Selling A Rejected Idea Back to Them: The SoulMUCH Story

Companies come to IdeaScale for a number of reasons. One of the reasons that they want a software solution to collect employee ideas is because they’re afraid that they’ll miss a great idea that comes from someone in their workforce. Of course, this means that a company needs to have the capability to recognize and act on great ideas when they arrive, as well.

This was not the case for Reyanne Mustafa and Krissy Krugman’s employer when they saw a problem in their restaurant. They noticed that a lot of perfectly good, unserved food went to waste at the end of the night and they proposed utilizing this rice and quinoa and turning it into a flour that could be used for cooking. The restaurant dismissed this idea and so Krissy and Reyanne decided to start their own company that processed that flour and turned it into baked goods: SoulMUCH.

Now just one year after launching their business, they are at 57k in revenue, 6,000 pounds of food waste avoided and they’ve got partnerships with numerous major brands like PF Changs and Starbucks. They’re even looking to move into their first commercial kitchen space with help from their crowdfunding campaign. But the real kicker is that they’re now selling their product the processed flour and the cookies back to the restaurants that failed to act on their idea in the first place.

If their employer had made a space for new ideas and had a process for evaluating and testing new concepts, then that restaurant chain could have grown its own revenue instead of having to pay for a new product developed by its former employees. It underlines the importance of making an investment in your employees and their ideas. Having a place and a system for managing innovation is what helps a company to keep pace with change.