Bonus Content - How Fly By Jing Catapulted A Condiment Subcategory

0:00Thanks for being a valued member of the Taste Radio community. We hope that you enjoy this presentation of our sister show, BevNet Nauseous Community Call, where we have open conversations with food and beverage leaders on specific topics affecting the industry. Through stories, insights, and Q &A, we explore the intersection of food, beverage, and the power of connection. Make sure to subscribe on your listening platform of choice.

0:31Hello, I am Melissa Travers, Director of Community here at BevNet and Nosh, and I am with my co-host, Jackie Brugliera, BevNet, Nosh, and BrewBounds Director of Marketing and co-host of Taste Radio. Hi, Jackie. Hey again, Melissa. This is great. How many, This is number six, you said, correct? This is number six. We've got number seven in the hopper. We're cranking these out like Play-Doh. Remember that Play-Doh crank with the thing and the stars? We're just cranking them out like that. Yeah, we got to create stuff for people to binge. You know, everyone's in Netflix mode. So they need as many episodes as possible.

1:11Yeah, one isn't going to do it. When you get a feel for something, when you realize you like something, you want to dive right in. So we're just trying to give the people what they want. Well, you're doing a great job, Melissa. Keep it going. Well, things have been getting busy in our Slack community. If folks aren't there already, the address again is slack.bevnet.com. We've been getting some great questions in over the last few weeks. We've had Julie Rhodes looking for packaging supplies. She got an answer from Moshe Frank, who sent a good number of options, which was great to see. We also got Yoni Schwartz asking about a cocktail showdown.

1:48Is there a cocktail showdown this year at BevNet Live, Jackie? There is. There's a cocktail showdown. And there's also a Spirits entrepreneurial track. So if anyone's interested, check it out at BevNetLive.com. Ooh, that sounds fantastic. That also sounds like a showdown I would like to be a judge on. So any help you can get me. Okay, thanks. I appreciate it. And then we had Allie Olivier asking about the redemption side of beverage. So all good stuff there and always happy to try and dig in and help folks with their questions. So sometimes we do a little digging. Sometimes it's our community.

2:23Sometimes it's a little bit of both. But it's just so great to see people helping each other and really interesting to hear what people are working on. For sure. And I know you're in the middle of it all and you're planning all of your future episodes. What's your process, Melissa, as far as choosing your guests and choosing what topics to cover? So sometimes there will be a particular topic that I think we should cover. So, for example, UNFI Deductions. That was a show that everybody has questions around how to deal with those, how to head them off. So that was something that I sourced experts for.

2:58And then sometimes they're just really smart people that I know we need to have on. And then those are a little trickier digging around to figure out what the topic can be because so many folks in this industry are so good at so many things. So for example, that was the case with Steve Wangler of GoodCrisp, who we're doing a community call with this month in October. I just knew that he was so incredibly smart and has so much to offer. It just took us a little time to figure out that it should be him talking about sales analytics. Awesome. And what other smart people do you have on tap? Other smart people we have on tap.

3:33So Neil Kimberly is somebody I just recently spoke with. So Neil spent a good chunk of time at Essential Water, which I think so many of us know him from. And then he was over at Bossa Nova. So we're still trying to figure out what our topic should be because everything we talked about, I realized he was an expert in. That'll take a little bit of time. And actually, I'm looking for brands who are currently selling on QVC or HSN. So if anybody out there in the audience is doing that, I would love to chat with you. You can hit me up in Slack, slack.bevnet.com, or you can shoot me an email, mtraverse at bevnet.com.

4:14I would love to chat with you since we're looking for folks who have navigated the system and can give some advice to people who are curious. I'm super curious about that. I personally haven't purchased anything on those platforms, but I'm very interested to hear how that process goes and who their target audience is and everything behind the scenes. Absolutely, me too. And I think certainly with platforms like that, there are questions that come up that are great to have the answers to before you launch. So what are the inventory requirements? I've heard that sometimes that can go bananas really quick.

