The Startup CPG Podcast

Jared Golestani
We wanted to make like, essentially like a nostalgic but better for you version of something that like, had like a simple, clean ingredient deck and, you know, parents felt good about giving to their kids also. That was another thing that I think that we had from a tailwind standpoint is the growing prevalence of peanut allergies, which fun fact circa about a week ago, the FDA just came out with their final ruling or not final ruling, a let's just say updated set of guidance that coconut is no longer considered a tree nut since, what was it, the 80s or the 70s? It was considered a tree nut because the word nut was in coconut, even though biologically speaking it's not.

00:51
Jared Golestani
Fortunately, schools, even before the whole FDA ruling were smart enough to know that coconut isn't a specific tree nut that needed to be limited from school lunchroom consumption. So we fit the bill there. Now it's an even stronger, you know, push because, you know, we have FDA guidance at our back. But that was kind of like the impetus for creating this product is then allowing it to be like lunchbox friendly.

01:17
Grace Kennedy
Hello everyone and welcome back to the startup CPG podcast. This is Grace and I'm here with another founder feature. Today I'm talking to Jared and Briana Golastani, the co founders of Kolkata. Kolkata is a snacking brand dedicated to crafting naturally sweet treats for the whole family. Made with wholesome coconut based ingredients and free from refined sugar, Kolkata makes a truly delicious coconut spread that comes in a variety of flavors like original brownie and cinnamon toast. Jared and Briana started Kolkata as a pandemic hobby, but it has quickly grown to a nationwide business in over 1,000 stores. We talk all about how they manage to scale so quickly, how they're navigating an international supply chain and the exciting new product they launched just last year. I hope you enjoy this episode and as always, let me know what you think.

02:14
Grace Kennedy
Hello everyone and welcome back to the start of CPG podcast. This is Grace and I am joined today by Briana and Jared Golestani, the co founders of Kolkata and also a married couple, which is perfect for this Valentine's Day episode. But welcome to the show you guys. So happy to have you here.

02:36
Breanna Golestani
Thank you. We've been listeners for a long time.

02:39
Grace Kennedy
Yes, you guys have been long time startup CPG members and you know, such a treat to get to learn more about Kolkata today. So I'd love for you both to just start by introducing yourselves and one of you can introduce Kolkata and maybe Brianna, we can start with you?

02:55
Breanna Golestani
Sure. So my name is Briana. I am one of the two co founders of Kolkata. Me and Jared say to everybody, I manage all things. Getting product off the shelf, so marketing, sales support, all that. Jared and I met 10 years ago, so you'll probably notice we're gonna say a lot of the same things. We're very much on the same page. Jared, you wanna introduce yourself and I'll kind of give the story.

03:14
Jared Golestani
Hi, everyone. Happy Valentine's Day. I'm Jared Golastani. Yes, I'm sure Brianna will mention several times throughout the podcast just how long we've been together. We are practically the same person at this point in time, and we've pretty much done everything together. And that includes when we met in undergrad, where went and worked in consulting. Afterwards, we didn't work in the same, you know, kind of division and departments and consulting ground. I focused more on, you know, the likes of, like, telecom and whatnot, and I focus more on, like, pharmaceutical sector, but still at the same company. And then after that, we ended up going back to business school together, starting to cotta together. So we pretty much do everything together. So we're essentially the same person that's morphed into one over the course of the past decade.

03:56
Breanna Golestani
But, yeah, I'm happy to give a background story of Kolkata and how that kind of inserts itself into the story. Another joke. We always say, like, food chose us as a career and as an industry. So I've always been obsessed with food, mostly coming from my father. Jared will attest to that. I live and dream about it. When Covid hit, I was experimenting with, like, everything in the kitchen. Like, I'm sure everybody was, like, baking bread and stuff, which I attempted and quickly failed and never tried again. But some of the other things I was playing around with is, like, homemade almond milk and stuff like that. And one of the things that I was really excited about was making what now is cocata. Then it was just coconut spread. It was inspired by a couple different things.

