Unit Economics

On today’s episode, I sit down with Mahsa Darabi , founder of MAHSA CHAI® , a premium chai company built around high-quality ingredients, and a powdered format designed to be easier for both consumers and cafes. What started as a personal blend Mahsa made for herself during a period of postpartum anxiety eventually became a product people in her community kept asking for, and today MAHSA CHAI® has...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Erin Forden and Maddie Nehlen , co-founders of Betty Jo’s , a small-batch, pastry-inspired ice cream brand based in Brooklyn. Betty Jo’s makes hand-packed pints built around dessert-inspired flavors, with eye-catching handmade toppings like pie lattices, buttercream, jam, and other pastry elements. The business started with small drops for friends and family, th...

On today's episode, I sit down with Sahand Dilmaghani , founder and CEO of Terra Kaffe , a company building connected, bean-to-cup espresso machines for people who want better coffee at home without relying on pods or manual barista equipment. In this conversation, we talk about how Terra Kaffe brought its first machine to market through contract manufacturing, what changed between TK-01 and T...

On today's episode, I sit down with Jamie Kim , founder of Jamie’s Farm , a premium granola company based in New York. Jamie started the business while she was at Cornell, first baking every batch herself and sourcing ingredients like butter and honey from nearby farms. Since then, Jamie’s Farm has grown into about 250 doors, including Whole Foods, Central Market, FreshDirect, Farm to People,...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Nico and Fran, co-founders of Pistakio. Pistakio makes pistachio spread built around real pistachio flavor, but the product is really built around a harder question: how do you take an ingredient that is already loved in Italy, and turn it into a pantry staple for American consumers who mostly know pistachios as a snack, a gelato flavor, or a recent Dubai chocol...

Brendan Flannery is the co-founder and CEO of RIP Cold Brew, a ready-to-drink cold brew brand built around smooth coffee, shelf-stable cans, and a more active, on-the-go use case. In this episode, we get into how Brendan and his co-founders developed the first RIP product, why making shelf-stable canned coffee taste good is harder than it looks, and why the brand leads with energy and lifestyle ra...

This episode of Unit Economics is a little different. At a CPGD dinner party hosted at Maxwell Social, I tested out a new pop-up podcast format with the help of Theorist Studios. Instead of a traditional long-form interview, founders sat down for quick, two-to-four-minute conversations answering a couple questions each. The result is a fast-moving collection of mini interviews with emerging founde...

On today's episode, I sit down with Basil Beshkov , co-founder of YUZUCO . YUZUCO is importing specialty citrus juice and makes citrus ingredients with yuzu at the center of the business. Yuzu has been used across Asia for a long time, and it's recently become more visible in the U.S. through fine dining, cocktails, bakeries, and specialty food. But YUZUCO is built around a harder question: how do...

On today's episode, I sit down with Jane Wong , co-founder of NOON . NOON is making functional mushroom gummies for focus, stress, sleep, and energy, but the product is really built around a harder question: how do you take ingredients that can feel medicinal, earthy, or unfamiliar and make them easy enough for someone to use every day? This creates a lot of hard operating questions. Gummies a...

