Hello, and thank you for joining.
I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNET and Notch, and I am excited to welcome you to the Nombase Podcast, a podcast built to help CPG owners and operators navigate growth challenges and build more profitable businesses.
Be sure to check out nombase.com, BevNET's platform built for the CPG community where you can find this episode and so much more. CPG is notorious for pulling people in from other industries.
Finance, tech, law, that means a lot of founders launching brands have never actually seen the backside of a food or a beverage business and have a lot to learn through trial and error.
Today, I am joined by the founding team behind Kadoots, Organic Crackers for Kids. Kiva Dickinson, who many of you know is the founder and managing partner of Selva Ventures, a firm that has seen hundreds of food and beverage brands up close.
And Jordan Carpenter and Rachel Mansfield, who are both partners in life and now partners in building this brand with Kiva. Rachel Mansfield, as many of you know, is a creator focused on healthy eating and recipes with a deeply engaged audience.
Jordan Carpenter brings his own operator and investor lens into the mix. Kiva, you have spent years investing in food and beverage and advising founders from the other side of the table.
With everything you've seen, honestly, why start a CPG brand yourself? Is it crazy?
It's definitely crazy. It's not something I envisioned for a long time. I think all three of us would probably say the same thing on that front.
But the more time you spend speaking with passionate entrepreneurs looking to build better food and beverage products across our ecosystem, I think the more exposure you get to the entrepreneurial bug, and the more you start to build a thesis in your
mind of what problems are left unsolved. In my mind, especially as a new dad who had spent years before even becoming a dad, evaluating nutrition for children of all ages, there was clearly a big problem to be solved.
Eventually, I didn't want to wait any longer to wait for the right founder to come across my doorstep. I think there was a belief that the thesis I had of what this could look like could look differently.
And luckily, I had two other people in my life and business community already who had a very similar vision for that.
And can you explain the thesis for starting up Cadoods to our audience?
Honestly, I think Rachel and Jordan are better prone to do that. So why don't they take it?
All right, Jordan and Rachel, please take it away.
So Jordan and I have three kids, seven, five, and three. And I make a lot of food. I pack a lot of snacks and make three lunches for school.
And my kids, they like to snack and they love to eat. And I reached a point of almost like fatigue, but also frustration where I kept going to pack my kids their food or give them a snack. And they were just hungry 30 minutes to an hour later.
And they love those almost empty calorie snacks. And there's only so many meat sticks and protein bars and string cheeses that like they could eat to be excited.
And I really wanted that crunchy, salty, maybe sometimes sweet snack that could satisfy kids' cravings, but also fit the parameters like a parent is looking for.
And like really fuel our children because there's a lot of amazing snacks out there, but there's no one that's making something that's like has protein in it, but also satisfies your like snack, snacky, munchy type of craving.
And can you explain to everybody what the nutritional pillars of kadoots are?
3:57
What are some of the other nutritional guidelines that you use to build the product?
Kadoots, our crackers are organic. They have five grams of protein. They have no seed oils.
We use 100% organic extra virgin olive oil, which fun fact is just like not that common for many other cracker ends. Like salty snack companies to use. We have no natural flavors.
So I think there's a lot of like misinformation out there about what natural flavors are.
And when a consumer sees on the back of a pack, like organic ranch flavor or natural flavor, like they think it's something natural and something that's like, you know, they could really trust it.
And I was very adamant on not having natural flavors in it because that one natural flavor ingredient could have like hundreds or thousands of other ingredients that don't need to be disclosed. So no natural flavors. They're gluten free.
But I almost like we don't talk about the fact that they're gluten free that much because so many people will be eating it. They're like, oh, wow, these are gluten free. Like they're not.
Yeah, like you can't tell that they are. And then they're not free and then seed free, which is really important for schools.
And like all of my, you know, all of your listeners that have kids that are in preschool know how many rules there are with packing a lunch and can do to something that like all of the ingredients are allowed in school.
And we're kosher, which is exciting.
Amazing. You tick all the boxes. You know, I'm really interested to hear about the non seed oil component.
That remains sort of a controversial topic. There is a new certification out the non ultra processed food certification. You can't have processed oils for that verification.
