[00:00:05] Melissa Traverse: Hello, and thank you for joining us. I am Melissa Traverse, Director of Community at BevNET CPG Media, and this is the How Do I Build This podcast for CPG Brands, where we talk to the people building the industry to share practical advice for building stronger, more profitable businesses. Visit nonbase.com, BevNET's platform for the CPG community, where you'll find this podcast and so much more. Losing distribution with a key retailer is one of the most challenging things that can happen to a growing brand. and getting it back can be really hard to pull off. Today we are talking about exactly that with Harrison Kahn and Stephanie Garcia-Turner Kahn is the president and GM of Vermont Creamery, a 42-year-old specialty dairy brand that was acquired by Land O'Lakes in 2017. Vermont Creamery has been through the full cycle of repositioning after an acquisition, getting onto and dropping off of retailer shelves and winning accounts back. Harrison is here to share how they did it and what he's learned about playing the long game with Stephanie Garcia-Turner is the co-founder and chief commercial officer of Tuyo, a brand that recently completed a merger with Nemi Snacks and Toto Verde and came out on the other side with a new brand identity, new packaging, and a product that now lives in a completely different retail category than it did before. She's right in the middle of figuring out how to rebuild retail relationships, decide which doors to prioritize and make a compelling case to buyers without a ton of new sales data to lean on. So thank you both so much, Stephanie and Harry for joining the non-based podcast. It is so great to have you here.
[00:01:50] Harrison Kahn: Likewise.
[00:01:51] Melissa Traverse: Thanks for having us. All right, Stephanie, let's hear from you first. Give us the quick story on Tuyo, the merger with Nemi snacks and Toto Verde, what the brand looks like now and some of those retail challenges that you are experiencing right now.
[00:02:08] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: Tuyo, I started the original, like we call it Tuyo 1.0, back in 2022 with agua fresca, powdered agua fresca and canisters. As we all know, building a business is very, very hard, especially as a solo entrepreneur. So through the years, I met my now two co-founders, Regina Trio and Jocelyn Ramirez. And just through the industry, I met Regina in Chicago at a networking event and Jocelyn and I were in an accelerator together. And so over the last couple of years, we were kind of having touch bases, seeing each other at trade shows, sharing resources. And I would say actually one year ago, we had this notion of what if we did this together, since our goal is very much aligned, which is elevating Latin culture through clean food and beverage. And fast forward, we completed our merger in May of 2026. So now we are just Tuyo Foods. We redid our packaging to show a fresh new branding identity and everything just, you know, bringing it all together in a more cohesive way, especially with the potential for the other products coming in. So the first products we launched in May were the powdered agua fresca with electrolytes. And with that whole, you know, merger and experience, the retail that we had, we had about 1100 doors combined. We had to pause and, and really end up losing some of that placement because anything, when you have to do repackaging and UPC code, you know, all of that stuff just means like that product is going to fall off shelf. So, you know, now we're in this rebuilding stage. So I'm really excited to hear from Harry, like how they navigated having a fallen off of shelf and then having to get back on as we're kind of going through this, you know, this journey of trying to rebuild our placement.
[00:04:16] Melissa Traverse: Excellent. Thank you so much. Harry, Vermont Creamery is an iconic cheese brand. I mean, it's certainly one of the brands that I think about when I think about, you know, brands that have been around for a very long time. Give us the background on Vermont Creamery and how some of the changes that Vermont Creamery has experienced and how you're positioned today.
