Episode 10: Sales and Marketing - The Many Channels to Sell Your Product

[Music] Welcome to Food Products FAQ, a podcast where we discuss how we make food products in the steps it takes to make yours. I'm Adam Yee. And I'm Brian Chow. And we're both independent food consultants who've been through the industry for over a decade and we're here to share with you how we make great food products that have been sold in thousands of stores. And we are in the final episode of this series, the short series about making food products. And I would say that we are at the point where we've kind of made the product and we've had all the checks and balances associated with all the episodes. And now we're ready to actually sell it, which is kind of some could are used the most important part of a food product. Yeah, I would say that it's the marketing and the branding aspect of things helps define the R&D process in of itself. It helps define the product portfolio or product strategy, you're moving forward. And then also the sales side of things helps inform us in terms of velocities and customer feedback. In terms of actual purchase intent on how to actually manage the whole business and or make any appropriate changes, whether it's a cost of goods sold reduction or a difference in pricing strategy or something that's more market forward. These are all different moving parts that we will cover today. Yeah. And you know, is what a kind of focus on this. We are specifically focusing on consumer package goods, which is kind of we we have the acronym in the industry, which at now they think about a lot of people don't know what it is unless you like really spell it out, but only the CPG industry knows. So CPG means consumer packaging goods generally it's food, but you can you can have other things as CPG as well. You can have out of this. There's a great company called Dude Wipes, for instance, that is a CPG product and they sell what but what I would paper for a bit. Yeah, basically it's for lagging very dirt, right? And they have great marketing and whatever. So, you know, a lot of these products are designed to grab your attention. There's a whole industry design or selling individual units of a product to a consumer and using different methods to do so. And these are all loved together in the category known as CPG. All the strategies are generally designed for CPG, especially ones that we're going to talk about. And there are other models too. We'll dive into a little of them like food service you can argue is not CPG, but in general I think the main focus of this will be because your package goods. Definitely. Great, how do we want to start this? Yeah, there's a lot of things here that we can tackle and in such a short amount of time. Let's start with Adam, what's your experience in terms of marketing and distribution and then moving on into sales side of things? Yeah, so I will say that for this clarinet everyone, we are not experts in this field and there are plenty of experts in this field. Probably more prolific than food scientists, I would say. And one resource I always recommend to get started is startup CPG to be honest, maybe my good friend Daniel and actually I knew him before it was even called startup CPG back in the Bay Area. All I say is that like that's a huge resource. It's a lot of resources. There's also a lot of third parties going on in there, which you may or may not agree with in terms of like budgetary spend and we'll talk about that a little bit. But yeah, I think the big one is that I was fortunate to be in a CPG company from not only in a corporate lens, but I would say more specifically a startup lens. So what's so both food that was from a zero to one build. So I built that from scratch with my co-founder from an idea to around a hundred stores, which is not a lot of stores. But I think, actually that store amount means something in terms of the, because the scale of the business, my most successful product, which I hadn't pretty much no say in the marketing of it or the sales of it, pretty chicken plus is in 7,000 stores, for instance, and probably more. So the scale of stores is kind of a weird metric we use in the retail space at least. And there's different ways you can sell your CPG product. So I'm just going to start with there in terms of specifically sellable foods way of doing it. And the big one is that one we did have money to market it. So we did get funding for that. But we really just went to small stores in San Francisco. And I think people need to understand location actually does matter quite a lot. Big cities generally have a higher hit rate. And you also have a higher small store culture, I'd say. You know, with San Francisco is one of them that has this kind of local vibe, local stores where there are just several small shops in the city itself where you can go and pitch product to the store on it directly. And if it, if it looks cool, if it fits their category and if it makes some money, that's actually, we'll get more into that. That's probably a sure far one that you'll get in. And so yeah, you just have to look like a legitimate product. You have to have a certain category that you'll probably fit in. So ours was flat-based frozen dumplings and dumplings are a big deal in the may area specifically. And they are trending. So we were likely to get into small stores because we had this unique offering for them. But you know, it required us to understand who are we in. I don't want to say competition with, but I will say we're in competition with for shell space in that category. So we started off specifically going to specific grocery stores that would take just us in general. And there's a barrier to a point where they'll ask for a distributor because they don't want to onboard it themselves. They want to use a distributor to do that. And that's kind of like a kind of like a phase two of the whole retail process. Basically, there are small distributors. We use the company called Good Stuff. But there's a few other ones in the Bay Area. And they are able to pretty much store your product and through a cut will send your product out to these independent retail stores. And that works around like maybe 50 store, though, say, but it's only in your local area. So that there's only a certain range that they can go in. I will say that a lot of cities don't have this luxury. I would say San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York are the strongest areas. Chicago. And Chicago. So I actually want to talk to you about that. I think Chicago, from what I understand because of the Fox Trust situation, is not super good. But I know it has a really good food, CDG culture, but I wouldn't mind you explaining that a little bit. Sure. So just for the audience, I currently