The Startup CPG Podcast

00:36
Daniel Scharff
Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. I am super excited to bring you a bonus episode here tied to the launch of an incredible resource that we are releasing for early brands. It's called the startup CPG retail sales tracker. I recently invited Aaron Barnholt of cultivate CPG and Eli bank of absurd stacks to talk about it. Cultivate CPG was kind enough to sponsor the creation of this resource and also provide a lot of insider tips for each retailer in it to help brands using it. Eli from absurd Snacks helped us beta test the resource and has a lot of ideas for how brands can use it effectively. This is the most massive tool we've ever released into the community. I am so pumped for you all to learn more about it. Enjoy. All right, welcome to the startup CPG podcast.

01:20
Daniel Scharff
I am your host, Daniel Scharff. I am really excited that we're releasing a bonus episode today talking about the release of our upcoming database, the startup CPG retail sales tracker, sponsored by Cultivate CPG. This tool is the most incredible resource that we have ever created. I really think it's the best thing we've ever given to early brand. When you're an early founder, you don't know who the buyers are out there. You don't even know who the retailers are you should be targeting, and it can be really hard to get started. So rather than everybody trying to build their list bottoms up. We created the ultimate master list of retailers for emerging brands to contact, and we've done a lot of work filling out the details. You're going to need even websites where you can submit to them directly if you don't have a broker.

02:04
Daniel Scharff
I'm joined today by our sponsor for the retail sales tracker, cultivate CPG president Aaron Barnholt, who has made this database possible and also included a ton of insider notes inside of the database for specific accounts to help you understand them, the ins and outs, and reach out to them. And I'm also joined today by Eli Bank, who is the co founder and coo of Absurd Snacks, one of our favorite brands from the community. So welcome, guys. I know that was a mouthful, but please say hello and just tell us a little bit about each of your companies. Aaron, if you could go first.

02:36
Aaron Barnholt
Sure. Thanks for having me, Daniel. It's good to be back on the podcast. Yeah, I'm the co founder of cultivate CPG. Started it. Good friend and grocery professional Tommy Williams. And yeah, we work with early stage startup food and Bev brands, and we help them scale nationally. And, yeah, do it as fast as possible.

02:59
Daniel Scharff
All right. And for anyone who hasn't heard that podcast, it is a banger. Definitely check it out. Me and Aaron really got into it on retail accounts. Honestly, one of my favorite ones, I was like, all right, well, you know, all these accounts, let's just go through and talk about them and just throw out some tips for the early brands. So even if you don't have a broker, great way to get some free tips from Aaron, who really knows these accounts. So, a few episodes back, but definitely check it out. Eli, tell us what you.

03:22
Eli Bank
Hey, what's going on? Daniel? Aaron, it's so great to be here. Want to thank you for including us and having us on the podcast today. We're super excited about what you're building, and of course, enthusiastic as always, about startup CPG, our favorite community in the space. So excited and just glad to be a part of it. We feel very lucky. For those of you who may not have heard of absurd snacks before, we elevate everyday snacking by creating inclusive, nutrient rich, and most importantly, absolutely delicious snacks that are free from the top nine allergens. We're based here in Richmond, Virginia, and our flagship line is a line of trail mixes that have crunchy roasted chickpeas, fava beans, granola clusters, and dried fruit. Retail shelves are on the mid Atlantic online, and some food service counts as well.

04:04
Daniel Scharff
All right. And Eli, I really appreciate the nice words that you have for startup CPG. That's exactly what we go for, is being really useful to you. Any things that you found particularly useful about the community or events or slack or some of the opportunities we put out there? Anything in particular that you found really valuable?

04:21
Eli Bank
I mean, from day one, Grace and I started absurd snacks out of college. It was started a college project, and now full time job. And being first time founders in the CPG space, you may not realize just how much there is to learn. And of course, the only way to learn is by doing. But being surrounded with other founders, mentors, experienced professionals who've been through it before time and time again, have seen all these potential pitfalls. We're able to really just leverage them as a community, as friends to bounce ideas off of. And we've been able to learn so much, whether it's podcasts like these or resources online like the retail sales tracker, or even going to startup meetups in different cities across the country at expo events and conferences.

05:00
Eli Bank
It's really just been a place where we've been able to grow as individuals, as partners, as business, and most importantly, as a community.