04:37
Breanna Golestani
After college, I played for the Jamaican national team, volleyball. It's like my random fun fact. And we traveled a lot. We went to all these different countries, played lots of different countries, mostly around the Caribbean and, like, Latin America. So all of those cultures, Jamaica included, has a ton of coconut. So, like, everywhere went, even were training in Jamaica. Coconut everywhere. When I came home, Covid happened. So I really wasn't going to Jamaica at all. I was playing around with coconut. And at the same time, like, my mom was pre diabetic so she's watching her sugar. As a sugar obsessed person, I was looking for things that tasted sweet, didn't have a word aftertaste, but wasn't going to like spike my blood sugar. And coca cod was one of those things I played around with.

05:17
Breanna Golestani
Inspired by a Jamaican candy and all the other coconutty things, I literally bought a 70 pound bag of dried coconut off of Amazon and started from there. And that's kind of the inspiration behind it. And we just went to a farmer's market that October of 2020. It was the first thing that opened. We were like, let's just get out of the house. Like, we don't even need to make money, we just need to do something. And it was pretty organic from there.

05:41
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, you were just like, let's just see people and talk to them for.

05:45
Jared Golestani
The first time through green. Yeah, exactly.

05:48
Grace Kennedy
Yes.

05:48
Breanna Golestani
There was an aha moment though. I'm not gonna like sleep on that. I actually. Jared, I want you to share the aha moment. Cause I think it evolved you.

05:55
Jared Golestani
Yeah. My first role at Kolkata, like Grandma mentioned, she was the one who like created our flagship products and whatnot. I had absolutely nothing to do with that. But my first job at Kokata was our cheap taste tester role. I was actually. I feel like this is probably pretty well known at this point, but I was self proclaimed coconut hater. I was not a fan of coconut in the slightest. And Brett tried to get me to try multiple iterations of the product and I refused vehemently. Finally, eventually caved. Not out of my own choice, but my own free will was taken from me and it actually was really good. And that's when we kind of like had like a little bit of an aha moment because for me it was.

06:39
Jared Golestani
Coconut was a little bit of the flavor, but mostly texture and everything of that nature. So that was kind of like it. But I did like some things that had coconut in it. For instance, like a Girl Scout Samoa cookie, I actually like really liked and enjoyed. So it wasn't like I hated all coconut, just like it wasn't something that I very much enjoyed. And that was kind of a bit of an aha moment where I was like, oh, wow. I actually not only do I like this, I really like it, I love it. So actually turn it to one of my go to snacks, which is one part of the inspiration for our latest product line, Cotta Dogs. But we'll get into that in a little bit.

07:11
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that's awesome. You converted a coconut hater, which is definitely a sign of a good product. If you can convert a hater into a lover. I'm curious a little bit of how cotta actually gets made, because for me, it's not something maybe like, obviously when I think of like a nut butter that's so well known and so kind of intuitive at this point to think like, oh, yeah, you grind up the nuts, then you get a nut butter. So how do you turn, you know, coconut flakes or shreds or whatever you use into the delicious spread you guys have?

07:44
Jared Golestani
Yeah, we don't actually talk about that a whole lot, rather on purpose. That's kind of like the secret sauce into, like, what allows our spread to be what our spread is. So as much as I think that we would love to share the secret sauce, that's one of the things that we actually, you know, keep to ourselves, rather intentionally.

08:00
Breanna Golestani
I'll add one thing which is coconut is very hard to work with. It's very finicky. One of our very close industry friends is Pockets Chocolates. They do chocolate totally different, but they say the same thing about, like, chocolate. It's really hard to work with. So if you're going to work with a coconut based product, just know it's going to be a challenge. But that's also one of our greatest strengths is it is so hard to work with and we've kind of cracked the code, right?

08:25
Grace Kennedy
You got to keep the trade secret so you can't have too much competition coming your way. I respect it. Even though I'm curious. I respect it. So another thing I'm curious about, though, is how you sort of turned kind of like a pandemic business into now what is obviously like business nationwide and growing and really like a fully fledged business. I think so many people sort of had these pandemic hobbies that they then sort of abandoned once were all going back to normal. But I'm curious, like, how you guys are like, what were your first steps when you're like, wait, we're going to take this beyond farmers markets. We want to make this, you know, a real thing.

