Hey, folks. It's Ray with Taste Radio. Right now, I am supremely honored to be sitting down with Catherine Smart, who is the founder, co-founder of Not Just Co. and the founder of an amazing podcast called Not From Concentrate. How are you, Catherine? Good to see you. I am so good. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Thanks so much for coming out. We've known each other for some time, back in the Milk Street days, from all the way back then. Yes. Milk Street is an amazing company that was founded by a guy named Christopher Kimball. who, If you know the culinary world and food TV, you've probably heard that name a number of times.
How'd you get started in the business of food and food TV? Yeah. So I finished college in 2007 from UNH, and I knew I wanted to work in food. I'd been waiting tables, but I knew that I probably didn't wanna be, like, a pirate person and working the line, even though I really loved that life.
And so I ended up at Boston University. They have this gastronomy program. I had a philosophy professor who, I went to him and I was like, "I don't know what to do. I wanna write. I wanna cook." And he's "There's this great program, and if you go for your master's degree, you can get federal loans to do it.
And so you should go, do the culinary portion, get the subsidized federal loans. And if you don't finish the master's you can always just drop out. But that'll help you make it work on the financial side." I did that. I ended up completing the program. And when I was there, I met Cheryl Julian, who was at the time the food editor at The Boston Globe.
And so she really took me under her wing. I was able to learn how to do recipe development and food styling, and then I reviewed restaurants for a long time. And then when Chris Kimball started Milk Street, when he left America's Test Kitchen, I, really raised my hand and managed to get hired as the first talent for their TV show.
So that was another great experience. I got to cook on the TV show and do some more food styling and culinary instruction, and it was there that I met Jacqueline Grady-Smith, who's my co-founder at Not Just. I cornered her in the Boston Public Market when she was six months pregnant, and I convinced her to, start this crazy sauce and dressing company that was based on just a handwritten recipe for a pasta sauce that I had.
You've done quite a bit. That was what, I think, two minutes of talking about your biography here, and it seems like you've had such an amazing experience in food, in all different areas of food between... I didn't even realize you reviewed restaurants for a time. Yeah, I wrote the Cheap Eats column for The Boston Globe
which was such an incredible experience because this was, like, the 2010s, so newspapers were a bit more vibrant. We could see the writing on the wall that things were gonna get tough, but at that point we had, budgets where I could go in multiple times anonymously, have fact-checkers, have photographers.
And we ha- I had this opportunity to spotlight, mom-and-pop independent restaurants. Oftentimes, the owners didn't speak English, or if they did, they certainly did not have the bandwidth to- have a PR team or talk about how awesome they were. And so it was such a rewarding job because you could really make a difference to these restaurants.
You would see, they'd frame the reviews and put them up in their restaurants, and I still sometimes see them, like these, like dusty, old reviews. But it's one of the favorite jobs I ever had. Yeah, if you go into some restaurants around Boston, you'll see some of those articles framed on the walls of their kitchens and their dining rooms, and it's so funny, 'cause now I'm gonna look for your byline-
in some of those articles. I'm there sometimes. Yeah. Yep. So Not Just Co, you founded in what year? So started that in 2018. At the time, both Jackie and I were at Milk Street, and I have also, I should mention, I personal cheffed my entire career on the side. As a lot of people know, food media is not supremely lucrative in most cases.
So I always maintained personal chef clients to pay the bills and just make sure that I was fine, whatever was happening with my media career. And while I was there, I developed this recipe for one family that became Not Just Pasta Sauce, which was our flagship product, and it was because this family had a farm share.
Every week, they'd get this box of veggies, and I was like, "What am I gonna do with this?" And I turned it into this 10 veggie sauce that started as a sauce for spaghetti and meatballs, but soon I was realizing oh, this is a great meal starter, and I was using it for, shakshuka, and enchiladas, and all these other things.
And so my pitch to Jackie, I had a s- one child at that point. She was pregnant with her first, was, we saw this kind of gap in the market where there's, the pasta sauce aisle felt so saturated but so sleepy, and we thought, "Okay, this is this in between of the meal kit trend," which was very big at the time.
And a traditional pasta sauce. So we started, yeah, that in 2017. As you mentioned at the top, we did shut it down last year and I'm excited. Excited is the wrong word. I think it will be really good to share that story, but it was an incredible adventure that started with literally putting sauce runs on credit cards.