And then on the other side, there are still folks who are saying that there's no research to back the fact that they're harmful. How did you make that decision to choose extra virgin olive oil instead of a more processed oil?
I think we really went out at about just, we didn't want to have any ambiguity as to what the ingredients were.
We just know that extra virgin olive oil has been such a pure, you know, well studied oil that we knew that if we went with that option, that we wouldn't have to defend ourselves as to why we were against or for seed oils.
So, it's really less so about making it a negative thing and just actually making it more of a positive, where we love the way the extra virgin olive oil tasted. We also knew that there were so many great benefits to having it in our product.
You know, I also just, we posted a reel on Canute's Instagram yesterday all about seed oils, and I don't think personally that seed oils are the enemy.
Like, there's many other things out there that I like, I'm a lot more passionate about, but it was more just like if we're, like Jordan just said, if we're creating a product that like has such integrity with the ingredients that we're using, like
You know, Rachel, you're coming to this not only through the lens of a parent, but also with years of experience kind of understanding what resonates with your audience and why they trust you.
How did that shape the decisions that you made as a founder at Canute's?
It shaped a lot of them. It really did.
I mean, I've spent over 10 years now cultivating an online community and like really getting to know my blog readers and those that are making my recipes and buying my cookbooks and sending me messages asking for advice.
And every time I would post a picture that was like my kids' lunch or we're on the go and they're having a snack, like, what are your go to snacks? What's your favorite snack? What's your favorite cracker?
What's your favorite cheese cracker? And I got to the point where I just didn't have a product or snacks that I was really passionate about recommending. It was more like, oh, I buy X because there's just like nothing else.
There's just no other options. And we see firsthand, like the customer feedback, which is so valuable. Like we have brought people, my community, along for the ride of like creating Kadoots for the last three years.
And we even had the Kadoots crew, which is like a small, intimate, like focus group where we're able to like sample them Kadoots as we were doing the R&D and like get their feedback.
And, you know, I think that's how I knew the pillars that we really wanted Kadoots to like, to have and stand strong with. And I wouldn't be anywhere if it wasn't for my community. So like having that information is just so valuable from them.
So it played a huge part in like every, in every aspect of Kadoots.
I'm so curious, how did that work? Did you, you know, send iterations of the product and get feedback throughout the formulation process? How did that work?
So it actually started way before that, when we were still ideating ultimately what product we wanted to start with and sort of what the parent or modern day parent consumer was looking for in their children's snacks and like what they weren't able
to find in the marketplace. So it started with just sort of getting understandings of like how parents read nutrition labels and how they look at certifications and how they look at what ingredients are in the product or not in the product.
So starting with really just understanding it there and then bringing them along the journey as we were trying different ingredients in the product and then ultimately being able to share with them bench top samples of what is now the Caduceus
Amazing.
And Jordan and Rachel, could you explain your respective roles at Caduceus?
Yeah, I think we need to really start defining them though, because we don't have a formal line in the sand, which is funny because I'm a very black and white human. I don't like having any gray area.
I think that for me, I am more of the visionary of this is where I want Caduceus to be. These are the products I want to be making. This is how I want to marketing it.
These are the retailers that I really want us to be in. These are the people that I want to connect with for the brand to help grow us. I definitely am more of the extroverted day-to-day, whoever has to talk to a lot of people, that is definitely me.
So a lot of the buyer meetings and I like to really take the lead there.
Just in case people aren't aware, this is actually the third business that Rich and I work together running. So we've over the last five years been able to figure out what works well for each other.
Then we've obviously been able to bring that over to Codutes where Rachel is definitely the more forward-facing person of the brand. Whereas my focus is definitely more on the operations and logistics.
Rachel is like, I want to be an X, Y, and Z, and then I find out or figure out the way to get us there.
Also Jordan handled all of our certifications, all the sourcing of the ingredients, finding the command. We are like the ultimate yin-yang, and I think I just said this last week too.
I need to find the yin-yang analogy for three people, because that's where I think Kiva, Jordan, and myself all really work so well together. Because of that, we're all so different in our skill sets.
I think that that's been so helpful in starting Kadoos, because we just know who's going to handle what, because we know what we're good at, and where our skill sets come into play.