09:00
Breanna Golestani
I'll start and then, Jared, I'll pass it to you. It was really organic. Neither of us were thinking, like, let's quit consulting and, you know, do this. That was not the intent. We were really just enjoying it. So it was like, iterating on the brand, getting feedback from, like, our bosses and our family and our neighbors. So it came from a place of just enjoyment. It was pretty organic. Getting into the first couple corner stores because it was like People at the farmer's market, like, there's a corner store on this block. Can you go over there and put the product in? And when went over there, you know, like they, the customers had already mentioned it. So that was super organic. Same with Amazon was kind of one of the earliest things we did. People asked us to do that.

09:39
Breanna Golestani
So it was very small. At that point we got into our first like chain or like co op chain I guess, which is called Weaver Street Market in North Carolina. If you live there, highly recommend going in there. It's an amazing place. And they kind of coached us on what like velocity is, how to move the product. Like we thought when you stick it on the shelf, like, yes, when a job's done, which everybody in the industry knows is not true, that's really when it begins. We were going to business school already. So we both were saying then like the paycheck was gone. Like there was, there was no paycheck coming in at that point by that summer. So we both were leaning into Kolkata just as a way to apply business school concepts. So you're taking like marketing one at one.

10:21
Breanna Golestani
You're taking like corporate finance. And it was really fun to apply it to the business and learn in a deeper way. And you know, we had the mental space to do that in business school. The big moment was like, nosh, pitch slam. We ended up winning in 2021. When they invited us, were like, let's just not embarrass ourselves and if we do, we can always just ditch this industry. So went out there and it ended up going our way, which was awesome. And there were so many other amazing brands. And that was when were like, oh crap, we gotta take this up a notch. Jared, I don't know if you want to like take it from there because the next six months were huge.

10:58
Jared Golestani
Yeah, that kind of was, I would say, probably the trigger for us to then decide that we wanted to go ahead and scale a little faster going into business school. Like, our kind of thought process was this would be really cool if one of us could run this thing full time one day. And that was only a few months in advance of when we decided that we wanted to take it national on a bit of a faster kind of progression. Prior to that, like our kind of strategy and goal was we'll just build out the business over the course of, I don't know, the better part of like two and a half decades, kind of sort of similar to a bunch of like well known brands.

11:35
Jared Golestani
That you look at and like never took any funding, grew organically and slowly from like local to then regional to then, you know, national. And that was kind of like our thought process going into school. And then we decided that with the awareness that we had and then also just with some of the connects that were able to make, there was an opportunity to go ahead and take Kolkata to be a national brand on a little bit of a faster, you know, kind of trajectory than what we originally had planned for. Not to say that we wanted to be like an explosive growth company. I think that neither Brianna nor I had any aspirations of doing all like raise every like six to nine months hockey stick.

12:16
Jared Golestani
That was not necessarily what we really wanted to sign up for, but there was a middle ground that, you know, existed between those two kind of dynamics that, you know, we thought was a very, you know, attainable kind of growth trajectory which is what we then targeted and have since shot for. So. And it's gone pretty well, but. And then over the course of 2022 we decided pretty early on that were going to take a leave of absence from school after our first year and then were going to go ahead and build out the supply chain because at that point previously were still self manufactured and weren't going to be able to handle the scale from a capacity standpoint for a national rollout.

12:53
Jared Golestani
So we stood up partnership with actually two co packers, one domestically, one overseas in Sri Lanka, which is where we source all of our ingredient from. And then we also then obviously started to build our distributor relationships. Keiki Unify got those set up by the end of the year and then also started queuing up launches with retailers for 2023, which is kind of exactly what ended up happening. And then 2022 to 2023 is when we like picked up, I think it was like total of 1300, 1400 total doors. Very fast growth. In retrospect, probably grew a little too fast, but that's kind of like the journey in terms of how we thought about our growth and kind of how we have since gone about it.

13:30
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that's so interesting. And definitely, yeah, pretty fast growth. Particularly coming from this sort of like small idea that just sort of started in the kitchen. It just reminds me that like every single brand's path is so different though. And like I've never heard a single brand have the exact same trajectory. I have a few different questions, one of which is thinking about some of your supply chain and how you went from maybe self manufacturing to then Having these two different CO packers, one of which at least is international and then your kind of growing pretty quickly into, you know, over a thousand doors.

14:03
Grace Kennedy
And something I hear from a lot of brands as a challenge is managing the supply chain and making sure you know, you have enough inventory, but also that you don't buy so much inventory that you go into massive debt and you have to run through it. And how do you kind of manage balancing international supply chain plus national distribution and maybe Jared, I'll throw that one to you.

