Elan Halpern - Dealing Yogurt Via Citibikes and Backpacks

welcome to shelf help today we're speaking with alon halperin co founder of sour milk nyc based functional greek yogurt brand that's been making a lot of waves as of late before jumping in the cpg world alon was a stanford cs grad i spent a lot of time at facebook instagram and silicon valley burner co founder kiki i think they've sold close to ten thousand units of yogurt originally on bikes across new york city excited to dive into this stuff but um yeah along just for a first off just for kind of the listeners that aren't all that familiar with sour milk love to just kind of get quick lay of the land just in terms of kind of the origin story and why behind the brand and what the kind of core product lineup looks like and then we'll go from there yeah absolutely thanks for having me on adam i'm excited to chat so my co founder kiki and i met at undergrad we went to stanford together um we actually met during a nutrition class taught by professor named christopher gardner and sort of bonded over our shared passion for food and health systems and how kind of those things interact and went on to do totally separate careers like you said i studied computer science i ended up being a product manager at a fast growing uh web three tech company in in in 2020 i was there for four and a half years and my my co founder kiki was in private equity for the same duration kind of throughout that postgrad experience i was going through some like you know pretty um i would say like intensive gut health issues um that kind of affected affected me on a daily basis and so these are things that are standard and common and normal pertaining to the gut so things like chronic bloating and inflammation and then other downstream things like brain fog and hormone disruption and all these things and what i realized is that all roads lead back to the microbiome and a lot of how you feel every single day stems from your gut and what's going on in your microbiome um and so i i was actually an athlete in college i played i was on the rowing team so i developed a habit of eating greek yogurt every day after practice cause our coach would line up greek yogurt bowls after we got off the water and i've been eating greek yogurt every single day because of that habit and what i realized in the process of trying to heal my gut and fix all these issues was that the greek yogurt i was consuming every day was actually doing nothing to contribute to my microbiome health and there's a couple reasons for that number one is many many yogurts will pasteurize after they ferment and so that kills off all of the live and active cultures but it extends the shelf life so you get this really long lasting yogurt number two is the specific cultures that are used in yogurt are they're called the yogurt cultures so lactobacillus bulgaricus they're great at making yogurt they're not probiotic cultures that are designed to be really good for your gut so you're not actually getting those those those benefits you get from other probiotics and then number three is even yogurts that do have probiotics in them they just like don't generally tend to have enough your gut has a hundred trillion bacteria in it to make a dent you need billions and billions and billions on a daily basis and so you i wasn't getting sufficient amount from that greek yogurt and so i started making my own and really the goal was i'm already eating this thing that has an incredible potential for being really probiotic right yogurt in itself is a is a really good vehicle for getting probiotics but the yogurt i could buy on the shelf wasn't actually designed to do that so i just started making my own that had the right probiotics in the right quantities so that i could eat the thing i wanted to eat every single day and get the benefits my body needed and that was really the inception of sour milk it was sort of a like self problem that i myself was trying to solve so it's kind of self fulfilling need here and what kiki and i realized is that two thirds of americans have digestive issues not too dissimilar to what i was experiencing and simultaneously yogurt has a ninety two percent household penetration in america and so if we can take this thing that people are already eating and familiar with and design one that's truly good for your gut almost a probiotic supplement disguised as a yogurt you can actually reach way more people than if we tried to sell a pill or a powder or a supplement and that's kind of the mission behind sour milk is like how do we actually help people achieve awesome gut health outcomes in a way that that doesn't force them to change their habits looking back at those uh early days of formulation and product development i imagine like most you went through a bunch of iterations to kind of get that final product and i think i read you really were kind of focusing on trying to get uniquely fluffy and light texture love this get a sense of what that journey look like in terms of the key variables that were top of mind for you as you were playing around with formulation what it looked like from you know between that that first version and the final version when you said okay this is right we feel good about selling this to customers yeah i would say that the yogurt that you know is on the shelf now the sour milk that is on the shelf now tastes a lot better than the one that i was making for myself and eating that's like kind of a huge variant obviously the the recipe developed from the yogurt i was making myself but this one is like actually tastes really yummy