Transforming Carbone’s Restaurant Lore Into a Premier CPG Brand | Chris Wendling, Carbone Fine Food

Speaker 1: 00:00
Welcome to Shelf Help. Today we're speaking with Chris Wendling, EVP of marketing at Carbone Fine Food, CPG brand, born out of the world-renowned restaurant brand Carbone. Prior lead to marketing at Carbone, Chris played various sales leadership roles at Carbone for a while, as well as some better big name brands like Once Upon a Farm, Plum Organics, just to name a few. So yeah, really excited to get into it. Chris, just first off, for the listeners that that aren't that familiar with Carbone, which is probably a somewhat limited few, give us a quick lay of the land just in terms of the Carbone group on both the restaurant and then the CPG side, and then maybe just a bit about the origin story, kind of why behind the CPG line, what led the company to launch that. And then you know, I know it's found everywhere, but maybe just a few places in it, and then we'll go from there.

Speaker: 00:48
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for that, the kind introduction, um, Adam. That was great. Uh yeah, so we I think we got to take a step back. So obviously, you know, carbone fine food is the uh you know the brainchild of this of this consumer good product that takes homage to to what's being made inside of the restaurants that you know I would say a good a good chunk of Americans know or have heard of, right? So you you've got a restaurant group that was founded, I think, at this point 12, 13 years ago. I kind of get my timelines confused a little bit, but I think the original Carbone in New York City is celebrating its 12th year of being around. So really all this started, you know, primarily from Mario Carbone and Rich Teresi, which are, you know, on our founding team. They're one of the three co-founders of MFG, which is Major Food Group, which owns the restaurant group and and all those rates of restaurants like Carbone, The Grills, Sadell's, uh, you know, Carbone, I think now is up to I can't even count the locations. They've got one in New York City, the original. They've got Miami, which has become second home base. They have um Las Vegas, Dubai, London. Um, I think there's one other in the Middle East as well. There's one in Hong Kong. Mario just launched, I mean, he launched essentially London, Dubai, and his new Las Vegas concept all within 12 weeks of each other. So he's just rapidly expanding that food business. But, anyways, so that's the restaurant empire. They're doing amazing things over there. And and we're essentially the the sister company within within MFG of kind of the consumer goods products. Really, the start of this brand really started and and ended with obviously, you know, Mario, Rich, and Jeff. Jeff is kind of, you know, the the financial partner with with Mario and Rich and the MFG Venture, and really sitting down with uh a man named Eric Scay about uh at this point five years ago in 2020, um, and really starting to understand how do you launch a CPG product, right? Like they they wanted to get into it, you know, they they've seen the success behind Rayos and kind of the premium of the category. You know, they had a lot of brand equity out there because of the restaurant group, right? They've got this built-in equity behind the brand, and they really wanted to key in on that on how you how you activate within CPT and retail, and then obviously leveraging the network that is MFG and Carbone. So those conversations happened um, you know, a number of years ago at this point, and then it led ultimately to the creation of Carbone Fine Food, which is again the three of them are obviously on the board and uh and and and own the majority of the company, which is amazing and great because they're very integral in all the decisions that we make as an organization. And then they brought in Eric Skey, who you know formally ran things at Rayos and led them through acquisition at Sovos brands. Um and really he's just a wealth of knowledge and and was a huge asset for them and in forming this company. So um, you know, fast forward to March of 2021, it was when we sold our first case um on D to C. And then I think it it might have been in a Northeastern grocery. Don't quote me on who it was, but I I do know it was a Northeastern grocery and um, yeah, the rest is history.

Speaker 1: 03:47
I think a little while ago, you can totally correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think a little while ago, back in another interview, you said something along the lines of the truly impressive part about this brand is that we've gotten to where we are. I think it's number two in in US natural, close to top five of general retail without a traditional marketing focus. What did the marketing organ strategy look like before? And I guess what are the key ways that it kind of looks different today?

