Jubilee's

0:00Ashley Waldma:Welcome 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.

0:42Ashley Waldma:And the best part is you could shop all the brands featured on the show. This podcast is brought to you by Hummingbirds. Hummingbirds is the go-to platform built for creator-powered retail activations. They're connecting everyday creators with CPG brands to generate shelf-level awareness, drive in-store momentum, and generate authentic content in markets that matter the most. Go to hummingbirds.com for all the details and let them know I sent you. 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.

1:35Ashley Waldma: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 I have Ashley Waldman. She is the founder of Jubilees, which is this super fun, super milk brand that is bringing delicious flavors to the milk aisle. This is a brand that's been on my radar for a while. I've been really looking forward to having Ashley on the podcast. She's done a great job getting the word out about her brand. So Ashley, I'm so happy to have you here today.

2:23Thank you so much for having me. I have been anxiously awaiting this conversation.

2:28Ashley Waldma:I love to hear it. And thank you again for listening to the podcast as well. That really means a lot. And this is why I have the podcast. I want the podcast to be this community that founders can listen to as they're building and also as they're building share what they're learning and sharing their stories. So let's jump into exactly what you're building. Super milk, flavors that are delicious of say banana cream pie and strawberry shortcake. Can you walk us through what was the idea for the brand? What was the white space and how did you come to this type of positioning? Yeah, absolutely. It's very much a story of iteration over time.

3:18Broadly speaking, our mission is to help the 70 % of families that really struggle to get their kids to eat healthy. This is absolutely my family. I'm a mom of two little girls, ages three and five. When my daughter was two, she was diagnosed with autism. And it was about that time that we really started to struggle with food. Flavors, textures are really, really tricky for her. So that's kind of where it started. I was trying to solve my own problem, but I didn't have a specific product in mind at all. In terms of my background, I come from product development and consumer research, first as a management consultant and then in-house for YouTube for five years.

4:01So I very much took that mindset into creating this. And what that really means is starting with the problem, which I mentioned, creating a prototype, getting user feedback, iterating more user feedback, iterating. And so I really use that to guide everything from literally what is the product to the packaging, to the flavors and everything in between. And what I arrived on is what I believe truly is a new category called super milk. You can think about it as sort of like a very bougie Nesquik with the biggest differentiators being there is secret vegetables. So carrot juice is literally the second ingredient with the first ingredient being real organic milk.

4:48It has three times the nutritional value of a typical chocolate milk or strawberry milk, something like that. Zero grams of added sugar. So all of the sweetness comes from the vegetables and the fruit juice, which is actually so novel. I have a patent pending for that innovation. And then eight grams of protein. But the really great thing about the protein, we all know everyone is protein crazy right now, but it's natural protein. There's no weird protein isolates or protein systems or anything like that. And so just an example of some of those insights that kind of got me there because I didn't go into it thinking like, oh, I'm going to be the queen of dairy.

5:28That was not on my life's bingo card. But as I started to talk to families, run these surveys, do focus groups, a lot of the insights that came out were, oh my gosh, every time I go to the doctor, my doctor is asking me how much milk is your kid drinking? There's a reason why the American Heart Association recommends your kids get between two and three glasses of milk per day. But also they talked a lot about sugar. So 50 % of parents said that low or no added sugar was really important to them. 70 % of families said protein was really important. 43 % said that vitamins was really important. And meanwhile, the flavored milk industry is a$58 billion market that's expected to grow to nearly 90 billion by 2030.

6:10Ashley Waldma:So I put that all together. That's huge. I know, massive. It's 30 times the size of ready to drink protein, twice the size of plant-based milk. And so I saw that. And then I saw that the players that are in the space, many of them billion-dollar brands, didn't support most of those user needs. And so I was like, wow, that is a huge white space. I think I will go there and do that. Yes. So you talk about your background with product development in tech. Going into CPG, food and beverage, is a whole other beast. What were some of those early steps that you took to actually create the product or create the prototypes?

