🧇 EMILY GRODEN // EVERGREEN FOUNDER & CEO

0:00I'm Sam Rose, and this is Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for consumer brand founders who know that building a business is messier than the highlight reel shows. Your supplier just missed their deadline, your top product is out of stock, and your competitors somehow just launched the same thing at half the price. Sound familiar? Every week, we dive into the real problems that keep founders up at night, from inventory disasters to supply chain nightmares, because surviving the chaos is what separates brands that fail from brands that scale.

0:30yeah well i'm so excited to talk to you about evergreen and and i love your story of just going from like a home vitamix to a really really big number that we can share publicly if you wish or not in retail sales last year and and what i can say is like almost 10 000 stores walmart whole foods target kroger like the the wish list really like the cpg wish list um i know you're about to double that or at least projecting to double that. So I would love to hear just the origin story and the Vitamix story and what color Vitamix you had. Did the motor ever overheat on you? It's still a Vitamix I use today.

1:08I didn't always love Mondays and didn't always sit down excited to work on Monday mornings. Making waffles was certainly not my career path that I expected for myself. I graduated from Harvard Law School in 2015, set on a career in corporate law. I moved back to Chicago and started, I'm from, and I live now, and started working for a big firm in the corporate group doing private equity deals. And it's a really long story, but to make it shorter, to keep the audience engaged, basically I had my now seven-year-old daughter, and I knew I was going to need something like a frozen waffle to feed her.

1:52I was a working mom. I had like, you know, 30 minutes in the morning to get something in her mouth and run out the door and catch the train. But I, I'd always loved food. I had always been really thoughtful about what I fed myself. I liked to cook things from scratch. So I knew I didn't want to feed her the frozen waffle brand in the yellow box that we all know from our childhood. And so I started looking for what better for you options were available on the market. And I went to my local health food store and flipped around a bunch of packages and started kind of inspecting the ingredients list.

2:27And to my dismay, realized, and this was in 2018, realized that like all of the better for you frozen waffles at the time were basically like that brand in the yellow box, just in healthier looking packaging. But actually the ingredients were pretty much the same. Yeah, the ingredients were pretty much the same. I still had to Google a bunch of stuff to figure out what it was. And I just had this moment where I was like, I really don't want to settle for this. I can, I can kind of compromise and make big batches of waffles on the weekends. I bought this mini waffle iron, which I keep right next to me.

3:00The OG waffle iron. Um, it doesn't, but it should. Yeah. I'll take, take suggestions. All right. I'll be percolating. Yeah. And so I started making big batches of waffles on Sundays. That was my compromise. And I basically would open my fridge and open my pantry and put the most nutritious kind of real food ingredients I could find. So whole grain, wheat, flours, eggs, nuts, spices, real fruits and veggies. And I throw them into my Vitamix. And that's how I made my batter. and then I'd have, you know, bag, Ziploc bags full of frozen waffles. I stick them in the freezer and that's what we would pull from during the week to feed my daughter.

3:40And after about a year of watching her devour them, like she truly loved them and ate them right up and realizing not only how good I felt about giving them to her because I knew they were truly, you know, preparing her for the day, they were nutritious, but also just selfishly how much easier it made my life to not have to think about one thing in the morning and have that box already checked for me, I decided I probably wasn't the only one out there who wanted something like it. So set off on this wild journey that is CPG and grocery retail to try to figure out how to get a product on a grocery store shelf with exactly zero background in CPG or grocery retail.

4:16And fast forward about five years. And as you said, we're nearing about 10 ,000 stores. So we figured out quite a few things along the way, but have a long way to go as well. Okay, I think I figured out the name because it's the waffle that launched a thousand waffles. So it's, she's probably Helen, really. Oh, I love it. That's so good. I think it's a boy who can plant Troy. Take your back. Oh, that's really good. Really, really good. I'll ask my kid. I'll pull my kid and let them decide the final answer. Yeah, it's really their, it's their decision. Ultimately, I defer to them. As most things are.

