Here’s why one California entrepreneur is moving his operation to NC and the Triangle
The light bulb went off for Dinesh Tadepalli in 2018, when he was taking his kids to get ice cream.
After finishing their cups of ice cream, Tadepalli and his two young children did what they always did: threw their plastic spoons into the trash can.
“It suddenly hit me, why did I not think twice about using a plastic spoon?” he said in an interview with the N&O. “It disturbed me a little bit, like, I’m an educated person, I’m aware of the plastic pollution, but why did I not think twice before using the plastic spoon or a cup?”
When he got home, he went down a Google rabbit hole, discovering that the average person consumes about five grams of plastic a week and the dangers that plastics present to wildlife, like sea turtles.
“What’s the point” of everything, Tadepalli, 35, said, if the world is a polluted mess for his children?
That’s when work began on his startup, Incredible Eats, a maker of cutlery that can be eaten rather than tossed into a landfill.
Now instead of throwing away that spoon, Tadepalli is hoping to convince people to eat a vanilla- or chocolate-flavored spoon instead. Or, if eating soup, they could use an oregano chilli or black pepper spoon.
The company is young and small, but it could be on the cusp of big growth. Tadepalli says he has gotten large orders from retailers across the world wanting to try out the spoons, though he said contracts prevented him from naming them.
In the coming months, Incredible Eats will roll out edible sporks, chopsticks and straws — and more sweet flavor options. Without any advertising, he said, it’s been steadily growing sales online to individuals.
The edible cutlery is being made in India, where Tadepalli is originally from. He spent more than a year working on building custom machinery to crank out spoons at scale. (It took about 80 trials to find the right amount of pressure and baking time.)
He said Incredible Eats can now manufacture 50,000 per day, if it wanted, and has around 30 employees in India. With more scale, he said, he has been able to drive down the cost of the spoons from about 35 cents per spoon in 2020 to around 17 cents today.
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The resulting cookie-like material is made up of vegan-friendly grains, has a yearlong shelf life and “stays firm for up to 25 minutes in a hot soup.”
However, he said he’s about to tweak the original recipe of the spoon to make it a bit softer to the bite. The new recipe will likely be ready for distribution in October, he added.
Eventually, he plans to move some manufacturing to North America to reduce his company’s carbon emissions from shipping. The company has warehouse space in California and Pennsylvania. At the moment, Tadepalli said, his company is reaching carbon-neutral status by contributing to alternative energy projects and planting trees around the world.
Tadepalli, who still works as an engineer for Intel, is doing most of this work from his rented home in Cary — he moved there during the pandemic from Silicon Valley. He’s now building a home in Morrisville, for what he said is a much cheaper price than what it cost in California.
“I can own my own home without thinking too much about my money,” he said. “California is just getting too expensive to stay there — even for my business operations.”
He said he picked the Triangle as his destination because so many talented students graduate every year from the local universities, and he expects to hire two to three employees in the next year.
Tadepalli avoided bringing on investment in the first few years of Incredible Eats. He sold his house in California, and invested every penny of the profit from the sale into his business.
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“I’m a very frugal person, so I’m very careful on the expenses,” Tadepalli said. “Literally my burn rate has been only like $2,000, $3,000 per month. That’s it. That’s the reason I was able to bootstrap, and we don’t take any salary till we reach 10 million plastic (spoons) reduced from the planet.”
But now, as it’s gaining traction, he has decided to start working with a few angel investors. It has raised more than $200,000, according to the venture tracker Crunchbase, though Tadepalli said the number is now closer to $300,000.
One of the company’s backers is Big Idea Ventures, which invests in food-related businesses. Another is Ryan Bethencourt, the founder and CEO of Wild Earth, a sustainable dog food brand.
Like Tadepalli, Bethencourt moved to the Triangle from California during the pandemic, drawn to the region by its cost of living and burgeoning startup scene. Bethencourt also cofounded Sustainable Food Ventures, an investment firm focused on food products.
“Our world needs to shift away from unsustainable food in every way from factory farming through the use of plastics,” Bethencourt told The N&O. “Incredible Eats was a startup that truly gets sustainable products, edible cutlery that removes the use of plastic and is also animal product free. It’s a shift our world desperately needs and I love that he felt the Triangle was the right place to build and scale his company.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published August 20, 2021 at 5:45 AM.
