Pistakio, a dope-ass business reinventing the way we munch on pistachios, is a brand I’ve been drooling over ever since stumbling across their IG last year. 

(And if you haven’t gotten to know them yet, you’re about to be drooling over them, too.) 

From the fun content they post on IG sharing their experience building their business from their dorm room (or testing their packaging by rolling their boxes down stairs to see if their jars would break) to their fabulous and fun branding…

Pistakio does a stupidly good job of welcoming you into their nutty world, giving you the inside scoop on their behind-the-scenes successes and shenanigans, and coming across like a chill, down-to-earth friend stoked on sharing their passion for pistachios with you.

But building Pistakio into the brilliant brand it is today? Well that story involves Peru, a whole bunch of all-nighters, a food scientist that changed everything, pleading their case to college professors, some accidentally illegal sales, and a passion for pistachios, of course…

Buckle up, buttercup, and enjoy the interview. 

(You’ll leave hungry and hopefully, inspired about a few fun ways you can build your brand and business, too.)

Q: So, where did the idea for Pistakio come from? What was that moment where you guys realized, ‘oh wait, we should actually do this’?

Nico: We started in college about a year and a half ago, and I studied social media strategy. My capstone project was an open book—you could create a campaign, develop a product, or do a campaign for another brand. Originally, I started working on something in the metaverse because that was really trending at the time.

But. During winter break, we went to Peru for a trip. 

While we were walking in the middle of nowhere, we started talking about how sad it was that every school project we did just lived in a portfolio and never saw the light of day. We would spend so much time working on something, only for it to die there.

That conversation led to brainstorming ideas for projects we could bring to life. We had this old idea for a food truck, and we started thinking about what could make it unique. We landed on pistachios because we were cooking with them a lot at the time and infusing them into different dishes.

We realized how, in the U.S., pistachios were mostly eaten as a snack. Even though other nuts were having a moment—nut milks, nut spreads—no one was doing anything creative with pistachios. That’s when the idea of a green food truck making pistachio products started forming.

Fran: But we realized pretty quickly that a food truck was too expensive. That’s when we thought, “Why don’t we start with a product instead? It’ll be easier.” The idea was that once we made enough money with the product, we could buy the food truck.

(A pic from Pistakio’s IG of their conceptual food truck!)

Nico: We thought starting with a product would make things simpler. Little did we know how expensive consumer packaged goods are! But that’s how it all began.

Q: Talk to me about how things started once you came back to school. How did it all come together?

Nico: Coming back to school in January, I had to convince my professor to let me pivot from the metaverse project. In one week, I had to do weeks’ worth of research. And, he made me take an entrepreneurship class so I could actually develop the business. 

Fran: At the same time, I was taking a packaging and graphic design class. It wasn’t my major, so I had to convince the chair of the department to let me join. I told him, “We’re building this brand, and I need this class to develop it properly. We’ll bring it to farmers’ markets, and I promise we’ll put in the effort to do it right.” 

Thankfully, he said yes. I ended up skipping three other classes to take it, and for 10 weeks, I focused on building the brand and designing the packaging.

Nico: While she was working on the branding and packaging, I was focusing on strategy and building the social side of the project. My capstone professor forced us to start an Instagram account. We didn’t want to because we were living in dorms with terrible lighting, and shooting content was a nightmare. But he said, “If you don’t make an Instagram account, you’re going to fail this class and have to stay another year.”

Fran: So we started posting random stuff about pistachios. At the time, we didn’t even have a product.

(Their first ever IG post which, honestly, is a 12/10.)

Nico: One day, for my entrepreneurship class, we had to do MVP testing. We made three spreads the night before and set up a little table at the farmers’ market with a sign that said “Pistachios Reimagined.”

That day was incredible. It was the first nice Saturday after winter, and the market was packed. Over 300 people stopped at our table to try the spreads. People were literally pulling out their wallets and asking if they could buy it. But we weren’t selling yet!

Fran: We had three products in little glass jars with a logo, but no real packaging. We told people it was just a trial run. After seeing that response, we spent the next two months finalizing the brand, the packaging, and the product.

