Robert Petrarca Of Maxine’s Heavenly: 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand

Sometimes it’s best to step down from the soap box and listen instead of scream.

As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Petrarca.

Robert is the Co-Founder and CEO of Maxine’s Heavenly and has led the organization through double digit growth for the last three consecutive years. Maxine’s, a recently venture-backed consumer goods organization in the Natural Foods space, has quickly become a category leader in the industry, propelling better-for-you snacking into the future. Robert is a two-time founder, having previously founded a nonprofit cultural arts organization in Northern California.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?

I definitely was born with entrepreneurship in my blood, although I didn’t recognize it as that. I just thought I had endless ideas about how I was going to make my family rich! On top of that, we only ever really learned about a small set of career paths (doctor, lawyer, teacher, trade). I wish someone said pretty plainly, “Hey kid, you know how you have endless ideas…well you can actually do something with that as a career.” So it took me a while to get to building businesses, but once I did, I knew I had found my calling.

I came from pretty humble lower middle class roots. I’m grateful for those roots. I was taught a lot about values and work ethic from some incredible people, including both my parents and my paternal grandmother. There was no forgiveness for not committing your full self to your work and for not respecting people (of all kinds) along the way. I had my first job delivering papers at 12 and it never really stopped from there. After my first week’s pay, I remember asking my mother for socks from the store and she said something to the effect of, “you have a job now, don’t you?” Our family even cleaned doctors offices to make ends meet. We, as kids, came along to help with the work — not for an allowance, but to make sure there was food on the table.

It was a wild ride, and I remember hating some of it, but I can’t reverse the values my upbringing instilled in me at the very core. They were real, character-building years, and I’m grateful for them.

Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?

Absolutely. Maxine’s Heavenly started very organically. My co-founder, Tim Miller, loved his mom’s cookies. They were favorites of everyone in the family, and he and his siblings would make the same recipe with their kids.

I’m good friends with his daughter, Jackie. While I was visiting with her once, he asked me if I wanted to try some of his mom’s cookies. I’m vegan, and at the time I was being careful about my gluten intake, so I told him I couldn’t. He didn’t want me to miss out on the experience, so he swapped out some of the ingredients to make it vegan. They were really good, but still full of empty calories. So we turned into this experiment where we’d swap out the ingredients for healthier ones.We fiddled with the recipe until we landed on a version that was relatively healthy, but still tasted like mom’s.

The results were so great that we decided to start a company. At the time, there weren’t any soft-baked vegan and gluten free cookies on the market — and certainly none using coconut sugar. We knew we had something really special that was rooted in a great story and so much history, so we decided to share it with the world.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

We made so many mistakes in the beginning because we had so many misconceptions about what it takes to start and successfully grow a food company. One of the biggest is not truly understanding how to make products that were shelf-stable and could withstand the distribution time it takes to ship the products to retailers and place them on grocery shelves.

After we landed on our first recipe, we were so excited because we nailed the taste with healthier ingredients. We honestly thought it was going to be so easy from there. Cut to three weeks later and the cookies were so dry and hard that you could’ve probably used them as a lethal weapon. That first big “oops” started a more than three year journey improving the formula of our super soft baked cookies to land on something with a solid shelf life that didn’t compromise on the ingredients and aligned with the values of the brand.

What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?

It’s pretty common to see brands chasing fads. Jumping on the bandwagon can be a great way to see quick growth, but it’s often a cheat for doing the hard work of understanding brand positioning and messaging. If you’re going to crutch on a fad, I think you need to ask yourself, “where do I exist in the category if this particular fad dies?”

I also think many brands underestimate the true cost of launching a food business, as well as the challenges of distribution fees and tight margins. If you don’t have cash and resources, I advise you spend a lot of time studying outside of the business and building a network of support to help avoid pitfalls.

Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?

My advice would be to get out there and start talking to people. Show your ideas to family and friends and get their feedback. Find out how often they’d use it and what they would pay for it. Talk with investors to learn about what milestones they would need you to hit before they would consider funding your company. Talk to other business owners and get advice from them. It’s all about learning fast and more importantly, building relationships.

So many people go into this business with romantic blinders on. At some point in every startup (like in relationships), the honeymoon phase ends and you start seeing your business in all its glory — the good, bad, and the ugly. If you haven’t spent time thinking two years down the road and anchoring yourself in a north star, you’re going to get disenchanted and your business will be at risk.

Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?

Starting a business isn’t for the faint of heart, and there are all types of people. So my best advice is to understand and know what type of person you are before you begin. Are you an ideas person that is not good at executing? Are you an operational executor, but you’ll need help with vision and creative marketing? Where do you fall, and consequently, who do you need around you to support your areas of weakness?

Also, it goes back to the previous question. Spend some time thinking about your business through the lens of what could be the darkest or maybe even just the most monotonous day in the life of the business. Are you still happy? Do you still know you want to do this? Prepare for how you are with the high of starting something fades away.

There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?

It really depends on the product, the person who came up with it, and a million other factors. In the case of Maxine’s Heavenly, we’ve worked with lots of food scientists, but we found that no one was as dedicated to taste and ingredient quality as we were. Ultimately, most of our biggest breakthroughs were done in-house incorporating ideas from many other people.

Also, it’s about time and resources. If you don’t have the money to support development, you may be on your own. But if that’s the case, you better be sure you think you have the right skill set to bring a MVP (minimum viable product) to market. And then there is time. What’s the difference in the go-to-market timeline if someone aids on the project versus you learning and executing yourself? Because ultimately, time is money and there is a real value to moving quickly in this industry.

