WILDE

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 and retail, go to tryglimpse.com backslash trial for 30 days free and let them know I sent you.

1:17Jason Wright: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 Jason Wright. He is the founder and CEO of Wild Protein Snacks. I'm sure you've seen Wild pop up on your Instagram, TikTok, seeing it in store. They are doing something truly innovative in the protein snack category. And Jason, I'm so happy to have you on the show. Kelly, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. Perfect. So to kick things off, I love hearing origin stories, how founders got these crazy ideas for a new CPG brand. Yours is using very clean ingredients, but doing something that we have not seen yet in the protein and just snack category in general.

2:14So I would love to hear, how did the idea for Wild first get started?

2:19Jason Wright:Yeah, for sure, Kelly. Listen, I love snacks, right? I love everything. I'm addicted to potato chip, french fries. I love Cheez-It. any salty legendary snack. And, um, you know, I've always kind of been a healthy guy. I work out, you know, I'm sure all of us do, but, um, for me, carbs, like just didn't really fit well with me. Like every time I would eat carb, I would just kind of feel like I had this drug hangover, but without the benefit of doing the drug. So, um, in 2017, you know, I was at the bottom of a potato chip bag. And I had this crazy idea. I was living in Boulder at the time. And I was like, could I replace the potato with chicken breast?

3:08Jason Wright:And that was really the origin of how wild started. And I, you know, I really, like, if I back up, I could, you know, do well with like, food, food, normal, you know, eating lunch or dinner, like, I could continue to do my high protein, low carb. And really that was just for a clear head filling, but snacks was always my enemy. Right. And, and I love snacking. And, uh, in 2017, I thought maybe I could change the snack industry and start using real nutrient dense food, um, to create our favorite snacks. And the chip was the beginning. Okay. I'm obsessed that that happened in 2017, right? Because you were ahead of the curb as far as using real food in snacks, especially protein.

3:59So what was your background at the time when you had this idea? What were you personally working on?

4:04Jason Wright:Yeah. So in my early twenties, you know, I'm sure you don't believe it, but I'm from the South, South Carolina and right out of college. I hightailed it to New York and that's kind of where I was introduced to like, well, that's the first time I went into a Whole Foods. And, and I kind of was, I got addicted with just like eating right and feeling better. And so in my twenties, I started a cereal company called Feed. We really got, you know, just crushed by bare naked. And really what I learned there was we were really just a me too product. Um, but I had went through the, the process. Obviously I launched it.

4:55Jason Wright:I brought it in market. I raised capital. And then we, we ended up having to close the business in 2010, but that was my education in the natural foods. And I got the bug. I got addicted. Like, you know, I think I always knew I wanted to do my own deal, but I didn't know what that was until I got to New York and was introduced to all this, this, you know, healthy food and how good food could taste. And, and so anyway, that was my background. And once I closed feed, my wheels were turning. And I just, you know, I was looking for the next thing. And I was constantly looking. And then potato chips, you know, happened to be the, the vehicle that sparked my interest to do something different.

5:38Very cool. And I can definitely empathize and relate to when you're an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur, you can't shake it off. You're always looking for that next thing. So I that resonates with me. Absolutely. So you are now having this idea, you want to use real chicken breast, you want to use real food in snacks. What did that look like as far as now bringing that product to market? Because I'm sure you heard a lot of co-mans say, wait, we can't even make this product.

6:14Jason Wright:Yeah. Yeah. So in the early days, my, you know, I believed that we would go to a pork rind facility and, and there's always, there's two phases of wild. There's where I take chicken breast and bone broth and egg white, and I turn it into what I call the wild potato. And then there's the process the part where we would um slice crisp seasoning and in the early days we thought we would do the wild potato um you know in a usda facility but then we would go down and ship that product to pork rind and that's where we would uh finish the product season the product and we tried that and it was a disaster and um and i had told the investors that that's how we would do this product.

7:00Jason Wright:And, um, I had to go back and say, well, we've got a problem. And, um, and so that led me down the path of, um, in my kitchen, trying to figure out like, how could we, you know, crisp it, how could we crisp it, season it, which led me to a manufacturer, um, that we, eventually we worked together and I came up with what we called in the industry a top submerger, which allowed our product to actually have the shape, but it allowed our product to not find his friend and marry to his friend. And that's what was going on at the Port Rhyme facility was the chips were all sticking together. And so little did I know that this had never been done.

