Brent Sisco - Upscale CPG Advisors

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: We are back, um, for another episode. And me and my bearded friend Ryan. Good to see you again. Thank you for always connecting.

Speaker C: Good to see you.

Speaker B: Today we have Brent Sisko of, uh, Dumpling Daughter. I believe you are the president, Brent.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: Resident gm. Love it. Yeah, so we met. Must have met at a Naturally New England event. Seen you at trade shows. I would classify you as one of the more friendly guys around.

Speaker A: Thank you for that.

Speaker B: The bigger hellos. And at Rainforest Naturally, uh, New England hosted an event there. You were the, I would call it premier speaker or featured speaker keynote, if you will, and absolutely crushed it. Really riveting. Like, you spoke for a while and I was interested the whole time. So after that, we reconnected and just excited to have you on the pod.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me, guys. It was exciting and, uh, love Naturally New England. What a great organization.

Speaker B: So you, um, have a company called Dumpling Daughter.

Speaker A: Yes.

Speaker B: I want to hear all about it, but first, I commented on LinkedIn. I wanted to make sure you appreciated how funny that was. Do you have kids?

Speaker A: I, uh, do not have kids. I am a fun uncle. And, uh, me and my wife are fun aunts and uncles to a whole bunch of nieces and nephews.

Speaker B: So you launched a duck sauce, and I made a comment about the duck going to the lemonade stand. Ryan, I don't know if you know that one.

Speaker C: I don't.

Speaker B: Did you get that joke, Brent?

Speaker A: I don't know, but I probably have seen the movie because I feel like I've watched every kid show on repeat.

Speaker B: Bump, bump, bump. Um, okay, so it's about a duck going to a lemonade stand. I will have to send that to you. But let's hear about Dumpling Daughter. I know you have an interesting story from finance to, like, where you are right now. So, like, we'd love to just start there.

Speaker A: My real career here with the CPG industry started kind of at my first job out of college. And that's where we met the Dumpling Daughter founder, Nadia. We, um, shared a cubicle. We had run out of room at this, uh, place that we both worked out of college, quickly became friends. You know, friendship through great food. Just like family, I think you get to share a lot of experiences. And Nadia, uh, really had a passion for good food and great eating, and who knew it would lead to where we're at today. Fast forward. She had left. We had gone different ways in our careers and finance, and she had been looking, you know, for an opportunity after moving back here with her husband. Wanted to open A restaurant after meeting Stacy from Stacy's Pita Chips at a barbecue. And Stacy convinced her, hey, you know, you got to really cultivate a brand new. I get that your mother had restaurants back in the 80s and 90s, but who are you? And that's really where Dumpling Butter was born out of. I helped Nadia with her first business plan and she then went on to grow this great brand, this great restaurant group. I was kind of sick of doing the finance thing and joined, um, the company basically right with the start of COVID Not really knowing what we were going to do. You know, we were just trying to keep this business alive. In a lot of cases, I had some investment money in it and a lot of friends and family from Nadia's circle had also invested. And what started as a DPC website became one store. And now we're in about 5,000 grocery stores. New England all the way down to Texas, and really nationwide now with sprouts.

Speaker B: So Brent, when you came on, was it just the restaurant or did the CPG start already?

Speaker A: We originally were a restaurant and we had built the business to three restaurants. Weston, Brookline. And we were near mit right in, uh, Cambridge had, uh, been an inflection point where we were deciding, you know, do we keep raising money and opening new restaurants? Is there going to be something in, I think, like a lot of businesses that are now in the CPG space today. We had had a thought about doing a grocery based product, but Covid really pushed us to foresee that challenge. We didn't have an option. We were trying to figure out how do we meet our customers? And a lot of it at that early stage was just trying things. And, um, we found out that there was a real appetite for high quality frozen dumplings that people couldn't really get at a restaurant given the times of COVID and everything was closed. So what started as just takeout and handing out frozen, making sauces in the restaurant really grew into something greater.

