Amy Zitelman - Building a Differentiated Brand in an Ancient Category

On this episode, we’re joined by Amy Zitelman, Co-Founder & CEO of Soom Foods, the chef-quality tahini brand she built with her two sisters. 

Amy and her team went with a foodservice-first go-to-market strategy that earned brand credibility with top chefs and eventually generated demand at the consumer and retail level, before launching on Amazon and eventually into national retail.

She shares how a COVID home-cooking surge kicked things into another gear, ultimately leading to her first fundraise 8-10 years after launch, a big rebrand, a national Whole Foods rollout, and eventually an expansion into other major retailers like Walmart and Publix.

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Episode Highlights:

🥄 What makes Soom’s tahini different
🍽️ Why foodservice was the fastest path to credibility and pull-through
🛒 Expanding into Amazon
📈 COVID’s demand spike and inventory strategy that accelerate growth
💸 The first fundraise 8-10 years in
🎨 Rebrand lessons that set up a Whole Foods leap
🏷️ Shelf placement, promos, and driving velocity in center store
🏬 Walmart expansion
🔭 Trends Amy’s watching across global flavors and better-for-you

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Table of Contents:

00:24:18 – Origin story
02:09:11 – Building Soom with Amy’s two sisters
05:10:11 – Building a differentiated Tahini brand
09:30:20 – Foodservice
19:06:10 – Expanding into Amazon
24:43:04 – COVID accelerated growth
28:05:19 – 1st fundraise 8–10 years in, the what and why
29:15:24 – Rebrand, recs, catapulting into Whole Foods
3514:04 – Whole Foods national launch
38:31:29 – Where Soom sits in the store
42:09:07 – Walmart
44:14:18 – Trends and brands Amy’s tracking

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Links:

Soom Foods - https://soomfoods.com
Follow Amy on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-zitelman/
Follow me on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-steinberg/ 

For help with CPG production design - packaging and label design, product renders, POS assets, retail media assets, quick-turn sales and marketing assets and all the other work that bogs down creative teams - check out KitPrint.

Transcript

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welcome to shelf Help co founder and CEO of Zoom Foods super excited to dive into this and maybe Amy just for a first off the listeners aren't that familiar with zoom it was yeah just give us a quick lay of the land origin story why behind the brand core product lineup maybe just call out a few places where people can get their hands on them and then we'll go from there sure so zoom we uh we sell tahini so a lot of times I start conversations with whether people are familiar with tahini or not many people still today are not familiar but it was a lot less when we started this company back in 2011 so my middle sister Jackie moved to Israel after high school my oldest sister Shelby studied entrepreneurial management at Wharton our parents are entrepreneurs and I was graduating from college when my oldest sister called me and said what do you think about the tahini industry and we were like what I was like what are you talking about she said Jackie's boyfriend sells tahini in Israel in Israel they use tahini in all sorts of ways of course hummus and on falafel but also in baked goods and in frozen yogurt and fancy restaurants and casual restaurants and it was a great question I mean I think entrepreneurship kind of runs in our blood what we found back in 2011 was that most people had no idea what tahini was if they did they only used it to make hummus and they typically could only find it on the bottom shelf of the international aisle with like dust on the lids so we really set out to change that to make tahini a more popular ingredient in the US market what's a little unique about zoom is we have a very omnichannel sales approach the foundation of our business is actually selling tahini in larger formats to restaurants across the country we grew for the first 8 years of zoom primarily with food service as our focus also accompanied by Amazon and it was actually during Covid that really accelerated our growth into consumers and more household penetration so we can talk about all of that as we discuss but 90% of our business is selling tahini to different customers across different channels and different sizes in terms of building a brand with family especially your sisters yeah um well since both of our parents were entrepreneurs too like having business at home wasn't really foreign to us you know our mom was in corporate gifts or swag uh you know as it's known now and so we used to help her pack kits with branded pencils and t shirts and mouse pads and calculator now mouse pads and all that stuff and you know we used to go to our dad's office and either do our homework from there or you know help him put spiral bound you know notepads together and things like that or reports together uh so I think that really helped as a foundation our father also grew up in a family business and that was the restaurant business so that's a very demanding industry we actually have a family lore to not go into restaurants and my sisters and I joke that we ended up going in the back door you know carrying buckets of tahini cause I think once in hospitality always in hospitality and so we were very aware of boundaries that needed to be set and the nice thing is even though my sisters and I look an awful lot alike we even sound a lot alike if you pick us up on a phone call you might be confused but we have very different skill sets personalities and interests so it was very easy for us especially early on to stick to our roles and responsibilities not that that made it necessarily seamless but we we actually work together really well was it pretty easy I was gonna ask about you know obviously you're you have the CEO title was that an easy did your other two sisters agree yeah