6:49Yeah. So how I got here a little bit is I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur from the moment I can remember doing a garage sale when I was five years old, selling up my parents' closet. I just had that bug and was always trying to figure out what is the thing. And I had some things here and there from real estate. I had a glamping venue for a while. But this came up, one, because the problem I mentioned was very personal. But also my dad has been an owner and operator of a beverage brand for the past 25 years. So I was like, okay, well, that's a

7:21Ashley Waldma:strategic advantage. So I had this problem. I'd also just read Kara Golden, the founder of Hintz biography and was like very inspired by her story. She also came from tech and from journalism, which is where I started. And I was like, wow, if she can do it, maybe I can. And then I talked to my dad and kind of pitched him on the idea. And he spent the next two hours telling me all about like the nuts and bolts of like, okay, you get a formulator, then a co-packer, then there's this like distribution model, then there's the retailers. And the sum of the story was it's extremely difficult. It's very expensive.

7:55The odds are all against you. You probably shouldn't do it. And I said, oh, wow, that sounds hard. I love hard. Sign me up. And this is how we got here. And since then, I really made myself a student. I really think I've sort of developed my own NBA by consuming as much content as I possibly can. Podcasts like yours, there are many others out there. I have tried to read and consume every single thing I can. And it's interesting, I talked to a lot of people in this industry and investors, people like yourself, and they're like, wait, you don't come from this. You talk like you've been doing this forever.

8:33I'm like, I know I've just been very much trying to make sure I'm an expert and go into this with eyes absolutely wide open because it is really hard.

8:40Ashley Waldma:It is really hard. And I appreciate you sharing that because I hear all the time of founders in the really early stages, they start going in without doing that due diligence and then are really blown away with what they realize is involved and they get very discouraged very quickly. So I appreciate you sharing that transparently because I think it's really good to share the hard parts so that people could have their eyes open to what is out there and also hear encouraging stories of yes it's hard and this is how I went about it right just because it's hard doesn't mean you shouldn't go for it it's hard and this is how to be thoughtful of finding your own strategy to really make it in this industry so thank you for sharing that.

9:33Ashley Waldma:Honestly, that's a big part of why I do this podcast. So I would love to hear how you started then getting it on the radar. I think you've done a great job. You post quite often on social. I remember the social posts that you did about leaving your nine to five. You know, you've really been documenting the journey. And I personally have always loved that approach to building brands for the last 15 years before it was cool. Like I was always a build in public type of gal. I would love to hear how you've been thinking about your strategy and how you've been getting your brand on the radar. What is your perspective?

10:17Yeah, totally. So just to talk a little bit about strategy first. So because I'm in a septic milk product in Tetra Pak, there's sort of like a blessing that occurs with that. The blessing and why I chose it is that it has a really long shelf life. It's a very established process. A lot of the co-packers that are in this space have been doing this for a long time. They're very trustworthy and reliable. So I love that about it. And it's not cold chain logistics, which obviously is relatively much more expensive. So I like all those things about it. The downside is there is no such thing as a low MOQ.

10:53I searched far and wide. It does not exist. So what that means for my strategy is that I needed to build velocity and volume very quickly. I think the general guidance is to like start slow, regional, in your backyard, like market test it before you go really big and wide. But I just did not have that luxury. So from the jump, I was targeting big distributors. I'm already, so I've only been to market 10 months and I'm already on KHE at UNFI. I'm already in major retailers. Um, and all of that was very intentional because as I said, I have had a lot inventory. My first production run was more than my first house and I paid for all of that out of my pocket.

11:36Ashley Waldma:So I was very motivated to like get this going. We need to move these super milks. Yeah. Super milks. So, um, that's a little bit about the, I guess that's more of like the constraints of the business. In terms of the strategy, yes, needed to focus on broad distribution, but also we all know beverage is massively expensive. So really thinking about profitability from the beginning. And so what that means is two things. One, yes, narrowing to specific regions. So I'm focused on West Coast and Texas. West Coast, because that's great for my target customer, Texas, because that's where I am and I want to be close to it.

12:15But what that allows you to do, And what I've done is open staging warehouses in those locations. So I can send full trucks and keep my landed costs as low as possible. The second part of the strategy is really focusing on the retail banners that have relatively high velocities. So you can get SPEN's data on your product category and even like more specifics about your product and see like, which are the retailers that have the highest velocity. So I looked at that specifically for eight ounce chocolate milk, strawberry milk, vanilla milk. And so I have like the top retailers that are just like crushing it intrinsically in this category.

