The Startup CPG Podcast

03:14 Jessi - Hi Amy, welcome to the show today. How are you doing?

03:18 Amy - Hi Jessi, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

03:20 Jessi -Yeah, so awesome to have you here. You and I got to connect, I think, a little over a year ago for an event, and I just remember being super inspired by you before that event, getting to meet, and then now to get to have you on the show feels so fun, and Soom has come out with more products since then, and so it's just very fun to have you here and also to celebrate building your company over the last 10 years, so that's amazing. So to get us started, maybe tell us just a little bit about yourself, a little bit about Soom, and then we'll just start digging in.

03:52 Amy - Sure, thanks again for having me. I'm Amy Zitelman. I'm co-founder and CEO of Soom Foods. We sell tahini and tahini products, like our new snack bites. Our main product though is just tahini. I mean, I joke I've been talking about tahini for 10 years. For people that are not familiar, tahini is an ingredient made from 100% roasted and pressed sesame seeds, and we sell that to restaurants all across the country, online, in retailers, and also third-party retailers, online retailers, and we have just developed our newest product, a line of snack bites that are made with dates, tahini, and oats, so we're really excited to be expanding tahini into new categories.

04:36 Jessi - Amazing, that's awesome, and the products are all delicious, like the dark chocolate salted, I think sea salt tahini spread. Oh my gosh, I've tried that at Expos. That is delicious, and then the new bites I love. I think the chocolate cherry is probably my favorite bite. I can't stop eating those, but I love the other flavors as well. The carrot cake is so fun, and I'm like, how does this taste like carrot cake? It's delicious, but you feel so good after eating them. It's really clean, delicious energy that's the perfect pick-me-up in the afternoon, so I'm a big fan of the products, and I'm excited to see other new products you develop, because they've all been so good.

05:17 Amy - Thank you so much. Yeah, I mean, the thing about tahini that really inspires us is how simple it is. Our mom always wanted us to make a tagline, so simple, so soon. She was in marketing back in the 80s. She's one of our entrepreneurial inspirations, but tahini is amazing. It really showed us, although we knew, but it really validated for us how much you can do with real simple ingredients. The versatility of tahini, of course, most people know it as an ingredient to make hummus, and that is what most people use it for. Not just use it for, it's really how most people are introduced to tahini, since still a lot of people don't know what it is, but tahini is delicious in sweet dishes as well. The combination, very simple combination of date tahini and some powdered oats is what inspired us early on. We would make those as snacks. It was actually one of our first recipe cards, was an energy date ball made with tahini. When we started really looking at our opportunities for product innovation, we saw some space in the snacking category where real ingredients that are made better with tahini could have an opportunity to get some distribution.

06:28 Jessi - Yeah. I love the recipe cards in your boxes. My last package had the card about making a dressing, like a salad dressing. I was like, oh, this is great. This is a great recipe. I probably wouldn't have thought of this on my own. Just teaching the consumers how to use such a versatile product. That's so cool. From our interactions in the past, you always seem very level-headed and calm. We've talked about mental health, taking care of yourself. You've been working on Soom for over 10 years. That's a long time. You've been growing your family at the same time. I think for today's conversation, I wanted to really talk about what that has looked like to grow a business over a longer term. A lot of times in the startup world, people are trying to build a company and exit in a couple of years. CPG is often a longer time horizon than that. How do you set yourself up in a fast-paced environment? I'm curious to start us off. If you take us back to starting Soom, what was your mindset going into it? Did you plan for this to eventually become full-time? Did you plan for this to be the business you were building as you were growing a family? What did it look like as you were getting started? Was there anything you did at the beginning that helped you establish a mindset that has helped you stay in the game for 10 years, basically?

07:51 Amy - That's such a good question. I think I have a unique approach to this because I started Soom right out of college. I didn't plan any of those things that you just asked about. I didn't know how long we would build it for. I didn't know what it would be like once I started having children. It really felt like a continuation of a college project. I studied interpersonal communication in school. I remember writing some of my first blog posts for Soom foods. I can't find them anymore because they were on an old website that, of course, I didn't save anything because I'm not very organized. I remember writing about some of the principles that I learned in my communication classes at University of Delaware and applying them to Soom, like Cialdini's Six Principles of Persuasion and seeing how can I apply these things that have been proven time and time again to what I'm building. It really did just feel like a college project. I think it got real once my oldest sister had her first child, actually both my older sisters who I started Soom with and have run it with had children around the same time. That's one of the benefits of being the younger sister is you get to see the older ones do things first typically, not always, but typically. You get to learn off of them what might be easier or why that was so hard. You just take little snippets of learning as you go. Seeing my sisters handle their change into becoming mothers really helped prepare me. In fact, I didn't have a child until two or three years after they did. The company was also five years old once I had my first kid, and Soom was in no stage for me to take a maternity leave. Not that I took much of one the first time anyway, or the second or the third, but it was nice to have a five-year-old business as opposed to a one-year-old business in our back pocket when we were making these plans to start growing our family. Now though that we each have three children, the tides have turned a lot. It's a little bit more than I ever could have imagined in terms of how challenging it can be and the importance of that balance and mental health and keeping all of that in perspective. But I do appreciate all the years that I had in growing Soom and making mistakes and learning and big accomplishments before I started having kids.

