R&D RADIO: How Startup CPG's Product Developer Database Helped This Founder Reformulate

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1:16One thing that I was like slightly allergic to was when I would get hard nose from people. Don't do that. It's too expensive. It's too challenging or that's a little niche for it. And I think, you know, as a co-founder, you have such a strong vision and you, whether or not you like it, you're adamant about your idea. And so sometimes when you hear like the no's or the swayings and they could be entirely right, it could have the best intention. You have such a clear vision of what you want to do and you think, you know, you're the one who's in touch with the customers and the retailers more than anyone else in the room.

1:50And so you have the confidence to say, you know what it is you want to be bringing to market. Hey everyone, this is Adam Yee, food scientist and podcast host of Startup CPG's R &D Radio, where we interview food scientists and product developers and what they do and how they can help you build your CPG business. But today we're doing something a little bit different. Today I'm interviewing Drake Nickel, the founder of Dimitri's Greek Kitchen, where he and his sister are bringing traditional Greek and Mediterranean snacks to a modern audience. His background, though, spans in food and beverage manufacturing.

2:25He's focused on building a brand for pita chips and whipped feta at the kitchen table. They're currently in around 300 stores and they're gearing up for a wider launch. And so they needed a product developer to help them. And so this episode covers how Drake used the Startup CBG's Product Developers Database, which has over 200 product developers, to find the right one for his brand. And we discuss things from filtering to relevant experts to vetting around eight of them. We talk about reading their communication styles. We talk about follow-ups, pricing transparency to some degree. And at the end of the day, Drake chose someone who we actually jumbled with really well.

3:06Again, Drake's a really nice guy. You'll find that in his episode. And he found all of the people he talked to really awesome. But I do think you just need to find that right fit personality-wise to really work together well. So what I found really cool about what Drake did was develop a well-defined scope of work prior to him chatting with the product developers he talked to. And this makes the whole process more efficient. We also talk about things that a brand and a food scientist might think differently of. For example, what is a mouthfeel and what is flavor? And I think we have a really good discussion on how brands can communicate flavor attributes and texture attributes in a well-defined detail that helps food scientists work with them a lot better.

3:51For example, a lot of food scientists use something called the gold standard to anchor what we think about when we think about attributes in a product. Of course, I'm droning on about the scientists. I am, for all, a product developer and a food scientist and on the product developer directory. So I talk about my experience vetting clients, reverse engineering products, and how food scientists and founders can speak the same sensory language. I find choosing the right product developer to be one of the most underrated decisions a founder can make. And getting that relationship and the scope of work right can be the difference between six to nine months lost in your home kitchen and a product that's ready for the shelf.

4:27Enjoy this episode with Drake. I'm sure you'll learn a lot.

4:32Welcome to R &D Radio, Dimitri. Or should I call you Drake? You can call me either or. I mean, every store, sometimes it's Drake, sometimes it's Dimitri. So love it. Love it. Well, anyways, I'd love to hear about your company and how you started it, where you're at right now. And then we're going to dive into how the product developers database has helped you kind of solve your problems, essentially. Yeah, so I can give you like a little bit of the background story of who we are, how we got started. So I actually have a little bit of food and beverage manufacturing background. I was actually in the cannabis edible space for, call it, four to five years.

5:08Really fun, really challenging. Fun's definitely one word for it. It was a crazy industry. Regulatory hurdles were like always shifting. The market was always shifting. Still is, right? It was like the wild, wild west. And the joke was always two years in cannabis is like 10 years everywhere else in the world. But it was good. And I joined very early on. So I really like cut my teeth on a startup business doing that. I was one of the first employees. I really oversaw the launch of our New York market when we expanded over there, which was a great learning experience. You really learn what not to do the first time, first go around.

5:45So but ultimately, I knew I had a hankering. I wanted to do my own thing. I had sort of my own vision of what I wanted to do. And more importantly, I wanted to do something with my family, mostly my sister. We've always been especially close. And we'd always known that if we were going to do something, it would be in the food and beverage space. It would probably be something Greek-aligned. So kind of like the small snapshot story is she and I, we were at our apartment. We had people over and we had a couple whipped fetas out on the table that we grabbed from one of our favorite Greek restaurants.

