Welcome to the Community Call Podcast.
I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET & NOSH, with my co-hosts Jackie Brugliera and Mike Schneider.
If you're enjoying the show, please follow and review us on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice.
Jackie and Mike, great to see you.
In addition to the really amazing benefits of having a fantastic espresso machine and the great company, of course, working here at BevNET & NOSH.
In that order.
In that order.
In that, yeah, I mean, it's a really nice espresso machine, right?
My coffee threshold has increased dramatically since working here.
You're getting really good.
Oh man, I love it so much.
You're getting good at.
I had a good teacher, you know?
I mean, you're gonna surpass at some point.
Well.
You're getting good.
In addition to those two fantastic things, we also have free snacks just lying around the office.
When I'm not stealing Mike's candy-coated fennel seeds, I'm picking up the free snacks around the office.
I was super happy to score three skews of the Julie's Date Pops.
This is the new line from them, a date and not energy bite.
But I also got a bag of the Juliet's.
We saw the, we had the raspberry chocolate one.
And I think we should do like a face-off.
Who would win in a fight?
The Date Pops?
Oh my gosh.
It's not even a contest.
The Juliet's would destroy.
What?
I think the Date Pops would be the Juliet's.
But it's all personal preference.
Cause I'm not really like a chocolate person.
And I really enjoy the Date Pops.
Jackie just went off the top ropes and kicked me in the face there.
So that's the contest right there.
I was like, no, no, no.
No, no, Mike.
I think it's a win for the Date Pops.
I just tried the lemon bar, which is so good.
And then the brownie one.
Normally, I don't like nuts in my brownies, but it turns out I do like a nut in my brownie Date Pop.
What does that mean?
And you like nuts as your podcast hosts.
And then the peanut butter and jelly.
Oh, yeah.
That one's really good.
Really tasty.
Nice job on those, Julie's.
We are thoroughly enjoying those.
The co-founder of Julie's and his family have a ranch in the Coachella Valley.
They grow medjool dates.
They've been growing for the last two decades.
And they've been successfully launching products like the syrups.
Oh, have you guys tried those, the date toppers?
They're rolled in rice flour.
What?
They have the, you know how like old school you go to a food co-op and they have the bins and they always had those little date nuggets rolled in like oat flour or rice flour or something?
I didn't realize they sold those as well, which I'm super excited about because those are so nostalgic and delicious.
We also need to shout out to BevNET & NOSH Taste Radio super fan, Amanda Sainz, who I'm sure had something to do with us getting these before they come out.
Thank you, Amanda.
Keep up the great work.
We're psyched about this.
One last little nugget on Julie's.
I was looking through their website.
I thought you were gonna take them away from me as your last nugget, Mike.
Oh no, no, I won't take them away until we're done.
I need to keep people happy.
They look like nuggets.
They do look like nuggets.
Oh my gosh, wait, also, before you go there, Jackie has the same snack as us at the same time.
It's unbelievable.
I think I just blew the mic out.
That is truly exciting.
I always feel like somebody feels left out, but this is a real example of togetherness.
Now I know that Amanda had something behind us.
This is totally a promo.
Amanda, you're our hero.
I was included.
Very nice of her.
Well, great stuff, Julie's.
Thank you so much for the samples.
We are thoroughly enjoying them.
In other community news, I am happy to announce that Spencer Hodson is our newest member of our Slack community.
Everybody else can check that out at slack.bevnet.com.
Join us, talk to us, tell us stuff, and then we'll talk about it on a podcast.
Spencer Hodson, co-founder of Gay Water, pitch slam finalist for BrewBound as well.
Very accomplished gentleman and very smart in their approach to marketing.
Spencer told me about the data-driven approach they are taking to marketing and figuring out where their core demographics are.
So he found some really surprising results.
For example, Kentucky is the second queer state from a population density perspective.
You may expect to see much more representation on the coasts and the cities, but there are these really interesting factors that come up that you may not just assume.
Yeah.
And as a member of the queer community who lives in a gayborhood in San Diego, I live in kind of a bubble of my own, and I would assume too that that's where the gays live.
But it's cool to see that the queer community is everywhere, and it's expanding and growing as people get more comfortable, and society opens up their doors to the queer community.
