Company Spotlight: Tru-Nut Company
A Q&A interview with Reid Edgar, Founder
County: Fulton Industry: Agribusiness
Tru-Nut Company specializes in healthy peanut products including powdered peanut butter, peanut flour and peanut protein powder. The company sells its products in more than 4,000 stores across the Unites States and currently exports to nine countries.
What motivated your company to start selling internationally?
Tru-Nut was founded in August of 2013 and by December we had already shipped our product overseas to fill an order request from a Kuwaiti company.
Shortly after getting that first order from Kuwait, we began pursuing international business. In 2014, we started attending international trade shows with the Georgia Department of Economic Development (GDEcD) and the Southern United States Trade Association (SUSTA) to meet foreign buyers and explore foreign markets. As a direct result from attending these trade shows, our international exports increased significantly starting in 2015.
What is the biggest lesson your company has learned about exporting?
One of the biggest lessons is not to be afraid, especially of learning and knowing the differences and new requirements that come with exporting. Especially for food items, it’s important to understand the climate and appetite for your product and consider that you may need to customize an item for certain markets. More importantly, be patient when exporting since international business doesn’t always flow a consistent pace, nor is business conducted the same in different cultures. How have GDEcD’s International Trade Team and its partners helped your company achieve success internationally? Since Tru-Nut is a relatively small company, the services and resources that GDEcD’s trade team offers have made selling our products internationally easier and more accessible. Through GDEcD’s trade team, Tru-Nut had the opportunity to attend trade shows and access the expertise of Georgia’s international representatives who are on the ground in other countries and dedicated to helping us build connections to make international sales.
One of the first trade shows we attended, Fancy Food in New York City, is where we connected with our first big international customer who now sells our products throughout Canada. Georgia’s trade representative Canada was incredibly helpful in getting us the information we needed to begin exporting to that market.
When it comes to the helping companies export, Georgia’s trade team offers so much more than we originally expected. Georgia really is one of the best states to do business and a huge part of that is thanks to of all the resources available through state agencies like GDEcD.
What advice do you have for companies that are just starting to export?
Find out where the people are that want your product and do your research to find out if there is a viable market for your product. It’s important to be proactive and visit a potential market or attend a tradeshow to determine first-hand if the demand is there.
What has been your biggest export achievement?
Our biggest achievement is that we’ve been able to customize our product for various markets around the world, mainly in terms of packaging and labeling; we have product packaging in so many different languages now. Since Tru-Nut is such a small company, being able to demonstrate to foreign buyers our ability to customize our labeling for different languages and cultural preferences really shows that our company is serious about international business.
To learn more about Tru-Nut Company visit www.tru-nutbutter.com.
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Are you a Georgia business looking for help growing your international sales? Find out how Georgia’s International Trade Team can help at Georgia.org/Trade.