[00:04:39] Harrison Kahn: Yeah, sure. And Melissa, thank you so much. And Stephanie, thank you, too. I'm psyched for this conversation. So Vermont Creamery, like you said at the beginning, Melissa, is a 42-year-old company. It was started by two Vermonters, Allison Hooper and Bob Reese, in 1984. And they were actually employees of the Vermont Department of Agriculture at the time. And they were tasked with putting on a dinner to honor the restauranteur of the year from Vermont. And this was at Stowe Resort. And the chef at the resort wanted to have goat cheese on the menu. But the only problem was in the 80s in Vermont and in the U.S. really, you couldn't find goat cheese right in the grocery store or from your specialty food service distributor or anything like that. But Alison had actually just returned from France, where she was interning on Darius, making goat cheese and cultured butter and creme fraiche. So she bravely raised her hand and said, hey, I can give this a try on my stovetop at home. And that's what she did and brought it to the dinner. And during the dinner, it was a hit. The chefs who were in attendance kept coming up to Alison and asking, where can I buy more? And it was actually her co-founder, Bob's wife, Sandy, who looked at them and said, you two should start a business. And they both put together $1,200 and started Vermont Butter and Cheese Company. That's what it was called. VBC for the folks who've known us for a while. And then with the advent of email, right, the company was founded before email was popular in the US, of course, and they had to shorten their domain names. That's why we became Vermont Creamery from Vermont Butter and Cheese. So anyway, that's our founding story and still very much what the brand means today. I love what you said, Stephanie, about elevating Latin culture, food and beverage, if I've got that right. as your mission. Our mission is similar in a way in that it's just elevating American food culture. We try to bring ingredients that otherwise wouldn't be available in the US. So that's why we have these largely French-inspired ingredients that we make here in Vermont, all with that mission of helping home cooks and chefs at America's best restaurants to elevate their game.
[00:07:01] Melissa Traverse: Great stuff. And we will get into some of those changes that occurred after the acquisition in 2017. Stephanie, one of the trickiest parts of your situation is that you changed categories. So as you said, you were in canisters before, and now you are in stick packs. Can you explain that category change? And you were also in the Hispanic set and now you're into a hydration set, I think. Can you explain what that change was like? What happened after that change in terms of your retail relationships and how some of those were disrupted?
[00:07:44] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: So the product being Agua Fresca was set into the Hispanic or Latin category at major retailers because it was really like one of the first items to exist. So it's not quite a Kool-Aid and it wasn't sitting where those beverages are, but it wasn't like super high function. So it was kind of like, let's just go with the authenticity, you know, Hispanic appeal of it. And so that's where they placed it. When we added, we made it into sick packs, we changed the packaging format, we added in the electrolytes. Now the buyers were like, this no longer fits into my set. And totally understandable. One of the things that I will say me and Regina and Jocelyn did was we let all of our retailers know that we were thinking about doing this merger. And as we kept getting more and more sure that this was going to go through, we told them, hey, this is our This is our plan. We're going to merge. It's going to change the other two companies for sure. And then it's also going to change the Thuyo company because we're going to transition things from one packaging format to another and make it a little bit more functional. So I talked to like my buyer at Meijer, the buyer at H-E-B, the buyer at Whole Foods, you know, all of these folks so that they knew that this was happening and it wasn't going to be a huge surprise. And I will say that was the best move we could have made because right now, I'm going to be in the review with these new buyers. And they, you know, they like personally connected me with the new category buyer. So it's still, I mean, it's still a process, like I still have to prove out, you know, that we should get a chance in the new set. But at least it wasn't like hunting down the contact, you know, from scratch again. So that was really great. I think the other thing too is that the price point is now changed. So we have to be conscious of, you know, where do we sit now compared to the category, you know, where are our competitors, everything like that, and make sure that our unit economics makes sense, but also that the product makes sense in the retail category that it's now moving into. So we really had to learn and get a lot of data on a whole new category because of this change as well.
[00:10:10] Melissa Traverse: And so in those communications, did any buyers turn over? Are there some category reviews you're sort of set up for and ready to apply for? And then other situations where you're not really sure what the next steps are? How did that all play out?
[00:10:30] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: Yeah, it really varied. I will say, you know, Whole Foods Market has been a really fantastic partner. And again, they actually knew that I wanted to move to stick packs even before the merger, that was part of my business strategy and plan. So we had already had that conversation going. And then with everyone else, it was really about understanding Because the product is still agua fresca. So it's about understanding, okay, why this shouldn't live in Hispanic, because it has a better opportunity for sales, you know, and customer foot traffic moving to the new set. So it was a really great meeting, you know, that I had with all of these relevant buyers and them being really supportive of, you know, we like the product, we like the brand, but we do want to see it succeed. And we see it succeeding the best in the category that most people would expect to find the product in. I will say that with this transition, it has kind of given us an opportunity for a fresh start and to really look at who are those retail partners that we were in. Do we want to carry all of them over or do we want to only focus on the ones that maybe we feel are just going to be the strongest partners for us? So there's a lot of really strategic questions and reasoning that myself and my team have to go through. So I'll be really interested to learn from Harry, like what their experience has been with that. And the other challenge that I have is we now have three products in three different categories. So while we're really concentrating on the agua fresca, like how, because I know with Vermont Creamery, like butter, you know, cheese, and then creme fraiche, like they all are dairy, but they do sit in different places. So I'm really curious to hear how, you know, y'all went about, like, proposing these items to the retail partners.