So I think that it's just a growing demographic, and there's going to be even more reporting and data and analysis on that community as it grows.
I think that's the key, is that the community is getting more comfortable with reporting itself, not that the community is necessarily growing, but it's growing.
Right.
Right.
It's like, I mean, it's kind of a self-reporting thing, and it's a self-discovery thing, and it's a being comfortable, being your true self.
So it's great to see that more people are more comfortable.
Go Kentucky.
Go Kentucky.
I mean, he was also telling me in Texas, you might assume Austin has the largest queer population, but they saw significant representation in places like Houston and Dallas.
I don't know.
I mean, maybe it would be wrong to assume otherwise, but they're really doing the work and getting in there and seeing what's going on.
I mean, this is really responsible work that any founder should be doing.
Finding the data, finding where your audience is, learning, well, first learning who your audience is.
Spencer knows who his audience is, and he's going to find that audience.
It's awesome.
And I think also his voice and his messaging and his authenticity is bringing in that community and bringing them together.
Because some of the things that he says on social media, I would only hear in a gay bar.
So it's great to see that he's using his platform, and it might shock some people, but I love that he's true to himself and he knows his audience.
And it really is so funny and clever.
It's great.
I think certainly because they have a 21 plus audience, they can push the envelope a little more than if it were a non-ELK brand.
For sure.
Well, really great stuff, Spencer.
So glad to have you in our Slack community.
One more time for everybody else, join us at slack.bevnet.com.
In this Community Call, I talked to Arnulfo Ventura who made a career out of scaling brands until they're ready to exit with organizations like Califia, PepsiCo, Beanfields and Alter Eco.
In this episode, Arnulfo shares his roadmap of steps to exponential growth.
Please enjoy.
Today on Community Call, we are very excited to be chatting with Arnulfo Ventura about exponential growth and the factors you can focus on to get your business to the next level.
Arnulfo, thank you so much for joining us today.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
So when we take a look at your work history alone, it's clear that you have an expansive perspective.
You owned your own beverage brand, you worked for CPG giant, PepsiCo, and then you went on to help grow multiple brands and the more of an emerging space to the point where they were acquired.
Could you walk us through your career trajectory and help us see how you really dialed in this blueprint?
Yeah, so it's funny that you say blueprint because I'll pick up on that.
My first career, I was an architect, so definitely a creative at heart.
And then I went to banking.
I was at Merrill Lynch for a handful of years.
So I say once I was lost, but now I'm found.
So I consider myself to be a reformed banker.
And then I went away to business school at Stanford to really basically combine both my left brain and right brain kind of interests.
And I felt like CPG would be like the best landing place for that, where I could really exercise both parts of what really interests me.
So while I was at business school, I started a beverage company, delivered out of the trunk of my car for the first two years, drove all along the California coast doing deliveries, et cetera.
And now fast forwarding to today, it's been about 15 years, a little more than that.
And I've had the good fortune of serving for eight brands across 14 different categories now through food and beverage and everything in between in terms of the size.
So like you said, big multinational CPG like PepsiCo, where I was part of our naked emerging brands business unit that was basically almost a billion-dollar business unit to my own pre-revenue startup, to companies that were early stage like Califia Farms that then became mid-cap stage in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
And so yeah, and then my most recent ventures that were slightly smaller than Califia.
So that's kind of the spectrum, but I'm not sure if that's enough, if you wanted to me to elaborate on.
That's super helpful in kind of giving us an idea of how you've sort of built this.
As we said, Blueprint, where in the growth cycle did you join some of the more emerging brands such as Califia, Beanfields, Alter Eco?
Is there kind of like a critical point where you typically tend to step in or is it a little bit more all over the place?
I think at this point, just given my experience, there isn't necessarily a place where I necessarily come in or have to come in.
I think I'm able to pull from my broad range of experience to figure out where I need to meet the brand, given where it's at in its like life cycle journey.
Califia was just such a unique experience in that when I met Greg Steltenpol, keep in mind my first desk was the conference table in his office.
And at that time, we were mainly known for our tangerine juice.
