Lottie's Meats

0:00Chelsey Maschhoff: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. 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.

0:42Chelsey Maschhoff: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 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 the co-founder of a brand that's been all over my Instagram that I totally slipped into their DMs.

1:35Chelsey Maschhoff:I wanted to have them on the show. They are creating a cool, femme-forward, really beautiful branded product in a space that it's been kind of the same old, same old boys club. And so I had to get them on the podcast. Today, I have Cassie Mashoff. She is the co-founder of Lottie's Meats. And Cassie, I'm so happy to have you on the show.

2:03Cassie Maschhoff:Thank you so much for having us. You embodied and captured our whole ethos perfectly. Okay. Well, that's a great way to kick things off. That's great. Yeah.

2:13Chelsey Maschhoff:I've been genuinely following along. I really have been. The brand genuinely has stood out to me because you all are bringing more of this femme feeling and you have to break through the noise in such a legacy male dominated very like overly masculine type of niche within food that you're in you're in the meats industry and so I would love to first kick off with how did this product and brand idea first start? What was like that light bulb moment? Yeah.

2:51Cassie Maschhoff:Chelsea and I grew up on a pork farm in rural Southern Illinois. So we're actually sixth generation. It's been in our family since 1851.

3:00Chelsey Maschhoff:Sixth generation? Yeah.

3:02Cassie Maschhoff:So we didn't just choose to get into the meat industry and I wouldn't recommend it, but it was, you know, Lottie's is an homage to our family heritage. When we were growing up, our parents encouraged us, try your hands outside of agriculture. Agriculture farming is a really, really tough industry that has changed so much in the few decades we have been on this planet. And so Chelsea, my older sister, went into culinary, graduating from Culinary Institute of America, working in top restaurants around Denver. And I went into tech. She had actually started using our family's pork in her restaurant because she liked the consistency and the traceability.

3:41Cassie Maschhoff:And she was experimenting making sausage using only pork loin and pork shoulders to the best cuts. Most sausage, if you look at a label, it's like all ingredients you can't pronounce fillers. Hence, you don't want to know how the sausage is made.

3:54Chelsey Maschhoff:Right, right, right.

3:55Cassie Maschhoff:She being a top chef was making it with those best cuts and really fun ingredients like Calabrian chilies that we import from Italy. I had learned a lot about CPG while doing like a part-time business school program and just working in like, I would say like the real corporate world. And while she was kind of making these sausages and doing like a fun pop-up series and just like playing around on the side, I was like, wow, this could actually be something that we maybe bring to market and put on shelf. Because when we look at the sausage shelf, it is a lot of those like Jimmy John Frank's Oscars.

4:31Chelsey Maschhoff:All those guys. Yeah, all those guys.

4:34Cassie Maschhoff:Or there's like a lot of chicken sausage, which totally dominates the market, but it's not like a chef crafted product that you would see on a restaurant menu. And so we started Lottie's kind of looking at that and saying, you know what, it's now or never. Pork gets this bad rep because of all those guys we just mentioned, or people think like bacon, but we know growing up in pork, it can be nutrient dense. it can be really accessible. And if anyone's going to reintroduce it, maybe we have the background and the acumen to do it. So we decided to give it a go. And the brand name is Lotties, as you kind of mentioned in the opening.

5:10Cassie Maschhoff:It's very, it's like a feminine, but nostalgic, like meat brand. So it's a little bit of both and it's a family name. So we wanted to name it after a woman in our family, someone who was kind of empowering us and always behind the scenes in food and agriculture.

5:24Chelsey Maschhoff:So cool. I love that it's you and your sister and sixth generation. I mean, that's incredible knowledge that you're bringing in. Also, your sister coming from culinary, you're coming from tech, meeting in the middle in CPG. So what were some of those early next steps of your sister and yourself actually building the brand and bringing this product to market? it.

5:50Cassie Maschhoff:Yeah. We really sat down and thought on it for a while because it's kind of insane, right? Why would you leave like your dream tech job or like this culinary job that you really work so hard to start a sausage brand, a cold chain, short shop, like sausage brand. But I think, you know, and this kind of goes into some of the brands you probably work with. Like you have to have that like connection and that piece I think that makes it feel like the delusion is maybe warranted so there was a bit of that and just you know that as I mentioned that homage to our family heritage and like kind of reconnecting people to where their food comes from in the country that's a huge piece of it but tactically we really looked down on paper and wrote what is this market size what could we actually do and how does this really like inch by inch come to life and then yeah to your point, it's more than just a product.

