The Startup CPG Podcast

Jana Goodbaum
We did set out with was this extremely high standard when it came to ingredients. So we said, okay, first of all, everything's organic, it's non gmo. We knew we wanted the clean label project certification. We knew we wanted to be allergen free so that they could go into sort of every school, every daycare, no matter what the restrictions were, and make them accessible to sort of kids with allergies. And so went in with this sense of, okay, we want this type of ingredients, we want them to taste really good, and we actually want them to fill a kid up.

00:47
Grace Kennedy
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the startup CPG podcast. This is Grace, and today I'm joined by Jana Goodbaum, the founder of Happy Wolf. Happy Wolf makes nutritious fridge fresh snack bars for kids in flavors like chocolate chip, apple cinnamon, and strawberry. Jan and I talk all about Happy Wolf's origins, the challenges of being a refrigerated product, how they utilized Expo west to get into Whole Foods and what they're doing now to ensure they actually stay in Whole Foods. I hope you enjoy this episode and as always, let me know what you think. Hello, everyone, this is Grace and I am here with Jana Goodbaum. Actually, I just realized. Is it Jan?

01:36
Jana Goodbaum
That's perfect.

01:36
Grace Kennedy
Okay, perfect. Well, I said it right. Jana Goodbaum, welcome to the show.

01:41
Jana Goodbaum
Jana, thank you and thanks for having me on.

01:44
Grace Kennedy
So excited to chat about Happy Wolf today, the brand you co founded, and I'd love for you to introduce Happy Wolf to our listeners.

01:54
Jana Goodbaum
Sure. So Happy Wolf, we're a snack company. We make wildly simple snacks for toddlers and kids that are made only with the ingredients that you would use in your own kitchen and nothing else.

02:05
Grace Kennedy
Yes. And I was saying to Jenna before we got started that I've tried Happy Wolf's snack bars, and I was like, is it okay that I'm an adult? You know, me and my partner both ate, I think there were like three boxes and we ate all of them. But they're delicious and super easy and like, of bite sized, which for a child is probably a perfect snack and for an adult is like a little bitty snack and perfect as well. So I'm a fan, would love to hear a little bit about why you decided to create this brand and, you know, why you felt it was needed in the market.

02:37
Jana Goodbaum
Sure. So I come from the advertising world. I sort of, like worked my way up. I had my dream job in so many ways. I was leading advertising for a quick serve restaurant company, actually, and I loved it. But at the end of the Day, like I wasn't really eating the food that I was selling. I've always been super health conscious, ingredient focused. And you know, that started to feel worse and worse over time. But that sort of health consciousness really became more extreme when I became a mom because of course, you know, someone else's sort of nutrition and health is now in your own hands. And so I was making everything for my daughter homemade from scratch. And that worked really well while I was on, you know, maternity leave, living in my Canadian bliss.

03:21
Jana Goodbaum
But when I went back to work, I was like, okay, I need to help myself out. I need to get some sort of convenient packaged options to help me, especially on the snack side. I'm already making three meals a day. Went to the grocery store looking for sort of like those toddler items, the kids items. And I was really sort of fascinated and frustrated that kids snacks had not really evolved since I was growing up in like the early 90s. You know, now it's not high fructose corn syrup anymore. Maybe they're using organic brown rice syrup, but it's pretty much still carbs and sugar, the vast majority of the category. And also like some pretty weird ultra processed ingredients that like, I certainly wasn't using at home when I was baking for her.

04:03
Jana Goodbaum
And so that sort of got me down this rabbit hole of like, if I'm feeling this way, if I'm feeling like there's this whole aisle in the grocery store filled with kids snacks, but I don't want any of them. There must be other parents out there like me. And I had done a ton of market research in my corporate role, so I sort of put that hat on. I started setting up calls and interviews with other moms. Ended up talking to like hundreds of them over the course of a year. I was doing these like mini interviews, I called them nap time interviews. And I really heard that I wasn't alone and that most people bought kids snacks but didn't like their kids snacks. And that sort of struck me as a big opportunity.