So we were hardly even known for the plant-based dairy alternatives that the brand is known for today.
So then we went on to scale and went into a number of different categories, like I said.
So that's where I came in for Califia.
And then for brands like Beanfield, Beanfields was a distressed brand.
So there that was unique opportunity and that the PE sponsor asked that I come in and help turn things around.
And so I felt that was like a unique opportunity to come in and be at the helm and take on what I thought was a meaningful challenge and a turnaround.
And so that's when I came into Beanfields and then we went on to have great success.
We grew top line by 3X, got to be on a profitable run rate.
And then not so dissimilar, Alter Eco, most recently, I wouldn't call it distressed.
It was a very quality asset.
At this point, it's been around for two decades, but it had flat revenue performance.
EBITDA was not necessarily trending in the right direction for where we wanted to go.
And so it was a very deliberate short-term mission for me to come in and help get that brand to be thriving again, in the original fashion and vision that the founders had had.
And so as far as today, we were able to accomplish that.
We are going to dive into a few of the factors specifically that you look at when you are kind of taking a look at a business and figuring out what things need to happen in order to get to that exponential growth.
But at a high level first, could you explain the pattern recognition that you sort of have at this point?
You mentioned that that's something that, after doing this a number of times, there really is sort of this pattern that you've come to understand in terms of how to build brands.
At a high level, can you explain that?
It's difficult almost, I recognize some of the names on here that have probably couldn't speak to this as well.
It's just something that when you see the brand, I think, and with experience, right?
So ultimately we're being tasked with creating brands and growing brands.
And what I'd like to say is sustainable and enduring way, right?
The true measure of our success is whether that brand can be around X amount of years from now, because all too often we see so many great brands come along that just don't make it.
And so what is cracking the code for that pattern recognition?
For me, I tend to go back to my roots in architecture.
And so oftentimes people will say, hey, you're kind of like the fixer scaler guy.
And before I'm able to put on any kind of like exponential growth or high growth, what I find is that I have to address the foundation.
The foundation isn't necessarily there.
So when you say pattern recognition, for me, it's about getting back to the basics of brand building and going all across the different verticals and just trying to figure out where can I meet this brand today?
Wherever they're at is completely appropriate, but what do they have buttoned up?
Where is the opportunity for growth?
And it could be something as easy as the brand itself, trademark, right?
So we talked about my mentors really instilling in me that we build brands, not companies, but it could be looking at the brand.
It could be looking at our umbrella colors, our primary, secondary tertiary colors, our secondary graphics.
How strong are those?
How well are we going to be able to story tell what the brand has to offer?
And then I'll just kind of do that same thing across the way.
I'll go through operations in deep, whether vertically integrated or with a comand structure.
What is the strength of that network, that supply chain?
And then the same thing, interestingly enough, is it's funny where I find that, and I think we see that there's a need for talent in this verticals just in finance.
How well can we tell what we're about to go accomplish or how far we've come financially so that we're in place to secure capital with more ease than could otherwise be the process, right?
And so we'll go through that, we'll go through the marketing and everything else, and then just try to figure out where are there bright spots, so to speak, and then where are there areas that we belong from.
We're gonna get into those foundations in just a minute.
You mentioned just now building brands, not companies, is something important that was passed down to you.
Could you expand on that a little bit?
What does that mean to you?
Yeah, so one of my earliest investors in my first company was an agua fresca, a bottled agua fresca venture.
At the time, we were the first to do agua frescas in a bottle, no more than a few ingredients, all natural.
And one of my investors who became a mentor was Roger D'Aremidi.
Roger was a former CEO of Kraft Foods, chairman for Pinnacle Foods.
And interesting in his background is that he was an accountant by trade, but also like a marketing guru, like taught marketing adjunct classes in business schools.
And so I had nowhere to hide from this guy.
I was like, oh my God, he can talk the marketing speak and we have to talk about cash and approval based accounting.
But one of the best things he ever did early on is that he says, I'm gonna walk you through, let's just pull a years worth of transactions.
And we're gonna look at a secondary market, primary markets, and we're gonna go through and we're gonna break down where the value has been assessed in these transactions.
And the bulk of the valuation came in the intangibles on the balance sheet.