6:47Cassie Maschhoff:What does that brand look like? And is there space for us? Especially when a lot of that sausage aisle is like, you think like black plastics, like really catering to men often, or like one type of consumer. So a lot of the brand building and like scoping was looking at like, okay, if we're targeting women that are often, we're finding our audience as women ages 25 to 49, we call them kind of like modern eaters. They value health, wellness, like trends, but convenience. They have a lot going on, but there's this willingness to pay. I feel like we like kind of business schooled it with a little bit of the art and like had a plan before we just dove in.

7:27Chelsey Maschhoff:So are you still sourcing your sausage from your family farm? Yeah.

7:33Cassie Maschhoff:So we still source from the family farm we grew up on and a network of family farms within that ecosystem, then we have to work with two different USDA facilities to make it. So one for the cooked product and one for our ground product. We've been through like so many different USDA co-packers. That's like a whole other story. That's a whole other story.

7:56Chelsey Maschhoff:So I know that you are now going to be launching in 200 targets. You're onboarding at Misfits Market, right?

8:06Cassie Maschhoff:is that already live yeah it actually just launched so you can now get us anywhere in the

8:11Chelsey Maschhoff:country with misfits market which is awesome so i would love to hear the fact that you came into the industry with such an incredible sourcing partner for the actual sausage but needing to work out you to your point the co-packing all of that especially working with meat cooked raw what did that look like to even start getting onto the radar and cutting through the noise? Because yes, you're doing something different. Yes, you also have a leg up as far as being sixth generation in the pork industry. But what did that look like actually going to retailers of saying, hey, you probably haven't thought about this yet, but you need to make space for our line because you're coming in with a fresh perspective.

9:01Cassie Maschhoff:yeah and honestly the step before of like bringing it to market I guess before even retail conversations had been more difficult as I mentioned there's only so many USDA co-packers to work with we're also coming from it from like an award-winning chef lens so we don't want to make sausage like everybody else we were often forced we need to fill this with extra water we need to add artificial maple powder no one wants to use grade a maple syrup and even though we had the supply chain and this connection to agriculture our family had never ever in like these hundreds years of history had a consumer facing brand they work with a co-op of all these other family farms you know and just like build up to sell into open markets and with other like big customers like a lot of the food system is today.

9:53Cassie Maschhoff:And so it was an entirely different game. And I think bringing it to market at scale was way harder than we thought. And it's still hard. We were like two years in challenges, every single production run. That being said, when we did have those retail conversations, our go-to-market was starting regionally. And we actually started with food service because Chelsea's a chef and we had some of those connections. And this, I feel like you Oh, that's really smart. Yeah. But just given your background with like restaurants and brands for us, it was nice because we had self-funded. We had each put in like a couple thousand dollars, but it was natural brand contextualization for us to be on menus at like some of these awesome bakeries that we still work with and pizzerias.

10:38And we didn't have to have like a USDA, but it just like, it was easier to sell like bulk

10:44Cassie Maschhoff:and just start that way while we finalize and got all the compliance and everything. like an actual retail pack and then we just went to regional small little shops in denver to start that gave us like enough ammunition to then go to more retailers our next big region was the bay area and tell a little bit about what you mentioned like here is what is missing here's some like baby data points you can extrapolate them out if you want right of what works and like who's gonna buy this and this is the new consumer we're bringing in, that was a big unlock for us. Like we had anecdotally on data, the folks often buying our sausage weren't buying sausage before.

11:26Cassie Maschhoff:They weren't entering the category. So now you're bringing in a new consumer with like a bigger basket size that really wants and is excited to cook with these products in this way.

11:36Chelsey Maschhoff:that's a great point too that i'm sure perked up the ears of retailers in your area and then going to the bay area of like hey this shopper isn't even buying pork sausages we are going to help

11:54Cassie Maschhoff:add this to their cart totally totally and we often and we still hear this like a lot of these buyers have been in their seats and have so much experience and they the biggest objection we got is like pork sausage doesn't sell. They have limited space. Like their jobs are very difficult. They want to put chicken sausage, maybe bacon, other things in there. So it was up to us to convince them that this is like an opportunity.