live in the Chicago, Chicago land area. But I did grow up in the San Francisco Bay Area. It's been a bit of time in the Pacific Northwest. Which Chicago, it's very robust in the large distribution space. K, you know, fine things of that nature. Regionally, it depends on where you go. So if you're looking in terms of food service, there's a large food service traction and distribution over in the Chicago, Chicago land area. And that if you're going into the very small route of things, it's going to be a little more difficult. You would basically have to look more into the tri-state area. So like if Illinois touches Wisconsin, bit of Indiana, Michigan, things of that nature, Iowa, etc. We're looking at basically Wisconsin, Illinois and or Indiana/Michigan as your three tri-state. That's where you'll have a regional growth in of itself, where you can actually have a reliable distributor. If you're only going to surface have distributors service that of the Chicago area, it's going to be a little bit more difficult because of the type of stores and the quantity of stores that they're able to reach. There's going to be a lot of competition in that sense. So in a regional level, you may have reliable, you may not necessarily have consistent, real sources in terms of distribution. I want to go back on the city situation though. So you didn't mention like Chicago is, you know, it is harder for small players. I think location does matter in a lot of these things. And honestly, like, specifically, we chose San Francisco because we knew about how much easier it is to get into independent stores. You could literally walk there. I think that's a really strong thing. Let's say with New York, LA is a little different, but there's kind of a flashy culture involved in there. But most cities don't have the infrastructure actually to handle smaller CBG companies right off the bat. And also they don't have the income level as well because New York, LA, and San Francisco, both are very high network individuals. The stores that the small stores specifically, they cater towards these high network individuals. And let's be frank, most of the beginning consumer package, good companies focus on these individuals. And I think that that is something that I've noticed a lot at least growing in the space is that targeting location is pretty vital. in terms of how you grow, especially if you are limited in capital. And I know this is like kind of ironic that you have to start at a big expensive city to get started, but this is kind of a pathway. Most CPG companies are going towards now unless they have a ton of capital to do an immediate launch in another place in the country. But in general, like at least for soluble foods, that's how we got started. With around 50 stores, we got a lot of pretty good deals going to trade shows, which allows us to amplify. And then eventually, when we wanted to expand regions, which is the next step. And going to LA, we would have to get a distributor like Kee or Unify. Unfortunately, these are probably the only two best options. And only two people will accept. Though there are some other players that are popping up. You would then have to, and this gets into all another complication, which you'll probably have to touch another expert about. But in general with Kee and Unify, those are the main distributors until you get even, like even past the Whole Foods stage pretty much. So after you get into Kee and Unify and go to more regional stores, eventually you'll have to go through cycles to bigger stores like sprows and Whole Foods. We're not there yet for soluble foods for instance, but most established food companies do have these sales cycles for these bigger grocery store chains. And that's only in the retail sense. I mean, we go to all sorts of other factors, but this is how we grew soluble foods at least. Did I know the source? Yeah, it's a good number. 50 stores is a good number from a regional basis. Because essentially if you want leveraged and go to a distributor, they want to know if they're going to increase their book of accounts as in the more locations that they can drop off or optimize their shipping routes. Essentially, that's how a distributor would think. So 50 is a very good number for them to operate within as on a regional basis. If it's less than that, then they start to kind of consider, is it worthwhile for their own manpower to pick up the products or even ship the products? Because is it out of the way in terms of the mileage and radius? Is it just not selling well in which it's just taking up space in their trucks? Things of that nature. So they're accounting for those type of risks. So if you're to be able to do direct store distribution with these independent small shops, first, you kind of prove the point of sales and the product market fit, then you have more leverage for the distributor to get you from 50 to 100 plus type of stores in that regional area and then start expanding to different regions in of itself. Yeah, and I think some people might have some anxiety getting into stores or just dropping on in and asking about it. Yes, it's a lot of anxious work. I will say that. I think the only thing you need is a good approach to get to the person who's in charge or what we call a buyer. He also need a UPC code that works and you can get those online. Don't pirate those codes because you'll get in trouble or it just won't work. So do that proper diligence on that. And also, I actually think this is more important. A good website or a good brand presence actually really works very well because now people can just look you up in instant. And if they don't see that you're legitimate, then they probably won't accept you. The more legitimate you see them and the more that you can get the money or the more they believe that shelving you guys will give them money, the higher chance you are going to be in the store. So that's always something I always tell beginning brands about that because that is the ultimate reason why retail is a little onboard you because they see potential in your brand to expand their business. Yeah, essentially if you don't have the bandwidth to do this and you don't have an internal team to do the sales, you can hire up sales brokers and there are brokerage firms, but there is a huge asterisk involved with that that goes down to the contract. Are they going to try to do on a retained basis first? In which case, you don't even know how well they can sell your product and you're already putting money to a different person that's just walking around with your product. And so that's really the tradeoff is if you have trust or have built trust or have a network of brokers that you can trust, whether they're friends or otherwise, then and you have the budget for