Deep Brands

0:00Welcome to the Emerging Brands podcast. Sharing the stories behind brands you'll want to shop next. I'm your host, Kelly Bennett. I am a New York City-based brand strategist for CPG Food and Beverage Brands. In each episode, I'll take you behind the scenes of founders that are building better-for-you products and bringing them to market. it. Also, I talk to brand builders, retailers, industry experts, and tastemakers who help bring those cool products to your shopping cart. You will hear stories of real-life founders, their launch strategies, and practical advice you could use to grow your own brand or simply discover what's next on shelf.

0:42And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Glimpse. Glimpse is an AI powered deduction management tool that disputes and recovers invalid deductions, winning brands, thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours back to founders so that they can focus on what really matters most. If you're a brand selling in retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you. Now let's dive into the new episode. Hi everyone. Welcome back to a new episode of Emerging Brands Podcast with Kelly Bennett. Today is a really cool episode because you're not just going to hear about one brand.

1:31You're going to be hearing about multiple brands and how a really cool dynamic CPG brand grows and evolves and scales over time. So this is a fresh look of what's happening in the brand now, but also understanding how the brand got here. Kiernan Laughlin, he is the general manager of Deep Foods, which we'll dive into all the cool global flavors, frozen food brands that are underneath Deep Brands. But Kiernan, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. And I really appreciate you taking the time to show us the behind the scenes of how this is all working and all the exciting things happening in Deep Brands.

2:19Kiernan Laughlin:Well, thank you so much for having me, Kelly. It's an honor to be here. And I don't think I have more favorite topics and emerging brands. And I'm thrilled to share more of the story of Deep Brands. Amazing. Well, that is my personal favorite topic too. So let's just jump into it. I know that Deep Brands is now expanding and really honing in on global flavors and frozen foods. So can you walk us through or maybe just taking a quick step back of why frozen foods? I think that frozen for a long time has gotten misunderstood or didn't have the quality perception that other segments in the grocery store had.

3:08But Frozen is really having a moment, which I was really excited to have you on the show and nerd out about the Frozen section in the grocery store. But I would love to hear from your personal point of view and the brand of why Frozen Foods and then also going into the different global flavors that you all cover within the brand extensions. Yeah.

3:30Kiernan Laughlin:So I'm glad you speak my language in terms of kind of the renaissance that frozen foods is having. I can tell you, I started my career 20 years ago in CPG in frozen foods, and it's very different today than it was then. But I think what makes it so appealing today is ironically, it's because it hasn't been that appealing to founders, to investors over the past 10 to 15 years or so. Although I think we both agree that's changing. But if you break down why that is, I think historically and today, Frozen has got some high barriers to entry, right? You've got really high free costs, much higher than Ambient.

4:12Kiernan Laughlin:You've got limited display space. So you can't just case stack something or drive awareness that way that often. And that's, that's scared a lot of folks away. But because of that, it gets really interesting because, you know, I would argue there are a lot of categories in frozen that are, that are a little bit less crowded with emerging brands and ambient categories. And they're often full of a bunch of legacy brands, which, which makes them, them ripe for, for disruption. So we, we do see frozen entrees as one of those categories. And, And, you know, if you can be a digitally native modern brand and, you know, price in some of those barriers to Frozen in your business model and then serve the unmet consumer needs and innovate, you can be really successful in Frozen.

4:58Kiernan Laughlin:So that's why we think it's really appealing. And then I can obviously share a lot more specifically about what we're doing within Global Flavors and Deep Brands. Cool. I would just love to personally know what has been maybe one of the top one to two shifts that you've seen over the last 20 years in Frozen. Well, millennials got older. That's that's a big part of it. And then Gen Z's came on their heels. So, you know, if you looked at what Frozen was 30, 40 years ago or parents generations, it was it was TV dinners. Right. Right. And most of those were kind of hockey pucks in a tray. They weren't particularly appealing, but they were convenient and they were cheap.

5:43Kiernan Laughlin:and over time there became I think a negative connotation with with frozen food for poor quality and then I think as millennials came of age they kind of led this renaissance or return to frozen foods where there was this realization that you know frozen is actually arguably the best way to preserve freshness and what started then to happen I think we're part of leading this is is increasing the quality in the frozen food aisle. You're starting to go beyond basics like lasagna, meatloaf, and now introducing more and more global flavors to the set as well as more better for you items to the set.

6:29Very cool. Okay, let's just cut to the chase because you are working on some incredible brands. They're personally in my freezer right now. Can you break it down for us of the brands that are under the parent umbrella of Deep Brands and how it works with the global flavors that you all are hitting on?