10:08 Jessi - That makes sense. How did you split up responsibilities with your sisters, especially in the early days? How did you decide who … Did you each have different focus areas? I'm always curious about the super early days of who's doing what. Also, I love that you have co-founders as well because then you're not totally alone in the endeavor. So I'm curious what that experience was like as well, being able to lean on people that you knew really well.

10:32 Amy - Being able to lean on people has been instrumental in keeping our sanity through the roller coaster of a startup. I mean, during some of our hardest times, for instance, around Thanksgiving of 2018, we had to participate in a recall. It was a very challenging six months, really almost 12 months after that. I remember there were days when my oldest sister, Shelby, would call me and say, how can we keep going? This is so hard. I would encourage her. Then there were days when I would call Shelby saying, I can't call one more customer and talk to them about this. She would remind me to stick to our values and we can get through it. So having that support system has been really important and really helpful. The way that our roles and responsibilities fell out in the early days was very organic. It was really based off of what we were interested in and what we were good at. Our father was a business owner. He taught a little bit of entrepreneurship at community colleges when we were growing up. He even taught a small business course at our high school when we were younger. We learned from him that if we can find what we're good at and what we like to do and apply ourselves in that way in business, then your days are a lot easier. Luckily, my sisters and I, we may look alike. People even think we're triplets, but we have very different interests and skill sets. Shelby studied business and so she was really responsible for the strategy in growing our operations and handling our finances. Things that I knew nothing about finance is still a big challenge for me. Jackie had her relationships in Israel and in Ethiopia at this point and could apply her master's in environmental science and what she studied undergraduate in Israel to use that to benefit Soom. Then I studied interpersonal communication and I was able to apply those behavioral strategies and communication strategies into actually growing Soom feet on the street. While I put in a lot more hours and physical work into growing Soom, I was the one making the sales and making the deliveries for the first 18 months because my sisters had quote-unquote real jobs and they didn't join Soom full-time until we realized that there were some legs under us. Being able to acknowledge what you're good at, what you're not good at, and having those co-founders to rely on to fill in the gaps was definitely important for Soom in the early days and still today. That's our entire hiring strategy is finding what we're all good at and what we like to do, what we're bad at and what we don't like to do, and trying to find the right people at the right time to make sure that everybody's in their good zone.

13:11 Jessi - Right, yeah. I usually start off with this but I'm also curious, since we're looking backwards some also for where you are today, I believe you've had some recent national launches which we'll dig into. Tell us a little bit about how many stores is Soom in now, like your primary channels, and then how many total employees there are right now?

13:36 Amy - So Soom has a unique approach to our business because we have a very omnichannel approach. Over 50% or about 50% of our revenue comes from food service. So it comes from selling our tahini primarily in bulk, 40 pound buckets, to restaurants, small manufacturers, fast casual companies across the country. We also repack those buckets into one ounce squeeze packs for meal kits and then we sell online on Amazon, on our website, third-party e-commerce like Thrive and Misfit Market and Imperfect Food, and in stores exactly as you said. We're now in 1,600 doors which for a company that's 10 years old might not seem like so many but in 2021 we were only in 500. So our push into retail has really been strategic since COVID and since that really accelerated us to shift into focusing into those consumer channels or seeing the opportunity present itself as the right time to invest into those consumer channels. And so with that shift into consumer channels, we grew from a company of about five in 2020 to now 12. So it's a really great team that we have. Most of us are based here in Philadelphia. We do our fulfillment out of our warehouse here in Philadelphia and have a great warehouse team, a strong ops team. And we've got one employee in Toronto, one employee in New York City. It's been really exciting to grow the company and also veer away from Philly and fill in with great people from all over the place.

15:12 Jessi - Yeah, that's so cool. And for the food service channel, because we've been talking about that more on the show and more in the Startup CPG community, which kind of area of food service did you start in first? Was it restaurants or like there are so many subsets within food service? Where did you get started within food service specifically?