7:48Jason Wright:And, and so we filed for a patent in 2018 and I think 2022, we, we received our patent. And, um, and so that allows us to, you know, get product, uh, to crisp it, to make the shape, um, and then, and then the season it. And, um, and so we, in 2018, we, um, built our first, what I call CRISPR, and we put it into a co-man in Virginia. We were doing the wild potato process in Chicago, freighting to Virginia. And we were really running the whole line. Like we were, the co-man, this is all new, right? And the co-man was learning our secret sauce as we were learning our secret sauce. And the economics were really bad.

8:39Jason Wright:I'd tell any entrepreneur, like, you know, We were in uncharted territories. They didn't know how to price it. We just had to really buckle down and say, let's get a proof of concept. Luckily, through Sprouts and Whole Foods, we achieved that. With the support of my board, we decided in 20 that if we were going to make a go, we had to go do it ourselves. We never set out to build our own manufacturing. or, you know, I never dreamed that I was going to be running a manufacturing one day. But, you know, 21, we opened a 50 ,000 square foot facility. And that is when we started to become a real brand.

9:23Jason Wright:We started to really make a lot of progress and making our product a lot better, closer to a potato chip. And then fast forward, we opened in 22, we opened a 75 ,000 square foot facility. And then today, I'm a couple minutes late for our podcast here because we're turning on 130 ,000 square foot facility. Incredible. Incredible. Really. I appreciate you breaking that down because there are so many emerging brand founders who listen to the show and just assume you have this idea. And then the next day you're in this huge facility that you built from the ground up. And it was just like that. So I really appreciate founders who break down the steps and the reality of doing something different, right?

10:12Because we, by and large, who's listening to the show and who we're in community with, we want to create better products. We want to create products we have not seen yet. And the reality of that is that most likely you're going to have to create your own path to do so. Yep.

10:31Jason Wright:A hundred percent. And I think, you know, for your listeners and I would tell people and this happened yesterday, I had one of my investors here and he said, you know, you guys did it right. You started slow. You started, you know, small. You grew and then you would go to phase two and then you would grow and go to phase three. and you know what you have today it's like i would put it up against you know any large manufacturer any large brand out there if they came through my building they'd be like i mean these guys are like you know they're right there with uh a frito uh you know but we didn't start there right it's taken me almost 10 years to get there and he was making a comment at some entrepreneurs they want to have that day one, but their sales are like, you know, a couple hundred thousand a month and they're trying to grow into something that can produce, you know, 20 million a month.

11:30Jason Wright:And that is, you know, you can't do that. It needs to be stepping stones. I'm really glad that you said that, Jason, because we see the flashy headlines. We see the buzzy things, you know, in the space and it's very easy to assume or could be easy to assume that that's just the way that it goes. But as a brand strategist myself for clients who are pre-launch in the very, very early days, and this is one of the reasons why I have the podcast, I love getting the real genuine stories of the stepping stones, right? And helping people level set expectations and just understanding what they're really getting into as they take a product idea and bring it to market.

12:13So I would love to talk about how you landed on your flavors. I know that you just launched a cheese cracker that is very nostalgic to crackers I ate growing up. They look, the cracker also looks great.

12:31Jason Wright:It's a game changer. It really looks fabulous. So I would love to hear just how you were making Wild also stand out because when you first started I'm sure you were the one of the only protein snacks now 2026 and beyond. There's so much protein now on the market. You're very much ahead of the curve, but I would love to just hear your point of view of how you're making wild really stand out. Yeah. I mean, first and foremost is the ingredients that we're doing our, you know, their own facility. There's a patent involved. Most of these, if not all the protein products on the market are powder first, right?

13:13Jason Wright:So first ingredient is going to be whey, soy, plant, but all powder. And they're all using Coveman, you know, and most of them are using the same Coveman. And so these products become like a me too of a me too of a me too. And wild, you know, the, the, if we just go and talk about the cracker line, for example, like No one is running a cracker with the machine I'm running it with and the equipment. And what I mean by that is we went through the process of going the traditional route when we were buying the equipment. And our dough would not run on traditional equipment. So I had to go to another industry because I was not married to a co-man.

