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Interests in getting paid to sample your brand? Looking for a new way to get your brand discovered? Leverage this innovative strategy to grow sales! There is now a huge need for packaged products. They want & need health ready-to-eat pre-packaged products

Elohi Strategic Advisors https://elohi.us

If you think about hotels, right, travel is decimated right now. Now, to be clear, for those of us of a certain age that lived through 9-11, we thought travel was decimated then as well. It does come back, it's just different.

Pre-9-11, you could literally all but take a cooler with you and have a picnic in the middle of O'Hare or on your United flight. After 9-11, you couldn't take any liquids except the three ounces through. So what happened that was really interesting was, for airport, sea stores and restaurants, their volume went through the roof, right?

Because you were forced. If you wanted to drink, you're going to have to wait to get on the plane or buy it in the airport. You couldn't bring your Starbucks with you, right?

So again, I keep coming back and telling people, food service isn't dead, it's going to be different. We may not know for a year or two what that's going to look like, but getting to the packaged goods piece. So for instance, hotels are still open, right?

They might be at 15% occupancy right now, but they're open. They have all closed all of their food service operations. So what they're looking for today is, do you have ready to drink, do you have bottled beverages, prepackaged snacks?

Do you have ready to eat meals that they can just put it in a microwave? And they're looking for, we need healthy things because we have people trying to take care of themselves while they respond. In a lot of cases, these are first responders that are being deployed to help in hospitals and so forth.

They want to eat well because they know they need to keep their strength up. So the hotel chains, first of all, are decimated, right? But they're not going to stop feeding people, they're going to feed them differently.

The other thing I want to say is that everybody's looking around going, oh my gosh, so many restaurants are closing. 60% of restaurants close within the first year, something like 80% within the first five. Restaurants have always been an iffy business.

It's just right now, everyone's kind of closing at once. Something like 67% of consumers said they would be willing to buy groceries from restaurants. Panera set it up so you can pre-order like toilet paper, because guess who had toilet paper?

The food service distributors. But you could buy groceries at Panera. So again, if you're a restaurant today and you're really scrappy, and those are the ones who are going to survive, you're thinking about how do I not only send, you're going to get your pizza, but how do I add on snacks and even health and beauty aids, whatever I can to make more money.

Are you ready to learn how you can literally get paid to sample your products? Let's start the show. Hello, and thank you for joining us today.

Welcome. Today's show is something you're going to love. Who'd imagine we'd be able to help another industry?

What I'm talking about is being able to help the food service industry. They've been absolutely devastated by COVID. So now is our opportunity to help them out, and helping them out is helping out our own Main Street, helping out our communities when they're desperate for a lifeline.

Think about it. We're all looking for worthy causes. Being able to focus your brand, your mission-based brand on helping your own community, can't get better than that.

And at the same time, help make your products more discoverable. Help get your product into more people's hands. After all, that's the whole goal of getting your product discovered.

That's the sole purpose of trade marketing. Well, what if you could get paid for that? This is a show you're definitely going to share with everyone you know.

Help me raise the bar in our industry. Now here's Stephanie. Thank you for being here because this is going to be an amazing webinar.

You're going to learn a lot of great strategies, things that I kind of wondered about but wasn't sure that brands could do. But this is going to help you grow and scale your brand exponentially. So first of all, I want to thank everyone that is helping to support this by promoting these webinars.

So why are we here? Well, when Expo West was canceled, I decided to lean in, realizing that the best thing I can do to help brands is to help answer your most pressing questions. And so this webinar series is something that is actually really brought to you by you guys, by everyone who's here today and everyone who's paying attention and listening, etc.

The point is this. You're reaching out to me and you're asking me great questions, and I'm finding the best people in the industry to come on and answer those questions for you. And that's why Stephanie's here today.

She's amazing. I'll get to her in a minute. So my mission is to make our healthy way of life more accessible by helping you get your product on more store shelves and in the hands of more shoppers and then includes online.

So do me a favor and help me raise the bar in the industry and share these resources with any other brand, all your friends, etc. Help me raise the bar. So first of all, in that mindset, what keeps you up at night?

What are the things that you want to know? Reach out to me, send me a note, and I'll do my best to put those on this webinar series, the podcast, etc. And remember that you're not alone.

There's a tremendous amount of web resources on my website, as well as Stephanie's, etc. And with that, so food service is not dead, it's different, and it wants to boost your natural brand with Stephanie. So rumors of the demise of food service during COVID are greatly exaggerated.

While it's true that the fate of many restaurants are in jeopardy, now there's a huge need for packaged products. They want and need healthy, ready-to-eat, pre-packaged products. And we're going to talk about how you can take advantage of this trend.

So with that, would you please stop? Would you like to start talking about, tell us a little bit more about yourself, Stephanie?

Sure. It's my favorite subject. I don't know if you warned everybody, I'm really snarky and hilarious.

So I actually started in working for big companies. My first job was at Frito-Lay on a truck. So I went through the sort of typical classically trained CPG rise through big companies.

And in 2008, I moved from retail over to food service. I was laid off by PepsiCo, which was sort of my first moment of what felt like failure at the time. But it turned out to be really good for me personally and professionally in that it made me rethink sort of how I thought about my career and also about how I thought about how I was going to approach what I put back into the universe, so to speak.

Fast forward to the end of 2014. I was just at a place where I had gotten big jobs, big titles, working for big companies, making a lot of money, big house, car, all that like check the box stuff that make your parents really proud, except that my parents were both small business owners. And so for them, it felt like a great thing.

But what I realized eventually, and it's the reason entrepreneurs are my people, is that big companies only know really how to work in a box, right? They're very rigid in their rules, and there's no room for being different, thinking differently. It's just they're built to scale.

And scaling means, you know, would you like that in black or would you like that in black? So I started Elohi in 2015 to almost five and a half years ago for two reasons. One is my parents, again, owning their own businesses, had also started a little organic farm so my mom could eat clean because she had breast cancer, but it had morphed into a 40-acre working farm.

So they were running their businesses and going to farmers markets two and three times a week. So some of it was just to be near my parents, but I also was at that point that maybe it was my midlife crisis or mid-career crisis where I just really wanted to do something meaningful and work with businesses that were trying to change the world. And I do think that that's a possibility.

So I started Elohi. I will be the first to confess I had no business plan. I just knew that I would figure it out along the way.

And it's turned into this. I mean, I'm super proud of kind of where we've landed. I fell into plant-based in 2016 with my first plant-based company.

And that's where I figured out what vegan really is and what that means and the difference between organic and non-GMO, pasture-raised versus cage-free, all those things that matter. And my big revelation was that after 20 years, 23 years, working for some of the best-known companies in the world in food, I knew nothing about food. So I spent three years on my parents' farm until we moved to San Francisco for the Impossible Foods project.

And then we just recently came back to Chicago. So that's, in a nutshell, sort of how I came to be here today with you.

Thank you for sharing that. I had no idea that you started on a truck. I too started on a truck, a DSD driver.

Yeah, and that was a lot of fun. Actually, I was talking to Brad Barnhart on one of these earlier webinars, and he reminded me of the relevance, and so let me frame it this way. You have an opportunity, first of all, when you work for a big brand, you're getting the best training in the world in terms of student training.