The first thing I did was I cold called, I think it was Mike Schneider, or maybe it was Jeff Kleinman, and I was like, "Hey, I live in Somerville. I have this sauce. Can I come and cater a lunch for you guys?" And I just showed up with pans of food that I'd made. It was so great to meet everybody. It felt so serendipitous that you guys were so close- to where I lived. I even convinced Jeff to let me write a column about what it was like to s- be starting this company, and I had this idea that would help me attract investors and get our name out there. But it was just an amazing experience. Yeah. The company Not Just Co.
folded last year. Yeah, it's so funny the timing of everything. It was about a year ago, almost exactly, that I put out that Instagram post that was announcing we were shutting it down. We knew that things were gonna be winding down, months before that. And then because of the way paperwork and taxes and everything works it wasn't until this sort of tax season that we fully, closed the books on everything.
Yeah, it takes time to wind things down, and it's important for folks to hear the context of what you went through and that's what we're gonna talk about today, or a lot of what we're gonna be talking about today. Let's just back up for a second. At the outset of the brand, did you see it as more of a specialty foods brand?
Did you see it as a natural channel brand? Did you see it as having broad opportunities, say, ending up in a Walmart or a Target? It is funny to be here 'cause obviously in my wildest dreams I'd be sitting here now because we had some massive exit. And I would be lying if I said I didn't used to listen to Taste Radio every week and fantasize about when Jackie and I would be sitting here talking to you about our huge exit.
But soon after it folded, I also couldn't have imagined that I'm, like, really okay. That was not crying. That was like, "I choked." I'm okay. I couldn't have imagined how okay I am, and I just felt like I wanted to share that because I think a lot of founders that may be in a situation where they're thinking that they need to wind down their company can't picture a way forward or imagine it's gonna be okay.
And I'm not alone. I have met so many founders who've been through a similar situation and end up doing very well on the other side of it. So that was, like, a big part of it. And then I also just wanted to share anything that I can to make that process a bit easier or smoother if someone does find themselves in that position.
There's certainly a situation where some things you just have to go through on your own, but that's my reason for being here. But going back to the vision for the company. So what's really kinda crazy about it is when I first thought of Not Just, it was a Trojan horse. I'd been in food media for a long time.
I loved it there, but the business model was so broken. And it's really interesting now 'cause you're seeing a lot of new media startups pop up, and the Substacks and the podcasting, and there's... something is rising from the ashes. But at the time, I was sitting there at Milk Street, and I had been at The Globe, and I kept thinking "How do you create great content, and how do you subsidize that?"
And being extremely naive about how expensive, CPG is, I had this idea okay, the marketing for this sauce company that we wanna build is going to be the kind of media that you used to be able to get at newspapers and magazines. And that started out as the original sort of kernel of an idea.
The product was actually second. I was probably naive in thinking what it would take to build the product. As far as the scale of it knowing that- Creating the media side was gonna be a big piece of it to us. On the product side, I very quickly approached Jackie, my co-founder, and she was really wonderful, even though it was our first rodeo for both of us.
Being a bit more educated and savvy than I was on the business side, I remember taking a walk around by the aquarium in Boston, and we made that decision. "Okay, are we gonna bootstrap this? Are we gonna go specialty? Are we gonna be in that zone, or are we gonna, swing for the fences and hope to be in Targets across the country?"
And we knew that we were building it to sell it from day one. So what I think we couldn't have imagined was how it was gonna take everything to just get the product out there and be as successful- ... as we were in CPG, and over time, the media part of it fell away. It was something I always hoped to get back to.
And just to be clear, do you feel like it might have been a distraction to think about being a food media company and also being a CPG company? That's a very valid question, and I think it could have been in the beginning. I think I was disabused of it very quickly. Okay. I think going back, hindsight is always 20/20, and I have wondered if I didn't have those desires professionally would I have been better somehow at focusing on the CPG part of it?
I don't necessarily think that was a distraction, but I do think that maybe I wasn't 100% honest with myself about my hopes and dreams for the business. And as anyone who has a business knows, once you get started you're on this treadmill. You're on this crazy rollercoaster, treadmill, however you wanna talk about it.
And so there wasn't a ton of time to reflect on that, but looking back if we had not worried about that at all and just focused on the product and fundraising might things have gone differently? I think it's possible. I think we still had a lot of headwinds. I don't think that was the thing that, that killed us, but you never know.
A lot of founders lie after the fact when they say they weren't building to sell it. I think most founders when they start a company think about the exit. Yep. It's important to because what are you building it for? Are you building it for yourself? Is it a passion project? Is it for your kids? What is it for?
And the fact that you knew that you wanted to at some point exit I think is critical for founders. At some point, you want to see something out of the hard work that you've put into what you're building. Once you realized why you were doing it, I think then you have that foundation for, "Okay how do we do that?