it, then you can go into that direction. But it is a lot of money. And on top of that, they're asking for commission for every sale they'll make. And sometimes the business development lifecycle could be very long. If it's small independent shops, the buyer may be hard to get a hold of because they manage the entire storefront. And that's a lot of different categories that they manage. The larger stores even on a regional basis, they do something called a category review in which every year the buyers of each category will receive in bulk or massive amounts of submissions of products for them to review. And they are always inundated with new products to review. And for them, it's you have to have a right storytelling and the right timing and the right relationships. So sometimes a broker can kind of cut through all that mass and then be able to say, hey, we've already established a working relationship with said retail buyer over the years. And if you want to get into the store, it just cost you this much. So you want to be able to evaluate that type of budget to get into. If you want to use a broker, definitely. So what I experience with brokers is that they do not guarantee that your products will get in the stores. What they specifically do is they guarantee you a meeting or they guarantee themselves a meeting more so with the buyer and then pitch your product along with all the other products that they're pitching as well. So I I dare to completely understand this. Like the broker does not have 100% your interest at heart. They have a bunch of other products that you need to expose to let's say Whole Foods or something like that. You have to have really strong brand communication to really reach into them. And also, as you mentioned, Ryan, timing is extremely important too because, you know, one example is that for Sobba Foods, we got an opening for a couple of slots in a certain store in San Francisco because a certain frozen Asian brand, Annie Wooz, was actually pulling back product and that left the void which we were able to fill in. I would say actually understand your competitive set or the people that you're competing against. And, you know, let's be frank, you're competing against everyone in the retail store and specifically in your radius where your product is going to be on the shelf. That is actually really important to understand. And that's in a price perspective and a branding perspective and a pagging perspective. That is pretty vital in terms of how retailers think about putting your product on their shelves. Yeah. And then going back to the expansion plan, if you're trying to go outside of the United States, oftentimes you are going to have to work with some sort of broker, not necessarily just a customs broker to manage the customs documentation, but also brokers that connect you to distributors or even to retailers for said new region, a new country in of itself. So focus more of your attention domestically before thinking about exporting. If you have the budget for it, go for it. And if there's a large interest, go for it. But if you don't have the budget and you're not necessarily able to understand the logistics, it's going to be a large hassle. And there's a lot of people that are involved in which you may start losing a good amount of margin. Yeah. And I'll say this too. Like most people think they're brand, you can see all the shelves they'll buy right away. Most of the time, it's not the case. There's so much competition in all channels, I would say, in the food sector that people generally gravitate towards the same things they always want to choose. It's just in terms of a risk perspective, it's easier for someone to buy the same thing than something different inherently that's true. So your product is different for their lifestyle. And therefore it is a lot harder for them to change their habits. Their habits, yeah. Correct. I think that is something to keep in mind is that if you don't have the marketing or a way to educate your consumer, or then it will be less likely they're going to buy your product when they go to any type of either grocery store or even a D to C campaign, the messaging is not clear or convincing enough, they just will ignore it. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, you're trying to build an authentic story, authentic to yourself, a story and connect that to other people. And if you're going into retail stores, essentially, you're taking the messaging from online, if you decide to go B to C and basically connect with people and show that that particular store has XYZ people shopping in that store. And that is a more convincing value proposition for said retail buyer because at the end of the day, a retail buyer is thinking more in the context of real estate. They have only X amount of shelf space available for this particular category. And so they could either pick something that's most promising, like the Fortune 500 type of brands, or they would have to take a risk for your type of brand. So what's your value proposition to take up that space? And how can people go to said real estate space on the shelf and actually buy that particular product? So you need to be able to convince that buyer. They're very conservative and very marginal in thinking about the intention, entirety of their store specifically their category because there's X, Y, Z stores that they have to manage or think about if it's more of a larger regional chain or even nationwide chain. And in that case, it's a lot of pressure because not all stores will have the same demographic. Maybe you'll have to pitch them. Let's do a regional launch of, you know, San Francisco Bay area or only Chicago because you know the demographic very well in that particular area. Yeah, and let's talk about more about stories because I think that's pretty important. You know, how do we get people to know about our product? And that's really difficult. Yeah, just just being in the front line specifically was consumer package goods like it is very, very tough for a consumer to be condensed about your product. And there's several ways to do it. Social media is a very strong tool to do that. And I would say a lot of brands have been successful leveraging social media. But it is one extremely exhausting actually to build up any social media. And generally when you hire social media person, you're not thinking of paying them a lot. Even though they do probably more work than other more important professions. But it is a ton of work is a ton of social awareness. It is a ton of humility too because you know I posted content and sometimes I feel bad when it doesn't resonate with people. Right. So which means I just get zero likes. So I think like it's important to understand that there are so many ways