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?
00:26:39 · Guillaume Moubeche, Pete Maldonado
[00:26:39] S1: What were people asking the the most about, like, in customer service? [00:26:46] S0: A lot of people were were learning then about grass fed, grass finished beef. Right? How are how are the animals raised? What farms what what farms are these coming from? And so I was like, so glad you asked. And, like, I just rattle off, and I'd had all, you know, all the great answers. And then it was also about maybe specific ingredients in the product. It went on. It was like the list goes on. It's like people are now now suddenly becoming really interested in not just the macros and... Or the nutrition facts panel. It's also about the ingredients, but then seeing an ingredient isn't isn't enough. People wanna know how is it sourced. And so, again, like, that's we thrived on this stuff because I I... We built the product for... It was something that we wanted for ourselves. Right? And so we knew, like, we checked the boxes. And so we loved it. When people would grill us and ask questions, I'm like, yeah, again, so glad you asked. So glad you asked. And just give them the info, and they're like, wow. So rare to find this type of thing. Yeah. And so in the early days... Like, nothing has changed, by the way. We had not changed the product once. You know, same ingredients, same everything, and it's just... Now we're just making more of it. So... [00:27:55] S1: Oh, that's so cool. And what would you sell? Why is the biggest challenge growing to almost a billion dollar in sales?
00:28:06 · Pete Maldonado
[00:28:06] S0: Capacity and forecasting. Forecasting demand for us has been incredibly difficult. Let's put it that way. So we would... We were basically doubling year over year. So we went from 10 to 20 to 40 to somewhere around 75. Then we went to... We had, like, a weird year. It was, like, coming out of COVID, and then we got to about a little over a 100. And then things, like, ramped right back out back out of that. Then we went to two hundred, then went to four thirty, then we went to seven seven, like, a 100 something like that. And now we'll do, like, oh, next... Close to a billion. Right? Like, each year for us, when when we're do... Putting these... Setting up the the forecast and the annual contract for the year, we look at ourselves and we're like, how irresponsible of us to to, like, to think that we're gonna add a 100,000,000, 200,000,000 of top line revenue in a single year when it took us ten years to get to a 100,000,000. Right? Like, that doesn't make sense. Like, how? But, again, like, the the way that the... These these are not trends anymore. These are, cultural shifts that we're dealing with. People... Everybody is eating protein now. Protein is in every product you could possibly imagine. It's in your cereal. It's in your pretzels. It's in your... It's like, you name it. It's in your... It's in everywhere. I think where we win is that Chomps is a natural source of protein. It's where protein comes from. Like, it's like, you know, animal, you know, animal based protein. So for us, I think that we're gonna continue winning there. As people... I think there's gonna be, like, this, like what's the word? A little bit of, like, proteinification fatigue. Right? There's just too much protein and everything, and people is like, get it out get it out of my cereal. I don't want it anymore. Like, it's just... You know? So I don't know. I think when that happens, people aren't gonna stop eating protein. I think they're gonna they're gonna be really selective on the sources. And so I think that's... We will win there. But but I would say, you know, understanding those dynamics and and how incredibly powerful they are and how big these waves of demand are, we way undershot them for the couple years in a row. We've trying to... We're trying to get better about... Trying to, like, guess where demand is going to be. It's still impossible, man.