How do we actually get to that place?" So the way that we started was we took our initial product, once we got it in a jar. And we did directly go to a co-packer. I knew from my time, because I also wrote a column for the Boston Globe that was just interviewing food founders. I knew that I did not want to be producing the product myself, and Jackie was in line with that.
And we pretty quickly fell into she was operations and finance and I was brand and marketing and sales. And so I went to Formaggio Kitchen because if you're in Boston, you know that it's the ma- The specialty food store ... the specialty food store maybe in the country. And even at that point, of course we had these dreams of being nationwide.
But I had this idea we need to be able to succeed in these smaller markets if we're going to take it anywhere. And then from there, it was Pemberton Farms. It was just driving and showing up at these different specialty food shops. And then pretty quickly, UNFI showed an interest, which was a blessing and a curse.
So then we started trying to target, still, trying to be smaller and build and make sure that we were going deep enough. But really targeting UNFI accounts, knowing that we had to meet that threshold. Did you reach out to UNFI or did they somehow find your brand and products? I'm trying to remember.
Knowing how tenacious we were, I'm sure we reached out to them. But both UNFI and KeHE were interested in the beginning. We said no to KeHE and worked to build with UNFI. But it was such a challenge all the time because we did take on funds, so then we had that pressure, which almost every CPG needs.
But we raised in small chunks, which is one of my big regrets because it felt like we were constantly fundraising, thinking about fundraising, running out of money. It felt very hard to get the kind of traction that we needed because we just didn't have the dollars that seemed were necessary behind us.
Let's come back to fundraising and talk about UNFI for a second, which was a gift and a curse. Yeah. I loved the people that we worked with at UNFI. The account managers were awesome. I think there is a general desire to see young brands, diverse brands succeed there. I don't doubt that from the people that we worked with.
The reality that anybody in this business knows, and I'm not just saying this because my company doesn't exist anymore, is that their business model is not built off of selling product and getting a profit off of it. People are always shocked when I explain that in companies that can afford it, there are people whose entire job is to just find the chargebacks that may or may not even be valid and fight them.
So you're dealing with the challenge of just it's a big company, it's a small margin business. There's just toughen up realities of that. But then there's also this more nefarious side that I don't think people like to talk about, which is the chargebacks, the sort of sneaky fees. And I would never say this when we were in business, but I feel like it's important for young brands to understand because we felt like we were going in eyes wide open.
Yeah. But it was still really hard when in the end, if I had to say one thing that is why we're not in business. I think there's a lot of reasons, right? But I think a lot of it is dealing with those large distributors. The chargebacks that you referenced, for founders or folks listening who may not be familiar with what you're talking about, just describe an instance of a chargeback and how it impacted- Yeah
the revenue that you thought you would be getting. Yeah, so there's two things to... There's an important distinction here. There is not being educated and understanding the valid, whether we think that they are fair or not, chargebacks, which is what you signed up for. For instance, if you go into a store and they wanna do a dollar off, they will get the product from UNFI, they will sell the product, and then you will get a bill back from UNFI because you're actually paying that dollar.
That is tough, but it's the game, and you're signing up to play it. What I think is more nefarious is there are oftentimes chargebacks that show up and you're like, "That doesn't look right." And then you go to fight it, and it turns out it wasn't right. But if you didn't have the bandwidth, the knowledge, the tenacity to fight those charges, they can add up very quickly.
So there's layers to this, and I don't have a great answer. The small distributors are doing the best they can, and they are working on small margins. So in order to get on shelf, oftentimes they have to take a bigger cut upfront. They might be taking a 27% cut, whereas UNFI might be able to say, "Hey, we're only gonna take 7," 'cause we have the sort of bargaining power.
But you're dealing with these sort of layers down the line of chargebacks and, just the way that their operation works. The gift side of UNFI is that they help you get into larger retailers. Yes. Whole Foods, most importantly. Do you feel like if you had just focused, at least for the first couple years, on making a name for yourself without a large distributor or without chasing large retailers, that you might have had a better chance?
Do you feel like there's... A- again, this is- Yeah ... this is all hypothetical. No, these are real. These are imp- this is an important postmortem- Yeah ... and I hope that I... My big wish I just hope that I come across... I hope that this is helpful information, and I also hope it doesn't come across as bitter, 'cause I truly...
Of course, when I talk about it, sometimes I feel myself getting like ugh. In general, I feel like I'm pretty clear-headed about it. And I wanna thank you for doing so. We rarely talk about- Yeah ... the negative. I think we, a lot of times, scratch the surface about the challenges and what people have faced. And a lot of times, it's a pretty similar discussion about this is a tough business and you have to pull yourself up from the ground.
