Building a Differentiated Brand in an Ancient Category | Amy Zitelman, Soom Foods

Speaker: 00:00
Welcome to Shelf Help. Today we're speaking with Amy Zeidelman, co-founder and CEO of Zoom Foods. Super excited to dive into this. And maybe Amy, just for first off, the listeners aren't that familiar with Zoom. Yeah, just give us quickly land, origin story, why behind the brand, core product lineup, maybe just call out a few places while people can get their hands in them and then we'll go from there.

Speaker 1: 00:25
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 eight years of Sum, 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.

Speaker: 02:09
What's that journey been like in terms of building a brand with family, especially your sisters?

Speaker 1: 02:14
Yeah. 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, because 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 worked together really well.

Speaker: 03:35
Was it pretty clear early on who would own what, or each of you would sit in the business? Obviously, you're you have a CEO title. Was that an easy did your other two sisters agree, yeah, you're the right person, the CEO, or how did that conversate?

Speaker 1: 03:46
I got uh 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.

Speaker: 05:07
That's great. That's great.

Speaker 1: 05:09
It was fun.

Speaker: 05:10
What's cool about Tahini is that I I know it's been around for thousands of years, maybe even and longer, showing up, I think, 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 are, I guess a few things like come top of mind for me, just in terms of ways in which a brand like Sume could stand out in the category. I'm curious what variables have you guys focused on that's really created a differentiated product in this category?

Speaker 1: 05:43
Yeah, it's a great question because at the end of the day, it is a commodity, right? Tahini based off sesame seeds. What we came to understand in 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 read a couple books over the years, Good to Great comes to mind. We run our company based off of EOS and traction. And so our 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. 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 Sum has been able to differentiate ourselves beyond the quality of the types of seeds that we expect and the manufacturing processes.

Speaker: 07:45
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 blended up uh chickpeas? Chickpeas.

Speaker 1: 08:01
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 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 shorma or something like that. And you blend that thick tahini with the cooked chickpeas, and that's what makes like a really spectacular hummus.

Speaker: 08:42
Yeah, cool. Okay, now I don't feel as stupid. All right.

Speaker 1: 08:46
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 uh, 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.

Speaker: 09:28
Yeah. Thanks to that. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. But yes, I know you guys have been pretty intentional, patient 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 a bit at the 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 at retail and all those stuff. But from your point of view, you've been in this channel for so long. What what have you found are just the the pros and cons of this channel and why'd you guys decide to really focus here for quite a while?

Speaker 1: 10:07
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 one-pound jar to a consumer in a farmer's market and they wouldn't buy another jar again for a year. But the restaurant was going to 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, it 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 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 come and gone over the years.

Speaker: 12:18
Yeah. Why would you say go ahead?

Speaker 1: 12:21
I wanted 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 zahavs of the worlds and the Oleannas and a lot of restaurants that Zoom sells to. There's fast casual, quick service restaurant, um, you know, 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.

Speaker: 13:16
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 like you guys, or is it more you had that relationship with that chef and it kind of naturally led to maybe this is a channel we should focus on and it kind of helped open up the door?

Speaker 1: 13:31
Or I think it depends on the product. So service fine dining cuisine, it's really hard to do that with a pre-made sauce, right? What differentiated Sume 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 Sume 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 uh whatever vegan meatball, I think food service is great for every company as long as they find a special 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 restaurant that Sume 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 volume's really high. And exactly like you said in your first coin, the marketing dollars just really don't compare.

Speaker: 14:43
Yeah. My next question was going to be about different product 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?

Speaker 1: 15:11
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.

Speaker: 15:40
Yeah. For for the brands where where this channel 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 bookkeeping vendor, it's uh you'll have your elbows up, it's hard to get kicked off the shelf, but it's really hard to get in. So I'm curious for brands where yeah, this channel does make sense. What should their strategy look like in terms of opening up and growing this channel and fighting through those sharp elbows to actually get in the door?

Speaker 1: 16:09
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 going to 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 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 Brussels 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.

Speaker: 17:39
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?

Speaker 1: 17:55
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 mother's 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 than another product that could be close to its quality. So those are a few things that come to mind.

Speaker: 19:07
About three years or so in the business, 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.

Speaker 1: 19:22
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 use Sume. 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 Salomonov, 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 Zoom 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're 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 an 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 15 Tahini interest was really high. We were able to start capturing customers on Amazon much faster than on our website. Um, and that played out to be very important. Especially once COVID hit.

Speaker: 22:03
Yeah. Sounds like it's a great time to I know this is really getting getting into the weeds on Amazon stuff, but I've heard this from multiple people that making sure you get your listings set up correctly, I think including all like the back end components 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 that brands should kind of watch out for as they're getting their brand and and setting up their listing?

Speaker 1: 22:34
That is totally right. Work with an agency and whoever you think brings the most value to your company. I can recommend a few and connect on LinkedIn or whatever. Um, 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.

Speaker: 23:28
That's great. If you had to define like two to three key things that come top of mind 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?