Speaker: 04:12
Yeah, I think to fully understand, like we've gotta we've gotta take a little bit of a step back. And I'll probably compare us to a few other companies that we're kind of in the similar set in terms of like founding year with. You know, I you can kind of publicly go and see the kind of you know capital we've raised, it's it's not out there, right? Like we haven't raised a series A. Um, so we're very self-sustained. Obviously, we've got a group of you know investors that we rely heavily on that are pretty much private and let us and Eric run things the way that they need to, but we're not out there raising, you know, $20, $30 million. That's not this company, right? So when I say that, like the majority of capital that we raised during those first few years were for sales tactics. It was for paying for slotting fees and, you know, getting getting on the shelf nationally at Whole Foods and getting people out in the street and and resetting shelves and focusing on store support. I would say, you know, historically, this company was founded in a sales capacity. It was about those, those four Ps, right? Like that was it. It was it was getting it was getting jars eye level placed, it was being a dollar more than Rayos every day. It was about, you know, backing everything up with quality customer service and making sure we're not cutting cases. And obviously we have the best product on shelf. So like that all lended well to itself. Um, you know, from there, obviously we did some things in marketing. I will say the brilliant thing about this company, and and I'd say one of our biggest competitive advantages when you take us versus some of our peer set, or especially the ones that have historically been around, obviously we're the youngest on the block, right? But what we have and what we kind of spoke to earlier is this this organic ecosphere of this brand and this company that nobody else has, especially in center store. I'll say people on Beverage and maybe snacks have it, especially when it's like a celebrity-founded brand. Having worked for a celebrity-founded brand, totally get that. But this, you know, this is a restaurant-founded brand that has celebrity allure and is in the zeitgeist. And that's how we were founded, right? So you think about when we launched, first thing we did is we access that network that we have with the restaurant relationship. There's not many brands out there that are founded and immediately have, you know, references to their brand. And even though, you know, Carbone the Restaurant and Carbone Fine Food is two different brands, it's all Carbone. So you go into a brand forming it and you're listed in two Drake songs. Like that automatically is pop culture relevance from day one. And we've leveraged that fully. So like we send out seating kits to every celebrity that's been inside of a Carbone. You know, one of the things candidly that really helped us build is like Carbone restaurants did not have an Instagram page up until six months ago. So the majority of things we were getting tagged in were people going to a Carbone restaurant and saying, like, hey, I just went to Carbone Miami, best meal of my life. Here's all my pictures, here's my you know, Instagram real dump.

Speaker 2: 06:50
Right.

Speaker: 06:50
They tag us in it, and what do we do? We send them product, right? So, like they've gone to the restaurant, now they're getting at the home product and they're gonna post about that too. So I'd say from like a marketing tactic standpoint, first couple years of this organization were 100% organic marketing. It was not as it was influencer seeding, no paid ads, no meta boosting, no whitelisting content, no paid influencers, no media buying. It was mostly either sales-driven shopper marketing tactics that are either in-store focused or demo focused, or that organic kind of network that we had through the restaurant association. So yeah, that's what I mean, and I'm glad you asked that because I can kind of qualify the statement, but we weren't doing the things that a lot of brands start out doing today now in CPG. Like if you look at, you know, a poppy or an Ollipop or a Garaza, we just weren't doing the type kind of marketing that they were doing.

Speaker 2: 07:42
Yeah.

Speaker: 07:43
Outside of the organic stuff, we just weren't hitting a lot of the executionally focused stuff and marketing that typical companies start with.

Speaker 1: 07:49
How did that kind of play out internally in terms of, I don't know if you want to call it a mindset shift, but at some point is that, okay, it's time to putting some more oomph behind an actual marketing strategy.

Speaker: 08:01
Yeah, I would say the transition for us was a lot of trial and error, right? So I think it was obviously we relied heavily on organic up until we're in 2025, up until probably late 2024. So majority of our marketing playbook was heavily shopper marketing, which we all know the landscape of shopper marketing today. We're not gonna comment on it because we don't want to make anybody mad. Um, but a lot of it is in retail media, right? Like that's just that's just where marketing is today. Um, so a lot of retail media. We did run a uh a brand campaign, I want to say it was in late, late 2023. We went ran our first brand campaign, and it was all our all that at home campaign. It's a great campaign from a product awareness standpoint. It really shows an activation between tying in Mario Carbone, who's the genius behind this brand, and then incorporating the restaurant. And then what does that mean at home, right? So we shot it with our wonderful friends over at Supernatural who helped develop the campaign. We launched a big robust CTV campaign about it where we had placements on Hulu and Universal and Peacock and everybody else. We had some out-of-home marketing that was going on in big cities like New York City and Miami, spent a large portion of the marketing budget for that year on that campaign. And um, obviously generated awareness, but like the sales left was not there. Like it just did not activate the consumer. And think of the marketing can always are always long lead time, right? You you do an awareness campaign in October, you could not see it, you might not see a sales effect for that until you know six months down the line. But when you're in a small company and you're fighting the race to build in a category that's super competitive, sometimes your lead times can't wait that long, right? So, you know, what we ended up doing is transitioning a lot of that money over into shopper because we had money already allocated and we just lean more heavily into into shopper marketing. And that's kind of how we built things. Up until, you know, let's fast forward to you, let's call it November, October-ish 2024. That's when we started leaning more into social media in terms of like influencer content, not relying on organic, you know, media postings and and really going after paid influencer and finding the right partners and and and and and those sort of things. So when I took over this desk in January, those processes were already in process. So the first thing that I did coming in here was like, we got to get back to brand here. We can't rely on retailers to build our brand. We've got to pivot away from that. Like that is the reach, you know, and and I think the best insight for me was obviously having been on sales the entire time for the organization up until January of this last year, you know, I had a meeting with Kroger and we ended up getting national placement at Kroger, which was awesome for a brand that was two years old to get you know national placement at Kroger. But my buyer, who I've had a relationship with in the past, he's um a fellow by the name of Jeff Stowe, he said to me in one of my presentations, he's like, Kroger is not in the business of building your brand. You've got to build your brand outside of our doors, and you can't rely on our marketing tactics to build your brand. And I carried that into marketing because it's like we were relying so long on the retail network to build our campaigns and to build our brand that we needed to just say, take a step back and really start building this brand for what it is. And that's, you know, mid-centered mantra modern brand, that's in the zeitgeist, that's geared towards millennials and Gen Z. And we'd have to speak to them in a way that's not just a retail media network. So first thing we did is we reallocated more money over the brand side, doing more events, doing more influencer things for the first time, taking those amazing influencer posts that we're paying for and whitelisting them and making sure that we're using that content for 30 days and that we're boosting it on meta and we're hitting our consumers and our demographics, you know. UGC hadn't done UGC at all up until six months ago. So doing things like UGC moving forward and hitting our consumers where they are. So, you know, that and in addition to some of the brand partnerships that we're gonna be starting up and that we've done this year and will be doing next year, we're much more brand focused than we were. And again, to me, it comes back to that philosophy of you can't rely on the retailer to build your brand. Yeah. There's there's avenues you can take that help that they can help certainly generate those. But at the end of the day, the amount of money that you spend in retail media and shopper marketing, you've really got to allocate good brand dollars to help build your brand and have a solid brand foundation before you start going to market.

