Legally Addictive Foods

0:00Laura Shafferman: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.

0:42Laura Shafferman:And 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 and 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 Laura Schaeferman.

1:30Laura Shafferman:She is the founder and CEO of Legally Addictive Foods, which my girlfriend, Nora, has been eating her snacks and keeps consistently saying, oh, my gosh, these really are addictive. She is obsessed with them. I have tried them. I think they're delicious. And Laura, I'm so happy that you're on the show, coming on the podcast, because I admire how you've built your brand, especially in such a competitive category and I'm excited to talk shop with you today. Yeah, I'm excited too. Thanks Kelly. You're so welcome. So let's first start with the product idea because you are in the snack, the chocolate section, but you're also doing something different and I really love how you've gotten really creative with familiar ingredients, but doing it in some new formats.

2:23Laura Shafferman:So I would love to hear how you first came up with the product concept. So the product concept itself is not my own. This particular cookie, the cookie made from a cracker with salted toffee, chocolate, and sea salt is actually a widely known recipe that people find on Pinterest. They'll call it Christmas crack or just, I mean, there's other variations for the name on it, depending on where you live in the country and variations on how you've actually make the recipe. I grew up in Virginia and my mother made a version with graham crackers and toffee and chocolate and nuts, but you'll find different versions in the Midwest, in Texas and in the South.

3:09But this recipe is as ubiquitous as the chocolate chip cookie. So I did not come up with this. I tried to trace the roots of this back to the 1950s with a woman who started making it with matzah crackers. cool yeah but then it's unclear from when it's moved somehow from matzah into other types of crackers um so but this is really just kind of like but nobody was making this and that's really the point is though though people were making this in their homes nobody was making this with at all i don't even want to say with better ingredients because no one was making it at all so no one was making it and selling it with shell stability so that's so interesting so that you

3:50Laura Shafferman:You grew up eating it, your mom making it, but you weren't actually finding it ready-made. Like there was no brands actually coming out with a skew with this combination. No, no one was. No, there might have been chocolate covered graham crackers, but our product only has chocolate on one side. So it's not completely enrobed. It's only on the top because in the original homemade version, people would just put chocolate chips on it and melt the chocolate chips. and chocolate chips aren't real chocolate. It doesn't temper properly in this kind of process. So that's why maybe you weren't finding it anywhere.

4:27I don't know. No one took the leap to try to kind of re-engineer the product and give it shelf stability.

4:33Laura Shafferman:Okay. Now I'm even more intrigued. I didn't even realize those origin roots. What made you want to take the leap and say, you know what, I'm going to figure this out? so well it really was kind of something I don't want to say this the timing I was making the version the way they are now which is different from the version that my mother made I was making them in my tiny New York City apartment and I was bringing them just to parties and to friends for gifts and stuff and people would linger around the table and eat the cookies and I would honestly overhear people saying this tastes like crack and they could not stop eating it this was also in like the homemade recipe version of it, not the current iteration that we have right now.

5:16And at the time, I was also working real estate marketing development in New York that I did for 10 years, I got laid off from my job and decided I was just going to change my life and do something creative. I've been spending years in these kind of like, semi toxic kind of corporate environments. And when I did get laid off, and I had a non compete that would run for one year that I was unable to get out of, which is a totally different story, but I'm glad those are not legal or finding anymore in New York city. And I probably could have pushed back on this if I wanted to, but I just wanted to make a complete change in my life.

5:50And what was that?

5:52Laura Shafferman:That was about 10 years ago. Okay. So you did a total, I'm changing everything. I'm kind of burning it all down and starting over of what I want my life in professionally, personally, and all the things. exactly like my back like when I was younger and growing up I was super into like print fashion magazines and I remember reading all the time like whether it was Elle or Vogue and there would be these little blurbs and it would say um this woman has started a jewelry business and now she is it's carried in Barney's which is sadly no no longer among us um yes um or it would be something along those lines, or they've opened a little boutique, or they started this tech company doing this or promoting that.

