How can you drive sales and advertise your product despite the pandemic? In this episode, Justin Queen shares information on the advantages of using different platforms like SnackMagic to promote and sell your product or brand, especially if it’s an emerging one. SnackMagic was built and developed due to the pandemic and is now being used by many people. Initially, it worked as a discovery channel to show, introduce and get exposure for your product. Now, it works as a sales channel due to the significant volume and success it got from people. They are now looking at expanding the products they are offering by including perishable wholesales in the near future and developing new channels that could help products in their platform.

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How Magic Is Made At Snack Magic With Justin Queen

Before I get started, I’m going to do a founder shout-out. I’m going to do it slightly differently and talk to all of those founders who are raising capital. It is hard. The process sucks. I was talking to an investor and she shared with me, “Think about this. I see about 700 pitches a year and make one investment.” The odds are stacked against you, but we’ve had some founders see the light, and have money drop into their accounts, and deals consummated. There is an end in sight. There is the potential of it and it comes from and to those who remain persistent, tenacious and resilient.

They don’t look at it as rejection but as, “Not now.” They foster and nurture the relationships, and make them a big part of what they do. You cannot do it as a part-time gig. Building and raising the capital you need to grow your business takes consistent, constant and committed effort. Do it and I won’t out you because some of you haven’t been able to release it yet publicly, but congratulations. You proved to us all that it’s worth the good fight.

With that, I’m excited to have this cool conversation. I know a lot of you are either already working with SnackMagic or investigating SnackMagic. They are doing some great things in this space and with a few of our brands. I’m having Justin join us to give us some good insight as to where the platform is going, how we can best utilize our relationship with SnackMagic, and all things related to what is happening in these hybridized e-tailers space. I’m thrilled to have him join us. I’ll let him introduce himself. Justin, thanks for coming on. Tell the world a little bit about you and SnackMagic.

Thank you for having me. We’re lucky enough to work with some TIG brands already so hopefully, some of you are familiar with us. It’s SnackMagic if you’re not. I’ll give you a brief background. I am one of the leaders of our CPG and our merchant development team. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SnackMagic, I will try to keep it brief in terms of our history.

Prior to SnackMagic, we were operating as STADIUM, which is a corporate catering lunch service in New York City. Alongside our corporate catering arm, we also had a CPG arm. As you can imagine, in March of 2020, that demand fell to zero. What made us unique at STADIUM was that we organized all sorts of different restaurants for one group. Let’s say you’re ordering for a group. One person wants sushi. One wants pizza. One wants a salad. We would organize that and then deliver that all together. On the side, we also had CPG snacks and beverages offerings.

As I’m sure you are all familiar with, in March of 2020, that demand went to zero. Also, a lot of our CPG partners were saying, “We have all this excess product. Foodservice channels are being turned off. There’s a demand and supply mismatch. We don’t know what to do with these. Retailers aren’t taking our product and taking us on. They are focused on the essentials. What do we do?” It was tough for especially emerging brands to get distribution.

We had spoken with many founders and many of our CPG partners at that time. They were all echoing the same sentiment of, “We have all these products. We need to get our product out there. We were trying to build our business still. What do we do with it?” We thought, “This was something we’ve toyed around in the past. Why not bring our ethos in discovery-first and the individual customization over to the B2B gifting and CPG space?” That’s what led to the birth of SnackMagic.

One of the things that always motivated us was that discovery online is broken. This was evident when everything first shut down. When you walk through a supermarket or any brick and mortar store, you can have that experience of seeing the end cap, what’s on promotion, buying one bar, buying a bag of chips or popcorn, buying one bag of dried fruit and experiencing all that together. When you try to duplicate that in an online retail experience, whether it’s D2C or a different eCommerce channel, it’s difficult. You either have to buy in larger quantities or as a customer, you’d have to know what you’re getting and what you’re looking for. Go to multiple different sites. There’s a high barrier to entry there. A lot of brands were facing this as well.

We decided to take that discovery-first ideology and ethos and put it to CPG snacks and beverages. That is SnackMagic founding our pillars. We wanted to make it so that when organizers or individuals come to our menu, they see us almost like a digital spinoff of a retail setting, where you’re browsing through a highly curated offering. You’re seeing everything that’s available. You’re able to buy one bar, one bag of chips, one jam from all of these different companies and experience it together with very little risk, which is something that all these emerging founders know much better than I do.