Speaker 1: 12:11
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that totally makes sense. You kind of alluded to it a bit a few minutes ago and you stepped into the to lead marketing after I think it was four years or so in the on the sales leadership side of things. What did that transition look like? And I'm just more kind of curious like, how do you think your approach to leading marketing has been different because of your strong sales background versus a more traditional marketing track? And how do you feel like as that has benefited you?

Speaker: 12:35
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I started with all aspirational goals in college was to be in the marketing. Like that was my goal. I, you know, I was previously a music major in in college, and then I got to the point where I was like, I'm not gonna make any money doing this. I don't want to sit in a practice room for 12 hours a day as much as I love doing this. I can't see this being a career, right? So I already started out like I'm a creative person. It's just who I was. So I was like, I'm gonna get out of business or get out of uh music and find a way to do something in business. And I didn't want to do finance because I hate numbers. Um, and I don't like the rules around finance, and everything's gotta be, you know, on this line and this journey. So, you know, marketing made sense. And, you know, I got into a spot where I started doing internships in college with some, you know, large cap CPG companies like Kellogg's. Obviously, it opened the door for me in CPG, and I wouldn't be in CPG today without, you know, that background. But you know, you get pigeonholed in sales, and then you get to the point where it's like you're you're just you're a sales guy, you're a category guy, you're a sales guy, this is what you're gonna do. Um, so and that's what we ended up doing for a while. So um, we had some some departures that happened on our team. Obviously, having lived this brand for four years, I think Eric felt very, very confident that I could go into marketing and get some functional things done. But I was I was gonna be a project, and I'm still a project. Like, listen, I don't know all the answers today. And there's still acronyms and stuff that I don't understand, but eventually, you know, we're gonna figure it out and get there. But for me, it was obviously that really solid sales background helped a ton. And and we kind of said said this in the last point is so much of a brand's marketing budget anymore is dictated to retail media. I think it's I think it's an instrumental asset to have somebody in your marketing organization that has a sales background when you know 45 to 50% of your total money is going to shop or in retail media. You need to understand that not all retail media is equal, right? Like there's three or four players that are amazing at retail media, and yes, go spend your money there. But then there's another three or four that are big companies that don't do it so well. And it's like you have to be able to discern what that reality is and have those conversations, right? Yeah. So, you know, I had that background, made a lot of sense. I walked into a team that is absolutely brilliant. You know, I've got uh somebody on my on my shopper marketing team named Emily, who's got a great background coming from Cliff, who is amazing, right? She understands the shopper landscape, understands where and where not to spend the money, knows where to challenge people. So we wanted somebody that could walk into this role day one and kind of understand the team and let them excel and let them be individual contributors that worked well in their expertise.

Speaker 1: 15:04
Right.

