Brand launching has always been tricky for owners. Knowing how to manage sales, operations, and production development is difficult. Fortunately, Rodeo CPG can help with that. Join the CEO and Founder of Rodeo CPG, Zachary DeAngelo, as he talks to Elliot Begoun about his innovative SaaS program. Learn more about Rodeo CPG and how it helps owners know more about their brand. Discover how to buy promos and develop sales plans so that you can grow your business. Launch your brand and be the owner you want to be today!

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Listen to the podcast here

Tools To Help You Launch Your Brand With Zachary DeAngelo

Before I start, I’m going to do a founder shout-out. I’m going to talk a little bit about Hector and Amy at Tia Lupita. They are one of the three brands raising on Wefunder. Please check that out. That was our last episode. Their campaigns are all there and the industry can show some love by at least promoting it if not investing. Tia Lupita learned that they are going to enjoy national distribution for a second time and Sprouts, this time with their full line of hot sauces.

I’m excited about that. I want to thank Sprouts. We have had a couple of creative meetings with their entire category management team. We brought brands forward and had some collaborative conversations with them about ways to innovate and bring more innovation into their stores and do so in a way that is also supportive and reflective of the realities of an emerging brand in an environment where the access to institutional capitals moved upmarket a bit.

Congratulations to Hector and Amy. Thanks to Kim Coffin, John Soukup, and the team at Sprouts. I’m going to turn it over to Zach. I’m excited to talk about this tool. There is a lot going on in this industry. It’s hard to manage and run a business. Zach and the team at Rodeo CPG have been helping a lot of brands do that for a while.

They have created a SaaS-based platform that provides incredible tools and can help brands absorb the growth that they are chasing so desperately. Zach, thanks for joining. I love for you to give folks who do not know, you cannot imagine very many that do not, a little bit of your background. Let’s dig in and talk about where this came from, why you felt the need to build this tool, and what your goal is.

It is good to be here. You and I have known each other for a little while and have worked with many brands together. I have always admired your approach. I’m excited to chat about RodeoCPG.io as well. Quickly for those who I have not spoken to, my background, I originally spent some purgatory and finance. I did not love it. I always loved food. I grew up in the kitchen.

My mom owned a small catering business. That was always my fascination. I went to grad school and started my first gluten-free cereal company with a Co-Founder, Sarah back in 2009 called Coco Mama Foods. I learned a lot operationally about the business. I traveled all over the country in co-man facilities. After that, I helped start a baby food company with Zak Normandin called Little Duck Organics.

We had some success there. We sold the business in early 2014. I moved from New York to Colorado up run sales for a natural pet food company called I and love and you, which eventually rolled up and we know now L Catterton portfolio. At that point, I was investing in the space a little bit and fascinated with the services infrastructure of our industry and trying to think of ways to build an operational infrastructure that was focused on technology, data, our experience set to help brands grow more quickly and efficiently at a greater scale. That was the impetus behind Rodeo. We are a team of 35. We help brands in three different service areas, operations, and product development. We have a 4,000-square foot R&D facility in Brooklyn with a team of food scientists.

The third is sales management and strategy. The idea behind the SaaS platform has been one that dates back to 2012 when Kevin Mannering was renting a desk from us at Little Duck when he was at Quinn Snacks. We were always fascinated. Everybody is using spreadsheets. The connectivity across stakeholders is pretty inefficient. Everyone is asking for intros and things like that. There has got to be a better way that is driven by technology. That thought was always in the back of our minds as we grew Rodeo. I’m super excited to bring the first step of the ideation process in this free environment that we have created that is at RodeoCPG.io. That is the background.

You see it firsthand. You have been seeing what brands are struggling with, even bigger companies. It’s amazing how many companies still try to deal with things in operations, supply chain, and across all facets of the business with Excel spreadsheets and so forth. Give us a rundown of what is in this version 1.0. If I’m a brand, when do I know it’s right for me? Tell me what I get on the platform.

