The Startup CPG Podcast

Joe Cassinelli
The great thing is, like, I think that the CPG world is a lot more collaborative than what, you know, kind of like what the restaurant world used to be, where a lot of chefs were always helping each other, and you lean on each other and you'd, like, borrow ingredients from each other. Like, hey, I ran out on tuna on a Friday night. I could call a friend and say, like, when you borrow 10 pounds of T tuna, you know, that's changed a little bit now in this, like, new modern restaurant world. But I have to say, like, the openness for everybody in the CPG world to kind of jump in and, like, just give advice. And people aren't afraid to tell you where they messed up, and neither am I.

00:44
Joe Cassinelli
And I've always taken a lot of pride in helping, like, chefs that have worked for me grow and, like, open their own restaurants. And I feel like the CPG world is a lot like that. Like, you know, people are more willing to lift you up than to knock you down.

01:02
Caitlin Bricker
Hey, everybody, this is Caitlin Bricker, editor at startup cpg. We are back with another founder feature. Today we're talking with Joe Casinelli, founder of El Nacho, a premium tortilla chip brand bringing restaurant quality chips to the snack aisle. After nearly 35 years in restaurants, Joe and his business partner built their own factory during the pandemic to create better for you. Tortilla chips with bold lucha libre inspired packaging. From launching as another me Too tortilla chip to completely rebranding and relaunching as premium Joe's, proving that sometimes you need to blow everything up to get it right. These chips disappeared embarrassingly fast from my house, so be prepared for this episode. Enjoy. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin, and today I'm here with Joe Castanelli, founder of El Nacho. Joe, welcome to the show.

01:59
Joe Cassinelli
Hi, Kayla. Thanks for having me.

02:01
Caitlin Bricker
Really excited to have you. Our team was super excited when we got the El Nacho samples for the Shelfie Awards, and mine are long gone. We can just say that. But really excited to have you here have a conversation about you and your brand. So. So let's get started. We can have you introduce El Nacho really quickly for anybody in the audience that isn't familiar with your products, can you tell us what El Nacho is?

02:26
Joe Cassinelli
Yeah. Thanks for the intro. El Nacho is a premium white corn tortilla chip that my partner Toby and I developed over the past year, and we just relaunched the brand actually at Expo west. And our new focus is really on using regeneratively farmed corn nixtamalized in house. We make the tortillas, same ones we serve in the restaurants, great bold flavors. We fry everything in avocado oil. Really just positioning ourselves as the premium tortilla chip, snackable chip in the market.

02:54
Caitlin Bricker
I love that. And there are some things that I notice about the tortilla chip that I think make it very stand out from others. Two of those things are, one, they are not greasy whatsoever and the other is that I noticed that you have no natural flavors, but you have very cool, fresh, funky flavors that I've never seen elsewhere. So can you tell me a little bit about your experience coming up with flavor ideas for these products and why you chose to go totally natural and not down the natural flavor or artificial flavor route?

03:27
Joe Cassinelli
So what's really important to us? So we have a restaurant background. We have a group of Mexican restaurants here in the New England area, Massachusetts, Boston, you know, it's upscale, casual Mexican. We've cooked a James Beard house. I've been in the restaurant business since I was 15, I'm coming up on 50 now. So consumer feedback, you know, what we serve our consumers is really important to us, our diners. And coming up with unique flavors was important to us. And we really looked at a lot of the items that we have in the restaurant. So, you know, our mango Miss Mango is really based on, you know, mango salsa on a mahi taco or pineapple salsa on a carnitas taco for the Yopena pineapple barbecue. Our El Diablo chilies are based on like ranchero sauce or mole or stuff we use for chiliquilies.

04:13
Joe Cassinelli
So you're right, everything is all natural. It's real mango juice, it's real pineapple juice, it's real honey powder. Like everything is just your freeze dried juice. And we thought it was really important to just have a really clean. If we're going to use regeneratively farmed corn, we're going to fry in avocado oil, then we need to use the best ingredients we possibly can. It's just important to us.

04:32
Caitlin Bricker
It definitely comes through in the flavor, I will say, because it feels like you're eating real food even if you're just sitting here snacking on tortilla chips. It's a really refreshing experience.

04:43
Joe Cassinelli
That's awesome. I'm glad you took it that way.

