Advice Line with Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield

26:01Through November 30th, use code GUI10 on HelloLingo.com to get 10 % off a Lingo plan purchase, one use per customer. This offer cannot be combined with other offers, U.S., Puerto Rico, and U.K. only. The Lingo Glucose System is for users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. Individual responses may vary. As a founder, you're moving fast toward product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal. But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are higher, earlier than ever. Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or, if you wait too long, stall it.

26:48With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit-ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure, and customers evolve. Fast-growing startups like LangChain, Writer, and Cursor trusted Vanta to build a scalable foundation from the start. I love that over 10 ,000 companies from startups to huge enterprises trust Vanta because it makes me trust them. Go to Vanta.com slash built to save$1 ,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10 ,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash built to save a thousand dollars for a limited time.

27:49Welcome back to the advice line here on How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest today is Gary Hirshberg. He's the co-founder of the organic yogurt and dairy company Stonyfield. Gary, what do you say? Let's take another call. Here, here. All right, let's bring in our next caller. Hello. Welcome to the advice line. You are on with me and Gary Hirshberg. Tell us your name, where you're calling from, and just a little bit about your business. My name is Jamie Poe. I'm from Santa Barbara, California. I'm the co-owner and co-chef of Poe & Coe Folk Foods. We make vegan dried camping meals. They're shelf stable.

28:22You just said boiling water and eat them directly from the pouch. Amazing. OK, well, welcome to the show, Jamie. Thank you for calling in. Okay. How did you start this? Where did the idea come from? Are you a camp, like a backpacker, a camper? So that will lead to my question, but I am not a backpacker. I am just your all-around adventure buddy who likes to go camping on the weekends. I have always had a Monday through Friday or Monday through Saturday job. What's your day job, if you don't mind me asking? Yeah. So my husband and I work together, and we own a catering company in Santa Barbara.

28:56So that makes sense that you started this as a sidebar. Tell me, what was the impetus or idea? You've got a catering business. You're probably super busy. You're probably working probably every weekend, I imagine. But what was the idea around this camping food or the dried food? So a little background, my husband and I have a lot of food experience, about over 50 years of cooking experience between the two of us. And when we decided to have kids about six years ago, we tried to figure out how two chefs could still make a living and work. And that's what started the catering business. And we've done pretty well with that over the years.

29:36And as the years have gone on and as our kids have gotten a little older, we have been thinking about what we can do to not work most weekends or at least Saturdays. We kind of actually don't even work that many Sundays right now. And, you know, we thought a lot about the fact that we have the service based business, but what can we do as a product? and it kind of led us to the fact that we both love the outdoors and that brought us to this category. That's awesome. Where are you selling them right now? So we sell them direct to consumer. We sell them in about 25 indie places and then we're about to launch on Amazon.

30:15And I know they're a pretty new business, just maybe a year and a half old, but have you guys managed to crack, I don't know, 25, 50 grand in sales yet? We're about there. And I like to say we're much more tortoise than hare. Great. It is very much our side hustle, and it is one we want to see grow, and we want to be able to become even more choosy about what catering events we take on and supplement it with running this business. Cool. Well, Gary Hirshberg was the OG tortoise to scale that into Stonyfield. What's your question for us today? How do we reach our target audience who doesn't seem to know our category exists?

30:55You know, I think what we've come to the crossroads, which we're seeing is that when we develop these, we develop them for your kind of comfort camper. So, I mean, in California, car camping is huge. And what we have found is that the category itself is much more known and sought after by kind of more hardcore people. So the backpackers in particular, and, you know, what they want from the product, they want more protein, they want more calories. And so we're sort of at this point where, you know, when we design these, we design them for all these other people. But the backpackers and the ones who know about this category are the ones who have found us.

