Wilde Found A Winning Position In Function-First Front of Pack

0:00This week on the Nosh Podcast, what attendees can expect to hear about it Nosh live, why the C-Store channel can be challenging for emerging and better for emerging and better for you brands. and the evolution of the chicken chip.

0:22Hi everyone, I'm your host Carol Ortenberg. On the NOSH podcast, we go inside the business of natural, organic, sustainable, and healthy food. Today, the team discusses pushes in the C-Store channel before hearing from Jason Wright, CEO and founder of Wild Protein Chips, about how he approached repositioning his chicken-based chip line in order to appeal to a broader audience. Joining me today, we've got two familiar faces, or shall I say voices, we haven't gotten to hear from in a while. First up is reporter Lucas Southerd. I'm back. Oh, I'm so excited, Lucas. Oh, I'm raring to go. It's been a couple of weeks.

1:04I feel like it's been like a month since I've been on the banter. So I'm excited. I got some, actually, I don't have any hot takes. I'm just ready to troll you guys. Okay. And then we've got editor-in-chief Jeff Kleinman. Lucas is back. Jeff, we missed you on the podcast. You've been traveling a lot for work, but then you've also got your head down working on BevNet Live. Yeah, I've been super busy. It's just this month of October. You really hit the Expo East, and then you hit the NACs, and then you hit the Kids College Reunion or the Kids College Visit. Oh, yeah. How did that go? How did your first parents' weekend go?

1:46You know, we all did great, actually. We ate a ton. The thing that I thought was really funny is I was looking at all this Celsius being sold everywhere, at Case Western Reserve University, the home of the Fighting Spartans, and I realized it's a Pepsi campus. And then my son actually sent me a picture of a Pepsi truck. Yeah, did your son actually point that out? Like, have you trained him to, like, know— Spot the Pepsi campus? Yeah, spot the beverages on campus. I wasn't. Let's just say, you know, he knew that the picture would make me happy. And there was a sort of like unspoken father son thing there.

2:35OK. Anyway, so, yeah, I've been I've been working a lot on trying to pull together a conference, as I know that you have, Carol, with with Nosh Live. Yeah, it's coming up fast. And I know I say this every single year that this is going to be the best Nosh Live yet. And I'm a little biased, but I do think this is going to be the best Nosh Live yet. Not only are we headed to a new venue in Marina del Rey, excited to mix it up a little bit there. But we also have a stellar lineup of speakers from companies including Mosh, Lesser Evil, Bain, Kind, Truefru, Mason Dixie, Spins. The list just goes on and on.

3:18And over two days, we're going to cover topics such as retail channel strategy, capital efficiency, the climate for raising capital. It just gets me so excited. I can't wait, Jeff. Yeah, it's always great to see the people who come in and taste all the great new products from new and established brands and meet some of the new investors on the block. I know you've got the family fund coming to speak, right? Yeah, I think it's going to be super interesting to hear from these three folks who have founded companies, know what it takes to succeed in CPG, and hear how they're applying that knowledge when they're evaluating where to put their own capital or, shall I say, the fund's capital.

4:04Of course, in addition to the stage content, we'll have our live stream lounge coming back. Elevator talk is coming back. The pitch slam is coming back. And then we also have retailer one-on-ones this year. Jeff, you guys did this at BevNet Live. Now we're bringing it to Nosh, bringing retailers like Kroger and Fresh Time to meet with brands and just talk to them generally about how their brand can succeed in retail. Yeah, I love those meetings. I think the brands were pretty excited. It's hard to necessarily turn those one-on-one meetings into immediate uptake with the retailer, but any FaceTime is really great, and the feedback we got from BevNet Live was pretty wonderful.

4:50Well, more to come on Nosh Live, but to start things off today, follow up from a previous episode. Ever since we talked about the One Chip Challenge, my news feed is just filled with hot pepper news, which as a hot sauce lover, I'm not totally opposed to. And today it was announced that the creator of the Carolina Reaper pepper has developed an even hotter pepper, which he's calling Pepper X. According to an NPR story, I saw Pepper X measures an average of 2.693 million Scoville heat units. Let's compare that to a jalapeno, which is around 2 ,000 to 8 ,000 Scoville heat units, and a Carolina Reaper, which is 1.64 million Scovilles.