04:47
Caitlin Bricker
I'm glad you made them that way because that is totally what I'm. I am personally aiming towards not consuming natural flavors as much as possible because you just never know what's in natural flavors. It's kind of like pulling the wool over our eyes. When you see natural, you think, okay, it's good. Which was the case for me for a very long time. So I appreciate what you're doing. And as far as your restaurant background goes, can you tell us a little bit more about that and how you went from restaurant to CPG founder?

05:16
Joe Cassinelli
Oh, yeah. So you hear a lot about like restaurant to retail now. And you know, Toby, I mentioned my partner, he's from Chihuahua. We met working at a restaurant probably 25 years ago, and we just stayed good friends ever since. And the restaurants have done, you know, well. And it was up until like the pandemic really, where, you know, were just kind of like struggling to, you know, especially here in Massachusetts, it was really tough. We didn't have patios and stuff during the winter. So were basically doing takeout. And Toby, we had stayed in touch and we decided to open a, you know, create a tortilla chip brand. And it was important that we just did it right. So when were quiet at the restaurants, we built a factory here in Waltham, Massachusetts and just kind of got it up and running.

05:59
Joe Cassinelli
But that was really the transition. It was like, let's take a. Take what we know from our restaurant lives and apply it to this new CPG world.

06:07
Caitlin Bricker
Do you feel like there are any parts of going from restaurant to retail that there is not a crossover? Anything new that jumped out at you in this process that was surprising?

06:17
Joe Cassinelli
Oh, I guess the biggest thing is the speed at which it doesn't happen in cpg. I mean, I always tell everybody it's like trying to float a school bus down the Charles river with the windows open. Like in the restaurant world, you want to make a change and you do it the next day. Especially when you're a chef owned company. You know, we want to change a dish, change an ingredient, get something in on special. Like we can put that out to our guests like the next day. And just a really long, slow process of like, I don't have a lot of patience. And so I've had to reevaluate my patience curve for cpg. So I think that's the biggest thing that didn't translate over.

06:52
Joe Cassinelli
But the great thing is like, I think that the CPG world is a lot more collaborative than, you know, kind of like what the restaurant world used to be, where a lot of chefs were always helping each other and you'd lean on each other and you'd like Borrow ingredients from each other. Like, hey, I ran out on tuna on a Friday night. I could call a friend and say, like, let me borrow 10 pounds of tuna. That's changed a little bit now in this, like, new modern restaurant world. But I have to say, like, the openness for everybody in the CPG world to kind of jump in and, like, just give advice. And people aren't afraid to tell you where they messed up, and neither am I.

07:24
Joe Cassinelli
And I've always taken a lot of pride in helping, like, chefs that have worked for me grow and, like, open their own restaurants. And I feel like the CPG world is a lot like that. Like, people are more willing to lift you up than to knock you down.

07:37
Caitlin Bricker
I love that. Does any piece of feedback stand out in your mind during this process of building El Nacho, where you think that you are very grateful for feedback that you received or a lesson that you learned?

07:50
Joe Cassinelli
You know, I've worked really hard to get people on the team that are much smarter than I am, and I've leaned into their experience, whether it's like, you know, I've teamed up with, like, a fractional cmo, fractional head of sales, fractional CEO. I've interviewed a ton of people for the position. I've met a lot of other brands and talked to a lot of other brands. But I think my biggest takeaway from this, and maybe this comes from the restaurant world is like, listening to the consumer. It's like listening to advice. You have to be humble enough to say you can do better. Right? So, like, we do our management meetings at the restaurant. We don't talk about P. Ls, we don't talk about all that nitty gritty stuff.

08:28
Joe Cassinelli
We talk about, like, what are we doing really well, what are we not doing really well, and how do we improve? And I think that gave us the confidence. It gave me the confidence really to, like, switch everything were doing from when we launched in 2023 to relaunching in 24 with a whole new direction. So I think it's important for you to really be willing to look in the mirror and say, how do we make this better? How do we become the brand that we want to be? Ultimately? I don't know if anybody said it in particularly, but I just think that's. If you keep your mouth shut and your ears open as you go through this process of, like, launching, it kind of comes intuitively.

09:04
Caitlin Bricker
Keep your mouth shut and keep your ears open is really good advice, because you can take in so much I think a lot of people say that too. When you're in a sales meeting, like, if you're doing all the, it's not a good sign. You want to hear your customer or your potential customer speaking more than you are.

09:21
Joe Cassinelli
I mean, that's the chef world, right? Like, you try to teach somebody how to cook, you're like, just let me show you how to do it.

09:27
Caitlin Bricker
It's so funny.

09:28
Speaker 3
We'll be right back. Hey, you got the big retailer.