4:50So making sure you have an idea of what the expectations are inventory-wise, cost-wise, so that you know exactly what you're getting yourself into and if it's even worth doing. Excited for that one. Well, I'm super excited to introduce this community call we did with Fly By Jing just recently to everyone as a podcast. Jing Gao is a very busy woman right now. She's on her book tour for the book of Szechuan Chili Crisp. And she is also launching her Sua Kitchen and Superette in LA, I think pretty much right about now. So that is a very busy schedule. Jackie, have you heard anything about the Sua Kitchen and Super Ed in LA?

5:33I know you're a West Coaster. I've heard rumblings about it. I've, you know, been on their Instagram, on their website, kind of waiting for them to open up because I'm going straight there. But I love that Fly by Jing, it just started as something based in culinary. And that's just always been part of the brand for Jing. And I love that a restaurant is now a component and she also has a cookbook. It just all makes a lot of sense for her. She's mentioned in a lot of interviews that she got her start in cooking by having a restaurant and then doing a pop-up restaurant. So it seems like a back to the roots sort of endeavor.

6:15It's prepackaged meals. And then it sounds like she'll have shelves full of pantry items from AAPI founders. So I also want to hit that up as soon as I can. I feel like maybe you and I need to go there during BevNet Live. I think we 100 % need to. We need to already put that on our calendar and get that situated. Let's get it all set up. We're going to be in Marina Del Rey anyways. It's pretty much just a hop, skip and a jump, right? Yeah, for sure. Until then, we hope you enjoy this community call that we did with Jing Gao of Fly by Jing. If you could, we would so appreciate it if you could follow us and give us a rating on your listening platform of choice.

6:57And please enjoy this community call. We are so excited because we've got Jing Gao of Fly By Jing joining us to talk about how she grew a condiment subcategory at retail. Jing is a chef, entrepreneur, and expert in Chinese cuisine on a mission to bring uncensored Chinese flavors to the table. Fly By Jing, Jing Gao's CPG brand, is the first premium Chinese food company that brings thoughtfully crafted pantry staples to the modern kitchen. Jing, thanks so much for joining us. We so appreciate having you here today. Thank you so much for having me. Really excited to be here. You're a very busy woman.

7:38Are you still in the middle of your book tour for the book of Szechuan Chili Crisp? Yeah. So I just started actually last Monday and right in the middle of it. I've got a couple days off in LA and then I'm about to go to the East Coast and do events in DC, Toronto, New York, and then SF. And not only are you in the middle of a book tour, but you are also launching Swa Kitchen and Superette in LA. So you're an incredibly busy woman. I don't know how it all kind of happened all at once. It's a lot, but it's exciting because, It's all kind of all three of the things I'm working on, obviously, Flabby Jing, the cookbook and the Sua Suparate, which is a Sichuan inspired, modern Sichuan, like grab and go convenient healthy food concept in L.A.

8:28All three of these really further our mission of evolving culture through taste, really exposing and sharing the flavors of China with more people and kind of doing so in an elevated way. So really excited for them to all come to fruition. Sounds like great stuff coming up. Certainly a challenge to work through all of that, but you are no stranger to challenges. Of course, Fly By Jing was quite an endeavor. You had manufacturing challenges from the beginning between exporting, ingredient sourcing, even the printing of the label sounded like that was a challenge as well. But you worked your way through all of that.

9:11you launched D2C. When was that D2C launch? I think the first initial launch was February 2019, so about four and a half years ago. And before that, it was through Kickstarter. And so today we're going to talk a little bit about how you grew the condiment subcategory at retail. How long did you spend in D2C before retail became a target? And what were the key considerations that made you understand it was the right time to head in that direction? So we started out D2C out of necessity because I just moved to the US. I'm Canadian. I lived in Asia for 10 years. I didn't know anybody here. And after visiting Expo West, I knew that, you know, the landscape kind of seemed very impenetrable.

10:02It was very expensive and, you know, just lacking in diversity. So I was like, okay, I need to do something that I have control over. So D2C was the way, even though not that many food companies, I think started out D2C, but I think it ended up being a blessing because we were able to build a brand. We were able to build a community and really get close to our customers and get that feedback and get, you know, that loyalty in return. And so we had interests very early on from retailers. Funny story, my first Whole Foods buyer was actually a Kickstarter backer. So he backed my Kickstarter and just was a really dedicated customer and loved the product.

