How to Build a Tribal Market that Loves your CPG with Allison Cayne of Haven's Kitchen

Speaker A: 85% of CPGs fail because of this unclear value proposition. In a tight industry with tight margins, you need product differentiation now more than ever. What's your unique selling proposition? What's your purchase driver? Messaging? What's your number one thing to outlast your competitors? I've been building brands. In the last 10 plus years I've have engaged with 50 plus CPG founders and CEOs. If you're struggling to drive product trials, you most likely have a product positioning problem and I may be your kind of guy. To help, I'm opening a few slots for my CPG Brand Development Consulting program. It's a one on one consulting engagement where I will be your strategy partner to help you with brand development for your cpg. This is perfect for pre launch startups and emerging CPG founders who need help in pinning down the best positioning path for your product so you can drive more trials. If this is you and you want to see if we'll be fit to work together, get on a free 30 minute discovery call with me. Pause this first open your browser and type in calendly.com LeoGrape CPGBrand that's calendly.com LeoGrip CP CPG Brand talk to you soon.

Speaker B: BrandStar goes healthy features founders and CEOs of healthy food and beverage CPG companies who share their biggest successes, hardest failures, strategic learnings and tactical tips so you can learn from them and help you avoid mistakes and instead succeed in building your own healthy food and beverage brands. If you lead a vegan, plant based, organic, all natural, functional and other healthy food and beverage CPG company, then this show is for you. Hosted by Leonard Grape, Founder and CEO of the Vineyard, the brand development company for the healthy food and beverage CPG industry.

Speaker C: Hey everybody, it's Leonard here and this is the Brand Start Goes Healthy podcast. The show that helps better for you food and beverage CPG companies build stronger brands through firsthand stories and insights from successful CPG founders. Today I'm joined by Allison Cain, founder of Haven's Kitchen, a brand that offers globally inspired sauces that are made fresh in easy squeezy lightweight pouches that are also vegan, non GMO and gluten free. Ali, welcome to the show.

Speaker D: Thank you for having me. Happy to be on the other side every once in a while.

Speaker C: Yeah, I know that you got your own podcast so this is going to be interesting Ali, but before we get going, can you please tell us a brief background about yourself and what you do?

Speaker D: Sure. Um, well, like you said, I'm the founder of Haven's Kitchen, which, um, we refer to as a. It's funny. I. Can I.

Speaker C: Go ahead. Feel free.

Speaker D: I just forgot what we refer to ourselves as. But we're a creative cooking company, um, which means that we are planning on offering multiple product lines for home cooks to make their experience in the kitchen easier, less stressful, more fun, more flavorful, healthier. Um, and our first product line, like you mentioned, was a line of fresh sauces that we launched in 2018. Um, and we're actually coming out with our second product line the day after tomorrow. Um, so very exciting. A shelf stable, um, line of condiments that, um, are same, you know, sort of attributes. Very flavorful, better for you, better for the environment. Environment. Easy squeezy, um, but easier for the consumer to understand and to find since they'll be in a category that people know. And, um, they'll be shelf stable.

Speaker C: That's wonderful. I'll circle back on a couple of insights that I want to like further unpack from your brief answer, because I think there are, like, a couple of really key, interesting CPG insights that others can learn from that. But I'll still ask you the first official question that I ask everyone who comes onto the show. Ali, how did your brand start? When and where did you get the idea to start? Haven's Kitchen?

Speaker D: Yeah, well, um, Haven's Kitchen actually started as a cooking school, like a brick and mortar recreational cooking school in New York City in 2012. Um, I was in a master's program on food policy, sustainability, all things sort of food related. Um, and really came to understand very quickly that the most impactful thing a consumer can do for the environment, for their personal health and for their community is cook. Um, and yet, you know, Americans are generally pretty stressed out from cooking. They don't know where to start. They're uninspired. They make the same four things every, you know, week. Um, they are kind of intimidated by flavor. Um, um. But a lot of people had the will and wanted to learn how to make better food. And so I started with what I knew, which was teaching. I've been teaching cooking for 25 years, and I opened a school in New York City in 2012. Um, it was wonderful. We taught a lot of people. We brought people to the farmer's market. You know, it was just people who wanted to make dinner. Um, and then after about five years, those students started saying, so, thank you for teaching us how to make this amazing sauce. Can you just put it in a container and we can bring it home with us after class. And that kind of evolved into the fresh line, the chimichurri, the romesco, all of those. Um, we put them in pouches because they're much more eco friendly. Um, and I didn't even know that I was really building a brand or creating a brand. Um, I just knew that I wanted to help people feel more comfortable cooking and that giving them a product in their kitchen that gave them a little bit of joy and confidence and creativity was the answer that I came up with.