Speaker: 15:05
Um, and that's what I did. Like I came in and I gave Emily the power that she needed to succeed, succeed. On the brand side, we have somebody named Caitlin who's phenomenal as well. All of those organic media placements that you see from us, whether it be Haley Bieber posting about pizza toast or, you know, LeBron James showing up literally to almost to the day of this year in the scarbone fine food sweater on Monday Night Football, that's all her. But when you give the team the ability to open up and run their kind of respective job roles without having the oversight or cramping their creativity, yeah, it's just you see the dividends paying it off immediately. So that was the first thing as I did is I came in and let them kind of run their desk. And obviously I I have oversight, but I want them to be the experts in their subject matter. In terms of like the transition period, I mean, I still call it on Whole Foods up until I think a month ago, two months ago. So yeah, I mean, I came into the company really to build out the natural channel, and I, you know, built out national placement at sprouts and Whole Foods within our first calendar year. You know, my last claim to fame with Whole Foods is we had 28 items on the shelf up until I mean we still have 28 items. We're getting even more incremental items, but you know, I I was still managing that natural portion of the desk up until very recently. So yeah, I a transition process has been it was a big workload. But hey, when you're an emerging brand and you're and you're fighting for space and you're trying to build a brand and you're in year four, like you'll you'll put in the hours and get it done. Luckily, I've had a team in place who has been extremely understanding as I get up to speed on the brand and on the marketing side and has been able to functionally carry out their duties and their roles without missing a beat. So it's been amazing. What did you feel like was the the biggest learning curve? You know, I think for me, I think coming into the marketing team, you don't realize how long things take, right? Like something in sales, sales is very, is very transactional, right? Like you're even like let's just say you're a national account manager and you're just calling on Kroger. You're in a large cap CPG company, that's your only customer. You live in Brief Kroger. Like it's not, I don't want to say it's easy, but like you have one relationship to maintain. You have maybe quarterly check-ins with your buyer if you've got a good relationship. You have one yearly new item appointment, and then it's all executional after that. You've got a broker running your contracts, you've got, you know, they're doing all your paperwork, they're keeping you informed of what you're doing. You're not handling procurement and shipment because your customer service team is doing that or your operations team. So really you're just functionally working within sales and it's all results oriented, right? Like it's all timeline based, depending on what's going on. Coming into marketing, my biggest learning lesson was like, I wanted to move quick. I wanted to keep things moving quick. I wanted to move as fast as we could on partnerships. I wanted to draw up partnerships, I wanted to draw up campaigns, I wanted to draw up events. Candidly, I probably pushed my team too hard for the first year and accelerated their working speed. And I think luckily they adapt with me and move with me. But it's helped build out the future of this organization and what it looks like next year. So I think had I looked back now on like what I've done here at Carbone, obviously the momentum we've we've kept through this year has been crazy busy. And we've seen the household penetration growth and we've seen the engagement and social media growth. But looking back on it, I probably pushed harder than I should have and moved faster than I should have, just because things in marketing take longer, right? Like you go in and you have a call with, like, you know, let's say we just did, we just did an activation with a K-pop group called La Serra FM, and you have a kickoff call. It sounds like a great concept. You think there's a potential there for something to be big, you say yes to it, but you don't really think about all the stuff on the back end that it's gonna take because you're just in execution mode. So for me, it's like you got to slow down more. I got to think about how long it takes to run an influencer kit, how many weeks is it gonna take? How many weeks is approval process gonna take? Lead times are a lot longer in marketing than they are in sales, because like you get that new item request or that new item appointment, you work for two weeks on a deck, and then you're not doing anything after that. And marketing these projects take much longer than you know, a couple of work hours a week.

Speaker 1: 19:02
So that's been the biggest learning lesson. For someone that's maybe about to make a similar sales leadership to marketing leadership transition, any like big tips or kind of pitfalls to try to avoid?

Speaker: 19:11
Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing for me is like in sales, like I said, it is a little bit slower in sales, but you move quickly and more purposeful, right? Like you're you're you're going at it harder for a shorter amount of time. I think in marketing, when you make that change, you just gotta take a step back and evaluate and constantly evaluate, right? Like that's been the biggest thing. It's like there's been partnerships that have come our way, and I've said yes to stuff. And then it's like you take a step back a couple of weeks afterwards and you're like, well, is this the right thing for the brand? And that's that's the biggest change, right? It's like it's not even about like what's right for the employees or what's right for you or within your job role, but it's like, is this right for the brand? Right? Does this fit the brand? And I think sometimes we don't think about that, especially somebody who's not a classically trained brand manager by any means. You know, I'm a sales guy. So like if I get an opportunity, I want to run with it. Like that's just who you are as a salesperson. Like, if somebody comes to me as a salesperson and says, hey, I need five new items, go create them and work with your marketing team. I'm doing it immediately. Like that's an opportunity that only comes up once in a while. But in marketing, you've got people calling you. At least I don't know if this is the case with most companies. It could just be because of our brand that we have. We've got people calling us weekly for partnerships. And it's like, sure, yeah, I'm sure I tend to say yes more than I say no. So now it's like I need to learn to slow down and say no. And I would say that from anybody. If you're going from sales into marketing, you've really got to work to understand brand and not move as quick because God forbid, like something happens and you do something detrimental to the brand. Luckily, we haven't done any of those things, which are great. But you really got to almost treat your brand as an employee and not as a commodity, if that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 20:43
Yeah, interesting. You guys have such a great testing ground to really validate prove out product ideas with those restaurants. I'm kind of curious when you guys are billing out the first SKUs that you launched. How has how did and how has restaurant data played a role in product development and kind of deciding what SKU to launch?

