In entrepreneurship, there is still a disconnect when it comes to accessing local markets and communities. Our guest in this episode is connecting it all by creating snacks on purpose. Renee Dunn, the founder and CEO of Amazi Foods, works directly with farmers and small businesses in Uganda to make their products by building a vertically integrated, more transparent, and connected supply chain that actually creates direct market access for those at the source. She joins Elliot Begoun to tell us more about her passion for this space and the challenges she encountered in the process of bringing the products to the shelf at a reasonable margin. Renee then shares her thoughts on the impact of telling the story through your product and the risks that come from your business models.

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Snacks On Purpose: Creating Direct Market Access For Those At The Source With Renee Dunn Of Amazi Foods

Before I have Renee introduce herself and share a bit about her story, a couple of things that I’m going to continue to call out on this show. First is inviting those of you who are Angel investors, VCs, or even beneficiaries of this industry over the years to participate in the TIG Venture Community. We are trying to build a venture community that supports early-stage brands.

Future exit starts with early money and in order to build brands and give those founders like Renee the optionality of either choosing to become a part of the venture rocket ship type approach, or maybe even bridge the gap so that they can get to commercial lending, private equity, or other forms of capital. It starts with having people willing to make the early bets.

That’s what we have structured here. It’s a venture community with dollars that are supported earmarked, and non-solicitous. We are building a fund that’s based on consistent singles and doubles, not the rare grand slam. We are investing in tardigrades and not unicorns. We are doing it through a rolling fund structure that allows the LP to adjust his or her commitments up or down, preferably the former and not the latter, on a quarterly basis.

We’ll have LP town halls where we are going to talk about our planned investments for the quarters so that there’s insight and opportunity to have a conversation around it. We are going to be structuring deals in unique ways that are both maximizing the impact that those dollars have on the entrepreneurs and the return that those dollars provide to the LP. To learn more, reach out to me or Jenny at TIGBrands.com and we’ll be happy to chat about it.

The other thing I want to hit upon is our other cool new initiative which is our TIG Collective. This is something that I’m very proud of. It’s a collective where we are trying to bring together great advisors, people with the true subject matter and expertise in this industry who have a diverse background of the lived experience of culture and ethnicity, and partner them with the entrepreneurs who need the guidance and help, and then sit in between and help make each of them more comfortable with working with the other.

The hope too is that we create a great bench of future board members that are ready to serve and are more representative of the communities that our brands serve. The TIG Collective allows brands to opt-in and signs an advisory agreement, but instead of between a single advisor and themselves, it’s between the collective and the brand, and issues the profit interest or stock options to the collective.

The reciprocal agreement is signed between the collective and the advisor, and all the advisors share in a pro-rata, aggregated upside of all the brands that have advisor shares in the collective. It’s a cool democratized way that people are all working to drive success for these entrepreneurs and learn along the way, and hopefully pave the path for more women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ board members in the future.

Those are my two commercials for the day. I’m getting pretty good at them. I have only been doing these commercials now. It seems like a full-time job. One of the things that I am reinforcing is the message that I share with all of you that fundraising is hard. It’s hard to stand in front of people you care about and ask them for money. If you care about what you are asking money for and believe in it, it becomes a little bit easier. Renee, why don’t we start with you introducing yourself, Amazi, and how this whole thing started, and then we’ll go from there.

I’m Renee, I’m the Founder and CEO of Amazi. Amazi is a tropical fruit snack company. Our slogan is Snack on Purpose and we work directly with farmers and small businesses in Uganda to make all of our products. Essentially, what we are trying to do is build vertically integrated, more transparent and connected supply chains that create direct market access for those at the source. They produce there as well from start to finish. Snacks are pretty good because we also produce them at peak ripeness right at the source. It’s a win-win in my opinion. We are in retailers like Sprouts, Wegmans, and Giant. We’re launching in the Thrive Market and just chugging our way along.

How did it start? It didn’t start like you woke up one day and said you are going to do the snack company. It started with your passion for helping people and the people of Uganda. Share a little bit about that cool story.

I did my thesis research in Uganda. I was studying abroad there. I was living there and studying my thesis on the political economy of local entrepreneurship.