Speaker C: That's a wonderful story. Uh, imagine creating a brand that really comes out of the need of your students and therefore your customers. Right. I mentioned. I want to circle back to a couple of things. One would be how it seems to me that you've got such clear focus on who your market is. Uh, and this is what I call, like the tribal market, because I see a lot of CPGs that tend to offer their product basically to everybody. And I know this is a true marketing principle, whether you're in CPG or not. But in your case, you're very clear. Like you mentioned home cooks, you mentioned, like, you really want to impact. Yeah. How did, how did you arrive at that? And what have you seen as impact, uh, that that has on, on your business, Ali?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, I think it started off with, you know, again, going back to a very basic principle. I'm not, you know, a classically trained marketer, but in my food entrepreneurship class, when I was opening the cooking school, one of my professors said, you know, you, you, if you're opening this brick and mortar school, you have to have a target audience. And your target audience cannot be everyone. It doesn't work. There is no everyone. So who are the people that can afford to come to the school can, you know, are interested in using their kitchens, want to make better food, you know, who, who are those people? And I had a pretty good idea. I, I thought it was going to be, um, Honestly, when I opened the school, I thought it was going to be more like young moms like myself. It turned out to be much more of like a cool, fun, gather with friends, date night kind of thing. Cooking got cool in 2012, and it wasn't really before then. So that gave me a bit of an indication that, yes, the young parent trying to get food quick and easy after a long day for the kids, that is definitely a, um, a customer of ours. But there's a whole other world of people who are curious about cooking, who know that it can be fun and a little bit sexy. But they're very busy. They don't have a lot of time. Um, that. That target customer turned out to be sort of primary for us. And then in Covid, everything even got more, you know, more intense because people who maybe didn't know how to roast a chicken or grill a piece of salmon before COVID learned very quickly overcame that knowledge gap. And 92% of them want to continue cooking because they know that it's good for them and it's good for the planet and it's fun. So now we know who exactly we're trying to help because they've made themselves very clear to us.

Speaker C: That's a great principle. And sometimes I feel like other CPG founders fall in love with their product in a sense that they tend to forget that the basic business ethos, whatever industry you're in, especially if you're in cpgs, your product has to solve a problem. Right. In your case, it seems to me like I love cooking, but I generally don't have the time. Um, but I love to be able to cook for my wife and my daughter. And now, very recently, we've been trying to eat healthier. Alice, I think I'd be proud of you. So, like, yeah, so if I only have, like, those, Those. Those products like your site, it's going to be easier. So, so when you had that idea, uh, because the consumers or your students back then were already clamoring for it, how did you actually, like, put things into action? Because you were. You were a teacher. Uh, how did it happen for you?

Speaker D: Yeah, I mean, it started off we were selling the sauces, like the chimichurri m that you see today on the shelf. We were selling it in quart containers out refrigerator in the front of the cooking school. And because I have this degree in food policy and because I know enough about the environment not to put things in plastic jars and, you know, plastic containers and whatever. I really wanted to have the pouch, um, on top of, you know, not having it in a glass jar or in a plastic bottle. It just seemed like that was a fun. Almost like paint, you know, almost like kindergarten. Like, let's play with this pouch of beautiful colored sauce and see what I can make with it. Um, pouch packaging has taken off all over the world, except really in the United States. It's a more complicated supply chain. It's a longer supply chain, it's more expensive supply chain. But again, you know, I. It just is in line with my values and what I want to put out into the world. And so that was a decision that I made. So figuring out how to make it, how to get it a shelf life over three months, you know, figuring out something called high pressure pasteurization, which has been used for juices for years, um, but hasn't really been applied to sauce the way that we did. Um, all of this took about, uh, two years. And, um, then we launched and we've been figuring things out ever since. You know, it's, um, it's. You're never finished, you're always improving, you're always trying to figure out a little bit better, you know, a little bit less expensive, um, you know, tighten up your messaging. But that's, um, that's how we started.

Speaker C: Thank. Thank you for sharing. And it shows a lot about your. Your passion in this, in this particular sector. And I know after talking to, probably now, at this point, about 50 plus CPG founders, it's not an understatement to say that CPG is a tough industry. So I'm curious to talk about your growth trajectory. So you got your start there. It took you like two years. And what I've seen is typically two to five years. It's just basically your learning phase. You're evolving, you're getting more insights. But how has Haven's kitchen grown now in the last 12 years? And were there any strategies or tactics that you think had a huge impact on your growth?

Speaker D: Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, you know, I. We only had the cooking school from 2012 to 2018. We launched the line in 2018. We had two years under our belt in local and regional, you know, Whole Foods and sort of the Northeast. And then basically the same week that we launched globally with Whole Foods. So unfi trucks across the country was the same week that I closed the cooking school because of COVID Literally, one business went completely to nothing, and one business grew six times. And it was. It was a, um, crazy. I mean, I don't know if you remember, you know, May, June, July of 2020, but it was insane. Um, and all these people were home cooking, but we also couldn't do any demos and we couldn't introduce our product to people. You know, it was just. It was a wild time. Um, but fortunately, you know, it. It speaks for itself on the shelf. And, um, you know, we had such a strong. So crazy, because I don't have any, like, proof for, like, data, but I can't tell you the number of data, instant messages, or DMs I got from people who had been to the cooking school in those six years and then basically moved because of COVID to Miami or San Diego or Austin or, you know, Minneapolis, they moved back home. They moved out of New York City, and they saw this pouch on the shelf that reminded them of New York. And when they took that cooking class with those friends or their boyfriend or whatever it was. And I honestly believe that that is why we got the velocities that we got as quickly as we got them, because there's really no other. We did no other advertising or marketing really, around the launch. We couldn't. Um, so it was kind of amazing. And I mean, we have now about 60, like, 70,000 people on our email list. And a lot of those people are original cooking school people who've just now followed us along in this journey. And wherever they go in the country, they merchandise the sauces, they make sure we look good. You know, they really. They feel like it's theirs because it really was theirs. You know, for eight years, you know,