4:49Yeah. So, okay. I love this story. I have such, you know, heartfulness around just like experiencing a problem and then like having fun coming up with a solution and then realizing like, wait, maybe I can give this to people. Maybe there's such generosity of spirit that really defines entrepreneurs like you. And it's so inspiring because I have to say as a customer, like my kids are obsessed with people. And as a parent, I'm like, Emily's got my back. Tell me. Explain the brand perfectly. Perfectly. Like that is our hope to have to make parents feel like we have their back. Well, mission accomplished.

5:26At least one, but probably thousands of us. Thank you. Tell me about the vegetables that you're sneaking into the waffles and like, did your kids even notice or are they excited about that? Do they not care? Do they even know? Well, it's funny you ask because this is actually partly guided our product innovation and our pipeline. So at a young age, don't even notice, right? And you can see in our mini waffles. So in our zucchini carrot cake, for example, you could see bits of real carrots and real zucchini in there. We still use fresh carrots and zucchini for that skew. As my seven-year-old, now seven-year-old, got older, her preference of which, and it's funny, they like kids and I I'm told this by parents all the time that kids rotate through their favorite flavors and they often call them by like the color of the bag like people come up to me and be like my kid loves the orange one or the yellow one and so for my seven-year-old the orange one zucchini carrot cake was always her favorite as a little kid and then as she started to get older she migrated to peanut butter banana bread and I was always under the impression and believed that it probably because you can't see the veggies in the peanut butter banana bread.

6:38All of our mini waffles have carrot, zucchini, apple, and pea in them, but some are in powder form, so they are truly hidden. And then some, you know, like I said, in zucchini, carrot, you can actually see pieces of them. And so she like was pretty exclusively eating the peanut butter banana of bread as she was starting to get older and started to kind of talk to her about why and what she might want to see going forward and what I decided from just observing her behavior. And then obviously we confirm this with consumer insights is as she was getting older, she was getting a little pickier, like she was a little less open to seeing vegetables in her waffles.

7:20And so, and she also had a bigger appetite. So she was eating multiple waffles at a time, like one waffle was no longer enough for her. And so it started our wheels turning and we actually just launched our second product line. They're called Thick and Fluffy. They're basically bigger waffles for bigger kids with bigger appetites. And the veggies are fully hidden. You cannot see any veggies. So basically, you know, as you were saying about innovating based on your own need and your own problem, like still very much doing that, still very much guiding our innovation pipeline. But when we did kind of concept testing, it affirmed the end of one that was my own daughter and that older kids would really love the thick and fluffies.

8:04So these launched nationwide at Whole Foods in September. We've got a bunch of big, exciting launches coming up, but they've been flying off the shelves from day one. So we're really excited about them. That's so cool. OK, so something you just said caught my ear because your customers changing over time, right? The kids like their taste change. And so you've got this moving target of preferences to follow and to sort of innovate around, which is so interesting because I feel like that's true of CPG just because like flavors trend and, you know, we're as humans, we're all experienced machines.

8:34We like to try new things. But it happens on such a shorter time frame for kiddos. And, you know, something that's like really working on day one, you're like, wait a second, my five-year-old like sees a pea and they're like, nope. right exactly how uh how is that influencing like next next steps is ours is there innovation on the you just got done with one launch so i'm not saying you have to launch it oh we have so much and we have so much already yes he's up with anything i can't tease you with any specifics other than to say that we've got a lot of innovation in the pipeline um and kind of with every potential product we look at, we do look at like who within the family does this serve?

9:19We are very thoughtful about wanting to grow with our consumer, as you said. I mean, some of the brands that I most admire take, for example, Once Upon a Farm, I think it's done such an effective job of growing with their consumer and kind of tacking on years to that consumer's quote-unquote life with their brand. And so that is our goal as well. I think we've done a really successful job so far of winning these loyal consumers at a young age. So now let's grow with them. So Thick and Fluffy's was a first step. You know, I think we've got some products that will continue to be a solution for similar age kids.

9:58They're like six to 12. And then we've got our next products that are going to be more like teenagers as well. So you'll continue to see a squirrel with our consumer. I'll say that. I was going to say, I bet some of my kids are 12 and 10 and 8, and they've gone through this kind of same cycle of violence.