14:26
Jared Golestani
Yeah, learning curve for sure. We certainly did not perfect it off the bat. That being said, I'll take solace in the fact that I seriously doubt that anyone does. So I feel like were in was a pretty big one with everyone aboard. But yeah, no, the way that we tactically thought about it was everything that we built was kind of like from a bottom up model standpoint. And that starts with our unit velocity that were shooting for on a store level. The total stores that we had we then layered in where were going to be able to provide a little bit more direct support. Specifically with our Sprouts launch. We do a lot of demos because they're very successful. Same thing in Whole Foods, super successful.

15:06
Jared Golestani
And then we're able to layer in our learnings in terms of movement that happens during demos on average to then, you know, layer that into velocity based off of how many demos we're running and then kind of build out that model all the way from the bottom up. And that gives us a pretty good, clear, I would say certainly not definitive because obviously there's a good amount of variability in the forecast but gives us a pretty good idea of, you know, the demand that we're going to need. That being said, we have like multiple different SKUs. So that's, you know, another layer of variability that kind of like enters the scene.

15:35
Jared Golestani
But again you can take the learnings in terms of as we sat on shelf and were in market for a set of months and then you got to be in a in store for a full year cycle and also understand the trends in terms of when the category itself has its highest selling and then lowest selling periods and a little bit of seasonality. It's certainly not like static throughout the entire year. We're able to then kind of work that into our forecast and then determine how much product we're going to need. And like I said, it was certainly a learning curve. We certainly had some product that came up on date that we had to go ahead and liquidate. Fortunately we didn't overextend ourselves like, you know, too greatly.

16:10
Jared Golestani
And then from an out of stock standpoint, there was times where, you know, we unfortunately weren't able to get product to our distributor on the timelines that they wanted. So we got hit with a couple of additional buildbacks which I'm sure all the brands know about. But we never ran out of product in distribution to satisfy product on shelf. So while there was out of stock, from the standpoint of like what we reported into the distributor, no retailer ever saw it out of stock from us. So from our standpoint, we considered that a pretty good win from a forecasting standpoint and something that we obviously just continue to iterate on such that we don't run into that problem again, but also then don't have a ton of inventory that we need to then have, you know, liquidated because it's coming up on code.

16:48
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. It's such a challenge. And you know, as you said, every brand is. Has probably been in that boat of the learning curve and can relate to it. I'm curious on sort of the external side of it, Briana, how you were working, as you say, to get it off the shelf as you grew relatively quickly into, you know, nationwide distribution in stores. Obviously you guys personally going to be at all these stores and how did you sort of support the marketing and you know, as Jared was saying in store demos and all those things to move Kolkata off the shelf.

17:18
Breanna Golestani
It was hard. I love it. It was and will always be like a giant puzzle in a very gray zone thing. One thing that really helps that we've learned over time is to ask the buyer upfront what is the unit velocity you expect from this product and what are the velocities you're seeing in the category today for a similar product? Like, we're not a peanut butter, we're not going to move like a jif. Right. So gut checking that number makes sense based on what you've done in the past is really important. And then once I have that target, I at least know what winning is. And that's the most important thing for me as the person who's responsible for our velocity and retail performance is just knowing like what is successful so I can invest accordingly.

18:02
Breanna Golestani
What we did in the very early days, that was not purposeful because we didn't think we'd be here, but now I'm so thankful we did was were in our local co ops like Weaver Street Markets, there's one called Durham Co Op, a couple others like that for about a year before we scaled pretty significantly with the Sprouts innovation set. It was more than a year, actually. We had a long time to figure out how to move product. I had never done a demo before. I'd never done meta ads before and never did, like, TPRs or price promotions. So a lot of it was just like, on a very small scale. Let me play with, like, the first meta ad I ran was like $5 a day in my zip code near the Weaver Street.

18:41
Breanna Golestani
And like, met ads is not something that we ended up scaling, but, like, just doing that for very cheap, very small, seeing if it makes any kind of dent was really helpful. And ultimately what we ended up kind of figuring out at that size was demos. And sampling is just a winner for this product. It's so unique. Nobody walks into the store and says, like, I need coconut spread. Like, you don't even know what that is. So sampling is huge. So at scale, what that looks like is we do a lot of demoing. We have a requirement for our team or a team of like five right now that we all do a couple a month, mostly to be close to the customers. And then we have a brand ambassador network. And we don't use a third party at the moment.

