Matt Canepa(right) and Pat Pezet (left) are San Francisco Bay Area natives who met as college baseball teammates at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Both Matt and Pat earned their degrees in Business Finance and Matt spent two years playing professional baseball for the Chicago Cubs. One night while in college, the two students looked for something that would keep them awake for studying, after finding nothing but coffee grounds, they proceeded to put it in their mouths much like chewing tobacco. However, it got all over their teeth and was pretty disgusting, so they decided to put the grounds in pouches and then in tins much like chewing tobacco, but without the nicotine or other dangerous side effects. San Francisco Giants coach contacted the two entrepreneurs and told them he loved their product and that it might be saving his life. This convinced the two to try to go big with the product they named Grinds. The duo appeared on Shark Tank to pitch their idea and ended up making a deal with Daymond John and Robert Herjavec. This has propelled their product to the top of the tobacco substitute market. The duo is hoping to go into the retail space very soon.
I love that they had an idea and then pivoted it and made them successful!
That is an incredible concept, I can’t believe nobody else has ever thought of this! I feel like most groundbreaking ideas such as this one are fairly obvious but nobody has ever thought of how exactly to create/produce them and nobody has taken the initiative to manufacture them. A simple concept like this could literally save lives and still give the results that people (such as baseball players) are looking for.