to show your product to the world. My advice is to try a lot of them. And once he finds into that works, it resonates. Keep on repeating around that area. You can do that with social media. That is probably the cheapest option is to do that. There are other ways to do that. There are better experts for this called paid ads. You can use Facebook ads or TikTok shop or something or even influencers, which I don't know if you are working with them, but they they are kind of random in a sense. And yeah, I need a big one though is that you know in general to narrow down the scope of trying everything to see if people are able to product. You really do have to understand specifically the type of person buying your product. Yeah. So a story I have is I work with a technology platform social media platform. They're headquartered in Taiwan. So it's mainly Asian Asian Americans that are looking at these different platforms and they're tapping into the influencers specifically Taiwanese influencers or Japanese influencers to be able to create products. Essentially they've hired a team of operators and brand developers to be able to say, okay, we're going to work with an influencer and be able to create a product. And so what I do is I help with the food safety side of things, helping them connected to getting connected to contract manufacturers of that nature. But essentially when you're working with an influencer, they are the face of the company. They are not necessarily thinking about the operations. You have to guide them through the operations and all the brand and operations people have to kind of do all the support. So really it's just it's just a face to the company and of course, you know, their risk is their brand reputation. They're face and they're social credit if you will. And so effectively it's finding some synergy to be able to find ways in creating feasibility in commercialization as well as figuring out how far is their reach in terms of consumption. So however many people they reach out to you are going to do some quick math in terms of how many potential customers can actually buy the product. Then you can actually figure out how many of the price should be produced and then that helps you figure out the minimum order quantities if it's realistic. So that's their one of their strategies in deploying the particular products. So another way to think about it is within the US framework, you know, there's the whole feastables and Mr. Beasts with a chocolate model and then there's like I think it was like snack blocks, which is a bunch of YouTubers that are like ninja stars or martial artists and whatnot. Try to you know create something very similar and like think what was it the ninja fruit ninjas or something like that that game. It's essentially they're trying to create some like fruit shoes in the things of that nature. So effectively they they have the influencer own X percent of the company. But they have an entire management team to be able to manage that. So if you think about in that context that level of success requires a lot of money to be able to acquire those type of influencers for a lot of startups. What you actually want to do is you want to find somebody that's not hugely influential because then they are very expensive and you have to manage a lot of the expectations and communications. If you're starting off what you want to do is you either you either do one of two things you find smaller niche social media influencers that have less than a hundred thousand followers. You know that they'll have some sort of traction and then you want to build with them something of value so that as they're growing the traction you're there you are scaling with them in that capacity. So that's one way to kind of think about how do you can leverage an influencer and you can offer them if you if they want to be a face of the company 10 to 15% equity in exchange. So if you see the value in the very well actually that's not that's a it's a really bad offer honestly that's my thing on it but that happened. I've seen that and the other way is you basically figure out how to grow your your brand reputation and then you're able to tap into whether it's a store count or some sort of intellectual property or just some sort of authentic. Story then you tap into the celebrities of the world so it's for example like Simulieu partnered with me. And so he becomes the face he invests money and then he's pushing out product in that capacity so you have a very risky proposition in the very beginning if you are trying to figure out what kind of social influence or you can scale with or you have a different route in which you kind of delay the process until you have product market fit and you are in the market. And you are in a better position to actually get something to not only investing your company but also be part of the face of the company. Yeah so another example is David's bar from Peter Rawls are X bar because he was a second time founder he kind of knows the game but one of his strategies was actually getting people like Andrew Hubertman to I don't know if his invest or something they use some type of language to assume that he has some type of stake in the bar. Andrew Hubert is a huge health influence I think is like one other guy to that invest in who's really big in the health space and sometimes just came back fire too because if the influencer does not align with the brand's proposition then people just get kind of their wires crossed and one it may not be just effective in general but to it just may people might see it as a cash grab a lot of the Kardashian products seem to be like that. I think one kind of insensitive ad was like beyond meat hiring Kim Kardashian to try the product and and show her on TV eating beyond meat products apparently there's river sins you didn't even want to touch the product or didn't eat the product. So like and and that is a pretty bad ad because when you have someone who doesn't align with your brand things can go kind of wonky. And you know micro influencers is what the industry calls them which are under 100 K followers when they are a craption as well they most of them are okay business people they're not the best and most of them really don't have your best interest at heart when it comes to selling a product they have to really resonate with your brand to where they want to sell it for it to be really effective. Most of the time brands do the guy in the spray and pray for micro influencers because micro influencers need money to because they feel like their content is important but there are studies saying like sometimes these are not effective because the messaging just doesn't get across so you need you need the messaging to be crystal clear and the person saying