Speaker: 20:59
Yeah, I would say, you know, first go to market, not a lot, because you know, candidly speaking, you typically have your top performers in pasta sauce, right? And you can look at what ours were. Like our first hues that we launched were marinara, got out of marinara. I would say up until recently, yeah, you got out of marinara, tomato basil, roasted garlic, arabiata, or something that's spicy. Those were our first four. That was the Rayos playbook. Those were their top performing items. So we had to have as as the brand that was founded to come in and essentially take the awesome job that Rayos did establishing a super premium category and taking it to the next level. We knew we had to have those products. We're gonna launch those products, and that's that. I will say, like, from the rest, like where restaurant comes into play for those is you've got Mario, who's a Michelin star chef and James, multiple James Beer nominee. You got Rich Teresi, who, again, multiple Michelin stars over his career, and a James Beer nominee, both operating fantastic restaurants and in up their own rights. They were there for every test batch that we made, right? Like they they we knew we wanted to use premium ingredients and everything because that's what they use in the restaurant. So, you know, we're importing Italian San Marzano tomatoes in regular cans that you would get on the bottom shelf at your local grocery store. That was important number one. Gotta do that, right? Gotta gotta keep that process as clean as possible. That's restaurant quality. So you're not discounting yourself from what you're selling in the restaurant versus what you're selling in CPG.

Speaker 1: 22:21
Yeah, totally.

Speaker: 22:22
Same thing with ingredients, right? Like we're using whole ingredients in every cook. We're using whole onions. We're using whole garlic. Nothing's coming into our co-manufacturers pre-processed or pre-chopped. All of it's being done on site. Basil's being hand stripped from the stem. We're not using, you know, pre-chopped basil or anything like that. So that's kind of the romance behind the ingredients in the restaurant. Like you've got to play that up. You gotta like lean on that. I would say from like an innovation standpoint, on top of them just being there for every production run and really working to create this product to as close to what they could do in the restaurant as possible. Um, yeah, there are avenues where we've taken, you know, data from the restaurant. You know, when we launched our spicy vodka, we had to launch that, right? Like we, when I came into the company in in in June of 2021, that was just a whisper at that point. Like we knew we were gonna launch it at some point. But when you have the most Instagrammed and photographed dish in in in the world, frankly, um, you've got to launch that in retail.

Speaker 2: 23:14
So right.

Speaker: 23:15
We obviously took that and launched it in retail, made some changes to it. You know, what we do in the jar is as close as we can do to the restaurant. There are a couple of differences between our dish and the restaurant dish because manufacturing-wise, you can't replicate everything, but there are things that we did that were different, right? Like we knew that people wanted the freshest thing possible. So we chose to delineate from what the category does in that product, and we don't include cream in our vodka sauce. We really leave it up to the consumer to add whatever type of cream they want, however much they want, whatever kind of butter content they want. We want to make sure that they're being inclusive there. You know, one of the differences is like our vodka sauce has vodka in it, whereas the restaurant doesn't. And we have to because we call it a vodka sauce, and it'd be weird to call it a vodka sauce in CPG and it not have vodka in it. So that's where we kind of change. I will say from like an innovation standpoint, yeah, like we take obviously any recipe content we do is directly from the restaurant. We take stuff that Mario and Rich make, and even our culinary chef Scott, you know, he's creating recipes that he's done in kitchens, you know, in New York City also. Um, but yeah, I would say any innovation that you see coming from us in the future will have some tie into the restaurant because we think that's important and it pays homage to what the restaurant does. But I would say like where the restaurant influences us most is just like quality and care of ingredients. Like any ingredient that we're using in our jarred sauce would 100% be found inside of the kitchen in the back room at Carbone as well.

Speaker 1: 24:38
Yeah. In terms of the innovation track, you guys recently launched the simmer sauces line. What was that uh formulation and RD process look like that?