5:35So definitely an uptick in heat. One thing I learned is that I always thought the heat comes from the seeds of the pepper. Apparently, it comes from the white pith that holds the seeds in, which is known as the pepper's placenta. So you learn something new every day. So I love the name Pepper X. That's like in Marvel Comics, you know, the one the one guy more powerful than Wolverine, the one the one more savage killer is Mutant X. Ah, OK. Or Professor X or, you know. Well, there's Professor X, but not as not as prone to to shredding people as as Mutant X. Do you think Wolverine feels the same amount of spiciness when he eats a hot pepper?

6:25Or does his mutant healing make him impervious to eating heat? I bet he does feel it, but his heartburn goes away really quick. Yeah, he doesn't feel it on the back end as much. They said with this pepper, you don't feel it in your throat as much. You feel it in your chest more immediately, and then it comes up to your throat when you're in pain. was the way they described it. So this yields to the question that I am pretty sure we talked about when we were talking about hot peppers before or at various points, but what is the point of having something this spicy? It's not enjoyable for anyone, even if you're into hot stuff, spicy stuff.

7:08Like why even breed this type of pepper? I mean, I think there are some culinary-oriented hot sauces that are really spicy, but I've still been able to appreciate that there's nuances to them. This, you're right, has kind of taken it to a new level. I don't know how you balance this at all in a hot sauce. It sounds like it's going to be really a dominant flavor, but I'm sure hot ones will find someone to make a bottle with some Pepper X hot pepper sauce in there. So you told us that it took them eight years to develop this pepper? It's something like they said eight to 10 years because you have to keep crossbreeding it.

7:50And so it takes like 10 cycles to finally get to a pepper that's hot enough. And then I know a lot of spicy peppers are very slow growing. I'm trying to grow some like their sweet peach heat peppers. I still only have three on my plant and none of them have changed colors yet. They're super late bloomers. So I imagine this takes a lot of time. But I think I read also that he was, the creator was waiting to see if someone else could come up with a hotter pepper before he released this one. I guess he didn't want to like jump the shark or the gun too fast. I think it was probably, you know, just waiting because he knew he had this nuclear option that he could throw out there.

8:34It's like, oh, you have the Carolina Reaper, or I have the Carolina Reaper. You have the Grim Reaper. I have Mutant X Yeah is Do we think Mutant X Is more scary Because you just said Grim Reaper And I'm like That's a good name For a hot pepper Jeff Well the Carolina Reaper Is you know Sort of I know I'm just saying There's other scary terms You could use Yeah there are Especially with Halloween You know We're in Halloween season Right now Mmhmm Mmhmm What about the Fester pepper Mmhmm I don't like it but I'll let it go. Jeff, let's move on to other spicy takes. We missed you. You referenced this, but you were at NACS.

9:21Anything you noticed when it came to the food side, particularly natural, better for you options, any plant-based hot dogs? I did not see plant-based hot dogs on rollers, although I assume some were there. You know, it felt like there's just a lot of assimilation of the products that have been absorbed by larger snack companies kind of just going on right now. And there were some interesting smaller brands, but on the food side, it felt pretty sterile in terms of innovation. you know there there was sterile or stale that's funny you know there was nothing that really reached out and grabbed me like pepper x it's not to say that i got to everything because it is it is a very very large show and my attentions were kind of split between three verticals beer and beverage and food but visits to some of the big company booths you know the the mars and the and the hershey's didn't show me a ton of of crazy new stuff you know you've got something like kind which is finding itself sort of cut up into a bunch of different use cases and lots of lots of new protein products coming in there.

10:57But at the same time, you know, you find Kind Bar enrobed in chocolate now and turned into like a crunchy version of Bark Thins. We hear a lot about brands saying they want to bring better for you to C-Store, but now you're talking about Kind enrobed in chocolate. Is that just nice to say you want to do, but when it comes to execution, it's harder to see that take? I mean, the thing about convenience stores is they are really small footprints. So just as there might be a natural and organic section in a supermarket that's an aisle or two, unless they've totally gone in line, in a convenience store, it's a facing or two.