31:40All right. So you design these for like families who are driving to a campground for the night. But actually, the people who want this are backpackers who are like going deep into the backcountry and they want something light to carry. But the problem, if I'm reading this correctly, the problem for them is there's not enough calories and protein in what you offer so far. Yes. So the backpackers are the ones who have really found us and they, you know, they're like great new backpacking food, but it doesn't have this, this and this. And we're like, well, it's really something that we thought more of, like the young families going to a campsite after school on the weekend and people who just want convenience food to have with their bottle of wine while watching, you know, the waves on the Pacific.

32:27Right. Gary, questions for Jamie? I mean, you've got a number of attributes here. You really are both chefs. And so you've got a gourmet aspect. I see in your background that you've been on Michelin star restaurants and then you've got convenience and then you've got gluten-free, right? And you've got taste. So if you have 10 seconds with a consumer to say, this is why you should have it, what's the elevator pitch. What's the one thing you tell people? You can have this food in the outdoors. You don't need to worry about a cooler or refrigeration and it's ready in 20 minutes. And why you versus Mountain House or one of the...

33:09Patagonia Provisions or whatever. Yeah. They're all vegan. They're designed by chefs to add boiling water too. So, culinarily, they just make sense. They're delicious. They're flavorful. They're better for you and they don't contain dried animal chunks that you're trying to rehydrate with water. Okay. And I'm looking at them right now. They're about 12 bucks a pop. So that's a pretty good price for a full meal per person. I mean, I would think that the channel would be like the REIs and the sports-based, you know, the outdoor stores, right, that people go to. Have you guys, I mean, is there one down in Santa Barbara or camping stores?

33:52Yeah. Yeah. So the local buyer there was actually super interested in bringing in our product, but they can't do it at a local level if it's a topical or a food. So when we first started, we applied there and we got denied and I haven't revisited that. Could I just stand back for a second? I'm Googling around while we're chatting here and there's this report you should get called Data Intello. the global outdoor camping food market size was valued at$2.5 billion last year. That's big. It's going to be$4.8 billion by 2032, growing at a compounded growth rate of 7.5%. So congratulations, number one.

34:30You're in a growth category. But here, catch this sentence. One of the most significant opportunities lies in the development of new and innovative food products that cater to the evolving preferences of consumers. There's a growing demand for camping foods that align with these dietary preferences. manufacturers can capitalize on this term by introducing new product lines that cater to vegan, gluten-free, etc. So some of this depends on how you're talking about yourself. You're not just your average ad water. You're gourmet. You're delicious. And when we were opening up this call, we were going back over some early Stonyfield successes.

35:06And I'll tell you, it all came down to getting consumers to pull in. You know, REI or your camping stores will carry you if consumers come in saying, hey, do you have that Poe and Company stuff? So I'm Googling again, you've got Santa Barbara County Hikers Club, 3 ,310 members right there. Can you do an event for them? Can you give some donations to help them raise money? Or can you do a contest, maybe go out camping with you guys for a night. I mean, people think automatically, like, how do I get into retail? But remember that in retail, there's consumers who are getting their information, you know, in lots of places.

35:45And how can you go directly to them? I would work hard on that succinct pitch, that one sentence, you know, sort of like tired of compromising with extra chewy campaign meals, or I loved your dried animal. You know, that's a good one. You know, why not eat gourmet in the outdoors. I'm sort of... Gary, I'm looking at these flavored black garlic ramen and coconut chickpeas too. You know, one of the things that you asked Jamie was, should we lean into the people driving the Subarus and going for day hikes or the hardcore campers? I think there's a value in at least trying one SKU that's a hardcore protein brand.

36:26Like each packet has 10 grams of protein and, you know, where you really lean into the idea of like, this is not only delicious, but it's going to really give you sustenance. Okay. I do think I'm on your site. I think testimonials would be a really important thing to have there. Again, this is going back to who your consumer is or even testimonials about you. And that's the other thing I want to say on a recent episode, Guy was interviewing my friend, Jim Cook, Sam Adams. And Jim was really emphasizing the personal stories. and he used his story. Your story is your unique asset. And I think you've got a really unique story.