Speaker B: Yeah, I gotta be honest, my kids are eating dumplings every day for lunch. We make them and then I put them in like a little, uh, container you'd put hot soup in. But I'm not using yours, so I'm excited to get yours into the mix.

Speaker A: Well, props to you for making them. It's not easy.

Speaker B: Oh, I'm not making them myself. Can you imagine that? No. God, that'd be crazy. I'm just buying them at Costco in, uh, the big bin, giving them six a day.

Speaker A: I love that. Well, they're the perfect snack for Kids. I mean, that's. I think half the reason Nadia founded the company is she wanted to share the food from her childhood. And this was really born out of like this was her Mac and cheese, her peanut butter and jelly. And now advance to 20, 25. It's for anybody's kid. You don't have to have a Chinese childhood.

Speaker B: I think that's such an interesting marketing spin on it. Like, this was her Mac and cheese, this was her peanut butter and jelly. But it's actually just a touch healthier than your Mac and cheese or, you know, I guess the typical peanut butter and jelly.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's almost like the Totino's pizza rolls. I can remember microwaving those like crazy as a kid. You know, it's like, here, let me throw a bunch of these on a plate. It's almost in more in that realm of things like coming home after school, having a snack or convincing my parents to make them for dinner or something like that. Like, you know, my kids now too, like love pizza rolls. It's crazy.

Speaker A: I was a bagel bites guy myself. But right there with you, I think it, like this is undercurrent that, you know, everyone's coming out with a. It's a better for you. Are we a better for you dumpling? Not necessarily. I think we just really concentrate on great ingredients that end up being a healthier version. You know, we do have lower sodium than your typical dumpling on average. We do have a heritage breed, pork or antibiotic free chicken. Things that I think matter to us. If I'm feeding it to my family, that's what we really focus on. And it has the added benefit of, you know, generally being very tasty as well.

Speaker B: When you're talking to brands or, uh, talking to retailers. Sprouts, we had mentioned luns and barleys. Are you playing up the fact that you have a restaurant when you're in those meetings? And how does that factor in?

Speaker A: You know, it's a great question. Uh, we do. I mean, it's part of our history. We always hit like how we are founded our foundation. I find it a really useful selling point when I'm talking to food service customers. You know, our food service, we're selling the same thing. And if you're a restaurant or you're a ski resort or you're anybody that's serving people food, this is designed to be quick, easy, and also extremely high quality. So a restaurant quality product you can eat at home. That resonates with people in retail and in food service. And I Think it's an important distinction. Like you said, it's not easy to make dumplings from scratch, but to have a handmade dumpling is certainly really valued. And I think that is part of our history, is that it's restaurant quality at home. It's restaurant quality for any kitchen. That story is important to, you know, not just our history, but it's what we're bringing to the table. This is as close as you can get to a handmade dumpling and a kind of wholesale application.

Speaker C: A little bit of a tactical question for you. It sounds like you've been there pretty much since the beginning, right? So how have you. I think it's worthwhile for the brands that listen to this, you know, and you're thinking about building out a team. You're thinking about growing. Like, you know, you mentioned the food service piece. Like, you guys were in food service, so maybe you, you know, or already had a relationship with Cisco or, you know, whoever else, US Foods or whatever. Like, how did you grow into those areas? Like, did you hire people? You know, I think you probably wore a lot of hats in the beginning, but how did you kind of look to kind of piecemeal your team together or bring in expertise or consultants to kind of help you go, like, okay, for sure, we want to, you know, build some food service. We have that history. Let's do that. But, you know, now that you're going into retail, like, how is that the tactical side of building a team or taking the right partners to grow? Like, how has that all come together?