11:51And A lot of the products that go in that are healthier still have to be appreciated by the convenience store customers. So, you know, I think you look at something like a one bar or, you know, it's beverage analog, which was bang. You know, you're still looking for these amazing candy and cake flavors just with protein and caffeine, but no sugar. That's one end of the sort of healthier convenience spectrum. And the other is getting in a lot of nuts and jerky. And you have upgrades there, but it's hard to determine whether those are the things that are going to become mainstreamed in convenience or they're going to remain sort of complementary to the big brands.

12:50And those big brands are really good at remixing what they do. It's also even just from looking at price points. I'll admit I went into a gas station two weeks ago and I needed a protein bar just for something to grab on the run. I wanted to buy one of the more emerging brands. I think Overeasy was there. But it was just so much more expensive on shelf that it actually stopped me for a moment. and I had to weigh out my decision. And I don't know if the average shopper is going to take time to like figure out, okay, well, does this really have more protein? Is it lower sugar? Then I think, you know, we ended up grabbing a Clif Bar because it was just such, it was over a dollar difference.

13:37Yeah, it's, and you're sort of parsing out which of those more expensive products you want to buy versus, you know, the everyday Clif Bar, which is known as a Snickers. Yes, that is true. I was still trying to go low sugar. If there was a low sugar of Snickers, you know, well, we'd have to talk. Yeah, but it'd be, again, you'd be paying more for what's not there. And that's, you know, in convenience, it's all about getting the best selling SKUs available and you're paying more for that. It's why it's often really hard for these smaller entrepreneurial brands to break in. That said, there are sets like candy, like beverage, like snack, where innovation is or has been traditionally appreciated in that channel.

14:42I mean, you said emerging brands, but even big brands have trouble cracking. And I was listening to Hormel's Investor Day call last week. And they said, you know, we really want to go deeper into C-Store. They've acquired Planters. Planters has huge penetration in the channel. And that's how they're going to get further in C-Store is use those relationships to, you know, I think one example was bacon or pepperoni on a C-Store chain's pizza line or get snack packs in. And so it was funny to me that even this mega corporation was saying, hey, we've got to parlay these existing relationships because otherwise the retail channel, they said, is so fragmented, they're just not really making as much headway seeing actionable results in it.

15:29Sure. That sort of goes back to the hostess purchase as well where one of the ideas that they had was that that might help Smuckers get some more of its products into convenience stores. And they have to develop peanut butter kinds of products that are going to work well in those stores. I'll admit my other issue with Better For You and convenience stores is I feel like when I'm on a road trip, It's one of those places where I give myself permission to indulge in something I wouldn't normally eat. So we always buy Chex Mix on the road, and I don't think any other time of the year I would purchase Chex Mix.

16:13Any time of year is a good time for you. I mean, it is good, but I'm just saying. What's wrong with Chex Mix? I feel like that's somewhat better for you. Is it just a little too much salt and sugar? A lot of butter. A lot of salt. Butter's good for you. I don't care what anyone's saying. Salt's good for you, too. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's interesting you guys bring it up because this was, you know, not that we talked a ton about convenience, but there was an aspect about my conversation that we're going to hear from with Jason Wright at Wild Brands about how to kind of lean into better for you snacking without giving up the core of what snacking is, which is indulging in something that you really want.

16:55And that was kind of how he initially started the brand and why he pivoted into the chicken chip product that is now called protein chips. Because he tried to do a bar, a meat bar, and he realized it was just too small of a category to really succeed in. Whereas he's found success with making basically a better for you high protein chip. Yeah. It's always hard with snacking. Are you helping people become healthier or are you just doing less harm?

18:01Yeah. snacking while making something that you can feel a little bit better about eating. Well, I can't wait to hear it. Let's get to it. Hi, Jason. Thanks for coming on show today. Hey, Lucas. Thanks for having me, man. Excited to be here. I'm excited to be a guest. Yeah, we're going to talk about some wild stuff, right? Pun intended. I promise that will be the only really bad punny dad joke I give. Actually, I can't promise that. Anyway, I'd love to hear a little bit about how you developed Wild Brands and kind of where you saw a hole in the marketplace and how you identified that white space to really hone in on opportunity that you felt was untapped in CPG Snacks.