Oh, yeah, the stuff that we went through, the what we learned. Back when I worked for Unilever, literally every single month, they would ship me off to a different part of the country and immerse us into a three or four-day seminar training about specific aspects of the business and what category management is, what negotiation, all that kind of stuff, which is great. Best education I could ever have.

That's why we're here to help you guys, is to pass along those insights. But the DSD part, I was able to leverage what I was learning throughout my business, throughout my career as a grocery manager, et cetera, and really drive sustainable sales at retail, understanding what it's like to be really on the front lines, dealing with the retailers, dealing with the store, dealing with the consumers, while at the same time working with that big retailer, I mean the big brand. And what was a little bit unique for me with Kimberly Clark is I did have the opportunity to think out of the box.

But with Unilever, yeah, you had to do this at this time of the day, and so on and so forth. So we'll talk more about that throughout different episodes, et cetera. But this is so relevant.

And the reason I wanted to frame it this way is because the insights that we're going to share are going to really help you, the brands, everyone in attendance, understand how to maximize each and every opportunity you have. So thinking about the customer journey from the customer standpoint, this is how we're going to do the most good. And what's unique about what Stephanie brings is understanding the food service part.

And so let's start with this. What is food service? What is the role of food service?

And then we want to talk, I want to talk about the difference or the similarities and how those food service and retail are so intertwined. So Stephanie, what is food service? What does it mean?

And why should we be paying attention to this today?

So just like you and I, having the DSD experience really helps us have a different perspective once you start working with the UNFIs and CAHES and so forth. Just like I spent the first 15 years of my career in retail and then moved into food service, spent some time in industrial, you just have a better understanding of all the different routes to market. So food service is effectively...

Here's how I try to tell people to keep it straight. Food service is when you have someone who's creating a meal for you, right? You might eat it in their establishment, you might take it home, right?

And we're going to talk definitely about channels blurring because it was a very, very fine line probably until about probably seven or eight years ago, maybe 2010, when you had the rise of the Groceron and all the meal kits and so forth. But the lines have been blurring since I started in C stores in 1996, which I've not dated myself. It was already blurring.

But at the end of the day, food service is where you're effectively asking someone else to create your meal for you, and you're eating it away from home. Again, now it's blurring so much that a lot of people are bringing it home and eating it home, particularly with COVID. But where food service, I think, really confuses people is not kind of how it's fixed.

It's more about who's fixing it. So in food service, you have effectively two paths, commercial and non-commercial. And this is where people, I think, really do themselves a disservice by not understanding the channel before they get into it.

The commercial space is where someone is, a company is buying, preparing and serving a meal, right? So Panera buys food, they prepare it, and then they serve it to you off of their menu, right? Non-commercial is where you have an entity that is in the business to do something else.

They're buying food, they're preparing it, and they're selling it to you. So for instance, I use prisons. It drives people crazy, but it's the perfect example.

Prisons are in the business of, hopefully, rehabilitating people who have been sentenced to time. By law, they have to feed them, right? So that's non-commercial.

That's not how they technically derive the revenue. K through 12, right? You send your kids to public school.

They're in the business of educating children, hopefully. But by law, they have to feed them. So whether it's a nursing home, a hospital, a college and university, airlines, pick any place that you eat, again, eat away from home, but they're in the business of doing something where they derive their revenues, but they have either chosen to or have to by law feed you, that's non-commercial.

And by the way, most people up until probably 2018 came into food service through non-commercial because it is more retail-like. It has more retail opportunities, right? So think about a university where you can eat in the cafeteria, right, on your meal plan, but you can also stop at the little sea stores and cafes along the route and pick up your bottled beverage and prepackaged snack.

So it was the easiest, it was the closest in, but we've seen an explosion into the commercial space over the last couple of years.

Great. Could you scoot over to your right just a teeny bit? So we can see more of you.

There you go. Hi. Thank you for going into that.

And this is so relevant because one of the things that is interesting about natural is I liken it to be the ripple in the pond. When you start seeing those clean ingredients, chai, whatever it is, you name it some of the unique attributes that make natural, natural, gluten-free, etc. You see those also at restaurants and you see those popping up in other food service locations.

And the reason this matters is because we're very intertwined together. So people, a lot of people don't, unfortunately, understand where their food comes from. And I've been talking about this a lot on the podcast, other webinars, etc.

We need as brands to help our customers understand where the food comes. And the fact is that the food comes from the same place. And that's going to be a common theme as we go through this entire conversation.

The reason this matters is that if you've got something new, quote unquote, like plant based, which to a lot of people, it's kind of new. Well, that's a big thing in food service as well. And so there are a lot of crossover opportunities.

And what's unique is that if we can take your brand, your secret sauce, and leverage that in the food service world, then that gets you in front of more eyeballs. That gets you exposed to or discovered by more customers. And that's, again, the underlying theme around this.

So Stephanie, thank you for sharing that. So what are the things that we need to be thinking about when we're talking about strategy, corporate strategy versus channel strategy? And you mentioned channel.

That's what she's talking about, channel blurring. So can you help define channel strategy and then talk about how food service should be part of your corporate strategy and the difference?

Yeah. So again, you start with your corporate strategy, right? What are you trying to accomplish?

Do you want to scale and sell? Do you want to create a legacy brand? All of that should drive your corporate strategy.

That then will drive your channel strategy. And I would argue there's really three channels. There's retail, there's food service and there's industrial.

And industrial is where you sell your product as an ingredient and it goes in something else that someone else makes. And by the way, whenever we talk about food service, we talk about food service and industrial together because it's not uncommon at all for big restaurant brands to spec ingredients to create what they want for their proprietary items. So a lot of what is sold in food service actually goes through an industrial or co-manufacturer, more so than probably anyone realizes.

And that's the way that, again, when you think about restaurant chains like whether it's a Panera or McDonald's, when you have 1,600 or 30,000 restaurants and the expectation from the consumer is it's going to be the same everywhere you go, you have to have that control of your ingredients. So retail and food service, again, used to be very split. Now you have them together.

And then you had in the industrial space. Underneath those, then you have what I would call segments or subchannels. And as you, if you're a brand and you're writing your go-to-market strategy and all you're focusing on is retail or, frankly, food service, because I've seen it go both ways, you're going to wind up with a lopsided strategy, right?

And the reason I say that is your food service packaging is going to be different, right? You don't need all the pretty packaging. It's going to be in a larger size.

But if you start in food service and you haven't thought about the implications for your brand in retail and you choose a manufacturer that can do the big brown box in larger quantities, then you're going to find yourselves a year or two down the road trying to figure out how to get a new comand because they can't do all the pretty packaging that you need that's consumer-facing. So I tell people, please, I don't care if you start in retail, but have a mind towards food service slash industrial because you just never know where you're going to wind up. You need to at least understand as you start to manufacture and you buy your ingredients what the implications are.

The other thing I would think about as you're writing these strategies is, again, there's this push towards creating a brand. In food service, your brand may not be front and center, right? Until 2018 with Impossible and Beyond, the only things that you saw branded were Pepsi and Coke, maybe Splenda on the table, Heinz Ketchup, whatever was in the condiments caddy.

But for the most part, what was branded was actually for the restaurant. Again, getting back to the consumer changing, right? And as the boomers aged and they're thinking about their health and you have the upcoming millennial moms who want their kids to eat better, there was a demand on restaurants to have healthier, and again, healthy is a big word, but healthier products.

