Chief Operating Officer (COO) Advisor — GENamaZing® / NOoodle®

FOUNDING COO ADVISOR — NOoodle® & GENama Zing®NOoodle Inc., doing business as NOoodle® and GENama Zing®NOoodle Inc. started in 2009 because I believed konjac could be much more than a noodle. Through NOoodle®, we became the first Made-in-USA shirataki noodle and grew into a multimillion-dollar food company. We sold through grocery, foodservice, direct-to-consumer, QVC/HSN, and Costco. We worked with UNFI, KeHE, and DPI. At Whole Foods Deerfield, NOoodle® became the #1 selling item in the store for six weeks. Today, NOoodle Inc. is being rebuilt around two connected brands. NOoodle® is the food and ingredient platform that started it all. GENama Zing® is the co-branding platform designed to take NOoodle® into categories throughout the grocery store, foodservice, and beyond. One company. Two brands. One much bigger vision: FARM → FLOUR → FOOD. 🇺🇸THEIR BRAND × GENama Zing® × NOoodle®But to understand where we're going, you need to know how we got here. FROM NOODLES TO FOODWhen NOoodle® started in 2009, shirataki was still a tiny category in America. I never saw NOoodle® as just a noodle. I saw an ingredient. We expanded into refrigerated prepared foods, including four fresh meals developed with Good Foods, meal starters, and other products. Then the big opportunities started coming. In 2012, QVC gave us an approximately $494,000 Food of the Month order. We couldn't fill it. We didn't have the manufacturing capacity. Later, NOoodle® appeared on QVC's In the Kitchen with David and sold approximately 50,100 cases. People wanted the product. We needed the infrastructure to keep up. SHARK TANKIn 2013, I stood before the Sharks. Lori Greiner offered $500,000 for 40% of NOoodle®.Kevin O'Leary offered a $500,000 royalty deal. I accepted Kevin's deal. Our episode never aired. We suspected A guest shark pulled out of his second episode, and the six companies that were on his second episode were cut, just like that. We had prepared substantial inventory expecting it to air, so we had to figure out what to do with it. We took it to Costco Roadshows and sold approximately $1.2 million of inventory. Costco later gave us another opportunity with our new soup and meal starters, manufactured with Tetra Pak, which made us look great on a shelf and were recyclable. Sales dramatically exceeded expectations. Again, we couldn't make enough because the supply chain was never in our control. That taught me one of the biggest lessons of my career: Creating demand and supplying it are two completely different things. WHY FARM → FLOUR → FOOD?In 2013, I also traveled to Hubei Province, China, one of the world's major konjac-growing and processing regions. I saw the farms. I saw the processing. I saw where the flour came from. I came home thinking: Why aren't we doing this in America? Grow it here. Mill it here. Make the food here. Today I call it: FARM → FLOUR → FOOD. 🇺🇸Over the next decade, the food industry changed. When NOoodle® started, most Americans had never heard of konjac. Then consumers started looking for lower-carb foods, gluten-free foods, plant-based ingredients, fiber, and alternatives to traditional pasta. The market was catching up. THEN CAME 2023.For approximately 14 years, keeping NOoodle® Made in USA mattered to me. Then the California manufacturing infrastructure we relied upon shifted production to China. I had a choice. Follow the manufacturing to China, make finished NOoodle® there, ship it back to America, and keep selling. Or stop. I stopped. I said YES to NO™.Konjac noodles and my wet dough are mostly water. It made no sense to me to build the future of an American food company around shipping a finished product that is mostly water thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean. NOoodle® didn't stop because consumers stopped buying it. The brand didn't disappear. The formulations didn't disappear. The relationships and knowledge didn't disappear. Our American manufacturing did. So now we're rebuilding. But I don't want to rebuild the same company. I want to build what NOoodle® should have had from the beginning. GENama Zing® × NOoodle®GENama Zing® takes the original NOoodle® idea and scales it up. The model is: THEIR BRAND × GENama Zing® × NOoodle®America already has incredible food companies that know how to make pizza, pasta, prepared meals, baked goods, snacks, frozen foods, and refrigerated foods. We don't need to become experts at manufacturing every one of them. We partner with companies that already are. They bring what they do best. We bring NOoodle®.NOoodle® wet dough becomes the ingredient platform. Think 50/50 pasta. Gluten-free pasta. Pizza. Prepared meals. Baked goods. Snacks. Restaurant foods. And foods we haven't even thought of yet. The long-term vision is potentially thousands of co-branded SKUs across grocery and foodservice. At the same time, we rebuild the supply chain underneath NOoodle®.FARM → FLOUR → FOODFARM: Develop commercial konjac agriculture in the United States. FLOUR: Develop American processing and milling so domestically grown konjac can become a functional food ingredient. FOOD: Work with American manufacturers that can turn it into NOoodle® products and GENama Zing® co-branded foods. Will we need to import konjac flour while we build the American supply chain? Most likely. You don't build an agricultural and manufacturing ecosystem overnight. Importing an ingredient while building domestic capacity is very different from permanently importing finished ready-to-eat food. Long term, this could require tens of millions of dollars across agriculture, milling, equipment, food science, and manufacturing. That's why I need the right operating person now.