[00:12:37] Melissa Traverse: Harry, I see you shaking your head over there in agreement. I know you have a lot of thoughts on this. Can you walk our audience through the acquisition by Land O'Lakes? I know you said that your sales team sort of started treating it like a mass market brand. There was an issue with selling butter at Walmart at a loss just to move volume. Can you dig into all of that to kind of help set the stage and help our audience understand how you know exactly what Stephanie is going through and some of the questions that she's trying to get answered?
[00:13:10] Harrison Kahn: Yeah, I hope I can help. And Stephanie, wow, it's such a rich situation that you're in. And I'm so excited to talk to you about it. Our companies are at different stages, but there are so many parallels with the merger and then with repositioning and multiple product categories. So Melissa, to your question about Land O'Lakes, so Allison and Bob built up this business over several generations, right? had kids, their kids became grown, their kids went off to college, and then their business graduated when they wanted to retire. And Land O'Lakes, as a farmer owned cooperative, looked like a really good fit for them in terms of culture and values felt very much aligned. Land O'Lakes saw in Vermont Creamery an incredible opportunity to take the Vermont Creamery butter and put that into national distribution. So at the time, prior to the acquisition by Land O'Lakes, we were still making goat cheese, we're still making creme fraiche, we're still making our culture butter, but it was really the butter that Land O'Lakes saw. Land O'Lakes knows a thing or two about butter and the mainstream dairy aisle. And they saw this incredible cultured butter that Vermont Creamery makes that's in one pound chef rolls and wanted to put it into stick format and get national distribution and put it alongside the Land O'Lakes butter to be their premium offering to go after some of the other premium offerings that were becoming larger in the US at the time, Kerrygold, namely. And, you know, there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. business case. It's just so different from where Vermont Creamery had been previously as a brand that really thrived in the specialty cheese section of the store. We had never been the dairy aisle, which is a very different arena. Your cultured butter is so different from sweet cream butter that, you know, sweet cream butter is what Land O'Lakes makes. Cultured butter is, you know, the cream is fermented overnight. It's much more premium. It's much more costly. We're buying local cream from from Vermont. There's so many reasons why it needs to be treated differently because it's such a premium product. But this was, you know, Little Eight's experiment to see if Vermont creamer butter could survive in the dairy aisle and stick form that. And overnight, yeah, after the acquisition, we were in national distribution, which is, was really exciting for the Vermont Creamery team, right? You imagine, you know, everyone's, you're getting phone calls from their aunts and uncles around the country saying, oh my gosh, I just saw Vermont Creamery butter at my local store, which is great. But ultimately, it didn't last. The investment that's required to be successful in the dairy aisle and awareness and in trial, and frankly, in time to really earn your place in the dairy aisle, never occurred. You know, Kerryball grew up in Specialty Cheese, and you know, I think of it as a 20 plus year overnight success. Prior to 2017, Vermont Creamery had never been in the dairy aisle. And I think what we learned is that shoppers have already more or less made up their mind when they walk down the dairy aisle. They might be pulled into a different brand based on a promotion that's going on, but they're not exploring like they are in the cheese bunker, you know, in the specialty section of the store. So it's a very different shopping experience. You know, ultimately, you know, Vermont Creamery had slow velocity and most of its retail in its grocery locations after the acquisition and stick butter format and the band-aid that the Lend-A-Light sales team used to retain that distribution was price, right? More and more frequent, more and more deep trade promotions and reducing the list price as well, I needed. So when I joined Vermont Creamery I'm only three and a half years into my journey here but when I joined in 2023. You know what I saw was a brand that was losing money at Walmart on every stick of butter that we were selling because of all of that history. So in first summer, working with the team here, we decided to increase our price to match the cost of our product to compensate for the additional time and effort, equipment, and local sourcing of high-quality cream, all of those things. And we didn't necessarily expect that Walmart was going to come along for that ride. So essentially, we pruned an unprofitable customer and didn't look back. And yet we're now having some really exciting conversations with Walmart, where after going through a lot of work to reposition our butter brand, to change the packaging, to increase the price, as you know, to update our marketing campaign, we've gone back to Walmart, a different buyer now, with a new plan. And they just accepted us into more than 400 stores. So that's super exciting that we're gonna be back at Walmart in a way that feels a lot more like Vermont Creamery than the way that we showed up after the acquisition in 2017.