Speaker A: I'd like to think that we had this great plan and foresight. A lot of this was either try it or we kind of pursued it because we were already doing it. So food service, we already had to make the product for our restaurants. Even then, we found that what we were making for our restaurants was not the perfect setup for any restaurant. We sell a ton of dumplings and buns. Other restaurants may not want a 600 dumpling case. So we adjusted things as we went, but we had a really, uh, unique opportunity. The, uh, buyer that we work with at Cisco and European Imports, he ate at a restaurant, like, 10 years ago or eight years ago with the Mike's Hot Honey team, who we happened to be friends with. He said, this sauce is amazing. It's like what I tried in China. Someday you should bottle this, and when you do, come see me. True to his word, seven years later, we had it bottled. He tried it, we grew. And, you know, you'll find that, ah, just like you Guys, certain partners are really willing to lean in. I would say even at Target.

Speaker B: Ryan.

Speaker A: Uh, you know, certain buyers are willing to really get behind brands and certain ones just want to fill the space

Speaker C: and they want a sure thing or whatever.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We've been so lucky to find the right partners that are like, you know, Cisco and European Ports have gotten behind us. Chef's Warehouse, you know, pfg. These places have really look to invest in our brand because it's not easy getting it off the ground in any area. When it comes to like hiring what we did, my plan was always to grow and really lean in, try to do whatever I can until I could afford that next person and or it uh, outgrew my skill set. I'm a generalist in investments. I see a FA charter. I was nothing for cpg. I didn't even know what a barcode was. I remember talking, you know it's a great industry because unless you're a direct competitor, people want to kind of help each other and it's really fun. You see it all the time. Probably the social like with the naturally groups around the country. Generally people are pretty great. Even competitors honestly are generally pretty great. I think it helps to kind of like get better from each other. So I kind of took things to a point where we were getting some KHI contract stuff. I need this VP of sales and I found the best one really fortunate there that we just keep finding people that are great additions to the team. I did all the FP and A work for a while and the finance, the board meetings. I just hired a director of finance a little over a year ago and she's fantastic, admittedly better than I am. So if I can keep hiring people that are smarter or better than me then I've probably done a good job getting it to that point.

Speaker C: How are you finding these great people candidates? Uh, is that just through your time now in the CPG space big time

Speaker A: network, almost everyone has come from a network. We've done LinkedIn and put stuff out there and I've also got some great candidates from there. A lot of times advisors, friends. We have a small investor network that's given us some seed capital. We've been really fortunate. It doesn't happen to everyone. I think it underpins a lot of my story is trying to get involved and I'm still not involved enough. I still don't go to enough industry events. But it's really helped us. You know Andrew came from one of our marketing consultants and he's my VP of Sales now. So they knew he was ready to be like the main guy. Had a wealth of experience with working for other brands and we just hit it off. We found uh, several people that way.

Speaker B: When that VP of sales came on, what was it like? Uh, what were their immediate wins? Can you fill me in on that? First couple months, we hear that typically with a lot of brands, like when they could hire that real salesperson, things just start to move.

Speaker A: It's a great question. I sometimes ask how much quicker could we have done things with him earlier? Couldn't have waited another day. His first day on the job was at uh, Expo West. I think it was day two. He was at Expo west with us two years ago. So two expos would go. It was instantly like, I was like, this is the right guy. I mean he was like the mayor of Expo, shaking hands, kissing babies. This guy clearly knew people in the industry and he seemed well liked. And I think that goes a long way to buyers get attacked from every different angle. I'm sure they have people they work with that they don't love seeing. It was clear to me that he wasn't one of those people. He was really well liked by the people that he interacted with and looking for people that are hungry. I think when it comes down to like a trigger point, a lot of brands can probably, especially if the founder is invested, can dig and get yourself to a million dollars depending on the brand. I think a lot of people could probably do that on their own. And there's something to be said about growing to a critical mass to attract top talent. I don't know exactly where we were at when we hired uh, Andrew, our VP of sales, but we are certainly past that benchmark and I think you definitely need to be on your way a little bit. I'd like to see, you know, if I were going to join, I'd want to have at least a little bit of shelf space. But you know, he quickly organized the company in terms of our calendar, the trade spend that we were doing, some of the metrics we used to uh, evaluate slotting and shelf and trade spend. It was clear from the get go that he had some immediate wins that just helped us as a company organizationally.