Speaker: 24:47
Yeah. So I mean, luckily working in a small organization, even when I was sitting in sales, I was helping, you know, sit on the innovation team. So every every jar that we've ever run from an innovation standpoint, I've tested at some point or tasted. So I've been, you know, ever since day one, I've been super integral in that process of helping ID8 and innovate. So yeah, that was that was a fun one because what we wanted to do, obviously, we wanted to do something still in pasta sauce. There's just so much runway in pasta sauce, but there's not a lot of sure, there's flavor formats that are incremental and like innovative. You know, I think there's some really good players out there doing some cool innovation in the category right now that necessarily Carbone wouldn't do, but there's no usage occasion that's different in this category, right? You've got your pestos, you've got your marinaras or your red sauces, you've got your vodka sauces, you've got your cream-based sauces, and then you have your Alfredos. You've maybe got some topping odds here and there in the category, but like nothing really usage occasion different outside of like pasta, you know, and and and and putting stuff on pasta or as an ingredient or um, you know, what have you. But the biggest difference for this brand that's different than like, you know, a Rayos or a Prego or a Ragu or one of those other guys, we found from consumers, like, and and and honestly, the content we get tagged in, like, we're used as a recipe builder, man. It's not, and and it's nothing against people who take spaghetti and put sauce over it because there's a usage occasion for that. And that is this brand to an extent, but like from day one, the majority of content that we see is somebody taking our sauce and making a lasagna or making something innovative and fun. So they're making a meal with our sauce. So that really clued us in on like, where do we go next from sauce, right? Like, where do we go from next traditional marinara and what do we launch that's innovative in the category? It's differentiated and brings incremental dollars to the category, right? It's like how many other tomato basils can you have on the shelf, right? Like we need to launch something that's different to the category that nobody's done. Yeah. Um, we took this concept of simmer sauce, and you know, I I think originally there was some pushback from buyers and like, well, where does this exist in the stores? This exist in meal solutions and it's a meal solution. Um, and our feedback is like, hey, we're in a 24-ounce jar. We want this to be on Italian sauces because we think it's incremental for your set. Um, it's gonna perform better in Italian, anyways, because this is how they're already using products of ours. So we think this makes a lot of sense. So from there, what we took is we took, you know, recipes that are classic Italian recipes with Bologniers and Paciatore and Fra di Abola, and really leaned into those concepts, right? So we and then they're drastically, and that's the number one question we get with those products is how is this different than marinero? Because it's in a 24-ounce jar, it's it's red, it's got tomatoes in it, and it's got onions and garlic. How different can this be? Culinarily speaking, it's completely different because it's starting with a completely different base, you know. And in typical, you know, marinero world, you're starting with sweating down onions and garlic and then adding in tomatoes. And it's the same thing you do at home, right? You let your aromatics go, and then you know, you build from there.

Speaker 2: 27:48
Yeah.

Speaker: 27:48
On this product, we're taking, you know, that sofrita of, you know, carrots and celery and onion. That's a completely different base and it builds out a different, completely different product. So totally. Um you start by cooking that, and then you add your tomatoes and all your aromatics and stuff like that, and you build a completely different base. So and then, you know, on top of like just that recipe-driven insight that we've gotten from consumers around using our product, you know, we know that our our consumers are overwhelmingly primarily, you know, millennials and Gen Z. And the number one insight that we get from those is like, especially Gen Z, uh, is that, you know, either Gen Z grew up in an atmosphere where they're not being taught how to cook or they don't, you know, they don't have the time to cook or they don't value it, or they, you know, grew up in this DoorDash and an Uber Eats culture where to them a meal could be as simple as like ordering it from a phone-click away.

Speaker 1: 28:37
Right.

Speaker: 28:38
We wanted to create a restaurant quality dish that anybody can enjoy at home with any background of cooking skill, right? So we, you know, bologners, for example, perfect example. You take your ground meat and you, whether it be, you know, veal or pork or beef or a combination of all those, you brown it up. You optionally can add milk to it to help tenderize the meat a little bit. Typically, your your best bolognays in your local Italian joint's gonna have milk in it. You can add the milk or you cannot add the milk, and then you add in the sauce. So we've done that three-hour prep work of cooking that sauce for you. All you're doing is browning meat and you're adding it to the pan, and then you're cooking your pasta on the side. So literally, you I mean, if you're somewhat capable in the kitchen, you can make this finished dish in 15 minutes. Yeah, you would swear that it comes from your best Italian place in your local cities. Um, that was the insight there. On top of just being a great basket builder for the category and for our our retailers, has been um it's been great. And I think the products stand by themselves and are amazing as well.

Speaker 1: 29:33
You guys somewhat recently roll out a label refresh. What was the the why behind the rebrand? Like, mean what what led to the decision to go through a label rebrand in the first place? Yeah.

