Hispanic Enterprise - February/March 2008 - (Page 45)

nyone brave enough to have tasted an undiluted artiﬁcial sweetener, that punch of intense, strange sweetness on the tongue, knows that replicating the experience of sugar is not easy. That’s because sweetness is as much a taste as it is a sensation. Sugar has a nice texture, a smooth taste and pleasant aftertaste, which is why it has reigned for centuries as the perfect embodiment of “sweet.” There are, of course, many artiﬁcial imitators, including saccharin, sucrose and aspartame. But Tim Avila noticed a hole in the market a few years back: an absence of a natural and organic calorie-free sweetener. Enter Zsweet, a product of Avila’s own creation. Its development is the remarkable story of an entrepreneur with a new idea who simply wouldn’t give up, even if it meant testing his new product in his own kitchen. Avila knows his sweeteners. “Sugar is very rich,” says the founder and president of Ventana Health, Inc., the California-based company that is marketing the new alternative sweetener. “There’s nothing like real sugar,” he concedes. Zsweet, which aims to replicate that taste experience, is actually made of a natural sugar alcohol called erythritol. Occurring naturally in fruits and fermented foods, erythritol is about 70 percent as sweet as table sugar, yet it is almost non-caloric, does not affect blood sugar, does not cause tooth decay, and is absorbed by the body, making it unlikely to cause gastric side effects unlike other sugar alcohols. A “THERE’S DEFINITELY AN APPETITE. THERE ARE A LIMITED NUMBER OF MEDIA OUTLETS REACHING THAT MARKET, AND IT’S UNTAPPED.” DEMIAN M BELLUMIO, CEO, HOODINY * Tim Avila level job that “set him off on a path of self-education,” as he puts it. “I would take hundreds and hundreds of medical literature articles and textbooks home and just read them,” he recalls. “My wife thought I was crazy because I read all that for fun.” Avila says he took home about a dozen different textbooks a week. He would check them out from the library at work. He read up on pharmacology, human physiology, biochemistry, nutrition. What pushed him forward was not just a mere entrepreneurial spirit, but also something more personal: diabetes runs in Avila’s family. “I’ve seen the devastation of type I diabetes, and it’s a key issue for me,” he says. Having developed an expertise in tech product development, marketing and strategy, Avila spent a few years working as a private consultant while he pursued his goal of creating a new product. His aim was to create a natural sweetener that tasted as close to sugar as possible while being safe for diabetics and people ﬁghting obesity or cardiovascular disease. Using his own kitchen as a laboratory and enlisting the help of his family to sample variations of the new product, Avila kept “playing around” with erythritol as a base for a new sweetener. Meanwhile, he waited for regulatory action and other necessary ingredients to become available in order to make the commercial product viable. “I wouldn’t give anything to my consumer that I wouldn’t give my family,” he says. Asked whether he was ever apprehensive about trying some of the blends he produced while developing Zsweet, Avila chuckles. “Everything is a risk,” he says, but he was always conﬁdent in his product. “I’m pretty fearless, but I know what I’m doing.” Judging by the steady success Zsweet is enjoying, it certainly seems that Avila’s intrepid approach to experimentation with erythritol also applies also to his business strategy. In 2004 he created Ventana Health as an umbrella company. He raised about $1.5 million among family and friends and slowly built up to $4.5 million. By 2006 he decided the quality of his product had reached the necessary level of sophistication to hit the market, and today the company is tapping into networks of high net-worth individuals to garner further investment. THE PROCESS Avila started working on a master blend of erythritol and other food extracts and natural ﬂavors in 1997. He found himself on this quest after working in the nutrition industry for several years. He had started out at an entryHISPANIC ENTERPRISE THE PRODUCT Apparently some users have found Zsweet to be almost identical to sugar, while others have said it tastes nothing like it. To Avila, however, beyond the particularities of taste, the signiﬁcant 45 February/March 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Hispanic Enterprise - February/March 2008

Hispanic Enterprise - February/March 2008 Contents Briefcase: BIZBUZZ: Business Briefs Briefcase: Trendsetters Briefcase: BIZTECH: Virtually Meeting BizLife: Travel: Madrid's New Attraction Q & A: Mi Case es su Casa Hispanic Commerce: The Agenda Cover Story: The Top 50 Corporations for Supplier Diversity Technology: Hispanic Web 2.0 Success & Motivation: Sweetening the Deal Politics & Government: The Rescue Generation Managing: The Method Franchising: The Hispanic Face of Franchising Chamber Focus: It's Showtime Movers & Shakers: Open for Business Finance & Investing: Getting Your 401(K) on Target

Hispanic Enterprise - February/March 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.