04:41
Jana Goodbaum
And I was like, parents are only going to be getting more health conscious over time. And so very, very long story short, I ended up quitting my dream job to basically set out to create the snacks I felt were missing for my kids and for millions of more kids, but absolutely no idea where to go from there. And so meanwhile, I had a good friend named Derek who I had sort of watched build and scale a premium, really sort of best in class pet food company over the past decade. And he had recently left. He was in early retirement, as I like to call it, like, for a few months, you know, with his young kids. And I went to him and verbatim, I literally said, derek, you already did this. You built the best possible products for millennial pet parents.

05:25
Jana Goodbaum
Well, all of those parents have now gone on to have kids of their own. And if you thought they were crazy about what they fed their pets, imagine how discerning they are about what they feed their kids. And so, I mean, it didn't happen overnight, but I did convince him, and then were off to the races.

05:41
Grace Kennedy
I love that's so true about, you know, people are really conscious of what they feed their pets because they're their babies. And then they have real babies, and they're like, okay, well, now I have to be even more conscious of what I'm giving my real babies. So that's a funny sort of transition for him from pet food toddler food. But it makes kind of sense the way you. You phrase that. So once you guys got off to the races, what were some of your first steps? And how did you decide on bars and specifically your refrigerated bars?

06:13
Jana Goodbaum
Yes, and we didn't necessarily decide that. I'll. I'll explain. So we knew that there was a whole category of snacks to innovate on and sort of clean up and make better snack bars. Bars was a category within kid snacks that almost every household we spoke to purchased. They're really convenient on the go. They're not messy. Like, all these really good things about them, versus, like, an applesauce, if you think about that. But nobody loved them. So were like, okay, snack bars is where we're gonna start. And we in no means set out to make a refrigerated snack bar. Absolutely not. But what we did set out with was this extremely high standard when it came to ingredients. So we said, okay, first of all, everything's organic, it's non gmo.

07:00
Grace Kennedy
We.

07:00
Jana Goodbaum
We knew we wanted the clean label project certification. We knew we wanted to be allergen free so that they could go into sort of every school, every daycare, no matter what the restrictions were, and make them accessible to sort of kids with allergies. And so went in with this sense of, okay, we want the. This type of ingredients, we want them to taste really good in, and we actually want them to fill a kid up. Because a lot of these kids snacks, like, you know, you have a bar, 10 minutes later your kid is hungry again. Like, they're not filling you up. You're. They're just giving you a blood sugar crash and sort of making you happy for a second. And so when we started innovating, we had, like, 154 recipes in my kitchen. We were meeting every day to sort of recipe develop.

07:45
Jana Goodbaum
Sunflower seed butter and pumpkin seed butter were the best base for our bar that we could find. That gave us sort of that satiation. Like, it filled you up, and it was high in fiber, in fat, healthy fat, and protein. But the problem was when we used that base, it would go rancid. Like, it would start to taste less and less good pretty quickly, like, over weeks. And were like, I don't really know how we're going to commercialize this type of product, but if we go to, like, an oat base or, you know, then we're just like everyone else. It's not so special. And so we learned that the fridge was a natural preservative.

08:26
Jana Goodbaum
If you bought a jar of pumpkin seed butter yourself, if you opened it up, I would highly recommend you put that in the fridge instead of in your pantry, because it will stay good in the fridge for months. Once it's been open months and months versus in your pantry, it will start to go rancid after weeks. And so we took that and we said, okay, this is a go or no go moment. We can try a refrigerated bar, almost like a perfect bar, if you will, but for kids. And instead of peanut butter being the base, it would be this, these seed butters. Or we can start over, and we can try to figure out a different category that we might be able to innovate on without using the fridge. We decided to go for it.

09:05
Jana Goodbaum
Knowing that it would add complexity, it would add cost, and it would be a little bit less convenient for parents because now they have to think about the fridge. We're still good on the go for three days out of the fridge, which is, you know, a point of education that also needed to be part of our thinking. But we decided to do it because we really felt like there were no good options in this category. People were really unsatisfied with the status quo grocery items. And were like, okay, even if this is going to be harder, we're really filling this unmet need. We're filling this gap, and it's worth it to do it.