Well, certainly, it's so helpful to have that kind of understanding, dealing with the hundreds, maybe thousands of decisions that it takes to launch and run a brand. I would love to hear from you all.
With everything that you've seen in CPG, what were some of the first mistakes that you were determined not to make when launching Kadoos, because you really have seen them before?
I think there are a couple that repeatedly come to mind as wearing my investor hat. I evaluate brands at the seed and series A stage.
One of them is setting up your product costs and pricing from a way that will not necessarily work across different channels.
In this unique case, I got to be involved with Rachel and Jordan in formulating the product from the beginning and estimating what that was ultimately going to mean for price and margin when we eventually got to market.
And I think the interesting thing when you have all of this opportunity to make decision is you get in this kind of paralysis of wanting to make the product as good as possible and then having to work backwards from that idea of optimal or
perfection. It can be really challenging. And I think be operating in this seat where we could affect what the product would ultimately be versus being more in the evaluator seat.
I think it brought me a lot of empathy in the decisions that these founders make in ultimately formulating the product.
But I think the hard thing in what we've tried to work through together is any decision that we make that ultimately results in the product being more expensive or the margin profile being lower. We need to get credit for as a brand.
We need to talk about it. You heard Rachel talk about it earlier in the idea of natural flavors.
By excluding natural flavors from our product, we're using more premium ingredients which ultimately results in either a higher cost to the consumer or lower margin to us.
We need to make sure that we take the time to educate the consumer what that decision means for them. It's not just a decision for us, but it's a decision that means something for them.
I think we had to bring a lot of that intention because at times we see brands go to market, launch nationwide, reach thousands of customers and then realize that they may need to change something because they're not either getting credit for an
ingredient or a consumer doesn't respond to a claim and it's really hard to undo at that point. I think the other thing is channel strategy and I could be a bit shorter on this one, but I think there are a lot of brands who take the first retail
opportunity to go into doors that are available because a retailer says yes and we have seen brands get in trouble where they're on shelf, they're struggling to move product off shelf, they're struggling to get in front of the consumer or there's
Rachel, on the topic of first retail partners, you mentioned that you pick out the retailers that you want to target and that you're a big part of that retail strategy.
15:00
So tell us, who are those initial retailers that you wanted to work with, and who do you see folding in as Kaduz grows further on?
Yeah. So when we were first starting out with Kaduz, Jordan and I took a lot of phone calls with founders of brands in this industry, asking them for advice. Who is your favorite retailer?
What retailer should we launch in? What was your experience? What were the pros and cons of launching there versus here?
We really took the time to hear from people's experiences, and also just taking into consideration how much has changed. Since brands that I've launched eight years ago, it's a different time to be launching now, and retailers are different.
They've been acquired by others. So where is the best fit for Kaduz?
We're very fortunate that we did find our first retail partner that we're launching in June, and we haven't disclosed it just yet, but we're doing a major launch there, like, you know, almost 2,000 stores.
And like, they're taking a risk bringing us on, and we're taking a risk going into so many stores at one time.
But we really understand, like, each other and the value that, you know, each is going to bring to, like, helping to get healthier snacks into everyone's pantry.
So the shorter responses, I wasn't as focused on the retailer, but more focused on, like, the buyer and the team that was going to get what we're doing and why we're doing it.
And just for, you know, folks out there who are maybe in a similar place and trying to figure out which retailers they should go to after they have a critical mass, maybe, of independence in the region, that kind of thing, are there any retailers
that stood out to you? And, you know, you can not answer this question if you don't want to.
But are there any retailers that stand out to you as being very well aligned with brands like yourself who do have a very, you know, specific nutritional profile?
You're really speaking to a particular audience who does prioritize the things that we've talked about so far and that the retailer will support those goals and provide a consumer base that aligns with what you're looking for.
Are there any retailers you can throw out there that would fit the bill, whether or not you're launching there?
We're not going to name names positively or negatively, but I will say that many young brands will look to the natural channel and see a number of brands that resemble what they may be building.
They may see a consumer base who may better understand the value proposition of their product, or may be more flexible to pay a premium price point.