Getting a customer to buy that first product is the biggest barrier. It can be the most vital part of that journey. As soon as they get it, you can give them your value proposition and tell them why you’re a good, functional brand. They are like, “That’s all I need.” If they taste it, they’ll get it right away, but getting them to try it is so difficult. That’s where we wanted to help especially emerging brands.

To your point, that is one of the biggest challenges to online discovery in its more common form. It’s the fact that you’re asking the consumer to take a pretty big risk, for the most part, to make the economies work for their brand. When you’re asking a consumer to take a $29 risk for a bar, a snack or a drink, the perception is that’s not such an easy thing to do, “What if I hate it?” It’s to remove that barrier and to do it. The other comment I’ll make is you said brick and mortar. I would argue that even prior to COVID, brick and mortar were losing their leadership in discovery.

They are becoming less mobile and nimble. They are becoming more systematic or institutionalized. They were getting slower. Consumers were stopping and no longer going on those treasure hunt-type impulse, discovery-shopping trips. If you look at the data, since COVID, shopping trips are still down 15% prior to pre-COVID times in 2019. That’s a different shopping experience. People are going more prescriptively and plan fully. The consumer and the emerging brand, all of us benefit from finding alternative ways to drive discoveries.

Some of that credit goes to the founders and all these brands. What they’ve done has led to brick-and-mortar being a little slow. Instead of trying to get into retail immediately, many of these emerging brands will go the D2C route first. They test their mettle online and build out that D2C channel and then go to distribution or look to get into brick and mortar and say, “We’ve already built this sustainable, great business online. Now we have more bandwidth to get into retail and a customer base that we know likes our product. You’re not taking a risk by putting us on their shelf.”

That discovery has shifted to being in either alternative channels or in an online setting, whether it’s natively on their own D2C site or they are doing it through another eCommerce marketplace. That’s where a lot of the unique things are happening in the CPG space. The only thing I would say there is that customer acquisition is tough when you’re launching a brand new brand and you’re doing it fully D2C. You’re doing targeted ads and trying to get people to your site. As you said, $29 can be a high barrier to getting somebody who has never heard of your brand or your product to buy that product for the first time.

That’s if they find you.

That’s if you targeted ad words and get the Google search. You get re-targeted and they finally click in. They find you and then they are like, “Do I buy? Do I not buy?” We wanted to remove a lot of that pressure and stress and say, “We’ll be your launching pad. We’ll help you market. We’ll share your brand story. We’ll give you a place where you can do all this. We have a customer base that’s a captive audience that’s already coming to us. We will create our entire portfolio of brand partners and help showcase your product.”

Once we get your product into the customer’s hand, the rest is in your court. They may come back. They may love it. They may go to your site. We’re not in competition with our brand partners. They may go to your direct site when they discover you on SnackMagic. They are like, “I love this product. I’ve never heard of this brand. Let me go online and check them out.”

What types of brands do well on SnackMagic? What are you looking for in terms of merchant development? What’s the ideal SnackMagic brand or product look like?

To be perfectly transparent, our split is not like you would think about in a traditional setting. In terms of tiers, we carry more snacks than we do beverages. I would say beverages are a little bit more than our “pantry section.” I would say it follows that same trend line in terms of performance but it’s varied. Snacks do well across all categories. We have categories that we create on our menu that are a bit different than you have in your traditional settings. We try to keep it a little bit more light and more user-friendly.

Our names may not make sense to everybody, but we have chips like potato chips section, alternative chips and crunchy chips section, cookies and chocolates. We don’t do any cold chain shipping. We only carry chocolates for about seven months of the year. Chocolates are seasonal. They do well. Gummies tend to do better in the warmer months, which is carried across the trend line across the whole marketplace. Cookies are a big mover for us. You can argue that everything is functional or better for you, but the consumer is looking for a more functional beverage. With our audience skewing heavily more on B2B, it’s more of that workplace audience.

Snooze is a good example of that, where they are targeting this B2B or this corporate audience, which is a hard audience to crack in general. Normally, you were doing it in food service or trying to get into an office pantry, but targeting those people that you think would be in your target demo. These are office workers who want a functional beverage. Maybe they want to sleep better with Snooze or want a functional beverage to stay focused. I think functional products are moving up.

