Meet Our Makers: Sandra Gosling of COYO

Sandra Gosling is a co-founder of the Australian made and owned functional coconut brand COYO. COYO has been dominating the alternative dairy space for years with their uncompromising approach to flavour, ethics and traditional processes like culturing with live probiotics.

They’re the original, the best, and never stop producing mouthwatering newbies like their recent addition of Oat & Coconut Yoghurt.

The COYO story is a great lesson in integrity, finding your audience and staying true to your values as a business.

C&C: Let’s go back to the very beginning of the COYO story - there is a story on your website about a really magical moment where you took a walk on the beach before fully committing to the business, and a wave brought a coconut in with it. Can you tell us a bit about the early days of COYO? Where did the idea come from and how did the business get started?

Sandra: It was a very crazy moment! Henry’s family have lived in the Pacific for many years and he was born in Fiji, so coconut was very much part of life. When he came up with this idea to make yoghurt out of coconut - which was literally a lightbulb moment at some ungodly hour of a Sunday morning - the coconut part didn’t surprise me, because coconut was so widely used in the family, but to make yoghurt out of coconut when it had not been done before was pretty crazy. 

I was not onboard at all. I thought it was a mad idea and didn’t see the reason why you would do that. Over the course of the next two or three months, he started experimenting with this idea. 

I come from a health background and had studied nutrition for many years and so I started looking at coconut and understanding the health benefits of coconut with its good, healthy fats and started to think that maybe this thing did have legs. So I did get in behind it. In the very early days, Henry was making the yoghurt himself about 60km north of the Sunshine Coast and packing and delivering. I was doing the sales and running around doing tastings, trying to educate people about this new product and this new category that had not been done before. It was extraordinary the way people accepted it and loved it as it was something different. 

We’re also foodies, so I guess our motivation for doing it was to give people a new experience and have fun with this thing. We started off not understanding who our market really was and then we very quickly discovered that it was people with dietary needs - so people who cannot have dairy. We were selling mainly to health food stores and that is still the heartland of our consumer - the stores that are really focussing on niche brands that have niche health benefits. 

This was our first market - then a couple of celebrity chefs got hold of it and started to promote it, and it started spreading into the wider, more ‘gourmet’ market. From there, it just grew like topsy. We had the market to ourselves for the first couple of years. It was exciting - it still is - it was fun, we were grabbing people off the streets to come and help us because the growth was phenomenal. We moved facility three times in the first three or four years until we finally landed where we are now, and we have more capacity. 

Of course, as you mentioned, that day on the beach walking the dog - when we were still pondering whether we should really commit to the idea - with wind blowing, heads down against the wind thinking ‘are we crazy?’ and ‘we’re not young anymore, we’re throwing a lot of resources at this, should we, shouldn’t we?’. As we walked back along the beach, bingo! The wave dropped a coconut right at our feet. We had a border collie that thought that was just wondering and he grabbed it and rushed off. We looked at each other and said ‘yep, let’s go for it - I think something has just told us to go for it’. 

C&C: How incredible. One of the standout features of COYO products is the use of high quality ingredients and the process of fermentation. Can you tell us a little bit about why you prioritise using organic coconut and how you make sure that there’s lots of good pre and probiotics in the product?

Sandra: So let’s start with the coconut itself. Firstly, where we source the coconuts from is really important. Henry and I make a point of visiting the plantations, we’ve even had some coconuts planted ourselves. The plantations that we deal with are ethical, they’re organic coconuts and we have a great relationship with those companies. That is obviously because the coconut comprises such a high percentage of our ingredients, so it’s our first priority. 

Then comes all the rest. We work with two culture companies, who have developed a set of cultures that are bespoke to us - we call them ‘coyobiotics’. We need to know that these probiotics have the correct functionality that we’re looking for. Not all yoghurt contains probiotics - they do contain very healthy, gut-enhancing bacteria (lactobacilli), which are produced during a normal fermentation process. Probiotics, however, need to be added. We are very mindful of what their function actually is. So this group of probiotics that has been formulated for us meets our needs from the beginning (when the product is first made and the probiotics are put in), to then still maintain their functionality at the end of the shelf life. It doesn’t matter which stage of shelf life the product is at - we know that the bugs in there are still alive and kicking and doing the job they’re meant to do right up until the end of the shelf life, so we’re very particular about that. 