10:15I've got stuff coming for your oldest one. All right, I'm going to let him know. Let's go back for a moment to sort of the beginning of all of this. You made your way from corporate law to restaurant law or hospitality law at Alinea. Alinea is like such an extraordinary experience. If you're in Chicago and have an opportunity to go, highly recommended. It was one of the most mind blowing. I've been to Alinea, both pregnant and not pregnant, which were very different experiences for me. Very different. Yes. Yes. But what I loved about, OK, here's a small personal anecdote. I promise we'll get back to you in a second.

10:51So I'm pregnant. I'm at Alinea, which is this like very fine dining, multi-hour experience. And they have a they have a juice tasting menu and a sparkling water tasting pairing. And so I have the juice pairing. But of course. And I just that level of extraordinary hospitality is like so, so thoughtful. And and I can say as people who watch this podcast a lot, like I always have a glass of sparkling water in my hand. I am a sparkling water connoisseur and they're sparkling water tasting menu. Was amazing. Amazing. And it felt. Yeah, really amazing. I guess my taste in sparkling water hasn't changed that much.

11:33I'm a static consumer. What is your favorite sparkling water? My favorite favorite is, oh my gosh, and it was just in my mind and now it's not. It starts with a G. It's German. Oh, why did it just pop out of my head? What is it? Goffelstein. It's not Goffelstein. I drink a lot of Pellegrino. Let's just spit it out. You know what has the bubbles are too big for me? Are so respectfully, God love it, Topo Chico. Really big bubbles. I love Topo Chico. I feel that there's like a spectrum of bubble size. Yes, for sure. And Topo Chico is just like one step too far. That's so funny. For me. Anyway, we digress.

12:15Yes, when I said that I was telling the shorter version of the story earlier, I skipped over the whole Alinea step. Let's go on though. Yeah, I... Gerald Steiner. Sorry. What? Gerald Steiner. Gerald Steiner. Gerald Steiner. Little bubble stuff. I will look it up. So I also didn't expect to end up as the lawyer for a restaurant group either. But as I alluded to in the beginning of this chat, I'd always loved food. Food was my hobby. When I wasn't at the office, you'd find me in the kitchen baking from scratch. You'd find me flipping like I read, you know, Bon Appetit and food and wine cover to cover every issue.

12:56I watched all of the food TV shows from Top Chef to Chef's Table. And one night I was watching Chef's Table and it was the Alinea episode. And I sat there on the couch and was just so overwhelmed with inspiration. I, you know, didn't love my job. I wasn't feeling particularly fulfilled. And I was just watching these chefs who were so deeply passionate, as you experienced, about their craft. And I was like, I want to be in that world and opened my laptop. I Googled Nick Hakonis, who's the co-founder of the restaurant group with Chef Ackett's. I found his email address and I sent him a cold email.

13:38And I basically said, I'm a lawyer who loves food. Are you looking for in-house counsel? And attach my resume. And I sent it off and I closed my computer and went on with my night. I assumed I'd never hear from him again. And 18 minutes later, my phone buzzed. And two weeks after that, I was hired to be his general counsel. Holy smoke. That is how I made the leap. And it was, I mean, as cool as like the job general counsel for the Alinea group sounds like it was that cool. It was an amazing job for a lawyer who loves food. It truly doesn't get better than that. My favorite days were when I got to work out of our offices, but we're in the Fulton Market District of Chicago, which is separate from Alinea.

14:19But once in a while I would go work out of Alinea so that like, you know, my face was known. and I would sit at the kitchen table at Alinea and just type away and watch the chef's work. And a chef would come over and be like, would you like some coffee? And I'd say, sure. And they'd bring me like the most incredible cup of coffee ever. But what was so formative about that experience was they really taught me how to be an entrepreneur. And I didn't even really know it was happening, but it's hard for it not to rub off on you in that environment, which, you know, watch the chef's table episode or you know anything about Alinea, these guys are infamous for or famous for constantly questioning the status quo.

14:59So, you know, the most one of the most famous desserts or items on the menu is the dessert where the chefs come out and instead of like having dessert on a plate, they paint dessert right on your table. And it's like choreographed to music and it's this whole show. And in the chef's table episode, Chef Hackett says, you know, I sat there and I was like, why do I need to be constrained to a plate? Like, why can't the entire table be my canvas? And that mentality pervaded everything that they did at Alinea. And I also, I split my 10 50 50 between Alinea and talk the reservation software that they started to kind of solve the problems they were experiencing with reservation softwares with Alinea.