Speaker B: And when he came on, what did you use your new time? Like, how did you fill your time? Where did you shift?

Speaker C: Take some time back?

Speaker A: Just.

Speaker C: Yeah, I wish 60 hour weeks instead of 80 hour weeks.

Speaker A: I started going on a couple vacations a year. My wife does love to travel. No, I went to the next buyer and I think if you're, you know, a GM or generalist kind of person, helping grow the business, hopefully you're savvy enough to kind of tackle challenges. I had been running ops for a while with a ops consultant. They did so many great things for us, but what they didn't do is they weren't living and breathing it every day like hiring the salesperson. I knew that we could do a better job if we were focused on it day in and day out. I took over the operations, let the consultant go. And I can tell you that our shipments were never missed. Our productions were always on time. Operations never goes perfectly. But we, you know, just realize if you got someone committed to 40 plus hours a week, you're going to get better results.

Speaker B: You know, speaking about operations too, it's an interesting setup you have where you have frozen and then you have the sauce. Like, I don't know that much about operations, but maybe you could just kind of fill me in and on how that works. Are there different distributors you're dealing with different buyers, I'm assuming. I mean, that's the puzzle for operations, I would imagine.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is. I mean, it's not easy. Anybody will tell you if they're in the cold chain. It is never fun. You might get heat abuse on a product that's frozen. Our dumplings are like ice cream. You will tell if they are heat abused somewhere along the channel. I can only be as good as that is up until it leaves the warehouse. And even then, what if the warehouse leaves it out in the loading dock for too long? Doesn't take as long as you think for dumplings to thaw out and then freeze together a dough ball. Especially since ours are kind of like handmade so they don't get precooked. They really are fresh and like need to be treated as such, just like ice cream. So, you know, definitely keep your POS separate. Do not let people order frozen with ambient because they're almost always coming from a different ship point. That's my first piece of advice. Find ways to merchandise your product together. So you mentioned two different buyers. You're 100% correct. They're almost always different buyers. But there are things brands can do if you have both to try to put them in the same area of the store. So I have freezer, uh, door racks, suction right onto a freezer door. Not every grocer allows them, but they enable me to merchandise my sauce right there in front of the frozen product. It also draws a lot of eyeballs right to that Shelf set that consumers may have been easily able to pass by if it's just a box of frozen and with a bunch of other dumplings.

Speaker B: Can you tell the difference in those stores where you have that merchandising?

Speaker A: Yeah, I've done on the sauce side, I think I get like a 30% lift in sales with my sauce. That's merchandise with the frozen.

Speaker C: Yeah. I feel like the cold chain is not for everybody, I guess. I spent 12 years in the produce industry, so it's like all cold chain, all running. You know, I've told the story on this podcast before, but it's like you're just running stuff from California to Florida or whatever. And this, you know, it's produce, so it's dying. So you're like trying to run it on, you know, cold team trucks for four straight days or whatever it is. It's like I saw, uh, a cold chain break many of the MBA in this business. Like it's a whole different ball of

Speaker A: wax and it's expensive. Ryan, you got an added. You know, for my frozen product, I think any brand like you gotta add a good 5 to 8% on top of your ambient gross margin targets to account for freezer storage and freezer transpo because it is more expensive. And it just takes that one truck driver that wants to save gas on his trip to shut off his cooler for a hundred miles, because that's ultimately what they're doing is they want to be able to get there most efficiently. And he might forget to turn it on when he stops for lunch. And then a pallet of your stuff ends up, you know, arriving all thawed out and then refrozen. That's only happened to us once, but it has happened, and proving it's hard. You know, the other thing I'd tell your listeners is take as much evidence as you can. Show it going on the truck. Show it in good shape, show it palletized. This is true for really any product. It takes a lot of effort, but if you can have support that shows your product is in good shape, you have a lot easier getting recompensated.

Speaker C: If something goes wrong, there's a PSA for you. And all those out there, there's like temp tails that you put on this product. You can actually get like higher end $30 temp tails that will like ping like cell towers. And like take a snapshot of your temperature along the way and you can actually have it like written down of like what your product did in the temp. It went up and down and Stuff. So if you're in need, look those up.