Speaker C: I was, you know, I was getting goosebumps. I'm kidding you not, Ali. Uh, because it shows a lot about how, when you build a brand. And I'm not just talking about, like, the aesthetics, like the strategy behind the brand, because I'm a brand strategist and specialist myself. But I think you nailed it on the head when you mentioned it started getting traction because people felt like it was their brand, because it actually is their brand. Um, and. And that's. I think that's the ultimate goal for any brand, particularly in the cpg. The moment people start talking about your brand, the moment people start affiliating themselves to your brand, and then you've. You can say that you've actually built a brand and 70,000 people in the email list. You gotta tell me more about that, Ali. I mean,

Speaker D: Maddie is my. Is our retention person, and she's always like, well, there's a difference between the master clean and the thing and the whatever. And I'm like, I just. Total number of people on the list. Like, well, these are the people that actually open it. But yeah, I mean, it's. You know, we. We had. I mean, before we were national with Whole Foods, we had eight years of every single day serving people breakfast and coffee and teaching them how to cook. We hosted weddings. We hosted tons of brand launches. I mean, it was a, like, popping, um, place, you know, for. From the minute it opened to the minute it closed. And I. I don't even think I realized at the time how many people came through those doors, whether we were just giving them, you know, a muffin or we were teaching them or, you know, we were hosting their wedding for them. And every single one of those people, starting in 2018, whether you came to the cafe or you came to a class or you came to an event, we were basically asking questions, we were giving them samples, we were asking them what they thought. What would you use this on? How would you use this? Which variety do you like better? You know, we, we didn't even know we were doing market research, but we were doing market research. And so by the time, I mean, we launched on Fresh Direct, I'll never forget this, we launched on Fresh Direct in like March of 2018. And at the time we did an Instagram and you could swipe up and it would take you to FreshDirect. And we got a call from our Fresh Direct buyer that we sold out our first purchase order in four hours. And they had never seen anything like it. Like, and it's because we had all of these people rooting for us. They, because it, like we said, it felt, you know, when you, when you, uh, when you are an in person brick and mortar and you are preparing someone's coffee in the morning or you're helping them figure out how to hold a knife, it's a very intimate experience. We had a very intimate relationship with pretty much everyone who came through. When you're planning someone's wedding and they have a mother in law and like a cousin who's like, got some issues and someone's got to keep an eye on him, that's an intimate relationship that you build. And we were very cognizant of that the whole time. It's called Haven's Kitchen. It has to feel like a Haven, you know, and so we really wanted that to extend through the products that we make. The first product, this new product, all the products and all of our messaging, it's never, you know, we're the cool kid and you maybe get to participate a little bit in what we've got going on. It's, we're right there with you in your kitchen and we know that this is hard and we want to make it as easy and as fun as possible. So however we can do that through our messaging and our products, we're going to do.

Speaker C: This really reminds me of a tool and principle that I have for CPG's uh, alley, which I call the hierarchy of product differentiation. And the highest level in that hierarchy is what I call the emotional registry. And I had to mention that because I think your brand is a perfect example of how that one is Built. And it's not built like in just three or five years. You mentioned you had like eight years of serving people and then you continued on. And it's so great when you have this customer base that when they see your product, they don't just see a sauce, they feel something about it. Right. And you mentioned this, like, in passingly, but I think you've been so cognizant of like, who is your target market? That's the primary quadrant that I have in my brand development process. What's going to be the positioning of our product? In your case, it's like healthier, better for you sauce that can help you cook easier at home. Who's going to be. What's going to be the character? So you mentioned it's fun making cooking cool. It's just wonderful. And how you've built that list. Because I've also mentioned this, I've written about this here and there, that sometimes, actually 90% of CPG founders start as a DTC brand. But one thing, but one thing that they sometimes tend to, like, neglect would be building out your email list. And I've mentioned this. If you build your email list right, it could actually help you with your retail later on. That was your experience, right?

