Brand Start Goes Healthy - Brand Development for Better-for-You Food and Beverage CPG Podcast

Partnering with big time personalities like Magic Johnson, Evander Holyfield, and affiliating your brand with organizations like the LA Lakers requires knowing how to get past the gatekeeper and being persistent. This is how Cory Lewis, founder and CEO of Warrior Beverages, managed to bring his brand to the radar of big shot influencers despite having no connections and get them to support his bet...

Crowdfunding is an effective way to help you address your challenges in raising investment funds to start and grow your better-for-you F&B CPG brand. But, it's not enough that you just look for a crowdfunding platform, set up your page, declare your target funding, and expect people to start flocking in. In this episode, I talked to Rachel Domb, founder & CEO of Rooted Living, who rais...

Understanding how to position your product relative to your core audience can drive results to your healthy food & beverage CPG brand. This was the experience of Sam Moore, founder and CEO of Hazlo, who made a shift with the way they positioned their product from being a drink mixer to an elixir lifestyle beverage brand. Listen to this episode to learn: 1) How to anchor your growth with produc...

Knowing when, how, and where to pivot can be a pathway to profitability for your better-for-you CPG business. And sometimes, it can mean pausing your brand for a while. This is what Ana Rodriguez, co-founder of InBite shared in her conversation with Leonard as they uncover key insights from her decades of her entrepreneurial experience as a better-for-you food & bev CPG founder. Listen to this...

Several factors contribute to the success of a better-for-you CPG food or beverage brands. It can be having a really unique product, a compelling differentiation, a branding and storytelling that rally customers, an effective marketing, an expanded distribution, among others. While these are important strategic and tactical components, there are three main principles that David Delcourt, co-founde...

Failure can be a stepping stone to lead you to where you're supposed to be and make you even more lethal at what you do. Kyle Peters is the former founder of a healthy food brand called Carter & Oak, which manufactured and sold high-protein, no sugar, frozen desserts. In this episode, he talks to Leonard about his journey of starting, building, and subsequently closing his brand and the ma...

Marketing is an important aspect of growing your healthy food and beverage business and it's not just about having ads or digital platforms. There has to be a strategy in place that is aligned with your product and your customers. In this episode, Leonard is joined by Erica Rankin, Founder of BroDough, who talks about her entrepreneurial journey and how she used a human-based marketing approac...

Midday Squares has sold millions of their functional and healthy chocolate bars. The key to their success? Understanding the importance of creating an emotional connection, offering transparency, and building trust among your customers. In this episode, Leonard talks to Jake Karls, co-founder of Midday Squares, who shares their journey from being a homemade product to scaling to a multi-million br...

Prabal Chaudhri found an unmet need in the market for chicken jerky when he saw that all products appeal mostly to men and do not have clean, healthy, and honest ingredients. This is what led him to start Brave Good Kind, a brand that offers healthy chicken jerky, bites, and bars while advocating for positivity. In this episode, he shares how branding became a core component of everything that the...

Getting your healthy food and beverage CPG product in retail is a goal for every founder. It signifies growth and readiness to scale. But, the question is, what are the steps that you should do to gain retail distribution for your healthy f&b brand? In this special episode, Leonard talks to Caroline Grace, a go-to-retail strategist where they talked about items like: 1) How do you get your pro...

Arshad Bahl started Amrita Health Foods ten years ago and has grown it into a strong and trusted healthy food brand. In this episode, he shares how he found his path to becoming an entrepreneur within the healthy food industry and his journey of growing his business. You should listen to this episode if you want to find answers to questions such as: 1) How do you grow a healthy food brand? 2) How...

Hillside Harvest is a natural hot sauce brand that competed in such a highly competitive category. Its founder, Kamaal Jarrett, talked about how he leveraged brand strategy, product positioning, and communicating a culture to establish differentiation for their products. He shared how focusing on local markets and understanding their consumers per locality and taking advantage of a retail-first st...