It should be right for anyone. It’s easy, free, and quick. It’s not onerous. The best way to describe the first environment is it helps brands create a sales plan. It helps brands track the sales plan and it will help the brand beat the sales plan with tools like Pitchable that help brands manage and execute outreach to independent retailers throughout the country. There are other nuggets of value when you log in, we have a marketplace with partners along the supply chain with exclusive deals and easy ways to connect. From that side, there is a resource library where you can deposit the most pertinent pieces like your sales deck or your spec sheet. Whatever is most pertinent to selling, you can place in there.

There are templates in there. There is a very easy way to input your most important product information so that you can perform the pricing exercises as it relates to distributor margin requirements, retailer margin requirements. Once you have done that, you can build a sales plan that is malleable, allows you to input assumptive analysis around velocity and category review schedules, independent retail, large-scale retail. It’s a pretty straightforward and easy-to-use tool that helps you plan and build an effective sales plan.

Out of curiosity, why start on the sales plan side or engine side?

That was, as you might imagine, very iterative in what do we start with. It comes down to when we work with brands. Some of these things that they ask us for most often that is where we started was, what are the basic tools that will help someone as they either are growing or a DTC company that has succeeded online, but is going into the physical retail realm? Those use cases that we are presented with so often on a day-to-day basis, that is what drove our decision-making there.

What does the future hold? Years from now, we are looking at this, what do you have on that platform?

I do not know if you have used the Bloomberg Terminal in the financial industry, but the easy analog is that financial professionals use Bloomberg to conduct their day-to-day business in various forms. They get the news there. They do messaging. They price their bonds. They trade. Their workflow is done in many regards in the Bloomberg Terminal. We would ultimately create an analog in the CPG industry where someone can drive value in 1,000 different ways in a cohesive platform. We will start with sales tools. We are working on a way to integrate EDI and email ordering patterns to pull out relevant data and easy integrations with Shopify, so dropship becomes a lot easier.

We are working on retail profiles, so you have all the information buyer category review required slotting or not required slotting recommended plan. All of that is in profiling. There is so much we can do. Creating databases around 3PLs, co-mans, enriching that data, making it queryable, reducing friction on outreach and negotiation. All of that stuff is certainly on our minds as we think about how to make this as useful as it possibly can be to the community that we are trying to serve.

A question from a sales plan is what most brands are missing. You see this, I see it as well, but I would like your thoughts on it in terms of when a brand is trying to push down the accelerator and grow. What are they missing or not seeing that this tool will help them better understand?

One learning that I have taken and this is a personal point of view, but some SaaS platforms or methodologies strive to create this complicated model. At the end of the day, there are so many unpredictable variables in how wholesale and retail are executed that the specificity almost is unhelpful after a while. Our goal is to create a tool that captures 90% of the variability and made it simple to build a sales plan. There are very practical things like that you have seen a million times.

For instance, if Whole Foods say, “We are going to accept four SKUs in your planogram across 500 stores.” Someone goes, “Awesome.” They will order two cases per SKU per store and say, “This is my production plan and this is what the expectation should be.” Execution from a merchandising perspective is almost never 100%. You will have 4 SKUs in 250 stores. You will have 3 SKUs in 150 stores. We intuitively create an easy button with an execution percentage. It’s examples like that where if you have been through it enough, you want to get someone 90% of the way there.

Staples has the easy button and you have installed the Cynic’s button. It’s going to happen button, which is so important. The other thing about planning based on pure velocity is it is lumpy, it does not work that way. It’s lumpy in the way you get your POs and DCs that they do not necessarily order in direct correlation to the demand from the retailer and the retailer does not necessarily order based on the demand on the shelf. Especially in these anomalistic times where nothing seems to be predictive. As you look towards this, are you hoping to make this a 360-degree platform where retailers are also accessing brands, finding brands, and doing things like that or is this going to be more focused on the company itself?

