Episode 19: From War Zone to Walmart: Beth Benike's Busy Baby Story (with Beth Benike of Busy Baby, LLC)

The other part of that question was manufacturing and that has been a really touchy subject in the last year and a half.

So when I started Busy Baby back in 2018, it's when I started the product development and I was working with a factory in Minnesota because as a tenure army veteran, I wanted nothing more than to be 100% made in the USA and more specifically made in Minnesota.

And the problem is the food grade silicone, the material my products are made out of, is not sourced in the U.S.

So it comes from a very specific sand and then it's processed into the food grade silicone.

And we do have a ton of this sand in the U.S.

The natural resource is there.

We just don't mine it.

We do make silicone in the U.S. out of the sand.

We do mine, but it's for commercial grade products like your gaskets and your car parts and not food grade stuff.

And the reason we don't do it is that it takes an insane amount of energy to create the raw material.

A lot of water energy, a lot of electric energy.

And so the raw material for my products is imported.

And that was a huge expense in the beginning.

And still today.

And so this factory in Minnesota was actually working with the University of Minnesota trying to chemically develop their own form of food grade silicone.

And they worked on that for about a year.

And it just really wasn't possible.

So I ended up starting to manufacture in China.

And China was able to give me a low cost because, again, this was a product that I've never sold.

I didn't know even how to sell a product yet at that point.

And in the U.S., they require very large production runs.

In China, they are willing to do small sample runs for you.

And so I was not... willing or able to produce high quantities of something I didn't know if people were even going to buy.

So I started in China and it just happens to be that my manufacturing partners in China are amazing.

I've been with them from the very beginning.