And Applebee's is a perfect example. When I grew up, Applebee's was huge. Every Applebee's served the same thing.

You weren't talking about nutrition. You went for fill your gut, family style meals, and it was an occasion. But as the consumer started to look for healthier items, those legacy brands realized that they didn't have the, they didn't have permission from the consumer to call, other than a salad, which frankly, if you looked at a lot of dressings, they weren't exactly healthy either.

They didn't have permission from the consumer to be healthy. So they started doing something in 2018 again that they hadn't done in a long time, which is put somebody else's brand on the menu. So now you see Impossible and Beyond.

You see Oatly. We think about all the places where you're seeing branding today on a restaurant menu that you never saw before. And it's because it's the only way they can, especially the legacy brands, that they can convince the consumer that they actually have options that fit different eating patterns.

Did I answer your question or did I just...

No, that's actually perfect. I love that. In fact, you went someplace that I wasn't planning on going, but I'm so glad you did because it's so relevant.

I talk about natural as the R&D of the CPG industry. And so our products that are blessed by natural are those products that are considered to be cleaner, better for you, healthier, etc. As opposed to the mainstream products that lack that trust, that consumer trust.

And what I mean by that is if you take a mainstream brand and they put the word natural on there, a lot of people are skeptical. But if you take a product that's natural, that's born in natural, that's proven itself in natural, that gives that element of credibility. That's why big brands are buying small brands.

But to your point, and this is something I'm so glad you brought up, is that if a retailer, a restaurant, can say, hey, we've got a natural brand on the menu as part of our selection, that helps align that retailer with your core customer. And again, this gets back to the customer. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to piggyback on our industry to build their sales, their credibility, their following, et cetera.

The reason this matters is because these are the trends that are driving across every category back to the ripple in the pond.

And every demographic, right? I mean, like every demographic, it's just when you look at plant-based in the data central is great for information in the space, well, you type in plant-based and it's not, you know, it's not just one little section of the population, the same in the natural retail space. It's literally everyone.

If you have 30,000 restaurants, you need to appeal to everyone. Right.

And on that note, you need to be, your products need to be available wherever your customer shops. And I've been saying that again and again and again. And the challenge is in this industry, we teach how to raise money, then we teach how to raise money, then we teach how to raise money, and then we teach how to hire a broker.

And the first place you want to launch is at Whole Foods. Whole Foods is great, but they're expensive. There are so many better ways for you to grow and scale your brand, to get to the point where you've got enough revenue, where you can thrive in other places.

So what about this? I know I'm kind of getting off topic of where I wanted to go. But if you're at a local restaurant, someone from Whole Foods is going to call you up and say, how come you're not on our shelf?

Which is really cool, a pull strategy. So in other words, they're going to ask for you. And at that point, we don't need to talk about slotting as much and some of the other fees.

And again, we'll save that conversation for later. But to go back to what you're talking about here, I absolutely love this concept, this idea. And the idea behind it, like I said, is now you're helping that food retailer, that restaurant, get blessed and natural.

You're exposing new customers to your brand. And this is how you can get discovered. And a lot of times, and we're going to get to this in a little bit, you can have quote unquote free sampling where they're going to be paying you, you're going to get paid for your product, and you're going to get to sample it for free, meaning you're not going to have, you know, sampling at a trade show, for example, you're just throwing away the money and let someone buy your product.

Go ahead.

So you said two interesting things. So one is in food service, particularly in restaurants, you have this thing called the veto vote, right? So think about in the good old days when everybody worked in an office and you're all going to lunch or you're a big family and going to dinner, somebody's gluten free, somebody's vegan, somebody's low sodium, whatever those different dietary needs are, trying to find one restaurant to satisfy.

Today it's not a problem, but again, I mean, just as little as three and four years ago, if you were vegan, and I know this because I had somebody vegan on my staff, I would literally have to call restaurants and say, look, I have a team member, he's vegan, and we're not eating anywhere where he can't eat. And if your only response is that you have a salad, that doesn't work for us. And I never thought I'd be saying that, but it made me start to think about, and again, there is this thing called the veto vote.

So it's the reason restaurants started to bring in plant-based, and now again, it's moving to keto and paleo and like pick a dietary thing. So the veto vote is a real thing, and restaurants just sort of ignored it for a long time. They couldn't ignore it anymore.

And then the second piece is, I actually call it paid sampling. So food service, to me, is paid sampling. This goes back to your strategy, right?

So if you have a very, if you have a brand and you're all about the brand, the brand, the brand, fine. With food service and particularly with restaurants, you have to check your ego at the door. The brand is the brand on the sign out front.

It's that chef's menu. Very few brands can actually get branded on the menu and do what Impossible and Beyond did. So we may not see as much of that.

But again, that doesn't mean you can't put a table tent, that you can't talk about it in press releases. There are other ways to get your brand out there that may not mean you get branded on menu. And we can talk about why that's a good idea and a bad idea at some point if you want to.

I think people make more of it than they need to. But what you have to decide early, as part of your corporate strategy, is are you strictly going to be brand, brand, brand, and food service is going to be a paid sampling opportunity to get people to try it, right? So they're buying it and sampling it to drive them to retail.

And if that is your plan, then could you please only launch in restaurants where you have retail opportunities around it? Or make it really easy for them to figure out how to buy your stuff. And if it's refrigerated and frozen, that's probably not going to work, right?

So again, this is why I say, could you please, please, please, brands, when you're really starting to think about launching a product, don't look at food service and say, oh, that's not for me. I'm growing a brand. There are ways to use it, but think about it upfront.

And then you can, you know, again, you can use that kind of local groundswell to help you then go to the next market and the next market. And so you're building a profitable business. So the other thing, and I see this in natural grocery, but I also see it in food service where people get into and Google.

I mean, honestly, I got into Google. I don't care, right? The margins are horrific.

Like, it's great, right? But don't get into Google and San Francisco if they can't buy it in Safeway or Whole Foods or anyone else around the Google office. But more importantly, if you're in New York and that's where your manufacturing is and you've now launched some food service, which is different packaging across the country, hello, logistics?

Like, that's going to be brutal. So again, don't, just because it's sexy or fun or it's the way everybody else has done it, it's not necessarily the right way to do it. It's definitely not the profitable way to do it.

Sorry, I'll get off my sofa.

No, no, no, that makes sense. In fact, actually, I'm glad you kind of brought us back to where we were. So I believe, and I'm sure you've heard me say a million times, that your go-to-market strategy should be so robust and so thorough that someone else can step into your business and run it on your behalf in your absence and be successful.

And that includes trade marketing, where you're going to get distribution, how you're going to promote your product, where you're going to be today, tomorrow, et cetera. I work with hundreds of brands from emerging all the way up to multi-billion dollar brands, and most brands struggle with this, especially the smaller brands. And so, you know, when I'm working with a brand, it's always emerging brand.

I sold $5 last year, and I'm going to sell $5 million next year. And it's like they have no path to go from point A to point B. That's why they don't get funding, et cetera.

That's why they die, a lot of them, unfortunately. The point is this, if you can bake in what Stephanie's talking about and leverage that in your strategy, build out a food service part of your strategy in addition to your retail strategy, and great idea, Stephanie, make sure that you're in the restaurants or in the food service opportunities that are local to you to start out to build that brand awareness. And even if your name isn't on the big flashing neon sign out front, your name is still on the menu or you're on your package, et cetera.