Why were you interested in that at that stage of your life? What about that that resonated with you? Was it like, “I need a topic and this one sounds cool?”

I think, partially, because I’m a huge nerd, but also because I had experience over the years traveling to East Africa. I did my study there in college. I went with my dad when I was in middle school. He used to work there. I went to visit friends of his when I was in high school. I built an interest in the region already from the people I had met and the time I had spent there. Separately, I was interested in “development economics” at the time.

I spent some time during my study abroad working on financial literacy programs. I was struck by the seeming disconnect between the lessons that kids were being taught about how they can make money and microfinance, and seeing this huge problem in real-time. What I’m getting at is I started to observe this problem through all my research of there’s all this encouragement of like, “This is how you do little businesses. This is how you do small savings,” which is very effective at the rural level or the farmer level.

I was seeing a greater problem where there are these very high potential entrepreneurs in the space. There’s also not a lot of access to the market beyond the local market because everyone is encouraging these tiny businesses. At the same time, they have this incredible tropical fruit that I would eat when I was there. I was like, “There are all these talents, people, and fruits, why is nobody making anything about it like what we have here?”

I personally also have a thirteen-year background in the fitness and wellness space. I used to do corporate wellness classes. I still teach fitness classes on the side and yoga. I personally was very much abreast of what health-conscious and generally conscious consumers we are looking at. I was thinking of all these ideas of, “You could do something with this and you could do something with that,” and saw that there were no outlets. I was motivated to try to find a way to connect those gaps and find a way to tap into the local talents and the local bounty. Try to find a way to bring it all full circle in Uganda and bring it straight to market and encourage local jobs and such.

That is bold and courageous. I’m sure as you look back at it now, it is somewhat bat shit crazy. How did you then take that kind of sense, shape it and build it into a brand? CPG is not your background. You didn’t go to school for CPG. Suddenly, you’re coming up with this and shaping it into a brand. Talk about how that manifested.

I have been working on Amazi for six years, so it did not happen quickly. From the idea of me getting on a plane back to Uganda to try to figure it out until now, it has been about six years. The first few years were that. I never had experience in manufacturing. I developed things on my own in terms of snacks and products, but never something to scale or anything like that.

My first steps were I spent a few months on the ground. I went to a local trade show to try to find people who would supply for export. I found there that there was a problem that I was trying to solve. There was a very limited selection of opportunities for partners that could export. I found a company that was making dried fruit products, and I built a relationship with her and started to go visit the farmer’s groups that she was working with.

I sat in on farmer’s meetings. I tried to understand how they work with farmers directly, how they organize these groups, what the interests and the conflicts are between the two, and then what their capacity is. I started to work with her. I said, “Can you essentially let me try to develop new products using you guys as my co-packer?”

That’s how it started. It helped me develop an initial product. We started with working with plantains only. We made a dried and roasted plantain chip and we still do, but the product is ten times better than it was when we first launched. I asked my friend who did graphic design in college to make a sticker that we could put on bags and a logo. I developed enough to bring a starting amount and brought it back to the States. I started creating a website myself on Squarespace.

I started to ask a lot of questions to people in the industry, naively going up to grocers, and getting feedback. That’s what led to the first something that we could iterate on. We soon learned that our structure was not sustainable because the partner company that we worked with didn’t have the level of transparency that we needed. They also didn’t have the level of quality consistency or trust that we needed. We ended up pivoting to now we have this vertically integrated model that we have developed, but that’s how we first got it off the ground and at least had something to get some feedback off of in the beginning.

What has been the most difficult or most surprisingly unique part of this whole process? You were probably banking on the hard part being the supply chain. You are likely finding out that the real hard part is getting this shit on the shelf at a reasonable margin.

Yes and no. One of the hardest things is that I feel like I’m running two businesses. You said this in the beginning. I didn’t start this because I wanted to run a snack company. Now, I am running a snack company and this is what’s happening. I think our cause is great, but I started this because of the mission. We are a supply chain that is a mission-first and partner-first type of business. Now it’s trying to get all of that to line up with what’s necessary in retail and in order to scale. I will update our growth model and then I have to go back and talk to our suppliers and say, “Is this a profitable path for you guys? How is it going over there?”