and so that's actually where a lot of the iteration came to be the way we're thinking about recipe it wasn't necessarily like how do we make a really yummy tasting yogurt it was like how do we create a probiotic and then how do we make that taste good so how we approached it was like okay there are a you know forty thousand different bacteria strains of those like a hundred to three hundred less than one percent are like probiotic strains of that subset of probiotic strains very few of them will survive in a yogurt form right cause yogurt's highly acidic it has a lot of water content so there are awesome strains out there that actually really only work in a pill form not in a in a food form so those have to get eliminated and then of those that we're left with which ones actually yield a taste that we think taste good and so it really like windles down to to what we're able to use so within those constraints we were doing a ton of iterations on sort of the ratios the amounts the the combinations and and kind of what textures and flavors that product yields like i've heard you say something along the lines of most yogurts kind of fall into one of three one of three traps can you assuming i got that right like what what are those three traps and how did you kind of go about intentionally avoiding those three yeah so this is this is a bit of what i was mentioning earlier it's a couple things it's the pasteurization after fermentation right and that helps extend shelf life of yogurt and that's really like you see that in in the traditional yogurts those types of americanized yogurts you'll see that they just don't have any live and active cultures then it's the culture choice so the the yogurt cultures are awesome at making yogurt they're not necessarily the best for your gut and then the third thing is quantity creating a really high probiotic requires longer time longer fermentation durations it requires more expensive cultures than the typical yogurt ones and so it it's not the yogurt companies today are optimizing for how do we create as much yogurt as quickly as possible we want to optimize for like super high quality and that just yields to slightly less efficient production lines and higher cost of goods and all of these things that help us make an awesome product that makes you feel good and has all these benefits but maybe is less like optimized on the cost effective side that that some of the larger yogurt brands care about in terms of manufacturing finding co packers or what not was it hard to find ones that kind of align this align with your vision totally i mean the hardest part about finding a co packer in our industry is that it's so old fashioned so nothing's online like i come from tech where if there is a problem you're trying to solve you open up google i mean not now chat gpt but you open up google you punch in that problem and there's like ten software solutions for finding that problem very well seo'd very clearly broken down like it's so easy to find solutions to problems if you're at like you can try looking up like dairy cobacker like you are not gonna find it like these these things are not on the internet and so a lot of the process of finding a cobacker was like calling random numbers not not like calling them and being like do you know anyone can you do this and they're like no but try so and so and they're like no but try so and so and it just kind of was a domino effect until we found someone that that could do what we wanted to do in terms of like the actual process lucky for us a lot of the the yogurt like if you're making a plain yogurt you know a clean plain yogurt there should be two ingredients it's whatever milk you're using in our case it's organic grass fed milk and then the cultures that you're using the culture combination the process of making the yogurt and this is really cool about this is kind of part of the reason why we're so excited about this product is that the process is actually something that you can literally do in your home and you can do with two thousand gallons of milk in a factory and like the process itself is generally the same that's not the same as like a potato chip or a protein bar or like a snack like those types of things cannot be made in your home kitchen i think there's something really cool and going back to roots of like you know packaging a product and making it really easy and accessible but it's also something that if you wanted to make it home you could that's how i started making it the the process is very similar and so really like the the changes that we're making in the process are that culture combination that we're using temperature that we're fermenting at the duration that we're fermenting at but the equipment required to actually do that will be the same as like another yogurt on the shelf yeah so that made it easy to fit into existing co packers often times when i talk to other brands find that co packer and they're really ready to really scale up often times they have to make maybe sacrifices is a bit of a strong word but formulation changes to be able to transition from a kind of a small batch production to you know co packer level production did you guys have to make any kind of hard decisions around that or was it pretty much you know your kind of your what you had in vision they're able to do exactly what you had in mind yeah it's funny that so we everyone we talked to we talked to a ton of cpg people about this process as we were starting and we were learning we got to we got to learn so much and from listening to podcast and all these things yeah and everyone