And the best part about that is if I walk into a restaurant and I try your product for the first time, they're endorsing your product. They're trying to leverage their relationship to get blessed and natural. And I'm trying your product for the first time, guess what?

Then I might go buy it someplace else. And then you can go into a natural retail or a mainstream retailer and say, how come I can't buy this on your shelf? Pull strategy versus the put strategy.

The put strategy is what every brand uses. It's where you basically just sit down, shut up, get out your checkbook, and you pay for distribution. It's true.

You pay for slotting. You pay for whatever you put on the shelf. And in fact, the big brands own their shelf space, so it makes it even more difficult.

The pull strategy is where you've got something so amazing that the retailers call you up and say, how come I don't have you on my shelf? And now you're in a position where you can negotiate. Now, part of the strategy I always talk about is you get to really understand and know who your core customer is.

And that should be the focus. What is the customer journey? How does the customer buy your product?

When do they buy your product? Why do they choose your product over another product? And what else do they buy when they buy your product?

So when you can leverage that with a food service strategy, now when you go to a retailer, now you've got a robust strategy, and you're providing insights that they don't have access to otherwise. You have company.

So, that's fine.

So anyhow, if you could leverage that in your go-to-market strategy, then that's a win-win for you. So thank you for bringing that up. So we've talked a little bit.

Go ahead.

I want to throw one more thing in.

Yeah.

This is really important, and everyone's living it this year. If you go into food service, and you haven't at least thought about retail, and a little pandemic hits, or any economic crisis, the first place people go to save money is they eat at home. Right?

But if all you are is in retail, and the economy is really good, and people have disposable income, they're not cooking at home, they're going out. So this is one where I've had brands in the past that were solely food service. They're like, yeah, we'll get to retail.

We're going to go to international, we'll go to retail. And I've said, and there are a couple that I'm looking at, I'm looking at you, you know who you are, and said, you don't have to go to retail, but you should at least think about it enough that if there's a big turn in the economy, you're not upside down. Because if you're a premium brand and only have food service, and haven't thought about that, it takes time to get your packaging and everything else with reviews and get in.

So there are a lot, I mean, I have friends, 85% of the business was K through 12. They literally, their company all but went under overnight because of COVID. Now the ones that are doing okay also have a retail business.

So again, I am, I'm not saying you have to be in retail, but you have to at least think about what's going to happen if the economy turns and I've got a really expensive premium brand. How am I going to weather that storm? Because food service is the harbinger of economic downturns, full stop.

And in fact, on that note, I'm so glad you segued into this because this is exactly where I wanted to go. So thank you. So what I want to talk about, let's talk about the elephant in the room.

There's a pandemic. All the restaurants are closed. Oh no, doom and gloom.

You know, life is over as we know it. No, it's not. There are some retailers that have figured out a way to do this.

There is a retailer in my neighborhood, for example, that you can buy from the same as you would buy from a retail grocery store. And they will sell you their items. They're in bulk.

And you can buy those. So imagine that retailer smart enough that they're now servicing the at home consumer through their food service buying strategy. And because they can buy products a lot cheaper, I don't need to pay slotting, etc.

I can typically buy a lot more food than I would at a traditional retailer. One, I'm not paying the slotting. I'm not paying all the trade promotion, etc.

They're promoting my brand. It's a win-win. And the best part about it is that there are other organizations that are looking to these strategies.

My next door neighbor has a business where he sets up a tent at events, races and outdoor events, etc. And he sells products. He can't do that anymore.

But he's starting to look at other opportunities to start selling his product but into other people. But now the challenge is they want packaged products. They don't want something somebody's made up in the back room.

Something that someone's touched because there's that issue. Could COVID be on it? All that other stuff.

There's so many questions out there as to how it's going to get you or if it will get you or whatever. So the point is this. What we really wanted to focus on today, if you've got a packaged, prepackaged product and you can make it available to that restaurant in my neighborhood, to other food service vendors, to other restaurants, to my next door neighbor, etc.

Then they're going to go out of their way to demo or sample your product for free. They're going to celebrate it. They're going to talk it up, etc.

By the way, you need to make sure they understand the value of it. Whole another conversation. But they're going to do that for you.

So that's paid sampling. In other words, they're going to go out of their way to celebrate your product, your unique product to their audience. And that's the win-win.

So can you talk a little bit about that strategy, Stephanie?

So if you think about hotels, right, travels decimated right now. Now, to be clear, for those of us of a certain age that lived through 9-11, we thought travel was decimated then as well. It does come back.

It's just different. Pre-9-11, you could literally all but take a cooler with you and have a picnic in the middle of O'Hare or on your United flight. After 9-11, you couldn't take any liquids except the three ounces through.

So what happened that was really interesting was for airport, sea stores and restaurants, their volume went through the roof, right? Because you were forced. If you wanted to drink, you're going to have to wait to get on the plane or buy it in the airport.

You couldn't bring your Starbucks with you, right? So again, I keep coming back and telling people, food service isn't dead. It's going to be different.

We may not know for a year or two what that's going to look like, but getting to the packaged goods piece. So for instance, hotels are still open, right? They might be at 15% occupancy right now, but they're open.

They have all closed all of their food service operations. So what they're looking for today is, do you have ready to drink, do you have bottled beverages, prepackaged snacks? Do you have ready to eat meals so they can just put it in a microwave?

And they're literally just setting up, it's sort of taking the hotel pantry that was sort of full of crap before, which drove me crazy. And they're looking for, we need healthy things because we have people trying to take care of themselves while they respond. In a lot of cases, these are first responders that are being deployed to help in hospitals and so forth.

They want to eat well because they know they need to keep their strength up. So the hotel chains, first of all, are decimated, right? But they're not going to stop feeding people, they're going to feed them differently.

The other thing I want to say is that everybody's looking around going, oh my gosh, so many restaurants are closing. 60% of restaurants close within the first year, something like 80% within the first five. Restaurants have always been an iffy business.

It's just right now, everyone's kind of closing at once. So any other challenges, restaurants generally, especially independent restaurants, their final kind of net income is going to be in a 6% range, right? Almost 65% of what they spend is just on rent and all the things back of house, about 30% is going to be their food costs.

So this isn't new, right? It breaks my heart to see because a lot of these are family businesses, but most restaurants don't keep more than two to three weeks cash in the bank. So they were woefully unprepared for what was literally their business stopping overnight.

That said, you had, HUB is a perfect example of a grocery store who actually has a pretty good food service program, by the way, food service at retail, just like Whole Foods Hot Bar. But all of a sudden they wanted to support the local restaurants, but they didn't really want to be in the business of doing that for themselves. So they started featuring prepared meals from local restaurants.

Beautiful. Like, thank you, HUB. Beautiful.

A lot of risk in it, but they're smart people, so I'm sure they figured it out. You know, I just read this morning, I'll try to find the article and I'll share it with you so you can share it with your, the folks who read your posts. But something like 67% of consumers said they would be willing to buy groceries from restaurants.

Panera set it up so you can preorder like toilet paper, because guess who had toilet paper, the food service distributors. But you could buy groceries at Panera. So again, if you're a restaurant today and you're really scrappy and those are the ones who are going to survive, you're thinking about how do I not only send, you're going to get your pizza, but how do I add on snacks and even health and beauty aids, whatever I can to make more money, to make up for the cost of that delivery.