6:16And there was basically an all-out brawl for the last remaining bits of it. It was like so popular. Everyone loved it. And we were like, okay, maybe this is like the starting point of what we did. So we started out with whip fetas. We thought what goes good with a dip, usually a PETA chip. So we evolved to that. And so that chip launched maybe about a year and three or four months ago. And it just really took off and really accelerated, which was really thrilling. So Dimitri's Greek Kitchen is the name of the brand. we're not one singular product. We're not just the dips. We're not just the chips.

6:48We really have a holistic vision of bringing traditional Greek Mediterranean snacks and putting a modern twist on it for a more modern audience. Very cool. So I've heard a lot about pita chips, but with feta though, it's kind of interesting. Yeah. You know, feta is generally dried and crumbly, and we're actually seeing a lot of kind of cheese that is usually not in dip form now become dip form recently. And feta is actually a new one I haven't heard of. I'd love to hear more about that. Yeah, I mean, for us, whip feta wasn't, whip feta, you know, used as something you can dip in, wasn't necessarily novel to us.

7:20We always had it in our family. We always had it going to Greek town in downtown Chicago and all those Greek restaurants. So it was something that was always on our radar. And it was something that we always knew was popular amongst our non-Greek friends who would try it. And frankly, we just saw the virality around spicy whipped feta on TikTok several years ago. It became really popular on there. And so we really saw that that was a product that people were really becoming knowledgeable about and really seeking out. Whipped feta is really hard. The pricing is really hard. Old chain is really hard.

7:53All of it's really hard, isn't it? Yeah. And, you know, we did the shared kitchen thing. We were making it in small shared kitchen rented spaces for, you know, as cheap as we could. and actually when the pita chips when we brought that into the fold we found an amazing partner we give so much of the credit to the partner on the pita chips we were just making them in our oven frying them on the stove and whatnot but we found an amazing partner who was willing to help a really small brand like us out that really took off and that became 98 of our focus and we hit pause on the dips we're now working with new contract manufacturer going to do a big relaunch of the whip that is coming up uh hopefully by the end of the year things always take longer than you want to love it they always do but uh you know that's the name of the game right yeah and so i love this story and i got a message from daniel uh the founder of star cpg i'm sure everyone knows that but about like your use of the pride developers database so i love to hear your discovery of the pride developers database and you know i think sometimes with i help a lot of small brands out and a lot of them have this decision to make right about choosing a food scientist or a product developer or someone in general to help them with their product?

9:03Yeah, so I mean, I can't say enough nice things about the product development database. It was exactly what I needed for this phase of the business. When we started Dimitris, we really cobbled a lot of different things together. We didn't really think about launching with the perfect product. We just wanted to get to market and see how things were going and really just learn from experience because neither of us had really traditional retail experience. We didn't know what that world was. And we thought, what better way than to just jump in for better or for worse, sometimes for worse, sometimes for better.

9:35And so now with the growth that we're seeing, like particularly in the pita chips being in 300 plus stores, we really kind of took a step back and said, you know, maybe now is the time to really do a little bit of like a product rehabilitation product. We really love what we have and people seem to love it as well. But we made a list. We sat down, we made a list of 10 things that if we're going to do a sort of new version of the product, here are 10 things that we want, whether it's mouthfeel, texture, appearance, all the way to fun and like sort of unique flavors. And my sister and I, we sort of said, you know, we could spend six to nine months R &D in our kitchen and trying to figure it out, or we can maybe do the more time efficient thing and really find someone who's really knowledgeable bring them into the fold day one.

10:20And so that was when I sort of started tapping into the towards the database. And I said, let's see if there's someone here who can be like, I like to say like the adult supervision in the room and really help us build the product that we have in our brains that we see like blue skies, gold best case scenario. What is it that we want to bring to market again? And so we sat down, we probably reached out to eight different folks. It makes it really easy. You can filter exactly to the experts that have relevant experience for what exactly your project is looking for. So I was a little fearful because I was like, surely this is going to be really expensive.