I also think that it’s twofold. Consumers are more aware of the brand story like, “Why did you make this product? What’s unique about this? What separates your product from the five other cookies that I may see?” It’s also ingredients-based, whether that’s upcycled sourcing, gluten-free or non-GMO. I know that those are all the hot buzz words. Consumers look at that initially before they decide to purchase for the first time.

Ryan Armistead with Happy Moose talks about 70% of the fruits that they use are upcycled fruits. Does SnackMagic plan to relaunch or launch perishables in the future?

We won’t launch perishables for our core gifting menu because it doesn’t work with our model. We don’t want to diminish the quality of anyone’s product in a way that we have so many different types of products going into one box. It’s hard to ensure the quality of keeping things cold. Cold chain shipping is a nightmare. That being said, we do have a wholesale channel that we’ll be launching soon. That will be available to brands who don’t participate in our core gifting menu. That will be fulfilled by brands, so it’ll be more of a dropship model. We will open that up to perishables. If they are doing nationwide shipping, we will open that up for them. That’ll be their avenue to get back into the SnackMagic universe.

I would think the opportunity would be for people to potentially bundle on your platform in a separate box just for perishables.

We thought about that route and it may happen in the future.

Cold chain is a challenge for everybody. It’s going to get solved in a way where economies of scale and efficiencies come forward and figure this out. The truth of the matter is that more of our products in every shape or form are showing up on our doorsteps. That’s what we want. We want convenience. It’s both a blessing and a curse. I’m guilty and I’ll give a shout-out to Imperfect Foods. Our Imperfect box showed up here at the house. I love that, but then I drive by Starbucks and I see 200 cars in line and nobody is taking the fifteen-foot walk into the store to get the product. We’re getting a little bit too comfortable with convenience. What should brands do to elevate the awareness of their availability on SnackMagic?

We are always open to doing cross-promotions on social. We have branded assets that we send out to all of our brand partners that they can use however they want in their social channels. All of our brands and our core gifting menu get a unique brand page with a unique URL. That’s a URL they can send out, whether it’s via an email blast or a hyperlink on a social post. That will take them directly to their page and their products instead of the SnackMagic menu at large. That’s a great way to say, like, “Get your awareness out. We’re on SnackMagic. Here’s where you can find us. Here’s our brand page with all the products that we have on SnackMagic.” It’s a little bit of a blurb about us.

Eventually, when we launch wholesale, the ability for people to repurchase their cases or bundles is there as well. That’s always good. We’re always doing what we can to cross-promote on social as well, whether that’s reposting brand posts or giving shout-outs, or highlighting actual products and packaging through our digital marketing. We always want to make sure that we’re highlighting our brands as well.

In general, one of the intriguing things is what you can learn by having your product on SnackMagic. Let’s talk about that for a little bit, and the insights you can glean that’s a benefit of that. Share some of that.

This is a good segue not to toot our own horn. We are also in the works of launching before the end of 2021 CPG Pulse, which you can set up for the waitlist now. That is our standalone analytics data and business intelligence platform. That’s our version of SPINS or Nielsen, but SnackMagic-centric. It’s geared towards being more approachable and more digestible than a SPINS or Nielsen, which can be so cost-prohibitive. Aside from that, they can also be hard to digest. There’s so much information. It’s hard to be able to synthesize and say, “What’s relevant for me, my brand and my products?” That’s something we’re working on that will hopefully launch soon, which will be an entire business intelligence analytics platform.

What we have now for our brands is we still show as much data as we can. That is super important for us. We want to give brands as much data as possible and give them this super valuable feedback that they may not get elsewhere. There’s a national heat map of where your product is going, what your top cities are, and whatever filter and date range you’re looking at, core analysis of what people are buying alongside you, which is unique.

I know a lot of brands are like, “I didn’t think that I would be coupled with this product or this snack.” Maybe there’s some synergy there that we can do a promotion between the two of us, or maybe there’s a flavor that I’m missing out on that I didn’t realize. That’s unique for them seeing their split within their brand. What’s the breakdown? What’s our top moving product? Is that changing over time? Is it changing seasonally? You can see all of that. That is unique.

You’re also seeing how you stack up against other people within your category. From a product percentile performance, where do I fall within snacks? As a step-down, where do I fall within cookies? Am I at the top or the bottom of the cookies? Once we have CPG Pulse, you’ll be able to bifurcate all that data and even go ten steps down, and play around with all sorts of different date ranges and get qualitative feedback of what people are saying about your products. What if they are rating your products? What are they rating them? Why are they giving them this rating? Which is super valuable.