Ali Elliott has always been a passionate foodie who also has a strong inclination to entrepreneurship. Her business, The Farmer Foodie, started as a food blog. But when she saw a gap on the availability of delicious, healthy, and long shelf-life cashew parm, she took action to solve this problem and launch her first healthy food and beverage CPG brand called Everything Cheeze. Now, they are gearin...

Not all healthy food and beverage brands survive and thrive. Knowing when to accept the fact that your product won’t make it is not a bad thing. It’s a reality for being a start-up CPG product and it can do you better to know when to close shop than to continue with a non-thriving business. This is what Jared Kligerman shared in this episode. He is the former founder of a healthy spiced nut butter...

Climate Candy is not your typical candy product. It’s a healthy treat made from fruits and vegetables. Its founder and CEO, Amy Keller, wanted to rescue unharvested ugly produce and upcycle them into a candy product that is not only delicious but also helps address issues of climate change. Listen to this episode to learn about the importance of doing feasibility study in the healthy food and beve...

Pricklee is a healthy beverage drink made from cactus water. It's a CPG brand started by two friends who hustled to learn the complexities of starting, running, and growing a healthy beverage product. Listen to Kun Yang's story on how they overcame challenges, built a brand that resonated with the market, win an investment from Shark Tank, and hit one million dollar in sales. Learn more ab...

Brand Name is one of the most important facets of any brand and yet it is also one of the most difficult brand assets to pin down. It requires both art and science, a structured process, a myriad of techniques, and a legal support to achieve the best possible name that strategically fits your business. Rob Myerson, a professional namer for more than 15 years, a brand strategist, and author of the...

To build a global brand is a herculean task. While brand development is at the core and an integral part of it, it requires several phases and strategic considerations to move from a local, to national, and then international presence. Matt Davies, a brand strategy consultant, joins Leonard for an expanded discussion of how you bring your company to a global scale with focus on the management of m...

Leonard and Anneli dive deep on the complexities of brand strategy and why people buy and patronize products or services that are not necessarily the best in their categories. Have you ever felt deeply connected with a company? If yes, that is a by-product of an effective brand strategy. Anneli Hanson is a long-time brand strategist, an educreator, a coach at The Futur, and the founder of Happy Is...

Personal Branding is your market persona. It is the effort that you do to build a reputation on how you want others to perceive you. But why does it matter for you to have a personal brand? Shouldn’t you just focus in building a brand for your business? One key principle is that people buy from people. Whether you are an entrepreneur who is the face of your business or a key representative of your...

Internal Branding is the process of being clear about who you are and defining who you want to be as a brand. Juxtaposed to it is being intentional about building the right culture, which is a way of bringing your internal branding to life. In this episode, Michael Sonbert, founder of Rebel Culture, talks to Leonard as they both discuss the real impact of not having a firm internal brand and the d...

Story is a powerful way to relate to your customers, to convey experiences, to influence them, to build a thriving brand, and even to impact the world. Helena Merschdorf, co-founder of Tales Consulting, sits down with Leonard to discuss the art of storytelling and how businesses can harp on the power of stories to build their brands. Learn about the importance of crafting your brand story strategi...

If the brand you are building is no longer relevant or is stuck, rebranding can be a powerful tool to reexamine the path that your business should be taking and revisiting who your brand really is. Kim Poxon, rebranding specialist and founder of KRNL, joined Leonard to probe deeper the importance of rebranding, how it must be done, and why it is a powerful strategy for businesses who cannot move t...

Much has been said about branding. But what is it really? In this pilot episode for Brand Start’s special branding series, Martin Zarian, co-founder and lead strategist of Factory 39, talks to Leonard about what branding is and what it isn’t, its key principles and components, how branding impacts businesses, and why it can be a vehicle to help change the world. Factory 39 is a branding firm based...

Rebecca has a very decorated background with a master’s degree from Harvard and working in a multi-national consulting firm for many years. She left her corporate career to build a brand that aims to help migrant workers and unbanked people send money overseas more easily and more affordably. In this Brand Start episode, she tells her story of finding her north star and starting her company called...