10:56This is going to be a huge project. It's going to be huge teams. Like maybe we're not operating at that level yet. To like my delight and surprise, we talked to eight folks. All of them were wonderful. And like the thing I've been telling people is whether you're day one, day 100, day 500. There seemed to be the right person for any sort of phase that you were in. We didn't want the most expensive 20 person team. And we talked to those people. It was just too much horsepower for what we needed. But we were able to find someone who was less than that, like really great rapport, really relevant experience, comes at the right price points, of course, is one of the most important things, unsurprisingly.

11:34And we just found someone we had just really great faith in that they could bring to life the product, the brand, the version of what we wanted to see. I think what I wouldn't mind getting more information of, and if this is like confidential that we don't have to put this in, but was it the pita chip or the dip that you need to help with? It was the pita chip. Okay. First. And so like we were able to get a chip with like, you have to play the hits. So we have like a classic, a sea salt, a garlic, but we had a vision for really fun and unique flavors, which were tzatziki, sun-dried tomato, and feta.

12:07We have a feta fry that we're currently R &D. A feta fry. Yeah, yeah. It's not a soup. It's something that you would always get like in a Greek diner and it was a plate of fries with feta, a little bit of honey, and sometimes a little bit of oregano, like a little roasted garlic too. And so it was just such a great flavor. And like a baklava, brown sugar, cinnamon. So we had really fun ideas, things that, you know, stay true to the brand and sort of like our Greek heritage that we really wanted to lean into and thought would be perfect for a pita chip. So that's sort of our phase one. And right now, I do think we'll probably do a phase two towards the end of the year or in the new year.

12:45And that will be more focused on the web feta side. We have two SKUs that we love, spicy and a garlic. But if all goes well and we're happy, we'd love to continue partnering with this person and do a couple more flavors, really bring out something fun and different and kind of attention grabbing. I love that. And, you know, I've had work where once the work is satisfactory for phase one, phase two happens, right? And I think that's generally, you keep this relationship going, right? I think that's the really important thing. Yeah, I'm all about like, just if you like it, if it ain't broke, you don't need to fix it.

13:15So I hope that this is like just the start of like a long pipeline or partnership, because so far, it's going pretty well. I guess for the, you know, you said all eight of the product developers you talked to were great. I'd love to hear just some general things you've noticed about the process of vetting a product developer, either their communication style or like what they offer in general to you, just so other product developers and even founders have a understanding of like what to expect when talking to a product developer. Oh gosh, that's a good question. Yeah, I think I never had interviewed anyone who did product development.

13:51I really didn't know what types of questions they were going to ask me, what types of questions I was bringing. The one thing I think that helped was I had a really clearly defined scope of work. That was the one thing I typed up in bullet form and I submitted it to the folks prior. That's great. Tried to, not everyone got it in time, but it was just a very clearly defined, here's what we're looking for. It's exactly this. Some variation, we're open to any sort of, you know, if you need to take some things out, put some things in, we're open to that. and a general sense of a timeline, when we would like to start, when we would like the project to be wrapped up by.

14:26And, you know, I made sure to say, you know, we have flexibility on all of these things. None of these are set in stone. So it's just going to depend on who we're talking to. So that for me was really helpful. I think it was helpful for the folks when I was having those initial calls and it just made it really efficient. Sometimes you can get caught in the weeds. You can, you know, get lost and get distracted on what you're talking about or lose sight of the project. So that's what I did. And that would be the advice I would give to folks. I'm trying to think, I'll tell you, like pretty much everyone walked into those initial Zooms and just sat and they clearly reviewed the scope of work and asked all the right questions.

15:02I will say one thing that I was like slightly allergic to was when I would get hard nose from people. Don't do that. It's too expensive. It's too challenging or that's a little niche for it. And I think, you know, as a co-founder, you have such a strong vision. And you, whether or not you like it, you're adamant about your idea. And so sometimes when you hear like the no's or the swayings and they could be entirely right, it could have the best intention. You have such a clear vision of what you want to do and you think you know you're the one who's in touch with the customers and the retailers more than anyone else in the room.

