Stephanie Lind Of Elohi Strategic Advisors On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand

An Interview With Martita Mestey

Solve a real consumer problem or need. We didn’t need New Coke. Don’t create New Coke.

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 Stephanie Lind.

Stephanie Lind founded ESA (Elohi Strategic Advisors) in 2015. Though best known for leading the global sales initiatives for Impossible Foods during its 2018 break-out year, Stephanie spent 20+ years working for food and beverage companies — large and small, private equity and publicly held — including PepsiCo, Sysco, and Kerry. Her cross-functional experience in sales, marketing, and supply chain; coupled with her cross-channel experience in retail, foodservice and ingredient (industrial) channels, gives her a unique perspective on the food industry.

With a team of over forty sales, marketing, insights, culinary, product development and supply chain professionals, ESA provides expert support and strategic guidance, precisely when brands need it. Focused on empowering companies to pioneer, develop, innovate, and accelerate in the food & beverage industry, ESA specializes in taking new businesses, new products, and new segment expansions from zero to momentum.

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”?

My first job in the food and beverage industry, selling Girl Scout cookies, was a telling one.

My mom owned her own business, in sales. She insisted I make the cookie sales myself, by picking up the phone and calling, with an old-school script. I managed delivery of my orders, either by delivering on foot or by coordinating a ride with her. And I ensured the dollars brought in coordinated with the cookies I delivered.

The lessons I learned:

• Have a plan — also known as a sales strategy.
• Have a script and be prepared to go off-script when necessary.
• Have a goal and work to meet it.
• Selling isn’t the end of the transaction — you have to actually get paid.

Learning those lessons and experiencing that success helped me know where I needed to go when I began my career. In some ways I’m still that kid selling Girl Scout cookies and helping companies apply the same lessons I learned way back then.

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?

I spent years working for major food and beverage companies, with an inside view to the ways innovation can get lost or fail to succeed. I realized I could use the outside-the-box, disruptive traits that helped me land jobs with those companies to lead innovation or new product launches anywhere. I love the beginnings; I thrive in the first twelve to twenty-four months.

Regardless of a company’s size or age, it’s hard to go from zero to momentum, and it’s my favorite part of the journey. I realized I loved the opportunity to take a clean sheet of paper and craft the road map to launch and scale a business. I loved rethinking which products were sold, how pricing was architected. Sometimes it meant creating the sales story from scratch. Regardless, if it required taking a step back to view the bigger picture and then getting up close to the painting to put the pieces in place, I was happy, happy, happy.

What inspired you to create Elohi:

I lost a job for one of those major food companies. I took a deep breath and had the ah-ha realization I just mentioned. I knew I wanted to do work I felt good about, and to make a positive difference in the world.

I could see the benefits and strengths of the structures and procedures that established companies follow. But I knew I belonged in bringing innovation from strategy through implementation and execution.

I attended Expo West and had the sense that I belonged with these entrepreneurs who were working on products that could revolutionize the ways we eat and change the world for the better. Many of them needed exactly the expertise I had to offer — launching and scaling products, and helping them move to revenue generation.

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?

When I first started the company, I had an opportunity to speak to my mother’s Rotary Club. She and my dad owned an organic farm at that point, with an orchard, bee hives, red wattle hogs, a herd of goats and hundreds of laying hens. The members of her Rotary Club included commodity crop farmers, livestock farmers, and coal miners, most of them in their sixties and seventies.

I prepared a very careful presentation about the impact of our food system on the environment, the implications of population growth, and the surge in plant-based diets and (what we now call) regenerative agriculture.

I’d come to alternative proteins out of my concern about the environment, but those concerns sincerely puzzled my audience. Just as I started to feel like we’d begun to talk past one another, I asked whether any of them had a family member with a dietary restriction — someone whose diet had to be accommodated at the Thanksgiving dinner table, for instance.

The room pretty much exploded with conversation and examples. One gentleman who’d actually been a little adversarial talked about the ways he used turmeric to help control a health condition, and about his doctor having warned him to limit his red meat. His wife talked about adding a dish to the table for their grandson, who wouldn’t eat the Thanksgiving turkey. The conversation came around to a sort of consensus, but from lots of different directions.

The experience reminded me that people come to products, especially in the arena where I work, from different perspectives and with different filters. Regardless of whether they’re motivated by their own health, by animal welfare, or by environmental concerns, everyone can come together with a common solution. None of those motivations is better or worse than the others, and they all deserve to be addressed.