that message to also resonate with your brand as well. Yeah I definitely agree it's it basically is very risky if you to start early on and saying oh by brand strategies or to scale has to work with an influencer or a bunch of influencers it's a lot of money upfront if you have the money great but most of who we work with don't honestly have the budget for that nor the time it's it's both money and time that's sinking all together. Yeah and there's a successful like and it go evidence for influencers or even celebrities that have done a really good job at this I think one one of these Ryan Reynolds who he has like aviation again in a couple other specifically consumer focus brands that have made a good profit but I would say Ryan Reynolds has a business. And it's going to be a marketing agency that focuses entirely on getting a stake in the company and then really going hard on marketing specifically they strategy is to be really fast on trends and put really professional ads specifically Ryan Reynolds on it and so Ryan Reynolds knows what he's doing most leverage don't know what they're doing. when it comes to these types of collaborations. Yeah, I mean, that's not to say that what we're saying here, the scary and the high-risk part should scare you away. We're just trying to be able to empower you just like every other episode. And so if you have a specific strategy and you have a clear communication and you have some connections into the space as unfair advantages, go ahead and deploy them. We're not saying don't do these things. And we're here to really support in the back end. We want to be able to understand all these different moving parts because that influences the whole R&D process. That influences the whole operations process. Yeah, I will say that maybe I would do want to scare people because this is a very competitive space. And I think we've personally have seen a lot of products not even go to market or launch and have not succeeded in the market. And I think that it's something to be aware of is that you just need to really be careful about, or you have to be resourceful, I would say, about how you launch your product. And sometimes it works on a bit while. And the market is very random. No one can really predict how people react to your product until it really is face first into the consumer's hands. And you have to also navigate how the consumer will react to your product and what they'll say to you about how the detriment of the product, even though they may or may not be true, for example, is source to assaulty, for some people yes, for some people no, right? You know, source is mostly salt. There are just these things that you have to be aware of that consumers are wind bombarded all the time with competitive products. And so you really have to figure out either consumer and or your product and what resonates the most. So let's talk a little bit more about the different media form factors. We've talked about social media at kind of high level, but when you're looking to social media, there's the picture formats like the Instagrams at the world. And then there's more like the TikTok, which are more video formats. And then there's of course audio, which is what we're doing with podcasts. So Adam, do you have any experience or what you've seen through each of these different mediums, what's taking off or anything of that nature? Yeah, so I would say that just being someone who has a decent amount of success with podcasting, all of these mediums have a different way of conveying brand authenticity. And I will say that and I've interviewed a lot of great brands that talk about their strategy. For let's start with the most common one. I would say Instagram is the most common specifically for consumer, consumer page goods. One because you have essentially a digital billboard that is free that you can manipulate however you want and their lost strategies behind that. And you can post things in pretty ubiquitous formats. So you can post pictures, but you can also post videos. I will say with Instagram, specifically with several foods, we do curate, which means that we, I would just honestly bluntly say we take time making the content before we post it and that helps a lot with Instagram specifically because Instagram, the content, you do see it initially and you might forget about it, but generally it does last for a long time actually. And so Instagram is really good at pretty pictures for lack of a better term and destined general, it allows you to focus a lot on your page and develops like kind of some, you know, there's so many interesting strategies you can do with Instagram. But I would say Instagram is the most common for consumer package goods just because it is kind of more substantial, I'd say. And then TikTok or video format or short form video is really good at authenticity from what I learned from Candice from game is that TikTok specifically looks for viral content that is authentic and or resonates with people and they have an ability to do that with essentially the algorithm. So I would say that with most TikToks, it is a, it is kind of random to see what works and what doesn't work for your audience. So it's a really good metric of testing out content that may or may not work and it can be completely random until you get a certain vibe going with your brand. One example I think is like not a butter has these really crazy ads just like these, these trippy acid trip ads that do really, really well on their platform on TikTok because it's just so weird and they capitalize on that. They probably, you might get argue they own that type of content because no other brand could do that or a brand does do that. It's not considered authentic because they copy nutty, nutter butter. And you know, this is like a really old cookie brand too, right? So the best guy I believe. And so like a lot of these are pretty, what TikTok specifically is all about testing a lot of content, seeing what is authentically viral and then capitalizing on that. And then with podcast specifically is more of a authentic communication. So when you advertise or talk on podcasts, you're leveraging a person's personality specifically to read and add. And because from what I've learned for podcasting is that because you hear this person and you hear them for probably hours, honestly, in some cases, for some of the bigger players, you hear them talk for hours. You start to believe that they're your friends. These are called a social, parasolous relationship. And therefore from what I have realized is that when a friend recommends me something specifically, I will generally choose a choice. Like if they recommend me a car, I will consider that car option. If they recommend me a type of shoe. Like yeah, shoes is a big