I would just say that you should not sleep on the ability for a mass or conventional retailer and a mass and conventional consumer to understand the value proposition of what you're building, and maybe even work better with you as a launch partner or
earlier supporter in your journey. We are seeing a much wider collection of consumers dig into health and understand the values and attributes of emerging brands.
We are seeing a wider range of retailers realize that their consumer does care about these things and want to merchandise brands that meet their values and meet those consumer needs.
So whereas 10 years ago, I would have put some of those retailers in years five or 10 of a company journey, I think it makes sense to consider them much earlier than I would have suggested in the past.
A crowded trade show floor is the hardest place to tell your story for the first time. Give the industry a head start by sharing your news early. Download the guide from BevNET CPG Media to learn how to reach buyers before the big show.
Visit bevnet.com/tradeshow.
You know, understanding what your consumer is looking for can really help you map out that retail plan, of course. What assumptions about demand, product fit, or scalability? Did you refuse to accept without proof?
I don't know if you already have access to data or you, Kiva, I'm sure that you do, of course, but you know, what data points were you looking to confirm before finalizing the formulation process and finishing production?
And, you know, Rachel, for you, maybe your community also weighed in on certain factors, but what were some of the assumptions that you were unwilling to make without that kind of proof?
The one that comes to mind for us was just price point at different retailers. I would say the snack category is obviously super competitive and crackers falls within that.
And just really understanding or trying to dig into a premium that someone would be willing to pay for an ingredient profile, such as what could do Ted.
So really spending time digging into data and just sort of understanding the customer and, you know, what would be an appropriate price point to enter that category in is something that we definitely spent some time and data mining on.
And how do you feel about the economy of scale theory that once you start to grow, that you'll be able to make up for some loss of margin and, you know, ingredients, co-manufacturing, that kind of thing. How do you apply that to your strategy?
The economies of scale are definitely real, and we're already starting to see it as we gear up for production towards our retail launch.
I would say the one thing to caveat there is, no matter where you start, you have to make sure that it's a small enough hole that you could dig yourself out of.
You know, I think spending the time to model and make assumptions around, okay, if I hit a certain amount of volume or stores, you know, saving 5, 10, 15% here or there, and then seeing how that looks in the long term perspective.
Because if you're just going to assume that if you go from a very, maybe a negative gross margin or a single digit gross margin, that you can get into that 30 to 40% at scale, the odds are it's going to be a very long uphill battle to kind of get
there. So yes, it's definitely there, but to what degree? And that's where you kind of have to do your homework on.
It's also worth noting that we formulated a product, thought we were done, and we were at the fancy food show over the summer. And we had gotten some feedback from a retailer and about the pricing and how we were going to do this.
And we looked at the margins and we were like, it's not going to scale at how we want this to fail.
And we actually went then went back to the drawing board and started reformulating before we even launched, which was like honestly kind of heartbreaking at the time, because it's like you think you cross something off your list and like that's a
huge something. And then you have to kind of go back and do it again.
And, you know, we saw that long term, like the product that we originally created, like wasn't going to scale the way that we wanted it to and help like set us up for success for Cadoots in the future.
It's a really big project to like and talk like it's a very important part of starting the business and like you have to think long term even in those early days.
I'm sure now you're so glad that you made that made those changes. What were some of those changes that you made in that last reformulation process? What had to change and why?
Yeah, so one of the I would say the biggest change was we went from using organic hemp protein to the organic milk protein.
And that made a huge difference. Also, like, I'm sure a lot of people know that hemp protein like is a bit drier than milk protein.
And so when we swapped that and it almost made the product, this probably isn't going to make that much sense to a lot of people, but Kiva and Jordan, I ate a lot of crackers, so it doesn't make a lot of sense.
It made them like almost creamier in some ways, richer when you were eating it. It wasn't as dry as you would. You don't want a cracker.
You want the cracker to be addicting and you want more, and you're like, oh my god, this is so good. And when we had the organic milk protein instead of hemp protein, we were like, oh wow, this actually made a huge difference.
And there were some other tweaks and such we made, but that was the largest change, right?
Yeah, I think it made the product more harmonious with real cheddar cheese. Because now you're just blending in two different dairy products and they worked a lot better while instead of trying to fight each other.