(Shout out to Davis Clem, Fran and Nico’s awesome friend and a talented photographer who took this pic!)

Q: What were those early days like after you launched your first product?

Fran: In April 2023, we launched our first product—a savory pistachio spread that had to be refrigerated. We sold it at the farmers’ market every Saturday, but it’s not the product we have now.

Nico: We were making about 20 jars at a time. It would take us five or six hours every Saturday to produce them.

Fran: It would take us the whole week to make the product. Then, we’d sell it the following weekend and hope to sell out by the end of the day.

Nico: We sold out pretty much every weekend. Toward the end, we started making mini jars because a lot of tourists at the market wanted something they could travel with.

Fran: And this was highly illegal. We didn’t know it was supposed to be.

Nico: Those were the the college days, but after college, we had to decide if we were going to pursue this dream and we decided we were going to try. So we moved to Portland, Oregon the summer after graduating because we heard it was a great place for a food business to get started. 

Fran: We landed on Portland literally through Zillow, people’s recommendations, and a cookbook I had that mentioned there was really good food around there. But when we moved here, we had no idea what to do. So we enrolled in this class that was called Get Your Recipe to Market within the first month of moving. 

The class was 10 weeks and for the first 8 weeks, all we had in mind was making our savory spread…

Until one day, this food scientist came to our class and told us our savory spread would never work because there was no way to make it vegan, shelf-stable, inexpensive, and all of that. 

Nico: And we were running out of money.

(A post from Pistakio, openly sharing about their challenges to create a shelf-stable product.)

Fran: I think we had $3,000 total in the beginning and that was it. Then after talking to that food scientist our whole plan pivoted and we had to figure something else out immediately. Especially because at the end of the course we had the opportunity to pitch to one of the biggest grocery stores in Portland. So we talked to someone from the class and the food scientist about our sweet spread and they told us that that product was shelf-stable and the way to go.

Nico: We had two weeks to figure it all. Jars, licenses, labels, kitchens. Everything. 

Fran: We didn’t even have a kitchen to produce it yet. We got the kitchen and FDA approval last minute. The day of our pitch was our first day of production!

Nico: At 5:00 am we were making the product and then we had to pitch it at noon. We were practicing the pitch in the car on the way there. 

Q: Did you really learn how to pitch by bingeing Shark Tank?

Nico: Yes! I literally said, “We need to learn from Shark Tank!”

Fran: We had people at the farmers’ market coming up to us saying, “This should be on Shark Tank.” At first, we hadn’t even seen the show.

Nico: So, we started watching it like crazy. I kept calling it the Harvard MBA of pitching.

Fran: Before our first big pitch, we were watching Shark Tank clips to get inspired. We practiced our pitch in the car on the way to the retailer and even 30 minutes before walking in.

Nico: And it worked! The retailer said it was one of the best pitches they’d ever seen.

Fran: We definitely owe some of that to Shark Tank. Plus, it was fun to pretend we were pitching to Mark Cuban.

Q: One of the things I loveeeee about Pistakio is how open and connected you guys are to your community! What were some of the things you were thinking about when building your brand in the beginning?

Nico: Since the beginning, we’ve been building a community of pistachio lovers. 

Fran: Even when we built our first label, we were posting it on Instagram and asking people to choose which label they liked the most and which color scheme. From the beginning, it’s been our community choosing how they want our company to come out.

Nico: After we launched the product, it was like 8 demos a week just asking people for feedback and taking all of that feedback to make a better product after 2 months. 

Fran: To this day, we survey people and ask them what they want to see done differently. It has been instrumental to our business. 

Building the brand kind of started in college because we were thinking about the different concepts we could play off. I went to culinary school in Italy and Nico is from there so we wanted to have the Italian inspiration. We wanted the packaging to imitate that sort of Italian way of life.

Nico: We wanted it to be fun, playful, lighthearted. America can be very work-focused and Italians are almost the opposite. It’s about sitting down, enjoying good food with good people, and spending quality time together. That’s what we are like as people and we wanted to pass that along with our brand. A laidback lifestyle pursuing stuff you love. 

(A vibe, might I add, that I think they’ve absolutely nailed with their branding and copy. Just read their product description!)