10:46And so he reached out pretty early on and he was the buyer for the mid-Atlantic region. But I felt like we weren't ready yet because, you know, I didn't know much about the retail landscape, but I knew that you had to be buttoned up, that it was easier to get on shelf than it was to move off the shelf. And so, and also that you needed a lot of capital. And so didn't have any of that, you know, held him off for quite some time and focused on our DTC business, focused on building the brand and making sure the product and the supply chain was strong. Then, you know, more and more retailers started contacting us inbound.

11:23Target actually was another one that was inbound. The buyer actually reached out to me on LinkedIn because he had seen our products, Wegmans as well. They had seen our products on their Instagram, you know? And so that's kind of how it initially started. And then we started going into like small specialty boutiques. So mom and pop shops, you know, like the shoppy shops as they're called, you know, like that actually got the word out. That was a great platform and a canvas for us, like for, for the brand. And, you know, more and more people started to find us through Fair. So Fair was like a platform that we were one of the earliest brands on.

11:59And then that steadily became like a pretty, pretty solid business for us. But in terms of like the first larger retailer, Whole Foods was probably the first one we did. And that was almost two years into the business. I had no idea that so much of the retail interest was inbound, which is certainly a feat and certainly not always the story. So that is super impressive. You mentioned that you knew you weren't ready for retail at the outset, that you needed to be a little bit more buttoned up. What were some of those things that you needed to button up in order to be ready for a wide-scale retail launch?

12:39Yeah, the first thing was supply chains. So I knew that there was still a ton of stuff to figure out. By the way, I was the only person working on the brand for the first two years. Couldn't afford any salaries, couldn't even afford to pay myself. So there was no bandwidth and capacity to really do these things quickly as I would have liked. It took a really long time until, you know, well after COVID that we were able to strengthen our supply chain, get, you know, multiple suppliers on board. And prior to that, we were selling out a lot. We were constantly selling out just, you know, poor planning, unpredictable demand coming in from a press article or this or that.

13:19and we would be sold out for months, you know, and because we produce everything in my hometown of Chengdu and everything is sourced there. There's 18 ingredients alone in just the chili crisp. It's bottled there. It's put onto a ship and then it comes here and it takes, you know, several months from beginning to end. So it was quite complicated to like figure out, you know, supply and demand at first. So that was the number one thing. And it's something that we're, facing even now as we expand even further into distribution is like brand awareness. You know, getting on shelf is fine, but if people don't know who you are, what you are about, especially if you're creating a new category like we did, right?

14:03Chili Crisp was not a thing that people knew about or what to do with it, what it was. And so there was that initial brand and product awareness that you had to bring to a wider audience before I felt ready to take that leap and to be able to comfortably say that if we got accepted, we would do well. And then the last thing was like slotting fees and all of the costs that are involved with promotions and how much you have to like really, you know, contribute to retailers pockets and stuff. And so that was just something that we didn't have as well. Sounds like a very thoughtful approach to retail.

14:41You just mentioned all of the fees that are associated with retail, which are certainly such a high barrier to entry and something that trips up so many brands and so many founders, pricing can be a very tricky area to figure out. It's kind of this careful equation, but also an art that incorporates COG's gross margin and competition. You didn't have any competition. How did you figure out what the right pricing was for the product? I would say that I did have competition in that people had perceptions of what Chinese sauces should be, right? And if you go to the global aisle, what was there before brands like ours was really just like a lot of kind of larger companies that have, you know, maybe soy sauces, chili oils and whatnot.

15:32And everything is well below$5, right? So we were up against that because the buyers would be like, I've never seen a product in the global aisle for more than$5. And here you are trying to say, this should be$15. I don't think this is going to work. I don't think it's going to move. But I think our earlier kind of traction on D2C at that price point was a proof point, right? We were able to show some of our data of like, here's where our customers are. This is the rate at which they're buying. This is the repeat rate. Like we think that this will move in retail. So you have to back it up with with that, which, you know, DTC having had that business is, was definitely a help.