But at the end of the day, right now, especially, people don't want other people touching their foods, they want it prepackaged, let's just call it what it is. But also restaurant operators have had to significantly downsize, right? They have a lot fewer people.

They can't afford to have all the staff in back of house because they don't know what their traffic is going to be like. And by traffic, I mean Grubhub and Uber Eats. So there's a lot of unknowns for them.

The other thing that's happening that's really fascinating, and I'm mixed on it, is the smaller restaurants, again, because you don't know what your traffic is going to be like, they're looking for smaller package sizes. So where they might have bought the 50-pound bag of rice before COVID, because they knew they were going to go through it, now they might want three 5-pound or 10 1-pound bags because they're not having to pay for a 50-pound bag, which is a lot more cash out of their pocket, which is a concern. But they also know that they can use it more responsibly.

They won't have as much waste

Love it. And on that note, and I'm so glad you brought that up, one of the challenges that restaurants have, as you alluded to, is perishables. They throw away a lot of food.

And that is one of the biggest costs of owning a restaurant, running a restaurant, is the amount of product they need to throw away. What if they sold a product that had a shelf life of a couple of months? That was shelf stable, et cetera.

Wouldn't that be cool? We're getting a lot of questions, and I'm going to be jumping in and out of those. So let me throw a couple of, answer a couple of them real quick.

First of all, Jeff, yes, this will be recorded. You'll be able to, this is being recorded. You'll be able to view it again later.

Thanks, Connie. We're preaching as much as we can. I'm sorry, probably missed some of the ones up above.

Megan says hi. So can you comment on gross margin expectations versus retail? Great question.

Thanks, Erwin. You want to take that?

Yeah. So I am actually not going to tell you the gross margin expectation as a percent, because again, non-commercial has 19 segments or sub-segments, and restaurants are totally different. But here's how to think about food service.

Your margins will be significantly better, because you don't have the costs in packaging. You probably won't have the costs in marketing that you do. You don't have all the demo stuff.

You're going to have some samples. But at the end of the day, you don't have the high-low promotions. You don't promote in food service.

And by the way, you don't have to do slotting fees. And if a distributor asks you for a slotting fee, please go to another one. There's 2,500 food service distributors.

It's just not a shell game up front. So again, when I tell people that I get that food service is complicated, but it is a much more profitable business. Again, if you can sell a 50-pound bag, that you don't have to spend a lot of money on marketing, and it doesn't need fancy packaging that eats into the margin, even if it's not branded, right?

You're making your supply chain more efficient. Why wouldn't you?

Right. Well, and let's go one step further. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is, okay, actually, back into that thought, trade marketing.

There's no trade marketing. So there's a lady that I'm working with who's got...

There is, but it's different. Yeah, it's different. But it's very manageable in that you know exactly what it is if you do your pricing architecture.

Yes.

Again, it's back to that kind of high, low, no slotting fees, that sort of stuff. You don't have to surprise.

Thank you for clarifying. There's a lady that I'm working with who's got a brand who's got a snack bar. She has to be 80 cents all in for her to be able to sell that product to you for $3.99 and break even at retail.

Imagine you're paying all that difference. That's one of the reasons why food costs so much money. Organic isn't that much more expensive.

FIt's because everyone has their hand out because there's so many layers of cost on top of the product to get it onto the retailer shelf. We're eliminating most of that. Imagine if you're a small brand, and this is what Stephanie is getting to, if you could leverage that with the food service, with the retailer, the restaurant rather, you could actually put your product out there at a much better price.

Granted, the consumer is not going to see it, but the other thing I wanted to mention, and this is really important, we like to pride ourselves in natural, for being mission-based, for standing up for other causes and things that are important to us. What more important of a cause is there than helping Main Street survive? In other words, if you're a brand and you're worried about surviving and trying to figure out where I'm going to get money, and where I'm going to grow sales, and you can leverage what Stephanie is talking about, the strategy that we're talking about today, and you can help your local restaurant thrive, your local food service company thrive, then we're helping them out in their greatest time of need.

And by the way, I'm sure they're going to be helping us out at a later date. So the point is, this is a great opportunity for you to really be mission focused. And I'm going to jump to this right, I was going to wait till a little bit later, but I don't want to run out of time and not say this.

One of the things that Stephanie shared with me when I was talking to her yesterday, is that if you're in a school district, and your product is being sampled at school, remember the free sampling? Well, then that student is getting your product for the first time. They're going to go home and say, Mom, Dad, look what I bought.

This is really cool. I want more of this stuff. When they go to the grocery store, they're going to buy it.

So it's great sampling opportunity for you then. So one of the things you might want to consider, and I love the idea that you brought this up, Stephanie, is that even if you did not break even, even if you lost a little bit of margin, a little bit of money, aren't putting that product into a school to make that kid's lunch healthier, the sampling opportunities are so phenomenal. The opportunity to get it in the hands of every pre-K kid in your neighborhood, in your local area, is just mind boggling great.

And the other thing that's great about it is that a lot of these school districts are feeding kids with really little or no revenue coming in. And so now we're helping them. So when we're thinking about our mission, our business plan, our strategy, what do we want to be as a brand when we grow up?

That is a phenomenal way to build brand awareness, to get your brand discovered, to have an incredible sampling program, and then more importantly, benefit your community, benefit the nutritional, help kids out with good nutrition, and make their families more aware of your product. Stephanie, you want to comment?

Yeah, so I'm so glad that you brought this up because it wasn't in my brain, but I just assumed that K-12 was complete, like there was going to be no feeding. And if you have a frozen or fresh product, it's going to be difficult. But many schools, particularly in school districts that are economically harder hit, they are continuing to feed that student population by giving them basically a grocery sack because that is the only meal that those kids get.

So when they're not going to school, they're not eating. So if you want to be mission based, if you're really about doing what's right for people and for the planet, anything that you can do to help feed those really at-risk kids. Nutrition right now, because they, I mean, we can debate whether or not most public school food was nutritious, but at least it was calories, and those were the only calories they were getting.

Some of those kids are with, literally without. Now, I do know some of the big school systems are feeding, but can you either join the backpack programs? There are some great nonprofits.

Can you work with your local public school system to see what you can do to help out? But there are a lot of children right now at risk and they need nutrition. And I'd much rather see them get something from the natural products industry than from big CPG.

Thank you for saying. And on that note also, a lot of us are focused on helping to do good other places in the world, which is critically important. But we need that help today, right now, in your neighborhood.

So please consider that as an option and reach out to those schools. And as a local food service vendors, et cetera, Stephanie can help connect you and then help them understand what you can do. Be part of that solution.

So a couple of other quick questions. Happy she mentioned prepared snacks. Tom says, I think it's pronounced shy.

I'm sorry.

She needs brownie points. You get them. But it's a good question.

So we'll answer.

Go ahead. I'll let you answer. Let you read it.

So he's asking what's the significance of services such as Grub Hub and Door Dash, so the delivery services and QSR models like Chick-fil-A, Bellhop and Taco Bell, GoMobile. So the first thing I want to start with is saying that I love the food service space. It's creative.

There's no rules. I mean, there are, but you can break them if you know where and how to do it. But they are very reticent to change unless they're forced to, i.e.