Yeah. And, it's tough to fundraise and so on and so forth. But I think getting into the nitty-gritty about what went wrong- Yeah ... and identifying places where you might have- Been able to help yourself or places where it really impacted your business from a financial standpoint- ... are the things that don't necessarily get revealed unless a founder- Right
wants to talk about it. And founders rarely wanna talk about it 'cause, you said you're in a good place, which is great. Yeah. But I think a lot of folks feel embarrassed about- Sure ... the fact that, things didn't go right. And as I mentioned, at the end of the day, most startups don't work out- Yeah
the way they thought, people thought they were gonna work out. Prior to this happening, I remember seeing founders that would, quote-unquote, "fail" and then go back again. And I remember secretly thinking "Oh, my God, that's so embarrassing. Like, how could they do that?" Now that I'm through it, I don't think if I'm ever in a position to invest in a CPG company, I don't think I would invest in a first-time founder.
If you've been through hell and learned all these lessons and still want more, you're the person I actually wanna invest in. So that was a huge, that was a huge learning for me. And I would also just say because I am squarely in the food media space now, I do feel a bit liberated to talk about this in a way that I quite frankly wouldn't if I was, like, looking for my next CPG job.
I would not be comfortable talking about UNFI so bluntly if I was gonna... And who knows? I love CPG. I love the people. I love the food. I could see myself in there in some capacity at some point, but it's not my immediate life right now. So I feel a bit more liberated, good or bad, to talk freely about it.
But getting back to what went wrong, I think before I get into these individual choices, which at the end I'm happy to get into and is important, looking back, something that I see now that I couldn't before is we never truly had product market fit. I think what got us as far as we did, but worked against us as far as seeing clearly, was we had a really great product.
Our products were delicious. They were healthy. People who bought them loved them. And Jackie and I worked really hard and built great relationships. Everyone we worked with have great rapport we'd work with again. Many investors said they'd invest again. I only have one investor who's a little bit cranky that it didn't work out.
So I think that we were good enough with people and product to get us so far, but the downside of that was it obscured this truth, which was if you don't have millions of dollars, don't have a celebrity attached, if you don't have some other sort of, incredible superpower unfair advantage, succeeding in a very crowded, very moneyed category like pasta sauce is very difficult.
Yes. Every category is challenging these days because I think there's a, frankly, and I've heard this from investors, a glut of brands that have existed probably for a little bit longer than they should've. And I wonder if you look back at Najess and think, "Maybe we should've just shut it down a couple years before we did."
Yeah. At the time of, building your company, it seemed and this is my perception, is, "Oh, they're getting there. Slowly but surely, they're getting there." Yeah. But I see what you're saying about product market fit, and this is why I asked about channel strategy. 'Cause I always saw Not Just, especially the way your products were branded and designed and positioned, it always felt like this would work really well in specialty.
Yep. This would work really well in some natural retailers, not necessarily all natural retailers. But then you went into Target. Yeah. So that was investment pressure, and our own maybe unwillingness to admit where we best fit. If I did this again, and I might, that's exactly what I would do. I would not raise a ton of money.
I would go back to those specialty markets. I would do it that way. I think the trouble was we took on investment, which again, we needed to do. We were not in a financial position to bankroll this ourselves. And when we had interest from Target and we had interest from these larger retailers, understandably, our investors wanted us to go there.
And we wanted to. We wanted everyone to get their money back. We'd been working really hard. There's one thing that stands out to me maybe more than any other moment of feeling like, "Oh, we're really in trouble." So we got into 240 Targets, which was, like, a huge, incredible milestone for us, and we had very little dry powder.
We were scraping the bottom of the barrel. And our investors were so happy we were there, but no one wanted to write another check. And to be fair, we did not have traditional CPG investors. We worked with angels primarily, but nobody wanted to write another check. And so I think a couple did, but we were working with very little, 'cause as you have to have huge production runs and all of this.
So we're loading into the Targets, and another brand reaches out 'cause they wanna talk about our launch strategy and how we're gonna succeed in Target. And they start going through to me all the things that they're doing, and the shopper marketing and the end caps. And my face, I'm sure, was green because I was like, "I'm so happy for you.
I have no advice for you," because we couldn't afford to do any of that. And so understanding how much cash it takes to be on shelf is something that, I think at that point we were delusional. We were just like, "We have to make this work with what we have." And that grit bit us in the butt, because you can't succeed if you don't have any awareness, for the millionth time on this podcast, I'm gonna say something which is something that a founder told me. Getting on shelf is the easy part. Yep. Getting off shelf is really the difficult part of building a CPG brand. And yes, getting into 240 Target stores is a big moment for Not Just. But how do you get people to know it, it's there?