Speaker: 29:42
I think a lot of it was inadvertent, if I'm being totally honest with you. We obviously had our core four items that launched originally, which were the four that I mentioned. Um, and then we launched Spicy Vodka. Don't quote me on the exact year because I'll get it wrong at this point, since I'm bit of the company for so long, even though it doesn't feel like it's that long. Where we essentially took the spicy vodka name, wrote it in that that beautiful script you see with a metallic label on it, uh, and launched that. We did that for both vodka and then spice. So we did spicy vodka first, and then we did a vodka skew that looks a little bit different, that doesn't have the spice in it because Midwesterners don't like that spice. So we did a non-spicy version and they really look sharp on the on the shelf. Like they they they there's a point of disruption there with that script on that beautiful white label. That really, I mean, our label's great. Like it's it's it's got a nice tactic feel to it, it feels premium, and that that that that script across the front with that metallic sheen looks awesome too. Where we started to get into kind of consolidating is like, hey, we know those items and all all four of those items performed well, but it's like, do we do we make this brand cohesive so that everything is the same, right? So then we had dialogues about that for you know, I would say probably six to eight months and trying to figure out what to do with that. Uh we wanted, and then what we ended up doing is we ended up going with it because it solved a couple of different you know opportunities for our brand. You know, as we continue to get bigger and we scale more in the mash channel, you know, you start seeing how your product appears at, you know, your Myers and your Walmarts and people that will and and retailers that will pack out in case, right? Costco, for example, right? Like Costco, everything sits within that tray. And if your flavor name sits below that tray, nobody knows what they're picking up, right? And that was a big insight that we saw, especially coming out of Walmart, is I would say majority of Walmart stores, even though we're not a red, not in a ready to display case, will pack it out as ready to display. So what ended up happening is a lot of times that flavor name would not be seen anywhere on the shelf unless you picked it up. So piggybacking off the success of vodka and spice of vodka and how they look, we were like, hey, we have a really opportunity to make our brand cohesive across the entire platform. And we saw the need of this packaging issue that we're seeing as we get bigger and start going into mass and more, you know, as we go into Aldi and as we go into Costco, it gives us the ability to show off our brand and our label and our flavor a little bit more. And then we have the ability to do some fun stuff down at the bottom that we historically haven't done because that's where the name's occupied. So luckily, Mario blessed us that we interrupt because that that front display on our jar is literally the restaurant menu. So if you ever go to the restaurant, it's it's iconic because they give you this menu that's almost comically big and it's on everybody's Instagram when they go, and that's the first picture they take in the restaurant. Yeah, and it made the perfect first white label for us, right? So we he let us disrupt that and and put some words over top of it, which I know took some convincing, but he bought in on the vision. Um, and then I'd say secondarily, what it also allowed us to do is it allowed us to add a little bit more color to our label by disrupting that middle section, right? So there's definitely a sea of yellow and white in most stores right now between us and Rayos. And by adding that little bit of color blocking through the center on some of these flavor names, really set us apart on shelf. And as we're seeing velocity increases already on those items that have transitioned over because it's becoming clear what it is. And now we've leveraged that bottom portion of our label to talk about those hero ingredients, right? So, like Mediterranean Marinera is the best example of this. It's called Mediterranean Marinera. It's in this beautiful purple, I think it's purple script on the front. And then down the bottom, it describes what it is. Where normally would have said like marinara or tomato basil, it says a marinara with capers and olives. Right. Um, so we've been able to really build that out and be creative with it. Uh, we'll have our Alfredo line starting to refresh here in the next couple of uh months. The images that I've and the proofs that I've signed already look fantastic. So we're really excited about what that does just to bring more brain cohesion to shelf.

Speaker 1: 33:31
One of the kind of core metrics that you're focused on is how do we get the consumer from one trip to three trips to the store to buy a carbon? Why is this kind of a been one of your north stars for you?

Speaker: 33:43
So I think it's it's all rooted in insights, right? Like household, I mean, I think we take a step back. Let's talk about household penetration at least for right now. So we're at the point now where our household penetration is actually greater than Rio's was when they sold the first time. Uh, we're the only brand in this category that is growing households quad week over quad week for the entire year. I mean, on average, we're growing about 160 to 175,000 households every four weeks, um, which is crazy that we're still generating that in year four. And it's only it's only exponentially gone up since like March of this year. Like we really turned some activation corners and how we're talking to consumers back in March and switched trap tactics pretty substantially, and it's generated very positively in household penetration. You know, where we go from there is like it's just to me it's like it's at the basics of marketing. It costs so much less to retain customers and keep building customers than it does to bring in new customers. And that's not saying we're shifting our tactics completely. 45% of our purchases are still from new to households, like just new to brand households, which in year four, I still have that number speaks to the volumes of like, you know, where this brand's gonna go over the next two to three years. Um, for us now, it's about what tactics do we tie in to not only get that first purchase, but to get that second purchase, then that second purchase to third purchase. Cause that all that does is drives loyalty. It drives purchase when you're not on deal and it drives more base volume, and it gets us candidly to where we need, like we won't we know at some point in the next, I don't know when it's gonna be, you know, I could still be here, who knows? We we will be bigger than Rayos within pasta sauce at some point over the course of the probably the next five to six years.

Speaker 2: 35:23
Yeah.

Speaker: 35:24
But to have that conversation, we start to have to start driving conversion like they do. And really what we're doing is taking their conversion numbers and trying to extrapolate it out to our brand. You know, we know, you know, for the most part, you know, they're getting, you know, 2.1 visits per trip. Typically, consumers are buying them, you know, I think five to six times a year across all platforms, and that's their brand, right? Like they're not growing households incrementally at this point. They're kind of flat and maybe up a little bit, but they've got that solid core behind them of who their household is and where they're converting. So focus much more on conversion this year, much more on loyalty. We're at the point now where we're actually seeing at Walmart specifically, where if we get really good robust data from number, a number of buyers buying three and more times is actually higher than our number of people buying twice, which to me is phenomenal. We'll continue to gain buyers. We want those one time buyers. We don't want to get away from one times, right? But we want our number three and plus more times to be more than number two. So that's the ultimate measure of success right now in conversion for us. It's just driving more purchase frequency throughout the year. You know, we'll continue to be a brand that obviously won't optimize that number because you know, half of our volume is still coming from new to brand purchases, but anytime we're seeing in that other 50%, the majority of which being three and more times, is a very good indication of what this brand's gonna become over the next three to four years. Totally. And it's fun, it's not category stuff. Like it's you know totally it's brand health stuff. I I did the category stuff. I don't velocity and all that's great, but I want solid brand health and what's gonna drive brand metrics into the future.