15:32 Amy - Yeah, you're so right. We got started in restaurant and that was because part of our market research was connecting with restaurants. We're lucky here in Philadelphia to have an amazing restaurant called Zahav. It's an Israeli restaurant owned by Mike Solomonov and Steve Cook. They've since expanded into an entire Middle Eastern, almost empire here in Philadelphia with hummus restaurants and falafel restaurants, a very famous tahini shake that uses Soom. And when we met with Mike and Steve and asked them the same questions that quite frankly, we were asking to grocery store owners or clerks and home cooks, which was what tahini are you using? And their answer was the same, which was I can't name the brand and it's not very good. I'd love to have something better. Well, the rest, the grocery store clerks weren't even saying that. They were more like, what's even tahini? And so they were one of the first restaurants to validate our idea to bring over good tahini. And they were also truly one of our first, if not the first customer. And selling to them made us realize the importance or the value of restaurants because they not only buy more tahini, they're buying 40 pounds a week. They're buying it more often. We knew that it was taking consumers over a year to not even finish an 11 ounce jar or 16 ounce jar. And so seeing the volume and the revenue contribution that could come from restaurants really inspired us to focus our efforts into restaurants and be able to prove ourselves and build our brand credibility in that channel and luckily have it organically influence the consumer channel as well. So when did you launch the direct to consumer? Was that right away as well or later? We did. We had a very basic website on a store on our website early on. I remember a friend of mine, Scott, was the first one to place an order and you could write a note and he said, I want fire flames on it. And I literally drew some fire flames on a jar of Soom and shipped it to him in FedEx or whatever. And so yes, we launched all three channels, or I guess the three channels, restaurants, online and to grocery stores simultaneously. So that's what I was focused on early on. I would do sales trips and I would focus on natural markets and restaurants that I thought would be good fit for Soom. And I focused from DC to New York and really drove around or walked around or took the subway selling and not only selling, following up a few weeks later with the delivery myself straight out of the Prius that I had bought to start the company. And so we did test or really try all three channels. It was just that after a short period of time, we realized the value, the volume that was coming from restaurants and how much more fun, quite frankly, that was for me and how we weren't capitalized correctly for retail yet, that we decided to focus our efforts onto restaurants and really let the retail channel grow organically.

18:37 Jessi - Yeah, that makes sense. And for food service, did you distribute yourself in the early days? And then at what point did you have to start working with a distributor for restaurants? And did you have to learn about that all on your own? Were you familiar with anything from that, either from your family or just curious about getting that set up?

18:58 Amy - Our family does have a history of being in food business, not necessarily as cooks or anything like that. But our grandfather owned a restaurant in DC and our father grew up in the restaurant industry. My great grandfather owned a small food market in Baltimore. And so it's funny, because we've always been in the business of food, but we didn't know anything. I had no connections as it relates to food service distribution. And you're right, we did all of our own distribution for probably 18 months when we first got started. So either we'd ship it to the restaurant, or if I could deliver or create a small group of deliveries in one shot, then I would deliver as far as DC and New York City. And that's one of the reasons why we love being based in Philadelphia is because it's such a great location to focus on these mid-Atlantic markets and Northeast markets. But we did very old fashioned, I did very old fashioned sales techniques. I'd fill a rolly bag, a duffel bag up with jars of tahini, and I'd make a list of restaurants that I thought might be interested in using Soom. And I would knock on the door and ask to speak to the chef and typically hear a no from some hostess saying, of course, you can't talk to our chef. But we made a very conservative and patient effort to give out samples and have people try the product in order to validate and convince them to bring it onto their menus.

20:24 Jessi - That's so amazing. That's so cool. And that also makes me think you mentioned like the that retail didn't make sense to continue to grow early on just from a financial perspective. I wonder if you can talk a little bit more about your financial mindset over the past decade. I believe that Soom did its first fundraise maybe like last year or something. And maybe you can share more details on that, obviously. But it seems like you built it to sustain you all for longer without outside funds. And so you mentioned that food service was a strategic choice in there. But curious about other thoughts and how you've kind of grown for the long term and then what it looked like to raise money after all this time of running the business. Did that make it easier or harder? Yeah, curious about more insights there.