In other words, where the trademark sits.
And so he was teaching early on, look, we build brands, not companies.
And for me, that's always important because even through a successful exit, to me, the brand still very much is a toddler.
And you have to make sure that you really nurture that all the way through.
And maybe I'm just kind of old fashioned.
I think food and beverage is like a romance industry.
I think we win consumers one bag or one bottle at a time.
And so for me, they're making a real decision to part with their hard earned dollars and vote with those dollars and try your product.
And they'll do it over and over and over again.
And we have to make sure that we reciprocate that and that we take that in, right?
We harness that.
So all of that kind of gets towards a specialness of brands to me.
And I think that's why I love building brands in our space so much.
Let's get into those foundations.
You just, you know, talked about the mentor that you had at the Agua Frescas company.
Certainly leadership and culture is such an important part of building a brand that's posed for exponential growth.
What kind of person or what kinds of people do you wanna see at the top?
I'm a big believer in growth mindsets.
So I come from a very modest background.
On the first my family go to college, my parents were Mexican immigrants.
If fixed mindsets was something that I subscribe to, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing or where I'm at today.
So when I'm building companies, especially for fast growth and for, you know, trying to get to profitability, achieve new things, break through to new plateaus, it's gonna sound cliche, but do we have the right people on the bus?
For me, the seats are less important.
We can figure out the seats.
I think it's more important to me that people are willing to be in a place where they can actually be one or two levels above where they're at today.
If that means that they get cross-functional experience, they start in one vertical and they can move in another in an early company, that's A-okay, we've seen so many folks do that.
So for me, it's, I don't even know how to exist.
I can only do that if I surround myself with growth-minded people.
So that's, you know, when I first landed, it's a real interesting kind of conversation.
It's getting to know everybody in the organization, why they're there.
What does a wind look like for us?
What does it look like for them specifically?
What is it about the mission of the round that really speaks to them?
So it sounds cliche, but it's super important.
What are some of the key words or key ideas you're looking to hear from people when you're taking a look at everybody's growth mindset, whether they have it or they don't?
A lot of times, I'm just trying to pay attention to how are they carrying themselves?
What types of words are they choosing to express?
You know, are there positive words in there?
Or is it a lot of like negatives, I can't, won't?
You know, those are red flags that maybe this person hasn't had the chance maybe to even see beyond what's capable.
I think at the core of it for me, no matter where I go, there's probably like a handful or so, like core philosophies that I absolutely believe to be true and that I try to instill for those to be anywhere I go.
And so I'm looking for those from my team.
And so the first one, not surprisingly, team is family.
So when you start with that, it really sets the tone for everything else.
The second one would be, how do you show up for the organization?
How do you show up in your role?
If we're in a hybrid work situation, or how do you show up physically and be something more than just for yourself or for the rest of the organization, that's important to me.
How you treat the person next to you is also super important to me.
Again, from my modest backgrounds, my mom used to clean houses and I used to spend my summers actually serving well-to-do families.
And so with that background, it really frames so much of what I'm looking for from people.
And that's the last kind of thing that I have in there is that you take pride in your craft.
So even when I would go clean houses as a kid, my mom, she'd look at me and she'd say, Hazlo bien.
Hazlo bien in Spanish means do it well.
And so we'd sit there and I'd actually borrow my dad's a little, he had curly hair, so I'd borrow his pick and I'd be combing out the tassels on the rugs, as a little boy, but that's how much pride we took.
Whatever we did, I was just kind of raised to like, it has your name on it.
Before you pass that off to somebody else, make sure that you take pride in that.
And so a lot of this kind of early philosophies that were like instilled into me by my parents is kind of also what I'm looking for, just because I've seen how much they've been able to achieve in their lives.
And so it's a real basic thing.
None of this sounds like rocket science, but I think inherently what we're going around on it is the early stages of building a strong, functioning, high-performing culture.
And what is it that needs to be present in that culture, so to speak.
You've just talked a little bit about what you are looking for.
When you're having those conversations with the team and you're seeing red flags, how do you approach those folks who it becomes obvious that it may just not be the right fit?
What do those conversations look like?
Because I think they can be very difficult.