you're the right person to CEO or how did that I got a CEO in 2019 when my oldest sister Shelby stepped out of the day to day to have her third kid so her life was becoming overwhelming she's like I don't think I can sit in this seat she ended up shifting to a COO like ops and finance seat for us which made a lot of sense but before she could even come back it was Covid and the whole company just kind of got flipped on its head and and she hasn't been in the day to day but yes I mean a there's the jokes of our um you know age order our birth order where Shelby the oldest was the CEO she studied entrepreneurial management she had a finance background like she really did understand the core foundation of building a business and the really important back of house things I studied interpersonal communication and was always really just outgoing and like talking to people so I fell into business development I think my first title at the company was VP of business development or something you know totally made up and Jackie sitting in Israel and now her and her husband are also in um the supply chain of sesame as a commodity from Ethiopia they have their own tahini factory in Ethiopia at this point so she always sat in our international supply chain kind of seat so yeah we were lucky I mean I guess it I think it couldn't have worked out easier considering three of us had to fit in in some capacity that's great that's great it was fun what's cool about tahini is that I know it's been around for thousands of years maybe even and longer showing up I think in in cookbooks like as early as the 13th century again maybe even earlier um you know high quality uniquely sourced ingredients proprietary production processes different flavor spices or I guess a few things like come top of mind for me just in terms of ways in which a brand like zoom could stand out in the category I'm curious what variables have you guys focused on that's really created a a differentiated product in this category yeah it's a great question'cause at the end of the day it is a commodity right tahini based off sesame seeds what we came to understand and this took 12 years so for those of you unfamiliar and I should have said it in the first question but sesame is made from 100% roasted and pressed sesame seeds so it's thicker than olive oil and thinner than peanut butter but can be used for both in savory and sweet recipes and most notably in the American market it's used to make hummus and salad dressings that's how most people know it what we've come to learn is that our differentiating qualities are of course of our product but notably of our people I mean I've read a couple books over the years good to great comes to mind we run our company based off of EOS and traction and though are three differentiating factors are our quality products but it's also our service and our expertise like people get a lot of value out of working with us and that was an opportunity that we recognized early on was that there was great tahini notably over in Israel and it was not being distributed or appreciated the way that we think it could have so the value that we brought to our own supply chain was just a better understanding of the American consumer and a you know a US per point of view on marketing and consumer education that the manufacturers overseas didn't bring I think what it also evolved into was our service a that supply chain that we play you know we take a lot of effort to not be out of stock and to keep our supply chain whole and that really played out during covid to our advantage because we didn't go out of stock we can talk about the value of that in the food service industry and then our expertise like we have worked really hard to just understand tahini and also how to bridge that knowledge of tahini from the sesame fields in Ethiopia to the manufacturing abroad to our buyers our distributors and of course the final consumer so I think that's ultimately how zoom has been able to differentiate ourselves beyond the quality of the types of seeds that we expect and the manufacturing processes that makes a lot of sense I get why you guys are you guys are having a lot of success I'm embarrassed to say I actually didn't know that hummus was made with tahini is that just blending tahini with um did I blended up a chickpeas chickpeas I was gonna say exactly so the secret to good hummus is good tahini because exactly it's blended garbanzo beans with tahini and water lemon juice garlic some people put or or spices like cumin in it but a good tahini a good hummus has a lot of tahini in particular that combination of tahini with water lemon and garlic to start creates like a very thick tahini sauce or the more water you add to it the thinner or and lemon juice the thinner it can get for falafel or on a shawarma or something like that and you blend that thick tahini with the cooked chickpeas and that's what makes like a really spectacular hummus yeah cool OK now now I don't feel as stupid alright not dumb at all Mediterranean food amazingly is still really in its early acquisition stages I mean if you think about of course Greek food has been here forever but as it relates to Israeli Lebanese Turkish all of that is still really up and coming compared to especially Asian cuisines and um you know different parts of Asia that have been very prevalent in the American you know food culture so a lot of information about Mediterranean and Middle Eastern is still very much in its earliest of acquisition stages so you and a lot of people will ask people are you familiar with tahini and they'll say no and we'll say oh uh do you like hummus and they'll say yes and we'll say well that's really our bridge right absolutely yeah thanks for that got it okay that that makes a lot of sense but yes I know you guys have been pretty intentional patient of when it comes to go to market and and and growth and I think you guys spent the eight the first eight years or so just really primarily focusing on the food