was like your first five co man production runs are gonna be trash like don't even like they're gonna be like something's gonna go wrong it's not gonna be good like just don't expect it to be like a good product for the first three to five runs and so going into it i was really nervous i had this product that felt very precious and you know like i was excited about where it was and i was like how is it gonna scale i wasn't sure how that's gonna scale up on different equipment and larger quantities and that first production run we got back was like amazing like we were like we're like this is so good it's like exactly what we wanted to be and we had future kind of common hiccups down the line and it's very common to like have something go wrong in your production but we were very lucky that the first one that we did went like very very smoothly and it was a product that we were super excited about our process is still like relatively manual with our command and so because of that like our very astute customers will notice like hey this batch is like a little bit thicker than the last one or it's like a little different and they'll notice that which is which is kind of fine we're still small scale so that type of customers have our phone numbers like many of them are able to like just shoot us a note and text us which is great but as as we sort of get more repeatable consistency they'll be way less variance in that from a supply chain standpoint from what i know you based on the east coast so it makes sense you've been sourcing an organic grass fed milk from some upstate new york dairy farms kinda curious what that supply chain looks like i guess in more detail like as you continue to scale up on you're getting to like you know national scale level distribution and you're in you know ten twenty thirty thousand plus doors at some point what do you guys envision what that supply chain is gonna look like once you get to that level of scale yeah it's a great question so the organic industry is is really interesting for for non organic farms they're able to have like thirty thousand cow herds right because you basically can just like cram as many as many cows as possible into a small surface area and so if they get sick you give them antibiotics all of those things use hormones and and you can kind of feed them whatever a lot of these like conventional dairy cows are fed like excess waste product from like other factories and candy and whatnot so that side of things basically is there's like a bottomless tap of milk you can access if you're going the conventional route that's it there are some not like non organic conventional farms that do an incredible job by all standards is like amazing milk it's just there's no you know there's no guaranteed consistency unless you know your farm and know your farmer so i think there's ways to source really high quality conventional dairy but a lot of it is coming from these sort of like kfo farms the organic side of things the kind of rules and requirements around organic make it much more conducive to having a large amount of tiny farms rather than a small amount of large farms like it is with conventional and there's a couple reasons for that one like the food is more expensive you have to you can't use any pesticides and the food has to be all organic that that they're getting fed you can't use any antibiotics or medicine so you have to use all preventative medicine to make sure that the cows don't get sick and you know if you do end up having to use antibiotics like the cow can no longer be a part of that organic herd it has to be sold off and then number three is they are required to spend like every single day outside at some point it's like some some super super large percentage of their time has to be spent outside and thirty percent of their diet minimum has to come from pasture and so you have all these like cow to land ratios that you have to meet which means you know if you have two hundred acres of land that actually puts a cap on the number of organic dairy cows you can have you can't just like endlessly grow because each of those cows have a certain acreage associated with it and so it it basically creates this supply chain that's like you know a couple really really huge conventional dairy farms that can kind of scale infinitely and then like a bunch of really really small organic farms and what happens when you want to buy organic milk is they're they're usually contracted and so a larger co op like organic valley or horizon or or some of some of the other ones will basically contract a small dairy farm and say hey i will pick up your milk on this schedule alongside all of these other routes and that enables this like teeny tiny farm that's maybe not producing that much milk to get pulled in with a bunch of others and then sold to like a larger corp so that's like you know that was probably like more than you asked for on the no it's great no i love the detail yeah the organic versus conventional sort of like dairy space but it does pose a couple challenges for us as a new to market brand right because in some sense we're too big to just say hey can we get a couple gallons of milk to make our to make our small batch yogurt and we're too small to say hey let's we'll take over all of these contracts and like create our own supply chain and pick up route and and do all of these things and so there's like sort of a a growth stage here which is part of the challenge with with organic right now is that we have to kind of stitch together and find these really high quality certified organic dairy farms that