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Transcript

GEMS: Getting Those Top Food & Bev Accounts with Red Clay Hot Sauce founder Molly Fienning · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:08
  What are the key kind of lessons? And I'm just thinking for anyone listening who's, you know, got a food product, who's wanting to kind of have that same trajectory and who's wanting to get into those, you know, top accounts. Yeah. How do you actually get into those top accounts? Like, how did you get into Whole Foods? Yeah. And so...
• 0:27
  I think it's a couple of different things and specific to food and Bev. First of all, you've got to believe in your product, right? You know, as if the branding isn't good, you'll get someone to buy something once. But if the product itself is not amazing, then they're not going to buy it a second, third, fourth time. And so the product needs to be good.
• 0:43
  first of all, then the branding needs to be good, needs to draw the eye. Right. And so somebody needs to, you know, want this beautiful, like you think about Brightland olive oil, it's this gorgeous bottle that you want to put on your shelf. Right. I want to look at that every day. And then, yes, I'll buy that once. But if the olive oil is bad, I'm not going to buy it again. Right. And so then I come back because the olive oil is so beautiful. I buy it again and again and again. And I sure I was killing it. And so I feel like so first and foremost, you have the product needs to be,
• 1:13
  Then once you're confident that you can go and you can sit in those meetings and say, no, no, no, this is the best sauce there is. This is the best olive oil you can buy right now. And then I think they perk up. And with Whole Foods is an example. They have a wonderful program called the Local Forager.
• 1:29
  And the purpose is they have these every Whole Foods, I want to say it's divided up to like eight regions. And so across there's one global buyer, but they have eight different regions where each region has its own local forager whose main job is to find the cool local startups so that it is not just Cheerios on every shop, right? Which were the organic version of Cheerios, as I told.
• 1:51
  So you have this this person whose mission is to find the local cool startups. And so somebody connected a friend of mine in my network who owns a paleo sauce company connected me to the local forager for the south and we sent her sauce and then we you know, I drove to Atlanta and I had a coffee with her and she name is Kristen. She was wonderful, so supportive. And then she said yes. And so that put us into the whole food system. So all of a sudden we got picked up by the right distributor, which is unified as all of Whole Foods distribution.
• 2:21
  Then we're in the whole food system. So our brand is in there. Our UPCs are in there. It's much easier once you're in the system for a second or third or fourth region to be like, huh, I want to try that sauce. We're in the Pacific Northwest. We eat a lot of oysters. That's an oyster sauce. Great. And so Pacific Northwest picked us up as the second region.
• 2:40
  Once two or three regions in Whole Foods pick you up, then the global buyer starts listening. And then they say, OK, now there's there's you know, I'm looking at the data. This is selling well in three of my regions. Then, you know, we're talking to Austin now about rolling it out to every four hundred and twenty doors in Whole Foods. So all the all 400 doors. But that's only after you kind of prove your concept in your home region and maybe another one or two.
• 3:03
  Wow, that's really interesting. And I imagine when you went in for that initial meeting with the local forager, you know, you really had already that like proof of concept. You had your community behind you being like, hey, we love this. We're trying to track it down all the time. So you're able to show that, you know, validation. But I'm also wondering, once you got into that first, you know, the first region for Whole Foods and you're trying to expand,
• 3:28
  What were you doing to try and drive people to the Whole Foods to make sure that your product was actually being sold? Totally. So that's a very good point, Dune. The start is sort of like first owning your backyard, right? Like people are all about local products right now. People all about buying small, supporting local, supporting small. So really kind of becoming your, in our case, hot sauce, the go to hot sauce for South Carolina, the go to hot sauce for the South, the go to hot sauce in our region.
• 3:56
  And then, you know, once you can get those sort of the support regionally, yes, you have to think about national eyeballs, national press buzz. And so I believe PR is an important part of that. And so with both of our businesses from day one, whatever budget we have, we put aside some money to get sort of a public relations sort of advocate for us. And that could be everything from gifting the right sort of social media influencers in our space to spread the word.
• 4:22
  Or, you know, pitching certain kind of with my partner being a chef, he can go out and cook some some really fun kind of recipes and dishes and pitching some television moments where Jeff might make a great, you know, Father's Day brunch with hot sauce or, you know, a barbecue with some spicy recipes or spicing up your holidays.
• 4:43
  And so he's done that on Good Morning America. He's done that on CBS This Morning, Beat Bobby Flay's Food Network show. So, you know, finding out what your assets are as an entrepreneur, where can you kind of spread the word about the brand beyond your region through earned media and,
• 4:58
  And then, yes, of course, in paid media too, we'll do Instagram ads and Facebook ads. But I find that the earned media, people trust more since it's not just like you being kind of fed something from the brand. It's sort of an objective voice that says, huh, I need to like, I need to, I trust this, I trust this blogger and, you know, she likes it. So I'm going to go buy a lot. So that's us too. Totally. It's almost like your paid efforts need to support your organic and your earned efforts as the backup kind of like retention and retargeting side of things. Totally.
• 5:32
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 5:57
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• 6:19
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