We have weekly calls with our partners over there and we work very closely together. We have essentially built this supply chain now from the ground up. We built a facility or helped support a facility from scratch, and we own a percentage of it, but it’s entirely Uganda-run and operated. It allows for a truly start-to-finish process where we can track right to our farmer. All the ingredients are hyper-local. They make it from start to finish. It’s an incredible thing, the direct access to the market that people like that don’t often get. I think also for us, it’s a story that can’t usually be told. It’s maintaining alignment as I try to grow. Sometimes I get a little ahead of myself even questioning decisions more maybe than I need to.

You are, and 95% of other entrepreneurs.

Retail has been a bear and we have had to get creative about other channels through which we can grow. We’re always trying to think about, “We have this unique supply chain and manufacturing capabilities. What else can we do to help support volume for our partners?” Even if my brand is not ready for it and things like that. That and working by myself and trying to figure out, “Renee, what’s next?” Those two things and trying to stay on track.

Let’s delve into a few of these things. Let’s talk about working by yourself. You and I have had conversations about those two constant companions that we talk so much about with all of those involved in our community, and that is fear and doubt. It’s hard to be doing something as complex as you are doing. As you said, you are running two distinct businesses. You are running a business that is built on a supply chain. It’s an import business, and then you are running a packaged snack brand. How do you manage those moments of fear and doubt? What are you doing? I know it hasn’t been easy. You don’t need to sugarcoat it. It’s a hard part of this process. Just share as openly as you are willing to about some of that struggle.

Frankly, sometimes I handle it better than other times. I think it’s very hard. In the way beginning, there was a lot of simply me in my own way kind of thing. Truly not knowing what the heck to do. This was pre-COVID too. I’m glad that there’s some different rhetoric around work schedules now. At the time, it was like, “I have to be working 8:00 AM until 7:00 PM every day. That is what an entrepreneur does.” It was like, “Renee, what the heck are you working on?” I would drive myself crazy and stress myself out.

I think there was a lot of spinning in those first couple of years of like, “I’m supposed to be doing all those things and I have no idea what to do.” It then would turn into this spiral, and I would sit there stressed out all day long. Now, I still get stressed but because I have been working on this for a while and we still have good ways to go, I am getting better at being like, “Today is not the day that you are going to be able to push through this problem,” or “Today is the day that you do need to quit early and go for a walk.”

Are you being better about that? Here’s what I have learned from others and also from myself. Sometimes I tell myself that I’m getting better at that, and then I step back and look at it and go, “No. I still suck at it.” A great example even for me. One of the things that I have learned or I shouldn’t say I have learned it. My wife was kind enough to point that out to me.

Over time, eventually, as an entrepreneur, some of the stuff that I worried about stopped being about my business. I started taking all of the worries collectively of all the entrepreneurs we work with, throwing those on my shoulders, taking them into my brain, and still having the same level of stress and still not doing a great job of necessarily letting it go. Are you doing a better job or are you just telling yourself a better story?

I’m going to give myself some credit. It’s tough. One of the hardest things about being a solo entrepreneur is my personal life and work. It’s very hard and I don’t know if there are boundaries per se. It’s more so like a balancing act. You don’t have other people necessary to keep you in check or to be markers or whatever. I think that is still a balance.

I go to therapy. I try different kinds of therapy. I meditate daily. I work out regularly. I still have my side hustle coaching fitness classes. I do think that I have improved over the years. I’m less hard on myself than I used to be. Loneliness is still something that I struggle with. It’s the loneliness on the journey. I feel like I sit here and I do this all day long. I stay over and I guess it’s still just me. That part is still very hard to balance and manage the ups and downs.

The one thing that I have learned, and I would encourage everyone, is that when you are in the midst of it, it’s very hard to separate from it. It’s very hard to give yourself that clarity. Building some boundaries is important. Especially when you are a solopreneur and there is no physical change in proximity or location from work life to home life and so forth. It becomes one mesh of both. Building some boundaries and treating those boundaries as sacred is so key. I have bookend boundaries for me in terms of my day. I will not start my work day before a certain time.