15:38And so like that, that trickled down to my legal work too. And so it totally reprogrammed my brain such that when I was driving home from work one night and I was listening to a podcast that happened to be talking about frozen waffles of all things. And in the kind of cliff notes version of the podcast is that, you know, saying frozen waffles are this massive category in grocery retail,$1.3 billion. And at the time it was 80 % that brand I alluded to earlier. And in the moment I sat there and I was pregnant with my first daughter, but I sat there and I heard that fact and I was like, what, why hasn't there been more innovation?

16:13And I need to like go figure out what to do about this. And I don't think if I had, you know, I think if I hadn't been working in Alinea, that fact would have gone in one year and out the next. And I never would have thought about it again. You had permission to just mark the rules. And, and, you know, I feel so much affinity to that story. And, and I, I too was sort of like leaving a job that I love and taking this like wild leap, but just thought, okay, it's, it's time. And I've got this idea that is exploding out of me. And I think that it's going to change people's lives or at least their moments that they treasure with families and in the kitchen.

16:50And, um, and, uh, yeah, being, being in an innovative environment really gives you permission to do that. And whenever, you know, we're sort of a few, a few companies pass now for us and, and, uh, whenever we've had a few employees leave to go start their own businesses. And it's like the most thrilling success and win ever for when someone says, I got to go because I'm going to go do a thing. And I'm like, yes, but I'm so sad to lose you. So I will say that it's hard to deprogram the lawyer out of a lawyer. And so I did have some risk aversion lingering. So I didn't. So, you know, I heard the podcast.

17:32I was pregnant with my daughter and I was like, well, I'm going to need a frozen waffle. As I said, like, I'm not going to have time to cook from scratch, but I don't want to feed her that brand. So like, why hasn't there been more innovation? I'm, you know, just going to make my own. And like I said, it took me like a year of feeding it to her before I thought, okay, actually, like maybe it's just not me. Like maybe I could be the innovation that needs to happen here. And even then I walked into Nick's office and I asked to drop down a part-time. I did not quit right out. So I dropped down to three days a week and I worked on Evergreen two days a week, but, and maybe he had a similar experience.

18:10I don't know. I was so nervous for that conversation. Um, and he was basically like, you know, if you can do our work in three days a week, I don't care what you do in the other two. So he was supportive. Maybe a little part of him was proud that he had taken the lawyer out of the girl or tried to at least. And then I didn't actually, quote unquote, retire from my day job until we'd been in Whole Foods for six months. So it took me a long time to fully take the leap. But everybody's got to do it in their own way. Yeah. Well, but speaking of you, but you've made some, you've made some risky or I should say bold choices with your brand.

18:46Like I, I remember the original packaging, which was sort of green and had this perception, like there was a certain shelf perception of it, of like, this is healthy and it's vegan maybe. And it's like all of these assumptions that you make about looking at something in like a green and brown package. I'm probably hurting some feelings right now. And but but the packaging didn't tell the story and the way that you wanted it to. And of course, as you shared at the beginning of our conversation, if children are in part helping their parents make buying decisions around your product and they want the orange one or they want the blue one, they need to be able to identify it and be part of that story, too.

19:22So tell us a little bit about just the packaging changes, the reformulation and then what that did for the business. It changed everything. The week the new packaging rolled out on shelf and it was a flow through change. So it wasn't like it was on shelf everywhere all at once. But the week it just started showing up in certain spots, our velocities jumped 62%. So wild. Wild what a rebrand can do. We started having conversations about the rebrand kind of beginning of 2023. My VP of marketing at the time came up to me and she was like, what is your goal for the company? What is your dream? What do you believe this can be?

20:02And I told her, like, I think we can be the next big frozen breakfast brand. And she said, awesome. I think you're the leader to do it. I think we got the product to do it or nearly. But let me tell you, this brand, like this brand is not going to do it. Nope. The white packaging with the green lighters, not going to be the next big frozen breakfast brand. So we decided in true kind of scrappy startup form that we were going to use Expo West. It was going to be it was our first time exhibiting in March 2023. We're going to use Expo West as a as a way to interview thousands of people about their experience with the packaging and with the product.