It's true, they can be.
I think one thing is I love the food and beverage space, I love consumer, I've taken such a long-term approach to it and even how I conduct business with all partners throughout the trade, they know that I'm here for the long haul.
So as part of that, I've been able to develop some really cool relationships.
And so when I'm sitting with employees and just trying to connect with them on a personal level, sometimes because I've endured a certain amount or I'm trying to find ways that I can be empathetic to where they're at, where am I finding them in their journey?
And then what does success really look like for them?
And then how can I enable that?
I would love to develop them and enable that within the brand that I'm on, but we might both conclude that that's just not the right thing.
So then quickly, I try to figure out how to make it a win-win for everybody involved.
It's like, okay, so you certainly can conserve a need here for us.
And in the meanwhile, let's think about what would be your highest best use?
And then how can I pick up the phone and enable them?
One of the things that is special to me is that if we get to a point where a team member isn't for the future, I'm gonna work very, very hard to make sure that I can find them a home somewhere else that works for them.
Because at the end of the day, that's what it's really about.
I'm really committed to trying to make sure that everybody's growing in the best way and that the organization is also in a place where it can get to where it needs to get to.
It's interesting.
We're talking about this stuff isn't like super, like it's not anything like in business school or anything else, but again, the foundation has to be right and the energy has to be right for the growth to take place.
Otherwise it becomes such a drive later.
And I would have to imagine that everything that you're laying out here, it's all about how you approach it and how you execute it.
I mean, you could have that conversation in a number of different ways, but if you have it the way you just laid it out, both people walk away happy.
Just thinking of my mom, she has a saying in Spanish that's crude, I won't repeat it, but it's basically in essence, it's not what you say, it's how you say it.
And so I've always said, hey, I'm gonna shoot straight, I believe in absolute candor.
And so no matter where I go, that's just how I move and conduct organizations that the concept of radical candor has to be there.
And we just have to be straight with one another so that we know where we're going.
Do you believe that founder mentality has to change as a brand scales?
And is that possible?
So the person who came up with the idea and was doing 50 million different things at once to get the brand going and started may not be the right personality and may not have the right set of skills to take it to the next level, to achieve exponential growth.
How do you approach founder mentality for brands at the stage that we're talking about?
So there's two things in there that I'm going to break apart.
So the latter part is kind of like, is something that I hear all the time that actually I'm going to bucketize that as like fixed mindsets.
It's that the person that got you from zero to 10 or zero to 50 million is different than the person that gets you from 50 to a hundred.
And that's different than the person that gets you a hundred or 500 million, whatever that is, right?
I come across that in what I do for a living all the time.
And to me, it's like the biggest fixed mindset out there.
Now, but I can say that having been at places like PepsiCo and then also everything in between that, I've seen the details of how brands get built in those different structures.
And honestly, at a fundamental basis, there is so much that is just so darn similar.
And a lot of times you're just adding the zero to the exercise.
Now, I'm also saying that there has to be quite a bit of discipline and processes in there, but that kind of belief I tend to take exception with just because it's just not how I'm minded, right?
Now, what I will say is that there's the founder aspect.
I think the founder mentality is something that I absolutely believe in.
It's something that I try to tap into with every brand that I get the honor of working with.
And I think it's part of inherently who I am, right?
As an entrepreneur who started in the space and I've seen all too often, it's less evident today as it was years and years ago, but it was just so obvious before that.
Brands that were doing well were swallowed up by strategics and then the next year, you'd be walking a trade show and their booth just did not have the same energy anymore.
All of the special magic of the brand just got sucked out and none of it felt like what the brand was, how it was special before.
So coming up in the industry, I saw that over and over again and I was like, wait, they're ruining the magic.
Like they're really letting that get distilled down.
Like you have to tap in to what was good about where the vision started with the founders.
And then if you can bring many founders grow into the role and grow with the organization, do it quite successfully.
We know who all those folks are.
And I think over time to make their vision even become more of an impact and reach more people, it's just a matter of bringing in some operating experience so that they understand or the organization as a whole knows what are the right processes, tools and disciplines to bring in to the brand at any point in time, right?