09:33
Caitlin Bricker
Huzzah.

09:34
Speaker 3
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10:15
Caitlin Bricker
So you just mentioned that you did a launch in 2023 and then relaunched in 2024. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what that process looked like?

10:24
Joe Cassinelli
So we launched in 23 and we kind of followed the trend that, you know, were white corn tortilla chips, non gmo. We launched in a kraft paper bag. Really cool, really cool packaging. Still really great packaging today. Our graphic designer in house is Ryan and he does an amazing job. I mean, his creativity is like unmatched as far as, like, we're concerned. And he's a very collaborative person as well, and that's really important to have on the team. But when we launched, went into the market and we had some pretty good successes, but I really didn't see the growth that were looking for. And as I did more of the expos and traveled the country and went into other stores, I was realizing that were, I hate saying it, but like another me too. Tortilla chips.

11:06
Joe Cassinelli
Even though were great, you'd go and you'd talk to a buyer and a buyer doesn't know the difference between white corn, yellow corn, flint corn, den cornmeal corn flour, maseca. Like, they just don't know. They just price you as like you're a 12 ounce tortilla chip. You're 4.99, you're 3.99 at TPR. So we step back and we look at the data, and tortilla chips is really a $4 billion category in the grocery aisle. Three billion of that is owned by Frito Lay, right? Whether it's Tostitos, Santitas, and Doritos. The other billion dollars is made up a bunch of smaller companies like, you know, Mission sochill, Que Pasa on the border. Like, you pick your brand. The biggest of those was CFE in late July. And of course, Pepsi went out and bought Siete.

11:48
Joe Cassinelli
Everybody else had kind of seen, like, plus or minus growth of like 1%, but the growth was coming in like the premium tortilla chip. Tortilla chips can be very regional. I mean, you go to California and you go to any store, Berkeley bowl, and you'll walk the aisle and you'll see 10, 12 different cellophane brands of tortilla chips all kind of selling the same thing. Nobody really setting themselves apart. So went back to the drawing board. We were like, let's get rid of this, you know, paper bag. Let's turn up the attributes. We sourced out farmers that could provide regeneratively farmed corn. We got certified by Agrino World. We wanted to increase the cleanliness of the product, the cleaner product, and be able to fry at a higher smoke point. And avocado oil came into play for that.

12:30
Joe Cassinelli
And of course, the cost is, you know, 10x really what, you know, the. We were using for sunflower oil, but we found it to be a much cleaner taste and higher smoke point. And coincidentally, there's now this, like, you know, seed oil free push, which, you know, I don't buy into personally because a hundred pounds of anything is bad for you, whether it's seed oil or it's avocado oil. Plus, 99% of the population can't afford to eat avocado oil all the time, right? So I felt like it was, you know, the message is alienating a big group of the population. And then we really focused on the flavors and the packaging. So went from a pillow bag, from the paper bag, went to a pillow bag.

13:05
Joe Cassinelli
And that really helped us extend our shelf life to six months as opposed to, like, were lucky if were getting, like, in the summer heat, two, three months. You know, it was just the material couldn't hold up. And so kind of combining all that and repositioning ourselves in the space and trying to take ourselves basically out of that, you know, bottom shelf white corn tortilla, 4.99, and putting ourselves into, like, the premium avocado tortilla chip, 5.99 SRP and then offering like a tremendous value at 10 ounces, really what we focus our retail side on. So you look at like other brands like Asea, which are, they're fantastic chips, we're different, but we're also offering you 10 ounces of chips as opposed to like 5.5 or 7.8 ounces. So it's a 40 to 50% value to the consumer.

13:50
Joe Cassinelli
So you're getting a great value, great packaging, great marketing. You're getting phenomenal, like really artisanal chips. I mean, Toby's a master tortilla maker. You're getting super clean product, you're getting avocado oil and you're getting it all for 5.99. It's like kind of a no brainer. And we're starting to see buyers like say, oh yeah, like you're right, the consumers are coming around. Like it's a shift and it takes time and you really have to focus on, you know, doing the demos and getting deep into it and getting like that repeat purchase going. But we're getting there.

14:18
Caitlin Bricker
I'm sure it's been a process and I am very curious. Got a little guy poking his head out in the background there. For anybody who's watching the video, you went from a Kraft paper bag to this bold, bright, unforgettable branding that you have now. Can you walk us through that branding a little bit and the decisions that were made to get there?

