[00:00:05] Melissa Traverse: Hello, and thank you for joining. I am Melissa Traverse, Director of Community here at BevNET & Nosh, 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. Today we are talking about frozen grocery, which might honestly be one of the hardest places to build a brand in grocery. It's not just about having a great product. You're fighting for attention in a freezer aisle where people don't always know what they're looking for. The layouts are inconsistent from store to store. And sometimes you are literally asking someone to open an icy freezer door, dig around to find you when they don't know if you're even there. On top of all of that, due to long expiration dates, Frozen has a long repurchase cycle, so momentum takes real patience. To dig into all of that, I am thrilled to be joined by two fearless Frozen warriors who are running brands at different stages of the Frozen journey. First, we have Shireen Khera, founder of Hay Hunger. Shireen started Hay Hunger at Farmers Markets and has grown it into a frozen brand now in more than 60 stores. She is in that critical early growth phase, focused on building real velocity and brand awareness on the West Coast before taking the leap into bigger national retailers. Helping to guide the strategy side of this conversation is Ayeshah Abuelhiga, founder of Mason Dixie Foods. Asha has been through it all. She has built and scaled a frozen brand through regional expansion, navigated the realities of velocity expectations, and learned firsthand how long it can take for frozen brands to truly catch on. Shireen and Ayeshah, thank you so much for joining us. I think we're going to uncover some really interesting information about frozen grocery today. Shireen, you really were the impetus for this podcast. As I mentioned, you're at this really interesting stage where distribution is growing, but the bigger question that you had is how do you build real depth and repeat purchase in frozen grocery, which, like we've said and will continue to say, is incredibly difficult. What has surprised you most so far about the challenges of getting shoppers to notice find and come back to your frozen product?
[00:02:40] Shireen Khera: I think the biggest challenge that I found is having them, one, recognize what the brand is, But then even at demo tables, having to walk them to the aisle and opening the door and showing them, hey, this is my product. They love it at the table. They want to try it out. There are many times that they go to the aisle, and then they're just walking around. And they'll come back and tell me, hey, I couldn't find it. So I have to walk them to the store all the time to have them pick up that product. I think that is the biggest challenge that I found. Even when products in that aisle have, like when the brand has been designed to like pop off the shelf, it is still a journey to get people to recognize it and then put them in the grocery cart all the time.
[00:03:35] Melissa Traverse: There is a lot of handholding that goes along with frozen. And for anyone in the audience who's not familiar with Hey Hunger, could you tell us a little bit about the product itself and why you started it? I'll have to preface and say that I am not a vegetarian, but your tikka veggie patties are so incredibly delicious that I would eat them no matter what. So I think you've really found an amazing product that appeals to a wide audience, but please tell us a little bit about it.
[00:04:04] Shireen Khera: I started the company because I wanted to bring something that was ultra low processed and truly nutritional to the freezer aisle. The company was the impetus of the company was my mom who had cancer and she needed something that was nutritionally dense but also easy on her gut. And lo and behold, Indians have their own version of veggie burgers, but they are very much a potato-based product. And so we've modified them to be more nutritionally dense, as well as easy on your gut, and also very, very flavorful.
[00:04:46] Melissa Traverse: Could you tell us about what the SKUs are?
[00:04:48] Shireen Khera: Yeah, so we have, unlike other products on the market, which use either proteins or protein isolates to pump up your proteins, I don't use any artificial ingredients. I use nuts and seeds as a protein base, as well as flax seeds to give you an omega-3 bump and a fiber bump. So you have beets and walnuts, roasted carrots and almonds, sauteed spinach and pistachio, and then braised lentils, French lentils and walnuts as the fourth skew.
[00:05:22] Melissa Traverse: I just ate lunch and that's making me hungry already. So you're in over 60 stores. That's a combination of small chains and independence in the West Coast. Is that right? Can you give us an idea of where you're placed now?
[00:05:36] Shireen Khera: Yeah, so I have been very fortunate to be placed in famous grocery stores like the Berkeley Bowl and very, very prestigious grocery stores like Good Earth, which is 100% organic, as well as larger grocery chains within the San Francisco Bay Area, like Nugget Markets, as well as Molly Stone's, among other various markets like Woodlands Markets and smaller grocery chains around the Bay Area.