05:07
Daniel Scharff
All right, perfect. Thank you. So you're really taking advantage of a lot of this stuff. How? Yeah, across slack and all of the, we do meetups around the country, so anybody who doesn't know about all that stuff should sign up@startupcpg.com. All right, so let's just jump into it. So I thought this is obviously a tool that is very visual to use, and we are on a podcast which is mainly audio, although we do now publish on YouTube. But I thought maybe what I could do first is actually just kind of describe the tool for Everybody, which will be released soon on our startup CPG email list, as well as through our slack, that everybody should join. So basically, if you were looking at the tool, what you would see is a pretty massive database.

05:45
Daniel Scharff
So we have gone out and listed every single retailer out there that we think is relevant for early brands. These are chain, so it's not going to be like the kind of one store independence out there, but pretty much any chain that we could think of. And I think we have about 220 listed right now. And we'll keep adding to that over time. And what it's going to tell you is what channel is this retailer in? If it's a retailer with multiple banners, it'll list those out. It's going to tell you what city are they based in? Which I think can be really helpful because it'll then map it to, you'll enter the state as well. That'll map it to regions and divisions.

06:21
Daniel Scharff
If you have a couple of people on your team that can help you actually figure out whose account it is, or if you're going to a city and you just want to know what retailers are there that you should try to hit up with one of those, hey, I'm going to be in town. Could you meet up emails then? That should be perfect for that. Additionally, we have in there the number of stores, which can be really helpful when you're trying to prioritize your effort. Let's say you're going after bigger chains. You can sort that and just try to hit the bigger ones first, or maybe you want to do the opposite. We also list the website for every retailer, and then also, if we could find it, a link to submit directly to them.

06:55
Daniel Scharff
So a lot of these retailers have just kind of a website that says, if you're a new supplier and you want to get in touch with our buying team, submit here. And in some cases, it's extremely effective. And actually, the retailer prefers you to do it that way. So I think two examples are Whole Foods and Publix. Whole Foods, if you have a broker, what they're doing is submitting in the Whole Foods portal. The same is going to be true for Publix, and I've heard that directly from publix buyers. As they say, we actually prefer that to be where we get the submission. We don't really respond to people a lot. So for all of these retailers, if there was a website, we listed it out, then also we have mapped all of these retailers to individual distributors anywhere where it's possible.

07:34
Daniel Scharff
So do they work with Kehi or Unfi? And if so, which DC? In as many instances as possible, we filled that out also with the help of my friend Matt Merson. Thank you to him for helping me doing some of the mappings. And then we've also listed if they can anchor a distribution center. Really important, because that'll tell you like, hey, if I get a yes from them, can they open up that distribution center? As we know, Kehi and Unfi often require, let's say 30 or 40 individual stores before you go. Say you have enough volume to open up the distribution center unless you have angle. We also then have built in some kind of like, CRM capability into the tool.

08:08
Daniel Scharff
So we have columns for team owner, team priority, and you can use those to actually assign it to people on your team and basically run your sales meetings that way and understand who's working on what. We have columns where you can enter in the buyer name, email, distributor name. Really good stuff to keep track of, review date, reset, and then the stage. If you're using it like a CRM. Did I contact them? Keep yourself on track with that and you can customize it further. We also have really cool filters built in, so you can filter based on any of this information or sort. There's a multilevel sorting function. So if you want to sort first by region and then by number of stores or anything like that, it's all within the tool.

08:44
Daniel Scharff
And then lastly, something I'm super excited about is that we worked with cultivate CPG to actually leverage their expertise and put in notes, insider notes on as many of these accounts as possible. And they're just supposed to be kind of quick tips, sharing some of their experience working with a brand. The same kind of stuff where if you ask one of your friends, like, hey, is this a good account? Like the quick thing that they would tell you? It can be incredibly helpful because the universe of retailers out there is enormous. We've got the natural channel retailers in here, conventional, even the most relevant club and alternate and ecommerce retailers in there. And if you're an early founder starting out and you didn't come from a bigger company or big CPG, you probably don't know who most of these retailers are.

09:24
Daniel Scharff
And so I think even just having those kind of quick tips will get you pretty far, get you up to speed. So, Aaron, thank you again for making this whole thing possible. Can you tell me about. I know internally your team has some great tools, but for brands, largely nothing like this has ever existed. Can you tell me a little bit about what you think it means for brands and also how you think that they might end up using it?