service channel and I feel like some people might say you're a bit of a head of the curve just in the sense that it seems like for whatever reason this channel has been getting a lot more attention lately maybe because you don't have to invest as much in buying shell space or retail and all the stuffs but from your point of view you've been in this channel for so long what what have you found or just the the pros and cons of of this channel and why did you guys decide to really focus here for quite a while that's a great question well one of the first people that we got to talk to during our market research was a chef here in Philadelphia named Michael Solomonov he has a restaurant called Zahav it this was back in 2011 2012 or so um by the time we started working with him in 2013 um he had a lot of acclaim and rose you know to the tops of the restaurant industry over the next several years and soon was right there with him which was very exciting him and his business partner Steve Cook great great company what we Learned from that relationship was the fact that restaurants not only bought a lot more tahini this restaurant was buying 40 pounds of buckets a 40 pound bucket a week but they used it a lot faster and more often right I could sell a 1 pound jar to a consumer in a a farmers market and they wouldn't buy another jar again for a year but the restaurant was gonna use more of that also because of a the credibility that they gave to us as a brand was very valuable and the word of mouth especially in fine dining kind of chef driven concepts is a very strong marketing engine an organic marketing engine but also they contributed tremendously to consumer education because chefs were more comfortable putting more tahini on the menus faster than a consumer would be to implement it at home kind of on their own timeline so it provided a lot of value to us and also um the mechanisms for this flywheel effect you know that um when restaurants started using it consumers were interested in it and as consumers got more interested in it the restaurants were inspired to be on trend to use it more often that actually it's come and gone over the years I mean we've done it for 12 years now 2015 to 2017 tahini was hot hummus Middle Eastern food was hot it got a little very different during Covid actually a lot of people made hummus for the first time during Covid there have been quieter years something about this summer there was tahini and coffee everywhere and tahini and Caesar salad dressings everywhere and it you kind of like you start to recognize that flywheel and so it's coming gone over the years yeah why why would you say go ahead but I want to say to answer your first question which was so great which are some of the pros and cons the cons are that it's really hard to get into I mean to get there are so many dynamics of the food service industry there's food service management and corporate business that we're just starting to learn about there's of course fine dining like the Zahav's of the worlds and the Olivia's and a lot of restaurants that soon sells to there's fast casual quick service restaurant um you know a standard mass restaurants like TGI Fridays or Chili's I mean the possibilities are endless but what I found is that it's very hard to get onto a menu but once you're on a menu you have a lot of kind of you know Protection and your elbows up because it's so hard to change a recipe especially a recipe at scale so once an operator makes something and it uses your product it takes a lot of upheaval to interrupt that that's super clear would you say that this channel does make sense for a lot of earlier stage brands and they should put a focus on all you guys or is it more you had that relationship with that chef and it kind of naturally LED them maybe this is a channel we should focus on and it kind of help open up the door or yeah would you say fine dining cuisine it's really hard to do that with a pre made sauce right what was differentiated zoom was we were providing an ingredient and that chef was creating with it they're not necessarily going to be as likely to buy a prepared tahini sauce for instance if zoom had one food service management on the other way which is all about convenience and scale and doing things faster a prepared product or a granola or a sauce or a whatever a vegan meatball I think food service is great for every company as long as they find especially specifically which niche within food service makes sense for their product because I've know a lot of friends that they can't sell to the same types of restaurants that zoom sells to because they're not selling an ingredient and there are a lot of accounts that zoom can't sell to because that chef does not want to make their own hummus they want to buy prepared hummus so it really depends but I advocate for the food service side of the business in any opportunity that I have because it's very dynamic the volumes really high and exactly like you said in your first point the marketing dollars just really don't compare yeah I was gonna ask that form factors different product formats that work better or worse in this channel but sounds like maybe what I'm hearing you a lot of different product formats can work in this channel it's more about within the I guess like subsets of the channel like as an example prepared foods like selling to Cisco who sells you know on airplanes they have pretty much all pre packaged stuff versus selling to restaurants different type of form factor that works is that basically what I'm hearing yes absolutely I would say like the biggest form factor differentiator for us early on was size right we could sell a 40 pound bucket to a restaurant and an 11 ounce jar to the retail and I think that's one thing for people to consider especially the value of increasing your production if half of your production is going into bulk and the other half is going into retail I'd imagine it's bringing down the cost of that retail product if you're able