6:38And I would just think to myself, how are they doing this? I was absolutely fascinated by the creativity that they were using in their lives. And I said to myself, if anything like this ever comes into my life, and I have this opportunity to be creative, I'm going to take it and I'm not going to let go of it. And I'm going to take it as far as I possibly can.

6:56Laura Shafferman:That's so good. So what, when did you start making those ups? Was that 10 years ago when you, yeah, how did you decide to, to focus on this type of cookie? Um, just, it really happened where I lost my job. And about six weeks later, one of my friends who worked at Etsy at the time was like, Hey, you know, those cookies you make, do you want to make them for this big Etsy holiday market? And I was like, Oh, I guess I do. Yeah. Um, so she was also a graphic designer and helped me come up with a logo and a label. And I bought those like really looked like coffee. Remember those like coffee bean bags that had the windows in them and they were paper.

7:35And then we made these stickers that I got printed at FedEx and I had to cut them myself and I had to put them on it. I didn't even have the ingredients on it. It was just like market ready. You know, it wasn't like market, like, I mean, go sell it whole foods ready by any means. And so I did it and I was like, well, I'm going to see what comes out of this. I think the very first day. I sold everything in like four hours. And then I went back and I was like baking till two o 'clock in the morning. And I was like, well, this isn't proof of concept, but I'm getting like a really strong reaction to the name Legally Addictive.

8:07And people are buying these cookies. And I had so many orders. People were asking them to be delivered all for the next couple of weeks. I started selling them on Etsy and delivering them around New York. And I was like, I'm going to make something out of this.

8:19Laura Shafferman:That's so cool that you were also selling on Etsy. back in the day. Back in the day, like there weren't very many, like where else, like if you were going to do it right now and you were going to do it without all of the same way that you would sell it in Whole Foods, where else would you sell it right now? Like people are still doing this on Etsy. And at the time that was really like, it was really important to me. No, that was groundbreaking to sell on Etsy a food product 10 years ago. So what did then from those Etsy early days to, I know now you're on JetBlue Airlines. You're in regional Whole Foods.

8:57Laura Shafferman:You've done an incredible job building this brand. So what did that leap then look like to make this a product that we're now seeing on shelf? Yeah, thank you for saying that. And that's a really great question because I think there's a perception sometimes things just always are like, one day I'm selling out with my kitchen. And the next day it's like all roses. And then this brand, it looks like one win after another. I actually really dislike that because it's absolutely not true. There have been many, many, many, many, many non-win days and moments of days. So it really just started with, I started working out of a, I made the company a real company and moved into what also has gone the way of Barney's, a communal kitchen that was called Brooklyn Foodworks at the time.

9:45I don't know if you remember this. It closed abruptly.

9:49Laura Shafferman:I don't remember this one. No. It was like a commissary kitchen where a lot of brands like started out of in New York. There were like brands like, you know, Jalapa Jar, Malai Ice Cream. Oh, okay. Yeah. We all started in this kitchen. So cool. Yeah. Like, so, and thanks to like the Mast Brothers and early, early bird foods, like, you know, those early Brooklyn brands, you know, running or walking so we can run or whatever the phrase is. But they really started up that whole like Brooklyn food movement. And then I feel like it started to peak like in the 2010s. It started to really pick up. And that was where it took shape.

10:30And I was working with one of my friends who I met on Craigslist. And I just put up an ad in there. And I was like, I need help making these cookies. And she joined. She was like employee number one. And she's still actually one of my best friends. And that's how it started. And about a year and a half in, I met my now husband, who is my business partner. And he was like, has a television background in television production. And we met and he was looking to get out of the world of like TV. I was really, really, really like he had been in it for a long time, was really successful in it and just wanted to do something different.