09:47
Aaron Barnholt
Yeah, absolutely. It is a killer resource for any brand at any stage, frankly, but especially for the new to market, new to CPG. This is almost the holy Grail, if you will. There are 83,000 stores listed on this spreadsheet. Certainly most young brands are not going to be going after that many stores, but it puts it all up in one place, one stop shop for you to see, every chain account in every channel, who distributes to them, et cetera. It also gives resources, links to where you can submit or where you can find out more about the retailer. So, honestly, if I could go back 510 years, if I had this resource when I first got into CPG, I think this shortens the learning curve pretty quickly. Yeah. So it's a powerful tool compacted into one stop shop. So thank you.

10:41
Daniel Scharff
It's funny that you mentioned for brands of any stage, because at startup CPG, our focus is on early brands and whatever we can do to help them. But actually, thinking back, I mean, I've worked at bigger companies where I would remember the head of sales would hold meetings with his account team and he would just kind of say, all right, tell me about your accounts and the status of each. But it was definitely not organized at all in a way like this, where you could actually hold people accountable to all the accounts in their region and have a more formal process around it, which I am personally a big believer in sales process, I believe in tools to keep you on track and remind you, hey, I need to reach out to this person.

11:15
Daniel Scharff
It's been a couple of weeks and I also believe that I would say resourcefulness and persistence are two of the absolute most important traits for somebody doing sales in CPG. That's great to hear from you.

11:26
Aaron Barnholt
Customizable. Right. A brand can take it and do with it what they want. They can add in buyer contact information for their category. Each account they're going after, they can filter by channel.

11:38
Daniel Scharff
Right.

11:38
Aaron Barnholt
Maybe a beverage brand might want to be going after C store, whereas maybe a baking brand is not thinking about C store. They only want to focus on natural and maybe conventional in their region. So there's a lot of ways to customize this for each brand, which I think is pretty slick.

11:55
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, thank you. I think it's a good point. Maybe some brands are just focused on a regional strategy. And in that case, you probably do want those kind of onesie, twosy type independent accounts that maybe surround a particular DC. So it is not the list of every single account out there. But I think you and I talked about this on your podcast. A lot of brands now, let's say early brands would be focused on the natural channel. And so, you know, you do need a certain critical mass where you can then start getting your minimum orders up to get your coleman prices down and just start like, sales beget sales. So there are some retailers that will only look at you when you're a certain size. Right.

12:34
Daniel Scharff
So in that kind of an instance, I think you do need to know who all the retailers are out there, especially ones that might work with your existing distribution system.

12:42
Aaron Barnholt
Absolutely.

12:44
Daniel Scharff
Can you just talk a little bit about the tips that you Guys have put in here? Because I think that it's really hard to overstate how important that is for a brand just to know. And all the time in our startup, CPG Slack, we see, hey, does anyone have experience with this retailer and can tell me about it? And this isn't going to be a full detail on them, but usually they mainly just want to know, is this a good account? Or like, hey, any watch outs with this account? Maybe even before I spend a lot of time trying to chase them. Can you tell me a little bit more about what your team was able to share?

13:13
Aaron Barnholt
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we gave really, we think, an inside track on what's going on within these retailers walls. Right. So we give a how do they go to market approach or look, which means are they first to market? Do they want innovation? Are they last to market? Are they going to wait like a publix per se? Are they going to wait until you have really good rest to market data to say, yeah, this is something we're willing to take a bet on. And do they play it safe or do they go kind of central market approach where they want innovation, they want to be first to market. We also put insights on maybe what makes them tick, how to, I guess, speak to their retailer programs, et cetera. So is it a high low retailer? Is it an EDLP, EDLC retailer? Yeah.

14:03
Aaron Barnholt
So we just give good advice, tips on how we would approach it. Is it truly a year, one year, two type of account? Right. Like, is it very high slotting pay to play low velocity through the register account? Maybe that's a note we have in there that make founders rethink approaching some of the accounts. And that's not to say that year, three year, four year, whatever those accounts do become important, because they will. It just might be a, hey, let's hold off and let's prioritize each of these accounts.

14:38
Daniel Scharff
Okay. And so if you were talking to one of your brands that you work with and let's say they haven't started anything yet, or. No, actually, better yet, let's say Aaron now drops his brokerage and starts his own brand again. If you didn't have all the info that you have now, years of experience and knowledge, how would you use this?