one. I don't really care about shoes, but a lot of my friends do care about shoes. They would recommend me like hoca's, right? So the word of mouth component of podcasting is pretty strong. It's not as strong as directly from your friends, but there has shown some resonance behind that specifically. And oh, I forgot like Twitter and now that is Blue Sky right now is starting to get more popular and that's more for kind of constant peppering of your brand though. It is hard to be authentic in those because the content is so short form. Though people have took advantage of this, I think one example is beyond meets threads accounts is just this little chaotic. She calls herself a little, I assume so she is just the language seems like it. A little green, a little green cow with a cape. Just saying unhidged things on threads, which is Instagram's Twitter, whatever. So, you know, there's these times there's like authentic little tidbits. There's a lot of ways to cut through the noise. I think the big one for social media is that because it is relatively free, I would say free. It is easy to test content to see what works. And then generally what brands do big and small is that once they find something that works, they try to build around content around what works. And I will say a trend right now is that the faster you are to memes, which is funny to say, the faster you are to memes, the higher chance that your product or brand will be recognized. Yeah. At the end of the day, when you're looking to speaking with R&D consultants and operations consultants, they may not be the sole individual to be able to do all of these different things, but they can connect you. So, if you are listening to this podcast and you're like, "Well, how should I navigate this space? Definitely reach out to Adam or myself and/or both of us, and we can definitely connect you with people." I mean, right here in the Chicago area, I just partnered with social snack videos and they'll create a lot of different video content. That's for advertisement or for social media or just getting you a library of assets. And of course, that's more for brands that are medium-sized and larger. This is, they can help you provide some context of when you should start working with some sort of studio that has all the resources necessary rather than you building out your own studio yourself. Yeah, I will say that I get them barred all the time by third party creative agencies. There's no sources of them. And therefore, they're kind of, in my opinion, they're very hard to bet, actually. So, recommendations are always great for this regard. I talk to your favorite brand and see what ones they use. Most likely though, the smaller brands will just have an in-house team of literally either the founder or one person. And so, that is important to keep in mind is that, you know, you should understand your brand first and foremost before going to third party because one, if a third party, like an influencer does not resonate or understand what your brand means, you can just be wasting a lot of money. At the end of the day, it depends on how much time and how much budget you have. Don't go to firms, don't go to brokers until you actually understand the basics of what you need to be able to present and be able to have some sort of measurable objective at the end of the day. Some sort of deliverable. So, both parties are able to come to an agreement. Otherwise, a lot of time and money is being spent going around in circles and the deliverable was not met and that nobody's happy. So, basically, make sure that you have some sort of working agreement or understanding of how to move forward and some sort of check-in processes in place. And this also applies to the R&D and operations consultants that you're hearing from today, from both of us. Yes, definitely. So, you know, for us, like, you know, we are going to have a lot of time. like this series is mainly used as a trust tool, right? So, we're just gonna be playingly honest. Like, we believe that this knowledge is valuable. We believe we wanna share it with you. And we believe that you would trust us when we share this information. And it's very similar to ad agencies and creative agencies and almost any agency you can think of, honestly. There's so much competition out there that it is hard to understand which one's the right one. So, use your trust tools wisely. Just like your brand is a symbol of trust to the people that you sell to. It is the same with these V2B agencies as well. Speaking of trust, let's kind of dive into packaging and certification because your packaging is technically your free communication tool for your consumer without spending ad dollars or spending social media time. What if you seem to work with packaging, Brian? Certifications, that's one of the most common questions I get asked, like, should I get it organic? Should I get non-GMO? Should I get kosher, halal? Are they important? And if it's like chocolate or coffee is like a rainforest approved, rainforest alliance, fair trade, there's a lot of certifications out there. And they were starting to see more in the upcycled space, we're starting to see more in the allergen free space and gluten free space. There are certification processes. All of them require a budget. So, before I even dive further into whether or not you should take a look into it, the first question is, do you have the budget for it? It's expensive to go through the whole paperwork process. It's vetting through all the ingredients and the manufacturer. So, it's a lot of time in just looking at all the paperwork. It's a lot of time in actually auditing the actual manufacturing facility to make sure that the certificate is actually legitimate and to be able to use that particular certificate or logo in of itself. So, if you have that budget and if your stakeholders, the ingredient suppliers actually have the certification or documentation to prove it and your contract manufacturer to prove the documentation and go through an auditing system, if everybody agrees, then that's a green light. Now, if you're a brand, if you're like a startup type of brand and you don't have that budget and you wanna work lean, oftentimes you end up just saying, this is a natural product. And there is no legality or definition of what natural really means. So, you can essentially build in or reinforce what natural means to you in that authenticity and story and being transparent by showcasing from the ingredient deck, by showcasing where you're sourcing ingredients or just showcasing the difference between your product versus competitors. And so, there's different ways to showcase all of that. There's front of pack, back of pack, by front of pack that's like the front of the package, back of the package