A Wichita startup in the food manufacturing industry will pitch its product this week on ABC’s “Shark Tank.”
Pinole Blue, run locally by business partners Eddie Sandoval and Kyle Offutt, will appear on the popular entrepreneurship pitch show at 7 p.m. Friday.
Representatives for the company weren’t immediately available Tuesday morning, but both the business and the show shared news of the coming appearance on social media Monday.
Pinole Blue, a former winner of Wichita State University's Shocker New Venture Competition, is a food processing company that manufactures an all-organic dry powder made using blue corn from the mountains of northern Mexico, from where Sandoval traces his lineage.
The rejuvenating properties of pinole have come to fame in recent years due to its popularity with the indigenous Tarahumara in Mexico, whose ability to run hundreds of miles without rest came to broader international attention thanks to the best-selling book “Born to Run.”
Sandoval has previously recounted the company’s history to the WBJ, explaining that his family has been drinking pinole for generations and has long-sworn by its health and wellness properties.
That prompted him in 2016 to bring home a half-ton of blue corn from a trip back to Mexico and to begin production locally in his garage.
After later boosting manufacturing by opening in a shop in Haysville, the company relocated to its current location at 242 N. Cleveland near downtown in 2018.
