How to Create a Winning Elevator Pitch: The Founders of Smoodi and Their Giant Dancing Pineapple Explain How

Most founders stand at a podium and give investors a slide deck. Morgan Abraham and Pascal Kriesche showed up to a pitch event with a person in a giant pineapple costume — dancing.

It sounds like a gimmick. It wasn't. It was the most deliberate communication decision they made in the early days of Smoodi, and it perfectly captures the philosophy behind one of the most effective elevator pitches in the automated food space.

The Problem with Most Pitches

Most startup pitches fail not because the idea is bad, but because the audience — even a smart, experienced investor audience — can't hold the idea in their head after the presentation ends. If someone can't explain your company at dinner that evening, you haven't actually communicated your idea. You've performed it.

The pineapple forced instant memorability. No one who attended that event forgot which company the pineapple was associated with. And from that memory hook, the actual pitch — 'We're the Keurig of smoothies' — was easy to retrieve and repeat.

The 'Keurig of Smoothies' Framework

The single most important line in Smoodi's early pitch deck was six words: 'We are the Keurig of smoothies.' It works because Keurig is already understood. Everyone knows what a Keurig is, how it works, and what market it created. By anchoring to that reference, the founders compressed a complex explanation of automated food tech into something any investor could immediately grasp and repeat.

This is the core technique of great elevator pitches: find the thing your audience already understands deeply, and position your company as that thing — applied to a new space.

What Made Their Pitch Work

• Instant memorability — the pineapple made them unforgettable before they said a word
• A single-sentence hook that leveraged existing investor knowledge
• A clear, demonstrated problem: healthy food is inconvenient and expensive
• A solution that anyone can picture: a machine that makes a smoothie in 60 seconds
• Numbers that proved the model: ROI timelines, per-machine revenue, labor savings

"If an investor can't explain your company to their spouse that night, you didn't pitch your company — you pitched a slide deck."

— Morgan Abraham, Co-Founder, Smoodi

The Lesson

Great pitches aren't about comprehensiveness. They're about clarity. The pineapple was absurd. But absurdity in the service of memorability is a feature, not a bug. Smoodi's founders understood that the goal of a pitch is not to inform — it's to be remembered, repeated, and ultimately funded.

The next time you're preparing a pitch, ask yourself: what's your pineapple? And do you have a 'Keurig of X' line that makes your category instantly obvious? If the answer is no, keep working.