to produce more yeah for for the brands where where this channel it does seem to make sense for whatever variety of reasons I heard you say that once you get on you know on the shelf or in a uh book vending it's a you really have your elbows up it's hard to get kicked out of the shelf but it's really hard to get in so I'm curious for brands where yeah this channel does make sense should their strategy look like in terms of opening up and and growing this channel and fighting through those sharp elbows actually get get in the door I really believe the psychological hurdle of getting a product into a recipe for food service always lies with the chef like of course there's gonna be somebody else and depending on the scale of the business with a financial point of view on what products a place uses but food is so emotional and it's unbelievable this has been validated for me at every scale and every stage the chefs at a university that are trained chefs care as much about food as the chefs at a Michelin star restaurant like it's just ingrained in them through that appreciation for hospitality and for cooking and I really believe going to the chefs and building up an economy of scale of demand from chefs is the best way to do it it's a really slow way to do it you know I used to um book trips to different cities this was before AI spend hours researching the restaurants of that city to see which had tahini on the menu what might have an adjacent type of product on the menu like Brussel sprouts with Sriracha or something you know a little bit more global and figure out a list of 20 restaurants to go and drop off a sample and talk to the chef and get feedback and with that I would say you learn how your product solves a need for the chefs the fastest and the most assured understanding of that use case so that you can just start scaling from there yeah how can brands get tripped up in this food service channel and I guess for things that are most common ways that they may get tripped up like how can they maybe plan ahead to avoid some of those potential landmines let's say I think the biggest tripping is the chicken and egg between the demand and the distribution like chefs always want you to have a distributor and the distributor wants you to have 10 chefs already and it is really hard to crack that we were lucky for two reasons one was because our product is shelf stable so we could ship it FedEx and the second was that we were using our mothers from the 80s FedEx account which we Learned a few years into the business was very miscategorized and also like really abused because my mom shut down her business years ago and so we used to be able to ship like a 12 pound case of tahini across the country for $5 so we were like shipping to everybody and that kind of got swept out from under us but luckily after we started kind of securing a little bit of distribution but I would say that's something that people really get tripped up over know your of course everybody says know your margins but it's razor margins with food service and so you have to have a good pricing strategy because as good as your product could be they're just not willing to pay that much more then another product that could be close to its quality so those are a few things that come to mind you decided it was time to expand into the next channel which was Amazon assuming I got that timeline right like how did you decide it was the right time one and then that Amazon made the most sense for the next channel to expand into we did have a very unprofessional and small shop on our website like I did not do good research in building our first website or shop at all it had very small sales out of it but this was one of the things that happened was early on I think the first six months of in business that same chef Michael Solomonov was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and he shared a recipe for zucchini baba ganoush and it used tahini and the journalist asked what tahini do you recommend and he said oh I assume it's these three sisters from Philly and they give me the best tahini and we got 60 orders on our website that day it was like the most obviously that we've ever gotten before it was like my friend Scott that you know ordered to Boston or whatever and um and that really validated for us the influence that especially chefs like Michael Solomonov and this was way before Instagram became what it became but we saw the um organic influence of the restaurant channel in 2016 Michael Solomonov same really important guy released a cookbook with his partner Steve Cook The Zahav Cookbook and it was very highly acclaimed James they won James Beard Award winning chef of the Year Cookbook of the year just everything really locked in for them that year and they also in that cookbook shared about zoom so that really accelerated our growth into other food service markets especially in the restaurant industry and what we found was that when then those chefs got interviewed in their media they also felt inclined to share about the great sum tahini which was just really cool very organic we didn't have pretty packaging we had nothing except our highest quality product and our service of course and the relationships that we built along the way and it was very hard to get people to convert to our website we just recognized it was obvious it is you are way more likely to buy something on Amazon because it already has your credit card you already have other things in your cart a variety of reasons and we were just like of course we're gonna set it up on Amazon so we did we found uh at first we sold to somebody that sold it on Amazon they were trying to build out like a e commerce business they ended up shifting their businesses to being an e commerce agency an Amazon agency so then we switched to fulfilled FBA fulfilled by Amazon and partnered with these same guys to start growing the brand on Amazon and that's where especially over the following I talked about how 2015 to teen tahini