14:53
Aaron Barnholt
Yeah, good question. Cultivate sales trackers don't have 83,000 stores. It is a more dumbed down list of accounts that we think are super crucial for building your brand in the earliest stages. So what I'm going to do is I will likely filter down to just natural and then just conventional as well. I'm not going after all of the conventional, but I will go after all natural chain accounts that anchor products, that open up kehi, that open up unfi. That is a definite. And then I'm going to cherry pick what I believe are super regional, high volume, conventional chain accounts across the country. So that's going to be Wegmans, that's going to be heb, that's going to be Meyer, that's going to be Rayleigh's. There's obviously more out there, but those are some honorable mentions at the top of the list for sure.

15:46
Aaron Barnholt
And that's where I'm going to focus. Right. I'm also going to use it for, if I open up, let's say chino for Arowan, I'm going to filter in the natural channel, or better yet, by Kehi Cheeto. DC what accounts pull from Cheeto. And then I'm going to go and I'm going to contact the retailer and or I'm going to contact the kehi rep and I'm going to add points of distribution to Cheetah. I want to be dropping off as many pallets as possible. I don't want to be sending half pallet orders once a month. That would really be the two things I do. Trim down to your natural. Some of the conventionals that I would cherry pick, and then I would also focus on building out the warehouses that you're in.

16:28
Daniel Scharff
I love it. And you obviously have years of experience working with as retailers and you know which of those accounts you would want to start with. But I think the cool thing about this tool is even if you're starting from scratch, you're a new founder to the industry because of the notes that your team has put into the tracker. It does give a lot of that insight and the clues about where you could go hunting first based on what your strategy is. But I love how you talk about that, about filtering first by channel and then thinking about whether maybe some of the higher retailer, like door count numbers or ones that you want to start with. So that makes a lot of sense to me.

17:00
Daniel Scharff
And Aaron, just before I move on to Eli, can you just remind everybody that is interested to learn more about cultivate, CPG and the brands that you work with, or just more tips on picking up retailers? What's the best way for people to stay in touch with you?

17:12
Aaron Barnholt
Yeah, so website cultivatescpg.com. You can email me at aaron@cultivatescpg.com. Or you can hit me with a text at 847-722-8215 bold.

17:25
Daniel Scharff
I love it. Just drop the number. All right, Eli and I will start prank texting you a little bit later. All right, Eli. Very excited to come to you. So, Eli, you're one of a few different people who were kind enough to beta test the tool. So as were figuring out the additional functionality and the kind of sorting tools that people would want as part of this tool, can you tell me a little bit about your experience of using it and how you're planning to use it?

17:50
Eli Bank
Yeah, absolutely. At first glance, I mean, to Aaron's point, it's very all inclusive. Right? We have so many different stores. They really span across the whole country, different categories, different sectors, but the tool really makes it easy to narrow that down to make it a lot more attainable. And so right from when you're looking at the tool right up top, having the ability to filter and thin the list down to exactly what you're looking for is super easy and accessible, which for any resource and any database, just makes it so much easier and so much more user friendly.

18:21
Daniel Scharff
So what do you think the process is like for an early brand? Like your absurd snacks is just starting out, or anybody's just starting out? What are they actually doing to try to start reaching out? They're figuring out who they need to reach out to and their outreach strategy.

18:34
Eli Bank
Yeah, well, as founders, it's our responsibility, it's our job to stay as close to our consumer as possible. And so for us, that means talking to people with allergies, people with loved ones with allergies, and seeing where they're finding new products, because we want to make our products more accessible for them. So by doing interviews, by getting feedback, by doing demos in our current existing locations, and being able to get that feedback from the people that we're trying to reach, we are able to better understand where we should be placing our products. And so we have those crown jewel accounts which we realized are natural grocers, like whole foods sprout. We strive to get on every shelf that we can. In addition to that, when we look around, sometimes we forget that CPG is not just food and beverage.

19:15
Eli Bank
It's also beauty and wellness and supplements. There are a ton of other products that are encapsulated here. So for other founders and other sectors, it's important for us to find our niche and then be able to dial it down and stay really focused on getting those accounts that will be our crown jewels.

19:30
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I think that's a really good comment, especially as you think about your strategy of who you would contact on this list is like, okay, we know who our consumer is. We've dialed that in by talking to them. And then we know then which accounts probably have a lot of those consumers. It always surprised me a little bit that buyers would actually just ask you, hey, who's the consumer for this? They really want to know. They are looking for your help, so they can just quickly understand what is this and who's actually going to buy it. I mean, that'll actually give them a lot of information. So it sounds like you guys are pretty ahead of the game on having a good understanding of that, which I'm sure has led to a lot of success for you guys.