12:54So that's the second part of the strategy. And the third is merchandising. So this is actually more of like a learning along the way is I launched into some retailers. I supported them all with like basically the same type of velocity support, like Instagram aisles, social nature, demos, like all the typical things that you do to get off shelf. And I noticed a massive difference in velocity. And part of that is just like relative foot traffic. But I think part of that, obviously, my lesson was like merchandising means everything. So in some spaces, I'm in shelf stable milk, which makes a ton of sense.

13:27And others I'm in, I'll just say like a different area, which is not like where the chocolate milks are.

13:33Ashley Waldma:and it's like half the velocity. So the lesson I'm taking that with me now is when I'm evaluating a retailer, I really want to make sure that I am either in shelf stable milk and the other area I love is protein. So I, and we're like the organes are the pediatures are because I'm very competitive from a nutritional perspective. Again, this is a new category, super milk. So like, where does it go? Um, so I really love the protein set. I like shelf stable milk. Conventional typically has like a kid's beverage section with the juice boxes. So love those. And then a new one I'm getting ready to test in mothers, which I'm really excited about is baby toddler because my target segment is like one to 11, but like cream, cream of the crop here is like two to five.

14:16And if you have a baby, you are going down that aisle every single time you go to the store and 35 % of mom that have a baby will also have a toddler. So it's a great like cross merchandising opportunity.

14:28Ashley Waldma:I was going to ask you about that because I have clients who are in the kid food category also have interviewed many founders within that space and some love doubling down of like this is made for kids and then some are saying well kids love it but also it's not just for kids what was your approach going into it? Was it, were you selling it to retailers as like, this is a kid's milk product or was it adults will love this too. And if you also put it in the kid section, I think that would even increase sales. I would just love to hear how you were talking to retailers about it. Yeah. I have very much focused on kids and the story around kids, partially because in addition to the TAM I already mentioned in flavor milk being$58 billion, there's also, it has, it's in the ecosystem of both kids snacking and kids lunch boxes, which are also like double digit billion dollar TAMs.

15:34And it's also a really important marketing occasion. So like back to school are huge. There's two of them. There's, it's huge seasons for retailers. There's the January back to school. And then there's the August back to school. And then like us to a smaller extent, there's like summer camp, like lunch boxes and snacks and things like that. So that's been a core part of my positioning from from the start and how I talk to retailers. Also, buying for your kids is a little bit like weddings. Like I will spend whatever because they're my precious babies kind of thing. Yes, absolutely. And also the other really great thing, another insight that I include in a lot of my pitches is 47 % of people who buy flavored milk for their kids buy it on a weekly basis.

16:18So I did a bunch of math and basically said, I really only need to recruit about five families per store to more than double the category velocity. So that's another really important part of my position. Now, having said that, I have discovered straws are trending again. I thought that they were canceled, but it turns out that the young people these days love straws. I had, it first occurred to me because I went to BevNet Library this summer in New York. And every time I went to a bodega to get my poppy or olipop or whatever, I'm sort of like totally on the all soda bandwagon. They would give me a straw at the bodega with my soda.

16:54And I was like, this is so weird. And then I started to like look around. I saw these like young women in their adorable yoga sets, like walking around with their drink and a little straw. And so I was like, is this a thing? And then I have founders reach out to me all the time who are interested in Tetra Pak. So I do have a fair amount of like grownups. That's super interesting.

17:14Ashley Waldma:Okay. That could be a whole other podcast about straws. So how did you start getting some of these data points? Because I think you've done a great job. And I know your background is in tech and consulting. Do you have any advice for founders of how to start finding data that is credible? And that you can feel good of including into a pitch deck, like what you're referring to? Yeah, totally. It's going to sound super stupid, but Googling about your market, Tam, there are public reports that you, and that's kind of where I started in getting the global flavored milk industry numbers. I just use public reports for that.