14:39
Joe Cassinelli
Yeah, sure. So when we came up with the brand, we wanted to have a story to tell. So my background, you know, I love comic books. I come from that world. Grew up watching wrestling. Toby obviously from Chihuahua, massive, like mucha libre fan. And we wanted to combine that story arc. And Ryan also like, you know, had a lot of creative ideas like how to tie it all together with the packaging. And so what we did was created different characters for each flavor. Right? So El Nacho is, you know, our hero. Skew. We used to have origin stories on the bags themselves. We took them off of the new ones, we couldn't fit them. But you know, my son was identifying as they them and we launched El Nacho. He was his story on the bag. He was they them hero.

15:20
Joe Cassinelli
And El Diablo was like the rudo bad guy who teamed up and became good and they launched a spicy flavor. Ms. Mango is this like long lost, like love interest that came in and like found El Nacho and he taught her all the things about Lucha libre and she was from a mango farm and she teamed up and they Made the Mango chip. And Yopena is, like, a little primo cousin. So he's, like, from the Pineapple place, and it's fun. Like, we wanted to have this storytelling involved. And Ms. Mango's got, like, the Scooby Doo van. Like, she drives her, like, lowrider Impala. Pina's got his, like, street cruiser bike, and we've got skateboard one coming out soon. And that's really just to appeal to, like, a wide swath of people, right? So big, bold packaging, bright colors.

16:05
Joe Cassinelli
We want to appeal for, like, you know, that Gen Alpha, right? Get them to notice it. Gen Z as well. But Gen X are really the ones that are buying this product for them, and they can feel good about buying a clean product for their kids. And then eventually, you know, those kids, those Alphas and Gen Z's will grow up and become purchasers themselves. But we really want to create a product that was just. We knew it was going to be super clean, healthful, fun, and it's something that people could grow up with, Right? Like, you grow up with a lot of things in your life that you are nostalgic about today. And we want to become one of those nostalgic brands for people that feel comfortable buying us and know that we're.

16:44
Joe Cassinelli
There's integrity behind the brand and that we're always going to offer something that is, like, that's the right thing.

16:49
Caitlin Bricker
I love that story of nostalgia, because I find that a lot when I'm tasting brands now or seeing packaging that I'm like, oh, this is totally bringing me back to the 90s in my childhood. And I can tell you right now, this is a little funny tidbit of information. When my husband tasted the pineapple barbecue flavor of the chips, it was our personal favorite. He was leaning up against the refrigerator in our kitchen, and he just had his hand in the bag. And I'm just sitting there watching him eating, and I was like, hello. He was like, I'm sorry. I just blacked out and the bag was gone. To be able to have something like that is. You know, I ate a lot of Doritos as a kid.

17:28
Caitlin Bricker
Maybe not a lot, but to have something that's a similar experience but way better for you and then to be able to not feel bad about giving it to my daughter either is just fantastic. So I think you nailed it.

17:40
Joe Cassinelli
Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, that's what we're looking for. I grew up. I was a cool ranch guy forever. You know, it is what it is. But There's a place for everybody. You know, it's a huge market and consumers are making decisions around health more and more today. And I have been making decisions around my health more and more. And you want to have products that are fun, that you can snack on and also that are going to change. There's variety and there's your diet. Hopefully. Like, people do a lot of things with their diet and they like keep themselves on repetitiveness. Right. Like, this is working for me, like repeat buy. So, you know, being able to offer a product that people can put into their diet regimen and like on a daily and not feel bad about it is important to us.

18:20
Caitlin Bricker
Yeah, I keep hearing you mention cleaner, better, a better for you snack. So can you tell me what your process looked like when you were creating these chips and if there was ever a point where you felt like you weren't gonna make a better for you chip, or did you always feel like it was gonna be that way?

18:37
Joe Cassinelli
No, we knew it could be done. We're a small, we're a self funded startup company. We invested heavily in owning our factory so that we could control our product. Right. So we're not dealing with a co man. Like, for example, we try to go on like comana salsa and you just get so much pushback. You're like, no, you can't do this. We can't cook like this, we can't dice like this, we can't mix like this. Or we have to add citric acid. Because xyz, there's not a lot of dialogue for like alternative, like problem solving. Right. Like when you're in a restaurant world, you solve 1,000 problems every day. You know, it's just like, that's what you do. And we knew that we could solve the same problems and just through experimentation. Right.