09:38
Jana Goodbaum
And every parent that we spoke to about it was like, I already send my kids with, you know, these, like, yogurt pouches with baby bell cheese with maybe a smoothie pouch. I'm sending an ice pack. Anyway, in Their lunch. It's really not that much extra work for me. And so we decided to go forward.

09:56
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, definitely. And it probably helps a little bit. That perfect bar already existed, and that, like, has been in the, you know, refrigerated bar category now for a long time. So people already kind of have some, you know, readiness to find a bar in the fridge. And now it's like, well, you can also find your kids bar. Exactly.

10:15
Jana Goodbaum
And we really did sort of feel like were riding this wake. You know, it still requires a lot of education. It's not as easy as being shelf stable in the center of the store where, you know, you get a little bit more of that organic discovery. But between sort of the perfect bars in the midday squares, educating on the adult snack side, and then, you know, incredible brands like Once Upon a Farm, who have really been teaching parents to go look in the fridge for better options for their kids. We felt like there was enough momentum that weren't just going to sort of leave people scratching their heads. What is this?

10:48
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, definitely. So once you decided to go forward with this refrigerated bar and, you know, set out to create it and bring it to market, what were some of your first steps? It sounds like maybe Derek was more aware of, like, operations and maybe you had more experience in the marketing. So how did you guys kind of team up to then combine your two expertise to bring it to the market in, you know, full force?

11:13
Jana Goodbaum
Yes. Okay. So on the product development and sort of supply chain side, we still did need to work with a few R and D experts. You know, contracted certain people to help us with things like water activity and extended or accelerated shelf life testing, which is like, where you put your product in, like, a hot drawer for a few months and check in on it every so often to understand, like, what's going to happen. Mimicking the effects of, like, time, basically. So if you can't actually leave your product to sit out for two years and check on it every week, how can you mimic that?

11:48
Grace Kennedy
Yeah.

11:49
Jana Goodbaum
And so Derek, I would have had no idea how to do that. Derek had done that before. He knew what to do, which was great. And then we had to find a co packer, of course. So finding a co packer was difficult. It's a straightforward category. You tell someone you want to make a snack bar. Meeting hundreds of co packers can make a snack bar. Most co packers are not willing to make a snack bar that uses no emulsifiers, no stabilizers, no syrups, like, basically nothing to aid them in helping like the batter not stick to the machine, stuff like that. Right. Also had to find it completely allergen free, you know, partner. So it was tricky finding a co packer who like believed in what were doing enough to experiment with us, if you can imagine.

12:35
Jana Goodbaum
So a lot of them would just say here's what we can do and here's what we can't do. But I think if we tweak this and tweak that, maybe make it work and we're sort of willing to learn with us. And I will say we like broke our co packers equipment a little bit using too much honey one trial run. And so that took a lot longer than I. I remember we had some sort of a schedule that where we said like co packer search. Two months. No, it took heck of a lot longer than that. But we found the right partner in the end on my side. So I'm the branding that's sort of the side that I love.

13:05
Jana Goodbaum
Brand marketing, it was coming up with a name, it was deciding, you know, what are we going to look like so that parents want to buy this brand and sort of give it a little bit of a health halo. But kids are still excited about it and it doesn't look like some sort of like boring organic green brand. And so the brand building side was really fun, but it was really strategic as well.

13:31
Grace Kennedy
Yeah. And I do love your branding and it looks really cute and kind of like it is kids appropriate, but it's adjacent. Yeah, kids adjacent. Exactly. It's not so incredibly like kids that you're like kind of embarrassed as an adult to have it in your fridge.

13:45
Jana Goodbaum
That's funny because that was one of the like key points in our brief when were saying what do we want to come out of this? It was like, I want someone to be able to like pull it out at the office and not feel like they're bringing out like a baby snack, you know, that people would look at them funny. So it has to be like mature and sophisticated enough that you would pull it out of your bag at the office. But also like my kids can't read. They need a picture, they need a character, they need something that gets them excited. And so it had to have that as well.

14:15
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, definitely. And I wanted also to return to some of that education piece you spoke to. And I'm curious how you are approaching that in like not only your branding, but also your advertising and marketing. And how are you communicating the message of like, it needs to be in the fridge, but also you can have it out for three days. If you, like, go on a camping trip and you know, things like that, how are you making sure your consumers and customers know about those details?