21:09 Amy - That's a great question. I think raising money is always hard, or at least it's definitely been hard for us. And I'm not sure whether we waited too long to raise, you know, when you're able to be held accountable to your actuals as opposed to an idea on paper and purely projections, then potential investors have a lot more questions and might ask not that this happened to us, why we didn't grow faster or how you know, or yada yada, why didn't this happen in that amount of time. And so I do question our timing about when it when we decided to go out and raise but I wouldn't change it for the world. You know, my sisters and I were fortunate enough to be able to fund Soom with family funds, a couple of friends here and there, but really just keep it internal. And with that, we were able to grow it as we wanted to grow. What happened was in 2015, we brought on somebody to run the company, we felt like we were young and inexperienced, just like your questions, Jesse, you know, how would we know how to talk to distributors, we've never done this before. And we ended up bringing on not exactly the right person, but he was very driven into CPG, especially a line of refrigerated tahini dips that we created together. And having had no experience there, we launched them into retail with quite a bit of success because they were delicious products. But we had no idea the cost really the time with sampling and demoing and money with replacing product that wasn't selling through and you know, having waste from it being refrigerated. And we nearly went under through the costs that we that we did not budget for. And we were able to separate from that individual and discontinue the line of dips and really refocus our efforts into food service in order to stabilize the business. But what we learned from that was that if you can do retail right, there is, I think, a system to getting it done in stores, you know, you need to be very well capitalized and be able to put the product on sale often and do demos and drive people to the stores to pick it up. And what we started figuring out was that the restaurants were contributing to our customer acquisition, that from the influence of the chefs that were working with STUM, food media like the New York Times and Bon Appetit and Saveur and all these amazing publications started talking about tahini and STUM being the first branded tahini and the tahini of choice of these chefs was the brand name that was mentioned. And so yes, some people were driven to our website, but what we decided to do since we were able to capture national distribution and food service far before, I mean, I'm talking about half a decade before we pushed into national distribution for retail was put our product available on Amazon. And so that was a great channel for us to be able to reach consumers where they were checking out and to be able to provide the media source with a click through that they might appreciate more than clicking through for a customer to purchase off of our website. So Amazon was able to fill in the void of national retail distribution for us for quite a long time. And then as it relates to that investment into the business, it was when we decided to push our retail distribution that we knew we needed not just more capital, but more strategic partners in order to accomplish the great feat of national distribution and velocity in stores and new stores and conventional and all the things that we want to accomplish with retail. And so when COVID hit and our restaurant industry shut down for three months, but our Amazon stores, our Amazon sales shot through the roof and our sales in stores increased dramatically as well. That was the time that we decided to raise money. So this was in mid 2021. We started the fundraise officially in November of 2021 and invest in a rebrand and bring on the right team members in particular in marketing and sales in order to accomplish the feat of retail distribution. So that is what informed the retail, sorry, the fundraise. And with that, we've had a lot of success in growing our doors and positioning the brand for that type of consumer growth. Yeah. Wow. So Sprouts and Whole Foods, you've launched nationally with both, right? Is that right? We're launching nationally with Sprouts at the end of July or the first week of August. And we launched nationally with Whole Foods in May of 2022. So we've been a year with Whole Foods nationally now.

25:50 Jessi - Okay. That's amazing. So did you, had you pitched to those retailers before as you were kind of growing retail before it was a focus? Or is that something when you were like, all right, now it's time to go national and retail, then did you gear up to pitch? I'm curious at what it looked like, or did you slowly work up with those different chains?

26:08 Amy - That's a really great question. We actually launched in Whole Foods regionally back in 2016 or so, and we were able to get our feet wet in Whole Foods through the Whole Foods in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, had a program called the Hatch Program. I'm not sure if it happened anywhere else. Maybe you've heard about it from another founder, but they set up a stand where brands could sell directly to customers with their own point of sale software. We used Square or whatever it was. Wow. And check out directly there. So I used to stand in Whole Foods near the checkout counter, sampling our tahini and our chocolate spread where people needed to buy it from us. They couldn't even check out with it at the register. I mean, you can imagine that purchasing experience was just a rollercoaster of confusion. And through that, we were accepted to be able to distribute regionally. So that meant back in the golden days of Whole Foods, once you were approved in that region, you could go store to store and have your category buyer bring you in. And that's what we did. But we just focused on the stores around Philadelphia. So we had maybe eight or so stores in the Philadelphia region within a 45-minute drive. And we focused on those stores and really started pushing our velocity. We demoed in stores all the time. And with that, we got approval and interest to grow more within the region. And it was after that my middle sister and I, Jackie, were listed on the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2018 that they approved us for regional distribution across the entire Mid-Atlantic. So we were in about 60 stores for four years or so, really growing our velocity and proving the brand in those stores, which I think set us up for greater success when we decided to grow nationally. And the rebrand helped tremendously. I mean, I don't think we would have gotten Whole Foods nationally if we hadn't aligned the branding for the consumer channel. That was how we were able to accomplish a Whole Foods market. There's another retailer, though, in this region. It's actually, I grew up in Rockville, Maryland, and it's called Moms, my organic market. And they were one of the hardest retailers that we were able to get into. I remember pitching to them every six months, trying to get onto shelves. And they've also been really formative. I mean, for us to have grown our brand in this region, really from D.C. to New York, I think positioned us to have success once we went nationally. We would do demos in stores. We would pop up at vegan festivals from New York City to Baltimore to D.C. You know, we really spent a lot of time, and this was before I had children, back to our beginning questions, investing in this region and proving the brand here before we decided to push larger.

30:00 Jessi - And the rebrand process I'm interested in as well because I'm curious what that process was like and did you hire an agency to help you with the process? And I'm wondering how you, if you used the data and info you had from the restaurant world and the food service world and like what, you know, the reviews you'd gotten from the press and those pieces, like if that helped inform the rebrand and what that process looked like because it sounds like it was really effective and the branding is wonderful. And so I'm wondering what went behind that.