Speaker A: We've tried it a little bit. We don't always get em back but we have messed around and they are uh, well worth it. Even if you're gonna audit new suppliers, like new trucking brokers. It's a great tool. They're not that expensive. I think the most expensive real time one is still under a hundred bucks.

Speaker C: I think they were like 32 bucks or something at the time. We tested them at Target for a while on like berry loads and stuff. Cause you lose a thing of berries at 42 degrees and it's, you know, a bad deal. And I would say, you know, another PSA as long as I'm at it. Three PLs three PLs are super important. And I think you or anyone else out there, it's like you gotta really have the trucking dialed in. It was definitely an afterthought. The smaller the brand I worked with, the less of a priority it was. Which uh, I totally get. You're spending your time on all these things that are important to you and all those kinds of things. So like, you know, not always easy to worry about, but at the end of the day you gotta make uh, sure you have good trucking. I saw a lot of brands fall down. You can't forget about it.

Speaker A: So there's one other thing you made me think of as you said that, you know, we've had a lot of success. We actually have gone in and out of some 3pls and we're setting up a new one. But I've had a lot of success partnering with a local or someone that's kind of local, a trucking broker. And I said I'm going to give you my volume for everything here, but I expect service. I don't have to have the absolute lowest price. And I gave him a few scenarios like take care of my product and I'm going to give you volume. And that guy's still to this day is one of my best, not cheapest options, but generally has given me very good quotes because I'm giving him the volume. And I know that they can do New England better than just about anyone. So that has been a big help for me, is really finding a trusted partner and then kind of giving them that handshake deal. You could contract it out too. But I've never had to really go and shop all that much because I after five years knew what a good quote is on a three pallet run to Maine or whatever.

Speaker B: Interesting with going with the bigger Cheaper option versus smaller, let's say regional option, that maybe you can get better service. I'm talking to a couple distributors. I mean you must work with Rainforest, but it seems like in the distributor model and I'd love to hear your take on this. How does like the Rainforests of the world compared to like the UNFIS or the Kahis of the world or like you know, smaller regional. I'm, um, not trying to have you knock on anyone, but just like what it's like maybe working with big guys and then the not so big guys,

Speaker A: they're all so different and so the same. And what do I mean by that? You know, you think, for example, a DSD distributor like Rainforest would be a lot more expensive. But unifying Keik your bottom line and contribution margin doesn't always end up being that different. Even if you may have other fees with Rainforest up front to pay for some of their sales and marketing team. I find that the startup going with local DSD distributors really helps you to penetrate those independent markets, the smaller regional chains, and help you to kind of start establishing that foothold in your neighborhood while also developing your data story. I've always said Rainforest was very fundamental in getting us from 200 stores to 1,000 stores. I don't think I could have done it without a distributor that had kind of that built in sales engine. And their sales teams are excellent. I think to be really successful you got to be ready to partner with them. They do have like incentive programs sometimes they're salespeople. You may not make a ton of money doing those, but uh, you will get a lot of new doors in many cases if you have a good product. You also, I think a lot of times get more opportunities to be in front of the salespeople with the DSTs than you do with a larger K and Unifi. And that being said, KE and Unifi are also great. No one can reach big national chains like a Whole Foods, a Sprouts, a Harris Teeter or a heb. Your DSC distributors at some point will be limited and you're going to reach a point in your growth where it's hard to go and find a regional one for every region you want to enter. At some point you need that bigger scale to get across the country to multiple units, multiple DCs. You got to be mindful in your growth. When you're ready to take that jump, most brands will know it. This is the way to get to all the sprouts in the U.S. for example, in many cases you don't have an option anyway, right? Wegmans, you can only go through a few distributors. One of them's regional based and one of them's a little bit larger. But you only have those two options.

Speaker B: Is there like a secret sauce, so to speak, with how many distributors you're working with now? And were you working with Rainforest? Were they kind of your first distributor to get from that 200 to 1000 and then you are distributed now by others?