13:57Jason Wright:I was going to have to build my own line. so you know instead of changing my dough I went to another industry and went and uncovered every rock and looked under every stone and finally found that you know this one industry that makes another type of product we could actually use it to make our cracker and that is a secret sauce for wild but but wild has to do that right wild doesn't have the option to go to co-man so you know that That is one a curse because there's a lot of CapEx involved, but there's a huge benefit to that. And having a product is super unique. And then if you talk about our ingredients, I mean, I truly never set out to have a protein product.

14:41Jason Wright:I mean, my goal was not like, hey, I want a protein chip. I was like, I want to replace the potato with chicken breast because I feel good about eating chicken breast. And I believe that real food drives real flavor. And so and so that was the the energy behind it. and then fast forward uh you know the cracker and what i'm thinking now is like why do we have to settle you do we do we have to settle for an empty snack like a cheese it or or a or a powdered protein like a quest cracker why can't something be in the middle just best of both worlds and and that's really uh my my goal now it's like i love cheese it's but i wanted something that It ate just as well, but a little bit better for you.

15:24Jason Wright:And who knows what's next? Maybe it's pita, maybe it's pretzel. But my goal is to take what we're doing and give people choices where they can have nutrient dense chicken breast, bone broth as the building blocks of the product, but yet still get the satisfaction of the crunch and the flavor and the experience. if I was to do like powdered first you know like our products are not going to eat like the legendary product it's going to eat like a protein and I just believe we're just too good to be called a protein you know but I'm biased no but that's totally fair you have to have that passion and that drive and that conviction right to navigate the ever never-ending cycle of trends and foods and what's happening and who's coming to the market.

16:19I would love to also hear how you've been growing in retail. Really impressive footprint, Whole Foods, Sprouts. I saw Costco, Walmart, Target, Kroger. I would love to hear how you've been approaching that growth.

16:38Jason Wright:Yeah. So, you know, I'll just speak on Chip first and then we'll get the cracker. But Chip, We were in about 20 ,000 stores, you know, from your natural industry, Costco or sorry, Whole Foods and Sprouts has been big partners of ours. And then Costco, Sam's have been big club partners to drive trial and then Walmart, Target and grocery, you know, Kroger specifically have been big supporters. and all these retailers, they see the movement in protein, like people want protein. And it's not just the gym bros that are eating protein, right? It's everyday people want to live more today than any time in the history, want to live a better lifestyle.

17:30Jason Wright:And we all know protein plays that role. And so not to speak in GL1 or GLPL1 is driving a lot of protein growth. So those retailers have wanted to build these protein sets. And Wild has been one of a few brands that have been anchored or been called on to anchor these sets. And so with the Cracker, when you look at Cracker, there's not a lot of competition. There's a few brands that have tried to do a protein cracker, but, you know, for whatever reason, they didn't hit the mark. We started working on a cracker two years ago. A lot of people don't realize this, but in the early days of Wild, it was between a cracker and a chip.

18:16Jason Wright:And I had to pick the chip because I knew less on how to do the cracker. But over time, learning through the chip, I learned how to do the cracker. and um and so that was like always my next move um and uh and and to be honest the cracker is i hate to say it like this but i think it's better than the chip it's it's it's you know and i've got a lot of other comments from people to validate that and um and it's just all of our knowledge of five six years went into that where the chip we constantly had to tweak it and bring it along as we learned. So, you know, for the Cheez-It style cracker we have, we launched Costco and Sam's, Target, we're about to roll out the Whole Foods and Sprouts.

19:07Jason Wright:So it has a big, you know, partner, big, big retail launch plan. And I did leave out that we're going to anchor the protein set in Walmart here in Q4. And that's in the cracker set. So it got a, I mean, I'll tell you now, we, we, I'm running the line like 24 hours, you know, five days a week and I can't keep up, which is the best problem I've ever had. Still a problem, but the cracker has really just took off out of the gate and, and yeah, we're, we're very blessed. It's really cool to see. I'll be honest from a CPG nerds perspective, I've been watching the cheese cracker space and I've been waiting for something to really hit it.

19:59Because to me, I saw that white space too. I'm like, there's something here that we need. And so when I saw your launch, I'm like, of course, Wild did it.