14:40
Jana Goodbaum
So I won't lie, we, like, made some mistakes on that side at the beginning. Like, I thought that was so obvious if it just said it, like, little on the side of the box, I thought that was enough. And, like, no, no. We need to put this front and center on our packaging. And so we actually redid our packaging only about, like, a year into being in business. To have store refrigerated. Good. On the go for three days at the very top is the first thing you read. Because that was being missed when weren't there, sort of supervising it, or if you weren't a follower of ours on Instagram or going on our website. And we realized that, okay, that was a huge miss. So packaging is how most people sort of interact with us for the first time in a grocery store.

15:19
Jana Goodbaum
And so packaging had to do some of that educating for us in a bigger, more obvious way. So I'll start there as a sort of marketing and education strategy. We have to go heavier on sampling than some other brands because, again, you're not expecting to find this amazing snack for your kid in the fridge right now, necessarily. And so we're really investing in, like, a little army of demo reps, brand ambassadors, who are standing in store and really trying to interrupt parents as they're shopping and direct them to the fridge to find Happy Wolf. And part of that spiel and part of that initial conversation, we always get questions, oh, but can I still pack it for my kid to school? Oh, can I still bring it on a road trip?

16:02
Jana Goodbaum
And, you know, I think being in store is something we won't be able to do forever, but at this beginning stage is so important, and it's really paid off in leaps and bounds already. And then we are very active on social, especially on Instagram. And so we talk about the sort of unique properties of our snacks all the time in conversation on social and stories and, you know, every day.

16:28
Grace Kennedy
Yeah. And speaking of being in store, you guys recently launched in Whole Foods, which is so exciting. And I'd love to hear a little bit about, like, how you're approaching sampling and packaging and all those things. But what has been your approach to actually getting into the store and now launching into Whole Foods? How have you guys been strategizing around that?

16:49
Jana Goodbaum
Sure. So getting into Whole Foods was always kind of like our North Star, their dream retailer. We felt like they were so Aligned. We've done, you know, hundreds of store visits over the last few years as were researching this brand, this category, CPG in general. And we really felt like Whole Foods was where, you know, our shopper was like, who didn't need as much convincing, let's say. So we really knew that we wanted to be there. Earlier in our journey, we took a big risk. We got a booth at Expo west last year in our first year of business, which was a huge investment. And were like, okay, what are our goals we met before. What are our goals of going next to us can meet the Whole Foods buyers and get into Whole Foods this year. And it worked.

17:34
Jana Goodbaum
And if that's what came out of Expos for us and it paid off. And I think what we maybe underestimated was okay, getting in is like truly just like baby step one, getting that approval to be in store. We are now at the phase we launched mid November, so really recently. And you know, we're getting pictures like Happy Wolf is alone in a fridge with orange juice at this one store in Connecticut and Happy Wolf is in a wine fridge with like champagne in this other store. And so merchandising, making sure that we're in the right place in every store. That's been a huge work stream for us. Getting ready for like our big sort of true launch that's taking place like now in January where we're on sale for the first time. We have 50 something demos planned for across the country.

18:30
Jana Goodbaum
We are going to be like doing all these fun in store activations with kids and so lots of work to do to just actually be able to sell in whole fifth, if you can imagine.

18:43
Grace Kennedy
Totally. And I, I think I hear that all the time from founders is, you know, getting into the store is one thing, but staying in the store and making sure you're like in the right place and your package isn't like upside down or you know, placed with a random like in a section it shouldn't be placed in is a whole nother battle. How are you working with like the team at Whole Foods or you know, external partners to make sure that Happy Wolf is in the right place.

19:09
Jana Goodbaum
So we hired merchandising partners in each region. Actually we use different partners who have expertise in that region and who are sort of small and scrappy and ready to get their hands really dirty for us and go into the cold storage in the back of Whole Foods and find us for example, if we're not on shelf the day that they get there. So we Hired merchandisers who you basically pay small amounts of money per store visit, and they basically work their hardest to get you into the best possible position in the store that you can be in. They're trying to find, you know, double placements, secondary placements if you're lucky. They're making sure that if you're almost out of stock, there's a reorder so that they know that your product's going to be in stock in the next few days, if it's not already.