The funny part of that presentation was that I showed up at the luncheon with a ginormous jackfruit. If you’ve never seen a jackfruit, imagine a twenty-five-pound fruit, shaped like a watermelon but prickly on the outside.

The room was enthralled with it. I auctioned it off because the septuagenarians wanted to know how I planned to cook it and I had no intention of schlepping that huge thing back home.

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?

• My mom loves it!
  This is not market research. Start with the best product you can make, pay for honest opinions and suggestions from disinterested people, and then make your product better. Use professional data research resources for this — a neighborhood party isn’t research.
• Hire people, so you can focus on your role.
  Whether you’re a person with a great cookie recipe or a food scientist with a new protein source, do you have the business experience to set your company up with the strategy and rigor it needs? Are you the best person to market or sell your product?
• Let go of it.
  Founders often have a different skill set and different temperaments than CEOs. The person who scans the horizon for the next opportunity likely won’t also be the best person to keep the company putting one foot in front of the other.

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

• Know what you want to do. Do you want to change the world? Grow a business and sell it? Pass a company on as a legacy? Different goals will require very different implementations, so know which goal matters most to you.
• Don’t create a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Read that again.
• Slow down to go fast. Have 6–12 months of living expenses set aside, so that personal financial desperation won’t influence decisions you make for your business.
• You only launch once. Be ready to deliver on any promises you make. If you can’t follow through on those initial opportunities, business will move on to the next new product.

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?

I founded ESA with a “more cowboy than corporate” attitude because we understand the dilemmas founders face. Each member of our executive team has owned a business, so we’ve been there.

Know thyself. Honest self-assessment will help you know which are your superpowers and which superpowers belong to other people. Then focus your energies on the things you do well and hire people whose superpowers complement yours.

That may mean that as a visionary founder, your first hire is a CEO who can execute. You may need to hand the reins to someone else for the day-to-day, and that loss of control can be challenging. Many times, though, the business benefits from having one person who’s watching the road in front of it and another who’s scanning the horizon.

Hire help with strategy. Hire help with research and data insights. Hire marketing help, hire sales help and make sure they work together. Hire people to do things you can’t do — and you can’t do everything.

For heaven’s sake, hire an attorney. Hire an accountant. DIY in those areas can lead to problems — like jail! — that more than justify the costs.

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?

I believe in hiring help at the beginning so much that I founded a company to do just that. We excel at supporting companies as they set in motion those initial tasks and move innovation out of imagination and into the world.

We help companies navigate the foodservice (restaurants and other food-away-from-home venues) channel of the food and beverage industry, but the same principles apply to any business that’s just getting started or that’s expanding into new whitespace.

You need a great idea, but in some ways that’s the easy part.

• Your company will need a solid business strategy and a roadmap.
• It’ll need legal and accounting help to take care of regulatory, governmental, and intellectual property issues.
• Then it’ll need to execute and generate revenue. That’s when things get complicated: supply chain, manufacturing, distribution, marketing and sales.

The right consultant or team of consultants can help you meet each of those needs.

We use walking into a maze as an analogy. Founders can wander around alone inside the maze, looking for success, but that’s often expensive and inefficient. Consultants who know the maze can help new companies avoid unnecessary delays, missteps and expenses — the dead-ends and detours that can frustrate efforts to build momentum.

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

There’s no single answer to this. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

Bootstrapping usually builds rigor and financial discipline, and forces tough choices that keep the company’s goals in sharp focus. Bootstrapped companies understand the importance of generating revenue. On the other hand, limited resources can slow or limit initial growth.

To mix our metaphors a little, bootstrapping keeps companies focused on finding the way to success at the center of the maze, but limited funding can mean they run out of energy before they reach it.

Venture capital can accelerate initial growth and ensure there’s plenty of energy but doesn’t necessarily come with the direction and discipline companies need. Investors may even have goals at odds with the company’s goals.

Plenty of investor money can make it easy for companies to wander around inside the maze, rather than focusing on success — generating revenue and addressing the company’s mission.

Again, knowing what you want — changing the world, scaling to sell, leaving a legacy — will help you determine the best way to start. Answering those first hard questions will make the decisions that come after them easier.

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?

These are great examples of exactly the kinds of knowledge gaps companies might find that consultants can help fill.

In our industry, for instance, a food brand might launch in retail, foodservice or as an ingredient. It might begin in one, two or all three of those at the same time, but the launches will all differ from one another.