[00:06:05] Melissa Traverse: Well, I know you have some great questions, which we are going to get to in just a minute. Asha, you live in the freezer aisle every single day. I mentioned a few reasons, but can you tell the audience really why is frozen such a uniquely difficult category?
[00:06:22] Mason Dixie: Yeah, I think outside of temperature state, right, with its own challenges in terms of distribution and logistics, you know, I always tell people to do well in frozen, you have three barriers to the customer that you wouldn't have if you were a shelf-stable item, right? So first of all, recognizing that you are frozen, getting them to the aisle, like Shereen just talked about. And then not only that, you got to get them to open the door and find you. And again, that frosted over window happens a lot. You know, you lose shelf placement. My new favorite anti-favorite thing are the freezers that the lights turn out for energy efficiency when you're not in the aisle. and they don't turn on until you walk past your door. Who thought of that? You know, things like, I mean, just think about it. There's things like that. No one's turning off the lights in the cereal aisle. No one's turning off the lights at granola, you know? So it is a very, very challenging environment because just to get the consumer there, you're already up against four more obstacles than, you know, the average shelf-stable brand is. And on top of that, you know, I think we talked about this a little before, but you got to be patient with frozen, right? One of the benefits of frozen is you can be naturally preservative-free. The downsides are you shove it in a freezer and you forget about it for a while, right? So really honing in on how to become a habitual item on a shopping list in frozen. is difficult unless patterns of behavior change and you're fortunate enough to really get that consumer to think of you just like they would milk, right, and butter and anything else on their staples. So for that reason, you know, frozen is challenging.
[00:08:10] Melissa Traverse: Those energy saving lights are, I asked for uniquely tough. That is, that is uniquely tough. When you look at founders like Shireen, who are in this earlier stage of their frozen journey, what do you think is most important for them to focus on to set themselves up for long-term success in such a difficult category?
[00:08:30] Mason Dixie: So I think number one, like I said before is patience, right? I think one of the things about the CPG industry is obviously it's high energy. you know, it's high speed, we want to grow, grow, grow, and you know, you see all these incredible stories that go out there. It's like, you know, overnight successes. I encourage you to remind yourself nothing in this industry is an overnight success. Do not believe the hype, okay? And be patient with yourself and the consumer. I think the other thing too is don't bite more than you can chew because Frozen is a notoriously expensive merchandising placement arena. Slotting can be heavy and so failure is expensive and sometimes not recoverable. So really, really making sure that you're ready to enter into appropriate distribution points, that you have the ability to support it financially and really with footfall. I think what people assume is that people will naturally just find me. and they won't. You got to bring them there. You got to really tell the customer where you are and when and why to buy. There's so many things that you've got to do and we don't get the benefit in Frozen of just being able to stand outside of a metro station and hand out a free bag or pop one in someone's backpack. It doesn't work like that. So you really do have to have a really great grassroots in-store strategy, which again, in my opinion, really inherently makes it yet again more expensive. And then obviously from a trial standpoint, it's not easy, right? There's a lot of places that won't even let you demo in Frozen, and people don't know that. And that's because you need heating equipment, and you can't just scoop it and serve it, right? When you have all of these challenges combined, you've got to really think through all of those strategies before you get too worried about growing. How are you gonna demo effectively? How are you gonna get butts in stores? How are you gonna get people to know where you are? How big of a net can I cast? How much can I personally get to? I think I told Shereen this when we got to know each other, but we made sure when we first got started, and this is for years, four or five years, we didn't go further than we could drive. And I went to every store, every store we were in. And I think you have to have that kind of tenacity so you really understand what you're up against and that you can be responsive to needs, right? Like I showed up at every random event, it could have been Valentine's Day, Biscuits had nothing to do with Valentine's Day, I was in there, right? So you just do whatever you can to get the attention when you can get it, right? Because there's not a lot of times we're frozen as a feature. I think the other irony too about frozen, frozen food month is in March. Why? Why March? Why not back to school time? Why not when most people are shopping? There's things like that too that don't necessarily coincide with how I would merchandise necessarily, but these are the realities of frozen.