interest was really high we were able to start capturing customers on Amazon much faster than on our website and that played out to be very important especially once Covid hit yeah that sounds like it's great timing for I know this is really getting getting into the weeds on Amazon stuff but I've heard this from multiple people that and making sure you get your listings set up correctly including all like the back end components like the first time is vitally important as it can be like really really challenging to go back and fix any issues later so I'm just kind of curious looking back now maybe you guys hopefully didn't have to make too many have too many learning lessons but what do you feel like are some of the key things a brand should kind of watch out for as they're getting their brand and and setting up their listing set up on Amazon and whoever you think brings the most value to your company I can recommend a few and connect on LinkedIn or whatever um well we were getting set up there was not a lot of competition for tahini on Amazon and I think it was just like a looser Wild West kind of place so I don't everything we did we iterated I can't say anything that we launched was perfect the first time not from the brand to the website to our sell sheets like I just a that's not my personality and b it was not the reality for zoom but I can imagine now with all the service and expertise out there that that is absolutely true but we're in our back end of Amazon Weekly you know um sprucing things up what when we get the opportunity to do new photography we add new photography and video content and optimization with our title names we're always iterating which is really fun that's great if you had to just I don't know that you would say are the biggest contributors or detractors of a brand having success on Amazon let's just say in the food space specifically what comes top of mind that's a very good question I would imagine at this point because it's what we're experiencing it's just all about ad strategy it's about high quality content especially for food you need good photography good videography it needs to look really good I know that on in marketing a lot of UGC and it doesn't need to be as high quality as it was 5 7 years ago whatever but people wanna buy food it needs to look really spectacular I would say so optimizing your photography um and I think being comfortable evaluating strategies like ad strategies and then iterating on those just not setting and forgetting and being very mindful to peek in and poke around as often as possible I think are two things not to be missed yeah that's really interested in Amazon my marketing director Julie has sat in that seat since she was an intern with us and she's grown Amazon with us for the past 7 years or 8 years or whatever so you should get in touch with us cause she has great that you felt like Covid really accelerated sales yeah it's a great question so first of all it for our restaurant industry just crumbled in a day I mean we had distributors cancel orders we canceled orders on their behalf we were just like let's just sit and wait and the blessing of having a product with 2 years expiration date is we had that luxury to sit on I remember the No. 40 pallets of buckets were just like sitting there but what happened ultimately almost overnight was that our sales on our website went through the roof we actually we reconfigured our website so that we could only sell full cases we didn't want to like take the time to pack a two pack or a four pack or whatever something so you could only order like a six pack of 11 ounce a 12 pack of 16 ounce it was just our master packs and that worked really well for our e commerce engine and for our operations because myself and two of my employees the head of our supply chain and our warehouse associate we were in every day I swear all we were doing for two and a half months was packing two packs for Amazon we would just build boxes pack two packs we ended up hiring two more warehouse people all just Amazon Amazon Amazon so that was something that really never came back down like the sales for tahini we have the data increased in June of 2020 and it's never come back down it's just kind of gone up you know up and down up and down ever since slowly growing from there so that was really instrumental the same thing happened in the 200 or so grocery stores that we were in the places we were sold we were selling thing out and it was nice because we kept our supply chain intact our father really encouraged us to find the capital to keep an extra container of inventory on the water at all times so that we were never kind of caught because you never knew when a port was shutting down or a manufacturer had to shut down you just didn't know what was gonna happen and what and and the biggest blessing for food service is once the restaurants opened up that summer soon was in supply so a lot of them had consolidated menus and they were relying on the ingredients that a they could use a lot of right that they could like get the most value out of and b that of course were in stock because so many things were out of stock so we found that actually compared to for instance our food service distributor partners who over 2020 I think they like lost 80% of their business zoom grew like 40% in 2020 in our food service channel and all of those things just really worked out and and we've I think we earned a lot of trust and respect during that time which was nice because it was actually on the back end of at in the end of this is not what you asked but I can bring it up at the end of 2018 we had a recall so we dug ourselves out of 2019 just like building back a lot of trust and increasing our distribution again and then Covid came it was all very fascinating to reflect now five years later that's awesome you mentioned that your your father recommending finding the capital to always keep a container on the water just for you know never being out of stock so I on that