20:05
Daniel Scharff
And I also love to hear the growth mindset. When you say, we want to get onto as many shelves as we can. It's not going to be true for everybody. There are many brands that may be capital constrained and are focused, rightly so, on profitability and maybe just growing smaller. But just me personally, I am so excited about sales and growth. I love to just get out there and the right accounts, just let it rip. But that's just how I roll. Sounds like a lot of fun. So, Eli, tell me again about, like, if you go back to the beginning, how did you guys actually start your retail sales process? Like, who was doing it? How did they go about it?

20:38
Eli Bank
Yeah, I guess going back to the way beginning, we started it as class project in school. So when we wanted to validate the idea and the product that were creating, we started off at local farmers markets. And that was our way to meet one one, face to face with our consumers or really learn who our consumer was. And so created this business on the basis of a mission to make it easier and more accessible for people with food allergies to have snacks and for their loved ones to have snacks that they could share with people with food allergies. And so by it starting at those local markets, and even just having some early adopters of local independent grocery stores that were willing to support us early on, were able to appear and just learn as went.

21:17
Eli Bank
And so those local early adopters were essential for us to get the name out there and just start that learning process. And then as we've continued to grow and go beyond the means of our community, our local community here in Richmond, a lot of that success has just come from persistence and from mentors that we've met through startup CPG and other resources where they've said a lot of similar things as to what are in the cultivate CPG notes, where each retailer has its own process, and it's our job to learn those processes and then be persistent and do what is favorable to those retail customers so that we can fit into not only showing where the white space is that our products will fit in, but also show why their consumers will love our products so much.

21:58
Eli Bank
And so that validation kind of starts at small scale, but once you're able to prove that velocity at small scale, then there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to do it bigger. So capital is a very real thing, and we've been managing it very closely and would urge every founder to do the same. But starting on that small scale, building our way up. We're two person, small but mighty team, but just keeping our feet on the ground and staying as close to the consumer, whether that be our retail customers or the end consumers who are purchasing our product. Just so essential. I love it.

22:25
Daniel Scharff
Okay, great. Thanks for sharing that. So, Eli, you were nice enough to kind of help us as were beta testing this. Let's call this v. One of this tool, and I hope we will keep improving it over time. What do you think are the kind of things that we should keep working on? What are additional things or improvement that you think we should look at over time to make it even better?

22:43
Eli Bank
Yeah. Well, the one thing that founders are always looking for are contacts. Who can we get in touch with? Because we all have had our experiences sending applications out into the abyss, whether that be on rangeme or into those customer portals that were talking about earlier. And sometimes it can kind of feel like a bottomless pit, but those one one conversations where you're actually able to talk face to the retailers or the representatives from those retailers can be so helpful.

23:08
Eli Bank
So whether that is the category manager, the person who would be purchasing that, or someone within that organization, so that you can learn how you can best position yourselves to partner with them in the long run, it puts founders in a really good spot for success moving forward to create that growth plan and then do everything we can to get our way there.

23:25
Daniel Scharff
Isn't it amazing how important it is just to figure out who the name of the buyer is and maybe what their email is? I can't tell you how many calls I had with founders in my, let's say, category, but not competitive, where we're just orchestrating. I mean, like, more pay it forward, like. All right. Hey, what contacts do you need here they are. Great. Don't mention my name. Obviously, you don't know where you got this email, and I benefited so much from it. There are so many accounts that I got because I finally knew who to contact and hopefully helped a lot of other people get distribution as well. That, I mean, you know, isn't that amazing?

23:58
Eli Bank
It's incredible. Grace, my co founder, Grace, who wishes she could be here with us today, she leads our sales efforts, and she is an absolute shark. She's amazing at building relationships, always people forward as we are at all things we do. And so building the relationships, not only with the buyers from the stores, but also from the people around them, just put you in a position where people are willing to help you out, extend an arm. And so places like startup, CPG, just make that possible.

24:21
Daniel Scharff
Not that the contact is the end of it. I mean, I always saw an email as one of the keys in an omni channel approach to try to become friends with that retailer. Like, try to connect with them on LinkedIn, try to see if I could attend a panel that they're on at expo in the very front row and just pay attention. They're like, whoa, they heard if they paying attention to me. So, Aaron, any other ways that you see people do well at building relationships with retailers beyond just kind of the cold email old school?