Just think of the different target markets for each of those channels. For retail, you’re selling to individual consumers. Let’s say you’re a cheese company. You’ll market directly to the consumer, via your packaging, advertisements, and building your product brand. You want people to look for your brand of cheese at the grocery store and choose it over other brands of cheese next to it in the dairy aisle.

For foodservice, you’re selling to restaurants, convenience stores, college and university dining services, and other away-from-home dining venues. You’re marketing to chefs, managers and buying agents, and helping them build their brand. The logo on the box doesn’t matter, because the person who eats your cheese will think of it — if they think of it at all — as the cheese on the great burger they had at that foodservice operation.

For industrial or ingredients, you’re selling to manufacturers. You’re marketing your cheese, in this case, as a topping for someone else’s pizza or as part of their frozen dinner, and again, your brand certainly won’t appear anywhere on the product packaging. The person who eats that pizza likely won’t have any idea of your product’s name.

Each of those channels requires entirely different methods. Manufacturing and packaging will differ, supply chain will differ, distribution will differ, marketing and sales will differ. Data collection, tracking sales and making business decisions will differ. Many of our clients have started out in retail and may have decades of success in that channel. They recognize, though, that expanding into foodservice requires a whole different set of skills.

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?

1. Solve a real consumer problem or need. We didn’t need New Coke. Don’t create New Coke.
2. Hire the help you need to stay out of jail. Don’t mess around with legal or accounting unless you’re a lawyer or an accountant. Build your company on solid ground by tending to legal documentation and questions and establishing accounting and bookkeeping practices from the very beginning.
3. Hire the help you need to get where you want to go. Consultants can help you design the strategic roadmap you need to take your company to financial success and to guide it toward the goals that matter to you. Strategy keeps your company focused, measured and accountable.
4. Hire the help you need to make the right first impression. You only get to launch once, so make sure you’re ready to ship whatever you show, that your marketing targets the right audience, that sales teams are in place and ready to hit the ground running. Choose the right manufacturing, packaging, logistics and other partnerships, regardless of your channel, and make sure they’re the right ones for your channel.
5. Hire the help you need, where you need it. Look for ways around hiring full-time headcount in areas where your needs will likely change. The team you need for moving from zero during the first 12–18 months will likely differ from the momentum team you need after that. Avoid the “right-sizing” we’ve heard about recently from so many companies by hiring drop-in team members with expertise in launching new products.

In other words, decide where you want to go, make sure there’s a reason to go there, and then bring in a team that can help make sure you get there.

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

For many founders, creativity and ideas come easily, so choosing the right product comes first. Unbiased product testing, user surveys and data can help eliminate the products or ideas that might fall flat.

Investing in the right research at the beginning will answer questions, set the correct course, and reduce costly corrections after production and distribution begin.

Then market and message to address the proper target market, with your buyers’ interests in mind. In our industry, a restaurant owner’s or other foodservice operator’s interests aren’t exactly the same as a grocery store shopper’s interests.

Finally, live up to your promises. Regardless of industry, people love products that do what they say they’re going to do. In food and beverage, make a product that tastes good, and then attend to the logistics of manufacturing, distribution and sales so that customers — whether retail consumers or foodservice operators — can count on getting it.

How have you used your success to make the world a better place?

I’m fortunate to work in an industry and with companies and brands that strive to bring people together around food and community. As a company, ESA can choose clients who work on meaningful innovations, and I, personally, can invest in emerging brands and partnerships that align with my sustainability and social responsibility values.

I also lead a company where I’d be glad to be employed. We offer competitive pay, generous benefits packages, intentional inclusivity policies, and significant time off. Creating that kind of work environment enables us to hire team members at the tops of their games, and to support them in doing their best work once they’re hired. As a result, our clients receive industry-leading service. Everybody wins.

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’d create a movement around providing worldwide nutrition.

In developed nations, we waste an appalling amount of food, while dying of illnesses that could be improved by more nutritious diets. We have an abundance of food; so much, in fact, that we make less-than-ideal choices about which foods and how much of them to eat.

In developing nations, an equally appalling amount of food goes bad because of poor logistics like road disrepair, poor transportation, and lack of refrigeration and proper storage.

As a result, people suffer, both physically and mentally — young people grow up without the nutrition they need to fully develop, while older people lose agency and autonomy.

I’d inspire a worldwide movement to address the ways our food economy addresses the fundamental human right — and our moral obligation — to affordable, sustainably-produced, nutritious food.

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