I use a part of my morning to do the same thing. I do my meditation, breathwork, go for a run, relax and so forth, and then I start my day. I won’t start before that timeframe unless it’s out of the norm or it’s an emergency or something like that. At 9:00 at night, no matter what, I would like to respond to all my emails every day and do all that stuff. Charity knows what a compulsion it is. Thank goodness. She tries to humor me.

By 9:00 at night, no matter what, I’m committed. My laptop gets turned off. In my email, I hit pause. I don’t get any other emails in the middle of the night, so I’m not drawn to check it and so forth and I’m done until that boundary on the other side of the morning. It’s imperfect, to say the least, and I probably should make those boundaries broader, and compress that workday a little bit more. The reality is the more you compress your workday, the more efficient you are. The better you are at choosing to do the things that matter, and the more time you allow yourself to work, the less efficient you are, and the more you meander and do the things that aren’t as important. There’s some truth to that I believe.

In the early days, I used to get mad at myself for taking a break. Going for a walk or something like that was so irresponsible. I agree. I think that I have in some ways gotten better at knowing those points when pushing through is necessary and knowing those points where you are better off going for a walk.

That’s one of the very few benefits that have come out of this period of this pandemic and the fact that we have all been led into each other’s life. There’s a little bit more informality. Everyone is on Zoom and people’s animals are running behind them and kids are running across the screen and all of those things. There’s maybe laundry that you forgot to put away. That level of veneer or formality has gone. Suddenly, it’s not such a weird thing to take a meeting while you are on a walk or to be in something.

Walking meetings are my DL.

Also, beyond my walking treadmill or whatever. We have been given some permission to be human in a professional environment. Especially for entrepreneurs who aren’t as able to compartmentalize comparatively to those who have the more traditional schedules, at least it’s a healthy thing because you can change that routine.

Speaking of change. Let me change the topic a little bit and go back to the business for a second. One of the things that you mentioned was that you have this awesome story to tell which it is. It’s an amazing story. One of the things that I hope you do slow down and reflect upon is what a cool thing you are doing. What a cool opportunity you recognized as a student in Uganda to take this and then take this idea and do something with it.

As a relative percentage, it is still a small percentage, but there’s a larger percentage of people who have ideas like the one that you had like standing in Uganda and going, “It would be cool to connect these entrepreneurs with a broader market and do something meaningful,” but there are an exceedingly few amounts of people who do it, who take the action and make it manifest. That’s pretty cool.

You have this awesome story to tell, but it’s hard to tell a story when you don’t have a lot of dollars to tell it and you don’t have a huge megaphone to tell it. What are some of the things that you are doing right now to tell the story and what are the things that you wish you could do, or maybe somebody here can help you do to better tell this story?

This is something that we are always iterating on. One thing that we have learned over the years is I used to be all story in my pitches. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to work. I start now like I often allude to what I open with. Our mission is to snack on purpose. We build 100% connected supply chains, then I will draw people to the product and then I will bring them back to the depth of the story. I found that for whatever reason, that worked a little bit more. Especially when you think about true packaging or purely how you are telling your story on the shelf. We came out with a new branding iteration. I’m very excited about that.

It does a much better job at very quickly depicting what the product is, and making people excited about it while a very clear call out to our sourcing. There’s a little map of Uganda. It says, “Snack on purpose.” You flip it over and the story is there looking great and robust, and pictures of our farmers and things like that. In terms of flash consumer storytelling, I have found that works a little bit better. At the end of the day, people want something that they want to eat. While a story might be a value-add, I don’t know if it’s the first thing that they reach for. That’s increasing but for us, we have learned that in terms of the quick dirty visual on the packaging. That’s the balance that has helped us a little bit.

In terms of other ways we are telling it, we run our social media. We do our newsletters and things like that, and blog posts. We do a lot of videos and Reels of how the product is made from start to finish. We’ll sometimes do fun Reels where someone is eating the product, then it flashes back to the farm level. We’ll share interviews of people that we work with at the facility and things like that. The tough thing is that Instagram is also an algorithm. Sometimes we do a good job telling this story and then no one sees it.