24:51
Aaron Barnholt
What we used to do is just call the front desk, say, hey, who buys soda? Who buys chip, whatever. Right? And typically, a lot of the retailers in general, they'll give you the contact for whoever buys that category. But I would say as you progress and get bigger, the questions to ask anyone at a retailer is, do you have a list of CMS in the category assignments? Right. And go from there? Yeah, I think, let's see here. What was your question again, Daniel?

25:19
Daniel Scharff
No, that's perfect. I actually love that tip about just doing something old school and picking up the phone and calling. That's been successful for me before. And almost like playing know you'd have a lot of retailers be like, don't you know you should be going through a broker? Like, oh, I'm sorry, I'm new to the industry. I just was going to call you and see if I could send samples. Do you sound nice on the phone? Probably that's going to work a lot of the time.

25:40
Aaron Barnholt
I think the other thing that you can do to build the relationships with the buyer are treat them how you want to be treated. Right? So it's good to be a squeaky wheel, know the boundary, right? They're all people on the other side of the desk, and they get a lot more emails than you and I get every day, without a doubt. So just treat them with respect, but try to set up short virtual calls, try to set up quick in person meetings. Yeah, hey, I'm in town. Do you want to meet up? Can I buy you a coffee, et cetera. Right. Bumping into them at trade shows and keeping the relationship going is a good place to start.

26:18
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I've seen some people share like, hey, here are the contacts for this one retailer where I've never heard of anybody getting an email back from any of them. Yeah, you do need a bunch of different approaches. Maybe if you get introduced by somebody over email or can run into them. Another approach I really like is when you're actually at the trade show, if a buyer comes by from a store and you know it's not the right buyer or you don't even know who the buyer is. I had 100% success just stopping and saying like, oh, hi, you're from Wegmans or whatever. Do you know, is your beverage or is your snack buyer here? They'll always stop to answer you and you say, oh, cool, what's their name?

26:55
Daniel Scharff
If I just could look out for them, and then a lot of times they'll say, oh, they're not here. Like, oh, could I have their email address then? 100% of the time I got it. I would never really ask for someone's card because I don't know, buyer just don't really want to give you their card or they don't have cards. But they never objected to me just asking for the right buyer's email address and writing it down on my phone quickly. So that's a tip that I would love for other people to make use of. So, yeah, I think Eli, just coming back to you and absurd snacks. Just before we wrap up, I want to make sure everybody has the chance to hear a little bit more about your guys'product specifically because it's just such a treat.

27:28
Daniel Scharff
So can you tell everyone, since this is a visual format and they can't actually see it? Like, take us through it? What does your packaging look like? What does it call out? Tell me more about what is it like to actually eat the product if you're a blind person, like most of the listeners effectively are, because they can't see us. Take us through the details and all of the taste nuggets.

27:48
Eli Bank
100% so absurd. Snack is a snack mix, but unlike your typical snack mix or trail mix, we don't use peanuts, tree nuts, any preservatives, any of that junk. It's high in protein, low in sugar. It's got crunchy roasted chickpeas, fava beans, granola clusters, and dried fruit. We take the chickpeas and fava beans. We roast them to perfection. So it almost emulates the experience of eating nuts without actually being nuts. So it's more inclusive of people with food allergies. The granola clusters pack a punch of flavor. They're loaded with seeds and oats, so they're nice and flavorful, nutrient rich. And then the dried fruit, we have two flavors, the maple cinnamon and the rosemary sea salt. Maple cinnamon's got dried cranberries that are infused with apple juice and the rosemary sea salt. The shelfy, award winning rosemary sea salt has raisins as well.

28:33
Eli Bank
We call them munchy crunchy trail mix because it's nice and crunchy. You can eat them on their own, but you could also throw the maple on yogurt. Some people will put it in milk and eat it as cereal. We'll throw them on a salad or on top of a soup as a crunchy shopping we put out a ton of recipe videos on our instagram and we're actually coming out with a cookbook later this year that's completely community curated. Some recipes do have absurd snacks in them, but it just shows the versatility of not only our products, but also how easy it can be to make eating more accessible for everyone. So yeah, you can find them on shelves at select Whole Foods locations around the mid Atlantic and other stores up and down the east coast.

29:10
Eli Bank
We sell on our website absurdsnacks.com, buy them on Amazon, and then we do some food service as well. So hospitals, universities, corporate offices we're looking to add a third flavor to the mix this year, so if you have any suggestions, definitely reach out and let us know what you'd love to see. And yeah, it's nice because it's like a trail mix or a snack mix where it has the variety of texture and size of the individual pieces in it are a little different and varied, but it's a unique product and it fits in really nicely in shelves. And best of all, it can be enjoyed by, hopefully everyone.

