Shelf to Scale

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...

For a month in 2025, a Dubai chocolate brand outsold Cadbury Dairy Milk in the UK . They launched just months earlier, with nine flavours, zero retailhistory, and a founder who'd failed six times before getting here. In this episode, we discuss: The distributor strategy that contradicts everything the big FMCG brands taught him and why it got Meltz to 48 countries faster What a signed distribution...

A software engineer turned e-commerce founder walks through how Claymoo scaled from $5–10K to $100K a month in under two years and why his technical background was the first thing he had to stop relying on. Matthew Wong covers:- the creative production ladder they use to test every ad before spending real time on it- the meta ad strategy that drives their growth- how manufacturing in-house became...

Rohit Kumar found a bamboo toothbrush listed only in Japanese on a website in 2011, validated it by walking into Bay Area farmers markets with physical samples, and built it into 2,000 store accounts before Colgate and Oral-B released their own versions. In 2026, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude still name his brand as the best. In this episode:• Why the early retail stores are actually the easiest...

Shelf to Scale is a podcast featuring conversations with the founders, operators, and industry leaders behind today’s growing consumer products. Each episode explores how brands expand distribution, navigate retail partnerships, and scale across new channels and markets. From emerging CPG/FMCG startups to established manufacturers, we unpack the real-world challenges of growing consumer products a...