can sort of divert milk to us or maybe they're not they're not contracted and we can buy milk from them as we grow in scale the hope is that we can start to develop those direct contracts and relationships and partnerships with some of these organic dairies where we're getting we're kind of producing enough volume um where we can kind of guarantee that for them yeah cool that makes total sense for let's just say you had another friend approach you and say hey i'm thinking about starting a a cbd company as well in the broader dairy space maybe we'll say ice cream or something what recommendations might you have for like them in terms of and they're about to start the co packer search like what might recommendations might you have for them based on what your experience was like and i guess you know eliminating some of the pain points that you had along the way yeah i would say get comfortable with answering unknown phone numbers that was what i like before this i'd never if i got an unknown phone number i'd never answer it with some scammers now every single one i get i answer cause it could be some some dairy farm no but in all seriousness i think it's just like you know expect to be on the phone a lot expect like every person that you meet even if they can't help you with directly what you need ask them if they know anyone that might be able to and that's really like how you um end up following down these threads and rabbit holes i think it's been really fascinating to learn about the industry and listen to the challenges that that are being faced and the problems that are um that the industry is trying to solve i think that dairy is a there's no better time to be in dairy obviously like american consumers especially tend to swing a lot but now there's a lot of like updated regulation and recommendations around dairy and and positive for dairy so i think it's a it's a really interesting time to to be in that space yogurt compared to a lot of other shelf stable cpg categories is it's obviously more of a perishable product i think shelf life is probably like i don't know six to eight weeks ish is my guess you can correct me if i'm wrong definitely seem like that presents some some more delicate challenges especially having a board dial in and strategy from like you know demand planning what does that look like in terms of yeah what you guys have found so far in terms of like challenges so far around that type timing demand around expiration dates and that stuff and how are you thinking about that as you really start to scale up as well yeah it's definitely something that was top of mind from the moment we started this thing in the early days we should have just started a protein bar company that could live for a year but the way we thought about it especially in the beginning as a new to market brand was that the moment we stepped into the factory and make you know a pallet of yogurt like in twelve hundred to two thousand yogurts we had to know where that product was going we couldn't just like conduct our first production run and then like market and try and sell it we had to know and so how we went about it is we built a waitlist of two thousand people before we ever even step foot in the factory and that way when we made that pallet of yogurt we already had this like virtual line out the door of people who were excited to buy it and sell it and so after that first production run we we went up we we we sent the palette of yogurt down and we sold all of it by hand on city bikes in seven days and that really kind of helped us you know build confidence to then increase the size and increase the size and kind of continue to sell now that we're in stores i think we're we're learning a lot we've we've been selling out on shelves and some things that we've learned is that grocery stores don't actually tell you when you're sold out it's like usually we find out because a customer sends a photo and says hey i tried to get this and it's funny 'cause as a customer you're like oh why why are you not on the shelf and from us like we didn't even know like we we love to be always on the shelf so so we're learning all of this in the cpg space and and navigating the kind of process there we wanna keep a tight lock on like supply and demand we never we never wanna be sold out that's like never a goal for us is to be sold out but we also don't wanna kind of overstep our demand where we're jumping to these huge huge production runs and not actually having the right distribution channels to to do that so part of our growth strategy here in new york city is like being very intentionally focused on new york city on our backyard and then expanding regionally once we feel like we sort of dominated this market and and our ubiquity is here yeah you kind of touch on it in terms of like i mean clearly there's obviously a lot of learning lessons building any company whether you know the industry or not but uh what have you felt like coming from the kind of the tech space uh before coming into cbg any things that now that you've been in the space of it anything that's actually proven to be pretty useful that you kind of brought over from your learnings and in the other tech world into into cpg yeah it's i mean so i'll give you i'll give you a couple couple examples one like very tactical like i study computer science and coded our website right like when we were when we were doing our pickup model um we're using shopify for our website and shopify doesn't natively have this like concept of like a pickup right you order it and then they like you know partner with fedex or ups and