So we wanted to also put three veggies in kadoots. And by we, I mean myself. And that was just like another one of the pillars that kadoots was going to have.
And when we took the vegetables out, the product really tasted a lot better. And everyone was just kind of like, Rachel, like you need to pick your battles here. Like you can't be everything to everyone.
And these crackers, like you need to sacrifice one of these. And I looked at it from like as a mother, I'm like, am I really, do I ever depend on a cracker or any type of shelf-stable snack to be giving my children vegetables?
Like, no, I want my kids to eat a vegetable to eat a vegetable. So we nixed having the three veggies in our crackers, which like honestly, I really forgot about them.
The formulation process is so eye-opening in how I now interact with the rest of the grocery store, because when you go through formulation, you again are forced into all of these decisions of choosing between better and cheaper, and you realize that
much of the US food system has solved for the latter. And so one of the pieces of advice that I would give to a founder starting a food company is before you even enter the formulation room, write down your non-negotiables and really debate them.
There were things that we thought were non-negotiables before we walked in and we realized that we had to address them. Because ultimately having a margin that works and a price that works for the consumer are non-negotiables also.
You need to be able to reach the person whose problem you're trying to solve, and you need it to work for all of your channel partners, and you need to work for your business and your employees.
I think the reformulation process led us eventually to what we believed were the non-negotiables that we ultimately needed.
I think Rachel has done a really good job through content of explaining what those are, writing them on the box, and really making them the pillars of our company. But the earlier one does that, the more pain they save themselves.
Because once you get in that room, you just want the product to be better. It's hard to think about cost.
Rachel, your point about you as a mom, do you ever rely on crackers to get your kids their vegetable or fruit quota for the day?
It makes so much sense, but I can also see how starting out, it would be really nice to be able to incorporate those things into a snack.
But that really does just prove the point around how debating those non-negotiables probably plays out in the formulation process. So I have a question about funding for all of you.
27:03
How, and this is probably a question that a lot of folks have certainly with the investor backgrounds that we have on this team.
How are you funding Kaduts and what does an ideal funding path, both in terms of timing and the kind of capital look like as you grow the brand?
I'll take the first part of this before we kick it off to Kiva, but I think something that Rachel and I were super keen about when we originally had the idea and then brought it to Kiva was, we've just seen so many brands, obviously from the
investing space and just understood some of the capital needs up front. We knew it was super important to have a partner like Kiva in the early days to help us be able to move quick enough where we were able to get a product to market, even though it
did take us three years with the reformulation and stuff. But knew that access to capital was super important, especially in the early days, as you need a lot of startup capital to formulate and ultimately get ready for market.
Then I can kick the rest over. I think Kiva could probably help answer the rest.
Yeah, I think many startup CPG businesses think about funding one round at a time or one cash need at a time. Maybe it's six months at a time, maybe it's 18 months at a time.
I don't think many of them think about where are they trying to go 10 years from now, work backwards from that point, and think about all the goalposts that they have to hit every single time.
We have seen brands that should have been successful, struggle because they were starved for capital, and we have seen brands that should have been successful struggle because they had too much capital too soon, and spent it the wrong way, and never
built scrappiness and responsibility into the DNA of the organization that would have been necessary to build what's ultimately valuable. I think we had really good early conversations about what kind of business we want to build, what are the brands
that we look up to, and thankfully, I don't think it's an accident that we are in business together with similar philosophy about this, but we admired many of the same brands and people in the organization, and agreed on some of the ones that despite
their success, we did not want to be like. And so I think the combination of that nets out to a business that we want to be profitable earlier on, healthy earlier on, not overspending for the sake of growth, and then fix business model challenges
later, but also have the means to be able to go through extended reformulations to be able to get to the right product. Have a brand from the beginning that really tells the story and represents the ethos of what we believe. Work with the right
channel partner even if it's expensive to do so. Obviously Selva Ventures is behind all of those things in what we bring to the table.
But I think in many ways it's the consistency of belief between the three of us of what we are trying to build, that we are trying to find capital that matches those needs rather than accept capital just because it's there and follow the guidance of
Kiva, you mentioned mapping out those milestones ahead of time.