On today's episode, I sit down with Gabriella Labi and Tonya Reznikovich , the co-founders of Gato Dates . Gato makes chocolate-covered stuffed Medjool dates using organic ingredients, premium nut butters, and a clean-label approach that makes the product feel more like a boxed chocolate than a conventional snack. What started as something Gabi made at home for friends and family quickly turne...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Matt Sims , co-founder of Courier , a performance sock company building technical socks for running, cycling, and training. I first found Courier at a boutique running store in San Francisco called Running Wylder, and they very quickly became my favorite socks, so much so that I wear them every single day. So needless to say, I was really excited to sit down wit...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Katharine Leitch , Co-Founder and COO of Esspo , a company making espresso soda in a ready-to-drink format. Espresso soda is not a new behavior. People have been mixing espresso with soda or sparkling water at home, and versions of espresso tonics have been showing up on coffee shop menus for years. What Esspo is trying to do is turn that behavior into a package...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Zoya Virani , head of growth at CPGD , one of the longest-running consumer brand discovery platforms focused on emerging CPG companies. We get into what it actually looks like to build a business around curation in consumer, including how CPGD decides which brands make it into the newsletter, what they’ve learned from operating a highly engaged founder and inves...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Clarke Pennington, founder of Lasso , a better-for-you gelatin brand built around protein and fiber. We get into what it actually takes to build a product like this from scratch, including the formulation challenges behind texture, why adding protein and fiber makes the system significantly harder to build, and how many iterations it took to land on something vi...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Tenley Fitzgerald, the creator of Yes! Apples , a consumer brand built to bring clarity and differentiation to the apple category. If you’ve ever walked into a grocery store and felt overwhelmed by the number of apple varieties, that’s exactly the problem Tenley is trying to solve. Yes! Apples is built around making the category easier to navigate, using brandin...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Saif Khawaja , founder and CEO of Shinkei Systems and Seremoni , two companies that together form a vertically integrated seafood business, where Shinkei builds robots that change how fish are handled right after they’re caught (resulting in longer shelf life and better quality) and Seremoni is the brand and standard under which that fish is sold. This was, with...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Gabe Turner, co-founder of Fjord, a floating sauna and cold plunge experience built on the water in Sausalito. In this conversation, we talk about how the business actually came together, from early experiments with a mobile sauna to navigating an 18-month permitting process across multiple agencies and ultimately building their first unit in the Bay using repur...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Noah Phillips , founder of Honey Department , a recently launched brand selling creamed honey in a tube. Honey Department started with a pretty simple observation: everyone uses honey, but almost no one thinks about the product or the brand, and it’s still mostly sold the same way it always has been. But what looked like a pretty straightforward idea quickly tur...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Brittney Cook , co-founder and CEO of Something Sweet , a frozen dessert brand built around pre-portioned, ready-to-bake brown butter cookie dough. In this conversation, we talk about what it looked like to turn a family recipe into a real CPG business with no prior food background, the challenge of scaling something as technical as brown butter without losing w...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Julia Marsh , co-founder and CEO of Sway , a materials company using seaweed to build compostable replacements for plastic packaging. In this conversation, we talk about why flexible plastic is such a difficult category to replace, how Julia went from a background in packaging design to building a company around seaweed as a feedstock, and what it actually takes...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Shay Carrillo , Founder & CEO of Madre Linen , a home goods brand focused on building a fully traceable, ethically sourced linen supply chain from the ground up. In this conversation, we talk about how the business actually came together, starting with hand-sewn napkins and an early wholesale order from Heath Ceramics that forced Shay to figure out manufactu...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Isabel Washington , Founder & CEO of Laurel's Coffee , a canned ready-to-drink latte brand built around A2 dairy. In this conversation, we talk about what led Isabel to bet on A2 milk as a core ingredient, why she saw a gap between what people are actually ordering in coffee shops and what exists on shelf, and how she went from idea to launching in Erewh...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Matt Hassett , Founder and CEO of Loftie , a consumer sleep tech company best known for its design-forward, connected alarm clock aimed at helping people use their phones less and sleep better at night. In this conversation, we talk about how the business actually got off the ground, including what it took to move from an initial concept into a physical product,...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Chelsey & Cassie Maschhoff , the co-founders of Lottie’s Meats , a company built around a simple idea: making sausage feel like a product worth rethinking. In our conversation, we talk about what they saw when they looked at the category early on, why so much of the sausage aisle felt visually dated and operationally stagnant, and how they set out to build s...

On today’s episode, I sit down with Jack Davis and Jacob Tubis , co-founders of Byte'm , a company built around a simple idea: bringing a true bakery-quality brownie to the grocery store in a bite-sized form factor. Jack and Jacob met as freshmen at American University and bonded over a shared interest in food and business. The idea for Byte'm started with Jack’s mom’s brownie recipe and a...