29:43
Daniel Scharff
And what's the background behind the name absurd snacks?

29:47
Eli Bank
Well, given that we started in college, it was originally called Spill the Beans. But due to trademark issues and our effort to be more inclusive of future product extensions, we didn't want to just box ourselves into beans, so we wanted something that was encapsulated our personality as excited, young, fueled up founders. Being college students, we just kind of asked our classmates and asked our friends, our roommates. We put out a little Google form to our community. We had over 300 responses and ended up narrowing down to three names. But absurd snacks just fit our ethos not only as a product, but as a brand. We want to make it fun. We want to remove any stigmas or socially uncomfortable elements to having food allergies and just make it more fun. Make it more inclusive, make it more accessible. So that's our whole thing.

30:31
Eli Bank
That's why we're absurd. We'll continue to put out absurd snacks with absurd flavors that are ridiculously good. And yeah, we're just super excited to be able to have a platform to make it a little easier and a little more enjoyable for everyone.

30:44
Daniel Scharff
I love it and I really appreciate your energy and earnestness I think everybody will pick up on that, and I think the name is just such a good fit for you guys and the product as well. So we're a helpful community. Do you have some title and ask for, like, hey, if anybody out there is listening, here's one thing I'm looking for. And it could be like, hey, dream retailer. We're really hoping that somebody there will hear about this and reach out to us. Or it could be like, oh, I need a financing partner, or I need a copacker or an ingredient partner for something or somebody to make the influencer kits that we're sending out. Anything out there, just put it out into the universe that maybe somebody from the community could help you with.

31:21
Eli Bank
Yeah, 100%. So right now, our distribution is super local. We are pretty much solely focused on the Midatlantic. 2024 is our year of expansion. It's our year of growth. We have validated and made a ton of improvements that we're undergoing right now going into 2024, and we're excited to roll those out. But with that, we definitely are hoping to expand in the natural retail front. Whole Foods is our kind of first cornerstone retail account. We're only in select locations right now, but we want that to grow. And so driving people to stores, if you have a location that we're carried in near you, please do go buy some absurd snacks. If we don't already carry you in your local Whole Foods, please ask.

32:00
Eli Bank
Even just going to customer service, like Aaron said earlier, walking up to the front counter and asking them to start carrying it is a huge help. If you're in the community or in the CPG space and you know of any natural grocers or you work with any natural grocers that you think would be a good fit for absurd snacks, we would absolutely love to talk to you. And, yeah, just there's anything else, anywhere else that you think that a more inclusive snack would be helpful? It would be really interesting to see how else we could just make it more accessible.

32:25
Daniel Scharff
Everybody would be lucky to get to work with the Whole Foods program regionally. How did you guys make that happen?

32:31
Eli Bank
We actually started talking to Whole Foods while were still college students. And going back to the question earlier about fun and interesting ways to get in touch with retailers. We had an initial conversation with one of the local foragers at the time when local foragers were still in existence with Whole foods, and we got offered a meeting and it kind of got pushed off a little bit. So we had emailed our local merchant and said that we would be in her area near her office one day, when in reality were in class. And to our surprise, she responded and said, can you meet in 2 hours? And so Grace and I ran to our dorms. We changed quickly, and we got in the car and drove right up to DC. And from there was expressed interest.

33:12
Eli Bank
But we had a lot to do to prepare for that launch. And so, just being persistent, making sure we did everything on our end, that we could have the foundation of the business. To be ready to partner with a retailer like Whole Foods was our top priority. And so just staying on it, keeping developing those relationships, allowed us to launch. It ended up being a year and a half from the time that we had that first meeting until we actually landed on our first shelf.

33:34
Daniel Scharff
That's amazing. And I think also, just, again, it really highlights the power of the, hey, I'm just in town kind of email for. I don't know why, but it is so effective. People who would never email you back or give you the time of day or a meeting. If you're like, hey, I'm in your city just these two days, any chance you could meet? They're like, yeah, okay, well, come on by. I don't know what it is, but I mean, Aaron, have you seen that work?