15:37And so you have the confidence to say, you know what it is you want to be bringing to market. 100 yeah sometimes i think sometimes food scientists specifically we have a very scientific mindset and we have a very certain way of doing things at a certain time in the process which and you know i've started food business before and so for me there is a nuance of like what kind of a food scientist people think about and it really does depend on what stage a food scientist is yeah which is the great part about the database is that you do have people who are very good at a specific part of the process of building a food brand right yeah i mean and again that was just like the value of the database was the sheer volume of partners that are on that.

16:16So you really can vet a number of people until you really find the right firm or the right team that you think you gel with the best. Very cool. What are some of the soft skills that you found to be likable for a private developer that you found to resonate, especially with the one you chose or in general, the one that you vetted? Yeah, I would say truthfully, I'm generally like an upbeat, high energy person. So just like I am always just going to be drawn to somebody who has that level of energy and enthusiasm as well. I really just wanted somebody that I not only thought was super competent and would knock out of the park, but I wanted to work with someone that I gelled with and felt like I could pick up the phone and have a really easy and efficient conversation and is just excited to work.

17:00So for me personally, it was about somebody who matched my enthusiasm. Yeah, I think that's generally how I feel, too, when I vet clients as well. And I think the product developers do also vet the founder, too, right? They want a certain type of attitude that matches there. Some are very kind of strict. Some are more loose. Some are creative. Some are very structured. So I think that's the beauty of any person, really, right, is to find who is good to work with. Yeah, and like there's neither one right way or wrong way, in my opinion. It was just a matter of, you know, who do you personally? it's a little bit of like a science equation it's a little bit of like a chemistry equation it's like who do you just match with the best so i met with someone who was incredibly process driven and i am a little bit more i'm like too distracted i'm like you seem really great and it would probably balance me out but i found someone who was just the right kind of blend a little bit so for sure yeah i think i always like to think about like myers briggs personalities for some reason and sometimes who compliments who who comes with what they all have a different style of like how to work with someone.

18:03So, you know, maybe we should put that as like one of the vetting columns. So I'd love to hear, did you feel like the scope or the timelines were resonating with you in terms of like the technical challenge? I know there's kind of a little bit of a tougher question, but I'd love to hear just how you felt about in general, how people talked about expectations for lack of a better word. Well, I guess maybe like one thing that was supremely helpful were the people who either came into the call with a really strong idea of when we could start, what would the timeline be, a rough approximation of cost.

18:37And I don't blame folks. Most people don't want to give that like sort of cost in that introductory meeting. But those who had the quick follow-up were generally the ones I went the furthest along with. Because for me, I just wanted to have a good sense of what's your price, what's your timeline, what do you envision, how long is this project going to take? So in terms of like expectations, like definitely the folks who shared that with me early on were helpful. Sounds like follow-up is a really strong indicator of like choosing someone, right? Yeah, or just being efficient. Like if you think you're too expensive or you're too much horsepower, like let's just nip it in the bud early on.

19:14It's no hard feelings for one person or the other. And same thing for the brand side. I was always up front and said, here's the range of what I'm comfortable spending and this is what exactly I'm looking for. And if it's too small for you, I completely understand. For sure. And I think that's good to go up front about. I guess, were there points of negotiation that you had to do with any of the product developers you've added? Oh gosh, I'm such a horrible negotiator. Really? And my guy was really great and came in at what I thought was like such a fair price or the individual I went with. In terms of negotiation, I really didn't do, I can't say I didn't do too much.

19:51Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. But I think, again, that was the benefit of me coming in and saying, here's my scope of work and here's sort of the pricing I'm aiming for. And most people would come in pretty middle of the road on that. I do think it's really important that you mentioned that you did have a scope of work ready to go. And I think at least the people I talk to who are generally like zero to one brands, they kind of don't have a clear understanding of the deliverables in a sense. So sometimes I get for them. But I think what you mentioned about this scope of work is really strong.

