00:18:36 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:18:36] S1: Yeah. And, I mean, that's that's really, like, impressive, especially with, I think, the competition around you. So how exactly do you navigate, you know, like, the the different, like, competitive landscape over the years? Because I assume that to the size you get, you've also, like, received acquisition offers along the way. So can you maybe, like, walk us through, you know, like, the the different phases of the business and why, you know, like, you decided that this is the business you want to focus on and where you wanna stay and not just sell it and do something else?
00:19:13 · Pete Maldonado
[00:19:13] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'll start off, like, like, phases of the business. Obviously, it started as direct to consumer for four years. And then in in twenty twenty sixteen, we'd still had no ambition whatsoever to go into retail. And then Trader Joe's reached out to us, and they wanted to put the product in because we were a Whole30 approved product. Right? And they were trying to... And, anyway, so they they put us in as a branded item. Incredibly fortunate. Trader Joe's is still to this day one of our favorite retailers to ever work with. I mean, they gave us a shot when no one never heard of us. Right? But they they also... Their buyers are so incredibly smart, and they saw the writing on the wall where this trend was going even even more so than we did, and it was our own product. Right? Wasn't that... That's crazy just to to see that. But going from there, we... What we did from there is, like, the opposite of what most brands would do and also opposite of what... Even we had some advisers early on that we used to work with. We don't talk to them anymore because they had nothing but bad advice, but they... But the advice they were giving us was you need to use this. Yeah. You have millions of people trying the product. You need to use this momentum to springboard and launch into other retailers and other channels. But Rashid and I were looking at this and we're like, we are also so fortunate to be brought into Trader Joe's one. That's like a that's a like a holy grail, you know, retailer. They brought us in as a branded item. Why would we even risk that? Why do we we would not just try to build that relationship and be the best possible Trader Joe's vendor we ever could be? And so we did that for over a year and focused a 100% of our time. We were two guys, by the way. Two people running this business who were using and leveraging third parties, but but this was... It was us. And so we didn't even have the bandwidth to do anything else after this. So that was for the next year. And then we started after that thinking about, okay, how can we, you know, test and get into other retailers? We found from there, it was the obvious next step would be, like, to find people at... Yeah. Our product would resonate with, and they're already buying our product usually through our website.
00:21:28 · Pete Maldonado
And so that was like, you know, the Whole Foods and Sprouts of the world and really the natural channel. And... But we... But every step of the way, we've been very slow and methodical, and we always think about going deep, and we wanna own that relationship. And before we allowed ourselves to go and approach the next retailer, we wanna make sure we became number one in the retailers we were at. And so, yeah, that's been the strategy, and it's still the strategy to this day. And if you think about it, like, we're in over 50... We have 50,000 TDPs or or points of of distribution. Right? And we're... Or... And we're still not in convenience stores. So if you think about, like, the the incumbents in this space that we we compete with, like the Jack Link's and Slim Jim's of the world, about half of their revenue comes from convenience stores. We are just now getting into them. And so we have a ton of white space. We also know, like, we're still little guys compared to them. Quickly approaching them, though. We're about the same size. They're very close to Slim Jim's now. But we also know, like, those guys have very deep pockets. They're... You know, especially ConAgra's got, like, they're a big multibillion dollar publicly traded company. They could spend a lot of money on marketing and buying shelf space and all those things. And, like, we just don't wanna compete and don't wanna go head to head with those guys. So, yeah, we're we're right now still working on building up brand awareness to a point where we feel incredibly comfortable going into the convenience stores. And we know velocities are gonna be second to none. We don't wanna go in and be number number two. We just won't do it. We wanna go in and make sure we have a strategy to be number one, and it's gotta happen very quickly.
00:23:14 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:23:14] S1: What would you say was the best, like, marketing action that you did to build such a strong brand awareness in The US?
00:23:25 · Pete Maldonado
[00:23:25] S0: Early on, it was obviously the... It was the the influencer thing. Right? And then and then from there, it was it was honestly, like, social media for us was, like, such a game changer because it's free, and I I just needed to have, like, decent content. But I think spending the time to build a community and having that direct relationship. And so I'll give you a... For instance. So I I personally answered every single customer service email that came in up until, I think, 2018, which I I think we were probably doing, like, 30 or $40,000,000 in revenue. And even when we started hiring a team, I was, like, so, you know, hesitant to even pass that job off to anybody. And the reason being is it was twofold. I mean, one, I I loved having that direct relationship so I could hear directly from the consumers and get that feedback and understand what they're looking for. So I have an incredible understanding and a very deep understanding of what our customers want and why they're our customers and how to keep them there. But it was also... I I think for me, it was, you know, at that direct relationship, I want them to under... It's gotta go both ways. That's... Now they're... They just... They understand that we're we're humanized. We're not just some brand. We're we're people that they're buying from, and people buy from people. You know this. Right? And so it's it's... You know, I wanted them to never forget that. So we had that personal touch every step of the way. So that for us was like... That was the the foundation of how we built Chomps, and we haven't really lost that. Now that we've been scaling the team, we have a lot more people to be able to reach out to people and keep those touch points open. It's really tough to do as we're getting we're getting so scaled now to have that direct relationship, but but that's why. It's actually funny. I'll give you another story, actually. So we we had no money, obviously. I couldn't compete with any of these other snack brands on marketing or any of that stuff. Couldn't really pay, you know, so... You know, the social media influencers to to talk about it. Was like, give them some product, and that was about it. But I was like, okay. What could we do that costs us nothing that is like a service or an experience that these people will never never expect? If you emailed to chomps...
00:25:36 · Pete Maldonado, Guillaume Moubeche
To to our team@chomps.com, back then it was team at go chomps, so we couldn't afford that that URL yet. But they... Within seconds, you would have a a response from me. And if I got somebody to say back to me, oh my god. That is the fastest email I've ever had back from a brand in my life. I would actually save that and bookmark it, I put it in its own folder. And that's how I would grade myself. And and so I'm telling you, man, like, little things like that as a little brand, like, people remembered that. And they're like, what a great service. What what great service. Like, and you... All the comments you would see in reviews were always like, oh my gosh. What great service. What great service. And so that to us was like, really onto something here. Like, we need to be able to scale that. How do you find that and scale it? Because I would compare our reviews to other peep... Other brands' reviews. This is like Amazon was already picking up, and so I could see all the... And, like, it's all about service, quality, like, until... And mentioning people by name that worked for Chomps. And so it was like, let's never lose that. [00:26:39] S1: What were people asking the the most about, like, in customer service?