Speaker D: Uh, I mean, we, by the way, until literally the day after tomorrow. I mean, because we have a fresh product that we do not sell directly and we do not sell on Amazon. The only call to action, if we had a call to action on an email would be go to the store locator. That's like the worst possible place for a consumer to go. It's like telling them to go to the garbage dump behind the. Like, I'm going to go to the store locator. I'm going to type in my zip code. I'm not going to know if they have the flavor I want. I don't even live that close to that one. What if they're out of stock? And by the way, on our end, we're like, we're sending you to the store locator. We have no idea that intent to buy. Because you have a visit to the store locator. I don't buy it. It's like we have no idea what happens to that person. So we made a decision years ago. Okay, no call to action. Just help. Just. Okay. It's. You know, we saw that, you know, we have these QR codes on the back of our pouches. We saw that about 60% of those codes are scanned at 6pm on a Sunday night. Okay. That Means that people are looking at our product to decide what am I going to make this week. That means that that is precisely when we should be sending them an email with a meal plan for the week. Here's your meal plan, here's the shopping list. This is what we're thinking. This is what's in season. This is the vibe right now. It's a little bit like cozy or it's a little bit like woo. I feel like doing something a little snazzy. That's what we're going to do. And by the way, there's no click here to buy or you get a code or you get a discount or you can. What? Uh, nothing. Just we're here to help you and that builds trust and that builds forwarding and that builds signups. And so when we do actually have something to sell, which we will, we're not going to do a hard sell. We'll just be like, hey, we have this new product, you want to give it a try? Like you're a loyal person, you've been us with, you know, with us for a long time. Here's the code, give it a shot, pass it on, tell us what you think you know. And, and it's painful a little bit for a brand like mine because while all of those DTC businesses, you know, between 2020 and honestly like almost the end of last year, it was like the go go years for those, for those brands. It started to get a little funny when the iOS changed and when you know, ads got more expensive. But I felt like such a Luddite. I have this like refrigerated brand in a grocery store, you know, and you know, at the end of the day I over invested in a lot of content and uh, you know, a lot of people working to make cooking more fun and easier for this list of people that we couldn't prove any real, you know, attribution or conversion on at all. So now we'll see.

Speaker C: Yeah, but, but that I think content is really going to drive a lot of like upside for you. But as you mentioned, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. So I'm also going to be checking on you. I'm really going to be interested to see that. Well, I want to shift our conversation a little bit in terms of like uncovering some of like tough times that you've probably encountered. Uh, I wouldn't assume but my experience with CPGs, they're always like really, really, really tough times if you're a founder. So to ask you Ali, what have been some of your biggest challenges, you know, in growing a better for you sauce brand like Haven's Kitchen in those last 12 years?

Speaker A: Building a CPG brand can be a turbulent journey and you don't have to do it alone. If you need help developing a strategic brand for your cpg, then I'm here to help. I'm opening a few slots for my CPG brand development consulting program. It's a one on one consulting engagement where I will be your partner to find the best positioning strategy for your CPG so you can stand out on the shelves, drive more purchases and win the competition. If you want to explore working with me, let's jump On a free 30 minute discovery call, open your browser and type in calendly.com LeoGrape CPGBrand that's calendly.com LeoGrip CPG Brand speak soon and back to the conversation.

Speaker D: Well, I think, you know, just to take a step back, the, the thing that anyone starting in this business has to really digest is that there are very high highs and there are very low lows. And you know, it just, there are a few things that as a leader you really need to develop. One is just self awareness. What happens to you in the high highs and what happens to you in the low lows because that is going to impact all of the people around you, especially your team. And that self awareness is really, really important as you mature as a founder. I'm, you know, still a founder so I'm still going to get jacked up on stuff and like spam everyone in Slack on a Sunday if I read something, you know, which I'm not proud about. And it's pretty obvious on my face when a uh, retailer says no. And I don't want to make it the burden of my team to cheer me up. Right. So that's number one. So are there high highs and low lows? Yes. And if you can't tolerate that this is not the industry for you, like it's not fun, it's not, you know, there was a moment where like being a founder was almost like, you know, being a celebrity or being in film school in the 90s. Like it's not that. It's actually, it is, it is hard grind, crazy work. Um, and what you see out there is the wins, you know, so that goes without saying in terms of some of our hardest parts, I would say I made the rookie mistake of making a brand new product in a new place in the store, in a new type of packaging with no clear category that it belongs in. So people are not used to buying chimichurri or Romesco or Tahini, right? They're not used to buying it in a pouch. They're not used to buying it in the refrigerated section. And buyers don't know exactly where to put us because we're kind of what you call like a category buster. So what the really successful CPG companies over the last 15, 20 years have done is taken something that everyone knows and changed one thing. I'm going to make this a cooler package. I'm going to make this better for you. I'm going to make it organic. I'm going right? It's like one change. Because that is the consumer's way of understanding what is this and how does it solve my problem? We did too many things at once. Um, and so while it's an amazing product and we have people who absolutely love it, we get a little bit tripped up sometimes on messaging. We get tripped up on scalability because we don't have clear resets and clear, um, you know, buyer reviews. We're also in different parts of different grocery stores, which makes the consumer experience challenging. If you are expecting to see something next to the thing that it's next to in this store, you are expecting to see it next to that thing in this store. And we're in different places. So that's been the big challenges. I mean, and each one of those then has parts and pieces of it, right, that are challenging, but those are the primary things. I think I, I think I tried to what they call boil the ocean. And that's going to take a longer, a longer time, you know, to get the scale, um, and time is money. And so, you know, it can be, it can be a little intense, but, you know, it's, um, I think at the end of the day, when you have a community of people that love what you're making, when you're making something really good, you know, when you learn from the challenges, right? Like, I would not make another fresh product at this point. Everything will be shelf stable going forward. It's just going to make my life so much easier. But I'm keeping all of the good aspects of that product and I'm keeping that product on the shelf, but maybe just more of a natural channel product. You know, it's all about mitigating the bad parts and like optimizing the good parts. And that just takes time and experience.