Speaker A: Secret sauce? No. Although I think everyone should be mindful that you only want so many people in one territory covering the same customer. So I wouldn't want to have, you know, six distributors all fighting over Massachusetts. It's just too crowded. Your people making those sales, they want to make sure it's worth it when they go into a new store. If they got five people fighting over the same shelf space with your product, I think it can get a little overpopulated, overcrowded, and they might lose some of that incentive. I don't like to have too many overlapping each other. I think that's important. And you have to be mindful of, like Rainforest, for example, sometimes has exclusives in terms of territories for some of their regions. So you have to be mindful of who you kind of, um, write into the contract with that. When you get started with those distributors like Rainforest, do you have any, like,

Speaker B: success stories for brands that are looking to, like, start with a Rainforest, uh, or a regional distributor like that you would recommend you decide you're going to partner with Rainforest. What's the engine to get them going? Because, you know, it's like the more you're involved, I'm assuming the better, the more you're in front of them, like, the nicer you are, the better pricing. Like any specifics?

Speaker A: They are great at getting behind products. A gonna have something good. Food always wins. Have some that tastes good, you know, sure, you could have a million sodas. They're all kind of the same. And the best tasting one, I think always has a leg up. But getting started, I would want to be in a general sales meeting. They host several a year. Rainforest, for example, most regionals will have sales meetings either once a month, once a quarter. This is an opportunity for a brand to take their product, sample it to the people that will be selling it, pitch them your brand story, and then make connections. This whole industry, no matter what channel you're in, it's all based on relationships. And when you can go to the Massachusetts general sales meeting and find the four best reps that you know Sell the most in that region. And at least three of those four really seem to like your product. It's well worth it then to go on the road and try to do a sales blitz with them. Spend a couple days visiting key accounts, go meet that regional chain like a uh, Crosby's a Brothers. If the opportunities is existing. That's been incredibly helpful when you're starting up. And then I mentioned they do sometimes have sales incentives. Hey, for every case that you sell up to a thousand units, I'll give you 50 cents per case. Over that I'll give you 75 cents. And I have found that you might be writing a check. And the bigger the check is, hopefully the happier are because it means they've sold that many more units. So it drives volume. I really like to add incentives like for me get me some um, shelf displays. Like I'll give you $5 for every shelf display you place and for every new account I'll give you another $5 or whatever. It might be just throwing numbers um, up there. Salespeople respond to incentives and they all seem to surprise, surprise, sell really well. When we have those programs going, is

Speaker B: money the always the best incentive. Is there another way like some of the pharmaceutical companies or we'll do like win a trip to Jamaica or something.

Speaker A: I've done that as well. They've both been effective. I've given someone, I said hey, I'm gonna take you know, you and your wife out to a great dinner forever. The best salesperson is and we'll take out to dinner or invite their family to dinner at a restaurant. You know, that is the. One of the nice things is you can have some of those like regional sales meetings. Tell em to come in for lunch, serve em lunch. You know, it's a nice tool to have. So money, not everything, no, but it's just ways to kind of activate. Especially early on. At least for us, I found it really helpful.

Speaker B: Let's jump into some marketing. As a social agency, your social looks great. It seems like your founder's involved. How does the operations work there and do you see it pushing retail velocity? How do you factor social into your spend?

Speaker A: We have a budget, we have someone monitoring it that basically generates a lot of the content. She works with my founder, she works with my culinary specialist who like does like menu ideation and will make some of the cooking videos you see. We'll also spend a boost our sales and we'll spend a little bit on some campaigns with influencers. We've just started investing in territories where we're launching our retail. For example, Carolina's with Harris Teeter and we're looking for content creators down there that hopefully aren't wildly expensive and out of budget. But we want to do some campaigns to build brand awareness to the brand, let people figure out what we're about, do some marketing studies and learn more about our product. These are all I think important parts of where we're at today with social just getting smarter and meeting our customers where they are, which is increasingly on the social media and digital front.