33:57
Aaron Barnholt
Well, I have a funny example about that. I used to run sales for ye's Thai, which is an awesome thai condiment company. This was probably five years ago, and I was out in Greensboro visiting the fresh market. For some reason, I got the bright idea to ping the Wegmans buyer and say, hey, I'm in town. I was just on the east coast, like roughly sort of, right? She was, yeah, sure. Like, sounds good. Come on in. And I was like, okay, now I have to get to Rochester from Carol. And the first thing she said when we sat down to meet was, we didn't fly in just for this meeting anyway. But I did lots. I know, of the things we will do to get our products in front of the key retailers.

34:37
Eli Bank
Right.

34:37
Aaron Barnholt
So, Eli, did you go home or go to your dorm room and put on a tuxedino before the meeting or what?

34:43
Eli Bank
He's in the butt. No, we will always just be ourselves. So we showed up at the meeting with big smiles on our faces and bags of product. Excited to show.

34:53
Aaron Barnholt
Good. That's awesome, man.

34:55
Eli Bank
Cool story. Appreciate it.

34:56
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, I love both of those examples. And I always struggled also, when I was running a brand with, if the retailer kind of throws out an in person meeting, whether or not it's worth it to go. I kind of always felt like, hey, if they actually want you to go, then go because it means, yeah, probably these days at least like post pandemic maybe. Before it was just commonplace. Like, no, you get a meeting and you go now, I think if you get a meeting that's in person, you're going to get distribution with them. Pretty much just if they know you're flying in from somewhere. But I don't know, I kind of always settled on at least just making sure they knew that I would be flying in for the meeting. Like, oh yeah, hey, in person is great. Happy to fly in.

35:35
Daniel Scharff
That would be so much fun to spend time with you. Or if Zoom is easier, that's cool too. And just highlight where I'm located in my email signature because it is nice to be in. At least one silver lining of the pandemic is not have to fly all over the country and pack and unpacked and uber everywhere and all that stuff for a meeting if they are willing to hopefully take your brand on shelf after just a Zoom meeting. Yeah, cool. So and then, hey Eli, if anybody wants to follow you guys, help you out or what's a great way for them to connect with you personally?

36:04
Eli Bank
Absolutely appreciate that. Can find us@absurdsnacks.com on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook at absurd period snacks, and if there are any other personal inquiries, you can find us at eli@absurdsnacks.com or grace@absurdsnacks.com and we are looking forward to meeting you.

36:22
Daniel Scharff
And you didn't want to give out your cell phone or home admiral relatives houses or anything?

36:28
Eli Bank
No, you'll have to ask around for that one. But if you ask enough people in the community, you might be able to find it.

36:34
Daniel Scharff
Okay. You could just text Aaron to find it. All right, guys. Hey, thank you so much. Probably everybody can tell how excited I am about this resource. I spent just a lot of time on it, especially over the winter holidays and Christmas holiday. Just like really envisioning this as a huge thing that we could deliver to everybody to really help them in this fresh new year and really just be effective with their outreach. So I am so excited to just hype it up as much as possible to make sure people go in and look at it and actually start using it. Thank you again to Eli for being one of the beta testers to help us really dial it in for emerging brands to use the right way.

37:15
Daniel Scharff
And then again, thank you so much to Aaron and the entire cultivate CPG team because that's how we can actually release stuff like this. And we're going to keep going. We're going to improve this tool over time. There's a form where you can submit any updates that you want to on the tool. If we got something wrong, probably we did. Or if you have requests, you can send an email in through there and just look for more of the same from us. So if you're not already following us, please do startupcpg.com. You can sign up for our email newsletter and it'll send you the slack link also where Eli and Aaron both hang out frequently and there's just lots of good stuff happening there.

37:47
Daniel Scharff
So thank you guys so much for joining us, and I really appreciate all of the help and support for this.

37:53
Aaron Barnholt
Thank you.

37:53
Eli Bank
Thank you, Daniel. Appreciate it.

37:55
Daniel Scharff
All right, take care everybody. See you on the next episode.

37:59
Outro
All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast today, it would really help us out if you can leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I am Daniel Sharf. I'm the host and founder of startup CPG. Please feel free to reach out or add me on LinkedIn. If you're a potential sponsor that would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnerships@startupcpg.com and reminder to all of you out there, we would love to have you join the community. You can sign up at our website, startupcpg.com to learn about our webinars, events and Slack channel. If you enjoyed today's music, you can check out my band it's the super fantastics on Spotify music. On behalf of the entire startup CPG team, thank you so much for listening and your support. See you next time.