[00:11:41] Melissa Traverse: Maybe it's the month that when you go grocery shopping, you can leave all your frozen groceries in the trunk without having to worry about them melt. That's ridiculous. We're so grateful to have you here on the podcast today, providing a little bit of mentorship and advice after seeing everything that you've seen. So Shireen, I'm gonna hand the mic over to you. I know you have some really great questions, so please take it away.
[00:12:05] Shireen Khera: Yeah, so I think the first one I would like to start off with is traditionally grocery shopping, as a consumer myself, I have always shopped the outer aisles, right? We have been programmed to not go to the freezer aisle unless it's pizza or ice cream. Outside of demos, what have you used as a technique to drive people into a habit to actually put your products into your basket as a regular item?
[00:12:42] Mason Dixie: Yeah, great question. So I think I'll go back to our biscuit days, right? Because frozen biscuits were non-existent in natural foods. We were the first natural frozen biscuit, right? So first of all, natural biscuits, non-existent. Second of all, natural, natural breads. There were no breads. It was just gluten-free stuff. I can't tell you the number of times we were merchandising gluten-free and I was panicking. I was like, you're going to kill somebody. We can't be in there. They're like, well, I don't know where else to put you. I was like, I don't know. Put us in ice cream. So I think part of the benefit and opportunity of being on the early side and being scrappy is finding the right partners that are just going to help you by doing what you ask them to do. So when we first got started, because we didn't have a category or a subcategory even, We told Whole Foods to just put us anywhere but. So they would find any space and we were very lucky because there wasn't a lot going on back then, but we got placed next to ice cream. We got placed next to entrees. We got placed next to wherever they could find the space. And while you can't do that in institutionally large places, including Whole Foods now today, I'm talking about Whole Foods 11 years ago, guys. Today, I think the opportunity really is with smaller Not even necessarily natural grocery stores, and I'm gonna emphasize that. Natural grocery tends to be challenging for a lot of frozen brands because there is not typically enough frozen real estate. Most natural stores in the independent footprint don't even actually have an aisle. They're like open cases, a couple reach-ins. They're not programmed like a Kroger where you've got aisle upon aisle of frozen doors. So in my opinion, they're not always the safest place for a frozen brand to go. So when we first got started, people questioned all the time why we had a mixed channel strategy and why we didn't go straight into all the Indies. And I was like, cause we can't, they don't have freezers. Right? Like this is like a reality that is like blew people's minds. So, you know, I think really thinking through who you could partner with early to make some merchandising decisions that'll be transformational in brand recognition and placement. So do they have an end cap? Do they have a mobile freezer? Do they have a coffin that you could fill up? Where can you get merchandising the best you can and own the store, right? We only started in, even when we were at Whole Foods, we started in 20. Again, I could drive to all of them. And that allowed us to go to every store and say, I don't like us being there. Can you put us in? I mean, I'll never forget, I even asked people to put us in the meat department because I didn't like where we were, right? So you really just have to get creative and figure out how much you can do on the merchandising side. And then secondly, I think we were lucky. We started out as a restaurant and we had, you know, this reputation of being a gourmet brand because we had a restaurant and people tasted the food and they knew it was going to be good. You got to get people to understand that the food's going to be good. Frozen, in my opinion, the biggest opportunity we have is emerging insurgent brands. is to bring good food to a really crappy category full of crap. It is just a not tasty place. And so the assumption that people have is the barometer is going to be really low. This is just going to be alright, right? It's just going to be the thing I buy because I'm hungover on Sunday morning, or because I forgot to make dinner and it's now 10pm and I can't order anything. You don't want to be the afterthought. You want to be the forethought. So you got to figure out a way to Really cement yourself in people's taste buds and want them to buy what you're selling because it just tastes good.