20:10Jason Wright:Yeah, I've been watching it for a while. And I know that you were coming on the show too. I'm like, oh, this was perfect timing because I've really been watching this space. So I think it's great. And you have three flavor skews, right? Well, we have a hot honey. We have Buffalo cheddar. We have classic cheddar and we have smoked Gouda. And you know, it's, it's crazy because you normally have like, you know, a top, you know, kind of close second. You always have like a bottom, right? And we don't have a bottom. Like we, everybody, I mean, some people don't like spice because so they'll just go to the, to the original or smoked gouda but um you know our chip buffalo chip is our number one selling chip yes and so our buffalo cracker is like out of the gate on fire i would say right now smoked gouda and classic are the top two just because of pure um i had those developed when we were showing them to retail and so they all all of them tucked those two in the in buffalo and Hot Honey were the last two to be developed.

21:15Jason Wright:But yeah, I mean, listen, I've never been a part of any product launch like the Cracker. I'm super blessed and super lucky that the timing just lined up and then we were able to pull off a really good product. So cool. I love when that happens. I love when those things align. For someone who's listening, like I said, I work with pre-launch CPG food and beverage founders and many emerging brand founders listen to the show, what piece of advice would you share with them? It could be based off of a new launch, building manufacturing, doing something different, but just knowing all of the experience that you've had so far, I would love to hear what you would want to pass on or could pass on.

22:02Jason Wright:Yeah, I mean, listen, I think the noise, I believe it's all about the product. So I think you've got to focus so much on the product. You've got to critique your product, keep tweaking it, and then next figure out the best way you can make it, manufacture it. Because I'll tell you, like, you know, and I'm going to get backlash for this, but there's no marketing plan and no sales plan that can outsell or market a phenomenal product. Really, when that product leaves, 90 % of it's done. It's going to, you know, we can get it into the right hands at the retail, at the buyer, and you can do all this, you know, fancy marketing.

22:46Jason Wright:But repeat, right? And so the product delivery, the deliciousness, I really believe it's all about the product. I wouldn't have done wild and built a facility if I didn't believe product was king. But I would just encourage any entrepreneur like, you know, we started like the branding that we started with was sitting over on my shelf like it was really bad. But we focused on the on the product and we kept tweaking the product and getting the product better, continuous improvement. I would focus on the product. I mean, you got to get the market and I wouldn't be scared to get the market knowing that in your, you know, strategy that you're going to constantly improve the product.

23:32Jason Wright:Right. I just believe it's all about the product, you know. Absolutely. I think it's also balancing the both. Right. of making sure you have a great product that someone would want to, one, think sounds delicious and come back for and building the brand around it because we know that it's even more and more competitive coming to market and staying on shelf and then grabbing people's attention to get off shelf. Yep. Last question. Can you walk us through where people could shop wild? Yeah, for sure. So Amazon has our chips. We're soon to launch Cracker. But, you know, Whole Foods, Sprouts, you know, if you're in a Texas region, you can go to Costco and buy both the chips and the crackers.

24:20Jason Wright:Soon to be on the West Coast as well in Costco. Sam's right now has all clubs have the Cracker, the Classic Cheddar. Target has just rolled out Classic and Buffalo over in Sports Nutrition. You know, we're very fortunate. You can find us in most retail locations, limited on Cracker. But as the summer we get into the, you know, the later part of the summer, you'll pretty much be able to get the Cracker in any Sprouts, Whole Foods, Walmart and Target locations. Truly impressive retail footprint. And thank you so much, Jason, for walking us through. And I know that you're literally opening up another manufacturing facility and coming on the show and sharing so candidly behind the scenes.

25:12I genuinely appreciate it. And just really congratulations on everything that you're building.

25:18Jason Wright:Yeah, no, thank you, Kelly. It's an honor to be here with you today. And thank you for having me on the show. And I got to get you the cracker. You got to try it. Yes, I'm really genuinely excited about the cracker. Thank you. Good. You're so welcome. Thank you everyone for listening and I'll see you on the next episode. This episode was brought to you by Glimpse. As we know, building a brand is not as sexy and glamorous as it looks on social media at times. A lot of those unsexy problems come into play when brands start to scale in retail distribution. Founders are always incredibly excited to see their products on shelves at major retail chains, but they don't realize all the hard work that starts to begin.

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27:04With a team of in-house deduction experts who come from some of the most successful and profitable CPG companies and custom built AI with 100 % accuracy and precision. You'll recover money that you never should have had leaked in the first place. 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. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Emerging Brands Podcast. It really means so much to me that you listen to this show, share it with your friends and support it. If you are a CPG food and beverage founder and you're ready to launch a brand, people want to shop, head to withkellybennett.com for the details.