The Startup CPG Podcast

Dina DiCenso
We use a special proprietary blend of cultures and that's kind of what sets ours apart from everyone else's. So we really have put a lot of R D time into perfecting our Kam Blue, which is a mix of Camembert and blue. And then we also have our blue cheese. And both are found in top vegan restaurants around the country and really cool stores. And we recently learned too, that our H cheese has been served at the White House.

00:36
Grace Kennedy
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the startup CPG podcast. This is Grace and I'm here with another founder. Friday Today I'm Talking to Dina DeCenzo, the co founder of Rind, a vegan cheese brand that actually rivals dairy. Dina created this brand in her kitchen after feeling disappointed by the vegan cheeses on the market and developed a product unlike anything else at there. We chat about their approach to breaking into retail. Their aged Camembert style cheese versus their sliceable deli cheese, and where Dina sees Rind going in the future. What's more, Rind was actually a shelfie winner in 2024 for their Camembert slash blue cheese, which is so delicious. And I'm personally a fan, but I hope you all enjoy this episode and as always, please let me know what you think. Hi, Dena, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you here.

01:36
Dina DiCenso
Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here.

01:38
Grace Kennedy
Yes. So I'd love to start just by having you introduce yourself and your brand, which is Rind, a vegan cheese brand. I mean, I guess I kind of just did it, but you can say it in more detail. But I'd love for you to introduce yourself and Rind to our listeners.

01:51
Dina DiCenso
Sure. I'm Dina decenzo and I am co founder of Rind. We are a vegan cheese company based in Brooklyn, New York. We have two brands. We have our Rind by Dina and Joshua and we also have our Veggie underground brand. So our Rind is actually a Shelfie award winner and we won it for our Cannes Blue this year. We're very excited about that award. It's very exciting. So our aged cheese was the cheese that we came out with first way back in the day. And in 2022, we launched our Veggie underground brand new, which is a size cheese and it comes in three varieties. It's made with real vegetable puree, comes in carrot, parsnip and red bell pepper.

02:31
Grace Kennedy
Amazing. And yes, as you said, Rind was a Shelfie winner last year and I was. It was so good. Like truly does not taste like Vegan cheese. And I feel like there has been so much innovation in vegan cheese over the last, I don't know, X amount of years, because for a while there, I felt like all vegan cheese just tasted like pureed nuts and your aged cheese. I'm like, I gave it to my dad, who's, like, obsessed with cheese, and he had no idea it was vegan. He was like, this is delicious. I love it.

03:01
Dina DiCenso
I love hearing that. We get that a lot. We use a special proprietary blend of cultures, and that's kind of what sets ours apart from everyone else's. So we really have put a lot of R and D time into perfecting our Kamblu, which is a mix of camembert and blue. And then we also have our blue cheese. And both are found in top vegan restaurants around the country and really cool stores. And we recently learned, too, that our H cheese has been served at the White House.

03:28
Grace Kennedy
Oh, my God, that's so cool. Wow.

03:31
Dina DiCenso
The chef actually reached out to us just before this year's inauguration and said that, you know, it blew his mind. So that was very exciting to, you know, have him find it so good that he had to say something. So.

03:44
Grace Kennedy
Wow. Yeah, that's really cool. That's how you know you're doing something right. Yeah.

03:49
Dina DiCenso
Yeah.

03:49
Grace Kennedy
That's awesome. So I'd love to hear a little bit about why you decided to create this brand and a little bit about, like, how you. You came to this. Because, like I said, you guys do make such a uniquely amazing vegan cheese. And, yeah, I'd love to hear about, like, why you committed to doing that.

04:07
Dina DiCenso
I mean, as you said, vegan cheese was really not in a good place for many years. And, you know, it's just not sustainable for dairy to exist. And you have to provide people with a reason to change. And they're not going to change if they don't see a problem with what they're consuming and if the options are worse than what they're currently consuming. So even as a vegan, I was really dissatisfied with the options, and so I started making cheese on my own at home. And then Joshua Katcher, my business partner, contacted me after he tried it through a mutual friend who had taken some home and was like, oh, you really gotta. We gotta do this. So we made the company and started with the aged cheese, and, yeah, here we are today. So that was really.