[00:16:28] Shireen Khera: So Aisha, I agree with you. Every time I'm at a demo table, the assumption that people come with is that if it's a veggie patty, it's going to be just terrible. And they're like, oh, it's a veggie patty. How good can it be? And then they try it and they're like, oh my God, this is so good. Even if they don't buy it because it's not part of their daily routine, but I feel better that they walked away with a better experience and a taste that will linger in their memory for a long time rather than something that they had a bad experience with.
[00:17:07] Mason Dixie: Exactly. And that's a great point too. I think it's very easy to be discouraged and frozen because You're not going to, for every 100 samples, you may not get 100 buyers. There's a lot more barriers to entry again. But you have to be patient. I keep enforcing that because exactly what you said, frozen is a beautiful place because you have to be a meal solution. When I say solution, not option, I say solution. Somebody's going to have to remember that they have options outside of just ordering because we have competition from everywhere. We have restaurant competition, you got homemade recipe competition from scratch, you got snacks, you got everything, right? So in frozen, you really got to be a full meal solution. And so the more that you demo and then they remember like, okay, at some point someone's going to go, I need to stop eating so much red meat. I need to add vegetarian to my diet at least once a week. I need to add spice to my life. They're going to have these thoughts and they're like, where do I start? I don't know how to make a curry base. I don't know how to make biryani on my own. Remember that patty I had? It's incredible how many times that will happen to people, but you've got to be present and you've got to be there. You can't just do it once. You've got to be demoing more and more and more because remember, the average frozen shop is once every four and a half weeks. right? Because it's from that, right? They don't need to go there every day unless they're going to use this stuff like smoothie mix, even maybe, maybe, I don't know. I've got probably a bag of frozen strawberries rotting in my freezer, right? Like you have to think about, you got to be there for every repeat so that, that, that, that top of mind starts to happen, right? And be patient.
[00:18:50] Shireen Khera: This leads me to the next question. How do you maintain velocity? Because every grocery store has their own barometer of how well you're doing. And if you're in a chain like Whole Foods, I think 10% makes 90% of your revenue. So one, how do you keep your velocity going outside? Yes, demo is one mechanism. Two, how do you maintain your presence on those shelves? Because at some point, the category review will come around. those 10% or the 10 stores out of the 50 stores you're doing or 100 stores you're doing, they'll probably perform better than the other 90. And so how do you maintain your shelf presence as well as your velocity as you keep going outside of just demos?
[00:19:45] Mason Dixie: Be humble, right? Like I said before, start where you can actually reach the retailer and impact the customer, right? I don't care if that's four stores. you'd be better off growing from four skus a week or four units a week to 40 units a week in four stores than you would be going into 40 stores and doing three units a week. So, and that's important because when you have that kind of momentum, people talk about it. Getting to 40 velocity is not a small drop in the pond, right? Like that's a, that's huge. And so somebody's talking about you, somebody's telling their friends, So when that momentum starts to shift and you see those gains, that's usually an indication of the right time to find your secondary retailer that's within reach, again, where that spillover effect of, well, who shops here, right? Is it, you know, wealthy yoga moms? Is it, you know, jockey 40 year old guys? Like who is shopping here and where else do they shop or where else do they live? Because maybe I'm only getting the one community of these people and then there's a whole another community of those people somewhere else. So you really have to have the time to understand the retail environment that you're in and what patterns you can find to go find that next retailer that you should go into as a result. And it does start to snowball, right? Like that coupled with really effective top of mind awareness building, whether it's social media, whether it's demos, whether it's localized events that you show up to. Again, I cannot emphasize enough. Frozen brands typically have the right to be next to restaurant and QSR type concepts. So go where they go, right? Chick-fil-A's always got their little mobile tent somewhere. Move Chick-fil-A, stand by the Chick-fil-A tent. Who cares about the Clif Bars, right? Like, you're not competing with Clif Bar. You're competing with Chick-fil-A. Go stand over there, right? So you gotta think about how you're gonna enable that kind of mindset in your team and in your strategy so that you can really start to build marketing tactics that really help supplement that top of mind awareness building. And you know, again, like I'm going to emphasize, it takes money and it takes time and you got to be willing to invest that, right? So, you know, it's not for the faint of heart, but if you really think through it and are patient and methodical and intentional about how you grow, it is very, very feasible to see those velocities increase that quickly.