9-11, great recession, and now COVID. And so they've been forced to adopt technology that frankly, they were slow to adopt, like the Grubhubs and Uber Eats. The significance of those is it is allowing people to continue to eat out, but do it at home.

The challenge is that they are taking exorbitant fees from those independents. That is a whole nother webinar. I have mixed feelings.

They still have rent to pay. They still have food they're buying, so that helps them in some ways. But again, each one is a little different in how they approach things.

I also think the restaurateurs didn't really understand how to use it, and so I think they're getting better at just putting up things that are profitable and also things that will hold. And that's the other piece. If you have a product that will hold, which ready to eat and ready to drink are, that's good for the restaurant operator today, because having it sit in an Uber Eats driver's car for an hour, it may not be in great shape when it gets there.

The other two things that Shige is referencing, the Chick-fil-A, Bellhop and Taco Bell go mobile, is really just about curbside pickup, right? Or using an app to preorder. Like, who thought that you'd have a McDonald's with two drive-through lanes that would then need to create an app so you could sit up front and they could bring it to you?

But it exists, it's the thing. So, it's a little crazy. Are they necessary?

I think right now they are, right? Consumers are looking for ways to go get what, like, I think I just saw that Chipotle is putting drive-throughs in. They have been so against drive-throughs, but they're adding in like a hundred of them.

Because Chipotle, if you think about where most of them sit, there's no good way for you to get, to pull up and do curbside, right? And then they're inundated with Uber Eats drivers and Grubhub and DoorDash, and like the list goes on and on. The implication for those services is the consumer was demanding them.

They've been demanding them on the coast. It's now finally hit mainstream America. I think it was innovation that was coming.

It just is coming faster. I do worry about the implications on the margins for restaurant tours, but they have to figure that out. We get back to 60% failed within the first year.

So some of this is just survival of the fittest. But at the end of the day, I don't care how you support your local restaurant. If there's a way for you to do curbside instead of doing an Uber Eats, I would challenge you to do that because it's more margin for that restaurant owner.

It's better for their bottom line. So if you really want to support them and you can do curbside, go there and actually pick it up yourself and take it home. But is it driving more business?

That's not my question. I would rather give them money. Not that I don't want to pay someone to drive it, to bring it to me, but I like the idea that I can put the money in the hands of the actual restaurant.

To me, it's the same as going to a local natural food store versus a big chain that's all over the country. So my few cents. But thank you for sharing it because I think it's so important.

So if you've got more questions, keep putting them out there. So Tom says, more schools are feeding than you think. Certainly at risk.

Certainly risk the deal with Sproger. Yeah. I mean, I think that makes so much sense to get your products on in the hands of the schools.

And one of the things, if you listen back to past podcast episodes, there are a few companies, Whole Foods, Whole Kids, Big Green, I think it is. Anyhow, so they're trying to bring healthy nutrition to schools, to urban neighborhoods, to big cities, etc. And the point is that now we have a unique opportunity to help them with that, because obviously those programs are on hold at the moment.

So thank you for sharing that. One of the other most important topics that I wanted to focus on, you touch on this a little bit Stephanie, is distributor versus retail private label. And where I want to go with this is food waste.

And I think this is such a great innovative idea. And so what you said, and I'm going to let you expand upon this, is that as you produce your products, there is waste. And you throw it away and you make nothing, unless you figure out a creative way to sell it.

And what Stephanie was recommending, and I love this, is that if you could put it into a bulk package and sell it to a retail, to a food service, and they could use it as an ingredient, then that would be phenomenal. So in terms of both helping you eliminate the waste, et cetera, and helping them, and then being able to use your secret sauce in their recipe. So can you talk about that?

Yeah, so this may not work for beverage items, but it absolutely works for ambient and particularly snacks. So perfect example, think about the Doritos Locos Taco. Where do you think the Doritos for that taco shell came from?

They're Dorito crumbs, right? So some, I actually know the person whose idea was brilliant. I wish I'd thought of it.

But they looked around and said, we have all this waste, right? We can't put it in a bag of Doritos because the consumer wants their triangle. So what are we going to do with it?

So for them, it was a brilliant way to use product that they couldn't otherwise use. They were just going to throw away and get a great branding program out of it. Now, you may not want to brand it.

It may just be like, hey, here's... And think about batters and breadings and, you know, crumbles that go on salads. Think of all, like, next time you sit down at a meal, whether it's a prepared meal from a grocery store or you order it in, look at all the little extra things that are on the meal to give it flavor and crunch or sometimes just visual appeal.

Is your product such that the waste, the crumbs, the leftovers could be used, even if it's just local restaurants? Now, putting it in a bag and saying, hey, look, I've got crumbs, like, I'm going to upcycle as much as I can, that doesn't work, right? So you have to be thoughtful about, okay, if I want to sell this, what would it be used for?

Can I create some recipes? Again, can I find a local restaurant or two that would love to showcase a local brand and their local brand? And by the way, the thing that the natural space does that restaurants don't, especially mom and pops don't do well, is social media, consumer awareness.

So again, if you can't figure out how you're going to let people know it's your brand, I'm telling you, they are hungry for people to help them with their messaging. And you can do that by using your social media presence to draw people to their restaurant, because it's something they are struggling to do. It's not something that they're generally good at.

And even if they hire someone, there's still so much noise. So where there's like 200,000 retail outlets in the country, pre-COVID, there were a million one. And by the way, there's always been a million to a million one.

So it'll bounce back. The one thing we didn't touch on, Dan, and we don't have a ton of time, but this whole concept of ghost kitchens. So she gave me this, maybe was trying to get at that too, with his question.

I just didn't kick in. But this idea of ghost kitchens is really fascinating. Brinker, who owns Chili's and Maggiano's, just created a ghost kitchen only concept.

I think it's called It's Just Wings. And so there'll be a thousand ghost kitchens, I think, across the country where they'll make wings. It'll be branded, but there will not be a restaurant.

You won't go anywhere and sit down. It's strictly for delivery and catering. So that's one of the other things that's happening in restaurants that people think, again, if there's so much going on underneath, if you don't keep up with it, there's so many ways to sell help.

Everybody on this call could create their own ghost kitchen, right? Or a concept in a ghost kitchen that's branded and it's just your products. Like, go crazy.

Love it. And so going back to where we kind of started earlier, your go-to-market strategy should be, I believe, every bit as innovative as the ingredients in your package. And this is what we're talking about.

How do you leverage these creative strategies? It's these creative disruptive brands, creative disruptive food service companies, restaurants, et cetera, that are going to survive and thrive in any environment, any economy. And so very, very important.

There are a million more things that we're going to talk about. Oh, one of the things I wanted to talk about is so generic was the original private label. So generic came about because someone got smart and they realized that they could sell the leftovers, the stuff that brands would not put in their package, branded products.

And they put it in a generic can and that became private label. Now private labels evolve to be also something that keeps their lines more running more efficiently. The big CPG companies, et cetera.

So one of the big differences is that you could have a distributor private label or put your product in a bag and it would be a lot cheaper, get in front of a lot more people, et cetera, versus having a private label product versus competing against a private label product at a retailer, which is not going to help you drive sales, et cetera. But what I'm getting at, and Stephanie, I want you to expand upon this, is that in terms of a strategy, we were talking about should your name be on it or not be on it. And if you can find a creative way to get rid of your waste, improve your margins, make your product more available, help out the restaurant industry, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, then that's something that you need to be thinking about as opposed to, as you said, Stephanie, it's all about my brand.

