hire food scientists and a flavor scientist, and after months of testing and iterating, we were in love with the product. 

We had agreed we would only make something that we thought was the best possible product in existence, and we felt we truly had achieved that.

The next step was paralyzing. We were not able to make just enough for us, we had to make a ton in order to meet the minimum requirements for production. This was an all-in moment. I still remember our hands trembling as we wired $15,000 to manufacture a few thousand jars - more fiber than we had ever dreamed of. 

Of course, we then had to figure out how to distribute it (many late nights and early mornings of packing boxes and printing shipping labels) and market it (many late nights having fun brainstorming sessions to figure out how to talk about gut health and digestion in a way that people would embrace since it was pretty taboo at the time). 

But, before and after work, we would meet and work on these things because it was a passion of ours.

Fast forward to today (skipping a LOT of details), we absolutely cannot believe that Pinch has become what it is. Jason and I keep a folder and massive spreadsheet of the different letters we’ve gotten from customers about the impact it has had on their quality of life, and we read them very often. 

Pinch remains a passion project, which we’ve supported through our families and our day jobs (fun fact: we’ve donated more to the three charities we support than we’ve actually paid ourselves over the last 7+ years). Pinch remains fully owned and operated by a close group of friends and our families in Southern California. 

There is no “buy button” in this post, no link to our products. We genuinely want to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting Pinch and giving us the opportunity to keep making the products that we want for ourselves. 

We will continue to keep you at the forefront as we go forth, and promise to never compromise quality or the Pinch experience. Thank you for a great year, and we aim to deliver an even better year ahead with a few exciting things we’ve been working on.

Sincerely,

Matt, Jason, and our family/friends