20:21Just really simply as a summary, what did you put in kind of the scope of work? Like what needs to be done, what our budget is, just stuff like that. Yeah. So I think I started out by saying we made a list. The project was focused on pita chips. So we had made a list of 10 things we wanted for the pita chips. And those were all tangible customer facing things like what's the mouth feel? What's the texture? What's the flavor? And then we even did some more of like back of the house things like here's our target price per unit. here's the ingredients stack what we want it to look like and then once we said that we said here are the 10 things we want here's the price point that we want to accomplish this by with you and we just kept it really clean really straightforward and just to the facts basically could you give me an example of how you talked about mouthfeel and the reason why i asked this is because sometimes founders can say words like to describe you the mouthfeel or flavor that a food scientist might not be able to track.

21:19And I'd love to hear an example of like either mouthfeel or flavor that you use to kind of discuss with a broad developer. Yeah. So like I am probably using mouthfeel incorrectly would be my guess. You'd be surprised. Go on, go on. Let me vet this. Let me vet this. And again, being upfront and I would kind of make it a joke and I would say like, I am probably using mouthfeel, right? But this is kind of in my brain how I'm explaining what it is I want. I want the crackers to be firm, but not tough. I want them to feel like more like a potato chip when you're chewing on it. So that thin and crispiness.

21:51So even when I say things like mouthfeel, I'm like really direct about like what I define mouthfeel as. When I say I want this flavor, I'm really clear. I want like this level of oiliness, like on a one to 10, I want like a six level of oiliness. I want in terms of salt level one to 10, I want like a five. So I was really, really intentional in like quantifying the 10 attributes that I wanted the product to have, whether it was that flavor, mouthfeel, which I'm using incorrectly or sort of anything else. Yeah, I think that works for some product developers, how we've done it in industry, which is kind of like a nice, maybe a little tip for you.

22:28I don't know, is describe it. We call it something called a gold standard. So we choose like, OK, we think this brand of pita chip has the best texture. And so for us as food scientists, we're very good at reversing your products, actually so we would take that off the shelf like look at it or taste it and we can kind of think through the nuance of just doing this whole process of making products figure out a way to reverse engineer like let's say that specific texture let's say your flavor is like oh we want this type of i don't know fried note to it and and it comes from this brand that helps us like kind of communicate with our partners as well to get the flavor you want so it's always interesting and talking to brands about it, about like, how do we describe the sensor's characteristics of a product to each other?

23:12It's so funny that you say that because like, I do remember when we were talking about what do we want like the firmness and the crunchiness to be? We had a spectrum on one side, it was Stacy's pita chips, which are very gold standard. They're not super crunchy. They're a little tough, not in a bad way, but they're just sort of a tougher type of chip versus a Lay's potato chip, which is just like a very thin, nice crunch, not too hard to bite down into. And so we, that was our scale. Like that was our one and that was our 10. And even for like saltiness and oiliness, this is going to sound a little crazy, but I kept bringing up like a McDonald's French fry.

23:48Like I wanted that level of oiliness. I wanted maybe a little less salt than what you would get on that, which was probably not helpful, but for me explaining it felt like I'm putting my point across. No, that's really helpful. I think we're very good at anchoring comparing other products right and i think that's important to kind of speak the same language i did another interview with like some flavor people and you know what is a raspberry right like or what is vanilla there's different types of vanilla in the world and there's different vanilla compounds so we all like people more technical than me and people less technical than me have to have the same understanding of the vanilla we want for instance yeah and that's why you got to kind of pick like those like super widely available brands like stays for like a ways it needs to be like if you're in Colorado and I'm in Chicago like I need we both need to be able to know what we're talking about when we say vats I understand at least you didn't say on a scale of one ten one is bad and ten is good right that yeah that probably wouldn't work for us all right Drake this has been lovely talking to you I think just one last plug for where we can find your brand and uh where can we find you if we want to talk to you a little bit more.

24:55Yeah, absolutely. So right now we are currently in all 189 Jewel Oscos in Illinois, Iowa, two other states I can't remember off the top of my head, but we are predominantly in the Chicagoland area in 300 plus stores. Everything from independent grocery stores to the Meyers to the Jewel Oscos. And yeah, if you want, if you can find me on LinkedIn, it's just Drake Nickel. Dimitri's Greek Kitchen is the name of the company. So you can find us there. Love it. Thank you for listening to Startup CBG's R &D Radio. I hope you guys enjoyed this conversation. We've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CBG podcast.