We are still learning how to tap into it fully because it works great for us in. We retell our pitches in conversations, and people get excited in person. I love telling the story and people love hearing it. It has opened up a lot of partnerships for us. In terms of the marketing side, it’s still something that we are trying to learn the balance that is going to be valuable information but also win attention. As a brand that doesn’t have much in marketing dollars, it’s something that we have scrappily been testing.

One of the things you were talking about, and I see this happen quite frequently in both investor and retailer meetings, is where the entrepreneur spends too much time telling the story. The story and the mission are important. To an investor, the mission is important for many reasons. One is it could be aligned with what their thesis is, but more than likely is that they recognize it’s that mission and that purpose that’s going to keep that entrepreneur running on all cylinders and in the game, and willing to weather the difficulties of the business. That’s important.

To the retailer, it matters a little bit. At the end of the day, for both of those constituencies, your job is to talk about how you are going to make them money. That’s what they are there for, and then your job is to tell them why you represent. There’s a finite amount of space in a retailer, and that’s a real estate play. There’s a finite amount of money to an investor, and that’s a financial play. Your job is to tell them why you represent their best opportunity to see a return.

Too often what happens is that entrepreneurs get in those environments and they talk about their passion and their story and all of that stuff from almost a consumer perspective. They are not putting an empathetic lens on it and going, “It’s fine to talk about that for two seconds, but show me the money of how am I going to do it.”

Where the story does matter is with consumers. You’re right. There’s double-speak around how important story is to consumers, do consumers eat story and all of that stuff. My belief in being an observer for many years is that in many cases, especially around snacks, those initial and trial decisions are just impulsive.

Most of that is driven because the packaging looks cool. The flavor sounds good and it sounds like something unique to nerf down. The moment they pick up that package and make the connection with the brand is like a handshake. If the handshake is limping and you are looking down, that’s it. They are not going to pick you back up.

If you have a firm and compelling handshake, and they look into your eyes, and they flip over the package, and they read this compelling story, now you have the opportunity to connect with them. The key to that is when they go back on their phones or go home, and they look you up on social media, or go and look up the brand on the website, it’s confirmational to the experience they had on the package to what they consumed. At the end of the day, none of these matters if the product tastes like shit. It comes down to delivering a good product. Do you think your first iteration was bad?

It was bad. Because I wasn’t a product-first founder, I was very like, “Get over it.” I would do demos in a small local grocery when we were first testing it out. People would be like, “It’s too crunchy.” It was very thick and starchy in the beginning. It didn’t have much flavor. It wasn’t very good. I’d be like, “Put it on a salad and you are going to like it. It’s fine. You are good.” It has a good story. You should buy it for the story. It took me some time to let the feedback in and be like, “They are right. It has to taste good and you have to fix it so that this can be a viable business.” Now, I’m proud of our products. They are delicious. We have done a great job improving over the years.

One of the things that you have to do to build a successful CPG brand is to find the fuel that you need to do it in the form of capital. What has it been like to try to raise money and talk about this complexity in your supply chain, in the mission and so forth?

It’s been interesting. It depends on who you talk to. People are excited about our mission generally. For us, it’s about preempting any concerns around the risk of our supply chain, and being prepared to speak about why these relationships are so valuable and strong, why this is an important model, why it’s different, why it’s also better and more efficient and allows us flexibility, and things like that. I will say that we have been mostly bootstrapped, friends and family supported us until this point. It’s a combination of loans and a small bit of equity. We have started to start to speak to investors again to raise a convertible note.

I talk to some impact people, some CPG people, and some Angels. I make a little blend. It’s interesting because you think people would be very excited, but then they don’t understand our unique model of like Amazi being the market entity and the US entity, and then the Uganda production being a separate entity. Even though we are legally combined in some ways, I get some pushback about that sometimes because they are so used to investing on the ground. Part of why Amazi exists is because so many of the NGOs and products on the ground are doing good work, but a lot of times they don’t have market access, which is what we are and what we are trying to grow so that this can be successful and impactful.