37:05And the idea that, man, I mean, isn't it kind of cool these two gourmet chefs who like to camp have now made this product? I mean, that says so much. So I'd try to maybe invite a food writer to come camp with you, get your story out there a little bit. A lot of entrepreneurs are shy about that, but you've got a hell of a good one and really a compelling reason to try the product. I think. Gary, you know, it's always a trade off. How much do you put on the label and how much do you leave off? You know, the, is there value? Do you think there'd be value in these guys putting just a line there? This is like, um, made by Michelin trained chefs or something like that at the top.

37:42Yes. But even better would be if, uh, I see you worked for Danny Meyer, maybe, uh, my old friend, Danny, maybe a quote from Danny. I mean, maybe Tom Colicchio, maybe a peer chef out there with a quote that sort of implies, says it all right there, you know, a must have for every meal. But I will say less about the package and more about the website, because this is, you're not really as much of a retail play as you are a direct, right, to consumer. And so I think having your site dimensionalized with, like I say, chefs talking, hikers talking, active people talking. And again, I think, gosh, you know, for me, the thought that there's a lot of commodity products out there, but you're not a commodity.

38:27You're chefs who want to have something great for yourself. Well, that's what I want to have. I like that. Agreed. The brand is called Poe & Co. Folk Foods. Jamie, good luck. Thanks so much for calling in. Thank you, Guy. Thank you, Gary. Yeah, good luck. Thank you. I mean,$4 billion. Who would have thought in camping food? That's right. And again, that means there's a lot of commodity. There's a lot of stuff out there. there's always room for something better. I also think, by the way, a lot of times these retailers who say they can't carry it, they might allow you to do a demo or something, you know, an enterprising manager, give a little trial outside, you know, out in the parking lot, just see if it creates a little excitement for them and interest for you.

39:12Just don't take no for an answer. Right. If you don't ask, you don't get is my favorite line. All right, we're going to take another quick break, but we'll be right back with another caller. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to The Advice Line right here on How I Built This.

39:38The holidays are upon us, and businesses are hiring for seasonal roles. Everything from haunted corn maze workers to snowplow drivers. This means that people with certain skills, experience, or even a special license are in high demand and not easy to find. Whether you're hiring for one of these roles or any other role, the best way to find the perfect match for your role is on ZipRecruiter. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash built. ZipRecruiter's matching technology works fast to find top talent, so you don't waste time or money. You can find out right away how many job seekers in your area are qualified for your role.

40:19Let ZipRecruiter find the right people for your roles, seasonal or otherwise. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash built. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash built. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. It seems like every day we hear about how AI is coming for our jobs and people are getting anxious and fearful. But a recent survey from Miro reveals that 76 % of us believe that AI can actually benefit their role, while 54 % struggle to know when to use it. Well, enter Miro's Innovation Workspace.

41:05It's an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. We've recently started a new project using Miro, and it's a really awesome creative partner. It helps us develop better processes for organizing. It even generates new ideas. You don't have to be an AI master or toggle to yet another tool. The work you're already doing on Miro's canvas is the prompt. Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com.

41:55Welcome back to the Advice Line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz, and today I'm taking calls with Gary Hirshberg. So, Gary, why don't we bring in our next caller? Let's go. All right, let's bring in our next caller. Hello, welcome to the Advice Line. You're on with Gary Hirshberg. Please tell us your name, where you're calling from, and a little bit about your business. Okay. Hi, Guy and Gary. My name is Diana Dar. I'm the CEO and founder of Cold Crackers, an organic seeded cracker company. We bake and manufacture in our commercial kitchen in Berkeley, California, and we ship and sell to about 500 retailers across the country and on our website.

42:32Awesome. Welcome to the show. Thank you for calling in. First of all, just full disclosure, I live in the Bay Area, so I know them. I've tried them. I bought them, but describe what they are. They're crackers, but what makes them different? So they're made with six seeds, sunflower, sesame, chia, hemp, pumpkin, and flax. So they are naturally gluten-free, vegan, organic. Got it. One flavor is made with cornmeal and corn flour. And the second flavor is made with cassava flour, which is a root vegetable sustainably grown. Got it. So one is totally grain-free with a cassava. Yes. And tell me how you launched this.

