The True Story Of The Impossible Factory That Shouldn't Exist

“I have no idea how I built all this.”

He paused, searching for the words.

“Honestly. If you asked me to do it again I wouldn't know the first step.”

She was quiet for a moment.

"That's not what successful people usually say."

Another pause, and he laughed.

“I’m successful? That’s news to me.”

She was looking at him differently now. 

"Wait," she said, tapping her pen to the top of her notepad. "That’s it. That's the opening line. That’s how this whole thing starts."

She stood up quickly, pacing the small office. "Most people who build something try to turn around and sell it, the framework, as a sort of tutorial. Makes them feel their luck wasn’t just luck."

The pen was stabbed up into the air. "You said you have no idea how you did it. That's the story itself."

“Is it?” He replied with a laugh. “And combine that with the meta-narrative story structure? Really think that’s the play?”

“Yes.” She turned quickly. "You’ve never followed someone else’s system anyway. Like this whole story with the ramen factory-- You didn't have a map. It wasn’t some ‘10 steps to financial freedom’ seminar. Even though you lived it, every day, you can’t retrace your steps..."

She settled down into her chair again. "So the story isn't 'how I built Vite Ramen.' The story is 'I built something I don't know how to build.' That's the opening."

-------

Foreword, and the meta-narrative:

Hello, reader.

A strange opening, isn’t it?

It’s Vite’s birthday today, and this is the untold story of Vite.

Hi, I’m Tim. I’m autistic and ADHD, and I have a lot of trouble writing Vite’s story. I've thought about it too much, picked apart every decision, framed it with every should've and haven't done.
How can I, then, tell the story objectively? Or, do I even need to tell it objectively?

So, I'm not writing this alone. Dustin, another writer at Vite, is helping me tell it. I will put on the mask of Tim, the character, as I play him to you, and Tim, the narrator, as I play him here. It's both fiction and reality, real reactions I've gotten telling this story before, questions I wish I got. The best truths are told through the lies of storytelling, aren’t they?

This isn't a story of success and wealth. It's a story of struggle. Of hardship.

It is, after all, a tragedy.

Or maybe it's just the part of the story that feels like tragedy because we haven't reached the end yet.
-------------

She continued. "Then you show them the gap. The before and the after. What didn't you have? What didn't you know? What should have stopped you?

Her pen returned to the notebook. "So. Where did you start?”

“Um.” He furrowed his brow, uncertain.

She could see the past flashing past his eyes, as he struggled with the overwhelming weight of everything.

“A lot of things, I guess. Everything. Money, knowledge, connections, certifications, skills, machinery...”

A beat, and he sighed, then grinned sheepishly. “I didn't know the first thing about food manufacturing, and still, somehow, I ended up building my own factory. Somehow.”

Her pen stopped mid-air.

"You built your own factory," she repeated, incredulous. "No money, no knowledge of the business, no industry connections, no certifications, no skills, and you--"

She set the pen down very deliberately. "Tim. You don’t just build your own factory. That’s not-- Factories require capital. Manufacturing requires regulatory knowledge. Food production requires certifications. You can't just... not have any of those things and end up with a factory."

He threw her a lopsided, tired grin. “And yet...”

She leaned forward, her eyes narrowing, then sat back with a sigh. "Alright, fine. So what was the first thing you actually did? How did you end up with a factory without... any of this?”

“I don’t exactly remember,” he said, staring intently at nothing. “All I know is deciding on this idea of high protein, nutritionally complete ramen, and so... I called consultants, I guess.”

“Consultants.” Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. “For how unbelievable your story sounds... You started like everyone else?”

“Weird to think about, right?” he said with a laugh, “I googled a lot of stuff, watched a ton of videos and decided I couldn't do it myself. Everything I saw recommended a co-packer. So I went and tried to find a co-packer. But…”

“Hang on.” Her pen moved furiously, trying to keep up with him. “What’s a co-packer?”

“Contract manufacturing, basically. They have the machines, certifications, factory, you give them what you want made, and they make it for you. That’s how 99.99% of brands out there do it.”

She leaned forward, pen poised over paper, brows lifted just slightly.

“And you couldn’t do it, because...”

“Because there were basically no noodle copackers in the USA, especially back then,” he responded, “And I wanted to make it here in the USA.”

“You didn’t just choose the USA though,” she said, raising an eyebrow, “You chose California, out of all places.”

“I know, right?” He laughed. “I wanted to not be far from loved ones, and I wanted to support local economies and trust that the stuff I was getting was what it was supposed to be.”

“One of the most expensive places, but... The reasoning checks out. I guess.” Her pen tapped on the notebook. “And you knew this would make your life way harder, and your prices higher.”