16:15And then we were also on Amazon, right? So people were able to see the traction online. And so it definitely still took a lot of convincing and, you know, it took like one or two buyers that would take a chance and then, you know, for more to kind of follow on. But in terms of how I set the price, I think that's like a really key point here is that I set the price at$15 because A, I saw that other premium sauces in market was around$15 or even more, right? Like at the time, Truff was like$18. And that I believe that this product and the value of the ingredients and what goes into it is worth that price.

17:00not only that i needed to make sure that this was profitable we didn't have funding so i couldn't subsidize the cost of making this product and running this business with any investor funding so that we can get the price down so i needed for every single jar to make money i mean we didn't raise money for the first like two and a half years right because we were able to run the business just on that. So I think that's really important for people to realize. And that is hard in food because people do expect food to be at a certain price point. But I think if you can present the value in what you are bringing, then you can justify what price you need to sell it at in order to make a profit and have an actual sound business that runs on its own without a ton of external funding.

17:52Again, a very thoughtful approach to pricing. Thanks for breaking that down for us. So did you have a pitch meeting or because Whole Foods approached you, was it sort of a different scenario? I did still go to DC and meet with the buyer. And we, yeah, we still did have to kind of go through the process and everything, but it helped that, you know, there was a lot of energy around that. Like at the time there was this recognition that the global aisle is outdated and they needed to do something and bring some new life into the category. And, um, and they could see like kind of the traction in the press that we were getting as well.

18:35That's how they found us. So, yeah, but I still did have to pitch and same with, same with Target and Wegmans. Mm-hmm. And so you also mentioned that Target and Wegmans approached you as well. What was the channel strategy that had you launch with Whole Foods first? Initially, going through those super specialty stores was more of a branding play and like, you know, in the presence of the brand and market. And then I knew that the next step should be natural and before we go into more conventional because you want to kind of go from premium and then eventually kind of make your way down to more mass.

19:17So Whole Foods was, I think, the perfect partner. Wegmans is smaller, but it's got this incredible base of customers, so very similar as well. Target was an exception, right? Like Target is not a natural grocery store. It's conventional, but it was different. I thought it was an outlier because Target has this relationship with its customers that that's what we were after, right? Like, is the audience the right audience for us? And Target definitely was able to like bring that. Same with Costco. Like we launched at Costco pretty early. We're lucky because Costco, one of their goals is to create a treasure hunt kind of environment for their customer.

20:02So they like new things. It's also a double-edged sword because, you know, Costco is very fickle. They'll bring you in, they'll take you out. They might bring you in again, they might take you out again. So it's not very reliable for kind of long-term growth, but Costco is another example of a retailer that has this intensely incredible relationship with their customers, right? People who go to Costco are obsessed with Costco. And I know that because I shop at Costco and I am like literally their target customer, which is like a, I don't know, 30 something Asian woman. That's like literally their profile, right?

20:37So I made some exceptions with Costco and Target, but otherwise we try to stay really focused, just go into higher end, natural, and then prove out velocities there and then move on to larger stores. I see a few questions coming in. Why don't I, why don't I address a couple of those? Jake Ellerbrock wants to know what you think helped build consumer awareness the most. Was it social influencers, email marketing, community word of mouth? In the beginning, it was only word of mouth because we didn't have any budget for marketing. It was word of mouth. And I think that led to a lot of really great press opportunities, right?

21:21Like, you know, again, this was the first time most people had heard about Chili Crisp. And as we know now, like it's been written about everywhere. But in the early days, like the writers, food writers were really on the pulse. Like they all wanted to write about us. Right. So we got a lot of press opportunities, which was great. And all of that was organic. We didn't have a PR company. It was just like inbound again, people just DMing us or emailing us. So I would say that was the main thing. And then as we grew, we started, you know, investing a bit on D2C. We were doing paid ads for a while.

22:00We've scaled that back considerably now. But at the time, you know, that was where a lot of our marketing funds were going. And a lot of people were discovering us through, you know, Instagram and TikTok and stuff like that. These days, I would say we do some micro-influencer campaigns, like on TikTok and Instagram, where, you know, people are going into stores and, you know, picking us up from the shelves. And, you know, it's not as produced. It's a lot more cost effective. And we think that it drives a really kind of good value for impressions. And email is something that we focus on a lot more now because, as I said, we scale back considerably our paid acquisition spend.