19:21
Breanna Golestani
We personally manage that. There's now maybe like 40 of them across the country in the most important metro areas, and they do regular demos. We also do lots and lots of sampling and gifting to, like, little gyms and daycares and 5Ks. And that's really important to understand at the smallest scale, like, how much is it going to cost me to acquire the amount of customers I need to move the unit velocity that this retailer is telling me I need to move. So if they're saying some crazy number, unless you know, have significant dollars behind you probably shouldn't take on that retailer, or if it's too big and, you know, you do the math, like, wow, it's going to cost. I don't. I'll make a number up. I don't know what ours is offhand.

20:01
Breanna Golestani
Like $50 a store, and you're launching in 1400 stores at, like, Target nationwide or whatever. Like, that's a lot of money. So that's how I think about it. I try to quantify it as much as I possibly can. And I spent maybe 60% of my time staring at our, like, spin stuff and our numbers, because those don't lie.

20:20
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, totally. And I hear that again and again from brands, particularly because so many of the brands in the startup CPG community are innovative, it's kind and the demos are just the way to go over like a meta ad even which can be so costly and ultimately maybe doesn't have the same acquisition that just a demo would. Something I was thinking about as you were talking about the numbers and money is just how you guys have approached financing some of your growth over the last few years. I know you said you didn't want to be on that like insane explosive growth where you're having to raise every six to nine months. But you know you have grown quite a lot. And so how have you approached raising money or bootstrapping? Not sure how you guys are approaching that and would love to hear more.

21:04
Jared Golestani
Early days back when were both working consulting, bootstrapping was an option and one that we definitely took advantage of that was again based off of like approach to growth that bootstrapping was a viable option. The minute that we decided that we wanted to take the brand national, that was no longer a viable option unfortunately for us. So we needed to go ahead and raise dollars obviously. Early days friends and family I feel like is that's where everybody goes first, you know, as we continue to go ahead and prove out the concept. And then since then, you know, we have a pretty good network from just our, you know, academic affiliations where we met at Duke and then a lot of the folks that we know there and then also our time at Wharton allowed us to and then but also our time spending consulting.

21:47
Jared Golestani
We had a pretty good network that then allowed us to connect into some angels and then family offices. And that's where the predominant amount of funding to date has come from is angels and family offices. Because of the growth trajectory that we've targeted, we naturally haven't been a great fit for venture capital mostly because of the return timelines that they look for and you know, handing back money to LPs on you know, the seven to ten year cycle. Even though I know that there's obviously I'm sure that you know, you probably have interviews with, you know, folks from the VC world and they're going through it right now because lack of exits and you know, ability to drive liquidity events and hand back money to LPs and all that jazz.

22:25
Jared Golestani
But anyway, all to say that because of that we haven't really focused on taking dollars from VC and we certainly have tons of conversations because there could potentially be a time down the line where we do want to go ahead and hit a bit of more of an inflection point and grow like that hockey stick, I can't say that's on the horizon anytime soon. That's what we want to sign up for, but it's certainly generating connections and staying with the close network is. It's in our best interest to do so. We do so. But yeah, we've predominantly just our fundraising has been focused on family offices and then angels.

22:58
Breanna Golestani
So yeah, and timeline wise, the way that looked is like the first year it was credit card, to be honest, it was my salary. Basically. We what ended up happening, and this was not the intent was we ended up living on Jared's salary and putting my whole salary into what was then the hobby. I don't know how that happened. That was not the intent. Obviously it ended up being necessary. When we won off Pitch slam, were like, we need a chunk of inventory because we have a lot of retailers coming to us and we want to take at least one major. That was when we did it was a lot of credit cards. And our joke is like, oh, we did like a small friends and family. We did our very first round and we had Sprouts innovation set internally.

23:37
Breanna Golestani
Me and Jared laugh all the time. We call it like the pinch. It's very much like chicken or egg when it comes to fundraising. And same with operations. It's like the retailer won't take you until you have the distributor. You can't afford either of those things if you don't have a significant chunk of money. But you go to investors and they say, well, do you have the retailer? The distributor and operations is the same thing. Right. You don't want to order a big PO til you have the major retailer distributor and they're not going to take you unless you have it. So that was the most stressful time of Cotta in my opinion, was those like three to six months where it just felt very in between for us. We ended up saying like, we just have to pick a direction.