“Yeah. And even worse than that... when we presented the idea of our high protein ramen to food consultants, we were laughed out the door. It couldn't be done, they’d tell us. Nevermind just the protein, getting the kind of vitamins and minerals and fiber in our ramen that we wanted was an absurd idea to them. Protein was the enemy of machinery, after all, and the amount of protein we wanted in our noodles--”

“Wait, hang on.” She held up a hand. “Why is protein the enemy of factory machinery?”

“It’s like--” He gestured vaguely. “Well, it’s something we found out the hard way ourselves, later. And it nearly destroyed us, too. And it’s something I’ll talk about later down the line when we got our machines.”

“For the record,” she said, pointing her pen accusingly at him, “You know I hate it when you do that, right?”

“Do what?” He tilted his head curiously.

“The whole...” She threw up her hands in mock disgust. “Leaving a topic to get to later thing. I want to know about it now.”

“But, if I get started on that,” he said, “Then we’ll be on just that for the next hour and never get back to this, so--”

“Well,” she replied, bargaining, “We could just cover just a little bit of it and--”

“Trust me,” he grinned, “When that ADHD gets going...”

“Alright, alright. Fine.” She sighed deeply and shook her head, smoothing out her shirt. “So you had zero options. Most copackers wouldn't touch you because the minimums were too high. And ones who might consider it told you it was physically impossible because protein destroys machinery."

She looked up, head tilting slightly to the right.

“Yeah.” He pondered the situation. “That sounds about right.”

She set her pen and notepad down, carefully crossing her arms. Her leg bounced slightly under the table. "Okay, so you already had not just one, but two impossible things ahead of you. This is where someone reasonable would say ‘this can’t be done. Let’s pick something easier."

He laughed. “Yeah, the whole thing, even at this stage, seems pretty unreasonable, doesn’t it?”

She arched an eyebrow in amusement. Who laughs at that? "But you didn't do that."

“Of course not.” He shook his head. “I thought, instead... what if we make our own little food factory instead?”

She picked up her pen in exasperation, and it flew across the paper again.

"So your response to rejection was… 'guess I'll build my own factory then.'"

“I mean--” he started, “In my defence, that seemed like the logical next step.”

"Tim...” She sighed. “That’s not-- Okay. No money, no knowledge, no equipment. So you called food consultants."

“Yeah, but instead of copackers, my question was now: How the hell do I start a little food factory?”

She looked up. "And what did they tell you?"

“One literally laughed in my face. Mocked me, with a condescending voice, "Where are you gonna get that money kid?" And when I asked how much he meant? Two to three million, he said, minimum, just for the factory, then however much spent on food technologists and consultants and millwrights and operations designers and whoever else to make it run.”

Her pen stopped mid-sentence.

"He laughed at you." It wasn't a question. There was an edge in her voice now.

He paused.

“Yeah, I mean... He was kinda right, wasn’t he? I definitely didn’t have that kind of money. Some 23 year old kid, who’s only ever had a poor wage as a Michelin Star cook? I made less than the people who I bought 24/7 burgers from at the end of my shifts.”

The silence stretched between them.

She wrote down the number slowly. "$2,000,000 to $3,000,000. Minimum."

She underlined it once. Then again. Then a third time, the pen pressing hard enough that it nearly tore through the paper.

“Let me make sure I understand,” she said, and her voice had gone very quiet. “You're 23 years old. You've been working in restaurants where you’re making, what, maybe thirty, forty thousand a year--”

Her voice kept rising, and her brow furrowed in agitation.

“Okay so-- Working insane hours, no savings, in one of the most expensive cities in America.” She looked up at him. “The product you want to make can't be manufactured with existing technology. Every copacker said no. The ones who even considered it said it would destroy their machines. And when you called a consultant for help, someone whose job is literally to help people start food businesses, he laughed at you and told you that what you're trying to do requires three million dollars you don't have.”

She stood up suddenly, pacing the room. “And you still thought that’s something you should do? That's not a barrier, Tim. It’s not a wall, it’s-- it’s the universe telling you to do literally anything else.”

She sat back down heavily, and picked up the pen, spinning it in imperfect circles between her fingers.

“You were 23 years old. You didn't have money. You didn't have knowledge. You didn't have equipment. The thing you wanted to make destroyed machinery. And even if you could somehow figure out how to make it without destroying everything, which is a huge if, you'd need three million dollars you had no way of getting."

A long pause.

“Why the hell did you try anyway?”

She was looking at him like she already knew the answer was going to make this worse.

He shrugged, and considered the words for a moment.

“I got spiteful.”

She set her pen down slowly. “Tim... what the hell did you do?”

-------

That’s part 1.

I still don't know how to tell this story properly. But we'll try anyway, one chapter at a time.

Every week, another piece of the untold story. Another impossible decision that shouldn't have worked.

It's all true. And somehow, that makes it even harder to believe.