[00:18:29] Melissa Traverse: What a great story. And it's certainly no small feat to go through the evolution you just described. Stephanie, I'm wondering too, if the hydration set is more expensive than the set that you were in before. What are some of those challenges that you're trying to work through now? And, you know, maybe Harry has some ideas.
[00:18:51] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: I guess my biggest question is really like when you went back to Walmart after having have lost that shelf space, what was that really like the convincing point that you submitted to them and discussed with them that made them say, okay, yeah, like, it sounds like this is a new plan. This is a new start. like let's give you guys a try because one thing that I've heard, you know, very much in the industry is that once you lose shelf space, like it's so, so hard to convince a retailer to take you back on. So I would love to hear kind of like how you navigated that persuasion with the retailer.
[00:19:35] Harrison Kahn: Well, first of all, I walked them through just what I walked you through, you know, the background so that they understood where we were coming from. and got them on the same page as us. We had to acknowledge that our past strategy didn't work, first and foremost, so that we were on the same page. And then we started walking them through our logic about why it would work this time around. So although we didn't have great historical velocity trends to show them on a national level, there were many stores within the Walmart network where we have been quite successful. And I wanted to show them that. So we went back to them with a plan to have a more geographically targeted relaunch at Walmart. And that's ultimately what they accepted. I also worked with a team where we showed them the repositioning, the why behind the new design of the packaging, which was an embrace of our roots. Vermont Creamery's butter has always stood for the best tasting butter. That's when people, people who know Vermont Creamery butter, that's what they, the first thing that they always say is, you know, this is, I love that butter. And sometimes it's hard to find, but when I find it, I always buy it, right? We're, you know, Martha has said, you know, that Vermont Creamery's her favorite butter. We've got some great testimonials from some of the best chefs around. So that's what we're known for. And that's also the number one reason why consumers purchase butter. So we went back to the buyer and showed them that data and showed them all those great testimonials. We also showed them a bunch of complaints from our fans. I've got some of the quotes in front of me. I'm looking at the slide that we showed the buyer right now. Actually, one of them says, I just went to five Walmarts and I couldn't find the Vermont curry butter. What's going on? Another was, I'm trying to figure out why Walmart made such a bad decision, exclamation point. Another one was, this is the only butter I use, I need it. And then another one was just simply, please help. I can't find the Vermont curry butter. And we showed them all of that. We tasted the product against our competitive set. Tasting is believing. And we also laid out our business case for butter, which is this is a large category. It's got tremendous household penetration. And most of the products are pretty similar. on the shelf, but because Vermont Curry makes a culture butter, it's quite differentiated. And it goes after that number one reason why people are shopping, you know, for their butter brands for great taste. So we laid all that out for them, you know, the new positioning, the new price point, the stores, you know, the testimonials, the complaints, all of that, and asked them to give us another try. I think the lessons are, you know, acknowledging where you're coming from, you know, that you've learned a lot from that experience. And then walking them through your logic and trying to get the buyer's head nodding, you know, of course, understanding what's most important to them and making sure that your relaunch fits their strategy. It's really important, right? Walmart wanted a valuable consumer and we showed them who the remarkable consumer was. They wanted to premiumize their butter set and we showed them how we could help them with that. So I would start with those pieces of advice. And maybe one question for you, Stephanie, is just to understand better what you believe is the true differentiator of 2EO and what you think the reason why people are reaching for your product is. Do you get that really crystal clear so that you can present that to the buyer as well?