43:10Were you in food before? So I had gone to culinary school and I had baked and I couldn't support myself working in restaurants. So I got into e-commerce and marketing. And when I was in my 50s, I was let go from my job. And a mom at my daughter's school suggested we should make these seeded crackers. And I was excited to start a new business, which combined the baking background and my marketing background. Wow. And then a shout out to Berkeley. I think it's the perfect place to start a food business. They really embrace me here. I was at the farmer's market and I'm in a lot of local stores. And people are just really supportive of local makers and good food.

43:53And along the way, I bought out my business partner. And now seven years in, the business is humming along and growing. And give us a sense of what, I mean, have you guys cracked a million dollars in sales yet? I mean, that's a big milestone. We will at the end of this year. Congrats. Okay. And tell us what question you have for us today. So my question is, every hire I have made along the way has been so I can focus on the next thing to grow the business. Yeah. And I now have a strong but lean team of four people, and they bake and package and manage the store accounts. And because my team is so small, I end up doing everything else.

44:34So it's sales, which I love. HR, not so much. Social media, purchasing, and on and on. And my question is, how do I hire someone who has those skills to take on many of those day-to-day things so I can focus on that next thing? All right. Lots to unpack there. Gary Hirshberg, let's bring you in. I'm sure you've got some questions for Diana before we tackle her question. I do, Diana. Nice to meet you. and I look forward to trying your crackers. I guess the question is, what are those things that you wanna be freed up to do? Is it sales or where will you focus? So it's sales and it's also recipe development.

45:11So creating a third cracker flavor. I need time to work on it. Yeah, and is your impediment scale and profitability? You don't have enough cash or is it more that you haven't been able to find the right person? It's not knowing what that role is. Cash is not an issue. Scalability is not an issue. I could double the business with a few more production workers. It's really taking those day-to-day things that were not on my to-do list yesterday that have to be taken care of. The website goes down and I need to fix it. Something breaks in the kitchen. I'm the one that has to do it. And I don't know if it's a group of consultants that I take on, or it's one person who can do some HR, some operations, some facility managing.

45:59I don't know how to find that sort of octopus. But you are comfortable that you have enough cash to pay a market salary for that role? Yes. Okay, great. Because I actually have lived your experience, Diana. There were all kinds of administrative things that not only did I not like, I just wasn't good at them, right? Right. And after four tries, I finally found the right person. And I would call her my partner today. In other words, she became that important to me and ended up being with me for almost 30 years. But it took a lot of trial and error. And I actually called it a controller. But it turned out she was really a COO, a chief operating officer, which, of course, would have been too fancy a title for the early going.

46:49Diana, by your own admission, you don't yet know exactly what it is that you're looking for. It's OK to be open about that. You need some definitions around it. You know, I think HR and administration, something along those lines. You're looking for somebody who's decent with accounting, who's decent with numbers, who's probably more precise and therefore legalistic and therefore okay with contracts and negotiations and things like that. And so one thing I really recommend here is networking the daylights out of, I mean, think of your marketing, your positions, like you're thinking about marketing your product.

47:27Right. I think it's okay to be out there talking to people, talking to your banker, talking to your accountants. There's lots of folks who I call corporate refugees looking to get into something like this. The other good place to look is often community colleges. I find there's often a lot of diamonds in the rough. You're talking about professors, people who are adjuncts there or teaching? Yeah, I'm talking about that. But I'm also saying, do you have listing yourself in there, all the students there are looking for positions? and define a little bit about who you are and what you're looking for.