they create the shipping label and send it out and so i basically had to build this feature into shopify that gated someone's checkout on them choosing a pickup location and so we would kind of like hard code in these like locations like pick up in union square pick up in the west village pick up on the upper east side and before you could actually go and pay for your yogurt you had to make that selection and so like you know if i didn't have a software engineering background like we probably wouldn't have been able to have that user experience of like conducting that and we sold like over eight thousand yogurts that way so that was like a good tangible tactile use for it um i think the other thing is just like product product thinking um so i was a product manager for four and a half years and i think the way that um kiki and i both sort of approach building a brand building a product the packaging the the sort of criteria that we have of how users interact with it and and how they feel about it all those things i think are very like start up and and tech forward and maybe less so like traditional consumer and a lot of that sort of non consumer thinking i think put it this way like if we had had consumer experience i don't think we would have done any of the things that we did like some of the things that we're doing are like so wildly unscalable and and pretty untraditional and i think had we had a background in consumer before and a new the way to do things we probably wouldn't have done it the way we're doing it and so i think that we've gotten a lot of value out of thinking out of the box i think you originally launched as i'm not sure how you pronounce it benny b e n i y and then you guys got some cease and desist or something from some energy drink company assuming i got that right and then you had to like obviously force you to rebrand yet uh walk me through that that process a little bit cause i think you're not the only one that's that's experienced this and like how you kind of turn it into an opportunity yeah that was a a tough moment for us we had been in our previous previous name was was benny and we had had that name um you know for like five months or so so in the grand scheme of a company that's so little but for us it was like the only five months we had yeah of course and we had built up some brand equity online thousands of followers and subscribers and people kind of you know we had merch and all of those things and so when we got that season to assist we were like you know we're we're felt like the floor was falling from underneath us and we basically had to decide a couple things one was do we just like take this to legal and like spend you know thousands of dollars just like fighting this in a legal battle or do we basically like cut our losses and just like go through the name change now and you know avoid when we got this this letter we were like days away from ordering a hundred thousand units of packaging right with our names in please say it was like yeah it was a lot so we basically had to decide like do we just say do we ignore it and just say whatever we think that will win on this discussion and and just keep going or basically put a pause on everything and and figure out a good solution here and i think we obviously chose to to just decide to do a name pivot and that was probably one of the best decisions we've made so we went through this like two week sprint of like you know internally brainstorming and then also externally like everything is content for us so the moment we got this we like posted and we're like hey we got we have to change our name like anyone have ideas and just kind of pulled and pulled got over five hundred submissions from our customers about different naming ideas which is really helpful um and we ended up choosing sour milk and there were a couple of reasons for this i think it it came down to some criteria that we had around naming at first we were just trying to find another version of our old name but then what we realized is that a name change is actually a huge opportunity like the name of a of a cpg or any consumer company is like a huge huge aspect of of their memorability of their recognition and all these things and so we decided to take the name in a different direction and the things that the criteria that we wanted were number one the name should be easy to pronounce i think there's so many yogurts on the shelf where people just don't know how to pronounce the name of their yogurt it's like that's true fage or faye and chobani and sig or siggy like just all of them are just like so hard to pronounce we're like we need it needs to be easy to pronounce number two is it had to be memorable and that i think is super super important so many brand names are are very forgettable and so to to take up space and actually have a name that sticks is very very high value and then number three is we wanted to tell you something about what the product was we really admired and liked you know the liquid iv the you know vitamin waters like these these types of brands that you read it and you're like ok i i kind of get what it is it's not just like out of left field and sour milk really checked all of those boxes super memorable easy to pronounce and helps you understand what the product is yeah totally that's a great name i think uh blessing in disguise having to change it to that hundred percent hundred percent visual identity and kind of packaging design standpoint you kind of mention those names like definitely competing in a category with some pretty big giants chobani and siggis and what