18:53In 2014, I was training for a marathon in Austin, Texas. And I started eating jerky and combining that with granola. And that was kind of my go-to snack as I was training for the marathon. and through the journey, this kind of idea popped in my head and the thought I had was, what if I could marry jerky and granola together and make a bar? And in my head, the vision I had was basically, what if this could look like a con bar? And instead of having the nuts and the fruit, I would have jerky combined with grains and I would have a complete protein snack. And so that was how Wild started. I launched Wild as a meat-based protein bar in 2016.

19:46We did pivot and we can get into that. The bar was not the success story that we all had hoped it would be. What we learned there was the category was super small. At the time I thought about this idea, no other bar existed, but by the time we got to market, Epic launched and many other bars launched. And at the end of the day, Epic was the really only survivor out of that small category. And, you know, the customer had options. Customer could eat jerky, sticks, meat bites. And I think the bar just kind of was, you know, it was just too much. And, you know, I can take you through the story and I can remember we were at a junction in the road where either I was going to have to close wild or I was going to have to figure out a really cool way to pivot.

20:37So tell me, tell me about that junction. Like, when did that happen? When did you come to the realization that the bar wasn't working and you had to pivot to a different format, a different product and kind of what, what got you to the decision to make that move instead of just folding up, you know? It was the end of 2016, and we had our second board meeting. The numbers, the velocities were just not there. No one saw a way. You could reformulate, you could try something new, but that takes a lot of time and energy, and it takes a lot of money. and we didn't see any kind of huge success in the category.

21:22And so I was basically put in a position of, you know, figure out the pivot or I doubt we get funding. So as you can imagine, you know, someone, I was depressed at the time, you know, you're struggling, you know, you're trying to figure out what's next. You got a lot of pressure on you. I immediately turned to comfort food. Being from the South, I turned into my favorite snack, which was potato chips. I grew up just loving potato chips. My mom would always say an open bag is an empty bag in our house because of me. So, you know, I was just craving potato chips. I was thinking through the pivot and at the bottom of a potato chip bag one day, I don't know, this light bulb went off.

22:04And it basically, I asked the question, what if I could replace the potato with chicken breast? and that's exactly the eureka moment that I thought that happened and and when I got that in my head you know I just could not turn back I did not know how to do it but I was already working with meat I was already working with Colorado State University and their meat science department and so I thought well I'm already halfway there like let's figure this out and so little that I know had never been done before. And there was a lot of trial and error. But in 2018, we had successfully figured out how to make a chip crafted from chicken breast, egg white, bone broth.

22:48But that was on more of a little small scale, you know, in your home kitchen. The trick was how are we going to really bring that product to market? So it's 2023 now. That was five years ago that you kind of got to that point of you figured out how to do it. But there's been some changes along the way since 2018. I'd love to know the feedback you've gotten over those years to get to where you are now. What would you tell another brand who was doing something very unique like you were in 2018? What advice would you give them to get to the place that you're at right now? If I could go back from now back to 2018, I would say build your own manufacturing facility and don't call it chicken chips, but let's take, let's take a journey through how we got there.

23:41Yeah. Let's split that up. I want that in two different pieces because those are two very important parts of the story, I think, but also very good pieces of advice, you know, together, you know, in 2018, I took our prototype to a pork rind facility where I thought we would partner and we would make the product. Fast forward, that did not happen. We learned quickly that nobody had the equipment necessary to make a product like we had. So I immediately started prototyping what I thought would work as a, we'll call it a CRISPR. So I wanted to basically form a product. We had a lot of problems when we tested at the port-riding facility.

24:23So I basically partnered with the largest manufacturer of equipment here in the U.S., and they helped me. Together, we built our first prototype, CRISPR, and that was in 2018. And we basically launched the brand in 2019. When we launched the brand, I called it Chicken Chips. and we started at Whole Foods and we did a ton of demos. And I can remember the first time I offered someone a chicken chip with my accent. They thought I said something completely different. And they really had this funny look on their face. What did they think you called it? Chicken shit. That's what I figured. And I'll probably have to cut that, but I just want to make sure.

25:13Okay, so we got a product new to the world. we don't explain how it's made or what it's made from we just tell you it's a chicken chip and people are not eager to try it now when they do try it they really like the texture the taste they like the protein but to get them to try it without me being there to sell it it's very difficult you know you got a bird on a bag calling it chicken chips the first thing in a customer's mind is what parts of the chicken are they using? You know, we really had to focus on how do we pivot and how do we change what we call the product. And eventually we landed on protein chips crafted from chicken breast, egg white, bone broth.