11:05And then we met and he was like, I love this business and I love you too. He's like, let's be partners. And that's really how that started. And then we started with one skew. And then we moved on and we added skews, the holiday skew, the everything bagel skew, which is like our homage to New York City cookie. And then it just, it really grew from there. We started working with Dylan's Candy Bar in New York. Yes. Which I don't think that their flagship is around anymore either. But that was like, at the time, that was a huge, huge win for us. Absolutely.

11:42Laura Shafferman:Was that more of a collab or they were starting to carry you? We initially, we were part of something that was called the New York, best of New York selection. And then that sold really well. It was the top selling product in that collaboration. So then we did a collab product, which was Dylan's Times Plus Legally Addicted Foods. So it was actually like a package made specifically for them. And we did that for about three or four years. And that was like a really important part of our business getting started. They were so patient with me. They would be like, how many come in a case pack? And I literally didn't know what a case pack was.

12:18Laura Shafferman:Were you looking it up and be like, oh. Somehow I managed to get around the question, but I would send it to them in these like giant boxes. They weren't even, I would just hope and pray that the right amount were in there. Right. So it sounds like it was very much grassroots bootstrap to get it up and going. And I really love the homage to Etsy, Craigslist, serendipity of meeting your husband and having him switch careers as well and helping the business. It sounds like also those early retailers who also took a shot on you too of proving out that people really like this product and it was moving and selling.

13:05Laura Shafferman:What did it then look like to scale production? Again, now doing the amount of business you're doing now, I'm sure that was a big leap from commissary kitchen to now manufacturing. capturing. I know so many founders listening to the podcast too, they're kind of in that in-between stage of what it sounds like where you were in the story right now. And I would love to hear what helped you make that leap. Well, we knew going through COVID in New York, most of the part when we had six SKUs and we were operating, we were now in our own kitchen, the commissary kitchen we had moved out of, and then it abruptly closed.

13:45Laura Shafferman:Unfortunately, And I loved a lot of brands like in the lurch. But we had already been out of there at that point. And then after COVID, we relocated. We were in like 600 square feet. I mean, you should have seen what we were operating out of. Our office was actually an electrical closet in this big building, the Pfizer building. Do you know where the Pfizer building is? And it's like, I think it's at the Marcy Avenue subway station. Yes. So you were in. That's wild. So you were operating your office from that closet, essentially? Yes. And it was connected to a kitchen that we had to build. It didn't come with a sink or anything.

14:24We had to build it. And we were just operating out of there until we could not make one more cookie.

14:31Laura Shafferman:Wow. So then what did that next step look like? That looked like relocating to North Carolina, which is where we are right now. I live in Asheville, our facility is in Weaverville. We now have about 12 ,000 square feet in New York. We had no more than 600 and that included our storage. Um, and so that's a huge leap. No, it's a huge leap. I mean, we just added on the 5 ,000 square foot warehouse, you know what I mean? So, but like, it wasn't, it was about 7 ,000 square feet for a lot for the first two years we were here. Um, and yeah, it was just, we just, this was the only choice. There was no way you could do large scale manufacturing, even medium or small scale manufacturing in New York City.

15:20So we do like we were at my mom's house over Christmas. There had been like a couple cases of COVID in our kitchen. So we decided to close until everyone was feeling better. And we were in Virginia. So I was like, let's just drive down to Asheville and check it out, which we did. And one thing led to another, had ended up having a conversation with another founder here in Asheville in CPG. And she was like, I actually know about a space here. And just like that, you know, Seth, my partner was on the, on a plane down to Asheville. We had a lease, at least in like six weeks, I came down after that.

15:56And then three months later we were

15:57Laura Shafferman:moving here and that really changed for us. Our process has automated a little bit, but a lot of it is still done handmade, but we are looking for, or we are creating other ways to scale our production, which is part of like our, one of our biggest projects right now. But it changed everything. So, you know, we went from having like, you know, three people in our kitchen, we now have 20 people in our kitchen. That's incredible. Yeah. And it sounds like it all really then was that next serendipitous moment of driving down, meeting that other founder, six weeks to then get a lease and how that really then just took your business to the next level.

