Shelf to Scale

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...

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...