Speaker 1: 23:44
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 five, seven years ago, whatever. But people want to 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. I do suggest that anybody 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 seven years or eight years or whatever. So you should get in touch with us because she has great.

Speaker: 24:43
Anything specific to your brand that you felt like COVID really accelerated sales?

Speaker 1: 24:48
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 two years' expiration date is we had that luxury to sit on. I remember the number, 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 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 going to happen. And what end and the biggest blessing for food service is once the restaurants opened up that summer, Zoom 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. And all of those things just really worked out. 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.

Speaker: 27:44
That's awesome. You mentioned 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 ten years in the business, which was amazing that you know you bootstrapped it all the way to that point. Why do you feel like this was finally the right time to raise?

Speaker 1: 28:10
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 with a 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 fundraise. We ended up acquiring a business called Seedable, really for their founder, our chief growth officer, Danielle. And he joined the team to lead our retail and all sales strategy since 2021.

Speaker: 29:16
Once you made that decision, you were going to do this rebrand. What did that process look like from beginning to end in terms of the key steps are involved? And how long did that process take?

Speaker 1: 29:25
I would say that took 12, 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 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 want to do and respect my colleagues' 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 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 our launch with Whole Foods Nationally in 2022, which was May 2022. So I think total it was like 15 to 18 months.

Speaker: 30:50
Yeah, that sounds about right. For the some of those kind of key variables that were top of mind for you and the team that you wanted to keep top of mind as you're going through this update.

Speaker 1: 31:01
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 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 in-depth 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 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. If you could see what it looked like before, wow.

Speaker: 32:20
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?

Speaker 1: 32:37
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 say that. And then I have to bite my tongue because all this crazy shit with like cracker barrel and whoever that updates their logos, then they get pushback and then they retract. I am shocked watching these things. But it really shows the emotional connection, I guess, that people have to brands. Um, but I would say that nothing is permitted, 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 that 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 is interacting with you, they're hearing the thing that will trigger that consumer behavior to purchase.

Speaker: 34:31
That's all really helpful. Really helpful.

Speaker 1: 34:33
Consumer psychology and like consumer behavior is just a whole nother thing. But it's really hard to get somebody to choose to buy a product.

Speaker: 34:42
Yeah, it is for sure. It is for sure.

Speaker 1: 34:44
You can have the best product, 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, but I don't know what will crack it, but it's hard.

Speaker: 35:08
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 Whole Foods launch, which totally makes sense. What did your kind of Whole Foods go-to-market launch plan and strategy look like?

Speaker 1: 35:24
Yeah, great question. We did a lot of demos before we launched nationally with Whole Foods, which was before obviously COVID. 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 subcategory, if not in seed spreads, far 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 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.

Speaker: 37:34
That's great. What have you found is is kind of unique about working with and and also succeeding in Whole Foods compared to some of those other retailers?

Speaker 1: 37:43
Whole Foods really is really hard because it's really expensive. Every time you want to 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.

Speaker: 38:31
Yeah. Eventually you guys expanded into Walmart. I think really kind of validating that Sum is 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 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 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?

Speaker 1: 39:02
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 was 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 Sum is the one that shows up. I love Instacart because of the fact that half the reason why I don't buy something is because 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 and 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.

Speaker: 40:43
I'm not as expert on Instacart, but by any means.

Speaker 1: 40:46
Me either.

Speaker: 40:46
Someone's searching on Tahini 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 the top of search or whatnot, 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 searched for tahini, like are the things that you can do to ensure that you show up the first one?

Speaker 1: 41:10
That'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 Zoom when they search for chickpeas or understanding what else it 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 uh not an expert on Instacart from my business. Uh Julie also does that. Praise to Julie. But I'm an expert shopper on Instacart because I'm totally addicted to it now that it's a part of my consumer-like behavior. And with the three kids and everything, I shop on Instacart every week.

Speaker: 42:07
That's great. That's awesome. What do you feel like found is unique about working with and succeeding in Walmart?

Speaker 1: 42:15
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 their custom they put us in the right 1,000 stores for sure. We're working to get into 1,500 more stores. That's our goal with Walmart. It's not, it 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.com. What's interesting because you can search for it on Walmart.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 suit for Tahini, well, it's only Sum and one other option. And Sum, 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 $699 instead of $599? And it's a right placement for us. But yes, you're right. It really validated that Tahini is ready for more mass consumption.

Speaker: 44:00
Yeah. Last question. You've definitely been in the C BG space for a while. Any trends or brand specifically just across the food and beverage CBG space that have kind of piqued your attention or ones that have gotten you excited at all?

Speaker 1: 44:15
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 callouts everywhere we possibly can. And for us, it was always just a natural benefit of tahini. Two tablespoons, a serving has six 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 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.

Speaker: 45:16
It's awesome. Really appreciate the time. This is uh a lot of really great insights here. I think it's been super helpful. Big fan of Sume. 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.

Speaker 1: 45:28
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.

Speaker: 45:50
Perfect. Well, awesome Amy isn't great. Really appreciate the time.

Speaker 1: 45:53
Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

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