And I think that's something that you really do need some CPG experience to be able to understand beforehand. Is there a way that you can explain what the milestones are in a nutshell?
Through the other hat, I'm aware of running an investment organization that invests in food businesses. We are talking regularly to investment bankers and strategic acquirers about what metrics they want to see.
That's not to say that we one day need to sell this company, but we know that in order to access capital, there are going to be people who evaluate this business who need to know that we could, if we wanted to one day sell.
Therefore, knowing what kind of margin profile results in what kind of value, there's gross margin thresholds by category that you need to hit.
There are EBITDA margin thresholds by category that you need to be able to hit to be a viable acquisition target.
When Jordan spoke before about not digging too deep of a hole that you can't one day get out of, I think we were putting numbers up on the page of what do we want our EBITDA margin to be at scale? What do we want our gross margin to be at scale?
How do we get there? Knowing that, sure, you may have cheaper production runs as you get larger and larger, but you also may want to lower the price of your product to access more consumers. Those things were certainly top of mind.
The other thing that I fundamentally believe in is within food and nutrition. There are very few highly successful businesses that have raised more than $50 million.
Over the course of one's life, when you think about mapping out, when you raise your living, honestly, most of the successful ones have raised less than 25.
That points to being self-sufficient around a period of time of like $15 to $30 million in revenue, and only raising money beyond that point when you need to, or sorry, when you want to, not when you need to.
I think those archetypes or gates on the road, we're giving us some specificity on where we needed to be, call it two or three years after launch, so that we ultimately don't get into a position where we're needing to raise money every 18 months
forever. It's helpful to have some at the beginning, and some of the reality of CPG is there are real upfront costs that you need capital for. But the sooner you can get off needing capital injections to survive, the better you are off as a company.
Jordan and Rachel, Kiva has just talked a little bit about how capital efficiency is important for any brand, no matter who you're backed by or working with.
At the stage that you're at now, how do you see investor discipline showing up in terms of spend and the decisions that you're making? What are you delaying, limiting or saying no to?
Maybe even though you've seen it done before, and that could be from an operations perspective, content and marketing, anything.
From the outside, it looks like we're this lavish company that's like, oh, they're well-funded, they partnered with Selva. We're very fortunate, and this isn't saying we're not. I am one of the scrappiest humans you will ever meet.
We don't have a big team. It's myself, it's Jordan, it's Kiva. No one's on the payroll.
We are doing this as lean and scrappy as possible, but also being intentional and investing in areas that we should be investing in. And our retail launch coming up in June is a huge moment for us.
And that is where we're investing a lot of our resources and dollars ahead of that launch and to help make it successful. And we launched D2C on January 7th of this year. And we also launched on Amazon.
And for our D2C business, like we are not paying to acquire these customers, which I think is something that a lot of D2C brands, like Kiva wanted to hang up the phone when I told him that I wanted to sell D2C at first, because he was right.
He was like, you don't understand how much brands are paying to acquire those customers and retain them. And it's a whole aspect of running a business. But from my perspective, we're not a D2C brand long-term.
I wanted somewhere to comfortably launch Kaduz that wasn't in a retail store and on shelves so we can get to know our customers.
And so we definitely pick and choose the areas that we're going to invest in and that we're going to do this as scrappy as possible. Jordan's answering all the customer service emails right now. He's calling people on the phone.
I'm sending voice notes on Instagram. You don't have someone doing customer service. So we really are picking and choosing where we spend our money.
And before running my own brand, I worked in this industry at a beverage company and I worked for the CEO and founder. So I watched how to spend wisely and where you should be investing.
I think just one other thought that I have there is, I think we have a pretty well mapped out as to what our skill sets are and what we really excel in, which I think has also been helping us dictate where we need to invest dollars for experience
that we might not have. And at this point, with our retail launch coming up, with experience that we can't really learn on the job and we'll need support in.
So I think we're really focusing on those areas that we just can't internally support very well. And I think to Rachel's point, one thing that is really important to us is if you outsource too much stuff too quickly, one, you don't get to do it.
And two, you don't get to communicate with your own customer.
