OLYRA President and CEO Yannis Varellas transformed his fifth-generation flour mill into a modern consumer brand.
OLYRA
How can a century-old family tradition from Greece successfully disrupt the competitive U.S. snack aisle. I sat down with OLYRA President and CEO Yannis Varellas to discuss his fascinating journey transforming a fifth-generation flour mill into a modern consumer brand. He details his approach to market entry, the distinction between Amazon and D2C strategies, and how his vision started with a single shipping container filled with Greek cookies.
Dave Knox: You have a fascinating background. This brand didn’t magically appear; it comes with a rich family history. Can you tell us about your family’s journey in the world of ancient grains and how that led to OLYRA?
Yannis Varellas: Every business starts with a problem. In our case, the problem was how to keep our family business around for another century. My family has been farming and milling grains forever. My great-grandmother grew up in a flour mill; her father collected grains from the area and produced flour. Grain milling has been our story for over 100 years.
I decided to join the family business, located in Thrace, Greece, where farming is the community’s main source of income. OLYRA came to life as part of our evolution. Instead of offering baking ingredients in a B2B model, we wanted to leverage our knowledge of grains to deliver an end product. We used our expertise in farming rare blends of ancient grains and developing flours to produce bars and cookies with both high nutritional value and the technical characteristics needed for snacks.
Knox: You had this amazing historical family B2B business. Why move into B2C and launch the brand in the United States?
Varellas: I realized the U.S. market is the most innovative in the world; all food trends and innovation come from here. Originally, my goal wasn’t to sell in the U.S., but to understand the trends so I could incorporate them into our market.
However, I soon realized that Americans snack way more than anyone else. Just to share some data: the U.S. market for breakfast and nutrition bars is approaching $9 billion, while the whole snack bar market in Greece is only $30 million. I realized I should focus on a market where consumers snack and are moving from conventional snacking to actively thinking about the ingredients and nutrition of the products they consume.
Knox: Once you decided to move into the U.S. market, there’s a story about one shipping container full of cookies moving to New York. What was that all about?
Varellas: That was all about ignorance, which is a driving force for entrepreneurs. If you know how difficult something is, you most probably will never try it. I originally believed that if I created a product that was tasty and offered value, the hard part would be over once I entered the market. I thought creating the product was the main challenge.
It took me two years to develop the first line of products, our breakfast biscuits. I decided to create a large batch, ship it from Greece to the U.S., and then travel to figure out how to sell it. I thought it would be easy, and of course, it was extremely hard. But after I started selling door-to-door and getting into grocery stores, I realized that wasn’t even the hardest part. The hardest part begins after you get into the market. Consumers compare your product to everything else on the shelf. You have to deliver a product that is tastier, number one, and convinces consumers to choose your item over those from Mondelez, General Mills, or whoever else is there.
Knox: Who was the first retailer that took the leap to believe in what you were doing, and what caught their attention?
Varellas: When I immigrated, I focused on New York. In certain metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco, there are more independent stores than grocery chains. I decided to go door-to-door to these independent stores rather than try to convince large chain retailers.
Honestly, this was the best period of the journey. It was very empowering going around and selling. The sales pitch to these independent stores was straightforward. They would often say, “Just bring me a case of free product. We’ll check the shelf for one or two weeks, and if it sells through, we’ll order by.” The hard part was, how do you now move the product from the shelf? That’s when you have to get in front of consumers, convince them to try, and then keep them buying again.
Knox: How have you communicated the uniqueness of the ancient Greek grains that are at the heart of your products?
Varellas: We just completed a big rebranding, after almost eight years in business. I believe rebranding is a vital exercise, but you have to do it at the right time. Until this rebrand, our messaging was more about me and what I thought was important to consumers, as I had limited data points in the early days. That founder TLC was clear on our packaging.
Now, we’ve gathered all the data on what the product means for consumers and translated it into our current look and feel. It’s less tied to my personal milling story. To answer your question about communicating the ancient grains: we do it in two ways. Obviously, we communicate it on the packaging, but mainly we communicate it indirectly through the product itself. If someone tries our product, they will feel and taste the difference. The purpose of the ancient grains is not just a claim but to deliver nutrition and taste that today’s mass market grains cannot.
Knox: How did you take the leap from independent retailers into the mass channels and ultimately end up nationwide with a great retailer like Target?
Varellas: We actually decided to go after large chain retailers earlier rather than later. You need a minimum scale in terms of sales to keep the lights on and survive. Selling into independent stores is vital to understanding what resonates, but you cannot operate only by selling there. You have to scale.
This is a very difficult dilemma for all CPG food and beverage founders: How fast do we move into larger retailers? We need the revenues, but if we go too soon and fail, you fail hard. It’s the hardest balance to figure out. Looking back, I would do certain things differently. I would definitely gather more data online and start selling on either D2C or Amazon—not both—to better fine-tune the value proposition before approaching big box retailers.
Knox: Why did you distinguish between D2C and Amazon? A lot of people see those as the same thing.
Varellas: That’s a great question. Many people think of them as one, but they are not. You have to think of Amazon as an online retailer. The difference between our own e-commerce and Amazon is that people scrolling on Amazon are there with purchase intent. They are looking for items to buy.
For people to go to your own website, you have to drive them there, often times through performance marketing (Meta, Google Ads, TikTok). The people you find through performance marketing are scrolling on social media; they aren’t necessarily looking to buy snacks. They see a snack while on Instagram. On Amazon, they are already there, looking specifically to buy snacks.
Knox: As you’ve expanded with different products, what has guided your product development strategy?
Varellas: We see the core of our products as wholesome snacks that offer energy on the go. We think of our brand as a nourishing snack that a mother would give to her kids, and also double as workout fuel for her and her partner’s gym bag. We are currently positioned in the breakfast/wholesome snack bar set.
Our strategy is to look at the set and figure out how we can offer an improved formulation of legacy brand offerings. For example, we saw Belvita breakfast biscuits and thought, “How can we make a healthier breakfast biscuit?” Then we saw fruit and grain bars, many of which are loaded with sugar, and asked, “How do we create a well-balanced, nutritionally complete fruit and grain bar?” We see a lot of room for growth here because not much innovation comes to this specific segment—most bar category innovation focuses on the protein/nutrition set.
Given our knowledge of baking ingredients, we can grow in many baked goods categories. For example, we see potential in categories like pita chips (like Stacy’s). There’s no one offering a better-for-you alternative in that salty snack space. While that is far from our current breakfast focus, our ingredients and knowledge allow us to diversify. Our immediate strategy, though, is to grow closely to where we currently are and expand within the breakfast set.