How do you get people to care that it's there if they see it on shelf? How do you do trial and demos? They're for many more dollars than the Good & Gather and all these other brands- Yeah ... that can discount at a way that you can't. And when I say we didn't have product market fit, like you said the product was great and people liked it, but...
And maybe I'm just cynical at this point, but- I don't think there's people running around their lives being like, "God, if only I had a better pasta sauce. My life would be better." In some places, I think yes. Yeah. I think discovery is big in some channels, in specialty- Yes ... in natural. Yes. Not necessarily in Target.
I think maybe, the Target buyers will probably claim that, yes, we wanna be a store, we wanna be a chain of discovery. We want- Yeah ... people to come in and feel like there is always something new on their shelves. But I think most people go to Target not necessarily to buy food. This is just- Yeah
Maybe the Northeast, our perception is a little bit skewed. Yeah. But if I go to Target, I'm going there for a pillowcase, totally. I'm, or some- Totally ... some paper towels or something like that. Totally. Yeah, no, channel strategy, this is actually a little bit revelatory for me 'cause I've picked apart so many things that we did wrong.
But I'm like maybe we should've thought about channel strategy a bit more. And also just with my background as a food writer and I feel very kindred to a lot of the specialty brands, buyers. I'm very in that space. And so there is some regret of did I overlook a place that we could've, succeeded?
It's hard. You said it. Your investors- Yeah ... wanted to see some progress. They eventually wanna get their money back. I've talked to founders who talk about this very candidly, which is, "We feel a lot of pressure 'cause these people gave us money." Oh my gosh. "These people gave us their money that they worked really hard for, and they wanna see something out of it.
And even though we told them it's probably possible, it's probably likely that you're gonna lose every dime"- Yeah ... they don't believe that. They wanna believe that this is gonna work out, and we picked the right people to run this brand or to start this brand and to see it through. But how much money did you end up raising and- Yeah, so we raised, over the eight years, we raised 1.7 million- Okay
in smaller chunks. And I would just say that, by far, was both the hardest part for me, like emotionally, spiritually, existentially, and our biggest downfall when you were talking about should you have shut down earlier. I had never raised money before. A lot of the folks that we raised money for were private chef clients of mine.
And even though, just like you said, we said, "You're gonna lose it," and they knew that, right? As one person said to me "Katherine, nobody writes a $25,000 check for a pasta sauce brand who's gonna be hurt if they lose it. They're doing fine." When we did finally shut down, I didn't have the capacity to go through my own grief about it because I was so distraught about my investors losing their money.
That was something I just could not fathom. I would not allow myself to believe. The business itself, by the end, I looked at it as a dog that was riddled with cancer, and you're like, "We should've put you down a long time ago. You're suffering." But it took me a really long time to come to terms with the fact that we were not gonna get their money back.
So we got into this situation where we had taken not insignificant amounts of money from some people, and- You know, we still had to keep the business running. And the other thing that I said from the beginning, and I still stand by, is by the time we were working full time, both Jackie and I took a salary.
Not a big one, and I still would get up at 4:00 in the morning and personal chef on the side so that I could, afford to live in Boston with two children. But we talk a lot, or maybe not enough, but it comes up that CPG is a relatively homogenous space. There's not been a ton of female founders.
There's a very few number of Black and brown founders especially that get funded, and we can't talk about having a more robust, diverse space if you're saying you can only do CPG, you can only start a company if you don't have to worry about paying your rent, buying groceries, paying for daycare. And so there was a situation where in order to keep trudging along, again, through the pandemic, through all of that, we still needed to pay ourselves a small salary.
We would've had more runway if that was not something that we needed to do. So I'm grateful that our investors were on board with that, but it did mean that when things were slowed down, we still needed more cash coming in. And we can pick apart my fundraising strategy and capabilities. We can blame invest- Like, however you wanna cut it, we needed more money for more time.
Was there an opportunity where you could've raised a larger amount of money? You mentioned- It didn't feel like it. No, yeah. I say I would've raised more, but the reality is I was trying to then. I was learning on the job. It was the first time I'd ever raised money. I remember the first phone call I made was to Zach D'Angelo at Rodeo- when I was like, "I really wanna do this," 'cause I'd interviewed him when he was at Little Duck for The Boston Globe. And he said, "Okay, you need to raise 3 to $400,000 just to start." And he might have said $3 million, and it was the same amount of money to me. It was so wildly out of my understanding.
Now that I'm through this, I look at investment very differently. I can think about the dollars with a lot less emotion attached to them, but I think sometimes we don't talk enough about depending on a founder's financial background, upbringing, baggage. A million dollars can mean wildly different things to different people.