19:56
Jana Goodbaum
And they're really just sort of being. I mean, I have two kids and a husband, and I have a lot of responsibilities here. I can't. You know, as much as I wish I could, I literally wish that I could be out visiting stores all day, every day right now. And so they're sort of doing that for me and acting as an extension of our team in these early days.

20:15
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, definitely. That's good to know about for anybody who's doing a big launch like this, because like you said, you. You physically cannot be at every store as much as you would like.

20:23
Jana Goodbaum
I didn't know this existed. Like, I think that's very naive of me, but I didn't. I've heard the term merchandising, but I thought that was something like that. Big brands did, not necessarily little brands. And I didn't realize that it's sort of table stakes, you know, especially around launch time, maybe not forever.

20:39
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, there's so much you don't know if you haven't been in the industry really before. And I even learned so much just from doing this podcast every time. And so I always feel like I'm asking dumb questions sometimes, but then I'm like, well, nobody knows these things unless they've been in the business for a minute. So, you know, we all maybe feel like we're asking dumb questions sometimes, but you gotta ask a rookie.

21:03
Jana Goodbaum
Like, there's just so much rookie learning. And I listened to this podcast, and I have been listening to this podcast for several years, and I always take notes. I always learn something. So anyone who's launching into Whole Foods, you should probably get a merchandiser. I have a merchandiser on call, at least.

21:20
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, absolutely. Another thing I wanted to go back to was, you know, when this episode comes out, it'll be like, mid January. And thinking about, there are probably brands listening who are gearing up to attend some of these trade shows this year, like Expo west or Fancy Foods or anything like that. And I'm wondering if you have any advice for brands who are deciding to, you know, make that investment to be at one of these trade shows. And how did you guys kind of try to ensure that the investment was worth your while? And obviously you got what your number one goal was. But any advice you have for brands who are gearing up for trade shows.

21:52
Jana Goodbaum
I think we got a little bit lucky. And so I'm gonna give us that this year. We know that every last dollar should be used to support Whole Foods, to create a case study to make sure that it's working. And so, you know, is there a lot of value in us spending thousands of dollars to like get into more stores at this point? Probably not, but we felt like, first of all, we're refrigerated. And so D2C is not this sort of channel that can work for us sustainably right now when we only have four SKUs, we don't have this like huge basket that you can build these hundreds of dollar orders. We just have snack bars.

22:33
Jana Goodbaum
And so we knew we needed to get into retail faster than maybe some other brands who could sort of build their customer base D2C for a longer time. And so Expo west felt like this place where we could reach the buyers. We had a handful of buyers, we knew who they were, we had emailed them, we had LinkedIn them, we had like met them at events, we knew exactly who we wanted to meet at Expos. We knew when they were going to be there, we told them our booth numbers. And so we did get lucky. But we also set ourselves up, I guess to like, we're going to xos to meet with Whole Foods. That was the goal.

23:11
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, very specific goals. And I, I think that's also great advice thinking about like literally knowing exactly who you're looking for because there are so many people, especially at Expo west that are walking down the aisle. And so I had a list.

23:23
Jana Goodbaum
I mean, of course you can't go to Expos by yourself. Highly, do not recommend going by yourself. It's mayhem, especially on the first day. So we had, you know, Derek's cousin, Derek's 22 year old cousin, who's amazing, but like didn't know anything about this industry at all. And he was just there to be like extra hands with us. So I made, you know, a printout sheet with the faces of these, their names, who we're looking for. I was, there's, there was four of us. I was drilling everybody the night before, like, here's who we're looking for. If this person goes anywhere near us, like all you know, everyone must stop, everyone must get her attention until were very laser focused. I hope she's not listening because that's really creepy. But that is what we did.

24:06
Jana Goodbaum
And then similarly we had a few influencers who I just knew, like, listen, you know, your niche and for us our niche is like ultra clean ingredients and parents who deeply care about ultra clean ingredients and non toxic living and things like this. And so I knew the influencers who, you know, let's say I had been trying to reach on Instagram for months and I wasn't able to and had reached out to every email and every connection, I still couldn't reach them. And so they were also on that sort of target sheet. Also hope they're not listening so that, you know, they could help us reach our audience which overlaps completely. And you know, we had a real, a lot of success with that as well.