It’s a little bit of a backwards approach. That has been my massaging and finessing those conversations. When it comes to speaking with investors that are more on the CPG side, it’s about ensuring that we have access to supply. This has been a huge leg up for us because instead of being a tiny brand and a co-packer who can lose their line spot on any day, we have this direct relationship and have access to innovation. We source all of our ingredients. We haven’t had any shortages at any point. We are able to have transparent conversations about our cost of goods too. In many ways, it’s a plus. Especially this has shifted in COVID as more of a plus, whereas before it was a little more wary. Now, the almost self-manufacturing component of it all is more attractive.

It’s controlling your own destiny.

We don’t even have it on our books. It’s nice because it’s the best of both worlds. We don’t have the manufacturing on our books, but we have access that we wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s how I have handled it in conversations.

A question in and around that. Have you been getting any pushback because of the distance? When an investor looks at an investment opportunity, they are looking at what the potential upside is, but they are also looking at what the potential risks are. A risk, if they are going to absorb that risk, is a reason to discount evaluation. There are two ways that they are going to perceive risk. As the entrepreneur, you have to figure out a way to mitigate that risk to take it off the table, or you have to acknowledge that that’s going to be in the investor’s eyes or a reason to “discount valuation.”

One of the things that we have seen is for those folks, even if they control their own supply chains, they have distance in their supply chain. They are requiring air freight, ocean freight, or so forth like that with all of the stuff that started to shake down. As we came out of the pandemic, there was that surge and that delay, and those costs went skyrocketed and so forth. Were you getting questions and pushback there? Is your supply chain such different because it’s Uganda? It’s not like there’s huge demand there. Talk a little bit about what impact the pandemic and post-pandemic have had.

This is as challenging for any business when you are far from where your production is. There is an element of you have to produce a certain volume at a time. You have to demand plan and forecast a little bit more. You might need to build out your inventory more than you would. Our production and order cycle is a little bit different than it would be if we were just getting products made in Texas, for example. That is something that we have to take into account and have to communicate pretty clearly. We have weekly calls with our production teams about the potential forecast, seasonality of fruit, what this is going to look like, or when we need to start production.

I usually overshoot production. I would rather have products on hand than not. That’s my approach to that. We did certainly see a surge in ocean freight charges from Uganda. We had to pay an extra fee to get containers reserved because it was hard to get containers for a little bit, but we are starting to see that level out. We are constantly looking at our logistics. We are considering a change in our warehousing somewhere further on the East Coast where maybe it’s cheaper to import to there or things like that. We are constantly looking at that.

As we look at our models to scale, we are already having conversations 2 or 3 years out about, “Are we sticking 100% Uganda? Do we have another partial co-packer somewhere else? Do we find another supplier in another country and expand our model there?” We are already having those conversations because you have to. That’s a long-winded way of saying, “It’s certainly a question, but I also think that at the end of the day, that hasn’t been a major red flag risk factor in conversations because we are doing our best to manage it. Frankly, we have seen a lot of the initial disruptions start to level out.

You are still doing business in a country where things are not as efficient or as developed as we are. That is the nature of the business, but we knew that we were getting into it. It took me three years to build our current supply chain. The first three years were spent developing products, building relationships, and building out this facility. It took a lot of legwork, but we have pretty solid boots on the ground there. I travel there. With COVID, it was interrupted, but I do still travel at least once a year. It’s like what you said. Every model is going to have its risks. How much do the different risks weigh and is it enough to discount certain things or not? How would you compare this offering versus that?

How do you turn that risk into strength and how do you articulate it quickly so that you put it out there? You need to control that narrative and let somebody else do it. If you know that could be potentially a risk in the eyes of an investor, then how do you mitigate that right off the front? I’m going to change topics again. I want to talk about being an early-stage brand in retail. We’ll leave the names of the retailers and the distributors out of it. None of it is malicious or intent. It’s model-driven.

You are a snack brand, but a relatively lower velocity snack brand. You are unique. You sit sometimes on the superfood shelves. You sit sometimes in snacks. More importantly, if you could sit down with the powers that be at these retailers and these distributors and were able to say to them, “If you could do some of these things, that would make it so much better for me as an innovator in this space, somebody who’s trying to bring optionality and difference, and make an impact. If you could do these things, it would make it so much better.” What would those things be?