We want to be helpful to every stakeholder. However that manifests, we will be eyes wide open there. We do not have to recreate fair. They did an awesome job of retailer brand discovery. We are trying to empower the brand owner, entrepreneur, or founder to take the reins and have the flexibility to create whatever growth that constitutes success to them. It will always be brand and founder-focused. As an example like external stakeholders, often when a brand will go to a co-packer the first question the co-packer asks is, “Give me a production plan.”

That trips people up because they are like, “What should we do? Should we overestimate? What does that look like?” This tool allows you to easily download a plan or three different plans based on different assumptive analyses that you can export to the co-man to show them on a case level what your production needs might be. We will keep embedding value that hopefully will be valuable to every stakeholder along the supply chain retailers included in that.

I would assume that the long-term plan is you build out more robust features and continue to learn what is working that eventually, folks will be paying for this tool, but for now, given that it is free, everyone reading, it’s hard to do these plans. It’s hard to try to put some method behind the madness. I’m a big believer in starting with strong assumptions, but embracing them as iterative and having a way to take what the market is telling you back to those assumptions, build, refine and improve them. When you are doing that in 5 or 6 different Excel sheets, it’s hard to see how things link together.

What data insights, if I’m looking at this, what should I be focused on? One of the things we talk about all the time. You have seen this both in your days as an operator and your years of supporting other brands. There is very little we can do to help eliminate cliffs or obstacles. It happens in this business. The brand and entrepreneurs that outperform others are the ones that have some foreshadowing or warning lights that go off before their toes are dangling off the precipice of the cliff and before they are teetering and then can make better proactive decisions instead of reactive decisions. In doing this and using RodeoCPG.io, how can the tool help do that?

It allows you to organize and understand. There is a huge educational component to this. It allows you to answer the question if an investor comes to you and says, “I need to understand the thesis behind your growth. What is your methodology?” It allows you to create a comprehensive, thoughtful plan quickly. It’s an organization to allow you to connect with different, either parts of the tech stack that are important, financing and options. All these new financing options are becoming more founder-friendly all the time. An example of that is Ampla and Rabobank. It’s not like factoring was years ago, which was super predatory, hard, and personal guarantees everywhere.

It’s much better than that. We are trying to connect, educate and serve. The first aspect of monetization of our platform will be Pitchable, where brands in their sales plan so far as independent retailers are a part of their plan, those are notoriously hard to manage outreach. Pitchable is made to make that whole process simple and automated. The brand only pays for qualified leads that come in.

As we are seeing this increasing disintermediation where brands are starting to have a more direct relationship who are using platforms like Faire to get to some of these smaller, independent retailers building a way to reach them. One of the mistakes that I see so often is that the brands do the one and done. They make one outreach to an independent and then they do not do another one for 3 or 4 months. That is not how it works. It takes 7 to 12 touches and consistency. Walk us through Pitchable. Tell me a little bit more about the tool and exactly how it works.

Not only is there usually a sales process issue, but there is also a tracking issue because if you are outsourcing this to a major brokerage that may not focus on these independent accounts as closely as you would want to, a lot of the time, these independents will make a deal. They will sell through the product, something will get lost in translation and then four months later, they will take another deal, and you have no way of adequately tracking what the history has been with any of these guys.

It’s not their fault. Think about an independent store where the owner is the merchandiser is the buyer is the everything. People are busy. To me, distills down to a math equation. There is a certain universe of stores and brands that should be able to query what is most interesting to them like, “I got into Moreno Valley and Rocklin of UNFI. I want to know what the university independents are and start targeting those.”

It is smart sales funneling, which is, here in the universe, the most important material and the outreach. You need to do this on a cadence of 3 or 6 weeks. You do not want to inundate the buyer, but you want to do it intelligently. It should be automated. Whether it is drop ship or run through UNFI or a pod, all of that can be automated on the backend through API and email automation.