Speaker C: That was wonderfully said, optimizing the good parts. And while you said that, I was actually thinking that sometimes the growth metrics are not just all about, like, how much revenue you've increased, how much store did you grow into, like, in the next. In the last two years? There's gotta be some great equity from failure and testing. And this is what I love to call, like, compounding learning and that, like you mentioned, like, right now, if you do other stuff in your company, you'd know that this is probably the better way to do it because you have this compounding learning. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right.

Speaker D: And, you know, onto your part about revenue and store growth, you know, uh, if there. There's always been, throughout history, you can buy sales anywhere in any channel, whether it's online or in a store. Right. I mean, there's. You can spend a lot of money and get on the shelf. You can even spend a lot of money and maybe stay on the shelf. Right. I mean, the retailers will say, well, it's not doing great, but if you put this much more into marketing. But then you're not really, are you really? I mean, I come from brick and mortar where we didn't look at top line, we looked at bottom line. I knew if I had money to buy a new hand dryer, I knew, you know, that's what I knew. Um, this industry is a little different, right. Because you're not going to get that until you really hit scale and until, you know, while you're subscale, you really need artificial everything kind of helping you along, or your scale is going to be much slower. You know, you shouldn't go into a Target or a Walmart or a Costco. But if you want to get to scale, you kind of need a Walmart or a Target or a Costco. So we're in this weird time where we're supposed to be profitable, but we're all supposed to be, you know, doubling and tripling our top line. That. That is practically impossible for, uh, a business with margins, you know, somewhere in the 40s, 50s.

Speaker C: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I'm someone who always, like, listen intently to my guests and later, you see, I'm gonna do a recap, and I'm already feeling a little pressured because there are so many insights that you've been sharing, Ali. But. But that's. That's. That's right. I mean, cpg, I've said this, and I'm gonna say it again. It's probably one of the worst industries to be in if you want to start a business. I mean, I'm gonna say

Speaker D: no right now. It is. And the reason why right now, it Is, is because money is so expensive. Right, Exactly. So a good decade where money was really inexpensive and you could, you know, you could get investors, you could get bank loans, maybe not super bank loans, but you could, you could find money at low interest rates or at really good valuations because you had a great logo and you had, ah, an idea. Um, those days are gone. So for now everything goes in cycles. Right? So for now those days are gone. So right now, you know, unless I was, um, I think, you know, you have to, you have to have some, some part of that equation that's like, that makes you sort of really have an unfair advantage. So if you're a celebrity brand and you don't have to pay anything for awareness doesn't necessarily mean that the brand is going to stick, but it does mean that you don't have to spend on getting eyeballs on it or you have a super high margin and you can just make something, you know, make something and you know, you're in the 80s, 90s in your margin, then you're going to like, be able to run off of your, you know, actual cash. Um, but right now if you are, if you just have a really nice idea for a cookie and you don't have lots of capital behind you to get that cookie going, I would hold off for a few years. It'll come back, it always does. But tough.

Speaker C: Yeah, but that's just like, that's a harsh truth that everyone needs to hear, Ali. So thank you for that. I mean, I've engaged with a couple of like, startup founders who are interested to launch something, but I think they need to hear something like that money is expensive right now. CPG is a capital intensive business. You need to have an unfair advantage, you need to have money to scale, et cetera. So if you don't have those things really, really set in place, you might as well hold off, uh, and maybe do it on the side, I don't know. Right.

Speaker D: Or you can get first order profitable on D2C. If you're not spending crazy on ads and your margins are solid. Right. Then you can build a nice business that way. But the minute that you move over to Amazon or the minute that you move into retail, that, that profitability goes like in the tank. Because it's just it, retail is very expensive. The way there's a, there's a guy you should actually try to have on. His name's Eric Sk and he was the gm, um, at Rao's and now he's the GM at Carbone and he's been in the industry for a really long time. And the way he talks about it is like, there's this little apple, and everyone's taking a bite of the apple. Right. I was actually just talking to a founder about this. One thing that I really don't like is sort of like the big bad distributors taking advantage of me, or like, this retailer isn't nice. Like, it's not. No one's being mean. No one's cheating you. This is just. We're operating on a very thin margin as our grocery stores, as our distributors, as our brokers and merchandisers. And, sir, everyone in our little chain here is trying to take a bite of an apple that's very small. It's already small. We're talking about, you know, we sell our sauce for $5 to a distributor. So, huh, Who's. How are people gonna get rich on that? You know? And the only way that it happens is with scale. So it, you know, and that takes time, and that takes a lot of money.

Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you so much, Ali. That's. That's a really wonderful message and insights, you know, and this has been really going wonderful. I feel like we can talk for hours and hours. So now I'd have to manage. I'd, uh, have to manage my questions. So I'll start, um, working towards wrapping up. I've got a couple more questions, and then we'll go to the last segment of the show. And so far, Ali, in my exposure in the CPG space, one key challenge that I've seen a lot of CPG brands need to really overcome would be driving product trials. And I've seen this to be true. Whether you're a prelaunch or a startup or you're an emerging brand, or even if you're already scaling up, it's still something that you need to be able to figure out. In your experience, what are your thoughts about driving product trials for CPGs, or how do you actually get people to pay to try our product?

Speaker D: Well, trying it is different from paying to try it. So, um, I mean, I think your point is paying to try it, right? So, I mean, that going back to the issues with the fresh sauce, that was one of the challenges. It was very hard for us to demo. It was very hard for us to send samples. It's very hard to just drive trial at all with something that's perishable and needs to be refrigerated overnight shipped. Right? So I would say a few things. One is, with any. With any marketing tactic, right, you have to figure out what is my actual goal for this thing? Am I just trying to get this product into people's mouths on the assumption that if 10 people try it, one will come back and buy it without really knowing? Right. Because there are a lot of different ways to do that. There are a lot of different sampling programs in real life. Demos, coupons, you know, social nature, aisle visor. There's a lot of them. Um, the only way I think that's ever been proven to actually get people to pay to try it is a promotion. Right? A good old fashioned yellow tag does better than pretty much anything else. It's also the only thing that's actually trackable unless you're selling directly to consumers. And if you're selling directly to consumers, you know, then of course there's like, you build the awareness, you build the excitement. You, you know, have that cool kid kind of halo. And then people just want to try it. But even the people who can afford it, everyone likes a little bit of a bargain. And even, you know, I was talking to someone at thing testing, especially young people, you know, cutting coupons when I was growing up, sort of signaled that you might not be able to afford the product. Cutting coupons today means that you're in the know and you've got the good, you know, inside scoop on something. And so there's just a different kind of zeitgeist around it too. But I wouldn't waste a, ah, dollar driving trial with people who can't very easily buy it again next week. And if you are not, you know, if you are only in the Northeast, you should only be spending money sampling people in the Northeast, sending it to people in the Northeast, doing what you can in your region. Do not spend on global awareness because they can't get it.

Speaker C: I'm pausing because I'm trying to digest what you just said because I, uh, typically start with, and I think we've covered this already from the heart and soul of the product and the brand, like all your whys, why is it existing, how it's going to add value. But I think it's one of the things, the very first few times I've actually heard clear, tactical advice on how this can be done. Right? So I appreciate that, Ali.

Speaker D: I'm, um, I am a teacher. Like, I'm like, okay, you want to roast a chicken? Great. We're gonna start with, like, preheating your oven and like, chicken, right? We're not going to talk about, like, truffles on your chicken. We're going to talk about, like, the brass Tax, because that's the only, I only know how to like, take information and break it down. I also, you know, you said at the beginning, this is about helping other people. My story about my why at some point is boring. Right. Like, I think people want to know, like, okay, but what does that mean? And how can I do that and how can I apply that thing? I don't have a cooking school. So now what? Uh, you know, that kind of thing.

Speaker C: Yeah. And it's totally coming out of, from this conversation how you're, you're, there's a teacher in you. Right. And it's, it's wonderful. I was just thinking maybe we should, maybe you should even have like a CPG school or something. I think people would learn a lot from it.

Speaker D: I, I, you know, it's funny because it's one of those things where, you know, until I have a, uh, fifty million dollar company that is like on all cylinders, I don't want to have anything that's like, here I am showing you how to do whatever. Comfortable saying, this is my experience. This is what happened in the last couple of years, and this is what I learned from it. Um, as opposed, and which is a lot what I do on my podcast, but as opposed to here's the answer. Because just as you think you know the answer, everything changes and there's a completely new playbook. One thing that's never changed is margin. And retail is expensive. So those are not, those are evergreen topics.

Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you so much, Ali. So what I'm going to do now is recap some of the highlights of the learnings and insights that I've gotten from this conversation. And then I'm going to ask the final question and then we'll go to the last segment of the show. The very first thing that really struck me was how you were so clear with your target market. Yeah. Let's say that you probably had the advantage of building a brick and mortar school, but still a lot of other people tend to forget that the basic principle of building a brand and a product is knowing who your customers are. And a, uh, key ethos should be talking or selling to everyone is practically selling to no one. And when you say, like, no, my target market is everyone, I'd even go to the extent to say that this is probably a lazy way of saying that you don't know your target market because in your case, as a brand Haven's Kitchen, you know exactly that. You know, you want to help home cooks. It's number one. That's your tribal market. But it's not just as simple as that. You ask the questions like, who are the people? People who'll be interested in my product? Who will I be able to help out with this product? And you found, like, different segments of the market. And one of the key criteria was, you know, these are people who think that cooking is cool, or you actually make cooking cool. So it's quick and easy. You've saw their Personas and you leverage that. Another thing is when you're a starting founder, especially, and you want to get into cpg, some of the critical components that you need to learn. Of course, number one, you got to figure out how to make your product. But as Ali mentioned, you got to next think about how to give it shelf life. Because I think we've touched on this so many times in this conversation that retail is going to be the way to go if you want to scale. And then how do you introduce something better in the market? And that process alone can take you two to three years. So if you're not in here for the long haul and just m looking to make a quick buck, maybe. But if you really want to scale, it's not going to happen because there's this quote from Ali and I actually wrote it. You're never finished, but you're always learning. So you got to learn how to tighten your message. You did, you did.