24:46
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that actually brings up a good point I'm curious about is like, how are you working with those influencers? Especially like you said, you're trying to put every dollar into a strategic place. And so how are you know, working with influencers or working with like social media people to where obviously so many parents like recommendations from people they trust. So it seems like a really fruitful space for you guys. But also, obviously can be expensive. Yeah.

25:12
Jana Goodbaum
So we have learned also lessons on this front. But I think, listen, there's no better place for someone to learn about you than an influencer who again, they really trust. We cannot afford to pay the rates that big brands pay. We really can't even afford to pay anything if I'm honest. Right. Like we are so new, we're a year old. And so what we have learned is at first were just gifting product like seeding products in the language of influence, intermarketing. We were seeding product to anyone and everyone, you know, who we felt like reached moms, these huge influencers and weren't getting, you know, the results maybe that we could have.

25:55
Jana Goodbaum
And so we quickly learned that gifting or seeding product to the influencers who spend their lives researching and you know, this niche, this area of ultra clean ingredient food, snacks, products, that's who cares about our mission and our reason for being and is so excited about what we're putting out into the world because we represent something that they've been looking for or that they know is a gap. Whereas if we just send it to like a mom blogger or a moment Instagrammer who has these millions of followers but who are all moms. It's like they are not going to sell it the same way. They're just going to be like, my kid loves these new snack bars. They're so yummy. And they're healthy too. That's not getting anyone to buy. It's just not a convincing argument.

26:43
Jana Goodbaum
When there's a whole grocery store filled with products. When we send it to these, you know, non toxic living Instagrammers, they are reading our ingredients to their followers. They're saying, look at this. They only use these ingredients, nothing else. There's not even any natural flavors in here. Things that our target demographic, especially the extremists who are going to like seek us out at this phase and go out of their way to seek us out that they are convinced by.

27:10
Jana Goodbaum
And so if you're another brand and you're starting out and you're thinking about seeding and you can't afford to pay the right influencers, what I would say is you give it for free, give your product for free, don't ask for anything in return, but only do that to influencers who care so much, who you know, care so much about what you're doing and you know that they appreciate your differentiators.

27:34
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that's great advice and definitely can be easy to fall in the rabbit hole of just like send it to everybody. But you need like to know more specifically your niche. And is there anything else you guys, I mean again, money. But is there anything else you guys are doing in terms of advertising either online or offline to get Happy Wolf in front of more people?

27:56
Jana Goodbaum
So we are not spending on social really at all. Like we're really not paying for customer acquisition or for followers or anything like that. Right now what we are doing is investing instacart and now that we're in Whole Foods. Whole Foods on Amazon. Because when you think about moms, busy moms are really our core customer. They shop online more than most. And so we Instacart and Whole Foods Market on Amazon gives us the opportunity to sort of bid to get in front of them while they're grocery shopping rather than waiting and hoping that they find us organically in the grocery store and discover us. So it's sort of aiding in that discovery. So that is where we are investing dollars.

28:40
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, I think. And yeah, so many parents do use these like online shopping for groceries. And so, you know, it's a great way to get Happy Wolf in front of more of them. Another thing I Was thinking about as you were talking, was just thinking about kind of the kids food market more in general. And I mean, it sounds like you guys have done a ton of research into like this niche. And I'm curious if you have any thoughts about just like where you see the kids market going and like how you see Happy Wolf kind of aligning with that trajectory.

29:11
Jana Goodbaum
Sure. So, I mean, I think across all food right now, we are real believers, obviously in sort of the clean eating wave. You know, I think for many years it was like what was on the front of the box mattered, what's on the nutritional panel matters. Like just looking at sort of the macros. And we are again strong believers that like you need to look at the ingredients first before you check how much sugar or how much protein it's, know where all of that is coming from, understand the source. And so I think that trend towards clean eating, we believe will ultimately lead to more innovation in the fridge because, you know, in the center of the store in many categories you need additives or preservatives to make something shelf stable.