The other thing we add is a prebiotic, which is food for the probiotic. They come in different forms - fibre is the main source of prebiotics. We use a fibre called chicory root and that provides our probiotics with their food. That’s a very important part. Certainly, we are probably unique in some of our products where we combine both a prebiotic and probiotic, especially in our ice cream. I think we are the only brand that ever does that in ice cream - you can be assured that you’re getting your daily dose of probiotics and prebiotics at the same time. So all of our ingredients are sourced with functionality in mind.

C&C: Any excuse to eat more ice cream! Now, you’ve just launched the brand new oat & coconut yoghurt range. Can you shed some light on how this blend of oat milk and organic coconut milk came about and what inspired it?

Sandra: This range is quite different and will appeal to a very different consumer. The packaging is very different from the COYO packaging - it suggests playfulness, lightness, brightness, and that’s exactly what this product is. It’s less coconut content and we have combined it with oat. Oat, of course, has its own benefits. The whole purpose of this is to appeal to a totally different consumer. We’ve also top-dosed this product, so there’s a very strong colourful, playful, fruity look and feel to it. When you open the product, you’ll see fruit sitting on the top and not mixed in.

It’s very light and bright - the feedback we’re getting is that it’s an easy thing to snack on, we still obviously have the healthy bacteria running around in there as a yoghurt, but it’s a very different proposition.

C&C: What has the process of getting COYO ‘on the shelf’ and into retailers been like over time?

Sandra: When you’re rolling in a new product, you really need to make a big splash right at the beginning and that’s what we try to do. Tastings have always been a very big part of our launch in any product. So, we are rolling out in-store tastings to introduce people to the new Oat & Coconut yoghurt starting with the Sunshine Coast, moving through to Brisbane, then Sydney, Melbourne and beyond. 

This helps to get it on shelf, because the stores are excited with the fact that they’re going to have promotions running - they need to have it on their shelves and get cracking with it. We’re finding that this is working very well. Obviously, we would love a hundred percent distribution right at the very beginning, but it doesn’t happen like that - it takes some time to roll it out.

We have good learnings from that and we’ve got other promotions happening as well - in Brisbane, we have a large event site running along the river called South Bank. We have a huge area there for the next six weeks, with all of our product on display. It’s beautifully set up with umbrellas and tables for the product. That’s another initiative to help encourage the stores to take the product up. Then, it’s simply a matter of making sure that we’ve got the stock in the chiller ready to go and then it’s over to the sales team to make sure it actually gets on shelf on time.

C&C: In the process of getting the products ‘on the shelf’, why did you choose to work with a distributor and why did you ultimately choose to work with Cartel & Co?

Sandra: We were always doing our own distribution - this is a very new thing for us. Twelve months ago, we started working with Cartel & Co. Until then, we had direct distribution which meant that we had our own trucks and our own drivers. We were doing the whole thing ourselves. 

That was fine as we were growing - and then came the day when we said ‘hey, we’re not distributors, we’re manufacturers. Let’s get onto this’. We started very slowly with a 3PL situation - then we thought that this was a halfway move and needed to go full on. We did our research, spoke to a number of distributors, met with Cartel & Co and talked about ours and their expectations, met the team and agreed to partner up.

This has been a great move - they’re a very easy company to communicate with, which is just so important. We work together really closely as a team and they’re a good lot! It’s good because we can have conversations around what we can do better. We really say ‘right. How can we help each other double this business? How can we actually make a huge step change here and what do we need to do?’. It’s an open, transparent conversation so they’re a very good company to work with. We have other distributors in other areas who we also have a very close relationship with - but Cartel & Co are by far the largest and cover the largest area, so they’re a very important part of our business.

C&C: If I was brand new to the COYO world, which product would you recommend that I try first?

Sandra: I would say definitely go for our flagship products, which are the Natural and Vanilla COYO. 

C&C: What do you envision for the future of COYO as a brand?

Sandra: I would like COYO to always be known as the brand with integrity that can be trusted, and as a brand that is always innovative. As we move through the shift to the Oat & Coconut Yoghurt as our first foray into blended products, there are benefits in blending with other products. 

It will always be coconut, and we will always be known as the coconut people. It will always be functional and there will always be a reason for its being on shelf. We’re so thrilled with our frozen yoghurt, for example, and I’m really encouraging people to try it if they haven’t had good experiences with frozen yoghurt before. Try it - it’s fabulous and it is such a functional product, it’s amazing! Yoghurt will always be the flagship product, but the frozen products are certainly making great progress. 

The persona around the brand would be integrity, innovation and a trustworthy brand that you can trust being what it says it is. You look at our ingredients and we have about four ingredients. So that’s really where we sit - this is the persona of the brand and always will be. 

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