[00:23:20] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: That's amazing. I love that you brought in the fact of, you know, Walmart is looking to bring in this other customer, which is the Vermont Creamery customer. I think that's a really great data point. And I kind of jotted that down. You know, with the agua fresca, one of our biggest differentiators is that it is like traditional agua fresca flavors. So our top two sellers are our hibiscus, the jamaica, and the horchata. And the sweetener that we use is organic agave. So I just did some demos last week and customers were asking, a lot of them asked, what is the sweetener? And that definitely is a point of differentiation for the brand. And the reason I say that is because a few of them said that they got a value bag of a ton of electrolyte drink mixes from a retailer. And that they're like kids hated them or like they gave them a stomachache and they just aren't sure like what is happening. And they're pretty sure it's because of sweeteners that are being used in those and they're having sensitivity to them. And so that I think has been kind of like, this is a data point that maybe we need to mine a little bit more. And see really, you know, if is this the differentiator and right now at first glance, it really is. I don't believe any other electrolyte brand in the set is using organic agave that we do also source from sustainable farms in Mexico, and there's no There's really no like hibiscus, horchata flavor and the potential for like other more agua fresca centric flavors is there for us. So flavor profile, like standing out really against the competition, I think will be really key. And then another thing that you said is the comparison to your competitive set. So we're going to do like a blind study in January in the University of Colorado. And so they're going to do like us versus a couple of competitors that we're going to give to them so that we can get that actual verbatim feedback. Because I do think you're right, like putting that in front of the retailer saying like, you carry this brand, here's what customers are saying about, you know, both brands or whatever it might be, like, here's why we're different from the competitive set. Sounds like a really great way to put that argument forward to be able to like get back on that shelf. Um, I do want to like ask you, did you ever think about not going back into Walmart? Like, did it ever not fit your, you know, your premium like strategy of really like, you know, this is one of the best dairy products out there. You know, what were your thoughts on that?
[00:26:23] Harrison Kahn: Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. It's controversial. I, I would say I've gotten that question from a bunch of folks, folks that really trust me, but I try to. focus on in my response is that the Vermont Creamery mission is to elevate American food culture. And we could act like we're too good for mainstream grocery, but then would we achieve our mission? Again, in order to elevate American food culture, we need to be in Walmart. And that's not to say that all of our products will be at Walmart and we don't sell from freshly or we don't sell our, our really precious, you know, two ounce medallions of geotrichum candidum, soft rib, and, you know, goat cheeses. Like those, those are for the, you know, the specialty retailer for, you know, the Murray's and Whole Foods cheese counters. And, and because that's where they'll be successful, but we, We want to bring culture and butter to the United States. And in order to do that, we believe it's important to be at Walmart. So that's why we're sticking to our guns and want to partner with them for both our and Walmart's mutual success.
[00:27:36] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: So you see that Walmart fits into your sales strategy, but with differentiated products, if I'm kind of gathering that, because that is something that we're thinking of as well, is just making sure that we're fitting each retailer in the most appropriate way, as we're thinking of like future product lines or future flavors. So it sounds like that is kind of on par with what you all are thinking.
[00:28:03] Harrison Kahn: Yeah, we're lucky because we've been at it for longer. We're certainly not the biggest food company. We don't have a ton of SKUs, but we have multiple butters, right? We have an 86% butter fat, cultured butter that really is only used for table service and fine dining. And then we've got 86% and 82% butterfat unsalted butter, which is used for Viennoiserie and pastry chefs. The 82% seesaw butter that's in stick format is what we put at Walmart. So you can sort of just see how we've laid out our product portfolio and given each product a channel focus. And that's the same for GoCheese and same for other products as well. Not all of them can and should be everywhere, but specific SKUs are designed for specific channels. So that's how we think about it. It certainly adds operational complexity, and we were not able to do that in the first chapter for Montgomery's Life. We really had to focus in the channel where we wanted the brand to grow up and where we wanted it to be defined in the specialty deli portion of the store and in fine dining in New York and Chicago and California. And that's what we did then. But now that we've evolved past that and the team has grown, the business has grown, and we're slowly going after that mission to reach more households with our products. We've diversified the portfolio so that Walmart and other more mainstream retailers make sense. At your company's stage, I might suggest a different strategy where maybe it isn't all of the channels that Vermont Kramer plays in today, but it's a more specified group where you know you can really be successful.
[00:30:10] Melissa Traverse: I have a question about getting back onto the Walmart shelves. Are you planning on a marketing campaign to help the customers who used to go there looking for it to help them understand that it's back? And then with the price increase, Is there anything that you're doing to mitigate any disappointment from customers that the price has increased? I also know it's an inflationary environment, and I feel like every time you go to the grocery store, you're sort of expecting everything to be more expensive. So I don't know if any of the changes you've implemented can sort of be absorbed into that current state of affairs. But how are you planning on supporting that relaunch?