At the end of the day, when you create a sales plan, you are like, “I want to outreach 150 stores for the next three months.” You then can see through Pitchable, how many of those requested a sample, how many of those ordered, and what the ROI on your spend is. The only money that is going out is when you receive a qualified lead. It’s a usage-based model that helps manage the process.

The tool is email sequencing.

Sequencing, order fulfillment and then there is API to whether it’s dropship, Shopify or through one of the distributors, just like a broker would do turnover and execution on the backend.

Who is the data nerd in your group? Which one of you decided to raise your hand and say, “I’m going to be a computer geek?”

Fortunately, a lot of us feel that way. Whether or not we possess the skillset, that is a whole another story. We have been a very strong technology lead in Walker Angel, who is a friend and wildly talented individual to help us architect these ideas and translate the user stories to easy-to-use technology. The huge thing for me in the learning is that no one wants to integrate complex processes on a day-to-day basis because if it’s too hard, everyone devolves back into Excel.

It’s inevitable. These things have to be elegant in their design. That is for smarter individuals than I to be like, “This is what we are trying to accomplish. How do we do that in today’s technology assets?” We do not have to build everything, but we have to organize and make the user experience seamless enough so that it’s not a pain in the ass for people.

Betsy, she sent me a text the other day that was a tongue-in-cheek text that she had read where the modern office worker was explaining the 97 different platforms that they were working on. That is the challenge and what you have to build in something like this is that habitual need for it. It becomes ritual. The Bloomberg analogy is the perfect one where if it becomes your dashboard or portal and it ingrains consistent behavior, then it becomes sticky. If there is a high-learning threshold, if it feels clunky, then people will abandon it. One of the questions coming up here is about the data. There is a lot of information going up there that some folks would feel sensitive to. What are you doing there to protect that?

Like any software platform, there are all sorts of anonymizing that are going on and segmentation of specific data. There is encryption to the highest degree that is possible. In short, following all those practices, there is an insane amount of data. Privacy in this day and age is more important than ever. There are also interesting and helpful things once that data has been anonymized to extract and help brands.

One of the huge benefits could be for everybody is the ability to create anonymized benchmarks and industry averages because that is so often asked. A lot of times, people pulling numbers that have been circulated and tried and true forever but are not necessarily valid.

They are dynamic. Nielsen spends IRI, they have such proprietary data. There have not been too many forms outside of that are applicable and helpful. If we have 3,000 brands on the platform and we can start categorizing average velocity rates in retailers that they are plugging in, if there is a crowdsourcing element, we can get closer and a little smarter.

Even attrition rights. One of the things that we talk a lot about is that brands sometimes trick themselves into revenue comas where they feel great because they are getting lots of new distribution. At some point, the apex of that distribution and start seeing a plateau or decline because there has been attrition. Oftentimes, there is attrition by category or attrition consistent with certain chains and so forth that would help brands make better decisions like, “This may not be the right place to go in for our product because other brands in this category have not succeeded there.”

Anytime you want to be a user story and software developer over here, you are more than welcome.

Another question that came up is you mentioned pricing and promotion. Can you talk a little bit more about how the tool helps figure that out or plan for that?

A lot of those features are down the line a little bit. You and I have both gone through promotional and trade ROI calculators that we will take a similar methodology to that where how do we distill this down to its most basic form so that it’s most helpful? The minute you start trying to establish what a promo is going to cost, it is all down to velocity. How is your thing going to perform? If you do not know that to a T, then all the refined calculations go out the window.

From the pricing calculator, because COGS is a function of the inputs here, we can help brands understand on a per unit basis what the margin profitability might look like. Think about Kroger’s promotions look different than Whole Foods’ promotions look different than Sprouts’ and having all that information already in the system so that it’s a click away. That is our goal here to help brands.

