Rip Pruisken launched his stroopwafel empire by stocking every tech office break room in Silicon Valley, but what keeps Rip Van thriving in a crowded cookie market is its commitment to innovation – turning a 14-gram sugar bomb into a 3-gram better-for-you indulgence.
Pruisken, CEO of the Brooklyn, NY-based cookie company, grew up in the Netherlands, where he said stroopwafel was his favorite treat. While a student at Brown University, Pruisken and Co-founder Marco De Leon began selling the waffle-shaped cookies on campus in 2010.
“We focused on that one product line for seven years,” he said.
A major inflection point came when the snack became a must-have for Silicon Valley break rooms, he said.
“We were one of the first companies to sell to Google, Uber, Yelp, all those companies,” he said. “They’re giving the product away for free, to the point where we actually got on Silicon Valley the show organically, because we’re the Silicon Valley snack.”
A brief history of Rip Van
In the first seven years of operation, Rip Van grew its retail presence at Whole Foods and Peet’s Coffee and eventually landed a deal with Starbucks nationwide in 2016, putting the brand at 12,000 of the Seattle-based coffee giant’s brick-and-mortar locations.
In the mid- to late-teens, Rip Van, which still produced its flagship stroopwafel cookie, began moving in a new direction by shifting the formulation from sugar to monk fruit and increasing the product’s fiber.
Over the next few years, Rip Van reduced the sugar gradually from 14 grams to just 3 grams. The current formulation contains 6 grams of fiber, 3.5 grams of saturated fat and 120 calories.
“Stroopwafels took a decent amount of time initially because we really wanted to figure out how to position the product, how we could scale the distribution and understand the fundamentals,” Pruisken said.
The deliberation paid off, and the healthier reformulation enabled the company to begin expanding its product lineup in the early 2020s into health and wellness snacks, he said.
Branching out with better-for-you
The better-for-you reformulation of Rip Van’s stroopwafels provided an on-ramp for portfolio growth, according to Pruisken.
“To really go into better-for-you and have a positive impact in a major way, you need to have other forms, and that is underlined by the fact that the cookie category is actually made up of many small segments of different types of cookies,” he said. “We realized that we can actually leverage those building blocks to make any sweet snack.”
Over the next few years, Rip Van added wafers, sandwich cookies (Leos), premium Italian-style layered cookies (Romeos) and a fruit snack lineup (Fruitfuls).
Product innovation has been assisted by Rip Van’s strong direct-to-consumer sales, according to Pruisken.
“By having a sizable online business, you’re able to invent a new product, run a small production run, sell it online, see whether it works, and if it doesn’t work, you’re not saddled with so much inventory, which you’re writing off,” he said.
The price barrier
The snacks market has changed over the last decade and a half, with consumers focusing more on what they are consuming, which has been a boon to Rip Van, according to Pruisken.
The rising cost of snacks from major food and beverage companies has created a better landscape for competition from better-for-you brands, said Pruisken.
“If you go to the convenience store and you buy a candy bar, you’re paying anywhere between $2 to $5 for something that’s not even low-sugar,” he said. “If you price your product in that range, then there isn’t a relative price barrier.”
Comparatively, a box of four Rip Van Wafels costs $4.99 on Amazon.
Consumers, particularly those on GLP-1s, also increasingly are aware of portion size, which has driven the popularity of snacks offering functional benefits like higher protein and fiber, Pruisken added.
“Portion control has become super important,” he said. “And as long as the price per unit isn’t egregious, it isn’t a barrier to trial and a barrier to purchasing a better-for-you treat more consistently, so you’re seeing a number of better-for-you sweet snacks pop up in the market.”
Taste is key
At the center of this reformatting of the company and its products is taste, Pruisken said. “There is no substitute for great taste,” he said.
Seventy-five percent of Americans might want to lower their sugar intake, but they’re not looking to do that at the cost of indulgence, he added.
“That’s what we’re trying to focus on as a brand: delivering great taste – and it happens to be a lot healthier,” he said.