Speaker B: How are you tracking that? Like that's what we struggle that with a lot of brands. You know we work with brands that are launching it, Harris Teeter and the Carolinas and we have a boosted budget where we're targeting zip code locations of optimized buyers or inquiring content. And let's say you spend five grand or ten grand on content and ads. How do you factor that into roi?

Speaker A: It's pretty hard as you alluded to. I mean there's uh, the obvious attracting your velocities. Do I get a bump? Is there a promotion going on at the same time? You'll never know from that. Exactly. The one thing I've been trying to look into more is Instacart. So Instacart has great metrics on new to brand sales for search like you know, people searching for dumpling daughter more. I have Amazon as well so I can track if there's spikes on the Amazon side relative to where those orders are going from a state. You can't really get too detailed on it but there's I think tangential ways that you can look at the data. There's also a few providers out there that I've looked at that do try to really get into like the phones. How many people are going into the supermarket that they can target those phones? There's some foot traffic metrics. I haven't found a perfect clear way to do it.

Speaker B: If you do, let me know. One of our clients, pickled vegetable company called Picker Fresh, some nice distribution in Walmart had a call it random person, like a fan of the brand, create a piece of content that got over 7 million views. And we saw spikes like throughout. Specifically we saw spikes in Walmart. We saw spikes on Amazon and our TikTok shop. So the TikTok shop, it was kind of obvious like it came from that the website. We felt pretty confident. But then we also saw some spikes in Walmart. But we also did like three other things. Change the size from 8 to 16 ounce, change the box that it goes in. So it's never just one thing. But it'd be nice if it was because then I'd have a better story to tell people.

Speaker A: You're right. And I'd say, like, I'm hungry for data and I'm never properly fed. It is hard to get a lot of it outside of spins, which most brands don't invest on early on because they can't. It's expensive. You know, I think there are a few companies out there that are starting to get keen on this, but it's still incredibly hard to have a true line in, especially on the creator side. The only thing I can think of is some of like the affiliate links that you can now, uh, create on Amazon store.

Speaker B: It's tough though. Yeah, those are tough too.

Speaker A: You know, some of the TikTok links and stuff, you know, some stuff is clear. We have Bon Appetit. Read an article about our sauce and it's what their editors love. You know, instant sales spike on Amazon.

Speaker B: Did you have to pay for that Bon Appetit placement?

Speaker A: Yep, just went down there, made food, got in there and it's a great opportunity that we were excited to get. There's probably a lot of brands out there that, especially me in the start I wasn't trying to generate media content with AI. Now, especially if we have like, we have our cookbook, you can feed it a lot of stuff and it'll turn out some pretty good writing prompts. Then you can kind of shop around the different publications. We don't do enough of it today, but you can be your own PR agency if you want to be.

Speaker B: Uh, you doing anything fun with AI? Anything like, well, what's your AI tech stack look like these days?

Speaker A: Uh, uh, helps me write emails once in a while. I think it does for everybody. I've actually been using a lot for target hunting, so I'm looking for targets transitioning again, taking in more of a food service sales role. And so I'm looking for targets to optimize my travel. If I'm head to California, I, uh, want to be in front of customers before and after a food show. If I'm heading to Colorado for a KHI show, I'm trying to partner with the Cisco team there to try to see if I can get in front of some ski resorts or some hotels or whatever. I think it's doing a decent job at helping me cultivate at least an initial list. And I think whether it's retail or food service, sales reps love if you come with here's what I think my targets are. Here are places I'd like to visit, and here's where I know we've worked. And they can take that and say, all right, well, you got 15 here, these eight are mine. Let's go visit them. Uh, just helps you to kind, uh, of get that one step further.