If you have your D2C channel, you try to collect as much feedback as possible. If you’re on somebody like Amazon, you try to scour those reviews but it’s not always as relevant as you’d want it to be. We want to give these qualified buyers a place to say, “This is what made me buy your product. I love the packaging,” or “I love the packaging and it made me buy it, but I don’t love the flavor or the texture.” Especially when you have an emerging brand, those are things that are invaluable.

One of the things that I’ve seen changes in terms of mindset is people looked at SnackMagic as discovery. Now they are looking at you as a sales channel, “This is a growth channel for us.” Why the shift?

We are a young company. I understand that when people first came to us, they were like, “This is a marketing discovery. It is a chance for me to get my product out there. That’s what I’m looking at this channel as.” I’m looking at it as a marketing expense even in the early days where brands were like, “Maybe this is a marketing expense of a channel.” Once they saw the volumes that they were having and the success they were seeing, they were like, “This is a growth channel. Aside from being a discovery and distribution channel and a way to get my name out there, I’m seeing significant volume. I’m seeing that this is one of our fastest-growing channels, if not our fastest-growing channel.”

That mindset wasn’t something that we tried to change or get people to see. We figured it would happen organically as they spend time on the menu. As they see the traction and progression they are having the longer they are on the menu, we know that people are going to say, “Hold on, maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is a significant sales channel on top of being a great way to market, get exposure and drive discovery.”

What are you doing to continue to build awareness of how you are targeting your customers to build platform engagement?

To be honest and do take this with a grain of salt, but we did very little paid advertising and marketing for the first year. We were lucky to have a strong user base that carried over from our Stadium days. Even though we changed our name but having a name and a brand that people trusted, especially within the B2B space. Word of mouth marketing was something that’s always been strong for us. We have great brandings. When you see a box out in the wild, that is great just like native marketing. Initially, we let word of mouth speak for us.

We had a successful viral loop of an organizer who treats somebody. Let’s say you get a box and you’re like, “This is amazing. I’m going to send this box to my friends or family or I’m going organize a group and treat people.” That virality is built into the product and enables us to grow without even touching it. This is very cultivated but it’s been amazing to see how successful it’s been.

As we’ve grown and continue to grow, we’re more organized in our efforts to get into some paid marketing and get our name out there. We’ve been lucky and successful in the fact that our name has organically gained a lot of traction. We have a lot more presence than we did before and continue to gain more presence. I’d love to say that it was a great marketing and targeted campaign. That will probably come in the future. It’s been a compounding success on our virality.

I also think the brands that are on there have a vested interest in talking it up too. There’s a real synergistic relationship and an opportunity for these brands to help amplify it. Michael of 3D Ingredients, which is a super cool frozen vegan super loaf that offers perfect, clean ingredients to start your day or eat throughout your day, asks, “When will the perishable wholesale program be launching? Who should people interested in that contact with in SnackMagic?”

That will hopefully launch before the end of 2021. You can contact me or you can contact our general email, which is [email protected]. We’ll make sure that somebody on the team answers you. We’ll start doing onboarding and getting brands set up there as well very quickly. Once we launch it, it should be seamless. We’ll do integration with your backend with our Shopify eCommerce or whatever platform you’re built on to make things seamless there. It’s not a lot of manual work. Once that is up and running, we can put you up on the menu and start collecting orders very quickly.

To touch on your last question, I wanted to say that you brought up a good point and we’ve been lucky and successful that brands have been great champions of ours. Communities like TIG and CPG and other communities for emerging brands and emerging founders have been great water coolers for SnackMagic. Founders are saying, “I’m on this channel SnackMagic. At first, I thought I was going to be marketing but now it’s being a great sales channel.

We get so many referrals, which is always great to see. It keeps us humble but also empowered. Maybe we are doing the right thing and we’re on the right track when brands are saying, “I have this other founder who I want to introduce you to,” or “I have this other brand who I’ve been talking to. I think it would be a great product for you.” For us, it is always great to see. It’s such a supportive community.