04:58
Dina DiCenso
The impetus was just everything was terrible. So I think that's always why things change, you know?

05:05
Grace Kennedy
Totally. How did you teach yourself to make Cheese. Were you just like going, Were you just like experimenting? Like, what did that process look like?

05:13
Dina DiCenso
Yeah, it was a lot of experimentation, a lot of trial and error reading online, what's out there, just even from my own taste memories from dairy cheese when I did eat dairy, because it's not that I didn't like the taste, it's that I really just don't like what it does to animals and to the planet. So to me, food is not as important as animal's life. So that's why I became vegan and that's why I wanted to offer something that was as good as dairy, if possible, to get people to change and so that they can also be nice to the animals.

05:48
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, it's great. I mean, it's definitely a cheese that I think could turn some heads from the regular dairy cheese. Because, I mean, I just, I'm a broken record at this point, but. And we're only like three minutes in, but yeah. So how many years ago now was that like the first, like, okay, you connected with Joshua about creating this h cheese?

06:10
Dina DiCenso
I connected with Joshua around 2016, and then we maybe it was even 2015, late 2015, I think maybe. And then we launched in 2017 and then became a legal business in 2018. But in that interim we made a lot of cheese at home. And you know, there were a lot of failures, really bad failures too, where you're like, am I going to survive this? But it ended up working out.

06:35
Grace Kennedy
So yeah. And did either of you have any experience in like CPG or food products or the food world at all?

06:43
Dina DiCenso
No, I think Joshua had maybe worked in some restaurants like way back when, but I had no experience in cpg, no experience in the food industry. I mean, I was an equity analyst and I covered some food, but it wasn't, you know, it was at such a higher level. It wasn't the nitty gritty of the day to day struggle, you know, dealing with daily problems of owning a CPG business.

07:08
Grace Kennedy
Yeah. What were some of those like early days problems and struggles when you were in those first few years of just like trying to get this product out there?

07:15
Dina DiCenso
I think consistency, making the product consistent because we didn't have the budget for a ton of fancy equipment. And so I think it's harder to create consistency if your equipment is crap. So, you know, money solves a lot of problems and you know, but it doesn't solve everything. And I think that has been proven time and time again actually over the last couple of years because we keep Seeing private equity coming in and giving people 20, 30, $46 million and they still can't make a so or they'll make a product and it is just terrible. So while money can help ease a lot of the pain, it doesn't solve everything if you have a bad product to begin with.

07:57
Grace Kennedy
Right. You have to make sure the product itself is good, no matter how much money you put into it. I'm curious, once you guys were ready to launch RIND more officially, what were some of your first steps? Were you like selling in the farmer's markets or did you go to restaurants or foods? Like retail?

08:14
Dina DiCenso
Yeah, we actually being in New York, we had some really good connections just from being in the vegan community. There was a vegan cheese shop in Essex Market at the time called Riverdale. So you know Mikayla, we've known her for a long time and she was like, hey, I want to sell your cheese. So there are definitely a lot of like just people in the community who had restaurants and small businesses that we could fit that niche. They were very helpful in giving us our start. And then, you know, once you start getting a couple of stores under your belt and you start doing more demos and getting word out there and getting organic media coverage where you're not paying for ads and stuff, you know, like that earned media really helped a lot too.

08:57
Dina DiCenso
So it was a slow process, but, you know, it happened. And then I think Covid happening actually helped us. We experienced a tremendous growth during COVID because people were starting to realize that animal ag causes pandemics and they started to become more conscientious of what happens. And so I think that also helped boost the vegan sector in general.

09:21
Grace Kennedy
So in that point with during the pandemic, were people ordering your cheese online or were they like, was there stores they could go to or how was that?