19:19
Joe Cassinelli
So our recipes since we launched have changed a little bit here and there. Like we'll get feedback from a consumer saying like, oh, your mango. I didn't notice enough seasoning. We'll go back and like, geez, you know what, maybe we should put a little bit more in the bag. Or let's turn up the heat on the chilies. Let's turn down the heat on the chilies. Let's turn the heat back up on the chilies. Like you're getting feedback from all over the country. Right? Like people in Texas want something hotter. People in the east coast don't want it. It's hot. So we try to find that like happy medium. But I think we're just so committed to the consumer Getting the best experience.

19:48
Joe Cassinelli
And I think where we're coming from a restaurant background where you're so consumer driven that it's not soup driven, it's not numbers driven, those things are obviously important, but you can make it work and just scale into it. So that's been the hardest part, but you can do it.

20:06
Speaker 3
We'll be right back. You know, it is so hard to raise money these days or really Even know what VCs actually invest in early stage brands. But good news, we are bringing all those early stage investors together. I am so pleased to announce startup CPG's founder and funders powered by our friends at doss. It's happening December 11th in New York City and it will be totally unforgettable. We'll have the top 50 early stage VCs, meaning the ones really writing checks for pre seed and seed stage brands and we're pulling them together with the top 100 brands of the year. They're going to be amazing panels, one one matchmaking and tons of networking opportunities. If you know anything about us, you know what a ridiculous opportunity this is going to be. So I really recommend getting your application in early.

20:52
Speaker 3
The website to submit is in the show notes. It's fandf.startupcpg.com Good luck.

21:06
Caitlin Bricker
How have you viewed your experience trying to scale in retail with the chips? Chips seems like such a crowded category. When you look at the shelf and then you are just spewing off all these different tortilla chip names. I was impressed that you could just do it so quickly. How does that feel being in a crowded space, trying to make yourself stand out and how has the retail reception been for that?

21:30
Joe Cassinelli
I think in business, like when you're going into category or going into a neighborhood, you're going into just like opening a restaurant. If you're going into a different real estate location, you have to understand what everybody else is doing in that around that location. If you're going into a category, you have to understand what everybody else is doing in your category. Right. It's not about like copying, it's not about following any one path. It's finding your own path while listening to everything else that's going on around you. Right. Like what's important to you may not be important to somebody else. And so we knew that there wasn't a lot of innovation happening in the category where we are now. Right.

22:11
Joe Cassinelli
There's two very different, like late July is not trying to be, you know, mission and mission's not trying to be late July or Siete Right. They're very comfortable in their category, in their lane. But where we saw was a gap to, like, a better for you Dorito. I hate saying better for you because it just seems like a cop out. But, like, there's just lack of a better description. Right. Like, we wanted to create a craveable snack that could kind of bridge the gap. And there hasn't been a lot of innovation in the tortilla chips. Right. Like, potato chips. Forget about it. Like, there's so much innovation, and it happens all the time. Tortilla chips, a little bit more difficult. And our strength comes from the manufacturing.

22:49
Joe Cassinelli
It comes from the chef background, and it comes from Toby being able to make an amazing tortilla. These are the same tortillas that we use in the restaurant for enchiladas, for tacos. So when you're starting with a great product, we knew that we just had to find a home for it in retail. When people try a product, it's, you know, you get a lot of different reactions. I mean, generally, people really love them because they taste like corn. Like, you open a bag of our original sea salt, and you put your nose in there, it smells like corn, Right? Because it's corn, people don't often look on the back of the package and realize that a lot of these chips that they're buying are made from, like, corn flour or cornmeal or blend.

23:29
Joe Cassinelli
And when you start with a dry product to make your tortillas, you're ending up with a dry tortilla that, like, crumbles in your mouth. It, like, kind of sucks all the moisture off your palate. Right. When you start with a fresh tortilla from fresh corn, you end up with a moist tortilla. And that moistness is so important because you need the steam inside the tortilla. When it bakes, that steam creates those little bubbles, those pockets. Like, hand cutting our tortillas creates rough edges. So, like, that expands. So it's of the palate experience. And we knew that none of the big brands are looking at this. Most of them are molding their little triangle shapes before they even hit the oven. So that was really important to us, even the size of our tortilla.

24:11
Joe Cassinelli
Like, we changed from cutting our tortillas from five pieces to now six pieces. And we found out that, like, cutting them a little bit smaller, like, you're able to get your knuckles in the salsa jar and, like, not have salsa all over yourself, and you can pop them in your mouth easier. So it's all about that. You Know, finding all the little things, like in your category that some people are looking at, some people aren't looking at. Right. Like, what are your competitors doing? Like, feeling confident in your space. Right. Like, it's hard. We don't have the budget, we don't have a big marketing budget to go after this stuff. So ours is really through trial getting people to try our chips. We've got an amazing fan base, like just people that have tried us in the store and like order direct from us.