[00:22:16] Shireen Khera: When you talk about velocities, the first thing that comes to my mind is this tension between quality and then margins. Going into a grocery store, I have been very, very fortunate for the first year I was able to do direct. Now I'm going through a distributor. At some point, there will be a broker. And so how do you maintain that balance between quality and margin. It is personally something that I always struggle with, being a premium brand with organic ingredients and having to make that decision constantly as to where I'm going to go and how I'm going to land on those shelves while also protecting my margin. So I want to get your perspective of how you've built that over the years.
[00:23:12] Mason Dixie: Number one, and I can't emphasize this enough, and this is not just for frozen brands, this is for any brand. The number of times I just get like blank stares when I ask this question is not, that's crazy to me, is have you asked your consumer what's important? Does your consumer care if you're organic or not? Does your consumer care if it's got four grams of sugar? Does your consumer care more about the protein or the carb or the spice? Does your customer care about the flavors? If your consumer doesn't care, why are you paying for it? So for us, for example, early on we had so much, you know, retailers, why isn't this organic? Why aren't you non-GMO labeled? Why, why, why? And I flat out said, because our consumer doesn't care about any of that. And I can prove it to you. Because we surveyed our consumers and we asked them, would you prefer us to be organic? Would you prefer us to be non-GMO certified? Would you prefer us to have X, Y, and Z ingredients? And time and time again, the answer was, sure. If the price doesn't go up, that just means our consumer base is a little bit more price conscious and doesn't care as much as long as they knew that what they did care about, transparency, clean label. They wanted to make sure we did the work that we did at the restaurant, where we clarified every ingredient was going in there and they could trust that it was clean. That's the standard we live by, right? We make sure that affordability is one of our central tenants right next to our no-nos list that's 200 ingredients long, right? So it's really down to you to really start to understand that consumer base. And it just takes time. You're going to have to panel people. You're going to have to ask them, those regulars that you see that are constantly buying you, ask them what their favorite parts are. And you should do a pricing study. It doesn't have to be anything crazy. You just tell them, how much did you pay for this? You just, it's crazy what people will tell you. And, and, you know, that really has always been our guiding light. And I encourage every brand, not just Frozen, to really get back to the consumer first.
[00:25:10] Shireen Khera: As you've grown your brand, what have been the most costly mistakes that you have done? And what have you learned? What were the takeaways from those mistakes?
[00:25:22] Mason Dixie: I started a CPG company. I'm a big reframer because I don't believe that, um, I don't like, I don't like the word mistake because I think mistakes are things that you make and then you don't change from, you know, I think, um, decisions. Did I make bad decisions? Sure. Did I pivot from them? Absolutely. So I'd say from, from a costly standpoint, I think. Everybody goes through this, right? I mean, like we had no, we were the first in our category to do a lot of things. So nobody ever told us, like my favorite story, we had to fill out our first distributor paperwork and there was tie high on it. And I was like, what the heck is that? So I Googled it and there was no definition of tie high. It just said pallet dimensions. And I was like, okay, is that inches? Is that number of boxes? Is that, you know? And so I asked everybody, including the distributor, and they were like, it's a tie high, you know, tie high, tie high. So we wrote something random on there and they were like, that seems small. And I was like, I don't know. Like what is it? So we just, so my, my, my partner at the time and I were like, okay, how many, how many boxes can we get on a pallet? And we stacked it as high as we could without the pallet falling apart. And we're like, okay, that's a tie high. So sure enough, the guy comes to go pick up the first pallets and they are stacked higher than God. And they try to get on this truck and the stuff is falling out and we're holding it up like this. And we're like, I don't think we did this right. And so we finally get there and like half of the pallets have fallen apart. The VP is yelling at me because I didn't know what I was doing and you know, whatever. I was like, okay, at the end of the day, I didn't know what a tie high was. So then we figured out you can't stack stuff like that. You gotta, you know, you gotta measure the height of a freezer truck. You gotta, you know, you gotta