Founder Feature: Joe Cassinelli of El Nacho

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1:30Caitlin Bricker:The great thing is like, I think that the CPG world is a lot more collaborative than what, you know, kind of like what the restaurant world used to be, where a lot of chefs were always helping each other and you'd lean on each other and you'd like borrow ingredients from each other. Like, hey, I ran out on tuna on a Friday night. I could call a friend and say like, we can borrow 10 pounds of tuna. You know, that's changed a little bit now in this like new modern restaurant world but I have to say like the openness for everybody in the CPG world to kind of jump in and like just give advice and people aren't afraid to tell you where they messed up and neither am I and I've always taken a lot of pride in helping like chefs that have worked for me grow and like open their own restaurants and I feel like the CPG world is a lot like that like you know people are more willing to lift you up than to knock you down.

2:22Joe Cassinelli:Hey everybody, this is Caitlin Bricker, editor at Startup CPG. We are back with another founder feature. Today we're talking with Joe Cassinelli, founder of El Nacho, a premium tortilla chip brand bringing restaurant quality chips to the snack aisle. After nearly 35 years in restaurants, Joe and his business partner built their own factory during the pandemic to create better-for-you tortilla chips with bold, lucha libre-inspired packaging. From launching as another Me Too tortilla chip to completely rebranding and relaunching as premium, Joe's proving that sometimes you need to blow everything up to get it right.

2:59Joe Cassinelli:These chips disappeared embarrassingly fast from my house, so be prepared for this episode. Enjoy.

3:10Joe Cassinelli:Hey everybody, welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin and today I'm here with Joe Cassinelli, founder of El Nacho. Joe, welcome to the show.

3:20Caitlin Bricker:Hi, Keila. Thanks for having me.

3:21Joe Cassinelli:Really excited to have you. Our team was super excited when we got the El Nacho samples for the Shelfie Awards, and mine are long gone. We can just say that, but really, really excited to have you here have a conversation about you and your brand. So let's get started. We can have you introduce El Nacho really quickly. For anybody in the audience that isn't familiar with your products. Can you tell us what El Nacho is?

3:47Caitlin Bricker:Yeah, thanks for the intro. El Nacho is a premium white corn tortilla chip that my partner Toby and I developed over the past year. And we just relaunched the brand actually at Expo West. And our new focus is really on using regeneratively farmed corn, nixtamalized in-house. We make the tortillas, same ones we've served in the restaurants. Great, bold flavors. We fry everything in avocado oil, really just positioning ourselves as the premium tortilla chip, snackable chip in the market.

4:15Joe Cassinelli:I love that. And there are some things that I notice about the tortilla chip that I think make it very standout from others. Two of those things are, one, they are not greasy whatsoever. And the other is that I noticed that you have no natural flavors, but you have very cool, fresh, funky flavors that I've never seen elsewhere. So can you tell me a little bit about your experience coming up with flavor ideas for these products and why you chose to go totally natural and not down the natural flavor or artificial flavor route?

4:47Caitlin Bricker:So what's really important to us, so we have a restaurant background. We have a group of Mexican restaurants here in the New England area, Massachusetts, Boston. You know, it's upscale, casual Mexican. We've cooked at a James Beard house. I've been in the restaurant business since I was 15. I'm coming up on 50 now. So consumer feedback, you know, what we serve our consumers is really important to us, our diners. and coming up with the unique flavors was important to us. And we really looked at a lot of the items that we have in the restaurant. So our mango, Miss Mango, is really based on mango salsa on a mahi-mahi taco or pineapple salsa on a carnitas taco for the yopina pineapple barbecue.

5:25Caitlin Bricker:Our El Diablo chilies are based on like ranchero sauce or mole or stuff we use for chili chilies. So you're right. Everything is all natural. It's real mango juice. It's real pineapple juice. It's real honey powder. Like everything is just your freeze dried juice. And we thought it was really important to just have a really clean. If we're going to use regeneratively farmed corn, we're going to fry in avocado oil, then we need to use the best ingredients we possibly can. It's just important to us.

