How Issei Is Bringing Cultural Significance To The Candy Aisle

Building community through candy has become the cornerstone of founder and CEO Mika Shino’s mochi gummy brand Issei.

While the continued rise of better-for-you candy has brought new ingredients, textures and global flavors like mochi to the space, Shino aims to share the story and history behind her new clean label innovation through direct relationships with retail buyers.

That strategy has proven to be effective thus far. Only a year and a half since its exclusive debut at Whole Foods, Issei is now sold in 870 stores nationwide. Before founding Issei, Shino had an extensive career in diplomacy, culture and the music industry, serving as the CEO and COO of numerous companies in addition to spending 15 years at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) leading democracy, philosophy and ethics programs.

She said she immediately recognized similar points of tension between intermediaries in both CPG and the music industry as these respective spaces work to bring an idea to market. That is why Shino is not working with a broker, instead forging each of Issei’s retail relationships herself alongside learning to navigate this new space.

“There’s a lot of parallels with the music business where there’s…different layers of middlemen,” Shino said. “In the music industry, there’s a lot lost between the artists and the label – who’s [like] your retailer. There’s a lot of mistrust built because all these middlemen people say, ‘Oh, you got to be wary…They’re gonna do this. They’re going to take that.”

In December, the mochi candies launched at Sprouts stores nationwide, and the brand debuted its first new flavor, Sour Watermelon, exclusively with the retailer. That growth is set to continue this year as Issei steadily takes on conventional consumers in a “limited amount” of Walmart stores after winning the Golden Ticket for the retailer’s 2023 Open Call program.

“[Walmart] said ‘What can you do? Can you do 500 stores? Can you do 2,000 stores? We want to grow with you,’” Shino said while recounting the call. “I’m sure you’ve heard stories of companies who do too much and grow too fast and burn out, and I’m sure everybody’s learned from them. So [Walmart] said, ‘We don’t want you to burn out.’”

Issei gummies are also sold at Raley’s, Hy-Vee, Bestie’s Vegan Paradise and Amazon. The product comes in four flavors – Vanilla, Strawberry, Mango and Sour Watermelon (Sprouts exclusive) – and are vegan, kosher, and free of gluten, dairy, soy, nuts and preservatives, carrying an SRP of $4.99.

“Even as little as we are today, we’ve definitely grown from the first shipment to Whole Foods, when our machinery was not in place. We had to hand-make, hand-slab and hand-cut 3,000 pounds of mochi – I had tendonitis everywhere, the factory workers had tendonitis, but everybody was so supportive… [We did] this 12 hours a day for three months to make that order.”

What is Issei?

Shino created early iterations of Issei as an alternative gummy candy for her two young boys. She didn’t want to limit her kids’ sugar or candy intake but was concerned about the base ingredient for gummy candy – gelatin – which is created from boiled animal skins. Pectin, the only ingredient currently billed as a gelatin alternative, is not chewy like a gummy candy, Shino said – “it’s a bite.”

As a first-generation Japanese immigrant (a label that directly translated to the brand’s name) with a lifelong passion for food, Shino began experimenting in her home kitchen to find a better alternative. She said there are hundreds of ingredients that could be used, but she quickly landed on mochi, a sacred food in her home country.

“We offer it to the gods in the New Year – it’s for prosperity – so it’s blasphemous to cut it up in small pieces,” Shino joked about the format of her creation. “But my kids, they go to soccer, they’re playing video games, they want stuff on the go. It wasn’t trickery; I genuinely wanted them to think that this could be a better option.”

When the Bethesda, Maryland-based entrepreneur’s children began sharing their new homemade candies with friends – some of whom’s parents happened to work in the nearby offices of major food companies like Mars and Unilever – Shino was quickly encouraged by those parents to pursue mochi gummies as a business.

But before any candy was sold, she had to figure out how to extend the product’s shelf life. Starting with a two-day lifespan, Shino along with assistance from a former food scientist at Mars, was able to adjust the ingredients’ moisture content and chemical composition to extend the product’s lifespan up to 12 months.

The candies were then prototyped and submitted to Whole Foods during the retailer’s annual category reset. Shino said her goal was to launch at the natural retailer, whether it was one store or a whole region. With the help of Allie Hausladen, principal category merchant, and Ian Cook, who at the time was assistant category merchant, Whole Foods helped bring the brand into its current form.

“We were able to launch because Whole Foods had a vision,” said Shino. But after being accepted by the retailer, they asked if she could handle a national launch. “I have this one product, I said, that I gave [the buyer]. They helped me every step of the way – redesign the packaging… figure out the best positioning, the best pricing. They gave me an opportunity.”

What’s Next?

As Issei plans for 2024, the brand will focus growth on service accounts, Shino said, building on its current distribution to World Bank offices and through the Compass Group network. In November and December, the brand was selected as one of Compass’ incubator brands and featured in major corporate offices in the D.C.-metro area including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Citibank.

Shino noted that Issei is well positioned to continue scaling up with its co-manufacturer and has a pipeline of new flavor innovations ready to go as well. That brings the brand right on trend and ready to keep growing – a recent Mintel report finding that new BFY candy launches ticked up 10% in 2023 with vegan and GMO-free claims being the fastest growing subsegments, up 89% and 68%, respectively.

Additionally, Innova Market Insights found that consumers are looking for candies with claims including real ingredients, no artificial flavors or colors and traditionally made/crafted, which bodes well for Issei. On top of those category headwinds, consumers are helping drive growth among new innovations with the National Confectioners Association finding that 61% of consumers occasionally or frequently shop for confections they’ve never purchased before.

“I think anybody dealing with candy knows the lack of innovation in this space – any buyer, any food scientist, any retailer,” Shino said. “A lot of buyers have said to me, ‘You’re in a white space, and that’s going to bring incremental growth.’”