20:39And the number one piece of feedback we heard was that people were like, this is so much better than we thought it would be. And we were like, well, we're delighted that you like the product. Why did you expect it to be that? And exactly what you said. We heard it over and over and over again. People were like, I don't know what like the white packaging. It's just and the green letters that screams like health. A lot of people did think it was vegan. Even the font on Evergreen was a really harsh. It had very sharp corners and it wasn't that kind of warm hug on a plate feeling that you should get from a from a warm, delicious waffle.

21:14And after Expo West, I turned around and I was like, we absolutely have to rebrand. We had both had experiences with our kids being drawn like moths to a flame to a brand that had really bright kind of rainbow-esque packaging in a different color per SKU. And so we knew that was the direction we wanted to go in. We interviewed so many branding agencies. And I'll never forget our VP of marketing turned to me one day. She's like, Emily, if we want the rebrand to hit shelves in January 2024, like you just got to make a decision. Like we've got so many great agencies. You just got to choose one. And we had one call left and it was an agency called Tarmac.

21:54And we had the call with them. And I was like, they're it. They're our agency. And they took our ideas and our feedback and they ran with it. and I mean what they produced is it was a dream like it really was exactly what we wanted and more and it has I think it really was the inflection point for our brand and started kick-started this momentum that has just continued to snowball since. Okay I want to dig into that decision a little bit more which isn't a question I plan to ask you but having run an agency of my own in the past this is such a hard and then also been a consumer of agencies it's a really hard decision like you're going to be in the trenches with these people and giving feedback about creative work is one of the hardest things to get really good at because it becomes so personal, right?

22:37And so you have to be able to deliver feedback that sounds like, ew, I don't like it. Go back to the drawing board, throw that away and keep working without like feeling self-conscious about hurting someone's feelings. And for that, you have to have very quickly a relationship where you've built trust and mutual respect and understanding so that like, if you are throwing their work into the trash, they're like, okay, I get it. and like we're going to build from there. Yeah, what were you looking for in all of those different agencies? How did Tarmac stand out for you? And what gave you kind of like that early sense of like, okay, these guys, they get us and maybe also I'm not going to hurt their feelings when I threw their stuff in the trash.

23:18Combination of things. I think first, you know, I think you get a sense with people, whatever position you're interviewing them for, whether like the people on the Tarmac team, we were kind of like, yeah, we'd like love to go get a drink, with them someday. And in fact, whenever I'm in Austin, we do do that. We always get dinner and drinks. You know, they were fun and the type of people that we wanted to be in the trenches with. So that was definitely helpful. But I will say like there were many other agencies where the people were great too. This is why it took us so long to make a decision because it was like so many of these would be incredible.

23:52We looked at their past work and looked at kind of the vibes, Right. And I think a lot of agencies do have a vibe, although, you know, also a lot of agencies can do lots of different things really well, too. But they had done some they had some case studies on rebrands they've done recently that suggested to us that they got it like they got the bright color. They could do the bright, punchy color and the really delicious looking food on front of pack really well. And then and obviously like price point is a fact is a factor, too. But I think, you know, like the personality of the team, their portfolio work really kind of spoke for themselves.

24:29And it was they also just once we started working with them, they over delivered at every stage. Like they told us they were going to give us, you know, three alternatives. And they always came back with like six and they were all amazing. And we found that to be the case every time we go to them. So they they're incredible partners. And we just caught up yesterday about all the new innovation I was talking about. But they really hit it out of the park. I would recommend them to anybody. How long did it take you to go from like, we're going to do a rebrand and we're maybe, or like signing engagement, right?

25:00To we've got new packaging or on the shelves. Probably, I think we signed up with them in April of 23 and new packaging hit shelves in January. It was a sprint. And that felt like a sprint. It was really a sprint because if you think about it, like the product being hitting shelves in January is produced in early December. So packaging has to be ordered, you know, go back probably eight weeks before that. So it was fast. Let's say in scrappy startup mode, you bootstrapped for a long time. You're packing your own boxes, you're handling sales, you're running production. And I want to talk about your production process too in a minute.