Fran: We were also seeing that every pistachio spread or cream that was on the market was marketed as super luxurious, something you would eat at Christmas, and only have one spoon of. We wanted to make it a pantry staple; something you could put on anything and not feel bad about it. It needed to be at a lower price point and not as decadent as the ones in Italy that are super sweet and super thick.

We’ve had so many people tell us that they got their jar in the mail and finished half of it in one sitting which we love to hear because that’s exactly what you should do. 

Nico: And there was a lot of thinking about how can we make our branding feel authentic, every day, and approachable like the way we are?

Fran: Making it vegan was also really important because we really cared about as many people eating pistachios as possible.  

Q: How did you come up with the name ‘Pistakio’?

Nico: It’s how you say pistachio in Italian: “pistah-key-oh!”

Fran: In school, we tested it out with a professor. He put the name up on the screen and asked the class how they’d say it. Everyone said, “pistah-key-oh,” which made me so happy because it worked!

Nico: We also realized people had fun trying to say it. At the farmers’ market, we’d hear people walking by, saying, “Pistah…chio?” “Pistachio?” It became a little game.

Fran: It’s part of the playful side of the brand. We love that people are intrigued by it—it’s such a conversation starter. And hey, if you pronounce it wrong, no judgment. We’re just happy you’re saying it!

(A cool-ass section on their “Our Story” page, explaining the pronunciation and history of pistachios.)

Q: What were some of the things you two prioritized early on that you’re really freaking glad you did?

Fran: Listening to our consumers. I think a lot of people get very stuck in their heads and think ‘this is the perfect product, everybody needs this.’ But then they never test it out or ask consumers what they would like to see. 

Nico: Creating community from the ground up and giving people something to feel passionate about supporting. I feel like that’s very underrated. I also think sometimes you get in your head and don’t start because you think that not everything is perfect which is what we would have done if our professor didn’t push us.

Fran: It’s great to just put yourself out there and see how you can build it. I feel like that’s something that I wish we did before, networking more with people in the industry and asking questions because everyone is super friendly. But at the same time, we didn’t even know we were launching a CPG business. 

Nico: Yeah, since we were doing a school project we didn’t think we were starting a business. But if we had spoken to other founders from the beginning they could have given us a lot of insight. 

Since the beginning of the year, we lived with podcasts in our ears. Every time we’re packing orders or in the kitchen. And we talk back and forth about it. So it’s also about looking at brands you admire and aspire to be down the road and thinking about the steps they took to get there. 

But also not comparing yourself with a brand that started with 5 million to work with because that’s a different starting point.

Q: Alright, last q… where do you see Pistakio going? What’s the big dream?

Nico: Crowdfunding is the big thing right now because it will determine how much we can scale. We get so many requests from people asking us to be in their local stores or more locations, but people don’t realize how expensive it is.

Fran: People really don’t understand. And we didn’t either at first. We thought launching a product would be way cheaper than starting a food truck. But slotting fees alone can cost $10,000 to $30,000 just to get on a shelf at places like Whole Foods. On top of that, you have to give free rounds of product, put in marketing dollars, and so much more.

Nico: This crowdfunding will hopefully allow us to launch a new product we’ve been working on. We’re really excited about it. If the campaign goes well, we’ll be able to bring it to market.

Fran: The big dream is to become a nationwide pistachio brand. We don’t want to just be a generic nut company. We want to innovate in the pistachio category and create products people can use every day.

See what I mean? F*cking cool as hell founders. 

And one thing that kept blowing me away while we were chatting was their insane ability to pivot rather than panic and get stuck on one idea. Plus, their insane willingness to take the feedback they were getting and run with it. AND. The incredible job they did of bringing their audience along for the whole journey—including all of the mishaps and dreaming big moments—something that made everyone (including me) want to support the hell out of Pistakio because it feels like you’re rooting for a friend.

Bottom line? Nico and Fran are incredible and you can feel and taste the love they’ve poured into Pistakio in every way. And with that said, go sink a spoon into their delectable products or say hi on their delicious Instagram. (Make sure to watch their hilarious video of sneaking pistachio tiramisu through airport security.)