INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Rip Pruisken waffled in college (we got that pun safely out of the way for now)
He was a student in the Ivy League at Brown University, and had focused on academics for much of his life
Italy that he had an epiphany
He was inside an Italian bookstore looking through business books when he suddenly realized that he had discovered a new passion
He had grown up in Amsterdam, where he used to eat stroopwafel, a snack composed of two thin waffle pastries melded together with a syrup
Today, Rip Van Wafels can be found in 12,000 Starbucks locations, and is a popular snack at tech companies, with some larger companies going
through tens of thousands of units a week.Their popularity comes from the intersection of a number of food trends
The snacks are made with natural ingredients and are healthy, with low calorie counts and limited sugar
Perhaps most importantly, they taste great, with different flavors that are designed to strike different moods (a chocolate wafel can work
as dessert, while the strawberry wafel feels more like breakfast)
The company currently produces eight flavors.While the startup food company has had tremendous success, none of this was planned a decade
ago when Pruisken got started
He worked with co-founder and co-CEO Marco De Leon, who was two years behind Pruisken at Brown University and was a good friend from Brazil
looking for a change of pace from his Morgan Stanley internship.They spent two years on campus trying to improve product marketing and the
well-educated and health-conscious tech workers.The two stumbled into their market and stumbled into their name
much work, the two founders discovered that a tech company was particularly enjoying the snacks
So Pruisken borrowed the couch of his brother and started going door-to-door selling these Euro snacks to every tech company he could find,
eventually 80 of them in one summer.As he sold wafels, the same pattern would hold up
An order for one case would become two cases, and then 10 and then 20 of them
Eventually, word-of-mouth and distributor partnerships got the snack into the mini-kitchens of dozens of tech companies in San Francisco, as
much as a software engineer might fiddle with JavaScript
like tapioca syrup and chickpea powder that can provide better nutrition at reduced sugar levels.He sees the future of the company much the
products that touch on the brain-enhancing nootropics space.Ultimately, Pruisken wants to redefine the category of packaged foods
to redefining the products on every grocery store shelf, stumbling has paid off for Rip Van, which is taking over the world one wafel at a
