Yough!

17:08Michael Rolland:Pizzas are passion. And then, but also then when you started looking at it, you have shelf stable versus not shelf stable. So if we went a different product, we started really, uh-oh, like we wanted to launch really as quickly as possible, even though it was beyond long to do R &D testing for a first market product. But we thought it would be quicker than trying to figure out a shelf stable version with Greek yogurt. And so you learn the nightmares of that. Like, God, you know, everyone sees these products online on Instagram and TikTok. It's like, oh, we should do that. Or you could do that. And it's like, you guys aren't even thinking about shelf stable and the commercialization product and why that product has these ingredients.

17:53Michael Rolland:Like, there's so many nuances. But what we did know also was is our core ethos. And we went against a lot of people's advice. uh we wanted the cleanest possible ingredients and that was where uh when when i was starting to eat more of the frozen pizzas when this first started was everything is going i'm obsessing on on watching trends and whatnot and you're seeing everything is going to clean ingredients like macros are there you're always going to have you know the gym bros and the macro people and all that um and you're going to get you know you're always going to have people who don't care per say about clean ingredients, but you're seeing a huge shift because of social media.

18:34Michael Rolland:Now the consumers have the power. They're starting to see that the ingredients that they're putting in their body matters. It's not just the big food companies marketing to them. We, as the people have the ability to market on behalf of clean ingredients. So I'm seeing that. I'm like, that's our core DNA. Greek yogurt, we know has more protein and that's fortunate because of the Greek yogurt. and you see, listen, from a health perspective, getting more protein in your body, that's quality protein, not just powders, is a good thing. I eat Greek yogurt personally every single day. I have Greek yogurt.

19:10Michael Rolland:I do it plain. Shout out to Faye. I wish we could have worked with them. Faye is my favorite. It's thick. It's creamy with just berries. I use blackberries, blueberries. I'm obsessed with it. So that we knew from the protein element and the clean ingredients happens to be lower calories too. But there's arguments that people make. Like, well, is, you know, is calories going to be here for the long term where people are counting their calories? You see some people caring about it. Some don't. But I knew the clean ingredients and protein was not going anywhere. So that's our core DNA. So when we were building this, we knew, all right.

19:47Michael Rolland:The flour, for example, two ingredient dough, it's bleached and it's enriched. well i don't want all like niacin and and all these different um chemical sounds in there even though they're they're vitamins and minerals and they're good for you in a sense they're added back so they strip it from the whole wheat and they add them back in there so some consumers are not gonna they're not gonna like that they're not gonna like the look of them on the label so we had um so that was a big thing we had to basically recreate self-rising flour we also knew that glyphosate is heavily sprayed in traditional non-organic flour that's the biggest thing so we want an organic wheat flour from that to get an organic yogurt is so expensive and it's just it's astronomical and all the other ingredients we wouldn't be able to price it we're already getting price issues from people saying you're too expensive so there's this balance of can we do it organic there's a reason why like you have basically no pizzas that are fully organic so we had to make some sacrifices on that but all these things i'm saying i can go on for another literally another year telling you all the nuanced details so you have to be so obsessed of building and just getting one step one step one step so you're just putting one foot in front of the other and you just keep doing it you keep doing it and you keep doing it And I think you start seeing everything come to life more and it's just so rewarding.

21:20Michael Rolland:The one thing I'll end with on that is, is my closest friend who's a serial entrepreneur, he's founded and sold companies for lots of money. He would always say you're in the hurry up and wait business. So you're always hurrying up.

21:33Jason Miller:Right.

21:34Michael Rolland:You keep going because you want to go quick. You got to be able to move quick and fail fast in this industry if it's not working in certain things. and so but then you got to wait on other people so you're hurrying up then you're waiting you're hurrying up and eating so you're trying to get to this point where you can't you're done waiting um so you got to also have patience which is tough for for entrepreneurs but um yeah it was constantly just doing that and then you're figuring out the strategy as we go as a team

22:03Jason Miller:yeah so mike can you walk us through the launch at target and sprouts nationwide i know that you just that happened in March and knowing the ethos and the passion, but then taking that and really scaling it. What did that look like as far as you leveraging your experience and your background? But what did that look like, especially Target? I think that's always a North Star for so many founders listening. So I think, Kelly, when Jay and I first launched and this goes back to you have to be delusional to launch anything, I think, in startup land. But Ian really thought we could launch online. And this was way before retail launched a couple of years back.