measure the shelves they're going to put it on. And then finally, at some point, somebody told us how you measure it. So we were like, okay. But I mean, that was, that was a small, costly mistake, but there's tons of those, right? We, we ordered packaging with, um, used UPCs. I didn't know that they couldn't be used. So then when somebody scanned it, it was like timber from some company in Minnesota. And we were like, that's not our product. What the heck happened there? You know, things happen when you're first getting started. So, you know, I wouldn't say there was anything that was ever like devastating to that point. But I will say like one of the, I wouldn't even say this is a mistake. It was an opportunity, but it costs us a lot to do was entering into food service. I mean, no one had done it, so nobody could tell us how to do it. The customers certainly didn't know. So I, the joke is that I became the director at one of our customers, the director of logistics, because they had no idea how they got food. And so we broke a lot of systems and we shook a lot of trees and the whole team was run so ragged trying to get this thing set up where it was like, wow, in the end it was a lot of work. You know, the opportunity side was mega, but should we have jumped into that as quickly as we did? Cause it was painful. I mean, if we had the luxury to do it all over again, I probably would have done it differently. But you can always do that, right? You can always look backwards and say, coulda, shoulda, woulda. I think the best thing about being an entrepreneur and an insurgent brand is you gotta be insurgent, right? You just gotta break stuff and forgive yourself later, right? And then I'd say from a Frozen perspective too, I would say mistakes happen in Frozen because no one helps you. It is a black hole for information, right? Four, five, six companies own 99% of the market share in it. So no one has input, no one has experience, no one has help. So you're doing it on your own. It's a lonely, lonely category. So I think always think about it from that perspective, right? It's an insurgent place to be. You're an insurgent brand. You're going to break stuff. forgive yourself and keep going, right?
[00:29:19] Melissa Traverse: Aja, could you explain why food service besides the fact that you had to run the company in order to get your product there?
[00:29:26] Mason Dixie: The food service industry is pretty locked down. It is, it's a mafia of sorts. There's many, many gatekeepers to information to access. And the biggest thing is it's unlike, unlike retail where the endpoint is, you know, the retailer is your customer. right? And the distributor is the, just kind of the mechanism for getting it to your customer. And then you control what happens because you control your shelf with your customer, right? In food service, there is none of that. The distributor can make or break you. It's a very different world. There's no guaranteed shelf space. There's no guaranteed execution. There's multiple pieces of red tape on whether or not they're going to stock your item, whether or not they're going to prioritize it going on a truck versus their private label brand. There's a lot of challenges around operating in the food service ecosystem. So it's not that it didn't work. It's just that the lack of information about how it could work really set us up to have to learn and build the plane while we were flying it, right? And so it's very different than I could ask anybody in retail, even if it wasn't in frozen, how to get into a grocery store, right? I quit it 11 years ago, just so everybody knows, this is new. Thanks to people like Melissa, you can.
[00:30:50] Melissa Traverse: And so how much of your business today is made up of food service?
[00:30:55] Mason Dixie: We're about a third food service. So still very sizable business for us But again, I think the other thing about food service is not every brand is positioned for it Frozen brands, I believe are there's a lot of utility around preparation that you can save for restaurants and food service outlets that don't have prep labor right or don't have the time or a want to do an LTO of something but don't want to invest in all the R&D around it. So frozen brands, because we're meal solutions, can be perfectly set up for food service operations at some point in, you know, their line of sight. Where I would say like a bag of chips probably could never, right? Bulked things like granolas and powders, it's really hard, right? Because now you're an ingredient. to a food service outlet, even if you're a full package. You don't have to make granola because you can just pour this in your yogurt. They're going to go, well, I can make granola at a quarter of the price if I just bought those oats, those raisins. So there's a lot more competition for a lot more of the ecosystem. So I believe that if you're a frozen meal solution, you have a lot of opportunity in food service. And it's worth looking into over time.