Speaker D: Great quote, I gotta say.

Speaker C: Yep, you did. You did. So there's a lot of, like, really good, good insights from this, and I'm really hoping I'm going to give this justice. But, um, one thing that you also mentioned would be you shouldn't scale just for the sake of scaling. You got to make sure that you're going to be ready because I think it's already like an evergreen truth. Two things. Margins are going to be tight, uh, in CPG space. And I think you even expounded on that very clearly when you talked about the Apple. A metaphor, like, it's such a small, tight industry that we're playing around, so you got to be able to expect that. Right? And second, retail is expensive. So I've written also about this based on my m learnings from other CPG founders, that if you scale in retail, there's a high probability, if you're not ready, of being delisted. And that's just not going to affect your business as a whole, but your brand as a whole. Now, I think a foundation of your success, and I hope I'm not generalizing on this, but based on what I heard is really, like, right from the beginning, you gotta care for your customers, connect with your market. Like, they gotta feel something about your product. And when I say this, it's not just about, like you can. When I talk to founders, I, uh, give them a lot of, like, strategies and advice. But the ultimate sense here is that you're gonna build this in different aspects of the brand in different touch points. Like in your case, whether that's in the email list, you're giving them content where they're on the shelf and you're the founder, you're probably giving them demos. Those are ways to build your brand. Uh, and the moment they feel something about it because you care. I love how you did your email marketing, where you just give value, give them recipes, you help them figure out how to best use your product, and you don't sell, at least not right away. That's the right tactic that you should be doing. And the way that you're going to build your brand, and I'm going to want to zero in on this and overlap it with my own framework, because I think you captured that is, number one, focus on your customer. And then second, once you figure that out, identify what's going to be your positioning. I mean, why should you even exist in this market? Right? You mentioned this. If you're just thinking about another cookie, you got to ask hard and long, like, why does people need another cookie? I mean, why is this going to be like something that's even worth to be in the market? And next, once you figure it out, identify your character. If you're listening intently. Ali mentioned this several times, like, tightening the message. And that goes with the character, like, how are you going to appeal to your consumers? And ultimately this is how you build your identity. And one thing that can be a real output from this, Ali sold out in FreshDirect in four hours, and not just because she was an overnight success. So I love to say there's no such thing as overnight success. You're probably not just observing keenly enough during those moments because people don't notice when you're not successful yet, right? But in your case, you leverage eight years of serving people, involving your customers, even making them part of the process. And that's a great way to take a look at cpg brand development and cpg, uh, company building. Now, on the real part of things, on terms of challenges, the highs can be highs and the lows can be lows. One thing that you said struck me as well as a founder too would be, you got to have that Level of self awareness, understand what happens to you in high, and understand what happens to you in the lows. Ah. I think that alone would be a critical success factor for a lot of people. I don't think I have that level of consciousness. So because you mentioned that, I'm gonna like, take that back from this conversation and hopefully other founders would also note that a few more items. I want to reemphasize the fact that if you want to scale, the only way for that to happen is you need to partner with big retailers. Another thing would be profitability and scalability just don't work hand in hand. I mean, it's always going to be like the chicken and egg situation, right? You probably want to build, at least in the first few years, a profitable business. So you get the really great foundation of understanding your margins, your customers, your distribution. But the moment you want to scale, and this is probably with the danger of generalizing, but I think this is what I heard from you. That's probably the only way that you can really become rich as a CPG found if you get to like that skill or maybe an exit. But exit is another story altogether. Right? So build your foundations, have solid margins, understand the dynamics. Be sure you understand how to drive product trials strategically. Like it. It seems so simple when you mention you don't necessarily need to have like a global or a national advertising or marketing promotion. We know that ultimately something that drive product trials would be your marketing, your promotion. But you got to do it strategically. And your ethos was don't waste driving trials on people who can't buy it again, because at the end of the day, right, it's a margins game, it's a driving product trials game, and it's a repeat purchase game. You got to build that loyalty, and it takes so long of a time. So if you're here, CPG is a business that can scale, but you just gotta understand that it takes a long, long, long time. Is that a fair recollection of some of the things that you mentioned and anything you want to add to that?

Speaker D: I. I feel like you could take that on the road. Like, that was amazing. You just distilled 51 minutes into just. That was. That was beautiful, I have to say. I mean, that was very, very well done. I, uh. Did you write all that down?

Speaker B: Where?

Speaker D: How?

Speaker C: Yeah, I was not. Some. Some. Okay, I'm gonna now spill my secret. Some. Some guests feel like I have like a tech or a software that I use here. I don't. I just literally like, try while Listening and asking and managing the conversation. I.