[00:30:54] Harrison Kahn: I'll hit the price question first. We believe our butter is not overpriced. We're getting just enough. Our farmers are getting just enough to be able to support the type of butter that we make with the type of cream that we source. in our area. So we've priced it at a level that we're just like barely comfortable at, right? It's a sharp enough price point that it can play in the dairy aisle, you know, next to, you know, Kerrygold and some of the other super premium butters on the shelf. but it's not so high that we've priced out the everyday shopper. So typically, people who are looking for a really great tasting butter for their everyday butter will choose VC. And then there are some shoppers who they shop two butters. They might have what they call their utility butter, which might be the private label brand or another one. And then they've got the good stuff, you know, that they don't let the kids eat. That's the Vermont creamery butter. Right. So that like this is for different households that might play a different role. And then in terms of the marketing campaign, yes, we are. We have to invest to raise brand awareness. And most importantly, trial. Like I said before, tasting is believing, especially with the category that so many people are used to shopping from and, frankly, are bored with because so many of the products are similar. And a lot of the brands are bending over backwards to explain why they're different. But the reality is that it's all pretty similar. you know, butter has to be 80% butter fat, you know. germ cream, right? And some has salt, some doesn't have salt, right? It's not a whole lot of variation. And then you layer in Vermont Creamery culture butter into the category, and the cream is fermented like a fine wine. And it tastes like the butter that you've had if you've had butter in a place like France, right? And so it's this very different experience, rich, creamy, almost like decadent experience. And we want people to taste that in the aisle. So investing in demo is investing in events. And then we are doing some paid media, not a ton. At the end of the day, we're still a dairy company. We don't have a big marketing budget. But we do work with influencers, and we do pay for ads on social media and in other media. And then we do some PR as well. We are, we call our fans butterheads. These are the people who know butter and know like good butter they're like you know they're sneaker heads and they're dead heads and they're also putter heads right and those are the folks that were. we're looking to find, and they're shopping at Walmart too, right? And they're also shopping at Wegmans and they're shopping at Whole Foods, they're everywhere. So those are the folks that we're looking for and we're just doing our best to communicate to them how this product is made differently and why it will change their lives.
[00:34:03] Melissa Traverse: Stephanie, with the change in packaging format, I'm sure that that's a challenge in addition to the fact that you'll be in a different set. I know that Tuyo hasn't been around for, you know, 40 plus years, but certainly you have a dedicated consumer base who really love the product. How are you planning on communicating to your core customers that the product that they've always loved has changed a little bit, but it's still that beverage option that they know and love?
[00:34:38] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: Well, first of all, I will say, I feel like I'm a butter head and that my stepdaughter is for sure a butter head. She actually like froze butter from France and like brought it back to the US.
[00:34:51] Harrison Kahn: That's classic butter head behavior.
[00:34:53] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: Yes. Lots of better heads in this family.
[00:34:56] Melissa Traverse: I had butter from my kids, so.
[00:34:59] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: Oh, wow. I love that. It totally resonates with me and the re-education that's needed for not just like the product, but like the refreshed branding and getting people to know, like, we're still here. I think The biggest thing that we've been doing is relying on social because we have a lot of social media followers, you know, Jocelyn and Regina and I have built out our communities through the years so that's been a really great advantage for us. But aside from that, you know, because the products are you can order them online, but because there are just only in a couple of regions, we're really needing to like go out to these places like ourselves and meet the buyers, meet the team, do the demos with a limited budget. That's kind of what we have thought has been the best use of funds is just being there in person and really getting that message out there. We do have plans, marketing plans for broader education, but right now it's like, we don't want to spend money on ads that you know, they're irrelevant to New York or to Seattle when we're only in certain places. So knowing that side of it, like Harry, what is the one driver that you guys think really moves the needle, whether it's for a business my size, or whether it's just advice as we grow, where you think we should put some of our energy and resources towards?