front I think part of this kind of covid bump was what helped propel you into that first fundraise you did eight to 10 years in the business which is amazing that you know you bootstrapped it all the way to that point do you feel like this was finally the right time to raise what we needed to do was rebrand we realized that with our velocity increasing on shelves that now we could actually Pitch Whole Foods nationally like we had the story there but we did not have the brand to support it so we decided to a rebrand and b bring on the right people to grow retail because my sisters and I we knew nothing about retail the one time we tried retail was in 2015 the line of refrigerated tahini dips they were really delicious and really challenging and a total fail we like shut them down 10 months later and that's when we repositioned to like focus on tahini to restaurants because we were so burned on the retail side but we knew that if we weren't going to grow in retail and now was the time that we needed a lot more capital so that was what prompted our fund raise we ended up acquiring a business called seatable really for their founder our Chief Growth officer Danielle and he joined the team to lead our retail and all sales strategy since 2021 once you made that decision you were gonna do this rebrand what did that process look like from beginning and end in terms of key steps are involved and how long did that process take I would say that took to 18 months or so because what we did was we brought on the capital we hired a marketing person and this you know we brought on our chief growth officer and the marketing person was leading the rebrand I was actually um entering or in I think no I just started my second maternity leave so my second son was born during this time and I have to admit I was not that involved in the rebranding process like it's one of my biggest regrets from my seat over the past 10 years is that I gave I'm very comfortable giving up control and delegating like I really trust people to do what they wanna do and respect my colleague's point of view on the business and the industry and I trust them explicitly but I'm I regret not being more involved in that period of time for zoom as in a marketing and and branding perspective but the branding was great I would say I took about three months or so to hire the right branding agency and they were also brought on to do our website and our new Shopify and like redo everything and then from there I would guess it took about a 12 months because the goal was to launch the rebrand with with our launch with Whole Foods nationally in 2022 which was May 2022 so I think total it was like 15 to 18 months yeah that sounds about right from like a that were top of mind for you and the team that you wanted to yeah keep top of mind as you're going through this update well what was awesome was we had so much data like we had thousands of reviews on Amazon we had hundreds of reviews on our website we had all the times that I demoed at a farmer's market or a grocery store or did a food cooking demo um for instance I had a a cookbook come out in November of 2020 so I spent like all of 2020 2021 doing Zoom cooking with people and like hearing their feedback about the tahini and we had so much indepth knowledge that really spoke to the quality of the product mostly that it was easy to stir and use like it was ready to use and that that it had like a great flavor profile and that it was preferred by chefs like that really became an identity of the brand and so we worked on you know I think being more explicit with the quality of our product I would have to go deep into our Instagram or something my marketing colleague could find it like our old labels versus our gorgeous new labels and so yeah it was very it was very well informed it was not a lot of guessing or projection or what I was most afraid of which was why I think I stepped back from it like my bias onto the brand I I didn't really like want that and we did not get that but it was a very thorough rebrand to see what it looked like before wow brand leaders that are about to embark on a similar process they're a few years behind you guys what are two to three things that you might recommend they focus on or they should use as their North Star and or things that they should watch out for that might trip them up along the way I think the most important thing is to recognize that once you're done a year later you're like 18 to 18 months to two years away from it feeling outdated again it's not fair especially the website and like all of this just like you know maximizing for new social medias or things like that so I think that should hopefully take away some of the pressure of perfection I don't believe in perfection and never have really believed in like a lean startup mentality and that the best is the best that you have available right now to put out and to get feedback on and to grow and move on from so that's the first thing which is just it's not it's him say that and then I have to bite my tongue cause all this crazy shit with like Cracker Barrel and whoever that updates their logos then they get push back and then they retract I am shocked watching these things but it really shows the emotional connection I guess that people have to brands but I would say that nothing is permanent but now I sound stupid given the context of these blowbacks but for small brands really it doesn't matter because you're not that big or well distributed or anything like that and the other thing is it for it to be as informed as possible with category data I think a big one is like either print it on paper or have samples and put it on the shelf like really see what it looks like in that big wall of all the other similar products right there that's one thing that has been instrumental for us over the years as we work on and think about new products so that's something that comes to mind but as much data as you can get and in conversations and feedback from your