Shelf to Scale

A $4M company finished the year with $748 in the bank. A 100-store retail win would have run another brand out of cash in 5 weeks. Fractional CFO Scotty Palmer breaks down why profitable CPG brands run out of cash, and the numbers to fix first. Scotty Palmer is a CPA and fractional CFO who works with food and beverage brands, including a hot sauce brand, distilleries and breweries. His last corpor...

Alice Grey waited 16 hours for chocolate to come out of a 20K machine. It never did. Here's how she fixed it, got into Whole Foods and 140 stores, and why her first hire tripled the business. Alice Grey is the founder of Mindful Monk, dark chocolate squares sweetened with monk fruit juice concentrate and sold in the fridge section. She started making them in her kitchen in 2018 while pregnant...

There’s a $200 Amazon program that gets 30 brutally honest strangers to review your product before you commit to a manufacturer’s MOQs. Most founders have never heard of it used this way. Shahnawaz Sheikh swears by it, and his own brand went from a website contact-form inquiry to every SKU in every Goodness Me store. Shahnawaz Sheikh built and exited Mommy Knows Best to a venture capital firm, spe...

Being in Whole Foods won't get your product into an ethnic grocery store. Aaqib Usmani, CEO at Tasteport, explains what actually does. How do CPG brands sell to ethnic and independent grocers, and why are those stores losing $210K in profit a year per location? Aaqib works with the international grocers that serve North America's Asian, Latin and African communities, and his platform holds a catal...

Yousuf Ahmed left Goldman Sachs to turn leftover oat milk pulp and corn grits into a better-for-you Cheetos. Why did his first product, a $15 cookie sandwich, have to die before B-Sides could work? B-Sides makes upcycled crunch puffs from food manufacturing byproducts that would otherwise be thrown out. Before that, Yousuf launched a premium pastry line in 25 NYC locations. He calls it "very...

Jim Kavanagh spent 49 years in Canadian grocery as a Sobeys and Metro category manager, a distributor, and now a food broker. He explains what getting on shelf actually costs. In this episode: - Why a $30,000 listing fee can be the wrong move in year one, and what to take instead. - What a category manager is thinking the moment you sit down: what am I removing for you? - Off-invoice programs, fre...

He was in 200 stores with pints. He killed the entire product line and went to 700. The idea that did it came from his sister, talking about her toddler's baby food. Sam Rose founded Rosebud Ice Cream and spent two years making every single pint by hand. Wake at 5am, teach boxing, drive from Denver to Longmont, make ice cream from 2pm to 2am, then deliver to Whole Foods before they stop receiv...

Matthew Kubick has run tens of thousands of in-store CPG demos since 2015, and he says a profitable demo can still be a failed one. Here is how he reads the numbers. In this episode:- Why he tells brands to take a loss on every unit sold at a demo- The metric that tells you whether the problem is your rep, your price, or your product- Costco roadshows: what six figures in four days actually costs...

She was blending cottage cheese in a rented New York commercial kitchen and meeting strangers in parks and Starbucks to hand off the dips they'd bought online. That unscalable model is exactly what got Cotto onto shelves at Fairway Market and West Side Market. Kendall Kransdorf started Cotto after health issues forced her to cut foods out of her diet and cottage cheese became her main whole fo...

One dairy trace cost this Canadian plant based brand $120,000, three months of unpaid shipments, and a public recall. PlantUp founder Aamir Malkani on getting into Sobeys, UNFI, and 1,200 retail stores across Canada. Aamir came to Canada from a textile manufacturing family in India, knew nothing about food, and cold messaged plant based protein suppliers on LinkedIn until one took a bet on him. Th...

Distributor or broker? Miki Talebi built oomé smoked tofu into Whole Foods and breaks down the CPG distribution mistake most founders make. If you think signing a distributor means your product will finally get on shelves, this episode is the correction. Miki Talebi, founder of oomé, grew a premium smoked tofu brand into Whole Foods, Save On Foods, Metro and Longos with no CPG background and a PhD...

How to choose a 3PL for your ecommerce or CPG brand from a 3PL owner who once had a fulfillment company lose his entire $1,500 order. Rahim is the founder of Get Set Prep, a Toronto 3PL fulfilling for CPG and ecommerce brands across Canada and the US. In this episode, he walks through the complete playbook for finding a fulfillment partner: when to switch from self-fulfillment to a 3PL, the 5 data...