22:48Jason Miller:And, you know, frozen shipping is really expensive. People are not used to buying packs of pizza, let alone they only have so much room in their freezers. So Jay and I learned a lot through that experience, although we did really well with that part of the business early on. It wasn't scalable for numerous reasons. When it came to Target and Sprouts, I think we got one of those lightning in a bottle situations with going viral on TikTok. I think we have the right brand look. Luckily, like Jay did a hell of a job getting our product to where it needed to be, too. And there when we look through the pain points we saw from the Weight Watchers community, all the GLP One users now, the moms being able to feed their picky kid eaters something they can actually eat and enjoy.

23:35Jason Miller:There's been a lot of, and you could even, there's overlaps, of course, with the fitness communities and the Gen Zs. We're starting to see where the anytime frozen pizza. So I think what our excitement was, even though at first, and it still is very overwhelming, we finally had the opportunity to allow people to go buy us in stores right down the street from where they lived, which was not possible up until a month ago. So even Jay and I, we were unable to buy our own product in a store near where we live. Up until the beginning of March. So were you on Target's radar and Sprouts radar because you went viral on TikTok?

24:13Jason Miller:Or was it through trade shows? Like, how did you guys get connected? We actually went viral on TikTok right when we launched Target. So Target reached out to us. Jay got a LinkedIn message back in the summer that he luckily responded to for us. We ended up meeting them in August at their HQ. And to this day, we'll never forget it. And Jay and I went to their test kitchen. They fell in love with our product and brand on the spot. We, at the time, were not expecting a partnership with Target to come about that quickly. We were hoping maybe they would trial us in a small area, maybe a year down the road.

24:52Jason Miller:Right. Within a few minutes of being there, they were like, we're ready to launch you nationwide in the beginning of March. And this was back in August. So we had about six months to get our ducks in a row. Jay and I were like looking at each other. we're like oh yeah let's do that even though we most people will say you know don't there's a

25:12Michael Rolland:transition in in startup world in cpg food i would say that everyone would say okay you know you start if you can't put the online business aside the amazons and on your website and all that because it's especially in frozen it's it's tough but everyone will say you know you start locally in your where you live right and so that makes a lot of sense because you can go in person you can go sample you can do all these things for us well our our manufacturer was in i was i'm in new york city mike was in florida we were making our crusts in um in wisconsin at the time and then we were having a top somewhere in la and so we didn't live anywhere close there and so like you're also kind of pigeonholed when people say that I would always laugh because I'm like that's assuming you live where you're making the product and so we didn't close by right yes we didn't because for us to then ship it to where we were the frozen cost to do that was astronomical so there's the logistic side to all that planning um so we had to kind of suck it up and just kind of get proof of concept and proof of market.

26:18Michael Rolland:But then we we were in a 50 or so local doors. You know, everyone says start with the, you know, essential markets, whether it's if you can get into the air ones, the pop up, the pop up grocers, the foxtrot at the time. And then eventually you you you move up into the natural, the bigger natural channels, whether that's the H.E.B.s, whether that's the sprouts whether that's the whole foods and then once you've proven that demand you're starting to build awareness for your product then you can go into the mass channels and see how you do and that's where you know vcs want to see how you do there because that's where the bulk of the consumers are when you start looking at numbers of consumers so we um we had our so those 50 or so doors we thought you know we were trying all right now it'll be like sprouts it'll be whole foods, but that target opportunity came about, we were in the process of switching co-packers because our initial one, we absolutely loved them.

27:18Michael Rolland:They were amazing people, but we had an issue with our crust being too tough. The machinery wasn't the right of machinery. And so for the founders too, I think all of them, the ones that are more experienced and as experienced, we're not that experienced to be honest, but the ones that everyone's probably had a version of this where you realize, oh man, like this isn't the right equipment or there's something that's not optimal. And then you got to go figure out what's going to be the fix. Right. And so, um, you know, we wanted to have the best one that we can scale with infinitely, but only so many people because of our product being first to market, there's only so many that are going to take you so a there's only so many that can take you because your minimums are smaller and our minimums were much higher compared to most other brands i'd say we had some funding um but the greek yogurt when you make greek yogurt in a pizza dough in a bowl in like a mixing bowl these frozen pizza places they never had that so they'll they have water you have a water from a hose that's going into a into a bowl now you're taking greek yogurt they're like uh how the heck do we do this?

28:35Jason Miller:Sure.