09:28
Dina DiCenso
There was stores that were ordering it, that were doing shipping at the time. So that helped get it to people who normally would not be able to get it in a local store.

09:38
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that makes sense. That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about the pandemic is growing the vegan sector at all. And I'd thought about frozen or the ready to go things, but I hadn't thought about its impact on the vegan world and plant based world. And that's really interesting to think about. And I'm curious if there's any data out there or what maybe you've seen anecdotally or also what you've heard from other vegan businesses. Post the pandemic, has that growth continued or has it kind of plateaued?

10:08
Dina DiCenso
I think what happened after the pandemic was, you know, people's memories are very short and they kind of went back to their old buying habits. And also during that time there was a lot of really bad products launched. And then I think, because those products just, there were financial difficulties after the pandemic as well. So I think that combined with bad products put a lot of those businesses actually out of business. And that caused some of the data to show that there was a contraction within the vegan sector, primarily in the meat and cheese areas. But I mean, I think it was also magnified because people love to trash the vegan sector in general. And so I think they, you know, made it more of blew it up more than they should have because it was just a correction in the market.

11:00
Dina DiCenso
And every sector has that. And especially when you put a ton of garbage into a sector, it's going to get weeded out eventually, you know, whether it's due to taste changing or due to just people not having the money to waste on really bad products. And I think that's really what happened. So it's recovering, I think, or at least plateaued now. But I also think that we're seeing, you know, in the meat sector at least, we're seeing a lot of really good meat products come out. So. But I think the dairy section sector still can be improved.

11:30
Grace Kennedy
Yeah. What do you see as the improvements that are necessary in the dairy, the vegan dairy sector?

11:35
Dina DiCenso
I think there are some tech companies working on some things that will create like the next revolution of products. They're creating plant based casein which will allow a more natural melt and stretch to cheeses. So that will help, you know, the mozzarellas and the provolones and cheddars, you know, things that melt. But there's still a huge gap where there are more fine aged cheeses like Manchego, things that are harder to replicate. And a lot of it has to do with the cultures just are not grown on a vegan substrate still. So that kind of limits what can be made. And so I think we're working on some things, but you know, it's going to take some time to get those worked out.

12:19
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it sounds like such a science experiment. Like when you're saying things like substrates and cultures, I'm like, that's going over my head. So it makes sense that it would take some time to do these science experiments. But it's exciting. To hear that they are happening and that there is people making steps towards further innovation. I'm curious, thinking of like post pandemic world, what has been the conversations you've been having with like retailers either like retail partners that you've continued to work with. And then I also know you've continued to grow Ryan since the pandemic into more locations and areas. And so what have those conversations looks like and what has your strategy been in terms of bringing Ryan to retail?

13:00
Dina DiCenso
Well, Rind by Dina and Joshua, the aged cheese has actually recently launched in Italy. So we're there nationwide. And so that particular product line continues to be picked up by these higher end stores and more expensive retailers. You know, we're in Whole Foods, we're in Erewhon. So I think that brand will continue to be in those types of stores. And they also tend to put our cheese in the dairy section. So people sometimes have a hard time. We don't find you in Whole Foods. Yeah, you gotta look in the dairy section, which is counterintuitive for vegan cheese. But that's where ours has been determined it belongs, which we're excited about. And for our veggie underground that we're launching that in Central market actually in the coming weeks.

13:51
Dina DiCenso
So that is continuing to find, you know, small retail chains, you know, that have 10 to 20 stores. It's in some other independent grocery stores around the country. But we're hoping to get that into more food service because that is more scalable and it's easier to make. Yeah.

14:07
Grace Kennedy
Can you talk a little bit about your approach to bringing both your veggie underground into food service? And also I know you were saying that the rind, the aged cheese is also in some restaurants. And so can you talk a little bit about your approach to that?