not the key variables that were top of mind for you in terms of building out the brand identity packaging so you really focusing on really being able to stand out on the shelf against some of these legacy players yeah we i mean we knew that the yogurt aisle was a sea of white which actually made our jobs pretty our sort of criteria pretty easy yeah we did not want to have white packaging that was sort of like the baseline thing was that if we're going to stand out on the shelf it's a sea of white we need to have some sort of bright color that really like sticks out and so we ended up going with this like like royal blue sort of our our like signature bright blue part of the other reason for this is that we knew that when we were launching we were gonna launch with one skew i know you probably adam know this but we got a ton of advice being like you need to launch at least four skews because you're not going to take up a lot of space and it's and no one's going to see the product and so we had sort of like a double header challenge of like okay we need to stand out in a sea of white and um we're only launching with one skew so it like really needs to stand out because it'll easily get lost most of the yogurt brands you'll see on the shelf have like four to even like ten different skews um and so they're taking up a ton of shelf space yeah and so we went with this like bright blue packaging and i think that plus our name being sour milk really helps us like catch people's attention and and grab their eye the other the other reason why we we didn't necessarily want to launch with cheese is because we felt like we knew who our sort of target demographic was and we knew that that demographic buys a plain yogurt like most of the people who are maybe a little bit more health conscious and are looking for sort of a clean label yogurt they're buying plain and then they're adding their own fruit and they're adding their own honey and they're adding their own granola on it at home and sort of building their own yogurt bowls or maybe they're using it for savory yogurt and so that meant like if we as a new brand wanted to stay focused and speak to our target consumer the only thing that matters was launching the product that they're looking for which is a plain yogurt totally that launching flavors which we will do actually in r and d for flavors right now helps us expand our market and and kind of attract different people that um that are looking for a flavored yogurt yeah it seems like from what i've read you've kind of positioned sour milk kind of like you know your favorite greek yogurt disguised as a probiotic supplement um assuming i got that right like how do you how do you guys think about kind of straddling the the food versus supplement category if that is kind of the goal yeah when we were first thinking about the brand and brand identity we had these sort of like two diverging paths that we could go on one was this like very serious very scientific kind of almost almost sterile health background i think there's there's companies that do this well like zbiotics seed ag one like these are very like this is clinically studied here here are health and outcomes and then the other was just like the opposite it was just like super playful super fun just like be a fun consumer brand and ultimately what we realized even though we sort of straddle both was that we'll be able to reach more people if we're just like a really fun awesome consumer brand than if we're like a very health focused product and so we took a strategic decision to you know go for this more playful energy and and really make it a yogurt that you want to eat every single day and it just so happens to also serve as your probiotic as opposed to something you're feeling like obligated to eat every day because it's your probiotic i don't wanna say this the wrong way but i feel like you've called it the the drug dealer model where in terms of what you talked about you know delivering yogurt on city bikes and like brown bags before you guys entered retail would you recommend this model thinking back now what do you feel like have been the big pros and cons yeah a hundred percent i think if it's possible for you to do and execute it was incredibly beneficial for us and we did we did call it the drug deal model yeah it's just just to run people through what that actually looked like so sure yeah customers would come to our website and they would choose a location to actually pick up their yogurts they would say i wanna i wanna buy five yogurts i'm gonna pick up in the west village on tuesday five to six pm and so when they go and they they place that order we then fire over a calendar invite to their email that has that location and hold and date and time and their order details then you know when it comes to five pm on a tuesday you'll see either me or kiki or both of us sitting with our blue sour milk backpacks and you'll come over and we'll hand you a brown paper bag of your yogurt that has your five yogurts in it and and that was the exchange and so you're really like coming to a street corner to buy your like brown bag of yogurt which is kind of insane but it it became known as the drug deal model because that's just kind of how how people would buy drugs and so we there was a couple reasons why we did this and and and we gained a lot from it so first and foremost speed when you launch especially a perishable dairy product the traditional way is to you know go produce a product sign on to a distributor that has a refer truck and then you know from there go to a bunch of retailers and sell it