It’s when companies are in alignment, and when objectives are aligned, and your success is their success, and their success is your success that you find that type of support throughout. Getting back to the wholesale side, how are you going to go out and solicit wholesale customers? What type of customers are you trying to go after? I’m assuming that you are going to be doing the same with non-perishable. You’ll be giving all brands the opportunity to transact with the dropship program, which gives the wholesale customer the ability to go to one place to aggregate, one place to pay, and all of that, which is super important to them but get the products they need. You’ve got to get those customers.

First and foremost, the feedback loop of people who try SnackMagic is going to be our first feeder. That will be, “I received the box, I’m organizing the box, and I’m trying this product.” That feedback loop is the first loop that drives people for wholesale love. “I found this brand I love. I found this product I love. I’m coming back to SnackMagic anyways. I can easily repurchase and buy in bulk.” That’s one end consumer for wholesale.

Another end consumer is some of these people who are organizing our office managers, event planners, people who are setting up treats for large groups or events who are saying, “I’m having another event,” or “I’m stocking an office pantry. Everyone in my group loved this product,” or “They liked this brand. I’m going to come back to SnackMagic and I’m going to buy this brand. Hopefully, a bunch of other unique, cool new brands and stock either in my office pantry, or have a solution for a hybrid event or even a fully in-person event.” We have solutions for that as well.

For the brands who are new to SnackMagic and not on our gifting menu, hopefully, that unique discovery will happen organically for them as well. For those customers who are coming back, we’ll do some marketing and some targeting efforts to explain this new channel. We also have another new channel that we’re launching called Snack Drop, which is our solution for digital sampling. As an emerging brand, sampling can be the lifeblood for new brands, especially in-store sampling prior to COVID. It’s starting to come back a little bit, but it was important for a lot of brands. It can be cost-prohibitive, time-consuming or difficult to get into the right retail stores to do that sampling.

Snack Drop will be our solution for digital sampling. Customers can sign up for a waitlist. We’ll give them a discounted rate where they can buy X amount of dollars of snacks for a lower price which will incentivize that. We’ll collect all sorts of data and feedback that will feed into CPG Pulse. We’re giving brands more robust data and analytics on their product, and who their consumers are. “I thought my consumer would be this person, but it turns out these people love my product or they are buying it. I thought my value prop was A but maybe it’s B.” That will also feedback into wholesale. Through that digital sampling, when all sorts of new users who are brand new to SnackMagic come and they get to sample all sorts of products, then we can feed them right into wholesale of, “I’ve had this new product I’ve never seen before. Where do I buy it? I can go back to SnackMagic and buy it.”

Five years from now, we’re talking and you’re giving me an update of where SnackMagic is and the place it holds in the marketplace. What’s the team’s vision for it?

We’d love to be a thought leader in the space. We’d love to be a champion and a launch board for emerging brands. We want to be the go-to place, not just for B2B gifting, which is already taking off and is a space that we’re entrenched in. People know to go to us for B2B gifting. We want to be that same space for emerging CPG brands as well across the board, “I’m launching a new product. I’ve got to go to SnackMagic to get and see what people are saying.” It’s a great feeding ground for that. “I want to get into CPG Pulse so I can see what people are saying about me. I can get my product and my data in front of investors.”

The CPG Pulse platform isn’t just going to be for brands. It is also for potential buyers or investors who come to the platform and be able to see what’s trending. What emerging brands are doing well? What categories are trending? What’s trending among these demographics from an investor looking to get after? We want to be the end-to-end solution for emerging brands. We want to do that for B2B gifting as well, but that’s on the other side. On this side, we want to be the end-to-end solution for emerging brands. We want to drive wholesale for them. We want to drive discovery. We want to be their go-to analytics and business intelligence platform, get them in front of the right investors, get them in front of the right consumers, and help grow their brand.

You have a bird’s eye view. You can see brands that come on that do well, and those that don’t. For the brands that do well, what are some of the common threads? Is it packaging, story, claims, category? For the brands that don’t, the same question.

One of the biggest things is the presence and not even just the number of SKUs because as a platform, we are limited in the amount of physical and digital space that we can grant anyone’s brand. We’re very mindful of that, but being in stock and having that presence. With everything that’s going on right now and with the supply chain pressures, it’s extra difficult. We are making sure that you’re in stock so when a customer comes back or comes for the first time, you’re not missing out on that potential discovery link.

