How Whisps Created A New Snacking Category

Today, Whisps Snacks are one of the most popular snacks on grocery shelves and the leader in a new category that they helped create. But just a few years ago, it was merely an idea sitting within the food innovation team at Schuman Cheese, the largest importer of Italian cheeses in the United States. I sat down with Ilana Fischer, CEO of Whisps, to learn more about how they created this new snacking category and the advantages of launching this “startup” within the halls of a larger company.

Dave Knox: If someone isn’t familiar with the brand, what are Whisps?

Ilana Fischer: Whisps is a pure cheese crisp, and it's a really simple concept. We take grated cheese and we bake it in an oven and out comes a Whisp on the other end. Italians have been making this product in their home ovens for generations and anyone can make it in their homes. You just grate Parmesan cheese, bake it in the oven at 350 for 10 minutes and out comes a delicious, crunchy sort of cracker that's made purely out of cheese. Those are absolutely phenomenal. The problem with those is that they have a shelf life of 10 to 20 minutes before they get oily, hard or really chewy. So what we focused on doing was taking that concept and turning it into something that was widely available to people in grocery stores and anywhere they buy snacks across the country. What makes Whisps so special is we figured out exactly which cheese bakes best, how to bake it, at what temperature, at what duration, exactly how to cool it and then how to bag it so that what we ended up with was a really concentrated cheese flavor without the oily or really hard texture. When we were developing Whisps, I was always really maniacal that this product should not be launched unless we thought that it tasted absolutely fantastic and that was always our gold standard. We were only going to launch something that tasted great and really reflected the deliciousness of pure cheese. It is not the idea of Whisps that is so special but the way that we were able to execute it.

Knox: How did the business get started?

Fischer: We launched Whisps as part of an Italian cheese company called Schuman Cheese, which is the largest importer of Italian cheese in the U.S. We launched Whisps as an additional item that our cheese sales team could sell. We handed Whisps to them to start selling alongside grated cheese and wedges of cheese to grocery stores and clubs stores across the country, and Whisps just took off. We really benefited from being able to develop this business inside of a larger company. It gave us the safety of time that a lot of small startups don't have when they are just launching. And so within a few years, it became the fastest growing business within Schuman and started to really feel, in some ways, like a distraction or a conflict with the core 75-year-old cheese business. In 2018, Neal Schuman, the CEO and owner of Schuman Cheese, decided to spin Whisps off into its own independent company. Today we are sister companies with Schuman, but we are run entirely independently and that's allowed us to hire our own sales team, our own marketing team, our own operations team, while still leaning on Schuman for cheese expertise. We have gone from being a company where people say, "Whisps, I think I've heard of them" to “Yeah, I've tried Whisps before." We're in 65,000 stores across the country and it's unusual for me to tell somebody that I work at Whisps and have them not know what Whisps is, which is a huge change, in the last few years.

Knox: Whisps has become the number one cheese crisp snack in the country. How did your passion for the cheese lead to this?

Fischer: When we first started to sell Whisps into retailers, we got a lot of pushback from buyers and they would say things like, "I don't know what this is. I buy cheese. This is not cheese, and then I buy crackers to go with my cheese and these are not crackers. I don't think I need this." A lot of our early sales pitches were about how we were creating a category. We're now in a position where we have created a category with Whisps and cheese crisps have a pretty significant face in grocery stores across the country.

Part of that category growth is because we are a better for you snack in that we are low carb, gluten free, low or no sugar and high protein. But we always lead with flavor and tastes. We always wanted to make a great tasting snack. We are out here to make a snack that will satisfy everybody's salty snack cravings, and tastes delicious and tastes exactly like what we say it is and what it truly is, which is cheese. At the same time, we are here as a snack of 2021 that reflects eating preferences of today and we are better for you than the snacks that we grew up with. 