5:52Joe Cassinelli:It definitely comes through in the flavor, I will say, because it feels like you're eating real food, even if you're just sitting here snacking on tortilla chips. It's a really, really refreshing experience.

6:04Caitlin Bricker:That's awesome. I'm glad you took it that way.

6:07Joe Cassinelli:I'm glad you made them that way because that is totally what I'm I am personally aiming towards not consuming natural flavors as much as possible because you just never know what's in natural flavors it's kind of like pulling the wool over our eyes when you see naturally you think okay it's good which was the case for me for a very long time so I appreciate what you're doing and as far as your restaurant background goes can you tell us a little bit more about that and how you went from restaurant to CPG founder?

6:37Caitlin Bricker:Oh yeah. So you hear a lot about like restaurant to retail now. And you know, Toby, who I mentioned, my partner, he's from Chihuahua. We met working at a restaurant probably 25 years ago and we just stayed good friends ever since. And the restaurants have done well. And it was up until like the pandemic really, where, you know, we were just kind of like struggling to, you know, especially here in Massachusetts, it was really tough. We didn't have patios and stuff during the winter. So we were basically doing takeout and Toby, we had stayed in touch and we decided to open a, you know, create a tortilla chip brand.

7:11Caitlin Bricker:And it was important that we just did it right. So when we were quiet at the restaurants, we built a factory here in Waltham, Massachusetts and just kind of got it up and running. But that was really the transition. It was like, let's take what we know from our restaurant lives and apply it to this new CPG world.

7:27Joe Cassinelli:Do you feel like there are any parts of going from restaurant to retail that there is not a crossover. Anything new that jumped out at you in this process that was surprising?

7:37Caitlin Bricker:Oh, I guess the biggest thing is the speed at which it doesn't happen in CPG. I mean, I always tell everybody it's like trying to float a school bus down the Charles River with the windows open. Like in the restaurant world, you want to make a change and you do it the next day, especially when you're a chef owned company. You know, we want to change a dish, change an ingredient, get something in on special. Like we can put that out to our guests like the next day and just a really long, slow process of like, I don't have a lot of patience. And so I've had to reevaluate my patience curve for CPG.

8:10Caitlin Bricker:So I think that's the biggest thing that didn't translate over. But the great thing is like, I think that the CPG world is a lot more collaborative than, you know, kind of like what the restaurant world used to be, where a lot of chefs were always helping each other and you'd lean on each other and you'd like borrow ingredients from each other. Like, hey, I ran out on tuna on a Friday night. I could call a friend and say like, we need to borrow 10 pounds of tuna. That's changed a little bit now in this like new modern restaurant world. But I have to say like the openness for everybody in the CPG world to kind of jump in and like just give advice.

8:39Caitlin Bricker:And people aren't afraid to tell you where they messed up and neither am I. And I've always taken a lot of pride in helping like chefs that have worked for me grow and like open their own restaurants. And I feel like the CPG world is a lot like that. Like people are more willing to lift you up than to knock you down.

8:57Joe Cassinelli:I love that. Does any piece of feedback stand out in your mind during this process of building El Nacho, where you think that you are very grateful for feedback that you received or a lesson that you learned?

9:10Caitlin Bricker:You know, I've worked really hard to get people on the team that are much smarter than I am. And I've leaned into their experience, whether it's like, you know, I've teamed up with like a fractional CMO, fractional head of sales, fractional CEO. I've interviewed a ton of people for the position. I've met a lot of other brands and talked to a lot of other brands, but I think my biggest takeaway from this, and maybe this comes from the restaurant world is like listening to the consumer. It's like listening to advice. You have to be humble enough to say you can do better. Right. So like we do our management meetings at the restaurant.

9:45Caitlin Bricker:We don't talk about P &Ls. We don't talk about all that nitty gritty stuff. We talk about like, what are we doing really well? What are we not doing really well? And how do we improve? And I think that that gave us the confidence or gave me the confidence really to like switch everything we were doing from when we launched in 2023 to relaunching in 24 with a whole new direction. So I think it's important for you to really be willing to look in the mirror and say, how do we make this better? How do we become the brand that we want to be ultimately? I don't know if anybody said it in particularly, But I just think that that's if you keep your mouth shut and your ears open as you go through this process of like launching, it kind of comes intuitively.