12:20Chelsey Maschhoff:And what helped you convince them that there was an opportunity?

12:25Cassie Maschhoff:We, I think we're so disciplined and we still are in getting the data and making sure it would move on and off the shelf. So taking, like I said, what we, we launched in March of 2024. In that first year, we were only in Colorado. So then when we started going into these other regions, we followed that same playbook and really invested, you know, like in a lot of demos, Chelsea and I, as the founders would go to, we launched in like Bristol Farm, Nugget Markets, Lazy Acres. We would go to all of those stores and meet people behind the counter because it's kind of like wine, you know, like a lot of CPG brands that are maybe center store that you work with, like meat and wine maybe are still ones where like people in the store might ask for advice.

13:12Cassie Maschhoff:That was in person. We turn them. Yeah. Like into meat, cheese, brand and wine. Yeah. Cheese. Totally. Um, but I think it really helped us to go and like share with the team there and make them an extension of our team and like really get bought into the product. And that is something that because to our advantage, a lot of these big neat brands are so big that they're faceless that they wouldn't or couldn't do or just like don't need to do honestly because they have so much market share already so I think that helped us

13:43Chelsey Maschhoff:like showing up and showing that's a great point because so many early stage founders can feel very intimidated with good reason that they're going up against these legacy brands that have such strong brand awareness or not even if you know their name you just know the packaging and it's like a no-brainer but what you're saying is that the fact that these were kind of like nameless or faceless brands that weren't going into the stores and building these relationships you actually cut through the noise so to speak and built more of that relationship to then help leverage that these people working in the stores could then translate that to consumers, to people who are considering buying, which is such a major unlock, especially for an emerging brand.

14:39Chelsey Maschhoff:Totally.

14:40Cassie Maschhoff:And especially for a product like ours, it's like we're at a higher price point. Sure. You often do have to try it, but people are thinking a lot about proteins and meat. It's like a big purchase. It's like one of the biggest purchases in the store. And so they are going to think a little bit more about it. Um, and then having a brand that hopefully pops and stands out a little bit on shelf has also helped us. But yeah, I think we often, you know, you hear, you hear this all the time. You get so much advice and CPG. It's one of the things I really had to work on when I started. Cause I was like so defensive in the beginning, but we often got a lot of advice of like oh just don't demo don't do this blah blah blah but I always had to remind myself that like okay well we're not a beverage brand or we're not like this like this is an important big purchase and it doesn't taste like other sausage because it isn't as crumbly and like you know like mystery cuts what's so important for us to like invest in small regional deep pockets that we know will convert and go that route versus like zero to a thousand

15:50Chelsey Maschhoff:like other strategies you know I'm all about a demo I think sampling I do I love a demo demoing or you love receiving demo samples I love brands demoing I love my clients demoing I've even demoed for clients before like I will go I will hand out samples with the brands like I think it's such a powerful way to build that excitement, to get real feedback, to have people taste quality. When you're working in a better for you product, no matter what you're doing, you're probably at a higher price point. People are going to maybe think an extra moment or two to purchase it. Building that feedback, I think, is one of the most valuable pieces of getting a brand off the ground.

16:40Chelsey Maschhoff:Totally.

16:40Cassie Maschhoff:Yeah. And I was going to say, especially in the early years, I mean, we're, like I said, two years in, but we're even planning another trip to the Bay area where both Chelsea and I are going to go and spend like days in stores because it is so important and we're still learning. Like you just learn so much. It's a lot of work and sometimes you're like, oh, but it's, yeah, I think it's impactful. Invaluable.

17:03Chelsey Maschhoff:Totally. So how did you get connected with Target? How did that look? Because I feel like they've been, I mean, they have been bringing on more Better For You brands, more emerging brands, been higher price point, like quality brands. How did you get on their radar?

17:23Cassie Maschhoff:Yeah. And they very much are investing in all of that and grocery, I think now more than ever. So most of the stores we have gotten into at this point have been very much like we have to attend. It's the same time as Expo West. So we can never go to Expo West. We always attend the meet conference. That's literally what it's called, the meet conference. There's a lot of regional retail buyers there, but it's been a lot of, you know, like inch by inch connecting, sending samples, pitching. Target was really rare in that they actually reached out to us. They had discovered our brand in a small retailer, I think Foxtrot.