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Shark Tank Tale
business SPOTlight
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The founders of Numilk, Joe Savino and Ari Tolwin, pitching on an episode of ABC’s Shark Tank.
Shark Tank Tale
With a $2 million deal, Detroiter allows consumers to create plant-based milk at the push of a button.
ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
ABC
Ari Tolwin always wanted to be an entrepreneur. When the now 39-year-old based in Brooklyn, N.Y., was growing up in a Southfield yeshivah family, he spent his days coming up with creative business ventures. At age 12, Tolwin was selling CDs to his classmates in school.
“I bought $400 of CD inventory using bar mitzvah money,” recalls Tolwin, who recently received a $2 million deal through Shark Tank for his plant-based Numilk line, which allows customers to make dairy-free milks with the push of a button. By selling CDs as a child, though, he got some of his first lessons in making money and finding buyers. Next, he moved on to selling baseball cards. Even when playing with Legos, Tolwin says he turned every game into a competition.
“I didn’t have commercial success,” he says with a laugh, “but that was my first entrepreneurial-like thing.”
EARLY STARTS
Tolwin, son of Rabbi Alon Tolwin, founder of Aish HaTorah Detroit, which is now led by his brother, Rabbi Simcha Tolwin, has come a long way from selling CDs and baseball cards in school. Now, he’s on track to scale Numilk nationally, with dreams of one day taking the plant-based line international. But it wasn’t an easy road to Shark Tank success, which saw Tolwin and co-founder Joe Savino close the deal with billionaire investor Mark Cuban earlier this year.
“I always wanted to do something in business,” Tolwin says of his ambitions. He was also a history buff, reading about entrepreneurs like steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, which helped him realize that business opportunities were always possible.
Tolwin pursued an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and then followed the business path with an M.B.A. from Duke University. By doing so, he combined his love for entrepreneurship with his passion for history and education.
His early career saw him working for McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm. Yet, when his older brother Chaim, who lived in upstate New York, invited him out to see how he made maple syrup from his maple trees, Tolwin had an idea for something different.
“I’m at his house and we’re making maple syrup,” Tolwin recalls, “and he’s explaining to me that water comes out of the tree. So, I tried the water and thought it was fantastic.”
This water — known as maple water — was the inspiration for Tolwin’s 2014 line, Happytree Maple Water, where he served as co-founder and CEO. But it didn’t give Tolwin the success he was looking for. “Maple was awesome, but ultimately the