Our success goes back to the cheese. We care a lot about the cheese. Schuman makes our cheeses that go into Whisps (and are exclusively available to Whisps) and even has two people whose full-time jobs at Schuman are to taste cheese and decide when it's ready for Whisps. If there is cheese that we thought was going to work for Whisps but turns out it didn't age the way that we thought it was going to, we don't use it and we put it towards something else. There's a level of passion and commitment to Whisps that I think is really unparalleled. We are the only ones that have the cheese that we use. We have a very special Parmesan that we use. It delivers a really nutty, delicious flavor. When we launched our second flavor, we had our master cheese maker actually make a new cheddar cheese from scratch for Whisps.

Knox: When you look back at the last few years, what are you most proud of as CEO of Whisps?

Fischer: I think there's really two things. The first is that we've built a company culture that is really inspiring to me. We've got a team of people who are passionate about the product, passionate about each other, and we came into a pretty interesting situation, which is that we were really a startup. I mean, on our first day, as an "independent company," there were two people on the payroll and yet we had these massive retail customers and I was programming laptops and shipping them out to people and finding office space and buying paper, and at the same time trying to run a business that was pretty well established. So we had to find a team that was both really experienced and expert at doing what we were asking them to do while also being super entrepreneurial and flexible and able to build something together. We found a group of people that work really well together and find a lot of energy from that, and that's something that I'm really, really proud of. I was super worried that when we went remote a year ago, because of Covid, that we would lose the culture and the energy and the spirit of the team, and I actually think, against all odds, that being remote made us more connected to each other, and focus a little bit more on spending time together. We actually won a best company culture award at the end of 2020 and that is something that I'm so proud of because we worked so hard this past year to keep the culture alive and vibrant. The second thing is that suddenly Whisps is more of a household name than I ever could have dreamed. I had gotten so accustomed to telling people about Whisps and having the question be, "Whisps, what is that again?" Now people say, "Oh yeah, I see Whisps everywhere. I see them in the supermarket. I see them in Target and Walmart and Costco and on Amazon, and at the airport." That is just something, I really have to pinch myself about that, and I just can't believe that this concept that was really just a concept five years ago is now something that millions of people eat every day. I'm just so proud and delighted about that.

Knox: What are your plans to build upon this success?

Fischer: I think there's a few things that we're working on. One is that as much as we're now in a lot of retailers, there's still a lot more places that snacks are sold that Whisps are not yet and so we're continuing to focus on just expanding our distribution. That's a big priority for our sales team this year. We have some new innovations that we're working on that I'm incredibly excited about. We are passionate about pure cheese being the leading driver of flavor, and there's a lot of snacks out there that I think would really benefit from a kick of pure cheese and so we're working on those. Then the third thing is that we have this fantastic marketing team that is really bringing the brand to life in fun and innovative ways. They're incredibly, incredibly adaptable, flexible, quick and scrappy. Our 2020 marketing strategy was to get Whisps samples out to people across the country at live events and obviously that became impossible starting in March. The team pivoted and took all of those samples and to hospitals across the country, shipping out 525,000 bags of Whisps to these hospitals. It was just a testament to how quickly they adapted and how passionate the team was about being part of the larger conversation. They have great plans for 2021 as well to bring Whisps to life and bring our company culture and sort of joy and humor to life in a way that we haven't before. Hopefully this year is looking like it'll be a better year to be a little bit more humorous and lighter and that's something we'll really be bringing out across our marketing efforts.

Knox: What advice do you give to your fellow leaders that are sitting in a corporation, working on an innovative idea and trying to figure out that balance of the tension of big business versus entrepreneurship?

Fischer: I would say to take everything that you can learn from those larger corporations in terms of expertise that they have and experiences that they have and resources and talent that they have internally, that you'd never be able to access if you were on your own, and get as far as you possibly can, using all of that. Then, if you want to become independent, make a case for it and stay close to the business as the leader or owner or one of the key people on the team. I think one of the things that larger companies are really realizing is that fast growing brands and businesses need their own space to actually thrive. I think that there's a really strong case to be made for that actually being a win-win as opposed to a conflict.