First off, we have learned a shit ton mostly by having things in the wrong place at certain times and having things poorly executed. We did a clip strip or something on the West Coast at one point. It was a disaster because that wasn’t the preferred distributor for the account. They couldn’t execute it properly. I even hired outside merchandisers to help, and it was a total waste of money. I learned a very hard lesson.

A lot of it is understanding where we belong in the store, what kinds of accounts are worth investing in, what kinds of placement we need, and which skews are going to do best. That’s certainly something we have learned by trial and error. If you could not do that, it would be great. If we didn’t have to spend hours every week going through deductions, that would be great, but we do. We push back on a lot of them.

It’s an issue with the model. The current distributor model is tough and it is something that’s encouraged us to do a lot of business outside of retail as well to balance that out. There are rules that overlap and end up in my mind charges upon charges that shouldn’t exist. That’s one thing. As you said, I don’t want to get into the details there.

Another thing is not even to the retailers and such but to us. We learn too like what I was saying before. We updated our packaging and everybody who saw our brand was like, “It’s so cute. We love it. I love your packaging.” We learned that it’s not doing the legwork on the shelf. It also took some time to understand that this is why it’s not working. We need to fix these things. We are going to see how this helps velocity once we roll out the new look because we need to take responsibility for that. It’s not necessarily the retailer’s job to do that.

Something that would help is it’s very hard for small brands to afford secondary placement. For us, that has been huge. Anytime we have been able to get secondary placement in produce or something, that has been big for us in terms of driving discovery. A lot of stores that we build direct relationships with will let us test it out, but it’s very expensive to do so otherwise.

Another thing too is as a small brand, sometimes you’ll get a yes from a retailer, but you don’t necessarily get a long meeting. You don’t get a conversation. You don’t get to hash everything out. It’s a lot of chasing of like, “What are my options if I want to support this? What can I do to make this a success?” There’s a lot of work that goes into getting that information. We are told there’s this program that exists. How do I take advantage of that? Can I take advantage of that? There is that missing piece that maybe this is where brokers and such come in to help. Although I have found that sometimes you still have to do a lot of digging. It’s sometimes frustrating how hard it is to do mutually supportive things.

It’s a true collaboration. Granted that it’s not the retailer’s job and it’s not the best use of the category manager’s time to be the coach of the entrepreneur. I have had some candid conversations with people both in retail offices as well as in the distributors because the desire is to figure this out. The reality is that consumers want to buy more products from brands and entrepreneurs like you. That’s what consumers want to do. They want those products to be at reasonable prices, and the retailers and distributors need to make sure that there’s money in it for them. It needs to work for everybody.

One of the realities that I see in this industry is at first, all the risk is quite frankly pushed to the small brands. The truth of the matter is if you go into a new retailer and fall flat, it’s a pain in the ass for the retailer to redo a schematic and find a new product to go on the shelf to replace yours. It’s inconvenient for the distributor to carve out another pallet position or two, but that’s about the pain of it. To you, to go into a big retailer and have spent the money on free fills and all the other things to do it, and then to fall flat, that could be an existential threat to your business. As long as the risk is so disproportionate, that’s a challenge.

The other thing that is important to see and understand is that the reality is as much as cost is important to you and trying to keep the costs under control, it’s cash that matters. It’s cash and the input of cash. We talked about this in one of our workshops when you say yes to a new opportunity, all of the cash that needs to go into that opportunity is basically put for illustrative purposes. It is put away in this box and put locks on it. You can’t get to it. That cash for inventory, for receivables, for promotions, or for free fills are all cash that you have now locked away.

You can’t use that for other parts of your business like hiring somebody to do some of your social media or hiring a team like Dirty Hands to help with merchandising or things along those lines. You need all those things, but it’s in a lock box because it takes that long for that revenue to return. If the industry could work together to figure out how to make it less of a cash burden to shorten that to some degree, that could empower entrepreneurs to do more. That’s what you need to think about and you now have this conversation. For all those reading, if I’m going to say yes to an opportunity, how much cash am I going to lock away and what’s the trade-off of not having that cash elsewhere?