In my wheelhouse, I probably have upwards of, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 self-grown tools, processes, disciplines that I put in place, but I never start with them all.
It's always about where is that brand in its life cycle and okay, what can I give it at this moment in time?
And then how can I use it into the next thing?
And then how can I layer in two or three more things?
I think that's a great way to wrap up the culture and leadership part of the conversation.
Let's move on to branding, brand strategy.
I mean, you called out in our conversation before this, something that's so obvious, but I mean, I think it's something that folks need to hear over and over and over again, that the product needs to actually taste good.
Where do you dive in from a branding perspective, brand strategy?
Where do you dive into some of those product specific topics when you join an organization?
How do you dive in?
I'm gonna bring in something from the last point we talked about and also as a transition here for this, because I'm thinking of somebody that helped me kind of navigate this.
But one, I was gonna say is that what's super important is how brands set themselves up with advisors, whether they're formal board advisors or not, but to help them avoid like the major pitfalls.
We're just about to talk about brand, right?
And oftentimes when I'm looking at the brand, like with experience, it's not uncommon to do a revamp of a brand, right?
Or to do a complete rebranding.
I've done it myself a number of times.
And there's learnings that happen in there, right?
So I think for so many entrepreneurs, they could be just so well certainly hear it all the time, like, hey, surround yourself with people that have experience, you can avoid the major pitfalls, but what does that really look like?
And in my first company, I was very fortunate in that Brad Barnhorn was my independent board advisor.
And so he's a well-noted person today in our industry, and I was able to kind of get him early, and I learned so much from him.
So what was unique about advisors like him, and there's so many other great ones out there.
I think I saw Bob Burka on the call earlier.
They just have that experience, right?
And so they can really take you also to the different areas that you need to go through in the brand, whether that's the creative, or that's the financial, the analytical, whatever that might be.
And in getting specifically into the brand, like, where do I start?
Yeah, it does start with the strength of the mark.
So a lot of times I'm trying to figure out, is the brand name easily identifiable?
Can it be pronounced?
Is there confusion with pronunciation?
We had this with Califia Farms.
It was a big problem.
We even did a whole campaign because Wiz Khalifa was a big thing, and everybody thought it was Khalifa Farms.
And so we had to address that.
But oftentimes I'll just take the mark and I'll just put it in black and white.
And if I didn't know anything else about that mark, and I just saw it in black and white, would it tell me I know?
Would it give me an idea of what that brand stood for?
And that at least I know I'm on the right track.
And then I can inject, you know, primary, secondary, tertiary, umbrella colors.
And then also little things like a logo lockup.
What I might say next might be controversial, but to me, the strongest mark is one that looks the exact same no matter how it travels, where it goes.
Whether it's a logo on a banner at a NOSH or BevNET event, whether it's on a website, whether it's on a packaging, it looks exactly the same.
And oftentimes that means it has a structure around it that protects it so that it can be that way.
But I've just seen kind of too many varying results with brands that their color changes with each and every execution of a skew or whatever it might be.
So not to say that it can't be done.
And there's certainly outliers out there that have proven quite successful with that kind of brand approach, but it's just not one that I favor if we don't have to.
So a lot of times I start there with the brand and the mark, and then we could really kind of double click and try to establish that brand igloo, so to speak.
So this is from like my PepsiCo days.
Each of the brands, that naked emerging brands, which was interesting, I had a chance to work on three or four brands, including Naked Juice, Izzy Sparkling Water, O&E, or One Coconut Water.
Eventually Kavita would come into the fold, the Kombucha, but we created brand igloos for every single one.
And it was like this, it really was like this diagram of an igloo, and it helped us understand what did the brand stand for, what were the guardrails for where the brand could or couldn't go.
And with that in mind, you're able to kind of make decisions much easier when it comes to innovation, when it comes to ingredient formulation.
And so I'll try to put that igloo together little by little so they can see what it tells me about the brand tone and voice to make sure that as I go out to socials or whatever it might be, that we're executing on brand.
How do you establish those guardrails?
Well, usually in the identity of the brand, you have such a strong, like getting back to that founder's mentality, right?
Like if you can tap into the what's special, like what is its reason for being?
What is the unmet need that that brand started with and that product?