17:57Also for the Lunchbox Tam and the Kids Snacking Tam, all of those was just public data. the insights around how often do people who buy flavored milk buy it, what occasions are most important, what factors, you know, I mentioned protein, vitamins, low sugar. All of those things is data I came up with myself. I ran surveys using a platform called Polefish. It's a public gin pop survey platform. You have to pay for the responses, but I really like it because they're intercept surveys as opposed to like survey panels where people are paid for survey responses, but tend, which tend to be like not super representative where intercept surveys are like more random humans, just like going about their lives.

18:39So I like it for that reason. And then you can use like, there's again, like public calculators you can use to understand how many survey responses do I need to reach statistical significance at what like confidence intervals. And so you can use that to like, you know, I include that on my footnotes. So it sounds like very representative. And then obviously like I come from research, so I know how to design non-leading survey questions, like things like that. Generally, I have people, again, founders reach out to me all about this all the time. And I am more than happy. I love nothing more than like providing advice around running these types of research projects.

19:15The last thing I'll say about that and on that note of like helping, there's also, you can do moderated studies and focus groups. There's platforms for this. There's one called a respondent. I use that both for like taste testing and also for like brand positioning. So all of these are super, super valuable tools that are relatively inexpensive when you compare to like hiring a research company.

19:37Ashley Waldma:Exactly. Well, thank you again for sharing that. I took notes and I'll link all of these. It's things like that that feel so hard when you're first starting out. And again, I appreciate you sharing so generously of those tips because it is really impactful to make logical choices and decisions and navigating something that is a totally new field that you're going into. As far as the year ahead, I would love to hear what's on your radar for the brand. Totally. So we have some super, super exciting national expansions happening next year. I can't wait to talk about it. I wish I could say the words now, but they are absolutely two of my biggest, biggest dream retailers.

20:29So those are both happening in April.

20:31Ashley Waldma:Keep an eye out. Can't wait to share more details on that. We're also working on some new flavors. So I had a strawberry shortcake flavor at launch. It sold out immediately. And now I've been working on the form a little bit to help with stability. So that one's going to be back next year, along with another new flavor, birthday cake. and obsessed. I know, right? Like what kids is not like birthday cake. Um, and then, and also we'll still be true to our brand, which will have the secret vegetables and all the vitamins. We're also creating a four pack. So that'll be a little bit easier for trial.

21:05Cause right now we merchandise the singles and then the 12 pack is mostly online. There's some stores that do the 12 pack as well, but the four packs just a little bit easier price point wise.

21:16Ashley Waldma:So that's something I'm super excited about. And then just continuing to meet more of the people enjoying our product. That's the best part of this whole journey is all the notes and messages and pictures of people saying like, wow, I feel like I can't believe this didn't exist. And that's really a big part of what keeps me going is just a reminder of like, yes, I am actually changing people's lives. I am actually solving a problem. And I still wake up every day like, I can't believe it. I can't believe I did this and this is like a thing that's in the world. So just excited for more of that. Amazing.

21:50Ashley Waldma:Any last piece of advice you would share with someone who's just starting out? Yes, please, please, please. Before you launch anything, before you spend any money on inventory, deeply understand your margins and your unit economics, your cogs. You should be able to know that on the, on the back of your hand, you need at least 60 % difference between your cogs and the price you plan to put on the shelf and be super educated about that price on the shelf. Speaking of research, like do user testing on that price. Will people actually pay that? What percent of people will pay that? I cannot explain how deeply important that is and how every single day of my life.

22:32And the more I get into the business and talk to investors, like it just comes up over and over and over again. And the number of brands I've seen discontinue because of that challenge is most of them that don't make it. So please, I cannot beg you even more. Don't say like, I'll figure it out later. Don't say it'll come with scale. It just won't.

22:54Ashley Waldma:So please spend time on that. Thank you for saying that. Thank you. That is such a huge one that needs to be starred, circled, top of the list. Absolutely co-sign on that. Okay. Last question, Ashley, before I let you go, where can we shop Jubilees? Yes. I would love if you could find us both in Texas and California on the West coast. We're in town and country, also Gelson's, United Brands. we just launched in Raley's, Sprouts, Central Market, Thrive Market, Amazon, GoPuff. These are all great places to find us. So thank you so much for asking. Yes. I'll link it in my shop, my store. Thank you, Ashley, again, for sharing all of your insights and how you're building your incredible super milk brand.