It’s something that we have also learned through reps. I’m much better now at that off the bat. For example, we got an offer from Giant. The old Renee would have been like, “For sure. When do you need it? Let’s go.” Now I know which questions to ask. What are the promotional expectations? Is this going to be slotting and free-fill? Is there a way to get this down? Can we do something with secondary placement to test it out?

It’s being upfront about what we need in order to move forward. Where are we going to be on the shelf? Where it’s going to be in stores? Which distributor are they using? Which warehouses is that going to require? Is that something that I have to pay for? I have felt more empowered over the last year or so to ask those questions. You are right. If you don’t ask, it’s not the buyer’s responsibility to come up to you and hold your hand and walk you through. You push through and ask or look for marketing contacts, or get a sense of what’s out there.

I’m big on direct relationships. I have direct relationships with all of our main accounts. While it’s challenging at times, it’s starting to pay off in some cases in the sense that they are willing to throw us on the innovation table or willing to swap out this SKU and see how it does. I think that we are getting a lot better at understanding true costs and also trying to ask for what we need. We don’t always get it, and then we say no or we say we can’t make it work or we figure it out. That’s something tough for early-stage brands.

It’s scary because you are afraid to say no because you don’t know when that next opportunity is. If everyone were to stop looking at it as just growth and start looking at it as an investment and analyzed it in terms of as an investment, what is it doing for my brand? Ask about the trade-off. If I’m putting $100,000 or $150,000 between inventory receivables or free fill, the first promotions, and so forth, then I’m taking that out of my account and putting it in a lock box, and now I don’t have it to support the rest of the business, what else am I not doing for my business and what’s the downside of that?

Suddenly, it becomes a little bit clearer because you are making a decision between trade-offs. Renee, you’ve been stuck listening to me long enough to know that I preach this all the time that this is an industry that is not about black and white or yes and no. It’s an industry of trade-offs. The entrepreneurs who outperform the others are those that can step back, evaluate, and see the trade-offs that they are making, and decide which of those directions and which of those has the better results.

We have a couple of minutes left because we kept talking. One of the things I always try to ask near the end is that what we are trying to do in our approach to everything that we do is build community. Those that tune in to this show are entrepreneurs, retailers, investors, and folks in the industry. It’s hard as hell doing what you are doing. How can they either help you or how can you help them?

It’s very hard. It’s always great to spread the word. If you see our product in a store, give it a try. Let us know how you like it. That is all in my view easy work. Liking something on social and stuff like that. It’s easy. I spent quite a few hours being more in the mentoring seat. I sat at a pitch competition. I gave feedback to very early-stage like way earlier stage or getting started. I also had a very long call with somebody who’s trying to build a similar model. My point is it’s both empowering and interesting to know that even brands doing the challenging thing at your phase like there are still things to offer to other people.

I’m going to interrupt there. What you’ve said is so important. I see this all the time with the entrepreneurs that we work with. What happens is you lose sight of progress. You feel like you are always mired in the mud and things are not progressing. You are never as far along as you hope you are and all this stuff.

In this industry, one of the great things is as you are reaching for the next rung of the ladder, always reach down below and grab the next person behind you and pull them up. Not only is it the right thing to do, and it is altruistic and all those woo-woo things. The other thing is it’s like when you are feeling shitty about yourself, you go to Walmart because you feel better about yourself instantaneously.

You realize how much progress you’ve made. You realize how far you have come. When you have those recollections or realizations, then it’s like, “I can keep plugging along.” When you don’t have that and you see how far you have left to go, you feel like you are idling. We are right at the top of the hour. You’re awesome. Thanks for doing this with us. We’ll have you back I’m sure. Thanks, everybody, and we’ll see you next time.

Thank you for having me.

Important Links

• AmaziFoods.com

• TIG Collective

• Dirty Hands

About Renee Dunn

Founder and CEO of start-up RAD Snack Trade, LLC – the company behind Amazi www.amazifoods.com – a mindful food company importing Organic, Direct Trade Ugandan food products to reduce food waste, create job opportunities, and encourage business development.

Wesleyan University Graduate. Interested in Health and Wellness and International Development.

Self-starter with small business management experience. Strong organizational, analytical, and communication skills; experience working and living abroad.

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