🤝 Meet Marie Thiffault. She’s the founder and CEO of Sunii Energy, a two-year-old Canadian caffeine gum startup that’s already landed in 1,500 Circle K stores. We sat down with Marie to talk all things caffeine and how she managed to turn her dad’s old invention into a business.
How does Sunii work?
Suini is a boost of caffeine that you can have whenever. It's for people who want a little bit of motivation to do something. You take the gum and you get a kick in the butt. Nothing crazy, it's just 15 milligrams of caffeine — about half a cup of coffee — and the flavour of gum. It's very convenient when you don't have time to drink something, wait for it to kick in, or carry a drink around.
In what ways does it differ from an energy drink or a cup of coffee?
The first one would be pricing. Drinks can get really expensive nowadays. To give you an idea, a 5-hour Energy shot is $5.89 on average, and a pack of gum is $5.99. So it's cost-efficient. There are no liquids, so no need to go to the bathroom and you don't feel bloated. Coffee will also give you the jitters, and that's a big reaction from digesting the product. When you chew the gum, it's absorbed through your buccal glands, so not only are you bypassing your digestive system, it goes straight in, which makes it work fast. You'll feel it in five to 10 minutes. And there's no sugar, so you don't get the huge spike some energy drinks give you.
I know that your dad developed the earliest version of this product. How did you decide to pick it up and turn it into a gum business?
That's how it started, exactly. My dad worked on this project years ago, and it was a complete failure. It was buccal absorption within the gum — think of something you want to feel really fast, like a painkiller. You don't want to wait 30 minutes for a pill to kick in, so you develop a technology to do that, and we had it in gum as a concept. That R&D was millions of dollars, and it takes forever. So he threw it in the trash, retired, and now spends his time in Whistler living his best life. I took the idea, tweaked it for the consumer, and made an energy gum out of it, with my own vision for it.
Was he happy that you ended up finding a positive use case for his old work?
It took a little while. As an entrepreneur, it’s hard if you have a failure, and then you see someone completely change the product and give it a second life. Now he's truly happy and super excited about it. It took a little stretch before he was like, okay.
Is part of the idea that you get more of a kick with less caffeine?
Yeah, one gum has 15 milligrams of caffeine. I take two at a time for the right kick, but I also don't drink coffee. I'm the ideal person for this product. The thing with coffee and energy drinks: think of how you drink them. You sip, and it gradually goes into your system, and at one point you're sort of at a little plateau. With 15 milligrams, it's less, but it's right there, right now, a precise dosage, and you know exactly how much you're getting. So a lot of people need less caffeine to feel the same benefit as drinking a whole cup.
Who are your typical customers?
That's such a tough one, because anyone who drinks coffee is a consumer. I've had moms switch their 2 p.m. coffee to this because they need to pick up the kids. I've had extreme endurance athletes taking it. In the retail world I'm in right now, it's definitely blue-collar. I've had doctors reach out saying, "You're going to be insane, can you send samples to my entire staff?" Truck drivers, anyone working in oil, mines, the field, people who need to keep going. People need energy and sleep; it's like the base, after food and water. Anyone who has caffeine in their day is a fit.
Do you have any other products on the horizon, or are you focusing on the one right now?
Focusing on the one right now. Coca-Cola had one really good product for a really long time, so this might be my route. But different flavours could be a thing, or different molecules. There are a lot of products focused on sleep, energy, and stress. It could be possible to tap into those.
You played Division I tennis in college. Did you have any thoughts of going pro?
Nope, never. I started tennis when I was nine or 10, and my dad asked, "Do you want to go to sports school?" I was like, "What's that?" You go to school in the morning and play in the afternoon. I don't even know where the idea came from, but I was like, "Yeah, let's go." I got into the routine of being a tennis player, and at the club I was at, we all went D1. I went to New Mexico State, in Las Cruces. It was a lovely place. I knew when I graduated I wasn't going to keep playing. I had really bad injuries too. My hips weren't going to make it, to be honest.
Where are you selling it primarily?
We’re now in 1,500 Circle K’s and that’s going well. We've got really good distribution, and I'm starting to expand into the U.S. What's really cool is that when we started retail a year ago, retailers had never heard of energy gum before. The caffeine market is huge, and gas and convenience is the channel worth targeting. Circle K took a chance on me, and it's doing so well that they pitched it to Circle K West. So all the other ones are following, and we're getting a lot of yeses.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