And so I think I didn't swing for the fences enough in the beginning, and some of it I think also was, like, not unwise for an investor to look at a first-time founder in a crowded category and say, "No, I don't wanna write you a big check." Yeah. So I don't blame them for that. There's also the chicken and egg here, right?
You're in 240 Target stores, which gives you a story that you can sell to more investors and say, "Hey, look at all these stores that we're in. Look at the traction we're getting or might get." And that's another way to raise your next tranche of money, which I can see the pressure is just... It's such a strange pressure, right?
Because you have to support- Your launch with money, and then you have to use essentially that money to get more money. Which is just wild to think about, but not necessarily wild if you're in CPG. Yeah. You also, as you mentioned, you sold other products other than pasta sauce. Was that something- That was the distraction, that was also the distraction? Okay. It was not... The distraction was not... 'Cause I've been thinking, the media thing I wanna go back to really quickly because where I think we weren't wrong, and I actually kinda wish we'd doubled down on it more, is I am a big believer in whatever you're doing, if you're an entrepreneur, what can you do uniquely well?
What can you do better than anyone else? And I felt with my background, I can create content, which now content is huge. It was not quite as big in 2017. I can create content better than anybody else organically because I've, done TV, I've done magazines and newspaper. So that was, like, the idea for the marketing strategy.
As I mentioned, that did not go the way we wanted. But what was a distraction was our original idea, we were in the height of direct to consumer. I should've done two things differently. I should've listened to my husband when he said, "No one buys pasta sauce on Instagram," because we were looking at these D2C companies that were just buying Facebook ads and, making money hand over fist.
Meanwhile, we had a food product- ... in a glass jar that was very heavy to ship. When did your husband say that? Day one. Okay. To this day, it's one of the few things where I'm like, "Artie, you were right." It's strange that... It's strange just to think about that, 'cause I would've said the exact same thing, and then you look at a brand like Sauze, S-A-U-Z- I know
which essentially is an Instagram or started out as an Instagram pasta sauce brand. When people were buying it, they were en masse. I don't know how many people were buying it via Instagram ads. I think a lot of people were going to store. Yeah. But I could be wrong. It's the millennial or early millennial, late Gen Z brand- Yes
where people have a little bit more to spend. It feels like their own. It's g- a generational- Totally ... kind of pasta sauce brand. And they're doing an awesome job. Yeah. And obviously I'm green with envy when I look at their path. They've also raised a ton of money. That was the other part of it.
Yeah. But anyways, the other part of it was the category. Yeah. And that's where we ignore people and we shouldn't have. So our idea was, like, we want you to have this packet kinda like a CSA or like a beauty box where you can, have everything you need. So we originally had a pesto, a caramel- one salad dressing, and one pasta sauce. And it was, like, great for discovery. It was great for getting written up. We got a lot of earned media. No paid PR. It was just us pitching. But what a mess when you're talking to a buyer. We knew that we needed to be on shelf. Yeah. And they're like, "So you have five products in five different parts of the store.
You guys have no money, and you're trying to stretch everything across five categories?" That is something that we should have listened when people were telling us that was a bad idea. 'Cause again, all great products, and you have those fans who are like, "Where's this? You can't not make this." But a few hundred devoted fans does not a successful CPG company make. Again, this is hindsight, and sticking to your guns at the time was your decision. Yep. There are so many people with so many different opinions about what you should do with your company, and you have consultants who- Want to get paid Yeah Who will offer some advice or say they'll offer some advice once they get paid.
There are investors, there's retailers, there's folks in the media like me who will tell you, "This is what you should do and not do." It's hard to try to discern what advice to take or if I should just stick to my guns. In the case of just sticking to pasta sauce, okay, maybe listening to others would've been the right path.
Maybe, who knows? But were there other instances where it was difficult to figure out which advice you should take about the direction of the brand, about a particular part of your business strategy? Oh, yes. So I think, in the end, it always feels kinda like it came back to money, but through the whole thing, Jackie and I were the only two people on the payroll, and we worked together really well, but we're very different people.
She was really focused, rightly, on the finance and the operations and wanting to spend there, and I was focused on the brand and the marketing and wanting to spend there. And we're getting advice, from our own advisors, and to be honest with you, Ray, none of it was bad advice. It's just that we had no resources.
And so sometimes I think it just always felt like we were stretched, a little too thin, and it was a constant push-pull of getting operationally up to snuff. If Jackie was here right now, she has her own horror stories of, the time our co-packer had a baby temper tantrum in the parking lot and decided that he wasn't gonna do our sauce anymore 'cause a line got clogged, or the time that, the labels that we had been promised would come on right came out wrong.