[00:32:10] Shireen Khera: I totally agree. I think there's trade-offs. from going from a retail to a bulk and trying to figure out where there's discipline in CPG, there's a straight path to the freezer door. So twists and turns, but yes, quite a straight and disciplined path. But food service is definitely a jigsaw puzzle that has to be figured out. And the volumes are different. So where at the retail store you will have only one or two at a time going off your freezer door, it's multiple pounds that are being shipped off and consumed at various places. So there's definitely a trade-off between both type of businesses.
[00:33:08] Mason Dixie: Well said.
[00:33:10] Shireen Khera: When did you start using brokers for your business?
[00:33:16] Mason Dixie: So when we decided that we were going to go bigger than where we could drive, and we said, we need a pilot study. So we were like, OK, let's go to a Southern retailer. And if they're going to buy biscuits and it works, then we'll keep doing this. If not, we're going to just call it quits and focus on the restaurant. So when we got into Kroger and Publix by LinkedIn-ing the buyer and then they asked us to fill in all this stuff and then they were like, who's your broker? I was like, what the heck is a broker? You know, that was where we were like, oh man, we got to get a broker. So I would say if I could do that all over again, I probably would have done my research and tried to figure out that that was a better way to do it in retrospect because I think we as an industry vilify brokers a lot and I don't like it because I think that's just people being ignorant of how the broker system works. They are extended sales support for you because the harsh reality that people don't want to admit is you're never going to hire 200 people to represent 200 accounts. Never. And so you need them. Two, it's not about the broker being a replacement for a salesperson, they are just a conduit, right? So you've got to manage your brokers and you've got to really understand what's in it for them and what's in it for you and how do you prioritize yourself because the crappy thing about the industry right now is most brokers have like hundreds of accounts on their desk. Very challenging environment today. So how do you get their attention, right? And that really comes down to you being a good person, a fun brand, something exciting that they could throw onto the list of things that they're going to talk to their buyers about. You know, it really comes down to you creating the noise so that that broker is enabled to sell you like as close to as you would. And I think too, you can't just be like, all right, the broker's going to sell it in for me. You need to be there. Right? Like you got to be there. So that's again, back to what I said is like, you can't bite off more than you can chew because if you get a brokerage that's national, They're incentivized to make money as quickly as possible, so they're going to try to take you everywhere as quickly as possible. It's really down to you to make sure you have a methodology and a prioritization schedule of when you're going to go to what accounts. And there are a lot of smaller boutique brokerages. There's all kinds of ways to skin the cat. You don't need to go to a national brokerage so quickly. I will caveat that, though, because as a frozen brand, It's very tricky to know where you can even play without access to data or information, right? So we made the selection to go to a national brokerage very early so that we could access that data. And we were very lucky. They were, they were great. And unfortunately they got bought, but, um, and they changed, but when they were with us, they really were invested and they took us through the pipeline of opportunity that there could be and where we could play. And based on where we were winning, all the things that we could do if we had data on our own, but they had it. And they were really good about sharing it. So I think when you're ready to actually expand beyond where you can drive to, and you really want to start thinking through your retail footprint strategy, that's when I would engage a brokerage.
[00:36:40] Shireen Khera: I agree with you on the fact that a brokerage is a sales arm and an extension of you, which also makes sense when you think about who you're going to bring on as your sales extension, because they have to be an extension of your brand too. On the other hand, I feel that having a brokerage is just the beginning, right? They can help you set up and get you on the shelves, but you have to have the operational manpower to actually stay there. I think that is where I always like stop and think like, okay, am I ready for that next step? Because that will also take to your point a lot of capital to be there and to support those accounts. There's this pressure to always be fast. From my perspective, as I've been building this over the two years, it's really not about a sprint, but more an endurance race and a very patient operational endurance race. So as you think about people who are coming behind me into the space, and also for founders who are trying to still prove it, what mindset would you want them to bring along? so that they can win on shelf.