there and we knew that was gonna take time that was gonna take a lot of trust a lot of build out and ultimately we were like our product is in a really good place we have all this customer demand actually the fastest way to get it to those customers into their hands is by doing it ourselves and so we wanted to get our product from production into customers hands quickly and this was a really good way to do that number two is it enabled us to get feedback really quickly so we were building these direct relationships with customers we were giving every single one of them our phone number and we could get like immediate that's when we learned people really love the texture of our yogurt because they would say like the texture is amazing i haven't had any other yogurt like this or i love the flavor or i'm i'm now more regular by by eating this yogurt every day i'm having better bowel movements like all of that all of that we got from having that direct relationship and if we had sold through stores we wouldn't actually have that direct relationship with them totally and the third thing which is really kind of related to that is there there is a world of a difference between going to a grocery store and seeing a product for the on the shelf for the first time and and being curious about that product oh what's that what's that new product i've never seen it before versus going to the grocery store and seeing a product on the shelf for the first time and saying i met the founders of that company and i've been eating that yogurt all summer and we've now had this direct face to face relationship with every single one of our customers who bought our yogurt this summer so that the moment we're in grocery stores they are just excited as excited as we are because they felt like they were a part of this journey they know us they've been eating the yogurt they developed this habit of consuming it and that was just like you know we had a hypothesis that was gonna benefit us in the stores and we saw that play out from like day one when we launched into retail is is our our customers are loyalist and we're our biggest advocates and and they were buying the yogurt i imagine sitting on a you know whatever street corner whatever with a bright you know blue bag and you're handing people yogurts and bags i imagine you had a at least a good number of people that you just saw that actual transaction happening and like learned about it that way and then maybe came up to you and said what is or you know eventually then saw the bag and then like googled it themselves or something hundred percent yeah we we had a ton of people um you know sometimes we sit outside at coffee shops we had people being like what are you doing and i'd be like i'm selling yogurt and they would buy it on the spot it was definitely like a bit we had people like meet at these drops cause you know we would have like sometimes up to like twenty people coming to pick up yogurt from us in a given drop and so there would be all these overlaps and i remember there was one time where um and we chat with everyone right like you're coming to meet us so so we we stay we stay there and chat with everyone we were talking to someone who just started a company and was looking for an engineer and and all these things and then you know our next customer comes and he was like oh i'm an engineer and i just left my company like we should chat and like they met and chatted and i don't actually know if they're working together but that would be awesome that's awesome so it just kind of became this like kind of community community space and everyone had this shared interest in in what we were building and so people got to meet each other fast forward a little bit started getting into retail did it did it has it proven in those first retail conversations having those you know thousand plus really loyal customers you could some level that data showing repeat orders that kind of stuff did that really help you get on the shelf of that you know first retailer or two definitely it it helped a ton and i think beyond that we had all of our customers like zip coded so you know we we just recently launched with butterfield market on the upper east side and we didn't really have the store on the upper east side to kind of capture that market and we told them look we have hundreds of customers in this zip code who have been asking to for us to stock here we'd love to to work with you guys on it and that's really really helpful in these retail conversations and then you have proof points right of course like in our first two stores that we launched with we like flew off the shelves and so we can point to that and say we launched with these stores and this is how many cases we sold and we think that you also have a really good market to to meet our customers and expand them yeah totally and i think happy year the grocery was like the first retail partner yeah happy year was our first retail partner why do you feel like they were the right fit to the first one you wanted to approach yeah we were we were very we looked at you know a lot of different stores of figuring out which one we wanted to actually launch with we felt like happier was a really good product discovery and landing pad so people generally tend to go to happier and they're they're more browsing they're more interested they stop and stare at things as opposed to like if you're shopping at a trader joe's or whole foods or some other stores like your headphones are in and you're like don't talk to me and so it felt more conducive to product discovery we also just like loved