30:45 Amy - Yeah, that's a great question. We put out an RFP. Well, our previous head of marketing put out an RFP and we talked with a couple of agencies. We ended up choosing Pulp and Wire who was really instrumental in guiding us here and exactly right. I mean, being so close to our customers for so long allowed us to truly understand what was resonating with them from the chefs that we had been distributing to for eight years to the customers that had been buying us in the region for a while. I mean, we don't have a lot of people that buy on soonfoods.com, but we are very close with the people that buy on soonfoods.com and exactly like you suggested, their feedback really informed how to best position the branding to represent our product. What we felt going into the rebrand was that our look did not represent the quality of our product and it didn't need to for a long time with our focus in food service. Restaurants don't care what your bucket looks like. A manufacturer doesn't care what your bucket looks like. So it never made sense for us to make that large investment into the brand since we were so focused on the quality of our product and on consumer education and we were able to do that without the new look. But once we wanted to be discovered on shelf without that close connection to our customers or perhaps without them being driven there from a New York Times article or Bon Appetit, we knew that the look had to speak to people. And so we used exactly like you probably know from other brands, which is what is the feedback from your current customers and especially your evangelical early adopters that most resonated with them. And so that's what informed for us to put a term like recipe ready on the front because people want to know that the tahini is already mixed or a quick mix consistency. People love that our tahini is able to re-blend if the oil gets separated after sitting and being able to have a product look as good as it tastes was a really great feeling that maybe we could have done it a little bit earlier. But like I've learned over 10 years, everything when you're a patient happens at the right time. And when you let it happen at the right time, it's a lot easier than trying to force it faster than it needs to be done.

33:03 Jessi - And you mentioned that the pace of what you did in the business was different before you had kids and since having kids. I wonder if you can also talk a little bit about you and your sister's experience too of deciding what you prepped within the business too. You also mentioned that you didn't take a super long maternity leave, but I'm curious how you prepped for that as a family. Because I know we have other listeners who are thinking about family planning within startup life. And so I'm wondering for you, what you prepped within the business? Was there anything that you've learned over time with three kids that you're like, okay, now I kind of know, on two and three of like, this helps for prepping and getting ready for needing to take some family time or setting the business up. I'm curious about what you've learned over the process. Anything you might share that you think other listeners that are planning families and startup life might be able to resonate with?

33:55 Amy - Yeah, I really appreciate that. I mean, the company can't grow if the founders are doing everything, at least to a certain point. And especially if you're doing things that you're not great at, then the company is being hamstrung by that lack of skill that somebody else could accomplish better than yourself. And so we started recognizing that early on. And once we had people in very important seats, like somebody helping us with our operations, taking in orders and helping in the warehouse to pack them up and even deliver them sometimes or hand off the distributor order, which were things that I was doing all myself, that is when I realized that the company was stable enough for me to take time. And a company always needs to be stable enough to take time because especially with being three sisters as founders, we were actually recently reflecting on this. It's not just that when one person needs to take off, God forbid, what if all three of us needed to take off for a family emergency? And we've had things come up in the family that have distracted all three of us at the same time. And making sure that the team is equipped to handle the company when and if you're gone was really important. And so those maternity leaves were the best way for us to realize that we could let go of the ropes a little bit. And it was really helpful. It was actually when my oldest sister, Shelby, had her third child, this was back in 2019, that she asked me to step in as CEO. She was CEO for several years before that, because she needed the time to figure out what life was going to be like for her as a family of five. And that's when we transitioned that role. So we've always been, having two parents that are entrepreneurs, I think gave us the boundaries that we learned from, which is that we brought work home. My sisters and I talk about Soom almost every time we talk, but we also know when to say, can we not talk about Soom right now? Especially to our parents, for instance, if they have lots of questions or family friends, we just sometimes lay that out and say, now's not the time to talk about business and we don't want to talk about it. But having kids, I guess my advice to anybody out there is there's never a good time. So just do it. Just like business, once you're in it, the only way out is through. So just put one foot in front of the neck and change that diaper or wipe that fit up and answer that email and make that call because otherwise nothing will get done. I think that was one of the best revelations I made in becoming a mom was that if, and my husband's a great partner, but like if I wasn't going to do it, nobody was going to do it. And it's the same thing in business, right? It's our babies, my business, Soom was my first baby. I'm lucky that it's 10 years old now at this point to lead my, and a little bit easier to manage than my younger real children. But I would say that having kids puts a lot into perspective and it's easy to feel overwhelmed and that everything happening at Soom is, or your business is the most important thing in the world. And once you have a child, I think you can learn that there are other very important things in the world. And I hope that people find that before they have kids or if they decide to not have kids or if they can't have kids, these businesses should not define us and should not be everything that we place our value in because there's a lot of factors that could disrupt that. And it's a dangerous path to go down.

37:25 Jessi - Yeah. Oh, I love all of that. Is there any moments that stand out to you or any stories of when you felt like maybe, I don't love the word balance, but it's the word that's coming to mind, I guess, of like where you felt like something was off of like, okay, I need to reprioritize or like, I'm going to have to make some adjustments. Are there any moments that stand out to you where you're like, okay, something's not working and you decided to make a change in how you were showing up in particular for the business?

