Connature Interview: Meet Kurt Paine, Founder of Abott Blackstone, Importer & Distributor of Organic Superfoods

We are thrilled to start this week by interviewing Mr. Kurt Paine, Founder of Abbott Blackstone, the importer and distributor of organic superfoods whose goal is to provide its clients with the highest quality food products from Asia, South America, India, Sri Lanka and Europe. Their sourcing approach is different by having a long-standing relationships and partnerships with  suppliers and by visiting them regularly to insure the best quality.

Through this series of interviews we want to connect the international sustainable industry audience by sharing information, operators experiences and business tips that can be helpful and effective.

How are Abbott Blackstone products unique?

Thank you so much to you. Well, our products are unique in that they are superfoods, which started out as a small niche market but has become a trend as consumers become more health conscious. It’s not so much that our products are unique, but our company is unique.
First of all we carry a lot of inventory, both on the West Coast and the East Coast. We have a lot of customers that need something right away and we can arrange for them to pick up very quickly. We carry a lot of inventory in these two warehouses. We also have a very good team here in Clearwater. We handle orders very efficiently and we make sure to keep customers apprised of the status of their orders. Our customers are very important to us so we take very good care of them.

Which are your primary markets?

The primary market for us are U.S. and Canada. We do sell a bit to some other countries such, as Mexico, but we concentrate on the U.S. and Canada. For our German office, the primary market is the EU and the UK.

Which is your typical buyer type?

I would say that talking about our experience through for example Ekowarehouse we are getting inquires either from R&D people or from small companies just getting started. Of course, we get inquiries from large companies as well, but most of the inquiries are looking for a new product or a new supplier.

Can you tell us how Ekowarehose supported your business?

Abot Blackstone averages about one lead a week but it could be more as some of the leads that we get come through our website and some of those have been referred by Ekowarehouse. Although a small team they do a great job of making changes to our listing and adding new items. Usually, it’s done within a couple of hours.

Which kind of advice would you give to a company that wants to use Ekowarehouse as a tool to find new business opportunities?

I’m not sure that I have any good advice for other companies, I'll try. Just make sure you have good photos of each of your products and that the listings are kept up to date. I did notice that when we ran a banner adv that sometimes we didn’t get more leads from Ekowarehouse  we had instead a lot of people landing on our website that was linked from www.ekowarehouse.com This is a great thing because driving more traffic to our website means enhancing the number of possible business contacts and sales.