14:18
Dina DiCenso
It is, yeah. For rind, we actually don't do any active marketing with that. Like it is just part of mouth. So the restaurants that pick it up, it's because they've looked around for is considered to be the best vegan cheese. And so they always end up finding us. So then that's how we end up in the restaurants usually. But for veggie underground, you know, that's a more competitive market because there's so many companies and so many companies that are much larger than us. Like we're a very small team, we've got four people and you know, there are other companies, the ones that we're competing with, you know, we're competing with private equity groups, they're heavily funded, they all have, you know, 20 to $50 million in funding. We're bootstrapped, we're self funded.

15:00
Dina DiCenso
But that also means that we can be a little bit more adept. And I think also because we are vegan, we're vegan owned, and everyone who works here just happens to be vegan. It was accidental, but it's. I think because we're all invested in having a product that we like and that we can eat and enjoy, rather than we're just trying to make money off of a growing sector. I think that is really what differentiates us. So we put a little more thought into our product. And, you know, were making vegan cheese at home for years. Like, even prior to making aged cheese, just since, like, you can go back to the 70s, there have been vegans making cheese out of carrots and whatnot. And so were making that at home. We're like, why wouldn't this be like, it's.

15:41
Dina DiCenso
You make it as a cheese sauce, so it's like melty. So why can't it be a slice, you know, and actually offer something more, you know, have the hidden vegetables aspect to the cheese and it ends up making it, you know, more flavorful. The coloring is all natural from it, from the vegetables that's in it. It just provides a better eating experience. And it melts and stretches a little bit, you know, not like a castane stretch, but, you know, you get some in there. And the fact that it just tastes and melts is so big for vegan cheese, you know, because everything tastes like plastic and doesn't melt or, you know, like, you've got to hold it up to the sun, you know, like be like two feet from the sun to have it melt. It's right. It's atrocious.

16:24
Dina DiCenso
So I think that because we want people to have a good experience with vegan cheese, because you really only get one chance sometimes to reach the consumer. And if they've had bad vegan cheese in the past, they don't want to try it again, you know, so that's one thing that we do come across every now and then at our demos or people who were burned by a bad product in the past, we're like, come on, it's free. Just try, even spit it out. We won't care. So. And they never do.

16:49
Grace Kennedy
They try it.

16:50
Dina DiCenso
They do, they always try it. They're like, okay, fine. And they're like, oh, wait, okay, this is great. I wish I'd had this before because then I would have been more open to it all These years, you know, So I think at least we're changing minds slowly, so one demo at a time.

17:04
Grace Kennedy
Yeah. Do you find there's any mind changing that needs to happen when you're talking to like, retail buyers or even these food service like people?

17:13
Dina DiCenso
Yeah, I think a lot of these people are not vegan and they don't care. And it's really hard to change habits and it's hard to change things that people have been just do. Like there's actually a. I don't know if I should even go into this. There's like a physical addiction component to dairy because there are casomorphins in it which bind to the mu receptors, which are what opioids bind to. And it. It's meant to bond the baby and the mother of cows. So when people eat dairy, they have that same effect. And that's why dairy is one of the hardest things to give up, because there is that addiction to it.

17:49
Dina DiCenso
So when you're asking people to give up, not only just a habit, you know, maybe it's their childhood memories, you know, they've eaten that way for 30, 40 years, whatever it might be. And then you tell them, like, okay, everything you've been doing is wrong and you have to give this up. It just doesn't go over well. Or, you know, even saying like, can you carry this product? They'll. It threatens them in some way. Sometimes, you know, they feel like you are asking them to completely change themselves, even if that's not what you're asking at all.

18:19
Grace Kennedy
Right. It's like sometimes you could buy the vegan cheese that's really good instead of the regular cheese, and that would be cool.

18:25
Dina DiCenso
Exactly. Like, just do less of what you're doing, you know, or be open to new experiences, you know, and they make the decision, though, not only for themselves, but they're making it for their customer base. So. And the other problem too, the other challenge, one of the big challenges to getting into stores other than just the mindset, is people pay brokers a lot of money. And these brokers have connections. So there's a company, again, it all goes back to money. Like, if you've got 20 million under your belt, you can afford to Pay your broker 10,000amonth to go get you in restaurants, on shelves, in stores. And we don't have that, so we have to be there by merit. So. Or someone who like, you know, was just like, okay, I feel bad for you.

