Sweet SUCCESS
The newest organic calorie-free sweetener is the brainchild of one determined Hispanic entrepreneur

By Sara Fernández Cendón

Anyone 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.

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 entry-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 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 difference lies in his product’s all-natural organic formula.
Like other common sugar substitutes, such as sucralose (known commercially as Splenda), saccharin (known commercially as Sweet ’n Low) or aspartame (known commercially as NutraSweet or Equal), Zsweet is almost calorie-free. Unlike these other sweeteners, however, Zsweet is a natural product. The primary ingredient in the proprietary blend is the erythritol, a natural substance new to North America but common in other parts of the world, such as Japan.
Zsweet is not the first sweetener to proudly proclaim its natural origins. Stevia, a leaf extract widely used in Latin America as a sweetener, is also a naturally occurring substance. In the U.S., however, Stevia is labeled as a “dietary supplement” by the Food & Drug Administration, a designation that has inhibited companies from marketing and selling it as a sweetener. Zsweet is considered to be a food, and has been certified organic by the USDA

The plan
Zsweet can be used for cooking and baking, or in its granular form, just like sugar. Avila’s company has decided to push sales of the tabletop product as a way to build the Zsweet brand, but the product can and has already started to be used as sweetener in other products, such as drinks or desserts.
As a tabletop product, Zsweet is on a three-phase distribution plan. The first stage covered the core market, made up of retailers whose core is health food and dominated by stores such as Whole Foods.
During this stage, Zsweet caught an incredibly lucky break when Perry Abbenante, a Whole Foods buyer, contacted Avila out of nowhere and agreed to carry the product in two regions. Momentum built as customers reacted favorably to in-store product demonstrations and began to pick up a box and take it to the check-out counter in growing numbers.
The second stage, currently underway, is market development, and it specifically covers mainstream retailers that carry health foods or specialty “health” or “natural and organic” sections. Stores in this category include a limited number of Kroger, Walgreens, Publix, SuperValue and Safeway stores with specialty subsections. Costco stores are also included in this category, even though they don’t fit the specialty sub-section criterion.
The third stage of distribution, expansion to mainstream retailers, is part of Avila’s strategy for 2009.
Avila and his founding partners, John Corella, Michael Sanchez (no longer with the company), and Bob Syverson, decided to foster a commitment to social responsibility within their emerging company. They founded LIFE (Lifestyle Initiative for Education), a non-profit that receives at least one percent of sales of Zsweet to fund outreach and education activities concerning diabetes, obesity and nutrition.
In addition to LIFE’s own activities, the foundation supports other nonprofits, including Vitamin Angels, Boarding for Breast Cancer, Para los Niños and the Tony Hawk Foundation.
“We’re part of the triple bottom line movement,” Avila explains. “We want to make money, to help the planet, and to help society and our fellow human beings.”

TIM”S RECIPE
FOR SUCCESS
Tim Avila, 41, the founder of Ventana Health and creator of Zsweet, was born in Los Angeles. He describes himself as a “Mexabilly,” a combination of hillbilly and Mexican, because his mother is from southeastern Kentucky, and his father is Mexican American. “There aren’t too many of us,” he says with mock pride.
After working a few years in construction and a few more at an entry-level job in the nutrition industry, Avila became an independent scholar in the field and stubbornly set out to develop his own product. Here are his words of advice on start-ups:•

1. Build a wellspring of resolve and determination. Talented and (sometimes hyper) intelligent people often fail because they give up (As Rudy Ruttiger says, it’s never too late keep trying and always too early to quit).
2. Be optimistic. Avoid all forms of negativity, naysayers and pessimists. There will always be someone to tell you that you can’t do something. Avoid those people.
3. Have a purpose. Always develop a sense of higher purpose. Socially and spiritually responsible enterprises will have a much higher success ratio.
4. Develop a brand. Understand the experience that your product or service delivers to consumers or customers, and focus on how to continuously improve it.
5. Do brand advocacy. You are the first advocate for your brand. Develop as many other brand advocates as you can. Brand loyalty is no longer enough, and word of mouth is now almost the only means of communication that works in today’s attention-overloaded society.