22:44we actually cut it to zero earlier this year to sort of right the ship. I think we were definitely spending a lot there and efficiency was declining a lot. So it didn't make any sense anymore. So what we did was we started focusing on retention, focusing on our existing customer base, turning them into more loyal customers. And, you know, we launched a membership program where people pay like a annual membership and get like 20, I think it's 20 % off on everything throughout the year and get access to like, you know, new products. We have a new product dropping in November, which are actually in two weeks, which is really exciting.

23:25It's like the most excited I am about a product that we've launched in a long time. And we were able to share it with our initial thousand or so like members where they provided us feedback and they were thrilled to be first to try something. So we've been doing things like that to really engage our best customers. And so email and SMS has become bigger recently as well. What goes into building a loyal customer base? Why are your customers so loyal to Flyby Jing? I think the product, first of all, should speak for itself and should sell itself and should keep people coming back for more. so that's at the core of it and then aside from that I think you know and it's rolled into that it's like a brand truly has resonance with a customer if there's you know shared values if there's shared ideals and if they believe in what you stand for so we are very vocal about who we are who we are not a brand is really a point of view it's a personality it's a point of view and And so when that's clear, and we try to be very clear with that in our social media and our marketing and everything that we do, every touch point that you have with us, including the label and the jar, including just how we show up in the world.

24:46I think that is what brings the most dedicated customers back to us again and again. And yeah, it's a belief in our vision. And a lot of them have been there for us from the very beginning. So they've seen kind of the journey. And so I feel, you know, they've seen the journey and the ups and also the downs. And I think that has brought us closer as well. So they feel very invested in our success. We have a couple more questions here, but I want to ask one last question that hinges on what you just said. A brand certainly is a personality. That's such a great way to put it. Has Flyby Jing's personality evolved since you've launched?

25:30And if so, how has it evolved in the last, you know, four or so years? When we first launched, like I never had a master plan that like this is where we would end up. You know, for me, it was really just like I used to have a restaurant in Shanghai. I started Fly By Jing as an underground supper club. I was cooking and I was cooking for a lot of people traveling all over the world. And because I realized that like these ingredients that are so essential to the magical flavors of Sichuan, are not available anywhere else and nobody even knew about it, that, you know, I had to even carry them with me in suitcases, like whenever I travel to do pop-ups, that was kind of the gap that I saw, right?

26:12And so I really just wanted to make it easier to access these flavors. And then it was a trip to Expo West in 2018, where I saw the complete lack of diversity and options. And I want, I was like, okay, I think I have something here that, you know, could potentially start to shift that narrative a bit. So when I first launched the product after the Kickstarter, I was really just seeing what would happen. I was just taking one step, put one foot in front of the other. And the initial label design is not what you see today. The initial label design was very eye-catching. I think some people, maybe Mike on the call might even remember what it looks like.

26:52It was like neon. I remember. Okay. And my purpose with that was purely just to stop someone in their tracks and like have them question why they expected Chinese food to look different because nobody expected Chinese food to look like that. A lot of people said that it looked like a beauty product or whatever, but that was my only purpose. And it worked, you know, for that purpose. A lot of people were intrigued. They were really into it. What I started realizing after selling in the market for a while was I was getting a lot of feedback, right? There was a lot of for as many supporters as we had and people who love the product there were more detractors and more challenges like to overcome people were like well this is what you say this is Chinese food like I've had Chinese food before I've never had anything that tastes like this so therefore this must not be Chinese food or I know that Chinese food should only cost two dollars but you're trying to charge fifteen dollars I reject that this is not Chinese food like there's a lot of like pushback.

27:57And what I really wanted to show was like Chinese food is not to be put into a box, right? Like people have this tendency to not allow Chinese food or any kind of ethnic cuisine to really evolve because of the values that we place on the cuisine. And I wanted to show that this is a very personal expression. This is not something that even exists in Sichuan, but in some ways it is more, if you want to call it authentic, it's more authentic than anything you can find because all of the ingredients are literally sourced in Chengdu. And it's specifically of that place in that time. However, it's 18 ingredients that I put together through my lens.