A step down from there, the brand story is important. The why. Why are you doing and making this? This resonates with a lot of consumers. For example, we do some curated medleys. Some of our top-performing medleys are the Buy Pick Medley, Women and Minority-Owned Medley, Upcycled Sourcing, Snack and Give Back Companies that are geared towards giving back to some degree, and thinking more holistically about their product, about the space, what they are doing and why they are doing it.

It sounds trivial but it comes down to taste. The discovery is important. The buzzwords are important. You see them on the packaging. Flashy packaging can be great to get that first discovery. For us, what we’ve seen is it comes down to taste. I can’t speak directly to pricing because of us being more of a B2B channel. People play around with their pricing in all kinds of ways. That is not something for us that we have a good grasp of if $250 is a better price point for you than $239 in retail. It comes down to why you’re doing it or how you’re doing it. Whether we want to have a focus on our functionality or we don’t care about our functionality, that’s a great benefit. What we care about is our taste and then, ultimately, your product.

There are no differences. The reality is you got to perform whether it’s the combination of taste or if your functional efficacy packaging speaks or messaging speaks. It’s the brands that have the legs of the stool that are necessary to succeed. One thing we didn’t cover is the flow of how things work. Let’s make sure to do that so everybody’s clear on that. I’m a brand and I’m interested in having my product sold on SnackMagic’s platform. Walk us through what that looks like from start to finish.

A lot of your brands are already familiar with the process and have our brand deck, which I’m sure they share around. From a high-level perspective, we start all our brand partnerships with an onboarding process, which is a trial. What that trial is we want to make sure that it’s a product that fits our portfolio from the actual format perspective of the size of the product is. We primarily do more food service sizes, so smaller formats than your multi-serves. We don’t do any multi-serves. That is what drives discovery. It’s the ability to buy a smaller amount. We do the trial process against it.

Are we a good fit operationally? Are we a good fit for each other? Is it a product that fills a gap in our portfolio? Is it something that we see customers are demanding but that we don’t have the right product to give them yet? Ultimately, sales. What does the velocity look like? What do your terms look like? Everything for our trial brands is an equal playing field. Everyone has the same exposure and ability to sell, and they are all given the same thing. It’s an equal playing field and the winner takes all sorts of deals.

We then move forward with onboarding. Once we go through the trial, it should all go well. We’d say, “Great. We want to onboard you as a core brand,” and move forward with procurement. That’s when we would get into, “We have a trial SRP. What do we want our regular SRP to look like? Here are some promotion opportunities we have for you if you’re interested in whatever it is.”

It’s either, “I’m interested in driving more sales or I’m interested in getting more exposure and getting my product into more people’s hands or I’m interested in marketing and doing a call to action on the box and having some presence on the physical box.” We have all sorts of different options for our brands there. Once that is in place, it’s an ongoing relationship from there. We grow together and it’s seamless. As we get bigger and solve problems, they do the same and we do the same for them. They ride the wave with us.

I’m eager to see how things evolve. We’re also in an interesting time from the B2B side, the evolution of work, and this hybridization of work. It’s going to be interesting to see how employers keep employees engaged and connected both while they are in offices and working from home. The place that set SnackMagic sits is an interesting intersection there. It’s going to be cool. It’s a great place to democratize things for a brand and disintermediate things from a brand where you’re not going through a distributor. You’re not being ratcheted down by other people filtering through. It’s more open. What other advice or suggestions would you want to share with our audience?

It’s tough. I am new to this space so I don’t know if I have the age of wisdom to give to people, but I would say that what I see in brands that are successful is they know their why. They know why they are doing it. They know what makes their product special. They don’t waver in their mission of, “I’m doing this because X, Y and Z,” but yet they are still flexible. With that being said, if they are like, “My mission is to set out to build the most sustainable functional bar,” that’s great. If people tell me that my bar tastes bad, I can still be flexible and tweak some things there to get more people to rebuy and get more people interested. Having that strong mission and knowing why you’re doing it, and juxtaposing ideas, but also being able to be flexible and say like, “Even though I think that this is the ultimate product, if everyone is telling me that this flavor or this taste doesn’t work, maybe I can change but keep my why and my same ethos but change some of the little things I’m doing.”

One of the balances of being an entrepreneur is the difference between being persistent and malleable simultaneously. You want to be persistent and dogged in the pursuit of your mission and your why. If you were to bend every piece of feedback you got and you’re a true innovator, your innovation is usually in front of what consumers think they need. Consumers haven’t caught up to it, but at the same time, you don’t want to be so damn stubborn that when somebody says, “I love everything you’re doing, but your product tastes like shit,” that you’re not afraid to go, “I better make it taste better.”