Speaker B: Yeah, you'd be like, teeing up Ryan right now. Just for our audience listeners. I think Ryan, like, his kid must have just got home or something, but he stepped out for a minute. But that was like teeing him up right there. We used AI in a new way to launch a for a client. You know, they launched in the regional and we ran some geotargeted ads with creators. But we boosted instead of like, what we typically would boost for is video through play. We want people to watch as long as the video as possible. This time we boosted for engagement, asking for feedback. Like, what do you think of the dumplings and the sauce? And we got, let's call it a thousand comments. And we just put that into ChatGPT and ask it for, like a sentiment analysis. That was really nice. So, you know, from there we also like, created content, like, of what we liked, what type of creators. So that small spend on the boost also got in front of people, like the right geo target. Take all those comments, do it in ChatGPT, and then we're able to kind of make smarter comments, smarter content, and smarter decisions moving forward.

Speaker A: I mean, it's unbelievable. If you're not using it, uh, I think you're at a disadvantage. We use it for buyers. I mean, if you're talking to a buyer or even an investor, whoever it might be, you know, learn about them, whatever you can. IAI is a decent research tool if they have any kind of public profile, you know, that kind of prep, I think can go a long way sometimes, especially if that person has just written an article, been quoted, whatever it might be. Makes you look a little smarter without having to dig through everything for sure.

Speaker B: I got one more question that came up when I was searching. Your, um, mentions on Instagram was Pop Up Grocer. I'm a New Yorker at heart. I lean a little more New England now since I moved to Connecticut. But I'm so curious about Pop Up Grocer. I mean, it looks beautiful. Like there seems like they're checking a lot of boxes. But you obviously spent some time and resources, money. What's your take on Pop Up Grocer? Would you recommend it? Would, uh, you do it again?

Speaker A: I started out Isaac As a pop up grocer, non believer, I was like, I don't know, you know you have to pay to be in there. Sure, that's like other grocery stores, but it's a one store in the Lower east side. It's highly curated. It's um, a great place to take pictures. Is it a place that a brand's gonna sell a ton of product? No, it's not. You know, it's one store. You just, you're not gonna see a ton of volume there, but you will be seen. And so if you're young and you're looking to get some notoriety on the shelf. New York City's got a ton of people and that store gets a ton of visitors. Bev nuts in town, they might go visit. You're there for fancy foods. A lot of people are going there. And happier groceries down the street.

Speaker B: Good call to partner with like a pop up grocer around fancy food.

Speaker A: That's a great idea if you can like afford it. I have found as long as your product sells well, is a brand that is getting some eyeballs. I think it was worth it. We probably didn't make a ton of money there, but I know we got a ton of impressions for the brand. So to me it's a marketing spend and you can hope to basically break even because they're not going to order a ton. It's expensive to ship frozen. There's, you know, if you're only shipping a couple cases. But for me it was worth it. And if you do well, sometimes they may not have something to slot in. And we were very lucky that we got a couple rotations kind of added on. Our uh, one rotation became I think five or six and we've, gosh, we must have been there for nearly three quarters of a year now.

Speaker B: Are you still there?

Speaker A: Yeah, we're just coming out like right now. And we started last November or something. I mean it was, it was a while. We've been in there for quite a while and we only had to pay once. So that for us was great. That's not gonna be everyone's experience, but we were very fortunate. We were one of their best selling frozen items. I think our boxes look great on the shelf. Our sauces went well. They'll let you do some cool stuff too, you know, book signings, cookbook. They'll like let you do some demo stuff, you know, it's not bad. But I think everyone needs to go in saying this is a marketing expense for me and I'll be pumped to break even that's what I would advise from a financial standpoint, but if it will be worth it.

Speaker B: Well, listen, I. I hope Ryan's okay. Ryan, we miss you. We. We'll see you on LinkedIn. He kind of left abruptly, but, Brent, man, you did not disappoint.

Speaker A: Oh, thanks.

Speaker B: I really appreciate you. Um, I mean, I'll see you at Expo West. I hope I see you somewhere in Boston before.

Speaker A: Well, if you do come into the restaurant, we'd love to treat you to. You and. Or Ryan to lunch. Vice versa. I'll have to hit you up when I'm in Connecticut or New York. I know I'll be in both places where quite often. So.

Speaker B: Thanks, Brent. Appreciate you.