their mission their vibe they're very founder friendly and just felt like it was a really good splashy landing pad for us to start with yeah for other brands that are in you know a bit behind you say like six months behind you they're gearing up maybe they've got that commitment from that first retailer now they're kind of gearing up for that first launch and want to make sure it's successful what's i don't know two three things that come like top of mind that you might tell them i think doing localized activations in that area can be really helpful so if you're launching you know your first grocery store is is on the upper west side find that local soul cycle that local solid core or whatever local gym and contact them and see if you can if you can actually do a pop up there or do demos there obviously in store demos are also great and you should be doing that in stores but like thinking creatively beyond that making it feel like the environment around that store is like you're everywhere within that environment i think that can be really helpful 'cause they're always gonna ask where can i get it and you can say actually we're in the store like down the block imagine probably doing pop ups and that i like a soul cycle they're probably more friendly and don't don't charge you the way that retailers do probably do no yeah exactly exactly we've had we've had a ton of success partnering with gyms and other sort of tangential partners that our core customer base also kind of goes to yeah um what's six what's the retail expansion strategy look like from here we're focused on new york city at the moment so we want to kind of capture there's there's like a thousand grocery stores in new york city so we want to capture this sort of local independence here and help sort of meet the existing demand from there we'll probably grow regionally so within the northeast and and sort of expand and fold out we'd love to be you know as far as california by the end of the year especially cause we have a lot of demand out there that that we haven't been able to meet yet but in the short term future just again kind of continuing to roll out in new york city yeah that's great that's awesome we have last last question for you and you've been in the space now for a bit you're probably like tracking what's happening any just like specific brands or trends in general in the cpg space that have just just kind of piqued your interest or things you've been just kind of tracking closely just for fun cause they they feel exciting or interesting that's a great that's a great question or maybe just brands that you admire or think are cool too if nothing jumps out that's fine delete this too yeah no no no um so something that i'll i'll kind of make it more more specific something that kiki and i think about is how does the brand image and brand identity evolve at scale cause there's something like very interesting and cool about like a small brand like right now we're a small brand it's very founder led we're like very scrappy but once we're like in stores nationally what does that brand identity look and feel like and how do we maintain authenticity i think the biggest thing that people lose as they scale is authenticity you start to create more distance between you and your customer yeah and i think there's a couple brands that we're looking at that we think are doing a really good job at that i'll call out one i think this is maybe one you get a lot but i think rosa actually does a really good job at that they're pretty much ubiquitous now but their brand identity and online presence still feels very intimate and small and genuine and authentic and so i think that we will consistently keep keep touch and try not to lose touch with our customers and our brand identity as we scale and i think there's a couple good blueprints that we're looking at to make sure that we stay on that path yeah i feel like fish wife is kind of a good example of that too to a certain extent too i'm not sure exactly yeah yeah so you know if you look at their instagram it's like total spectrum there's no like you look at instagram some of these big food corporations it's like very sterile it's not very engaging it doesn't feel very human um and i think we we like seeing that brands can be really big and ubiquitous and still maintain authenticity yeah i love that that's a great point yeah along this has been awesome what's the best place for people to fall along with you and all the stuff that's going on i know you guys are kind of building in public and then best place to fall along with the brand as well these days yeah so if you're in new york city go to sourmilk dot com slash stores and and find a store that's closest to you um we also partner with farm to people on deliveries you can get it delivered to your door in terms of kind of following and staying staying up to date we have a newsletter called gut check where we go really really deep on basically all the topics that you and i just talked about we share everything that we learn so anything from gut health to building a business to the name change like all of those things are shared there perfect i post a lot on linkedin feel free to connect with me just my name and then my co founder kiki posts a lot of really awesome video content online so tiktok and instagram at couch woman um and there's a lot of behind the scenes really fun stuff on on her account and then the sour milk is at get sour milk so yeah that's all the way for sure that's great awesome great awesome a lot has been great really appreciate the time i think that's thing that's the pop

‍