And then slowly start to expand out there to see where does it get uncomfortable?
Where do you start to lose your value proposition?
Where for a retailer might you lose your point of difference, right?
And so that you don't get too broad in your ethos and what you mean and figure out where you're gonna live.
That would be in the most earliest of days.
For a brand that's more established, well, then there's quite a bit that you can do and tap into your social listening, who your consumer looks like today to come up with your own customer identity.
Like what does that look like?
Something that I saw you say in an interview when you were at Beanfields was centered around brand relevance.
And that was something that you took a close look at.
Can you talk about brand relevance when you join up with a business?
What are you looking for there?
What are some of the factors that you're pressing on to figure out what that looks like and how to make it more successful?
Yeah, so in Beanfields, that was an interesting case where we were known for our bean chips.
It was meant to be a vegan offering back before vegan was cool.
The founders did a great job of coming out with something ahead of its time.
First and foremost, it was a bean snack company.
And so for me, it had established some level of success, but then kind of lost the attention of its core consumer, right?
So as we're building brands, as we're trying to put on this exponential growth, I like to say that there's room for brands to grow in their category, in adjacent categories, into new categories, but you can never do it without making sure that you have the consumer's permission to go there, right?
So even in my time at Califia with Greg, Greg would plot out the different kind of, in his world, like planets that we were gonna go tackle.
We knew them as category, I think of a diagram that we drew that looked very planetary.
And he's like, okay, we're gonna go there, but we're not ready to go there yet.
So before we even came out with oat milk, before we even came out with probiotic yogurts, we identified them and then we had to make sure that how we were talking to the consumer and bringing them along, that we had their permission to go there and that our retail partners would support us along the way, right?
So there's so much of that.
With Beanfields getting back to Beanfields, it had kind of lost that kind of attention.
And so build with a strong base, build where you have your base, re kind of invigorate that base and then move from a position of strength.
So for me, said simply, it was about re-establishing our bona fides and chips.
I had aspirations to take that brand to other adjacent subcategories like puffs, meat crisps, and we did those things.
But my first step of innovation went back to giving them more of what they wanted, more plant-based options in the way of the chips.
And then that awoke our base to the brand once again, and then getting word of mouth spread.
And then we had this attention, and then we were able to then pivot and go into new categories.
Figuring out what consumers want is perhaps one of the most difficult pieces of this.
How do you get yourself into the minds of the consumer to figure out where the relevance is, where the opportunity is?
Do you typically use a consumer research agency?
Are you asking your core consumers through social media what they're looking for?
How do you get yourself into the minds of your consumers?
The idea of focus groups, et cetera, I think there's a time and place for them.
I tend to not really want to start there.
And also what the consumer tells you isn't necessarily, we know isn't necessarily what they're going to do or how they're going to behave.
I do think that there's value in prompting your consumer based on social media about, what are their favorite flavors?
What do they think?
We used to do informal things.
We used to go to WeWork and just do a pop-up and have them taste and do a survey real short.
There's a lot of informal ways to gather information in that regard.
You know, what's interesting, so much of what we're talking about is just kind of like listening, like just the ability to listen attentively.
Whether that's to an employee that wants to grow into a new role within the brand, or whether that's to, you know, how do you reconnect with your valued consumer?
If we just, if we listen very closely, the answers are there.
And so another example that comes to mind for me is Alter Eco.
So we launched, you know, primarily known for our chocolate, dark chocolate in fact.
And so there was another good example of when I came on board at Alter Eco, we reestablished our bonafides in chocolate, came out with a bunch of innovation in chocolate, reinvigorated our base again, and then we went into granola, whole new category for us.
How we got into granola was again, listening very closely from what our consumers wanted, but then also listening to our retail partners.
I'm the first to give so much credit to the various retail partners that I've had the fortune of working with very closely on building brands.
And I think they would do the same thing, that you never want the tail wagging the dog, so to speak.
I think one of the worst things that a brand can do is go do something simply because a retailer suggested that they had a need somewhere.
It could create an opportunity, but you have to make sure that the brand is meant to go there and that the company and the structure is ready to support that and be successful.
The next piece of this that you mentioned was keeping in mind the macro CPG environment and the micro environment of the brand.