Whereas Rachel, or mostly Rachel answering DMs and me answering customer emails, we're now having a one-on-one conversation with a customer that once we get into retail, we're not gonna have that sort of information.
So we're trying to take this in and say we need to be the ones on the ground, really listening and learning because we won't have that chance as you continue to scale.
Yeah. And managing the Kadut's Instagram and managing my own Instagram right now is gonna dig me into a grave, but I want to know everyone's message. And I want to know that your four-year-old ate nothing besides Kadut's and her lunch that day.
And I want to know, oh, you're having an issue with your order. Please let us know. I'd like to know everything, but that's also the control freak in me.
But I think that right now it's really good to say it's lean and scrappy. But we also brought someone on to help with ops, which is really important. It was a huge investment.
I think we feel really strongly about showing up to the world as a best-in-class brand that has family values.
So we are not a big CPG company, but we want to have excellent-type branding. We want to have really tailored content.
Especially when we show up to our contract manufacturer or our retail partners, we want to have people who speak with real credibility, which is why the fractional partners we have on ops and on retail were so important to bring into the fold and we
feel so strongly about. On the flip side, we don't want to be paying for answers to inevitable ambiguity of running a food business.
There are times when navigating ambiguity, you just want somebody who has done it before, and that person who has done it before sometimes can be expensive and inflexible in their thinking.
I think to the team's credit, Jordan especially has continued to insist that we hold a lot of those competencies close to us, that we learn live, we ask the hard questions, rather than ask somebody just, how do we do this, or even worse, can you just
do this for me? I think that is where entrepreneurs lose sight of the important things in their business and start running up the tab really quickly.
Well, certainly one of the functions of the business that you're holding very closely is content marketing.
39:25
Rachel, I am dying to know from somebody who does this for a living and does it incredibly successfully, what does your pre-retail launch content marketing plan look like? You said you were putting together boxes.
If you're up for sharing step by step, what are you doing?
It's a great question. Thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it.
Sometimes I'm like, am I good at this? What am I doing here? I still, oh no, I'm like, is my mom the only one out there watching?
You know, I just, I don't know. So thank you. For me, it's about that I want to connect.
So the influencer kits that we're sending out, that we're building out tomorrow that we're sending out, I personally messaged over a hundred creators from my Instagram, like Rachel Mansfield, being like, hey, I'm launching this product.
I'd love to send it to you. I catered each message for each person, because I know them.
Whether my friends, I worked with, I talked to them, and I want the people that are associated with content marketing to really get it and not just be like, yeah, sure, send it to me, here's how much it is for a post.
Or I just want to send people kadoots, and if they are enjoying it and their kids are enjoying it, feel free to post about it. If you don't want to post about it, then don't, that's fine. Don't buy it or buy it and don't talk about it.
But I think that it's interesting because it could be seen so hypocritical because brands pay me for the exposure on my account and the recipe creation and everything.
But when I'm looking at this now and I learned this through running our venture fund from the investor lens, there are so many costs associated with a successful launch and company that influencer marketing just isn't going to work in the early days.
So it's like, how could we get creative from now until our launch to really continue to generate like this Kadut's crew and like hype online? And for us right now, it's sharing every single post of a customer that gets our product.
I share it on the Kadut's Instagram, because like I think that's exciting for a customer. They get really excited about it like, oh my God, they reposted it or they answered.
And it's not just for us about the like people with large platforms online that are talking about Kadut's. It's also about like the people that are actually ordering on our website for like the third and fourth time now.
And like they're posting about it, making them feel really special. And I think once we're in the store itself, I have a lot of fun ideas that I'm really excited about.
Like I have my second cookbook coming out in August, and we're planning a book tour.
But then like, let's plan a retailer X tour where we can go to like, you know, as many as we can, like many stores as we can, it's humanly impossible for me to do that all in June.
But go to all these stores, like do fun incentives where we like leave notes in the Kadut's box. And gift cards and like do shopping sprees together. And really, how can we make this like fun?
And just like the goal for us is to get Kadut's into as many families, homes and you know, anyone really who wants to snack their hands as possible.
So however, we can do that in like a fun, unique and like lighthearted way is like what I'm trying to do. I just want to create like this passionate group of humans that want delicious snacks.