I have been doing this business for years from abacus to AI. I have seen it all. Many people have been trying to create some type of predictive analysis of how promotions are going to perform. The reality is that there are far too many moving parts to that. I will give you an example. You are running a promotion in your category, but in a completely unrelated category, there is an incredibly hot price on some key high-velocity mover.

About 20% of the shoppers shop based on those big categories and will move their entire basket over. If you are running a hot ad promotion at Sprouts in your category and then Whole Foods down the road is running a hot ad completely unrelated category, but a category of higher velocity and so forth and 20% of the baskets move over to Whole Food for this week, you do not perform well.

Conversely, you run the same thing and it’s a week that Sprouts has something going on that is big in their stores and you get those baskets and you perform exceptionally. That variability had nothing to do with you, your price point, the category, or any of that stuff. They are all extraneous forces. It has been a challenge that I would love to see somebody solve, but I do not know that it will ever be, not to mention consumer behavior. It was beautiful and sunny outside, so people blew off going to the store or there was a big snowstorm, so they did not go.

It’s very difficult to predict. It is good to look at things over time. Benchmarking will be helpful. Starting with strong unit economics and understanding that when I wind up on a shelf, I should be on a shelf at the price point I’m going to win at and back to trade spending COGS and so forth. My net contribution works for my business. If a tool can help you make that decision, then that is a massive benefit.

In this case, I also feel that way. These are big datasets. At some point, blockchain and AI and all these buzz words will make some of this more possible, but what owners need, it’s not necessarily like, “This promotion is going to cost you $25,354 as opposed to $25,585.” It’s more about, “Is this going to cost me $20,000 or $50,000? I need to know that because my capitalization depends on it.” Distilling what the most helpful for people to understand how to approach their business is.

A question here about the tool is to look at the arc of growth. The whole premise behind the promotion is that if you were to graph out your velocity and total units in any chain or one account, your graph with your promotions should not look like a rollercoaster or a bunch of hills and lumps. It should look more like a staircase where you promote and then you come off promotion and you are building base. That is in the perfect world that you are using promotion to bring in new consumers and drive trial, not using promotion to subsidize your base business and create lumpiness. Did the tool helped with understanding that or giving visibility to that at all?

On the promotional side is in the future. Everything we do, I need to believe wholeheartedly that we are having a specific point of view and that it’s helpful. Until I can do that with extreme clarity, there is no reason to overcomplicate things. What you described is incredibly important. Every brand has the responsibility because trade and promotion end up being such a high-cost driver for brands to essentially understand if this thing working or is it not working?

If it’s not building your base of usage over time, that is not working. Change up your strategy. This is so complicated because distributors have their agenda and retailers have their agenda. It’s unfortunately not just about what is the best thing to sell the most amount of product. That is not the world in which we live, but understanding the nuance and empowering the founder to understand a little bit more is a major step forward for everyone.

Another question is around how you are getting feedback from brands as they use this tool. I’m sure you are listening to them and want that. That is probably a big reason why you are putting this out in the universe, not behind a paywall and trying to get users.

It’s also the acknowledgment. It’s all product-led growth. The product has to speak for itself before we take a dime. We are doing webinars, we are reaching out directly and we have two product managers on the team that are engaging with customers. We do want to know what is helpful and not. How do we help you get started? The first thing you need to do is input your product information so that you then can do pricing and forecasting.

How do we help take brands through that? Some of this stuff might not be intuitive. We have all sorts of learning integrations, pop-ups, and video tutorials on the thing. It’s an intuitive question because no matter how straightforward you think your software is, people always need training, help, assistance, and feedback loops. That is part of it. That is an important part of our process.

You described entrepreneurialism. We are all consistently taking feedback, refining, and iterating. This question is going to take us slightly off-topic a bit, but given your perspective, it’s important to ask and hear what you are seeing. Your take on all the stuff that is going on with supply chain challenges and labor issues from the perspective of your team as your team supports so many brands on that aspect of your business. What are you seeing? Any coaching, advice, and light at the end of the tunnel?