30:00
Jana Goodbaum
And so of course we may be early on to it, but we really believe that we're going to see grocery stores expand their refrigerated sections and their frozen sections as the center of the store starts to become just less attractive.

30:14
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, definitely. That makes sense to me, I think. I mean, I certainly buy a lot of refrigerated things.

30:20
Jana Goodbaum
I think interestingly, like, what's been so interesting to watch this last year especially is like the conversation around clean eating that was maybe more niche has become very mainstream this year. I mean, between, I mean, regardless of your politics, I won't go there. But like, the Make America Healthy Moms is this crazy powerful group of moms who are basically single issue voters on kids health and specifically the ingredients in their kids food is like a top conversation right now. The boycotts around Kellogg's and food dyes and kids cereal. I think it's been really interesting to see something that we talk about all day. Just like, you know, be front and center on CNN and the New York Times.

31:05
Grace Kennedy
Totally become kind of like a hot button issue. And yeah, very interesting. And I think you're right in that we'll see, you know, things, you know, probably go in that direction. And of course, you know, it'll be different for different stores, but certainly for the niche you're looking to tap into, that makes a lot of sense to me. So obviously you guys are launching into Whole Foods and that's very exciting. What else do you see coming down the pipeline for how Happy wolf this year, 2025 and beyond.

31:34
Jana Goodbaum
So something that we are really excited about, I guess, is the fact, like, what Instagram has allowed us to do from a community building perspective. I think a lot of people say it, but I think it means something different to everyone. And for us it's been, you know, were very inaccessible, let's call it. When we launched, weren't in a lot of stores. We were refrigerated, so were making people pay for shipping with ice packs. Like, so a lot of parents, moms specifically found us online and were engaging with us and were like so excited about what were doing, but they weren't actually eating the product yet.

32:09
Jana Goodbaum
And now that we're in Whole Foods, it's like that has sort of unleashed this really powerful, like, yeah, it's a superpower of like these moms are going to Whole Foods, they're buying happy wool for their kids whole class or their kids holiday parties. They're like, I told you weren't necessarily getting out of the back room on those first days after launch. Like, we had moms going in every single day begging the store managers at Whole Foods to bring us in. And so I think we've really seen the value in being transparent on social, in telling our story, in building like customer relationships very deeply through DMs and Zooms and calls.

32:46
Jana Goodbaum
And so we really want to go further there and invest more of our time and energy into creating this, that community and growing it and like setting up special events for our community members. We have, we've been having like little kids demo for us in Whole Foods, like super fans who eat Happy Wolf every day. We have this little sampling cart and we literally have their moms like meeting us at Whole Foods and those kids are the ones handing out samples. And that, you know, is so special. I think it's fun, of course, but it's also like, it really makes that family feel like some ownership, a sense of ownership over this brand and what we're doing and our Whole Foods launch. And so just more of that, I think is where we see 2025.

33:29
Jana Goodbaum
And then eventually, like going forward, of course, more retailers one day, we want to be more accessible to more families. We really believe every kid deserves this type of food, these types of snacks. And so making ourselves more accessible is a big long term goal. And then, you know, snack bars is really just the beginning. It was the first category that we launched. We felt it was sort of the most ubiquitous where we could have the impact right away, but there is endless kids products that could use sort of the Happy Wolf touch and this sense for parents that it feels homemade, but we made it for them.

34:03
Grace Kennedy
Absolutely. So exciting. Well, how can the startup CPG community and our listeners support Happy Wolf and follow along?

34:12
Jana Goodbaum
Okay, well, you can follow along on Instagram @happywolfsnacks and you can purchase us at stores like Whole Foods, Wegmans, Erewhon, Gelson's and more. And you can Visit our website happywolf.com if you want to order online.

34:30
Grace Kennedy
Amazing. So much fun to chat with you, Jana, and learn more about Happy Wolf. And I'm so excited to see where you guys go next. And everybody should also flood their local Whole Foods or after they listen to this. Even if you don't have kids, they're. They're a perfect snack for adults too. But especially if you have kids, you should go flood the local Whole Foods and send Jenna a picture of Happy Wolf on the shelf.

34:54
Jana Goodbaum
Thank you.

34:55
Grace Kennedy
Yeah, thanks so much. Take care. 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 King 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.