37:49 Amy - Yeah. Wow. What a thoughtful question. There was a time after my third child. So my third came very unexpectedly just 15 months after my second, which means that I found that I was pregnant, what, like six months. I felt like I was just coming back into the real world and just becoming more of myself and more involved with the business. And then I got slapped with another baby and pregnancy. And when I came back from that third maternity leave, I actually did take a little bit more time. I was in and out, but I really kind of stepped away for the business for almost 12 weeks with the third baby. And when I came back, I realized that I actually had, I think made a mistake and stepped too far away from the business, not to try to scare anybody from that, but I realized that I wasn't accountable to my team the way that they needed me to be. And everybody was very understanding and they definitely, you know, did not hold any, they would have never suggested that either. But I found that there were some dynamics in the team that weren't right. There were maybe some teammates that weren't in the right seat or not the right people. And it was after coming out of that fog and kind of letting the company run a little bit more autonomously that I felt compelled to take back the reins a little bit. And I shifted people's expectations about their roles and responsibilities. We even had to let some people go or restructure in certain ways. And that was a really interesting learning experience for me, because I realized that everybody needs different management. But when you're not showing up as the manager, there are small seams that can kind of emerge within an organization, especially a small organization. And so I don't regret anything. I would still take the time and nothing is catastrophic. You know, we can always overcome mistakes or bumps in the road. But I did realize that I think in the fog of two back to back pregnancies that I kind of lost my way as the manager or really the head of the company in setting our expectations and our strategy. So that was an interesting learning experience for sure.

39:53 Jessi - Yeah, no, thank you for sharing about that. I really appreciate it. And I think that leads into kind of hiring and setting up your team. And it sounds like the team has grown a lot in just the last few years. And I'm curious about how you've thought about hiring if you could maybe share it sounds like some of your early hires were like operations and fulfillment, but you could you maybe kind of share the like structure of how you hire people like in what or and I know this depends on every, you know, business on what's right for a particular business, but I'm curious for your journey, what order you hire different roles. And then I believe I think you use like the the entrepreneurial operating system to help set up like accountability charts. And I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about that. I know that is probably a big topic, but I'm curious what you can share there about how to set up and scale your team.

40:43 Amy - Yeah, sure. I'd love to. So going back to what we like and what we're good at, what we did early on was reflect about where our time was best spent, you know, as the founders of the company and for myself as the face of the company, something that became apparent early on was that it was not worth it for me to be in the warehouse packing boxes, packing orders for the website or prepping, you know, the orders to go into my car to make the deliveries, it was still worth it for me to make the deliveries because the face to face time with those customers was very valuable. And so I didn't mind being in the car for two hours. But you know, that build up time that I could have been doing other things like selling and developing those relationships or working on the marketing, that was what made us realize that it was time to hire somebody early on to help with our operations. And so that is what we that's the same structure that we keep doing. We look at our current team, and we see what roles are missing based off of everybody's strengths and weaknesses or what roles we need based off of what's missing within our organization. And the EOS accountability chart has really helped with that because what we do is we structure the organization for how we want it to look in six to 12 months. And so we review this on a quarter, really twice a year basis. And what we did is what EOS suggests that you do is divide the company into its departments. So for as Soom our structure looks like the head of the company and then somebody supporting the head of the company as an integrator. And then there's a sales department, a marketing department, the ops department and the finance department. There's a head of each department that builds our leadership team. So from the top and the integrator and each of the heads of the department, we come together on a weekly basis in order to go over all of the most pressing issues at the organization and ideate how we can solve them to move the company forward. We also establish our yearly and quarterly goals to keep the company moving. And then each department leader manages or really leads their peers throughout those departments. And so now we have just two people in our marketing department. We have two people in our sales department. Our ops department is the most stacked because we kept our fulfillment in-house. So we process all of our DTC orders, prepping for Amazon, FBA. All of our distributor orders come out of our warehouse here in Philadelphia, which is really rewarding because I love building out that department from our warehouse team to the ops and the logistics. And with our finance team, we have an outsourced CFO at the moment. And a junior financial analyst who also doubles as our administrative and HR person. And so we were able to design those seats before putting the people in them to understand what the company needed. And then based off of the people that we have, we made sure that they were right for the seat. And now we have a hiring plan of what seats need to be filled in the next 6 to 12 months to keep the company growing. So that structure was really helpful for us because it's not a hierarchy. It's not an org chart. It's an accountability chart. If you're sitting in that seat, if your name represents those roles and responsibilities, then you are accountable for those things within the organization. So if something goes wrong with logistics, we know who to ask what went wrong. And that person will likely have the answer because they're involved with everything in that department or in that role at the company. So it's been really helpful to not only make sure that everybody understands what they should be contributing to the company and holding them accountable and responsible to that, but also helps us plan who we want to bring into the company and approximately when based off of our more long-term strategy.