The murmur is that 2022 is going to continue to have supply chain challenges, maybe alleviation in mid-2023. That is generalization and hearsay, but that is probably accurate. We see it all the time. We do a lot of rapid innovation and commercialization launching brand work. Co-packer, staffing issues, line time, bigger companies buying up, there is a huge consolidation effort in the co-packing world from private equity to larger co-packer networks themselves. That is going to impact things. From a recommendation, it’s planning and flexibility. Some brands will come to us and say, “We are looking at a 12-inch glass with a 200-millimeter lip.”

That thing might not be available, so you have to be flexible in what form factors you are choosing, product launching, or when you are going to product launch. I do not want to be on a soapbox here or state anything too obvious, but it’s a difficult time. Extending networks and broadening your reach is important because if you are looking for chicory root fiber, most of that has already been commissioned for the next two years, so you have to get scrappy about negotiation and finding partnerships with other brands. It is an environment where communication and partnership have never been more important.

Reading between the lines of your advice, the other is this industry and the one thing that is consistent and constant is that you are going to be forced as an entrepreneur to make trade-off decisions. Maybe now more so than ever, you are going to be confronting those. That might be calling a SKU that is not performing or too difficult to make or source. It could be walking away from a business that you want, but you cannot support it fully. You have to think through those things. I do not see a significant lessening of this. I’m anything but clairvoyant in the near term. 2023 is a reasonable bit of optimism. If that is the case, then be smart about it and cautious about it, stress testing your business.

“What if I cannot get these supplies? What if I cannot get line time? What if I cannot get my product on a container or get the container into a port?” Try to think through the answers to those. An NFL coach has a play, someone in their playbook for thirteen seconds left against Buffalo and trying to get down to score. They may never have to call that play, but it’s a whole lot better to have that play in the playbook if that situation comes up than to try to come up with one on the fly.

This is becoming at least more visceral to me. Perhaps to the entrepreneurial community, this is a long game. There are so few cases in which you are flipping a business in two years and making a bunch of money. Once you get into that mentality and you realize the thing that you are doing now is not the thing that is going to carry you to success in a year or two, there is always iteration, innovation, supply chain, freight management, in everything. It’s always evolving for everyone. It takes a long time to achieve the perfect product-market fit if you ever do. That notion is hard, myself included, to understand as an entrepreneur. This is going to take time to build something that is a time-tested, resilient, high growth, and meaningful.

That is the reality of this business. They are going to be a lot more tardigrades than there are going to be unicorns. They are going to be a lot more brands that had to figure out how to be nimble, capital-efficient, and resilient to get through. You said something that I could not agree with more. You mentioned the word innovation around things like supply chain and product development. As entrepreneurs, we leave innovation to the front end of our business, marketing, brand, even the product itself.

We are not leaning into innovation around the capital, supply chain, and sales process. The brands that are truly bucking the norm that are challenging those things, they are the ones moving up to the front of the line. They are driving innovation on the back end of their business just as much as they are driving innovation on the front end of their business.

We are in the technology age of CPG. You have to embrace all of it because there is so much optionality. You have to be smart about it from financing to supply chain to freight management to warehouse management systems to everything. Finally, we are getting a lot of money flowing toward that and a lot of very interesting companies that are popping up that are trying to shake up how typical distribution and 3PLS work. I love the boring stuff in the background. That is where a lot of the opportunity is. It’s a fun time.

A lot of people have a hard time seeing that, that it’s a fun time. I get why. It’s a terrifying and stressful time. That boring stuff, under the cover or under the hood, is the place to lean in, innovate, do different things and show up differently because everybody else is paying attention to the sexy side. That is where you can win. A question here going back to RodeoCPG.io, in this omnichannel environment, you have talked a lot so far about the retail component, but what about long-term functionality around alternative channels, food service, corporate campuses as well as eComm? What is the roadmap there?