So we're dealing with sort of those very basic things, and you can't have a company if your operations are not right. Meanwhile, I'm being told, "Oh, but you guys need to be working with a designer on that," and "You need to have a more robust social strategy." So I think it was... That, that was the hardest part.
I don't feel like we got a lot of bad advice, and I'm really grateful. I feel really lucky that we were able to work with so many people in a fractional way that were all just such good, talented, trustworthy people. Yeah. I'm glad to hear that you got good advice and that you had a team of advisors that could help you along the way, and I think that's really critical because when you're in those dark moments and you need someone to turn to and need someone to be honest with and say, "We're in big trouble here.
What should we do?" You don't wanna be alone. No. No. Shout out to Jamie Bortek. Jackie and I are still good friends and talk constantly, and I'm so grateful for that. Yeah. I think a lot of people go through this and, I don't know, but I think, I'm sure she would say the same thing. Jamie Bortek worked with us for a while, and he got us through both the super nitty-gritty tactical, in-the-weeds details and also just coaching us to keep going 'cause it can get really dark.
You'd also told me that there were a number of potential exits- Or at least ones that you had in discussion with people and- Oh, God, yeah ... it seems like- Just kidding. I have so much more advice. It- Listen up, guys. It seems like from what you told me- ... that these folks could have been more honest with you.
Oh my God, that is my plea to anybody who does roll-ups, who, scoops up failing companies, 'cause there's a lot of them, is be decisive, and actually just investors in general. Don't drag people along. So there did come a time after that situation happened and we knew that we had to close up shop, I was very much "We gotta just shut it down and cut our losses."
And at that point, Jackie, and this is so funny, like our relationship, there's always one who's willing to keep going. You pull each other up, which is generally an awesome thing, but can be tough at the end. I was done at that point, and she was like, "No, I think we can get our investors a little bit of money or at least wipe out all our debt if we do one of these sort of roll-up sales."
And so I did not have a lot of faith, to be honest, and we did set a date of okay, if it hasn't happened by X, then we're just shutting it down. So I would say if you are gonna go down this route, do set a date where you're just done. But what happened was six months of meetings and follow-ups, and this is so interesting, and this is so great, and in the end it was all the same, which is like, "You're too small."
And what was frustrating is we were so transparent. We were so forthcoming. We were like, "Here are our books. Here's the situation." And I will never understand the logic of these people who don't just give you a quick no. 'Cause that dragged it on, and it's every month. We were paying someone to help us wind it down.
We're having to not be able to focus on getting new full-time jobs ourselves. It's just such a tough thing, and there's no upside for the company. Maybe there is and I'm not thinking of it, but I would just say investors, give a quick no. Be merciful. Yeah. But, like us pushing it past the point of being able to save it didn't get anybody their money back, and also all of those people are okay.
This is a business. They made that choice. There were moments, there wasn't necessarily moments like that, but there were moments where I was like, "This is not what I'm supposed to be doing," at the end. To be very candid, I remember being at one trade show, and I was just desperate to get into this account.
And I remember we were like three espresso martinis deep, and it's like me and my wing man sales guy, and we are just laying it on thick. To a retail buyer. To a retail buyer. And he was eating it up, and I was "This- Yeah ... is gonna be my life?" And I love to schmooze. I love to go out. I am fine with that being a part of the job.
But I had this moment where I'm like, "This is it?" And there were a couple of those times when things were going really bad, and I felt so desperate. And I would just implore people to, listen to that gut thing, where if you're like, if you're, I'm feeling desperate and nothing is working, and I am willing to go to lengths that I wouldn't normally that feel not- It's not sitting right with my integrity and who I am as a person.
Listen to that because you exist beyond your company, and no investment and no company is worth, driving yourself. It's your life. When did you start to think about getting into podcasting again? Yeah, so it's been a funny, circuitous thing. So I knew... What did help me is that I did have this sort of other previous life in food media, and it always called to me, and it was, like, always something I knew I wanted to do in some capacity.
So when we shut things down and I was licking my wounds, I reached out to an agent at UTA who'd reached out to me about ghostwriting for some of her TikTok stars for their cookbooks. That didn't work out. Yeah, that's a whole other- we gotta pause there for a second. Yeah. Which is another just another indication of how fake social media is- Oh, yeah
for the most part. Yes. Yes. So these are huge TikTok stars, and they have a lot going on, to their credit. They have a lot going on, but she had read some of my writing and was like, "I think you'd be a great ghostwriter." Didn't end up moving forward with that, but we really connected, and she actually has an awesome whiskey brand called Boss Molly that everybody should check out.