Go ahead, please.

Yeah, so it's very similar in food service. Probably it's actually more important in food service than it is in retail, right? So distributors, Cisco, US.

Foods, and then there are small consortiums of distributors who come together. They have their own private label brand. And by the way, it's not the like crap, you know, buy it on price.

Some of them, like they're coming out with really high-end premium products because what they found is the manufacturers aren't necessarily specking it the way their operators want it, and there's more margin in it for them. And again, we get a lot of brands who come in and are like, I'm not doing distributor private label, to which I will often say, why not? Right?

Your brand's not going on the menu. Let's just call, just assume when you come to food service, your brand will not be on the menu. But that doesn't mean that you can't sell a ton of product at a better margin.

And why wouldn't you want the distributor to have your product in their private label when they've got thousands and thousands and thousands of distributor sales reps that are incented to sell the distributor private label? I get it, but I don't get it. It's just such a no-brainer to me.

FrBut if your ego is going to get in the way and you're just about your brand, then it's not for you. But I think you're being really short-sighted about the implications again for your margins and supply chain for retail.

And on that note, so we're getting close to the hour. And if you're okay to keep on going for a little bit longer, Stephanie, okay, great. So we'll continue.

The only thing I can tell the boss that I'm going to be late.

Oh, you're the boss. There you go. So by the way, there's information about how to get a hold of us.

Oh, let me put that up in the chat. So, but on that note, oops, so I'll put up our how to get a hold of us file. So on that note, so we'll continue to go for a little bit longer, but let's talk just for another minute about private label versus distributor.

Your product is a guaranteed sell for a retailer. If your product falls off the shelf, gets damaged, et cetera, they're going to send you to reclamation, et cetera, and you as a brand are going to pay for that. If you're a private label item, the retailer eats that, right?

But if you're a private label through a distributor, they pay you upfront. And one thing Stephanie was also talking about is you get paid quicker. You're not getting paid for all the things that don't matter, okay?

I am not against distributors. I'm against all the ridiculous fees that they charge you that do nothing to drive your business. So let me explain.

If your distributor and they make money on how much they sell, the amount of commission, et cetera, and you have distribution in 800 stores, they're not going to tell you where the stores are unless you pay for a report to let them know where the stores are. So let's say that you're missing 30% of the stores. You're not distributing in there.

If you close that gap, they make more money. But instead of being smart enough, and I'm saying that on purpose, to say, well, here, close the gap so I make more money, they charge you for a report to tell you here's where you need to close that gap. And then a lot of times, they don't even tell you what stores they are.

So it's so maddening and frustrating, the fees they charge, et cetera. What I want to do is I want to go back to, in this industry, Tom's on your side. Oh, someone says cough.

Yeah, I love that. By the way, I get to your comments, Tom and Clayton. But absolutely.

And so when I think back on this industry, when I started this, I'm dating myself, early 80s, yeah, early 80s, late 80s, mid 80s, anyhow, every brand went through a distributor. And the reason they're gone today is because they don't provide the value that we really need them to provide. They just add a lot of cost.

And that's why Kimberly Clark, P&G, Unilever, et cetera, they don't go through distributors. They go direct to the retailer, et cetera. They've got a lot more efficient supply chain.

Walmart's claim to fame, whether you like Walmart or hate Walmart, is the fact that they can put a product on their shelf cheaper than literally anyone else. That's why they can keep their prices so low. So, oh, we got another call.

So cool. So the point is that if you can leverage the food service distributor to get your product into a retail store, to get your product into a restaurant, that's the win-win. I was so thrilled when I heard that Cisco was delivering products to grocery stores because that's what they do.

They deliver it to a grocery store. They don't go through all that minutia of deducting and all that other stuff that you've got to deal with, all those headaches that add unfair burden and undue burden to your brand. Stephanie, you want to chime in?

Yeah, so again, the first thing I can tell you about food service is it's really important that, and it's the first exercise we go through with every client, do your pricing architecture full stop. Know from top to bottom all the different players, because it can get, where people get sideways in food service is they don't understand the players. And so they haven't created enough room in their pricing architecture to make money, or it's so expensive because they don't, again, they don't understand how to manage things.

So number one is pricing architecture. Number two is, again, do you get deductions from distributors in food service? Yes.

Do they look anything like what I have encountered on the retail side? Again, if you're Cisco, I'm going to use as an example, and you have 400,000 customers, right? You don't do, you might do what are effectively MCBs, which in food service are called deviated billbacks.

But you're doing it through the chain, right? So the restaurant operator that you're doing it with. But there is no off invoice, right?

You don't do a 15% off invoice. I used to have to do this with a convenience store distributor, and it made me crazy, right? So it's going to start on this day for the distributor for all products.

But the retailer can't buy until a certain date. But then any inventory that's like the games they play with how you do the math is ridiculous. You do not get that in food service.

Unless you're dumb enough to set up that program. But they don't have time for that. That's not how they make their money.

So, number one is, you know, again, make sure that you've prepared by having the right pricing. But number two, you know going in, if you do it right going in, when and how you're going to make money. And you can make a decision on the spot.

Do I actually really want to sell that chain or that operator or not? But it's not. The only reason it gets messy is if you have a group purchasing organization like a Foodbuy or Premier, right?

And you don't understand the relationship that they have with the operators that have signed up and distributors. But again, if you do your pricing architecture up front, you have to do some tracking. Don't get me wrong.

But it's nothing like the games that are played in retail.

Let me go one step further. Thank you for sharing that. You also, as Stephanie was alluding to, you get to be captain of your own ship.

You get to decide how you sell your product, where you sell your product, etc. There is a brand that I'm working with, a different brand, who got into one of the distributors listed on the chats. And that distributor said, hey, we're going to help you out.

They're in California. They got them in a store in Florida, a store in Indiana, and two stores in Louisiana. Now, logistically speaking, they're going to pay more to get that product on those shelves.

They're not going to be able to support those retailers the way they need to be. So, again, this is all about where do you want your brand to grow? Where do you want your brand to be?

How do you want to expand your brand? And if you're giving the keys, effectively giving the keys to your brand to anyone else, then the mistake that you're making is that you're not having a strategy, you don't have a strategy that identifies where you want to sell, how do you want to sell, etc. It's critically important that you have a strategy that identifies exactly what you're going to do.

Back to the example before, I made $5 last year, I'm going to make $5 million next year. Okay, well how? What are you going to do that?

What's your path to whatever? This is why brands get beat up in the shark tank, etc. You need to have a strategy, again, that is so robust and so thorough that anyone could step in and run your brand in your absence and on your behalf.

And so with that said, leveraging the food service model is great. Again, we're getting more exposure to the community. We have an opportunity to, this is something else I was going to talk about, improve our, what is the term on use?

Oh, make your top line growth better, which is great, give you more runway, improve your margins, etc. So some of the things that we need to be thinking about, remove waste. Thank you so much for sharing that.

So a couple of the questions. Tom says, SNA nationally keeps members informed. State SNAs are really focused on state level needs.

Curbside pickup is happening a lot. Absolutely. And as Stephanie said, I think that's great.