You got something to say?
You like my tour, right?
My tour idea. My two add-ons to that would just be really like community building early on. I just can't stress it enough, like how important it is for us to really like cultivate, like really firm believers in our brand.
Because knowing if one family has the cracker in their home and they're super passionate about it, they're going to tell their friends. My other point was around just education.
I think Rachel's done a really good job educating our community just around the pillars of our brand. I think it's just super important that getting into a retailer is a really difficult thing, but succeeding in a retailer is even harder.
We've been saying for the next few months, what can we do with our community to continue to grow it, to educate them on our product, so that when we are on shelf, it's not the first time that they're ever seeing us.
They already know what our values stand for. Maybe they've even tried the product thus far, and now it's just an easier avenue for them to include it on their weekly grocery shop.
Well, I think you all have given us such a great idea of how folks who really do know the industry and do know the community would launch a brand.
I would love to hear from each of you, in closing, in a nutshell, how has launching Kadute with investor brains and a creator lens, how has it changed the way that you've thought about going to market and how do you see that continuing to guide the
business as it grows? Kiva, do you want to start?
Yeah, I'd say just a big team mentality. I mean, each of us have our places that we come from and each of us are closer to different parts of the business.
And I think it's given me a great appreciation of how to have constructive disagreement to come to better answers and how to put a lot of trust in different members of a team to pull things through.
I mean, I feel like we all have our different fingerprints on each of the components of this business and there are things that we joke about, especially things that have turned out to work, where we think back to the disagreement at the time and
things that I thought were not going to work that they've proven me wrong on. And maybe there's going to be a few vice versa.
Yeah, like what?
I was not sold on a name the first time Rachel said it, and now I love the name. And I feel like it's so unique. It's so fun that the origin of it is really cool.
And so, you know, I think the reality is so many little decisions roll up to the place that you're at, and those decisions having a diversity of viewpoints that ultimately lead to them ultimately make the decisions better, you're never going to get
every decision right. But I feel more confident than ever that having different backgrounds and perspectives leading to these and having not every single decision being what I would have done if it were just me has led to a way, way, way better
Yeah, I would say that challenging each other for the better of the brand has been something that's been really cool to see.
I really haven't had that experience in other areas of my career, whereas sort of that challenging each other, but all knowing that you want to have the same goal and outcome, I think has pushed us all in a direction that's made us better as a
collective. Just trusting that process, honestly, it's been an amazing three years of doing it, and it just makes me so excited to continue to grind and bring this brand forward.
I think that the investor part of me at least, and I know Jordan and Kiva would probably agree with this, is that it almost paralyzes us sometimes in making some decisions because we've seen brands do it well, we've seen brands do it not as well,
unfortunately, and we don't want to follow in the footsteps that didn't have that amazing, happy ending and journey. I think sometimes we're like, well, this brand did it this way, and then they saw this, and then this one did this, they launched in
this retailer over this one, and they didn't have a good experience. Like, should we be launching there? And I think I'm a very decisive person.
Like, I'm not easily influenced by other people, which I think has, like, helped set me up for success in parts of my career. But at some moments, I'm like, find myself being like, wow, is this the right decision? Is this what we should be doing?
And I think when you're coming in a little bit more blind, it's a bit easier in some ways because you haven't seen those failures and those successes. So for me, that's been the hardest part.
And then as a content creator, I just always fear there's so many brands out there that creators just put their names on and they're not really building it.
And I was very clear from the beginning that this was a company that I was going to be helping run. And it's not just like, oh, Rachel has a snack brand and so and so is running it for her. This is something that I want to continue to do.
And it's like definitely where I see myself and my career like long-term. And I think that like that has only proven to be even more so the case as we've launched this company where I'm like, I can't hand this to somebody else.
Like I have to be doing this, which is like, you know, ever since launching, it just made it even more of like a love affair that I'm having.
Kiva Dickinson, Jordan Carpenter and Rachel Mansfield, thank you so much for joining the Nombase Podcast and sharing all of the great advice and learnings that you've had so far on your caduce journey.
For everybody else, thank you for tuning in to the Nombase Podcast, 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.