where you have the nutritional and the ingredient statement and the story or QR code that leads to a story. So, there are different ways that, and you don't have to specifically say, use the certification process itself, or certification logo itself. My opinion with regards to organic versus non-gmo versus not having anything is, first and foremost, organic has superseded that of the certification process for non-gmo for the most part. If you get it organic, more likely than not, it's gonna be a non-gmo product. Now, there are certain circumstances where you cannot get organic certification because it's made in a lab, but you can mention that it is a non-gmo process. And so, that's where you start to see non-gmo kind of pop up in that sense rather than organic. Depends on your category, just like any consulting answer, it depends on the situation and of itself. But I think that's where you wanna think about is price first and then figure out which one that you want to move forward with rather than both. You don't really need both. And if you wanna start and you don't have a budget, but you are buying organic ingredients and you're going through our grant process, can use other ways of nomenclature so long as you don't use the USDA organic or equivalent logo. And you can have in the back of your package all the ingredient statements that says organic this, organic that asterisk that says anything with an asterisk has organic. So those are different ways to move forward. You can have that in your messaging. It's just if you really want that logo, it does come with the cost. And that applies to everything. - Any certification requires a good amount of scrutiny and cost and understanding of essentially your supply chain, a third party will go in and try to understand almost everything about your product. I will say in the retail channel, the retail journey, specifically the natural retail journey, more people, especially bigger ones like Aeroan are focusing a lot more on NGMO. And this can be a big barrier to your products. And this is something I wasn't aware of actually before going through several foods, retail journey, is how important certain claims are. So NGMO is actually a really big one. Croaching is pretty big too. And there's some claims about that as well that can give kind of finicky, which involves a lot of calculations. That's not that bad, but it is something that if you get caught, you can get in trouble if you put the wrong protein amount. And there's a certain way to calculate it. For NGMO specifically though, there are interesting weight grounds. - Wakerings, yeah. - Basically, if they say, is this NGMO, you could probably just say, yeah, and get away with it honestly. Like you don't even have to check and they won't check, specifically for a retailer. Some will be very scrutinist. Though none will actually go and dig into your formula and check it if anything is NGMO. However, I don't recommend lying. That just breaks the trust. - Yeah, right, that breaks the trust. Eventually, certification is pretty useful, but again, it does take a lot of work and a lot of scrutiny, specifically in your product. And generally, what I would recommend is that, you know, formulate or have someone formulate with NGMO as an option. And then when it is time to certify, certify it and then launch like essentially a version too, or a way to communicate with your consumers that now we're NGMO certified. 'Cause generally consumers actually really do care about the product journey, especially if they're longtime fans. They do care about the new things that you're launching. And this is one example of that as well. And you know, there are brands that specifically are. I think one example is like it wants upon a farm is specifically focused on NGMO and specifically organic. And that is kind of their ethos of the company. So sometimes that can be your ethos as well. Sometimes it doesn't have to be, but you know, it is something that, at least in my channel, and in general with premium CBG products, a big focus is on natural slash NGMO slash organic. And now I would say just to make this podcast feel more recent, regenerative is starting to bubble up as well. - Yeah, we don't often hear too much about kosher, at least on the west coast, or Halal in general. But if you are trying to reach to certain demographics that are religious and have the purchasing power, then that is something that you can look into. So for example, the East Coast has a lot of, Jewish population, and they do look into kosher certifications where there's kosher you or circle K. Just going back, essentially, if you're looking at selling to Jewish populations, a lot of them happen to be in the East Coast, the Chicago land area, and they care about circle K or star K, and the, was it orthodox U, and things of that nature? That is an expensive process. The rabbi does have to go to each of the manufacturing runs and vet through the whole process. If you're to go through a Halal certification, they kind of make it a little bit easier and kind of build it into the whole hasa plan. So you have actual checkpoints to make sure that it is Halal. And you can go through different firms like Eifanka, for example, that has a team of food scientists that looks at the entirety of the formulation to make sure that it is Halal. So there's no pork or pork type products or alcohol that's being incorporated. Most of the time, it's actually any type of flavor that is an, like, that's like, say, a vanilla extract. Those are typically alcohol. They're going to try to replace that with a non-alcoholic of vanilla flavor profile. - There's a lot to really focus on on these, you know, on this. But I will say that brand packaging is really important, and I will say it's also easy to understand what other brands are doing, right? Because they are also using their packaging as an agent to convince you to buy the product. So, you know, even D to C campaigns are direct to consumer campaigns. They have ads that will play out what's important for you in those who have gots, right? Like, most of the time, the communication force, ebg products is pretty simple. Like, if it's not simple, then people just don't get it. They'll buy it. But in general, like, a clear value proposition is very easy to spot on a Cbg product. - Yeah, and it can take time to be able to develop, as you're testing out your minimal viable products or your first commercialized product, as you're learning from customers and speaking with them, doing sensory evaluation or demos or trade shows, and things of that nature, you start to learn that, Oh, the mess shit. I am talking about may not be the most accurate for XYZ person and that's okay for now And you're focusing on that niche Usually high net worth individuals