24:13
Breanna Golestani
Like, there's really no win right now. We either like pony up for the first PO and put it on credit card and maybe it crashes and burns someday and, you know, we're, we'll recover eventually or, you know, we go a little slower and we don't go that route. So that's what that looked like, was that in between time was pretty rough. And then once we had Sprouts being our first retailer, we got through the innovation set. It felt smoother in general just because we had our first retailer and we can order pos and take on a little bit more risk.

24:41
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. I'M curious, do you guys have any advice for brands who might be in a similar position now, who are like, at that inflection point of do I want to, you know, take this plunge and do a fundraising round of friends and family or anything like that, or do I want to keep bootstrapping, say, slower growth? Do you have any advice? I know it's different for everybody, but any thoughts, J.R. Do you want to go first?

25:08
Jared Golestani
To be honest, I think that a lot of it, generic advice would be, you know, just do your pro cons in the valuation and do like an honest evaluation of, you know, does it make sense to take the risk? Can I absorb that risk in the event that, you know, even if it's over an extended period of time? But you got to be prepared to sit with the consequences of, you know, moving forward in the event that things don't work out. But to be honest with you, I think it's more of a case by case basis instead of providing general kind of guidance. And I don't have a framework to go ahead and evaluate that. I'm sure that if I, like sat down, I really put pen to paper and thought about it for a little while.

25:46
Jared Golestani
You probably come up with a set of principles and like, you know, things to go ahead and like, think about and measure and then like, you know, come up with some KPIs. And this is the consultant me thinking through things right now. But I don't have like a generic set of a guidance. It's like similar to were once doing a panel and someone asked, do you think that I should go into business with my husband? And I was like, I don't know who you are. Any guidance that I provided you right now would be pure speculation. And I think it's again, we come back to a set of principles in terms of like, you know, if you work well together, like, you just go down the laundry list of like, you know, do you check these boxes? Then I think it's a viable option.

26:22
Jared Golestani
It's definitely not a yes or a no at that point, but it's at least a viable option. I'd say probably same approach for deciding whether to take the plunge or not, but ultimately I think it comes down to the risk and, you know, your how the level of comfort and in sitting with that risk and absorbing that risk personally.

26:38
Breanna Golestani
So, yeah, I have a few thoughts looking back, knowing what we know now. First is we had a pretty significant amount of pull when we fundraised from our friends and family. We had one nosh Pitch slam. We had significant interest from several major natural retailers. We felt that we could sleep at night knowing were taking our friends, our family's money, knowing we had that pull. And this was more like gas for the engine. I guess this is just me personally. Everybody has their own thing. I don't think we would have been comfortable doing that if we didn't have that pull. So that's the first thing. And if you don't have that, it's not a bad thing. Going and growing like geographically is. And slower is an amazing business model. So there's nothing wrong with that too. That was the first thing.

27:30
Breanna Golestani
And then the second thing is there is a lot of pressure you're going to end up putting on yourself. When you take friends and family money, not even friends and family, any investor money, it really changes the way the business feels to you. Now you're just going to feel a whole nother level of pressure when things are going poorly. You're going to feel like, wow, this is everybody behind me. So it's something you're going to have to live with. And it never gets lighter. You just end up feeling more and more confident as you're getting wins, but it changes it. And I think that should be an important thing you ask yourself as a founder is do I want this to be that? And that's great if you do, it's great if you don't.

28:11
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, I think those are two really important things to think about and it's a really hard decision. And yeah, it's so individual, but I think those are great pieces of advice to think about. Another thing I wanted to come back to that you had mentioned early on, Jared, is a new product you guys have and just general the growth of Kolkata and like where you guys sort of are at today and what you're hoping to do this year.

28:35
Jared Golestani
Well, I'll show the product. Bree, I don't know if you want to go ahead, talk it through, but I have it some sitting next to me because down here at our office in North Carolina. But this is the product. It's called Kolkata Dunks. Inspired by a bit of nostalgia from, you know, the 90s Dunkaroos and everything. They've since made a comeback since they were relaunched under Betted Crocker through General Mills. But we wanted to make like essentially like a nostalgic but better for you version of something that like, had like a simple, clean ingredient deck and, you know, parents felt good about giving to their kids. Also that Was another thing that I think that we had from a tailwind standpoint is the growing prevalence of peanut allergies has led a lot of schools across the country.