It’s never been more important to understand and develop an omnichannel strategy. With Pitchable, the universe of what that database looks like can certainly include all sorts of things. Anything that ever would sell a CPG product, gyms, hotels, all of it. All of it should be sortable and filterable. That is one example. Adding a quick DTC eComm model component to the sales forecasting is something that is coming.

Foodservice, understanding how those distributors work, how they are much more operationally minded, and how volume-based pricing becomes more of a component. That is important because as brands start thinking about long-term and being tardigrades, profitability, valuable revenue streams, cash cycle, that is when omnichannel becomes more important.

Many brands have flipped the script, starting as digitally native and then bridging the divide. Where the tool can help is when you are ready to make that jump from a digital plane into the physical plane. It’s different. One of the things that we talk a lot about is that in this industry, we love to talk about channels. We talk about D2C, natural specialty, conventional, mass, and club. In the mind of the shopper, we do not wake up saying, “I’m going to start today in the D2C channel that I’m going to shop a little bit in mass and maybe later I will do drug and alternative.”

We have two primary functions as we buy. On one end of the continuum is to discover or try and the other is to replenish. There are two planes in which we do that, physical and digital. The brands that are going to win are going to find where they intersect along that continuum effectively, where they can be found, heard, and can get a reasonable return for their spend.

The point at which you reduce friction between consumer and purchasing decision. That happens in many places if you are creative.

The question here is that you are going to be at Expo West 2022 and talking about this there.

We will be there in full force. I’m excited about it. I ended up not doing fancy, which was a difficult decision, but it was more important for my wife and me to go away for a few days as we have not slept in months. Expo will be a lot of fun. I’m excited to see people, yourself included. I’m always available. My email is Zachary@RodeoCPG.com. Anybody can reach out at any time. I’m always happy to help in any way that I can.

When I saw the post about this, I reached out and said, “You have to come on.” This business is so damn hard. Anytime we can have a tool chest, and even if that tool chest is iterative and growing, having things at our disposal to make better decisions, to see things with more clarity, to be more predictive about our business is so important and such a highly challenging and competitive space. I would encourage everybody to lean in, try it, use it and see if this makes you a better business. It will. I wanted to make sure that those reading were aware of it. For those who do try it, I’m sure you want to hear about it. I would be interested as well. I love to hear people’s feedback on it.

We will listen that we are all ears. We are students of this, as much as anybody else. We are always learning all the time. That feedback is critical to building the fame that our community deserves.

Thanks for doing it. Thanks for joining me. Any last parting words of wisdom that you want to share with those reading?

I hope everyone is staying safe. I’m excited to interact with people in person at Expo. I’m always happy to be helpful if I can. What Elliot does is incredibly important. This is a representation of Elliott and I have overlapped on brands. Sometimes we do the same stuff, but ultimately, we are trying to be stewards of a much broader industry. That confluence or partnership is a testament to the industry that we have all chosen to work in. That is one of our greatest strengths.

What makes this industry special is that it’s hard to find competitors. There are overlaps, but it’s everybody trying to make sure their success. That is nice. I spent plenty of years as a corporate hack. That is not the same environment where people are wanting to step on your fingers and kicking your ass. Thanks for joining. Go get some rest if you can. We were talking before about the joys of being parents of young children versus the joys of being grandparents of young grandchildren. I got the better of the two deals. I will be curious to hear everyone’s feedback. Thanks for joining.

Important Links

• Tia Lupita

• Wefunder

• Sprouts

• Rodeo CPG

• Pitchable

• Bloomberg Terminal

• Ampla

• Rabobank

• Faire

• Zachary@RodeoCPG.com

About Zachary DeAngelo

From instant quinoa cereal, to wild and healthy kid snacks, natural pet products, and fruit and nut butters, it has become clear to me that my passion is helping exclamation-worthy brands in the natural food/bev/HBC space. I have made it my mission to build an action-based ecosystem that offers practical assistance to start ups.

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