customers to understand what they like about it and what resonates with them and then hopefully you highlight that on the pack either front of pack or the back of pack so that when a customer's interacting with you they're hearing the thing that will trigger that consumer behavior to purchase yeah that's all really helpful and like consumer behavior is just a whole another thing but it's really hard to get somebody to choose to buy a product yeah it is for sure it is for sure and if the pack isn't right and people don't try it then they'll never know we have a chocolate spread which is the most delicious thing in the entire world and it is severely underappreciated we just started iterate on the label um and we're hoping that that will increase some trial but we have a gold mine sitting in the wrong label I know I don't know what will crack it but it's hard yeah my fiance loves that chocolate tahini it's it's amazing it's really good really good it's really good so you mentioned this this rebrand was tied to this this Whole Foods launch which totally makes sense go to market launch plan and strategy look like yeah great question we did a lot of demos before we launched nationally with Whole Foods which was before obviously Covid and and so we had very strong velocity in our core market it's from like New Jersey through the Pennsylvania stores really high velocity which was a good anchor because as you start adding more and more stores your average velocity goes down and it obviously really impacts their evaluation of you evaluation of you every year for the category the hardest thing about tahini has been that we've been in the nut butter category which has been great we wanted to be there but always on the bottom shelf so it's been really challenging to make additional I think customers like discovery type customers in that set we've done a lot of brand building and demand building before we got to shelves there were a lot of people I don't know this for sure but that bought us online or on Amazon we had been written about in articles and food media for many many years before we were on Whole Foods shelves nationally so I think all of that helped with our launch because we very quickly started growing the tahini category like the velocity of it and also just really stabilized our place as like that best selling tahini in their set again it's not the most competitive set it's not like I'm a bar selling against 20 other bars you know this is like a tahini selling against two or three other tahinis but it's been really exciting that for the past three or four years since we've been following the data we know that tahini is the fastest growing sub category of nut and seed spreads are outpacing almonds which have peaked and cashews and sunflower and things like that so we did a lot of sampling a lot of couponing over the years we did influencer marketing and more social media marketing other times especially more recently we've pulled back on that to really just focus on promotions and and IRCs like shelf tags and things like that so we've tried a variety of things and our velocity especially at Whole Foods has been really stable since we've launched with them that's great is kind of unique about working with and and also succeeding in Whole Foods compared to some of those other retailers Whole Foods really is really hard because it's really expensive every time you wanna put the product on sale there's a cost to do that whereas in more conventional stores I think their cost to acquiring customers is much lower than Whole Foods when you put your product on sale and say Publix it's just the cost of the product on sale you're not paying tens of thousands of dollars to do like a national promotion so I think that's one of the big things is that we look at Whole Foods like a marketing partner and a consumer awareness partner of course a sales channel they're really important partners to us but the fact of how much influence they have in the marketplace makes it worth it for that additional investment but it's expensive and the margins are slimmer at Whole Foods than at other conventional channels yeah eventually you guys expanded into to Walmart I think really kind of validating that seems as a conventional brand not just suited for the natural channel you touched on it a bit in terms of being fighting to not be on the bottom shelf of that that nut butter aisle I think is what you said I'm similar from like how do you think about placement in like the ethnic specialty aisle versus the center store and that is the goal to be in both or you just want to really just focus on being in that center store stuff not being relegated to that ethnic specialty aisle like how do you guys think about that it's a great question when we started we were really adamant on moving tahini out of the ethnic aisle and into the nut butter category what we Learned over time was that we want to be where the customer knows where tahini is in the store so we're not there to ruffle any feathers you know Publix for instance who is really our most crucial stepping stone to be able to even have a chance at Walmart with any conventional data you know in our wheelhouse they have us in the kosher section which is in their international aisle and the product's selling really well there and so what we've Learned is that as long as the customer knows where to find it in the store that the product and the brand especially will do well I mean the thing that I love now is that's almost it's not yet and I don't think it will ever be because most people will go to the grocery store to shop but it's almost irrelevant with Instacart people just need to search for tahini it doesn't matter where it is in the store and we need to make sure that zoom is the one that shows up I love Instacart because of the fact that half the reason why I don't buy something is cause I can't find it you know quickly in a store so I think that whole dynamic is changing and we really rely on our retail partners