19:10
Dina DiCenso
I'll give you a chance, you know, but it has to be someone who's like open minded enough and is not connected to money. That's really what it comes down to. So, you know, and even though these people are paying brokers a ton of money to get on shelves, sometimes, you know, they don't have the staying power. But in a lot of cases, you know, they will just because if they're only offering like two products on the shelf and there's any vegans in the area or even people just who are lactose intolerant or who are trying to lower their cholesterol or deal with hypertension or diabetes, you know, they may want to eat those products, like you said, some of the time.

19:51
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I'm thinking about like the customer base of both rind the aged cheese and veggie underground. And I'm curious how you do market to your customers because for vegans it's a pretty, it sounds like it's a relatively easy sell. Like, but what is your. Do you take different approaches to like the vegan marketing versus the, you know, maybe curious vegan person or the lactose intolerant person or like how do you market rind and veg underground to like this wide base of possible customers?

20:23
Dina DiCenso
We pretty much just have one marketing plan and that's, you know, yeah, it's vegan, but it tastes great. You know, whether you love dairy or not, you know, this is the cheese for you, especially with our aged cheese, because it is made exactly how they make the dairy version. So, you know, we just change out the base and we make sure that our cultures are vegan as well. So that's a little bit easier, I think, for consumers who eat aged cheese because the people who are eating the blue cheese, the stinkier cheeses, the more pungent cheeses, they're already a little bit more adventurous in their eating, so they're willing to try things. Whereas the sliced cheese is a different consumer.

21:07
Dina DiCenso
And that as the person who is more a standard middle of the road eater, you know, like not very adventurous, they like their grilled cheeses, they like their hamburgers, they like their pizza. So I think for that we do say it's vegan, it just tastes great. But this is also made with vegetables and try it. So we don't really try to like market it like it's dairy, try to sidestep what we're doing at all. We don't see a need to. And if we usually are pretty successful at convincing people to at least try it.

21:37
Grace Kennedy
And how do you. Is this, when you're saying convincing people to try it, is this like in a demo setting or do you guys do any online marketing or are you kind of all focused on in person activations?

21:47
Dina DiCenso
It's usually demos where it's convincing people to try it. When we do our demos, they do go very well. We usually, you know, sell out when we do them. So, you know, if you can get the consumer to try it, then they'll tell their friends and you know, then it becomes more of word of mouth. So I think the demos very important and I think showing up as, you know, an owner and founder to do demos is really important. People really love to meet the owners of the companies, which is kind of surprising to me for some reason. But yeah, they do like it. So yeah, it's.

22:20
Grace Kennedy
How do you manage that? As you know, as you said, a small team like wanting to do all these demos and wanting to get out there and also having so much responsibility and having a small team of your growing business.

22:30
Dina DiCenso
We do have to be selective where we do demos, but we do trade shows a lot to try to reach buyers and then the stores will sometimes hold their own demos without us. But they definitely do go way better when someone from our team is there even over hiring a demo company. Like the demo companies just, they don't have that same enthusiasm or passion or drive to really convey the mission of the products and to make sure that the customer really understands what the company is about and what the products are. So we do our best to do demos. Eventually at some point, you know, it's just going to be totally out of control and we're not going to be able to service all the stores. But for now, like, you know, we've been doing an okay job with that.

23:18
Grace Kennedy
How do you select like which stores or locations feel most important to demo at?

23:23
Dina DiCenso
Some stores actually mandate it.

23:25
Grace Kennedy
So, you know, no choice there.