24:49
Joe Cassinelli
You know, we're always asking, where did you find us? And they tell us what grocery store. And that means to us that we're doing the right thing. You know, our growth will be a little bit slower than big brands, but it's a more confident growth.

25:01
Caitlin Bricker
I think that's really inspiring. I feel like I am talking to more brands that are just, they're okay with that slow growth because they are not compromising on their values, they're not compromising on the supply chain and they're not compromising on the expectations for the consumer. So I think it's very admirable. And the consumer can stay confident in what they're receiving from you, which says a lot. In an ever changing landscape.

25:26
Joe Cassinelli
Confidence is everything, like for the consumer, if you don't, you know, if you're asking the consumer to spend their money, their hard earned dollars on your brand, then they need to know that they can trust you. And that trust is huge. And trust that we're doing everything for them and we're going to stand behind the product. Anything, any brand that does that is doing the right thing.

25:46
Caitlin Bricker
Absolutely. I am just super curious, have you ever considered or have you seen served the El Nacho tortilla chips in your restaurants before?

25:56
Joe Cassinelli
Yeah, we actually serve all of the original sea salt avocado oil chips are served in the restaurants.

26:02
Caitlin Bricker
Yeah, amazing.

26:03
Joe Cassinelli
Yeah. It's all the bags at the host stand. Yeah. So we get that feedback. You know, there are 10,000 people, more a week are eating these tortilla chips, like in our local area and they love them. So we know the experience is there because people are trying them on the daily. So we're getting all that feedback kind of in real time where we're not sending that product to a distributor to go to a shelf to like be bought and then like get a feedback like maybe a month or two from now, like we're getting real time feedback every day. That's cool.

26:30
Caitlin Bricker
That is very cool. And I'd love to circle back on your mention of collaboration in the retail Space and in the CPG space versus in the restaurant space. And I'm just curious, how did you find startup CPG and how did you become a part of this community?

26:47
Joe Cassinelli
Oh, gosh, how did I find startup cpg? I think it was just Googling. So when I start a new business venture, I try to learn everything I possibly can about it. And a lot of that starts with Google and trying to just get as much information as I possibly could. And CPG startup came up and I joined a Slack channel and just started digging in as I was writing a business plan. And, you know, I started kind of dipping my toe in the water by asking questions. Actually found my CMO through startup cpg. So, you know, just making good connections. But it was anybody that wants to get into any business, like, you have to jump in and like, try to learn as much, like gobble up as much information as you can, you know, but that's how it happened.

27:29
Caitlin Bricker
Very cool.

27:30
Joe Cassinelli
Yeah.

27:30
Caitlin Bricker
All right, so we know how you found us. I would love for you to tell everybody who's listening how they can find El Nacho. Where are you living online. What's your handle? Tell us everything.

27:41
Joe Cassinelli
Oh, sure. So we're www.elnachochip.com. You can find us there. You can find us at a bunch of local retailers. We're in about 1150 stores now. We just launched in Whole Foods actually this week, depending where you are. Fresh thyme. We're currently sprouts in the innovation set. We're doing Raley's innovation set. Hundreds of independents have our product. You can order direct from us online. You can find us on Fair. You can find us on Instagram @El Nachochochip. We're not hard to find, just Google perfect.

28:12
Caitlin Bricker
I have a feeling even though you're on the slow growth boat, that once people get their lips on El Nacho, it's going to move fast. So I've really enjoyed talking to you, especially at this phase in your growth and I'm excited for other people to learn more about you. Thank you so much for joining us.

28:30
Joe Cassinelli
Thank you, Caitlyn. Thanks for the time.

28:32
Caitlin Bricker
See you later. All right, everyone, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, do us a solid and leave us a five star review on ratethispodcast.com startup cpg I'm Caitlin Bricker, the host of the founder feature series and editor at Startup CPG. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn or reach out to me on Slack and get on my radar. I'm always keeping my eyes peeled for new and emerging brands to spotlight. If you're a potential sponsor who would like to appear on the podcast, please email partnerships startup cpg.com and finally, as a reminder for anyone listening, if you haven't already, we would love for you to join our free CPG community on Slack. You can sign up via our website@startupcpg.com see you around.