29:17
Jared Golestani
And when I say a lot, I mean like north of 60% for middle schools and elementary to either outright ban or limit peanut and tree nut consumption, which. Fun fact, circa about a week ago, the FDA just came out with their final ruling or not final ruling, a, let's just say updated set of guidance that coconut is no longer considered a tree nut since, what was it, the 80s or the 70s? It was considered a tree nut because the word nut was in coconut, even though biologically speaking, it's not. And it's a droop, which is why, like, less than.02% of the population, 2.2% of the population has an allergy to it.

29:53
Jared Golestani
So, anyway, fortunately, schools, even before the whole, you know, FDA ruling, we're smart enough to know that coconut isn't a specific tree nut that needed to be limited from, you know, school lunchroom consumption. So we fit the bill there. Now it's an even stronger, you know, push because, you know, we have FDA guidance at our back. But that was kind of like the impetus for creating this product is then allowing it to be, like, lunchbox friendly. And a lot of this came, I'm sure Brianna will comment on this is from our customers, and I'll hand it over to you at that point free, so you can share some of that.

30:25
Breanna Golestani
Yeah. Our process, just for those listening, is like, I like to say I'm the ideal guy and Jared is brave enough to make them reality. So the original idea actually came from a lot of the demoing. And this is the perk of demoing is a lot of customers or people who were interested in buying ended up wanting to know how they could use it on the go. So they were already putting things in Tupperware for their kids or whatever. So we had thought about going into snacking for a while. It was just a matter of how and how could we bring additional value that people aren't already bringing to a store, like sprouts or something like that. I grew up on the 90s snack that were inspired by. I definitely like a junk food kid. I still love junk food.

31:06
Breanna Golestani
But the format just made a lot of sense and was a little white space that wasn't innovated in yet. But it really did start with customers saying, like, I'm already on the go and putting it in Tupperware. So that's kind of where the thought came from.

31:20
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, I love it. It's definitely nostalgic for me as well. I remember that my mom would never give me those because she was kind of an early days health nut. But I would like steal my friends. Or like you'd be at a friend's house and you'd sneakily get some.

31:34
Breanna Golestani
Yeah. I was the cool kid you got.

31:36
Jared Golestani
To take advantage of. Yeah. Bri Ree's experience was her pantry was the one that was getting looted by friends. But I was in the same boat as you growing up. I was like, no fruit by the foot, no dunkaroos. My. My snacks were like an apple and some fresh granola.

31:54
Breanna Golestani
Right.

31:55
Grace Kennedy
An apple with like the all natural peanut butter that separated so all the kids would be like, ew, what's your separated peanut butter?

32:02
Jared Golestani
They're like, why are you mixing your peanut butter right now? You're like, because it's unnatural. And they were like, yes. Yeah. But this gif stuff tastes so much better. You're like, yeah, you're not wrong.

32:11
Breanna Golestani
So you're not wrong.

32:12
Grace Kennedy
You're not wrong. But thank God, now we have Kolkata. So how are you guys sort of rolling out the launch of this new product? Or I mean it sounds like it's maybe already out, but how have you rolled out the launch of this product?

32:22
Breanna Golestani
So we started last year all things launches me the timeline for cocaata because we think in timelines truly is like 2020, we're playing around. 2021 was. We're continuing to play around but oh crap, we won nosh. This is huge. 2022 was the kind of reset year and upgrade the brand and fundraise a bit. 2023 was jars and launched those early or late 2023 when were launching, we kind of saw the snack opportunity. But one thing that were really taking to heart was slowing down the distribution expansion because we did go from zero to whatever the number was 13, 1400 very fast. And we did not want to keep growing through distribution. Like we want to take a pause and grow through like unit velocity, same door sales, all that good stuff.