I would rather go help out that restaurant, if nothing else, to cheer them on and say thanks for being there. Clayton, answer your question. What is the best way to sell products and food service?

How do we manufacturers sell our clean, healthy products if phone calls and emails are being ignored and ghosted? I heard that a lot. This goes back to the poll strategy.

So I would argue the answer to your question, Clayton, is that you haven't given them a reason to take your phone call or respond to your email. Again, you're talking about a restaurant operator that in many cases may have mortgaged their home for this business if it's a little one. This is why I tell people leave your ego at the door for food service so it's healthy and natural.

Great. What the restaurant operator wants to know, will it drive traffic? Are new people going to come into my restaurant via a grub hub or curbside picket?

Are you bringing people in? Can you drive demand? Can you increase my check size?

So is there, will your brand actually allow me to charge more or make more because now they're going to add it to the meal? Or is it going to decrease my costs? So is my labor going to go down?

Well, if it's prepackaged, yeah. Is it going to reduce waste? Because there's something about your packaging or the way it performs in application.

If it doesn't increase check size, increase or drive traffic or reduce waste, and you can't articulate that in their language, they're going to ghost you because they're getting, they're just trying to run a business. And the way that you sell in retail does not work. The way that you market in retail does not work.

And if you come at them like they're a retailer and use the same language, they are going to ghost you, right? They don't have time. And this is why I tell people, learn about food service, work with food service experts, work with some local restaurants, find a food service expert to help you.

But the best thing that you can do for yourself is get somebody to help you with your messaging so that when you send a message, they actually want to read it.

And that's why Stephanie's here. So reach out to her. Please reach out to her if you've got questions.

She's a wealth of knowledge. I've learned so much about this. And I started earlier on, even before the truck, delivering.

I used to work for a company that made the Neko Broiler, which is what Burger King uses to make their burger and also the soft serve machines and stuff like that. I deliver them, fix them and all that stuff. But the point is, I was in the back of the house, back of the kitchen, and I had an opportunity to get to know some of the people in food service, restaurants too.

And it's such a different world. And you need to really understand what that looks like. So thank you for sharing that.

One other thought is when you're talking about people ghosting you or knowing your emails, this goes back to what I've been saying all along. Your product needs to be available everywhere at Customer Shop One, but how do you do that? And it's about building a thriving community around your brand outside of traditional retail.

Stephanie touched on this on social media. I developed a free Turnkey Sales Story Strategies course to help you with exactly this. In other words, this is what I mean.

If I tell you a story and someone else tells us, if I tell you a story and you share it with someone else and they share it with someone else and so on, by the time it comes back around to me, it's unrecognizable. This is the Achilles heel of literally every brand out there. If you can leverage your entire community to talk about your brand, the same passion and enthusiasm as you do, and you can build that buzz in the community, then that restaurant, that food service company that may not even have you on the radar is going to get whiff of you.

You're going to know your name. And then when you make that call, it's going to be a whole lot easier for them to say yes. So thank you for that.

Erwin says, what do you think of allergen free dessert and bakery driving demand? Oh, yes, absolutely. Think about where we kind of started this conversation.

What do retailers want? And as Stephanie said, okay, that's what restaurants want. One of the things I've been talking about a lot is retailers generically don't make anything.

They sell the real estate that your product takes up on their shelf. They want more traffic in their store, a reasonable profit, and a competitive advantage in the market. Almost exactly what Stephanie said.

So if you can leverage that and bake that into your selling story, that's going to help you compete back to the course, the Turnkey Seller Strategies course. If you understand how your consumer buys your product, which is unique about your consumer, if your consumer is gluten free, allergy free, etc. And you can leverage that in all of your messaging.

And then you have that on your outside community, and then you leverage that with restaurants, with food service, it's going to help make it easier for them to say yes to your product. Stephanie, your thoughts?

Yeah, so you are going down a path that I was like, oh, so Sorry, I got all excited because I had a point I wanted to make and now I've got to make my brain work. Okay, so this, Erwin, this is actually a perfect question, right? So again, in retail, you are speaking from the shelf to the consumer.

They're basically, they're making the decision and retailers like, they kind of will try most everything, which isn't always a good thing for you as a brand. In food service, again, think about it, when you sit down to order a beverage in food service, you go to an operator, you get Pepsi or you get Coke. You don't have a choice.

There is no choice in food service, unless it's prepackaged. And even still, they have a tendency, they don't have a huge warehouse in back, right? Think about a restaurant, they've got a very small back of house to hold everything they're going to sell in front of house.

What you have to think about is, for that operator, who's their consumer, but your messaging has to go back to the operator. They are the gatekeeper. And again, that's where people get stuck.

So thinking about this question about allergen free dessert and bakery. If that entire restaurant is an allergen free, are they going to be able to actually serve it on a plate without other allergens? And I'll give you a perfect example, and it tickles me to this day, and I'm not going to tell you who it was, but it was hilarious.

It was a company that did gluten free breads. And he chased down Ron Shake, who is the CEO and founder of Panera. I was like, you got to bring in my breads.

And the guy looked at him and he said, you realize that Panera actually means mother bread. Everything we do has gluten in it. That's literally anathema to who we are.

So while I hear you, there's no way that we would or could do anything gluten free. Like, what would be the point? Because it's going to be sitting next to all this gluten stuff.

So when you think about allergen free dessert and bakery, what's the perfect example? If I'm you, I'm looking at menus and saying, do they call things out as gluten free? Right?

How much is our allergens a part of their communication on their website and on their menu? Because if they're not talking about it, it's not important to them, they don't care. And by the way, sorry, Erwin, unless it's a place that's really, really known for its desserts, people don't generally go for dessert, right?

They go for the meal. That's a little different now. So what you may have that's to your advantage, if it's something that can be easily prepackaged and hold in delivery, you could say, hey, now you have an opportunity to provide allergen free or gluten free products to get to that veto vote or get an additional dessert, because normally they would just eat whatever gluten free stuff they have in the pantry.

But you have to think through why is that important? Does it drive traffic? So are more people going to come by and are you going to help them find it, right, because they don't have time, and can they charge more for it?

Or is it just displacing something they make money on today, but yours is going to be more expensive? That is how you think about food service. And if you think about it that way, you can be successful.

Love it. Great answer. Great question.

Thank you. We are way over.

No, no.

Thank you. I appreciate everyone's questions. If you've got additional questions, please reach out either to myself or Stephanie, our information is on the screen.

Thank you so much for being here. Stephanie, thank you so much for your insights. Next week, don't forget, we're going to be talking about trademarking.

The week after that, we're going to talk about how the consumer, the new consumer is buying your products. Again, do me a favor, help us raise the bar in natural. Share these insights with everyone else.

This will be available for replay. Give me a little bit of time to get it processed and stuff. And again, thank you so much.

And I look forward to helping you. So thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Happy Friday.

I want to thank Stephanie for coming on today and for sharing her wisdom and her insights. What an amazing concept. What an amazing idea.

The ability to sample your product during the time of COVID. Something all brands are asking me about. How do they do that?

Well, you just heard a creative suggestion. A creative idea on how to get your brand in front of more people. And again, best part yet, you get paid to sample.

I'll be certain to put a link to Elohi's strategic advisors on the podcast web page and in the show notes. Reach out to Stephanie and ask her how you can get involved and how she can help you grow sales and help the food service industry.