An ice cream brand put freezers in the produce aisle, next to the bananas, and sales jumped 200% in six weeks. How does a local startup out-merchandise global brands, survive three Dragons' Den rejections, and land 1,300 stores? Yazeed Yasin co-founded NanaShake with his wife Tamara after their son's asthma ruled out dairy and every alternative on shelf made things worse. In this episode:...

David Ngo helped build North America's #1 poop bag brand. Then he bet everything on dried mango from Vietnam and hit 250 stores in 12 months. How do you scale a CPG brand when your first dollar doesn't come back for 9 months? David launched Nam Fruits in May 2025 and will be in 250+ Canadian stores including IGA, Provigo, and Metro by the end of June 2026. In this episode he breaks down th...

Costco will pull every price you've ever sold at, find the lowest, and ask for 40% under it. Here's how a beverage operator prices so that never happens. Autumn heads R&D at Gnusante (Newbies, Radiate, 52 North) without a food science degree, after a career in ballet, modeling, and scuba diving. She breaks down the real margin math of beverage, the clear-pouch sampling trick that catch...

He made ice cream out of cottage cheese. It's now headed for 1,500 stores. How do you build a frozen category that didn't exist, then get Sprouts, Whole Foods, and a 500-store retail win in your first year? Smear Case is the first and only frozen cottage cheese ice cream. Half the fat, half the calories, and the most protein of any pint on the shelf. Joe coined and trademarked the word &qu...

Arshad Bahl built Amrita Health Foods into 1,500 stores across Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Wegmans. Then lost all of it overnight to a product recall. What came next changed how he thinks about everything. In this episode: - Why a product recall was actually the best thing that happened to Arshad's business- The real role of distributors in your supply chain and why it's not what most founde...

The buyer conversation most CPG founders get completely wrong — and what to say instead. Opal Rowe started Stush Patty during COVID, delivering hot patties out of her car. Today she's in Whole Foods, RABBA, and four provinces across Canada. In this episode, she breaks down exactly how she got there: two rejections from RABBA before getting in landing Whole Foods at her very first trade show th...

Paul Weedman has spent 26 years on the ground in Shenzhen sourcing products for brands from the West. He says 60–80% of Vietnam factory inputs still come from China. So what is China + 1 actually solving? In this episode, Paul breaks down the manufacturing ecosystem concept — why a factory is the smallest part of the supply chain why industrial clusters make China nearly impossible to replicate wh...

Miriam built Delicious Without Gluten from her basement to coast-to-coast distribution, an 8-year Boston Pizza contract, and a Wegmans pretzel that their own buyers couldn't tell was gluten-free. In this episode: Why the word "gluten-free" killed her Costco demo sales (and what she said instead) How a distributor exclusivity blocked her from Metro for years, and why she's still s...

Peanut butter is down 30% a year. Pistachio butter is up 500%. Utsab Roychowdhury and his partner quit investment banking to bet on the gap. In four months he went from a blender in his New York apartment to live on Amazon. Two-person team. No mass retail. $20 a jar. Sold out for two months straight. This conversation breaks down the exact moves: how he found a co-packer in 20 calls why he turned...

David, 21 years old, just built three full UGC ad campaigns for Olipop, Feastables, and Rhode in under an hour. No creators. No studio. Just one product image and an AI prompt. In this episode, you will learn: Why the $150 to $500 UGC creator model is officially dead The Pixar trend that's flipping AI ad strategy on its head (it works because it doesn't try to look real) How Petco Labs is...

A customer opened a bottle of Lost in the Sauce and it exploded. Fresh mangoes were fermenting inside sealed glass. Karthy pulled every bottle, went back to the drawing board, and rebuilt. Eight years later, he's sold over 100,000 bottles across retail, DTC, and farmers markets in Canada. Karthy started making sauce in 2017 after his best friend Brandon passed away. Brandon's Trinidadian f...

Daniel Carson almost deleted the email that put his cereal on the Artemis II mission. The Canadian Space Agency picked Goldy's strawberry lavender flavor and orders started pinging in during live TV interviews. This episode covers the real mechanics behind getting from a commercial kitchen to 700+ retail doors and a Walmart launch in August 2026. Daniel breaks down the CPG pricing chain most f...

She walked out of a federal prison with no money, no manufacturer, and no retail relationships. Today Comeback Snacks is in 4,500+ stores across Canada and Walmart is next. Emily O'Brien built the entire foundation of her brand from inside Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener. No internet. No laptop. Just handwritten letters, a prison library, and a business partner mailing her logo...