16:43It really did. I mean, a lot of that has to do with like the business community here in Asheville, which like really rolled the red carpet out for us. And I'm not kidding. Like they were treating us like we were like, I don't know, like Boeing or something like that when we were coming down here.

16:58Laura Shafferman:That's really sweet. It was great. And you know, I've never seen another business community like like the one in Asheville where everyone is like genuinely rooting for each other and everyone genuinely shows up for each other in New York. There's a lot of like the resources are very limited in New York. Self space and local stores is very limited, but it's very different down here. And even if you're in the same category as someone, there's no like, you know, resource guarding or gatekeeping of things. It's a very open place. And I mean, there's so many great things that are made down here too.

17:32Laura Shafferman:Incredible. So how did it look then getting connected with JetBlue? So that also is, that happened. Are you familiar with Newtopia? Sort of like the junior in the West? Yes. Yeah, we were there this last August and we, the buyer had come up to our table with her team. And I believe some people on the team had already tried the product. So they already had their eye on us and they said, we, let's do this. So it really happened very, very, very, very quickly for an airline. You know, we met them the last week of August and we launched April 1st. Wow. That's super fast. It's super fast. They had another product in there, another brand that they were terminating, like their contract was up or something.

18:18I'm not really sure what happened. So they were really looking to make a move quickly. So this was fast tracked. Like we've talked to other airlines where lead time could have been 18 months, 16 months.

18:29Laura Shafferman:And it sounds like that opportunity lined up perfectly when you had also scaled production, moving headquarters, being able to then take on a large order like that. Well, as soon as we knew that this was a go, we started like reconfiguring everything and making our plan on how to like change production, how to move things around in the kitchen, how to like how many people we were going to hire. We started doing all of that. So we did have ample time to prepare, you know, like ample meaning like a couple of months, like really something like this. In entrepreneur time, ample amount of time. Yes.

19:12Laura Shafferman:And also Whole Foods, was that happening at the same time or did you have Whole Foods first before the jet blew? So Whole Foods, we actually met them here in North Carolina at a food event, which was called, I believe it's called Taste Carolina. This is a$350 event. Compare this to Expo West or Newtopia, where we met the forager for the region. Wow. And he's like, I've heard great things and came right up to us. And they've been amazing for us. And it happened just like that. But that took longer than JetBlue did. I think we met them in February. We didn't launch for 11 months. OK, so that was a longer process.

20:00Laura Shafferman:But at the same time, I think that's a great thing for people to remember that, yes, leverage larger markets. and at the same time, if you are in a secondary market or a smaller community, you could still leverage that to really cut through the noise and get in front of the right people in an event that, to your point, was$350 to show at and you were able to land Whole Foods. I mean, that's incredible. It is. Yeah, that's what most people are looking for when they go and spend a lot of money at some of the other, either Fancy Food or Expo West. I'm not saying that there's not value in that. I'm just really glad that this is the way that it happened for us.

20:48Laura Shafferman:It's a great example of that. And something that I did personally also in my career is I worked in a smaller secondary market to really get my name out, to really get some great case studies of brands that I was building. And then I came back to New York and then really took my business to the next level. but I really got my start in an area, a community that was hungry for new ideas. And I had that white space to really experiment and test, and there wasn't a lot of pressure. So I love that you're touching upon that because I think it's really easy for founders to overlook those opportunities that could be happening in their own backyard and to really leverage that for that further growth.

21:34Yes, I agree with you. Yes. And we, I mean, we say all the time, that's the best$350 that anyone could have ever spent ever.

21:42Laura Shafferman:Amazing. Absolutely. So where are you taking the brand now? What are you excited about building? Well, we're excited about building, I mean, making big strides. We've obviously think like the JetBlue thing, it's fantastic. And this is just like the beginning of other things that we have planned. And we are raising capital right now, and we're doing that to expand our production, to grow within our foods, within food service. Food service, and this is another thing that I think that food founders should pay attention to, food service and hospitality are categories that are very low-hanging fruit.