6:53Kiernan Laughlin:Yeah, so Deep Brands is new. So if folks haven't heard of it, I mean, I think we announced it about a month ago. Oh, amazing. It's relatively new. But it starts with Deep Indian Kitchen. And Deep Indian Kitchen is a frozen Indian brand that I co-created and launched in 2019. And that was a rebrand and turnaround of the former Tandor Chef brand and business, which I've been leading as GM since. And I should mention, Deep Indian Kitchen really starts with Deep Foods Inc. So we like the word deep around here, but Deep Foods Inc. has been the leader in global flavors manufacturing since 1977. And I'm, you know, I'm also EVP of that company.

7:40Kiernan Laughlin:But Deep Indian Kitchen, it's scaled since 2019 pretty considerably. So we now have a 51 % share of frozen Indian food nationwide. Incredible. Yeah, and we're sold in 26 ,000 doors. and lucky to be in your, proud to be in your freezer. But we're still growing pretty rapidly on Deep Beating Kitchen. And we were recently named Bain & Co. Insurgent Brand. So proud of that. The brand really started with frozen entrees. And as we've scaled, we've innovated with, certainly with more flavors. But increasingly, as we built out the core, more forms, more formats, more occasions. and we've also innovated with a lot of insights from our insights team and we don't just do insights on global flavors we do on Indian food we do it across global flavors so we said we also wanted to eventually innovate into new cuisines and if we did that for authenticity reasons it would have to be a dedicated brand so there's never going to be a deep Greek kitchen or a deep Thai kitchen.

8:52Kiernan Laughlin:And the reason for that is where we play in the market is at the premium restaurant quality end of the market. And if you think about it from a restaurant perspective, you probably don't want your Indian food from a Greek restaurant or vice versa, right? That's fair to say, yes. Yeah. So if we're trying to play in that space, if we're going to go into more cuisines, that means we need more brands. And because we've had this insights team quantitatively, we've done research into the space and we just saw a huge white space in frozen Thai food and noticed it was a large market. So that's why we're now launching deep brands, including a new Thai brand called Temtoa.

9:36And aside from the quantitative,

9:39Kiernan Laughlin:the research side of things, personally, I love Thai food. In the past, I've been to Thailand and ordered Thai food all the time. And I've been walking the frozen aisles for Deep Indian Kitchen for about seven and a half years now and wondering, like, why is there no frozen Thai brand? Like, obviously, we do frozen Indian. There's frozen Chinese brands, et cetera. Right. Why is there no frozen Thai brand? So that's why we've now created and launched Temtoa, which launches on April 5 at Target nationwide. And that's a frozen Thai brand. Deep Brands is the umbrella over that. It's kind of a roll-up global flavors organization, including Deep Indian Kitchen and Temtoa.

10:23Kiernan Laughlin:And I'm really excited about our future and to be leading that. That is an incredible way to kick things off going into Target and really making a splash. So you mentioned authenticity and the global flavors and having a brand per cuisine. How does that look behind the scenes? Are you working with different chefs, different innovators per cuisine? How does that work behind the scenes? Yeah, we have a fantastic R &D product development team here at Deep Brands. We're really fortunate to have them. And we also self-manufacture. So we've got some incredible resources here. And from a culinary perspective, obviously we have chefs that are trained in Indian food, but trained more broadly in Pan-Asian.

11:12Kiernan Laughlin:So the chef that did a lot of our Temtoa Thai cuisine got his degree from the Culinary Institute of America in Pan-Asian cuisine, has worked as a chef at Morimoto, which is a Michelin-starred Pan -Asian restaurant. So we had the culinary expertise internally, and we obviously had the manufacturing ability to make meals. And then a lot of it comes down to once you've got the right recipe and the right processes, having the right and high quality native ingredients. So with our Indian food, not surprisingly, we source a lot of ingredients from India. With our Thai food, we're sourcing ingredients from Thailand.

11:56Very cool. I like that you're connecting the dots and also how you're positioning with using the insights of chefs with Michelin experience and bringing that into the frozen aisle. That alone is a huge differentiator. Yeah.

12:16Kiernan Laughlin:And one of the things about us, I mean, if you look at Deep Indian Kitchen, our repeat rate in our entrees is 55%. That's incredibly high for the frozen aisle, right? Yes. Which also says, hey, it makes a lot of sense to go drive trial on that because people come back. But one of our hallmarks of our success is always making our products from scratch, doing it the authentic way, doing it the long way, which means we're doing it often in custom ways. So we're very passionate about that at Deep Brands. We want to represent cuisines in their traditional and authentic ways. And then we want to brand them in modern ways to get more people access, you know, accessibility to them, more people trying.

