Meet the Snack Guru

“I decided to start a new line of snacks,” Aaron says, in an interview with Business Day last Wednesday at his pharmacy on Frederick Street, Port-of-Spain. “I wanted to have snacks that would be healthier and still have a bit of fun in it. So instead of the normal, plain pumpkin seeds and dry stuff which a lot of people find very boring, I decided to go into coated nuts and dried fruit. It was a real uphill struggle to get that first customer to be convinced that it was worth a try. That was the hardest thing. And then the second and third customer. And then, trying to develop a trend.”

Guru snacks seem to have come along at just the right moment, with an increasingly greater focus on health issues. There is now an annual fitness ritual with thousands jogging around the Savannah, doing aerobics and other exercises - all to fit into that costume on Carnival Tuesday. This month, Ministry of Health officials warned that the nation’s population, specifically its children, are too obese, prompting many calls for a review of what we eat and what we snack on. There are now Guru products in hundreds of locations nationwide.

“We have these products in probably over 300 places,” Cheng says. “It varies in terms of category. You have them in the chain supermarkets and in all of the major pharmacies. That’s how I initially started the business: selling to pharmacies. And then we have them in health shops, gyms and mini-marts.”

The Guru products are small 50g packs with dried items like yogurt-coated nuts, sunflower seeds, cranberries, cashews, almonds and much more, sometimes mixed, sometimes on their own. They have names like: “Smoked and Spicy Mix”; “Crunch Mix”; “Luxury Mix”; “Hazel Crave” and “Guiltless Pleasure”.

Cheng is the Marketing and Managing Director of Triponae Ltd, the San Fernando-based company that’s behind Guru. He says he originally did not plan to go into business.

“Originally, I studied medical studies — a totally different thing to what I am doing now,” he says. “I lived in London for 13 years and decided to move back to Trinidad. I just missed home. I was looking for the perfect opportunity to move back. So I moved back about five years ago and decided to start up a new brand of snacks; a new concept.” He came up with the name Guru, after a search for just the right word.

“I was looking for a word that can represent a leader, represent something pioneering and wise; that you can get something fulfilling,” Cheng says. “The word guru just came.”

The Guru products are made abroad but packaged locally.

“The products are made at different parts of Europe because of economies of scale,” Cheng says. “But some are locally done as well. One that is locally done is the granola mix. A lot of our mixes, like the ‘Power Up’ and the ‘Havana Sunrise’ - they are mixed here. In other words the consistencies and percentages are our design. There are other things done locally. We have a ‘Crunch Mix’. The company itself, the brand itself has really evolved from the beginning to now.”

Cheng recently launched his own take on the traditional Tobago bene ball

“One of our new products is called Sesame Snaps,” he says. “It’s a wafer-thin bene ball or bene stick if you want to call it that. As Trinidadians, we are accustomed to eating bene balls. But not everyone likes it simply because there is inconsistency of taste, it can be bitter, and it’s really hard. What I found through some research is that if you can take that same product but make it thinner and easier to eat, then we will be onto something because our palettes are already adjusted to the taste of sesame. So we did our research. We found the product. We did our testing and piloting and we decided to move forward with it. It’s been about a year and a half and we have managed to penetrate the majority of our network, including the large supermarkets.”

Other Guru products include Peanut Snaps. Though he started out studying medicine at King’s College, London, Cheng’s dived headfirst into business. In addition to his work in relation to Guru, he’s the founder of a video guest book unit called The Guest Factor, predominantly used in the wedding industry. Machines with touch screen questionnaires are set up at weddings for persons to leave messages for the lucky couple and to provide marketing data. Clients include: the Ministry of Trade, Unit Trust, WITCO, Ministry of Sport among others.

Of future plans for Guru, Cheng says, “We’d like to take Guru to an exporting level so we can send it to Caribbean islands but it is a bit easier said than done. It’s about teaming up with the right distributor so we can take the range of products we have out there.”