28:36Michael Rolland:Gluten free places have a little bit more, uh, had a little bit more familiarity with it. But for us, we knew that the gluten free product just didn't taste as good. And, you know, you look at like what Googles did. Googles didn't have gluten free at first. Then they had a gluten wine afterwards. That's more of where we want. We want to taste to be

28:56Jason Miller:priority at first and, and clean ingredients.

28:59Michael Rolland:And with gluten free, a lot of times you got to put in fillers and this and that so we didn't want to have the time we don't want to put in it's another animal of that so to put in that work so we said let's launch with this then we'll get to a gluten-free version maybe later on um so we had the manufacturing issue me and mike were at expo west and i remember i looked at him i go mike we have an issue like we're losing like half of our run it's like sticking to this it's getting issues there i'm like, like we tried to fix it. We tried to do this. And like, it's just, we gotta, we gotta find like, we gotta figure out a new co-packer.

29:37Michael Rolland:We gotta do something else. So we look at each other and Mike met someone who was in the frozen pizza industry, very high up guy. And he was at pizza expo the next week. So we're like, Oh my God, pizza expo. We're renting a car. We're going to pizza expo. We're just driving. We just said on the spot. We're like, we're going, this is our lives like we we fortunately we don't have kids we're single guys and we're like we're just going this is this is it yeah this this is our baby it's our whole world so we rent the car we drive through the desert it was amazing trip never forget it and um we met a manufacturing equipment company and they go yeah you can come test out like all the different frozen type pizza equipment types like amazing we'll come tomorrow where do we go like oh well you know it can't come tomorrow, but we have a facility in the Netherlands.

30:31Michael Rolland:I'm like, oh, that sounds amazing. Where's the one in the U.S.? They go, oh, we don't have one in the U.S. yet. We're working on it, but not anytime soon. Like, it's not for a few years. I'm like, oh, my God. So how are we going to get our ingredients? Because every ingredient matters. Like, every little difference can change how the end product works. So we can't get ingredients, Greek yogurt, flying into Europe. Like, do they even allow it? you know all the nuances there so we get all of our spec sheets from all of our suppliers and we try and match it as close as possible um in europe and we had some great people who helped and i went with um my good friend who helped us make the initial prototype we went to the netherlands for like five days and the first four went terribly and then on the last day like at the 24th hour um we figured something out and i i looked at him and i was like oh my god thank you thank you lord um and then we had to come back though and find a co-packer who can do it and that was a whole process so it was like literally like another two years it was almost like restarting so we're on the sidelines but we knew we had all this time put into it so we knew when the Target situation happened, they reached out, like Mike was saying, through like a DM.

31:54Michael Rolland:They're like, oh, do you want to be on like this digital thing and on Target or that? And I remember saying like, you know, if we can be in the main Target, like yada, yada, yada. And so like, it was maybe like five months later, our broker was like, oh, we have a Target meeting. And I realized that that woman sent it to the buyer. She's like, oh, I'm going to send it to the main buyer. Her name is XYZ if you hear from her. And it wasn't like until months later, our broker, I was like, oh, I put two and two together. She, the buyer definitely started tracking us and saw, wow, Target, as everyone knows now, they're looking for innovative brands to bring people in.

32:32Michael Rolland:And they honestly, I think Target gets a bad rap from certain people in the industry, but they have been such an amazing partner of ours. They have data. They want us to win. And obviously they want themselves to win. So it's just been very rewarding when you have a large partner like that. Because everyone says, be careful, be careful, be careful. which we were and but the time we knew the timing was right we had a great co-packer

33:07Jason Miller:then at the time you had done all that preliminary work already so that getting that po and that interest you felt comfortable and confident of like okay we've done all this like work we could we could really yeah we weren't going zero to 100 like it wasn't a normal startup at

33:23Michael Rolland:that it was but it wasn't like we had a co-packer who's worked with walmart and worked with costco So they were able to scale. They had that infrastructure.

33:30Jason Miller:Yeah.

33:31Michael Rolland:So from us, it was like, OK, you have the funding in place like we we we end up using a very good broker who who was familiar with brands in the freezer set. So we were ready and we knew that we knew where the trends were. So like then when we launched, truthfully, just we've been going very viral or people are loving it. they're able to access it all throughout the country and our whole thesis that we've spent those years on it's just now like seeing it come to life it was just meant you're seeing the best

34:07Jason Miller:feeling like you guys really put in the time and the years right and then to go from 50 stores to target and sprouts nationwide just in the last month that must feel super full circle it's a great feeling, Kelly. I think Jay and I always try to remind ourselves, and I'm sure all entrepreneurs realize this, it's tough to smell the roses when you're, but like as Jay's best friend always says, the whole, like the journey is the destination. You realize that. And I saw that in my last business. I was too young and naive to realize it at the time, but it flew by. And then you look back at these times that we're in right now.