13:02And are you able to do that because you're working or have the manufacturing in-house and also the insights team in-house, the culinary team in-house? Is that how you all are able to scale? I mean, even from when we booked this interview to now, you jumped quite a few stores of even talking about deep Indian kitchen. Is that what's helping this engine move forward quite quickly? Is that all of it is internal?

13:36Kiernan Laughlin:We have a lot of external partners as well. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention them. So between our internal and external teams, we've got just a fantastic team, a fantastic culture that works together to make this all happen. So, you know, one of the things I would note, it's, you know, we're owned by a three generation family company. We're not playing the growth at all costs model. I don't believe in that. We've never played that. So we try to grow rapidly, but in a disciplined and focused way. So ultimately, our growth is the result of having good velocities, growing in a sustainable way, being responsible about how we grow, and then the rest takes care of itself.

14:23Thank you for emphasizing that point because we all see the flashy business headlines and that culture of grow at all costs and worry about your cogs later and worry about even profitability later, but just open as many doors as possible. But what I'm hearing is that because this is third generation owned of the infrastructure, you're able to sustainably grow and scale in a responsible way that now you have the opportunity to expand because you had that discipline in place.

15:00Kiernan Laughlin:Yeah, certainly that helps. Whether you're a co-packed or whether you're self-manufactured, though, you got to manage your unit economics. You got to manage your P &L and your cash flow in a sustainable and practical way. that's that's just part of our ethos regardless of whether we were we were owned by a family company or not and yeah I think it's one of the big temptations of our industry most of us if we're in this space we love growth I love it myself but you got to be careful not to get ahead of your skis and you can get into more doors and that's a nice headline but if you don't have the velocity to support that, or if you don't have the supply chain to keep up with that, then eventually you're going to lose that distribution and nobody wants to be there.

15:51Nobody wants to be there. So can you walk us through the success and momentum behind Deep Indian Kitchen? You said you're now in 26 ,000 retailers nationwide. Can you just give us a peek behind the curtain there of what is really supporting that growth and also what you see for Deep Indian Kitchen as the overall deep brands expand.

16:18Kiernan Laughlin:Yeah. So we're still growing on Deep Indian Kitchen. And as we innovate, we're adding more flavors. We're driving more awareness for the brand from a marketing perspective. and we've been innovating into new occasions. So we started Deep Indian Kitchen as essentially a dinner brand. We've since innovated into the lunch and on the go occasion with our Cathy Street Wraps, which have been quite successful. And what, you know, we can talk for a long time about the brand and the products and obviously we love those. But at the end of the day, what's making this scale is our people. We've got an incredible team, an incredible culture And we figured out a success model that works for TPN and Kitchen that now at the deep brands level is being extended into Thai food with Temtoa.

17:10Kiernan Laughlin:And it's the same success model. It's the same consumer. It's the same, you know, very similar in terms of go to market, although we're obviously we're going to incubate the Temtoa brand and not put into 26 ,000 doors overnight. but we're a digitally native organization and we've we've I think built a number of competitive advantages in terms of how we how we drive trial so we've got on the deep ending kitchen brand we've got 182 ,000 social media followers not quite there in temp talk because it's new but that's that's part of being digital native and doing a lot of performance marketing that's how that's how we drive trial.

17:53And then having breakthrough packaging at the shelf where consumers can discover us and try us.

18:00Kiernan Laughlin:And then we know we have high quality food. So that repeat rate kicks in and eventually those, those velocities grow. Very cool. And this is just coming from a brand strategy nerd. And I love talking about brand extension. So you're really all the, all the things that you're saying is like totally up my alley. Is Deep Indian Kitchen promoting Temtoa or like helping get the word out about that brand? Are you keeping them essentially separate online, but you know how to then activate that type of customer because they are essentially the same customer? Yeah. From a consumer facing perspective, it's not Temtoa from Deep Indian Kitchen.

18:42Kiernan Laughlin:From a industry perspective, deep brands is over both of those. So we go to market as an Indian brand and a Thai brand. And from an authenticity perspective, that's what our consumers are looking for. Based on our research, we know, you know, kind of that point I was alluding to earlier, you don't want your Thai food from Indian restaurant. You don't want your Indian food from a Thai restaurant. So the brands are dedicated to those cuisines and they're stand-to-load brands. But from a business-to-business perspective, we are united under Deep Brands. Cool. What are you most excited about? I know that you have Temtoa coming to market, will be launching in Target.

19:25Deep Indian Kitchen is, I mean, growing incredibly well. Deep Brands as a whole recently launched. What are you personally excited about of seeing all these pieces now really coming together and seeing how you've been creating this engine that now can expand into multiple brands.