Speaker 1: 36:53
Isn't great. You've got so many good insights. I'm just kind of curious. It's kind of a last question for you, just in in terms of getting your general take on what's happening in CPG, like any out outside of Carbon, any any specific brands or just trends in the CPG space in general that has been piquing your interest lately. Things have been, yeah, but you're particularly excited about it all?

Speaker: 37:14
Yeah, I mean, I I think obviously we're getting getting into a CPG culture where things are finely about the ingredients. Like I think that there's there's more and more brands that are being evaluated for their ingredients. And I I think I think it's an amazing thing, right? I think we're getting to the point where, you know, some some things are in a vacuum, some things aren't created equal, right? I think there's some education that's required along the way, especially when it talks, you know, specific ingredients. But I think you're seeing more and more brands that are founded on an ingredient basis and using the best ingredients and creating that premium culture. I think that's amazing. I think we're getting into the point where I don't want to say we're in COVID. We're obviously not in COVID, but I think financially we're in COVID again. Like we're getting there, right? Like where people are dining out less, you know, disposable income is going down, grocery costs are going up. The coolest thing that I see, and and you look at Rayo's success before we were around, like Rayo's company doubled during COVID. And they doubled because they were in stock, because the others couldn't keep up with supply, um, and because people were dining out less. Right. And if you're gonna dine out less and you're not gonna go to your local Italian joint for two people and drop 80 to 90 bucks with drinks, go buy that $10 jar of sauce with a nice premium imported pasta. Well, we'll see what happens with premium imported pasta after the 115% tariffs. But you know, people are at least dining at home more. And yeah, and I don't want to say like categories are recession proof, but I think that brands that are starting to get it are the ones that are premiumizing, right? So for me, I look at somebody like Fishwife, amazing. Like the the team over there really creating a premium product within 10 fish that's culinarily best in class speaking and sourced well. I think that's amazing. Anybody that's doing anything innovative with flavors and ingredients, I love. Especially, I think the next big thing for me seeing is like just the continued premium of categories, right? Like I think frozen, for example. I think there's a good runway there still specifically within ethnic food of like premiumizing that, right? Like what does the next premium meal solution look like in frozen? I think that's gonna be a big thing. Fresh, I think, is still doing well. I think it's fresh is starting to move towards frozen because you can do more in frozen in terms of like innovation and culinary stuff. But I think you know, frozen is a big, is a big avenue. And then I would say, like, from a marketing perspective, outside of that, the biggest thing that I've learned since being on the desk from like a I would say just like an industry thing, right? There we're at this point, and it goes back to ingredients. So you'll follow you'll follow me here eventually when I get there. It'll take me a second, though. But so many brands are using food marketing as kind of their sense, their sensory marketing right now, especially in cosmetics and culture and lifestyle and and and clothing.

Speaker 2: 39:48
Yeah.

Speaker: 39:49
Like that's just the thing now, right? Like, you know, Haley launching something with Road and with Krispy Kreme, or you know, brands finding ways to include food that historically haven't within lifestyle, whether it be, you know, fashion or entertainment, like those things are happening now.

Speaker 2: 40:05
Yep.

Speaker: 40:06
So I think brands that find a way to take those cues within food and almost flip it on its head, right? So, like here at Carbone, we're gonna embrace lifestyle marketing for the next couple of years. We're gonna find good brand partners, you know, outside of food that activate brand and drive loyalty and drive awareness. So I think the brands that figure that out within this lifestyle space and premiumization space are gonna be the ones that build brands at last for the next 20 to 30 years. I think that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1: 40:33
Well, yeah, Chris, it's been awesome. Really appreciate the time. Shared so many valuable insights here. Uh, what's the best place for people to follow along with you these days? And then I know you're focused on a lot of stuff and you know different channels. What's the place you want to direct people to follow along with Carbone these days, too?

Speaker: 40:48
Yeah, I would say obviously find us on Instagram at Carbone Fine Foods. Our website just got renovated, which I'm super proud of. That was one of the first things that I worked on coming here. It's awesome. Our website was much more D2C focused, and now it's lifestyle branded focused. So I would encourage everybody to go check out our website. I think it's beautiful. Perfect. We had a great partner with a company called Gletka Plus out of Chicago who helped us launch that. TikTok, we're getting bigger on. TikTok historically hasn't been a big platform for us, but we've developed some good UGC over there and creating content. So everything in the know for us regarding event activations, brand partnerships, you know, events. We're going to do a lot of events this year. You'll find all that news on our website and on Instagram and TikTok. So yeah, go follow us there and uh please engage with us and buy our products.

Speaker 1: 41:30
Awesome. Sounds good. Isn't it great, Chris? Appreciate the time.

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