So keeping in mind both of those things at one time.
And you gave some examples like shifting category dynamics, inflationary market pressure, how the industry is moving.
So you gave the example of pricing increases.
How do you balance those two things and how do you sort of investigate whether or not those two things are in sync?
Yeah, so we're continuing our theme of listening, right?
Listening to the market.
What is the market telling me?
I think there exists jet streams and jet streams can be super powerful.
And jet streams are different than trends.
Trends and fads will come and go, but jet streams are a unique opportunity that is lasting, but the opportunity to participate in it is a fleeting moment.
And brands that can capture those jet streams have a chance to grab a disproportionate amount of market share as a result.
So those jet streams can take on the form of so many trends coming together, like I want to say, like macro themes.
So plant-based, for example.
There's so many different ways that that can exist, right?
But I also think it's there in timing in terms of execution in the market.
So we talked about pricing.
We just came off of one of the toughest commodity markets this past year in terms of price increases.
And so much has been said about even the big CPGs are gonna be challenged to take price to consumer this next year and whether they can do that at all.
But I had a brand reach out to me over a year ago asking for advice about how to take price with a big natural retailer.
And I had to say that while we had been successful in doing that twice, that they had missed their opportunity essentially that the market that time came and went.
Somewhere in there, I'm not sure how that opportunity didn't get recognized within that particular team.
And there's also a way to go about that.
Earlier we talked about like how you say things.
The floor, meaning the forum to communicate with your retail partner has never, and your go-to-market partner, right?
Your distributor partners don't wanna leave them out has never been more open, has never been more wide than it is today.
They are so open for anything that you might be going through.
And they're actually quite empathetic and wanna understand how they can best support and be there to participate as you go through your growth spurts, as you go through out of stocks.
Why is that?
Our generational will be one of those that talks about like before COVID and after COVID.
And I think it's an after COVID phenomena where as it because of the squeeze on supply chain and that resulted in so much out of stocks.
And then the increase in freight rates and then now for freight rates coming back down again.
So all those things in the supply chain created enough of a disturbance to really get everybody proactively thinking about creative solutions.
And not surprisingly, more listening and communication is the result of where we're at today.
So I think there's an ability for leaders to recognize those jet streams as they shouldn't be surprised by them.
It should be something that you're discussing with your peers, with your board members.
And it's more of whether you'll take the action or not versus kind of missing the opportunity.
You really have laid out a blueprint for how brands can get to that next level and achieve growth in the way that you've helped brands achieve so many times before.
How does a founder ask these questions of themselves?
Is it possible to take a look at your baby and really be honest and real about whether or not you're achieving and executing all of these factors?
Or is it helpful to bring somebody else in who maybe has less of a personal attachment to the brand to help you really take an honest look at all of the things that you've just talked about?
I think there's super value in independent board members or board advisors, however you want to think about that.
I can't speak to that enough, right?
So many great folks out there that can really help brands understand that.
When I had my first company as the founder of that company, I wanted the absolute truth in the market.
Cause you know, you have like sweat equity in the company, you have your own real equity financing.
In my case, it's a pretty big credit card that I took out to start my company.
And so I always try to make sure that I wasn't selling myself what the truth was and that I was letting the market tell me what the truth was as I guided that brand through its kind of life cycle.
And so I think that it's a delicate dance in that you want to be positive and optimistic to the outside world, to the consumer, in retail pitches.
You're quite proud of what you developed, why you think it should exist, all those things should be there.
And in the back, there should be another side of you that's constantly trying to get to the truth of where are we at and what do we have to accomplish for where we have to go?
And what is the truth of the environment that we're in?
And asking questions so that we can better inform ourselves of what is that environment?
What type of credit environment do our investors think we're going into in the next 12 to 18 months?
What does that mean for consumers?
What does that mean for us as a brand, et cetera?
Just always being inquisitive and trying to get the information from folks that can be helpful.
And so I've always been shy to reach out to board advisors or mentors to get the information that I needed.
Arnulfo, thank you so much for joining us today.
That was a fantastic way to break down a very complicated topic.
That concludes another episode of the Community Call Podcast.
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