44:44 Jessi - That's so interesting. I'm really glad that you shared about that. And can you expand on the integrator role? So is that a separate role? What job title does that look like? And can you share a little bit about the specific work that that type of role is doing?

45:00 Amy - Yeah. So EOS structures it as a visionary, which is typically a CEO, but it's somebody that is more focused on culture and big relationships, big ideas. And our company, I sit in the visionary seat and that includes product development and market research. And the integrator is the person that keeps the visionary grounded, right? Assuming that other visionaries are like me, where we're not as attentive to details as a company might need, this person might hold the title of COO and asSoom it is chief growth officer, our CGO sits there. They're responsible for the P&L and overseeing cross-departmental projects. So if anything is happening across the entire organization, they are the person accountable at the top of it. Other people might be accountable for the packaging or the QR codes or the UPCs and the logistics, but at the end of the day, it all rolls up and answers to that person sitting in the integrator seat. When you have a small team though, people can sit in more than one seat. So our integrator is our chief growth officer and they also are the head of our sales department. And so we are able to plug in people. Somebody can sit in more than one seat, but two people cannot sit in the same seat. Nobody's accountable if not one person is accountable. You can learn more about EOS from their original book called Traction. It's by Gina Wickman. And you can implement it yourself. We work with an EOS implementer, which they have many of, and it's a really great structure for teams. You do need about 10 people or so in order for it to be cohesive and relevant, but we've really improved our organizational structure and execution since implementing it.

46:55 Jessi - Yeah, that's great. I've heard other founders have gotten a lot of value and organizations have gotten a lot of value out of that structure, but hadn't had a chance to kind of dig into a specific example. So I really appreciate you sharing about that. I'm also curious how you prepped the team with the national launches that you have right now. And last year, especially in retail, there are just a lot. There's so many different pieces. There's a lot of stress. And then just getting it to the shelves is the first step. Now you're trying to sell it through in all these different stores and the pressure can just be immense. And I'm wondering if there's anything that you've done or that the team has done to help make sure that everyone makes it for the long term through the launch, that you have everything set up so that it's not just like get at launch and then everyone's so exhausted that you can't support the launch. I'm curious how you've thought about it. If there's anything intentionally did to make sure that everyone had what they needed to continue through and support a big launch.

47:51 Amy - Yeah, I think we were not lucky, but our launch was different because Soom was eight years old or nine years old when we finally launched into our first national retail account. And so we had customers in almost everywhere where they could have started buying it in stores from Amazon or from our website. And over the years in food media. And that really was the culmination of my belief that when things happen at the right time, they happen a lot easier. And so of course, you can make your little pushes or requests to grow into a retailer before they might say yes. But hopefully by the time they say yes, not because you're forcing yourself onto the shelf, but because you've been able to build up a little bit of demand before reaching the shelf. Because you're right, Jesse, the pressure of launching into a store and not knowing whether you're going to be able to be there in a year is really overwhelming. And I would say that this is our first time launching a product with that type of potential pressure with our new snack bites, because this is a product that is brand new to us. We've launched it softly on our website over the last six months. We just rebranded it also, we launched those without proper branding, just to get the customer feedback. We just took those back to our branding partner, Pulp and Wire to get them ready for a proper retail launch. You can check out the new packaging around Expo East this year, which we're really excited about. But I do believe in taking your time and going with opportunities that have as little friction as possible. Because when that happens, the stress is a lot less, you know, for Expo to be an established brand and have a baseline velocity that was more than what the category buyer wanted alleviated that stress for us that other companies can fall to. And so we've had now quite a few months in preparing for our retail launch of the new snack bite. And it's been really exciting to apply all the strategies that we do day in and day out to a new product in a new category and to see how it goes. But we don't have the full amount of pressure because the company does not live or die on these snack bites, right? We have a very strong foundation not only just in tahini, but in our food service channels. And so if God forbid, every grocery store got taken away from us tomorrow, we would still have nearly 60% of our revenue coming from Amazon and food service. And so having that omni-channel approach alleviates some of that pressure because the company won't live or die on one product launch or one retail launch, or just one product anymore in one channel. We have diversified our revenue in order to support anything that could come our way. And so I think having that in our back pocket alleviates the stress that could come with these types of launches. That's very helpful perspective. But I would say if you don't have that type of omni-channel support yet, just giving yourself more time than you realize is the best way to prepare for a launch like this, because it takes months to figure out what kind of couponing strategy you want to do and talking with the clearinghouses I'm learning and preparing your social media strategy or your SMS strategy and your email strategy and what's going to announce when. But having that all prepared beforehand makes the timing when it is launched less stressful because all the work was done over you know several months before you really hit go. So doing as much as you can beforehand helps you be able to put out the fires once it's really launched.