that is growing with you if you're trying to go in that capacity And the other other way to think about it is how can I change my messaging so that it is more appealing towards the demographic that I want to start growing with as well So there's different ways to think about it And at the end of the day it goes back to owned versus earned versus paid advertising paid advertising is where you just pay money to get ad spend with the social media actual TV and mass media earned essentially is where you'll have somebody like a reporter reach out to you and you're able to kind of have it have your product advertised And it could also just be an influencer that naturally isn't being sponsored trying out your product like a bunch of unboxing videos that people can see Owned is where it's something that you have created yourself and that could be a blog post that could be your own vlog your own Audio log and things of that nature. So there's different ways to think about it and all of that is Is integral to your to your overall growth and I think to to really make it connecting the dots Essentially we as our Indian operations we are here to help translate all of that you know There's a lot of different technical translations But the more we understand about your brand and where you're thinking and where you're going with your strategy helps inform us figure out How to move the needle in terms of flavor and if you're to hire us with exploration of New concepts then essentially understanding your brand and where you're going with a brand helps us kind of be able to Relate to you and the brand and the end customer so we can design something that is more pertinent to the end customer in of itself In general like the CPG are like anytime you're selling a product specifically like one there's a lot of thought behind it In the product end what we do, but there's also a ton of more work to do once you launch that product So you know it's almost like passing a baton in the sense and Yeah, we're we're not experts in selling a product though. We know that the pathways It takes a lot of hustle take a lot of grit It takes a lot of creativity to get your product Essentially salt I respect everyone who has the hustle to do that and I've done it before It's not my favorite thing to do I'll say but it is you know It is kind of the basis of building a food brand which is important to sell your food product and You know there again there are tons of experts tons of resources and there are tons of strategies to explore in this field We're just kind of giving you the kind of the inside of information about how we've kind of sold our products Yeah, I think one thing to add here is not necessarily Certification or more authenticity in from an ethnic background type of thing Is that we start to see a lot more at least You and I start to see a lot more of Asian American type of brands showing up in terms of second or third generations etc And I think to to that regard There's a lot of other ethnic groups that are growing and just focusing on the cultural aspect of things and food really connects in that sense and so You may not need the Certifications of organic down GMO if your focus is on cultural and it's really more about that The connecting of people and sharing of the food and sharing of your culture and doubling down in that context So we start to see a rise in this context especially in the United States as a melting pot And I think we're we are to expect more of these type of brands especially when the the larger media mass media is showcasing Simulieu or Hassan Manage by into brands or seeing merges and acquisitions in some capacity And so I think there is a lot of movement towards your own voice your own say religion or ethnicity or Gender or it or something of that nature that connects to a specific group of people and I think that is Powerful and of itself that's not necessary tied to a certificate. So a certificate is not necessarily a must if that's not part of your brand Yes indeed Storytelling is a very powerful tool. There are a lot of strategies to store tell your story Can resonate with people with the right context and I think you know You mentioned specifically with Asian Americans like several foods is an image of Asian American dumpling brand that focus a lot on Asian American flavors and There are tons of great stories with mothers recipes and with kind of You know the these generational foods and I will say this like though we as food scientists do You didn't you can assume that we change the food we do respect the stories that come from that food too and You know, we're not trying to you know manipulate in a way Where it is in authentic we we are trying to make it in a way that is safe and Tasty and I think that is something to keep in mind When you work with a food scientist is that we we are not trying to ruin the story of your product We are trying to make it known in a better and safer way Yeah, and commercially viable and cost effective So you know your grandmother's recipe may take hours or days And it's very laborious with human hands. We're trying to be able to translate that to something that's more cost effective Something that's less laborious But still be able to translate the same flavor or sensory experiences at the end of the day And I think another added value at least for for Adam and myself is that we grow up with certain cultures That's not that's outside of the Western Influence if you will and that actually might be added value. So if your her nation and Definitely All right, it is a really good end to the podcast Again, Brian. Thanks so much for busing out these episodes. I think we've done an episode almost every day so No, no problem. This is this has been really fun and can't wait to show us the world Brian, how do we reach out to you if we need help? Definitely you can check out Child time chau dash time chau dash t i m e calm and you'll also be able to find if you're more looking into freelance Work and try and understand the whole R&D process and do have an online course that just launched Earlier this year in 2025 and you can also find that on the website if it's up to Great and I'm Adam Yeek you can search me up on LinkedIn type of in I'm the only one that probably has the word food in their profile And you can reach me at Adam ye 80 am y e at umiworks.com UM AIW ORKS All right, that hope everyone has a great rest of their time and good luck on making your food product All right, enjoy a good couple coffee moving you have every day it loses luxury That's true. That's true. I respect those who care I really do I really respect those who care about without coffee but For me, at least in a daily basis, it just takes too much time to do anything other than drip Hmm very enough. All right