to understand their consumers ideally we'd love to be in both because I think we're gonna capture new customers in nut butters and new to tahini and nut butters I don't think anybody's really doing a lot of exploratory shopping in the kosher section it's a little limited but we'll see how we can expand from that kosher set other um other parts of the store maybe with off shelves maybe on a promotional campaign you know something like that yeah but by any means neither I went searching on tahini um or searching for tahini I know there's you know kind of retail media stuff where you can you can run ads on Instacart and you know show up at the top of search or what not but outside of actually spending money on ads like is there a like an Instacart SEO strategy like if you do certain things outside of ads if someone search for tahini like are the things that you can do to ensure that you show up the first one it's a good question I'm not sure to be honest I think it's mostly the pay to play kind of thing um I love so many dynamics of Instacart like behavior modeling because we could show up when somebody searches for chickpeas right we could spend our money to make sure that they're seeing soon when they search for chickpeas or understanding what else goes into a cart has been really instrumental you know we know that a lot of people buy red peppers when they buy tahini and so there's all these like very dynamic ways I think of both cross promoting and parallel promoting or you know just bidding on the keyword itself but I'm a not an expert on Instacart from my business Julie also does that praise to Julie but I'm an expert shopper on Instacart cause I'm totally addicted to it now that it's a part of my consumer like behavior and with the 3 kids and everything I shop on Instacart every week that's great that's awesome what do you feel like found as unique about working with and succeeding in Walmart I think Walmart out of everybody really knows their customer the best like there's not a lot you can't put it on sale right you can't drive trial with like a yellow tag or anything like that they we're really pleased with Walmart they gave us a goal of half a unit per week per store and off the bat we rose to three units per week per store within like six months um they knew that they put us in the right 1000 stores for sure we're working to get into 15 more stores that's our goal with Walmart it's not hasn't happened yet um but they really understand their customer also the data that they give us is amazing like the ratio of how many people are searching for it on Walmart dot com what's interesting cause you can search for it on Walmart dot com but pick it up in store so we know so many details between who's buying us online who's shopping online but picking up in the store or getting it delivered and all of those things play into our average velocity in Walmart size so I would say that they have a really dynamic marketplace between the in store and the online and there's really not a lot of fuss because you're setting your lowest price and you're just sticking to it and their customers will come it's similar to how Amazon felt to us in the early days when tahini wasn't as competitive on there it was just like okay if somebody's shopping at Walmart and they're looking for for tahini well it's only zoom in one other option and zoom maybe it's a little more expensive but it looks nicer it's trusted by chefs right like it's like oh I'm just buying this once a year anyway

so who cares if I spend six 99 instead of 5: 43:46

99 and it's a a right placement for us but yes you're right it really validated that tahini is ready for more mass consumption yeah I agree with that for sure any trends or brands specifically just across the the food and beverage CBG space that have kind of peaked your attention or ones that have gotten you excited at all I'm really curious I was kind of poo pooing the protein trend but it does not seem to be going anywhere for sure like the plant based protein kind of popped but now I mean we have been advised to put our protein call outs everywhere we possibly can and for us it was always just a natural benefit of tahini two tablespoons a serving has 6 grams of protein but that is really coveted in like trending consumer interest right now so protein seems to really be here to stick hot sauces and spicy stuff seems really interesting but it's been a pleasure everybody said just like make it to 10 years and you'll start to understand who does what and how things really work and it's true there are certain trends um and certain just natural progressions of consumer behavior now that if you're comfortable being patient and maybe growing a little slower you can ride out whether like it's in your favor or it's against you so it'll be interesting to see yeah this is a lot of really great insights here I think it's been super helpful big fan assume what's the best place for people to follow along with you and then best place for people to follow along with the brand these days sure so my best place is definitely LinkedIn Amy's Idleman on LinkedIn the brand is we have a great newsletter especially if you have some tahini in your pantry and you need some ideas for it but otherwise of course we're on Instagram you can find us on a store finder page but good old Trusty Amazon is also an easy place to get some tahini perfect awesome man you've been great really appreciate the time awesome thank you so much for having me what's that journey been like pretty clear early on who would own what or each of you would sit in the business I think it depends on the product to service my next question was gonna be about different product about three years or so in the business that is totally right work with an agency like 2 to three key things that come top of mind really helpful consumer psychology and what have you found is I'm not as expert on Instacart you've definitely been in the CBG space for a while this is awesome really appreciate the time