Speaker D: That was amazing. I want to just, uh, double click on one thing you said too, which is, you know, at the beginning, I would. We would get these incoming calls from these really cool big brands to sample with them. You know, send out the chimichurri and we'll do this, or, you know, and we took everything, we said yes to everything, um, because we were so flattered in a way and, like, excited that someone, like a big kid wanted to play with us. But, you know, as you just said, when we are at the festival in la, but we don't have any stores in la, that makes no sense, right? Like, those people, even if they fell in love, the best case scenario is that someone falls in love with the sauce and tells someone in New York, hey, this sauce is in New York. The worst case scenario is that someone falls in love with the sauce, they can't get it, and they feel frustrated, and now they're like, physical, emotional connection to your brand is frustration, which is, like, not what you want. So that was really. That was very well done. Thank you.

Speaker C: Thank you so much. And that means a lot. You know, I've always said this. One thing that I want to do in this podcast is really, like, you know, honor the time of my guest by making sure I listen to the best that I. I can and, you know, and, you know, like, recap it so that I know there are, like, other listeners here who probably just want to get some. Some of those highlights, but they should really listen, like, to someone like you and, you know, get a lot of those insights. So I appreciate that. It means a lot coming from you. Thank you for the kind words. Ali. I'm gonna now ask my final question, and this is on a personal note. I'm probably gonna change the question that I sent you because I feel like we've covered that. So I'm gonna ask you a different question. Was there anything that you regret about being a founder? Anything in your journey at all that you wish you could have done differently or you wish you should have done,

Speaker A: uh, in the past?

Speaker C: Ali.

Speaker D: So I have two different thoughts about this. I'll start with the positive one. The positive one is, you know, human beings cannot learn things unless they experience them. You can tell a kid not to jump on the bed 50,000 times, but until they jump on the bed and they fall off the bed and they bump their head, they're not going to really internalize what that means. I have five kids. I know this to be true. Similarly, you know, things that you learn, theoretically, unless you really experience and you really go through them, they're very hard to interpret, internalize. So that takes me to the, you know, to the regret question, which is I can't really have regret because then I would be sort of saying the opposite of what I just said. Everything that I've done and everything that's happened to me and to this business, of course I've made mistakes. Of course I've wasted money. Of course I haven't mentored people well, or, you know, I've done my best in every situation, and sometimes it wasn't good enough. And that is every single person in the world has to admit that to themselves. And can I regret those things? No, probably not. Because with every one of those things, I've learned how to be a better mentor, how to spend less money, when to really partner, when to think about things differently. What. What do these numbers mean? You know? Ah. So, yeah, I mean, if anyone tells you that they have done this perfectly or that they just. It's so amazing, like, how awesome everything's gone forever, like, they're either not that smart or they're just totally full of it. Uh, but I don't think that you can use regret, really, because you. I mean, ideally, you learn from those experiences, and they just make you better.

Speaker C: That's wonderful. And I think that's a perfect segue for us to now go to the last segment of the show, which I call the finish line. It's basically the lightning round, where I have five questions, but this time, I want you to answer them as concisely as possible. Are you game, Ali?

Speaker D: Not great at concise, but I will give it.

Speaker C: Okay, fair enough. First off, name a characteristic that an entrepreneur must have to succeed.

Speaker D: Self awareness.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's a powerful one. Second would be book or podcast that you want to recommend for entrepreneurs to read or listen to if you have any acquired podcasts.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker C: Okay. Next one would be, what is one thing that you fear the most as a founder?

Speaker D: Um, letting my team down.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's. I don't hear that a lot, so thank you for sharing that. Ali. Next one would be, if you're not an entrepreneur now, what do you think would you be instead? I think that came out from this conversation. And finally, Ali, I wanted to complete this phrase.

Speaker D: Success is, I guess, building something that makes people's lives better with people whose lives you're making better.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, Ali. This has been really, really wonderful, and I appreciate you so much for being so kind and generous. In sharing your story and insights, but I let you go. Can you please tell us where's the best place for people to learn about you? In Haven's Kitchen?

Speaker D: Yes, for sure. Um, so definitely go to the website havenskitchen.com. that's where we have about 500 recipes and cooking tutorials right now. Um, our sauce line is on there with a store locator. Our new product line should be up there around March 1st, so I'm not sure when this is up, but it should be up there soon. LinkedIn is a very good place to find me. I. It's my only social media and it's. I'm pretty much there every day and I'm just Alison Kane. But you can also follow Haven's Kitchen. Um, we're also on TikTok and Instagram and Pinterest and all of the others. Um, if you are interested in our content. Great.

Speaker C: We'll make sure to link those up in the show notes. And once again Ali, thanks for being here and may God bless you.

Speaker A: My CPG brand development consulting program is now open. It's a one on one consulting engagement where I will be your strategy partner to help you with brand development for your cpg. This is perfect for pre launch startups and emerging CPG founders who need help in pinning down the best positioning path for your product. If you're interested, let's jump on a free 30 minute disclaimer discovery call, open your browser and just type in calendly.com LeoGrape CPGBrand that's calendly.com LeoGrip CPGBrand I'll see you soon.