Why I Stopped Measuring Babo by How Fast It Was Growing

When I started Babo, I thought growth would be fairly easy to recognize.

More stores. More orders. More people knowing the name. Bigger numbers than the month before.

There is something comforting about that version of success because you can measure it. You can put it in a spreadsheet. You can point at it and say, See? We’re moving.

So I got very good at moving. Emails. Retail pitches. Production. Markets. Samples. Packaging. Content. Wholesale. Following up. Fixing things that went wrong. Figuring out the next thing before I had finished the last one.

From the outside, I probably looked busy. I was busy. The problem was that I had started treating busy and growing like they were the same thing. They aren’t. That took me longer to understand than I’d like to admit.

Babo sells Panjiri, which means I’m not only asking someone to choose my version of a familiar product. For a lot of people, I’m asking them to try a food they’ve never heard of before. That changes the job.

If I were selling something everyone already understood, the question might simply be:

How do I get this onto more shelves?

With Panjiri, another question has to come first:

How do I give people a reason to understand what they’re looking at?

Because putting an unfamiliar food everywhere before people understand it doesn’t necessarily make it more successful. Sometimes it just makes it easier to overlook. That realization changed the way I think about growth.

I still want Babo in more stores. I still want more people eating Panjiri. I still have ambitious plans for this company. I just don’t want speed to become the only proof that the company is working.

The product deserves a little more grace than that.

Panjiri has existed for generations without needing a trend report, a protein claim or a viral moment to justify itself. What it needs from me is a good introduction.

That means explaining why our family’s version has always been made with roasted moong lentils. Why it has that deeply toasted, nutty crunch. Why we call ours Panjiri Granola even though Panjiri has its own much bigger story. Why it can live beside yogurt one morning, disappear by the handful at three in the afternoon, or end up over ice cream at night.

It means giving someone enough context that the first bite isn’t asking them to decode the whole thing by themselves. And that kind of growth is harder to put on a dashboard. There is no neat metric for the moment when somebody tells me,

“I’d never heard of Panjiri before, but now I keep a bag at home.”

There is no chart for familiarity. But I’m beginning to think those are some of the most important things we’re building.

I used to look at other food companies and wonder whether I was moving quickly enough. More doors. Bigger launches. Faster expansion. It is very easy to let somebody else’s pace become evidence that you are behind. I don’t think that way anymore. I’m much more interested in whether Babo is growing with the right people.

People who are curious enough to try something unfamiliar. Retailers who want to understand what they’re putting on the shelf. Customers who care that the ingredients are real and the food actually tastes good. People who don’t need Panjiri turned into something else before they’re willing to make room for it.

That feels slower on paper. It also feels much more durable. Because the goal was never to make Panjiri look like the newest thing in the snack aisle.

The newest thing changes every six months. I want Panjiri to still matter when those things are gone.

There is so much pressure in food to constantly invent. A new format. A new claim. A new ingredient somebody has just discovered even though another part of the world has been eating it forever. I’m much more interested in what happens when we stop assuming that “old” means outdated.

Some foods don’t need reinvention. They need a way into the life we live now. That is the part I want Babo to be good at. Not taking something that already exists and pretending we invented it. Not freezing it in time either. Just giving it enough room to continue. That is also why I’ve stopped measuring Babo only by how quickly it grows.

I still care about revenue. I care about retail. I care about building a company that can support itself and keep going. But those things are serving a bigger goal now.

I want to make sure Panjiri isn’t forgotten.

I want the next generation to know the word. I want someone who didn’t grow up with it to see a bag on a shelf and know what it is. I want Panjiri to have the chance to become part of somebody else’s everyday life without losing what made it worth carrying forward in the first place. 

If Babo is still here thirty years from now, I don’t hope people remember me. I hope they remember Panjiri. I hope we helped it find a place in the modern pantry before the world forgot to make room for it.