10:25Joe Cassinelli:Keep your mouth shut and keep your ears open is really, really good advice because you can take in so much. I think a lot of people say that, too, when you're in a sales meeting, like if you're doing all the talking, it's not a good sign. You want to hear your customer or your potential customer speaking more than you are.

10:42Caitlin Bricker:I mean, that's the chef world, right? Like you try to teach somebody how to cook. You're like, just let me show you how to do it.

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11:23Joe Cassinelli:That's SPSCommerce.com slash Startup CPG or check out the link in the show notes.

11:33Joe Cassinelli:so you just mentioned that you did a launch in 2023 and then relaunched in 2024 can you tell me a little bit more about that and what that process looked like so we launched in 23 and we kind of

11:46Caitlin Bricker:followed the trend that you know we were white corn tortilla chips non-gmo we launched in a craft paper bag really cool really cool packaging still really great packaging today our graphic designer in-house is Ryan and he does an amazing job. I mean, his creativity is like unmatched as far as like we're concerned. And he's a very collaborative person as well. And that's really important to have on the team. But when we launched, we went into the market and we had some pretty good successes, but I really didn't see the growth that we were looking for. And as I did more of the expos and traveled the country and went into other stores, I was realizing that we were, I hate saying, but like another me too tortilla chip, even though we were great.

12:27Caitlin Bricker:You'd go and you'd talk to a buyer and a buyer doesn't know the difference between white corn, yellow corn, flint corn, thin corn, cornmeal, corn flour, maseca. Like they just don't know. They just price you as like you're a 12 ounce tortilla chip, you're$4.99, you're$3.99 at TPR. So we step back and we look at the data and tortilla chips is really a$4 billion category in the grocery aisle. $3 billion of that is owned by Frito-Lay, right? whether it's Tostitos, Sentidas, and Doritos. The other billion dollars is made up a bunch of smaller companies, like, you know, Mission, So Chill, Que Pasa, On the Border, like, you pick your brand.

13:01Caitlin Bricker:The biggest of those was Siete in late July. And of course, Pepsi went out and bought Siete. Everybody else had kind of seen like plus or minus growth of like 1%, but the growth was coming in like the premium tortilla chip. Tortilla chips can be very regional. I mean, you go to California and you go to any store, Berkeley Bowl, And you'll walk the aisle and you'll see 10, 12 different cellophane brands of tortilla chips, all kind of selling the same thing. Nobody really setting themselves apart. So we went back to the drawing board. We were like, let's get rid of this, you know, paper bag. Let's turn up the attributes.

13:34Caitlin Bricker:We sourced out farmers that could provide regeneratively farmed corn. We got certified by Agrino World. We wanted to increase the cleanliness of the product, the cleaner product, and be able to fry at a higher smoke point. And avocado oil came into play for that. And of course, the cost is, you know, 10x really what, you know, we were using for sunflower oil. But we found it to be a much cleaner taste and higher smoke point. And coincidentally, there's now this like, you know, seed oil free push, which, you know, I don't buy into personally because 100 pounds of anything is bad for you, whether it's seed oil or it's avocado oil.

14:10Caitlin Bricker:Plus 99 % of the population can't afford to eat avocado oil all the time. Right. So I felt like it was, you know, the message is alienating a big group of the population. and then we really focused on the flavors and the packaging so we went from the pillow bag from the paper bag we went to a pillow bag and that really helped us extend our shelf life to six months as opposed to like we were lucky if we were getting like in the summer heat two three months you know it was just the material couldn't hold up and so kind of combining all that and repositioning ourselves in the space and trying to take ourselves basically out of that you know bottom shelf white corn tortilla$4.99 and putting ourselves into like the premium avocado tortilla chip 599 srp and then offering like a tremendous value of 10 ounces really what we focus our retail side on so you look at like other brands like a siete which are they're fantastic chips we're different but we're also offering you 10 ounces of chips as opposed to like 5.5 or 7.8 ounces so it's a 40 to 50 value to the consumer so you're getting a great value great packaging great marketing you're getting phenomenal like really artisanal chips i mean toby's a master tortilla maker you're getting super clean product you're getting avocado oil and you're getting it all for$5.99 it's like kind of a no-brainer and we're starting to see buyers like say oh yeah like you're right the consumers are coming around like it's a shift and it takes time and you really have to focus on you know doing the demos and getting deep into it and getting like that repeat purchase