What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?

The answer to this question really lies in understanding what you want from the business and the type of product you have. In one sense, if you want a slow-growing legacy brand that provides you with a modest salary and grows over a generation or lifetime, then you can avoid outside capital if you have enough resources in your own network to get things off the ground (although, again, really understand how much it takes to start a food business…like, really).

If you have a dream of selling to some strategic food giant in your own lifetime, then you probably aren’t going to avoid capitalization. It’s a tough business with slim margins, supply chain hurdles, and fierce competition.

If your product is very unique, has an IP component, is a food-meets-science product, or requires highly specialized production processes, these would further support an argument for capitalization.

Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?

In general, there is one critical piece of advice: everything takes more time and money than you want it to and no one will move as quickly as you do.

With regard to patents or trademarks, find a lawyer. There’s just no way around it. And do it sooner than you want or you’ll be backtracking and likely spending more resources on it than you wanted to. A good lawyer will do a solid discovery phase, assess risks on certain patents or trademarks, and help you make up front decisions that will make this process easier and more defensible in the long run.

Ingredients: there is no single answer before you reach scale. You will be buying from everywhere in the early stages: small local distributors, local (probably expensive) suppliers, and even Costco and Amazon (yes, really). This will really depend on where you are and what you have access to without having to ship things all around the country. Critical advice here is to think long term about ingredients. Even if you can’t get the best prices now, understand how you get things more directly and more inexpensively in the future. Will this always be an expensive ingredient or is it just expensive now?

As for manufacturers, there are a few industry lists but they aren’t public. I always wondered why it seemed like co-manufacturers felt like they were hiding from producers. Start building a funnel and ask everyone you know. Or ask me if you think it’s a good fit.

Distributors, oh distributors. Start with local distributors and work your way up to the big players. You will always need to do the heavy lifting with these relationships. Don’t expect them to bring you all your business. Bring them business and make them unable to refuse carrying your products.

Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)

First, you need a really good product. To make your life easier, it needs to be one of two things: completely differentiated or better than everyone else. Like I said before, when we started, there weren’t any other soft-baked vegan, gluten-free cookies. Now there are plenty. So how do we stay better than the rest? That’s the work we do every day.

Second, you need a good team. When I tell people how many people are on our team, they think I’m lying because we’ve managed to get so much done. And that’s because I work with a bunch of rockstars. There’s no room for deadweight when you’re starting out and money is tight.

Third, you need a good story and vision. Anyone can make a Chocolate Chip cookie. We have to give people a reason to buy that cookie from us. And you have to think big. Who cares about that one chocolate chip cookie. What empire are you building? How is it changing the world? How are you a movement the world has been waiting for? If you want to just bake a cookie, stay at home in your own kitchen. You’ll be a lot happier. If you want to build a movement, then make that cookie for the world.

Fourth, you need to either be a creative problem solver, or have one on your team. There are so many issues that pop up that need to be solved quickly — some of them can truly mean the life and death of the company. On the flip side, if you aren’t thinking creatively, you can miss a lot of opportunities.

Fifth, you need a tribe. And I mean that in a bunch of different ways. You need customers who are super loyal to your brand. You need mentors that are ready to lend advice at a moment’s notice. You need investors who want to see you succeed. I have spent more hours than I care to count building a network around me and Maxine’s, and it’s been integral to our growth and survival.

Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?

Start with what you know! Create a product that you wish you had. If you really want it, there’s a good chance there are a lot of other people who wished it was a thing too.

Also, be relentless about your own standards. We live by that. We almost drive ourselves mad making the product better every day.

Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

Growing a business and being a good steward to the world can often be at odds with each other. We’ve always been big believers in the idea that a triple bottom line (social, environmental, and financial) is the best way to do business. So much so, that it’s one of our core values.

While we continue to put ourselves on the forefront of the future of food (plant based, constantly improving on sustainable packaging, ingredients from responsible suppliers), the next best thing we can offer is a workplace that brings people together in a meaningful way.

We pride ourselves on being a highly diverse group of people with varying backgrounds. We try to acknowledge and reward everyone’s ownership of success. And we look to use that influence, as we grow, to be something different in this world. We want to inspire others to do even better than we can do today.

You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I’m really inspired by the growth of the plant-based and reducetarian movements. I’ve been vegetarian for 20+ years myself, vegan for eight. I’m one of those people that stopped eating meat cold-turkey (no pun intended) after watching a video about animal cruelty, but the climate benefits of going vegan are really compelling.

That said, the vegan movement has gone through so many iterations and the most current one is the most inspiring yet, because it’s about inclusivity — celebrating going plant-based for all sorts of reasons, from the environment, to health, to animals. In being more open to everyone’s varying journeys to some version of plant-based, it actually has grown the entire category faster than ever before. Is that a coincidence? I don’t think so. I think it’s a good lesson that we all need right now: meet people where they are and be a steward to help (NOT PUSH) them along. And have humility. None of us know everything. We could use so much more, “I don’t know, but here is what I think” in the world. Sometimes it’s best to step down from the soap box and listen instead of scream.

I hope to instill all of these philosophies into Maxine’s Heavenly. And I hope it moves our brand to greatness and allows us to build an army of people and products that make life a little, or a lot, better.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.