48:02But again, it's less about skill set and more about the kind of person. Good thoughts. The best people I found, and again, this goes back to the Stonyfield story. We've always been very mission driven. Our whole thing, and you have a mission too. Don't underestimate the power of that mission to attract the right person. I totally agree with that. The idea that you're looking for a Swiss army knife and somebody who's passionate about the product. Whenever we look for people who work on this show, we want people who love what we do. It's critical, not necessarily the best producer, editor off, we can make them that, but somebody who's really passionate about what we do.

48:39We want them to believe in our mission. I have one last source for you that's gonna seem like totally crazy, but you mentioned you're selling at Air One and Berkeley Bowl and local grocers. Talk it up there. You may find people there who are looking to make a change. or who talk to their own customers. And they may become advocates for you. They may say, hey, there's this awesome lady with this really cool cracker company. It's got real legs. And people in retail know a lot of people and have a lot of surface area. Gary, let me ask you this question. When looking for somebody like that, does Diana have to give that person some skin in the game in order to ensure that that person is going to really supercharge her business?

49:21In other words, not just a salaried employee, but somebody who has some equity? I wouldn't give away too much at the outset. I really believe in dating before you get hitched. And so much of it is chemistry. But I would say if you, to answer you, Guy, when you do find that right person and you want to keep them, that's where what I call the three-legged stool comes in. You need to have, obviously, a market-based salary, so they're not going to be looking elsewhere for a better pay. They should have some kind of equity incentives or options if possible. And I also think profit sharing some kind of annual incentives, frankly, that's better shared with the whole team is also important.

50:02I call that the three-legged stool. Great. Thank you. Awesome. Diana Dar, the brand is called Cult Crackers. Good luck. Congrats. I'm going online to order some right now. Thank you. Get some cheese and we have a party. Mm-hmm. Well, you know, crackers are so competitive. It's competitive, yeah. Good on her. She sort of fits into the earlier discussion that, you know, she wants to really build word of mouth, build passion from the consumer. Gary, before we let you go, when you look back on your time starting at Stonyfield in your 20s, is there something you wish you would have known that would have made it a little bit easier or, I don't know, that would just smooth the way a little bit more for you that you kind of wish you knew?

50:50Yeah. I wish I understood that being an entrepreneur is really being a pathological optimist and the most dangerous word in my vocabulary was yes. Doing fewer things better. You know, I can point to the marketplace that was a challenge. I can point to lots of external factors, but I have to hold up the mirror too and tell you that a big part of our curve to getting on our own feet was our own excessive imagination and optimism taking on too many things. I can't do it all, which ones should I do? I think that, again, gets back to that Churchill quote about the wisdom when you need it after you needed it.

51:29Yeah. Gary Hirshberg, thanks so much. Guy, always a pleasure. Thank you. That's Gary Hirshberg, co-founder and former CEO of Stonyfield. And by the way, if you haven't heard Gary's original How I Built This episode, you have got to go back and listen to it. It is so good. We will put a link to it in the podcast description. And here is one of my favorite moments from that interview. On many occasions, I would tiptoe over to the office to call my mother-in-law to have a chat to see if I could borrow another$3 ,500 or$2 ,500 to make ends meet. And one night I heard the click-click of call waiting on my mother-in-law's phone, and Meg was calling from the house to say, Mom, don't do this.

52:11Wait, your wife was telling her mom not to lend you money for the business? Right. Because it sounds like maybe she didn't believe in it. Well, she had no reason to believe in it. It was insane.

52:47or questions you'd like help with, and hopefully we can help you with them. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. You can send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com, or call us at 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. And we'll put all this in the podcast description as well. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtin Arablewe. It was edited by John Isabella. and our audio engineer was Saina Lafredo. Our production staff also includes Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Devin Schwartz, Elaine Coates, JC Howard, Catherine Seifer, Kerry Thompson, Neva Grant, and Sam Paulson.

53:29I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to The Advice Line on How I Built This Lab.

53:42if you like how i built this you can listen early and ad free right now by joining wondery plus in the wondery app or on apple podcasts prime members can listen ad free on amazon music before you go tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey Goodbye today.