[00:38:12] Mason Dixie: I do believe that it's harder to be in CPG than ever because a lot of ground rules have been put in place, whether that happened because of COVID or, you know, all the craziness with venture capitalists going nuts and, you know, acquisitions happening and things failing on shelf post acquisition. So it's been a really crazy place because it got treated like every other dot com boom thing, right? And the reality is, so food is food. That's never changed. And if it was that easy, then everyone's Meemaw would be a billionaire right now, because I guarantee everyone's Meemaw made the best food ever, right? So the reality is, I think a lot of people, because we all relate to food, because we all eat it, think that they can be in it, and that they can operate in this environment, and that there's just some magic you know, carpet that's going to take them at warp speed to this half a billion dollar valuation overnight. And that is just not, that's never been true. That's absolutely never been true. And I think getting that out of your head now is the most critical thing you could do. When you start in this industry, you got to want to be in it. You got to care and you got to be in it for the long haul. And that's always the mindset that I've had, right? I've half joked that, you know, I want this to be my last job ever because I truly do. If that's five years from now that it ends because it was acquired or 20 years because I retire, I don't care because this is where I want to be and this is the brand I want to build and these are the products that I want to make. And so if you're in it to just sail to the moon on warp speed, you should pick a different industry. Maybe go into AI, go into something else, right? Because this isn't it. And I think if you, if you change your mindset from thinking you're going to have a five-year exit, Never happens, by the way. If you change your mindset from that to, I'm here because I enjoy what I'm doing, or I'm here for the long haul, it doesn't matter when it happens. A good business will sell one day no matter what. The other thing too is you should never be in this industry to sell. This is one of the most difficult places to sell any business. So whoever spoon feeds you those lies, throw that away too, right? This is not, This is very difficult from an industry standpoint in terms of acquisition strategy, right? It's very, very targeted. So the goals that you should have is make the best product you can make, sell as much of it as you can, as profitably as you can, and you will be successful no matter what, right? And I think, you know, being in Frozen, you're never going to operate at the speed even of candy bars and potato chips and soda. You won't. You just don't get those placement opportunities. It's a reality you have to live with and you have to set realistic expectations around what winning in Frozen looks like. And I think the sooner that you create that frame of reference, don't create those bullshit TAM documents where you're showing somebody a $15 billion market and you're going to have, you know, a percent of it. Don't. Don't. Get real. Okay. What is really your addressable market? How much of it do you want? And how much of it can you actually impact? And if you are honest with yourself early on about that, it really does frame and reframe your growth strategy. So it's not about speed. It's about accomplishment, right? I conquered San Francisco Bay Area. So I went to Seattle. And then from Seattle, I went to Portland. From Portland, I went to Denver, right? Like you create a map for yourself to grow versus I got it. I got to be in 20,000 doors in three years. Good luck.
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[00:42:19] Shireen Khera: Thanks, Aisha. I think I totally agree with you. When I came into this industry, I came from tech, right? So I did have a little bit of a distorted view of what and where I would be, but I also had a humbling experience very early on. where I was reaching out to people and understanding what their journey was about and how long they took to get to where they were, either from acquiring or selling or retiring or just shutting down their business and saying, I'm done. But at the end of it, it was always about how personal food is to everyone. They have been there to build something that was personally very real, very close to them. And that's why those brands have existed for 10 years, for 20 years. And it's amazing to see that come to fruition every day, whether it's on the shelf or not. I think when I meet my own customers at demos, at farmers markets, or just walking down the street and they recognize me and it's like, it's that moment of truth. Like, okay, this is why I'm doing it. because it's making someone's life a little bit better.
[00:43:38] Melissa Traverse: Well, Shireen Khera of Hayhunger Veggie Tikka Patties, thank you so much for joining the NAMBES podcast. I know you've made a bunch of people's lives better just by asking such great questions and sharing your story. So thank you so much for joining the NAMBES podcast. Asha Abolisha, you were giving your last answer and I was thinking the hardest thing about working with you and generating content with you is that it's hard to figure out which clips to pull because there are so many gems. So really, Asha, thank you so much for joining the show, giving such great advice and giving such great advice to the CPG community in general and keeping it real. So thank you so much for joining the Non-Based Podcast. For everybody else, thank you for listening and we will see you next time. That concludes another episode of the Nambase 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 nambase.com. And don't forget to join our Nambase Slack at slack.BevNET.com for company updates, industry networking, and community discussions. See you next time.