What some people get hung up on is when they get that feedback of like, “I love what you’re doing but your product tastes like shit.” They are like, “Have you seen that we are gluten-free and we are non-GMO and we are upcycling? We have twelve grams of protein and we have all these ancient grains.” “That’s great. I love that you’re doing that, but I can’t continually eat your product.” It’s being able to say, “Let’s find a middle ground here where I still am doing the things that I love and I know why I’m doing them but I can get you to revive my product.”

I say this all the time. A person’s desire to help and be part of the climate crisis solution or social justice movement and so forth does not outweigh their gag reflex. It’s a reality. This is for everyone reading. One of the hardest things to accept is rightfully, a lot of you entered this industry with idealistic and idealized views that you’re going to come in and change the world, that you’re going to make a difference, which most and many of you do.

However, this is a business replete. It is completely, basically consumed by opportunities for trade-offs. Everything has trade-offs. As an entrepreneur, you have to ascertain what are the right trade-offs to make and the wrong ones to make? For instance, packaging. All of us desire to put out 100% backyard compostable products. The reality is that technology hasn’t caught up yet for most of them. It’s difficult to do it at a price point that works. By doing that, you move the price point up that your products are no longer accessible to the people you’re trying to get to buy. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. Trade-offs are super important.

I’ll share a bit of our learnings from our Stadium days. I’ll give you a little insight. We faced the same thing that you’re saying. In having restaurants that have all sorts of different products and different dishes and some that were very liquidy, some that needed to stay hot. A lot of what our consumers in our corporate lunch clientele were saying was like, “I love your product but does it have to come in these black plastic containers?” That was a restaurant choice to have it in black plastic containers, but they are like, “It’s not sustainable.” We would iterate. We would talk with our restaurant partners like, “Have you tried?” There are so many different solutions for meal packaging, whether it’s the fibrous ones, fully recyclable materials or upcycled materials. They were like, “We can try it.”

What would happen is you would switch and they’d be like, “My burrito bowl is soggy. I’m getting paper when I eat it. Go back to the plastic.” In their mind, they have that trade-off of like, “It’s wasteful.” Everyone’s bottom line is we want to drive down waste. We want to be as sustainable as possible, but you have to hold those two ideologies and say, “I want to be sustainable but you also have to make a product that is edible, or make a packaging that doesn’t disintegrate when it’s hot or it doesn’t burst at the seams.”

It’s still viable but at the same time, I’ll encourage everyone that it’s going to take a few bold brands and entrepreneurs who are willing to say, “It’s a trade-off I’m not willing to make. I’m going to put a product out there and I’m going to continue to iterate and understand that it’s less than ideal, but I’m not going to contribute to the decline of our planet.” All of these things are difficult decisions for entrepreneurs and teams based on the ethos of a brand and based on the impact where you want to make that impact and the viability and the long-term viability, all of those kinds of things. You’ve got to think it through. You’ve got to think it forward. Justin, take us home. If people want to learn more or they want to explore working with you and SnackMagic, how best to do that?

Feel free to reach out. We have a general email address, which is [email protected]. I can provide my email address as well. I can make sure that anyone who wants to be added to our short mailing list when we launch wholesale or CPG Pulse or Snack Drop, we can include you all there. If any of you are interested, feel free to ask any of your friends or colleagues who are already working with us for any advice or feedback that they have. We want to be as transparent as possible. It’s good to get it firsthand from the source. If you ever have any questions, we are a super-responsive team and we’re all very hands-on. We want to be able to support our brands and our partners, and help everyone and get everyone on the same page.

I love what you’re doing. You’ve been a great partner for a lot of our brands. A lot of our brands are excited about what they are starting to see in terms of results on SnackMagic. It’s been surprising in a good way for many of them. We talked about democratization and disintermediation. These are the future of our industry, which is super exciting to me, where consumers and businesses move closer to the products that they want to get. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for being on. I hope everyone has enjoyed the episode and we’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• SnackMagic

• CPG Pulse

• [email protected]

• Snack Drop

• email address -Justin Queen

About Justin Queen

Justin Queen. Merchant Development at STADIUM & SnackMagic. SnackMagicGettysburg College. Brooklyn, New York, United States430 connections.

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