25:54That was a huge game changer for a while. I, you know, if we had not done that, I do not think the product would have made it. That was a huge turning point. And then when we opened our facility in January of 21, We made the product in a short period of time just wonderful. I mean, it was delicious. You know, we understood or learned a little bit more about the process. You know, we were able to make some changes in the process where it really brought the product to more of a potato chip experience versus a protein chip experience. that was a huge game changer for us that if we were going to make it and we were going to be profitable one day we had to go and do our own facility we had too much secret sauce that we were educating too many co-mans and then we had too many co-mans with our hand in the cookie jar so i needed to own both of those in order to prop you know save the proprietary formula and proprietary process.

27:01And at the same time, you know, make the margin that we needed to support the business. You know, you've said a couple of times that chicken chips wasn't working, but protein chips has. It's a slight change. I mean, obviously you're calling out the health benefits now as opposed to the ingredients, but is there anything else that you've, that, that you discovered along the way in why calling it a chicken chip wasn't working? Like what about chicken chips is so different than protein chips from a consumer standpoint? I think it's important to remember there needs to be a bridge. You can't build a pier.

27:45You need to build a bridge. And when you called it chicken chip, that was the first time anyone had ever heard of a product called chicken chip. So they didn't know what to compare it to, and they didn't know really why they should be eating it. But protein chips have existed, just not crafted from chicken breast, egg white, bone broth. So when we pivoted and called it a protein chip, I think that was the big game changer for Wild is building the bridge to protein chips, where the customer immediately knew why they should eat it, what the benefit was, And now it was about how do you deliver the benefit?

28:25And for us, we deliver the benefit with real food. So going back a little bit, you talked about partnering with the largest manufacturer in the country, creating this prototype. All of this requires a significant amount of capital, obviously. Like you're making brand new production equipment. You're trying to put a brand new product on the market, which in itself, even if it as a regular potato chip would cost a lot of money. Walk me through the process of, you know, not just getting investment to do that, but getting buy-in from investors to say, this is worth it. You know, like I'm basically making my own subcategory in high protein snacks and it's going to be worth the investment to do.

29:15When we decided to pivot, you know, at that point we had raised series A. And when I went to Series A investors and said, I'm going to do this chip crafted from chicken breast, no one believed in it. Not a good starting place, I guess. It basically ran for the heels. Luckily for me, it was right around Expo West, and I was able to meet Bill Moses. Bill Moses is a serial entrepreneur who started Kavita, had a successful exit. He fell in love with the product and he really liked my story. And he introduced me to a guy by the name of Alan Carr. So Alan was a big investor and supported him through Kavita.

30:06And Alan really liked the concept and the product. So I had two individuals that really took a liking to me, took a liking to the product, thought it was a big idea, thought that the world needed it. They needed a healthier snack that we could all feel good about eating, something that we would get protein from. And they supported me and they became my lead investors when everybody else kind of turned their back on, you know, the concept. And listen, I understand that. I'm not pointing any fingers. I can clearly understand why it would be a huge risk to pivot and do something that's never been done before.

30:46I had no choice. You can't fail at a product and then launch a Me Too product. You can't launch Jerky and think that's going to solve your problem. You're just a Me Too. Nobody's going to give you the time of day. I knew I had to do something extraordinary. So luckily for me, Bill Moses and Alan Clark believed in me. And, you know, till today, they are my largest investors and they have, you know, believed in me and they've went on this journey for the past five years and supporting. And if I fast forward to today where I'm sitting at as we're doing this podcast, I'm sitting in a hundred thousand square foot facility that we built in the great state of Kentucky.

31:29So let's talk a little bit about channel strategy. And where do you think the brand has worked best? And how are you trying to blow that up into other channels or other types of retailers? The journey of Wild, we started at Whole Foods, started in natural. We're now transitioning out to mass, to grocery, club. Sports nutrition is really big at Target and really big at Walmart. We partner with Kroger in trying to create a better for you, I call it a great for you category, where you have products with benefits versus just like an absent of a negative. So like in my opinion, grain-free is an absent of a negative.