34:48Jason Miller:So I think Jay and I are appreciating that more and more because there's always fires to put out. There's always things to plan for. And that's always going to be the case. And you need that to be the case or you don't have a business anyway. But you do have to take a breath and pat yourself on the back once in a while, which which is hard to do, which is really hard to do.

35:10Michael Rolland:What Mike just said is, is you and I keep saying this to to myself and really everyone who I come across, you have to be obsessed with building because like, and, and putting out the fires and creating this and that, because like, okay, cool. You launch and call it, you know, I hate the word viral, but you're viral on Tik TOK. And that feels good. It's, it's just small little dopamine hits. If you're constantly looking for them, you're, you're chasing the wrong things. It's just, it's going to die out. They're going to, this is going to die out that. So it's like, you have to enjoy the underlying, like you have to enjoy calling up your co-founders and your partners and building this and like building, you know, seeing something like that come to fruition and then seeing that come to fruition.

35:55Michael Rolland:You got to be chasing the right things and not the wrong things. And, um, otherwise a, you're just, you're, you're not going to truly be happy throughout the process. And I think, you know, it's going to be hard to achieve what you're really, what you're really, your goal is. And I think to that too, I think we try and define success. You really can do that with everything. Any decision you make, try and define success. I think that can potentially make it easier to achieve it and make it easier to enjoy.

36:34Jason Miller:Enjoy the ride, the experience. Yeah. And it's, you know, the mystique factor. I think we're all here on earth for discovery. I think that's what makes entrepreneurship so much fun as crazy and you know nauseating as it gets sometimes with the emotional roller coaster there's that unknown around the corner that's addicting every day you wake up and it's like oh what's going to happen here so to jay's point on like enjoying those conversations and even though some of them are more challenging than others that's part of

37:03Michael Rolland:the game you know that's what we signed up for i would say this too one important piece i would say that I've learned along this. And you hear this, but you don't, from many other founders that I think are successful, but it's hard to really appreciate it until you're in it, is just obsessing over the customer, like your customer. Like there's, you know, everyone nowadays on social media, you're seeing influencers and you're seeing creators and you're aspiring to either be like them or you appreciate these people who are just, not on pedestals but you you have this admiration for for certain higher level people the the bulk of who's buying your product they're just everyday people like you go into your local community it's like obsess over those like that's at least that's my take is is that's what um that's what enabled us to kind of i guess go as viral as we kind of did on on tic tac is we've so obsessed about them.

38:04Michael Rolland:That's what matters to us. They don't get the appreciation that others do a lot of the time. So it's just like appreciate and try and build as much with them. And everyone says it, but it starts with within. You have to actually appreciate them and want to obsess about them and care about them.

38:23Jason Miller:That's a great point. I think going back to having integrity around the product, the brand, and who's buying it and really investing in bringing them the best product that they could have. So I know that we're at time. I appreciate you both so much for peeling back the curtain and bringing us behind the scenes of Yo! What a great story. I am so excited to see you all at nationwide target sprouts. You shared so much insight and just value for aspiring entrepreneurs, which I always appreciate. And thank you both again for coming on the show. This was a great conversation. Thank you so much for having us, Kelly.

39:10Jason Miller:You're welcome. Everyone go look at your local target and sprouts in the frozen pizza section. You won't be disappointed and I will see everyone on the next episode. Bye. 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. Retailers and distributors are known for their processes of deducting amounts from invoices.

39:58Jason Miller:Most of the time, those are totally valid. Promos, slotting fees, free fills, and all the things that brands agree to to be part of the retail experience. But sometimes those deductions are invalid, costing brands thousands to millions in fees. Actually finding those needles in the haystack though and fighting to win back lost revenue, it's a costly, manual, and time-consuming issue. And that's where Glimpse comes in. 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, scaling their businesses.

40:51Jason Miller:With 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.

41:44Jason Miller:And as always, thank you so much for listening, shopping the brands featured on the show and following brands I'm working with. It means so much. See you on the next episode.