19:47Kiernan Laughlin:I mean, that is a lot of what I'm excited about. What we have here is we've built a foundation with Deep Indian Kitchen that's still growing. We've seen a white space in frozen Thai food. And, you know, just being able to see that white space is one thing, being able to do something about it is another. So we've been looking into this space for a while. And if you think about it, the market size is pretty massive. I can ask almost any millennial or Gen Z if they have a favorite Thai restaurant. And usually the answer is yes. And like, yeah, I order from this Thai place in my neighborhood relatively frequently.

20:34Kiernan Laughlin:And the statistic we have on that is 41 % of Americans like or love Thai food, which is a staggering number, particularly when you think about it's really only restaurant consumption where that's happening. It's surprising how undeveloped it is in the frozen aisle. And if I asked most millennials or Gen Zs, what is your favorite frozen Thai brand? They probably wouldn't have an answer. because it doesn't exist. So yes, there are, you know, brands out there with a pad Thai skew, but it's not a dedicated Thai brand. It's, it's an, it's a multi-cuisine brand or it's an American brand. And that means no one's really tapping into this, this need for, you know, replicating that authentic mom and pop Thai restaurant experience in your home.

21:27So massive TAM or

21:29Kiernan Laughlin:or total addressable market, massive white space. And we know Global Flavors. We know the Global Flavors consumer. We know how to get them to try our products and we know how to make good food. So I'm really, really excited about the potential of Temtoa to build really a house of Global Flavors brands. For someone listening, I always think about my clients. They are the early on emerging brand founder. They're usually coming to me when they have a product idea, but I'm helping them flush out the brand concept, the product concept, who's going to buy it, how they're going to create buzz around it to get those really first early retailers on board.

22:13And what you're speaking to in your point of view is essentially many of their big, big goals and dreams, right? To be able to have a brand that then becomes a parent company and then launch another brand like what you're touching upon. I know so many are like writing down as dream case scenario what they could grow into. What piece of advice would you share with an emerging brand founder who dreams of something like this or being able to expand into multiple markets or to launch another additional product line? anything that you're learning now boots on the ground with this new expansion that you would tell someone early on if this is something that they aspire to be able to achieve

23:03Kiernan Laughlin:yeah so it's great to have those aspirations and obviously we had them i don't even know that we would have said we were going to do this seven and a half years ago but that is also one of the key parts here we've been doing this for a long time we've gotten deep in the kitchen to a place where it's nationwide, where it's over 50 % market share in its space. So what I would say is that's what motivates a lot of us, that creativity, that desire to scale, that desire to build a portfolio. But you got to build your core first. And we've been very intentional about building our core on Deep Indian Kitchen.

23:43Kiernan Laughlin:That's the core that's now in 26 ,000 stores. And we didn't start extending on deepening kitchen outside of our core until about two years ago. So we stayed tight in terms of the entrees. And when I say core, that's your items. It's also your retailers, right? You need to be careful about how you cultivate that brand. Make sure you don't get ahead of your skis. It's alluring to get that door count. It's alluring to have more items and more categories. But if your support model isn't there, if your velocity isn't there, it's all very expensive. So it can become a big problem. So you want to make sure your distribution and your velocity are both growing.

24:28Kiernan Laughlin:And then as you progress through those stages, you can start innovating into adjacencies. And statistically, look, the majority of all innovation fails. I don't care how much resource you have or who you are, it usually fails. And even for us, I can't say historically our success rate is 100%, but I can tell you the bigger bets we've made, such as our Cathy Street Rast, which gets us into the lunch occasion, have worked. And that's because we spent years building that core as a foundation. And then we expanded into a logical adjacency, and we saw and unmet consumer need that we could solve. And then with Temtoa, I mean, we're not going everywhere.

25:14Kiernan Laughlin:A, we don't have unlimited cash to just go spend on this, but B, we still have to build a new supply chain with ingredients from Thailand. And C, we want to make sure this scales sustainably over the long term. So, yes, we're launching with Target nationally, and that's a big retailer. But we're being very selective about who we partner with in year one. And unfortunately, that doesn't mean we're saying no to some of our good partners from Deep Indian Kitchen. But we have to think through who's going to help build the core with us. Where is our early adopter shopper? And because we've done this with Deep Indian Kitchen, we know who that is.

26:00Kiernan Laughlin:And we know who that index is, you know, the highest. And unfortunately, where we're not launching, we have to say, hey, we're going to we're going to figure this out in year one, we're going to prove success. And then as we scale our support model, as we scale our supply, we'll we'll work with you in the future. Thank you for emphasizing the discipline of doing one thing really well first before jumping to the next. Because again, for people that are interested in this space and getting into this space, we are the creatives. We love the rush. We love building. But we have to do one really solid thing at a time.