51:32 Jessi - Is there any other tips that you have or sometimes I ask like questions that you ask yourself when faced with a hard decision or anything that helps you just take care of yourself or feel supported or make sure that you're feeling mentally well, like your family's well, like anything that any tips that you have or just things that you come back to that help you prioritize and focus on the right things. Because I think I remember from a conversation with you before where you said that you're generally a pretty chill person. You don't get super stressed out. And I was like, man, I need to like just absorb that from Amy. So I'm you know, tell us your your chill your tips for being chill and you know how you center yourself and stay focused.

52:16 Amy - I remember on our mental health panel that I shared a yoga video that I loved. I came back to it a ton during COVID. Unfortunately, I don't know why it was taken down. I don't know if like something happened. It's not up anymore, which pains me because of course, I never went down to like really write down the quotes that super resonated with me. But one of them was the yoga instructor was telling you that in a pose, it doesn't matter how far along in the pose the person next to you is that you are getting as much benefit out of the pose at your furthest push of it than somebody that is in its full expression. And that has really resonated with me because when you're doing the best that you can or what's right for you, it doesn't matter how other people are accomplishing their goals. You are pushing yourself and making yourself stronger, healthier, better, whatever it is. And in as far of the expression as you're able to get to, that's as far as you need to be. And so I always find comfort in that saying, what is the worst that can happen? You know, if this happens, or if this does not happen, what is the worst that can happen? And when you go down and really drill yourself into the final, you know, ideas of what could happen, you probably hopefully find that it's not all that bad. You know, you might still you still have your health, hopefully, you still have your family and your loved ones, and you still have a job to give to the people that you're working with, like, you know, what could really go wrong, if you choose to make that decision. And so I think that that is something that I really keep coming back to. And I might have said this phrase earlier in the episode, but when I had my third child, and I was really and like I said, I don't freak out a lot, but I was like really freaking out felt very overwhelmed. A friend of mine said, the only way out is through, you know, you can't really wish yourself to be further along than you are. And you can't make anything happen that's not meant to happen. And so by just putting one foot in front of the next, of course, trying to create the best most cohesive strategy that you can, but once you're in it, just keep going and try to do the best you know, neck thing. So I think that is a mantra that I keep coming back to almost daily is the only way out is through.

54:36 Jessi - I love that. That's that's amazing. Was there anything else that you wanted to share before we share some links on where to find Soom and get some Soom in your life? If folks haven't already, I just want to make sure there was a I gave you a chance to share anything else that you didn't feel like you're able to get to share today.

54:52 Amy - No, I just wanted to express how appreciative I am to you and the startup CPG community, because even after 10 years, but only being two years into the CPG space of Soom, I've learned so much and I'm so appreciative of the resources that you share. And there's so many others in this amazing network on LinkedIn on slack, all over the place. And I feel so fortunate to be able to be building Soom amongst people of your caliber and other brands that are so willing to share their experiences and makes this a lot less lonely and a lot more productive, I think where we can all succeed in what we're setting out to do. So thank you.

55:31 Jessi - Amazing. That's a lovely note to end on. If you haven't tried Soom, make sure to go to soomfoods.com. So that's soomfoods.com. You can follow Soom Foods on Instagram, same handle, and then make sure to try the tahini spreads and then the or the teeny products and then the the bites. Is there anything else anywhere else that we should direct people to links I can conclude or anything else later this year people should look out for?

56:04 Amy - Yeah, we'd love for everybody to head into Whole Foods in August and buy our exclusive 11 ounce organic tahini. So it's the first of the organic sizing hitting Sprouts shelves at the end of July, early August, and we'd love the support to make that a successful launch. So thanks, everybody.

56:18 Jessi - Amazing. Awesome. And then I'll include a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. And yeah, just hope that people can try the products and head to their local stores and support the brand. So thank you so much for being here, Amy and sharing with us. This has been really amazing and just appreciate you taking the time for us to learn from your journey and you know, excited for the next 10 years of Soom.

56:46 Amy - Me too. Thank you so much, Jessi.

56:50 Jessi -Thank you for listening in today. I'm so honored you joined me for this conversation. And I love hearing from you all with feedback, suggestions, or if you just want to say hi at podcast at startup cpg.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn. If you liked this episode, we'd love for you to share it with a friend or colleague, subscribe so you don't miss future episodes, and maybe even leave us a five star review on Apple podcasts. If you aren't yet in our slack community of founders and experts, we'd love to see you there. You can get the free invite at startupcpg.com and find all our other awesome resources there like webinars, databases, the blog, the magazine, and virtual and in person events. And if you found yourself rocking out to our intro and outro music, which I do every single time, make sure to check out the Super Fantastics on Spotify. It's the band of our Startup CPG Founder, Daniel Scharff. I'm Jessi Freitag, your host and producer. And on behalf of the whole team at Startup CPG, thank you for being here and see you next week.