[00:36:39] Harrison Kahn: Yeah, it's a great question. I think it really depends on your point of view for how you want to achieve your mission. And if that mission includes growing your brand and growing the category, how do you believe that that will happen and putting forward those products and those channels? I think that the key here is to not despair. learn what you've learned. You've got this packaging format change and this significant change that's happened to your business, which gives you kind of a liberation from your past, right, from the period of time when you were on the shelf. And now you get to come back renewed. And how can you do that stronger? And then when you're ready, how do you tell the most compelling story to the buyer? And I'd recommend that that story include what your mission is, what your point of view is for how to achieve that mission, and then very importantly, how does that fit into the buyer's strategy? What's in it for them? And I think that you'll be successful in gaining and regaining distribution if you go through those steps.
[00:37:48] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: One of my other questions I have for you, Harry, is was there a time or has there been a time where you guys were at risk of falling off shelf at a retailer? And what did you do to get that to not happen and to convince them to wait? Don't, don't discontinue us. We can do this. And like, has that ever happened to you?
[00:38:14] Harrison Kahn: Absolutely. It does happen. And luckily, we don't have a ton of experience with this. But when you start to see your velocity creep down in the ranking of other brands in your set, that's when we start to wonder, OK, what can we learn here? How can we better support our products? So typically, what we do is we invest what we can in things like demos, shopper marketing, maybe in some media. We look at the rest of the shelf set and try to understand what we can, from what data we can glean, why shoppers might be slowing down their purchases and try to learn as much as we possibly can, and then prepare for our next meeting with the buyer. We might get ahead of the conversation by saying, hey, we're noticing that velocity is slipping here, and here's what we've already started doing about it. That's I think you're taking a proactive approach and showing the buyer that you can be their partner and making sure that the set will stay vital with your assistance is key. But it's a really good question. I think you're really smart for looking at it and getting ahead of it. One of the hardest parts is for a brand at your brand stage, I wonder if you have the data to see whether or not your velocity ranking is coming down. And if you don't, then I think it's even harder. So I give you a lot of respect. And I think for just trying to keep your finger on the pulse of how the brand is performing at retail, it can be very, very difficult.
[00:39:57] Stephanie Garcia-Turner: very expensive data to buy. So it's really us keeping an eye on distributor volume movement, you know, case movement. So thankfully we're getting some of that outgoing data and then just kind of coming up with, you know, is that trending up? Is it trending down? Because for the agua fresca, it is seasonal. So we do expect there being a huge push spring and summer, and it'll start to taper off. And then January, February, into March are just very, you know, very slow. So we have some baseline to go off of. But I think you're, advice on getting ahead of it with the buyer definitely makes sense.
[00:40:45] Harrison Kahn: We have lost distribution on a variety of products over the years. So, some things that we've made have stock and some things just have not, right? So, some of the, from earliest days, we were making crème fraîche and goat cheese and butter, but There are things that we have launched since our early days that just have not worked. At one point, we had a salmon torta that we were making inside the creamery. We also had a chocolate and cherry goat cheese. There's been a variety of things that just haven't worked, so we've had to reinvent the product portfolio over time. And then, of course, there are some things that have worked, right? Like we've added Mascarpone, we've added the soft Rabin cheeses, and a variety of other things that have stuck. So I think another lesson here, Stephanie, for us, for the whole industry, is that not everything is going to work too, so you've got to keep trying. And if you discover that one of your products is more of a seasonal product, maybe there's another capability that you have. to make a different product that might be around or be counter-seasonal to the product that you're making today. So I just encourage you to keep experimenting too and bringing innovation as rapidly as you can to the buyer, relevant innovation to find something that really delivers for both you and for the market.
[00:42:10] Melissa Traverse: Well, Stephanie, I would love to second Harry's respect for you and the TUYO brand that you are building relentlessly. So I just want to thank you both so much for joining the Non-Based Podcast today and sharing so much great information with our audience here. Harrison Kahn, president and GM of Vermont Creamery, and Stephanie Garcia-Turner and chief commercial officer of Tuyo. Thank you so much for joining the Non-Based Podcast and sharing such great information. And for everybody out there in the audience, thank you for tuning in, and we will see you next time. That concludes another episode of the Nombase podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a review and follow us on your listening platform of choice. You can also watch and listen to past episodes on Nombase.com and don't forget to join our Nombase Slack at slack.BevNET.com for company updates, industry networking, and community discussions. See you next time.