23:28
Dina DiCenso
Yeah, no, if we don't have a choice, we do it. But it's also like the stores where we think we're going to have the highest impact. That's usually what we'll prioritize because there's some stores, even if it's within the same company, there's some locations of those stores that just might not be as fruitful because of the client base there for whatever reason, you know, whether it's the area it's in or the city or region or whatever. So that's usually. And we also take into account like who's available, who can do it. We going to be, are we going to be close by like you know, next month we're going to be in Chicago at the National Restaurant association show for food service and happen to be in some stores in that area.

24:08
Dina DiCenso
And so we're going to try to set some demos up while we're. We're there as well.

24:12
Grace Kennedy
So that's super exciting. How are you guys preparing to go to the National Restaurant association and in trade shows in general, how do you guys prepare for that and approach them?

24:22
Dina DiCenso
Usually it's just a last minute panic sort of thing. Like two or three days before we have to like, either ship our stuff there or actually drag it over to the convention center. You know, it's like, what are we doing? Throw it into a box, ship it off? We have a pretty basic setup. We've. We don't spend a lot of money on our booth because we feel that the product is strong enough to actually, like, represent us well. And we, you know, while we do have a banner and we do have a tablecloth, like, we just don't go out of our way for wasting money on swag that people are just going to throw out later anyway. And that kind of goes against our sustainability mission anyway. But we usually just demo our cheese straight up.

25:02
Dina DiCenso
We don't put jam on it like, you know, some other people do to. To mask the flavor. You want people to try it and in and of itself and really get that full rind effect?

25:13
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, thinking of other things that are coming down, you know, the pipeline for rind and veggie Underground this year besides the trade show. But, like, what do you see for the second half of this year? What are your priorities for rind and what are you guys really trying to focus on?

25:29
Dina DiCenso
This year we really are focusing on food service and then expanding the retail reach. We want to be in additional small chains across the country with veggie underground. So we are really pushing the expansion of veggie underground as well as supporting the current distribution of rind.

25:48
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. That's super exciting. And I was saying before we started recording that there's a great vegan restaurant in Philly that I'm actually going to soon and I'm going to be like, do they have rind cheese here? And maybe they'll pick you guys up? Because they should. That's really exciting, though, to see, like, what comes out of all of these, you know, trade shows and like, where else rind slash veggie underground can go next. A question I always like to ask as we come to the end is how can our startup CPG listeners and Startup CPG community support Rind and follow along and buy rind.

26:25
Dina DiCenso
Yeah, well, you can go to our website and buy it there. We actually just launched Veggie Underground on Amazon the last two weeks or so. So you can buy it there, give us good reviews. That always helps. Tell friends, tell families, and most importantly, badger your local buyer at your stores. That really goes a long way for small companies because all they need are a couple people saying, I want to buy this and you know, they'll say, oh, our customers are willing to buy this. If these couple of people will, then there must be others that will as well in our area. So don't underestimate the power of a lot of individuals, you know.

27:01
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm going to go talk to my local shops asap. Well, it was so much fun to chat with you, Dina and I can't wait to see what happens next and where Rhine Veggie Underground go. And good luck with the trade show and all of the above. And yeah, was great to have you on.

27:21
Dina DiCenso
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. I always love working with startup cpg. I think it's been a very important force in our growth actually. It's been very helpful. So I think it's important for every small startup out there to be a part of it if you've got a CPG company. So lots of great resources and support. So. And we're actually in the Startup CPG section this summer at the Fancy Food show, so we're very excited.

27:46
Grace Kennedy
Can't wait. The Fancy Food show is like the most fun trade show I think too, so.

27:50
Dina DiCenso
Oh, it is.

27:50
Grace Kennedy
It's a great one to be at and thrilled you'll be in the sort of CPG section, which is also a very fun section.

27:56
Dina DiCenso
It is so much fun. That's actually why were like, oh, we got to be there this year.

28:01
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, I love it. Well, I can't wait. Hopefully I'll see you there. And yeah, great talking to you.

28:08
Dina DiCenso
Great talking to you too.

28:10
Grace Kennedy
All right, everybody. Hey 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.