33:05
Breanna Golestani
So our thought was we have amazing partners in our retailers who really believe in us and we're growing pretty solidly in there. So let's put the dunks in there. So the dunks are available in two different formats in sprouts and wegmans at the moment and more to come. This year we tested two different theories with those two retailers. One was a four pack available in sprouts in the lunchbox snack section one was single serve available in Wegmans for 199 per unit in the nut butter section next to our jars. And those were two hypotheses were testing. The first is like this is like a standalone snack in a new category, which I would recommend very carefully thinking about if you're going to take on two categories so early. And the other was let's stick to the category that we're already in.

33:51
Breanna Golestani
Kind of use these as a much lower cost than our jars. SAM Sealed sampling opportunity and both work out fine. They both, they both turned out pretty good. That was theory last year. And this year it's continuing to expand those two into our current retail partners and a select one or two other partners. But we're being very purposeful with distribution growth and more, trying to grow our current accounts with dunks and with jar growth.

34:18
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that's awesome. Really exciting. And are you continuing both paths or are you focusing in one like the single server or the four path?

34:26
Breanna Golestani
JARED I would say we're honing in on where they are at their best. I guess the learning is the four packs in natural is great. The price point is fine for a four pack. They move really well. So I think that was what we learned from last year. The single serve is a great support in the nut butter section as well. There's a couple other channels where the single serve makes a ton of sense like food service and all that other stuff. So we're leaning that way a bit this year. So I think we're just honing in on where does the format make the most sense. Is that fair?

34:59
Jared Golestani
Jared yeah, and also I think we're looking at like on the single serve front, more like front end opportunities we've had specifically with our Weaver street partnership that, you know, we've been, you know, they've been a retail partner of ours since literally almost our inception. And they're like the greatest partnership that we could possibly have. No knock to all of our other great retail partners, but they just, they've been, they've been our day one. So we've had the opportunity to do some front end at checkout displays with them on dunks and the product just moves so much faster there in comparison into the nut butter category.

35:35
Jared Golestani
And I think, you know, intuition, I mean everybody knows that front end moves faster, but intuition will tell you that, you know, when you're going exploring, it's great from a sealed sampling standpoint, but from a product discovery standpoint, most people, I mean, there are definitely people that go to the nut butter category for like, you know, exploring new products and whatnot. But a lot of like, you know, the typical places in the center store aisle where, you know, folks go for, hey, I'm looking to buy something new, like let's see what's on shelf kind of a deal is snacks and then like specifically like salty like chips and like that area as well as other like kind of like snacks, snackable items, bars, et cetera, which is where our four packs currently sit, but not where our single serves currently sit.

36:15
Jared Golestani
So we're exploring on our single serves, looking to do more front end stuff because the front end tests that we've done with Weaver street have gone unbelievably well and obviously velocities there, you know, miles above what, you know, sitting in the middle of the peanut butter aisle is so for the category. So we're going to look to go ahead and replicate that and then also continue to build out our food service stuff like Brianne mentioned.

36:36
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, really exciting. I, I feel like I could see the little single serves at like an airport, different things like that. So yes, hopefully we'll see that soon enough. Really exciting stuff. It sounds like coming from you guys at Kolkata, we're coming up on time. So I love to just ask how can our listeners and the startup CPG community support Kolkata?

36:56
Breanna Golestani
Sure, the standard you hear all the time, but finding us on shelf is the best possible way to support us. You all as founders know how it is in velocity and growth. So you can find us in Sprouts, Wegmans, Harris Teeter. We have a spolocator. You can look more. But testing out our new dunks or like our flagship jars is the best way to support us. And also I will say social media too. We're giving that a bit more attention, so follow along. We are leaning too transparent on social media but it's fun to share the behind the scenes so you'll hear more good tidbits there.

37:28
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, congratulations on all of your growth and launches and everything. And yeah, everybody should go find Kolkata at their local store. And what's your website for people to use the store locator?

37:41
Breanna Golestani
Yes, it's just Kolkata.com, so that's K-O-K-A D A dot com.

37:46
Grace Kennedy
Perfect. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on the show. This was such a treat and really informative across the board. All right everyone, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would help us out so much if you left a 5 star review on ratethispodcast.com startupcpg I am Grace Kennedy, the host of the Founder Feature series, so feel free to add me on LinkedIn or reach out to me on Slack. I'm always on the hunt for new and exciting brands to feature, and if you're a potential sponsor who would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnershipstartupcpg.com and finally, as a reminder for anyone listening, if you haven't already, we would love for you to join our community on Slack. You can sign up via our website startupcpg.com.