15:35Joe Cassinelli:going but we're getting there I'm sure it's been a process and I am very curious got a little guy poking his head out in the background there for anybody who's watching the video you went from a craft paper bag to this bold bright unforgettable branding that you have now can you walk us through that branding a little bit and the decisions that were made to get there yeah sure so when we came

15:59Caitlin Bricker:up with the brand we wanted to have a story to tell so my background you know i love comic books that come from that world grew up watching wrestling toby obviously from chihuahua a massive like lucha libre fan and we wanted to combine that story arc and ryan also like you know had a lot of creative ideas like how to tie it all together with the packaging and so what we did was create different characters for each flavor right so el nacho is you know our hero skew we used to have origin stories on the bags themselves we took them off of the new ones we couldn't fit them but you know my son was identifying as they them and we launched el nacho he was his story on the bag he was they them hero and el diablo was like the uh rudo bad guy who teamed up and became good and they launched a spicy flavor miss mango was this like long lost like love interest that came in and like found el nacho and he taught her all the things about lucha libre and she was from a mango farm and she teamed up and they made the mango chip yopina is like a little primo cousin so he's like from the pineapple place and it's fun like we wanted to have this storytelling involved and And Miss Mango's got like the Scooby-Doo van.

17:09Caitlin Bricker:Like she drives her like lowrider Impala. Pena's got his like street cruiser bike. And we've got a skateboard one coming out soon. And that's really just to appeal to like a wide swath of people, right? So big, bold packaging, bright colors. We want to appeal for like, you know, that Gen Alpha, right? Get them to notice it. Gen Z as well. But Gen X are really the ones that are buying this product for them. And they can feel good about buying a clean product for their kids. and then eventually you know those kids those alphas and gen z's will grow up and become purchasers themselves but we really want to create a product that was just we knew it was going to be super clean healthful fun and it's something that people could grow up with right like you grow up with a lot of things in your life that you are nostalgic about today and we want to become one of those nostalgic brands for people that feel comfortable buying us and know that we're there's integrity behind the brand and that we're always going to offer something that is like that's the right thing.

18:08Joe Cassinelli:I love that story of nostalgia because I find that a lot when I'm tasting brands now or seeing packaging that I'm like oh this is totally bringing me back to the 90s in my childhood and I can tell you right now this is a little funny tidbit of information when my husband tasted the pineapple barbecue flavor of the chips it was our personal favorite he was leaning up against the refrigerator in our kitchen and he just had his hand in the bag and I'm just sitting there watching him eating and I was like hello he was like I'm so sorry I just blacked out and the bag was gone to be able to have something like that that is you know I ate a lot of Doritos as a kid maybe not a lot but to have something that's a similar experience but way better for you and then to be able to not feel bad about giving it to my daughter either is just fantastic so I think Like you nailed it.

18:59Caitlin Bricker:Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, that's what we're looking for. I grew up, I was a cool ranch guy forever. You know, it is what it is, but there's a place for everybody. You know, it's a huge market and consumers are making decisions around health more and more today. And I have been making decisions around my health more and more. And you want to have products that are fun that you can snack on and also that are going to change. There's variety and there's your diet. Hopefully, like people do a lot of things with their diet and they like keep themselves on repetitiveness, right? Like this is working for me.

19:29Caitlin Bricker:They repeat by. So, you know, be able to offer a product that people can put into their diet regimen and like on a daily and not feel bad about it is important to us.