Okay. But we stayed in touch, and so I went back to her and I was like, "Brandi I know it's probably not the right moment, but I do wanna write a book." I promise I'm getting back to the podcast, but this is all part of it. I was like, "I know it's probably not the right moment, but I really wanna write a book, and what do I need to do in this media moment with a big five publisher?
What are my odds?" And she's you should have a million followers on TikTok. If you don't, maybe you could do a single-subject book that a publisher just wants, written, like maybe a chocolate book or a kimchi book." She's "Or if you have a very specific, very sellable idea and you're the person to write it, then sure."
And as a joke, I was like, "I should write a cookbook for people with ADHD. It's so hot right now, and I was diagnosed in third grade." And I see the money signs in her eyes and then I got immediately defensive, and I was like, "No one needs that book. I'm not monetizing my trauma. This is so stupid.
I'm a generalist. This is..." And she's "Chill out. Why don't you just go write?" So I went and I wrote a proposal, and it just poured out of me. 'Cause I realized that all these things that I think of as personality quirks or, just learned experience or tricks or tips those are strategies that I have developed for my ADHD brain in the kitchen and running a business.
And I know lots of entrepreneurs have ADHD, so this might resonate with them. And so we sold that book to Penguin Random House. It comes out next year. Hugely exciting for me. A dream I've had for 20 years. What's it called? It's called Not From Concentrate. Okay. Yep. So same as your podcast. So this is a book.
And then part of my marketing plan, 'cause when you... And this is, again full circle how this was business school. Part of a book proposal, 'cause if you write a cookbook, what happens is you sell a proposal. You don't actually sell the full work. If it's a fiction book, you're selling the whole work.
And in my marketing plan, I said, "Listen, you hire people like me to write the books for your TikTok stars." I'm gonna take the advance, and I am gonna use those resources to build my platform, 'cause I don't have a million TikTok followers, and I can write my own book. And so I've poured my advance into launching a podcast, launching a Substack, and I'm really looking at it as that's my investment.
That's my startup money. So the podcast, also called Not From Concentrate, it's also about food, and we talk to different chefs and authors and neurodivergent food lovers. And depending on the week, there's more or less sort of ADHD of it all, but it's really about creativity, calming chaos, sparking creativity, and putting our attention where it matters through the lens of food.
So that's what I'm doing these days. I'm happy to say it's done pretty well. Yeah. We broke into the top five food podcasts on the Apple charts. There's no celebrity attached. I decided not to raise funds. I was going to, and then I got cold feet and said, "Screw it, I'm gonna bootstrap this time for a little while."
And it's just been, it's been a really fulfilling, crazy adventure. And if you'd told me a year ago when I was, like, sobbing on my kitchen floor about nachos I would not have believed you. I think it's really smart to get back into what you love, and food has been your life for- ... so long that sharing the passion in any capacity you could, whether it's a cookbook or a podcast, was the right thing to do.
And maybe subconsciously you knew that this was something you could fall back on. I'm making a lot of assumptions here- Yeah ... about you, Katherine. No, for sure. And I think about it a lot. And something else I wanted to share, 'cause if I'm listening to this, I can imagine many people being like good for her.
She already had this other career, and she already had this passion. What are you gonna do?" She's not here, so I wanna be careful, but my co-founder Jackie did not have that experience. She did wanna stay in the industry. She, like me, struggled for a while with what she was gonna do. And the moment she put herself out there, she's now doing consulting through Tenacious Ops is her brand.
The outpouring of people who wanna work with her, the joy. We had lunch, and she looks five years younger because she's thriving. She's helping people. She's making a good living. However you're leaving your company you have learned a lot. And once you can get through the grief and the stress and the shame, if that's a part of it you gotta be really tactical about what did I learn and how can I take those skills?
And I think seeing a career coach can be a great idea. But yeah, there's lots of paths there. And I would also say trust yourself because there were... I can think of at least four smart, well-meaning people with my best interest at heart that were like, "Katherine, do not do a podcast. That is crazy.
It's so saturated. There's no way. Bad idea. Don't do it." And I said, "I'm gonna do it," and it's going pretty well. For folks listening, check out Not From Concentrate on Apple Podcast or Spotify. It's a fantastic show, and- Maybe you'll feel some solidarity in that show in all the great things that Catherine's doing, and maybe extend your brand into food media.
Which now that I look back on it, actually, not to keep this going, but you know what? That was a good idea, actually. I wish I had doubled down on it, to be honest, 'cause you just see so many brands have their own content studios. Yeah. I swear, Ray, I felt crazy, but I saw it, and I wasn't quite able to make it happen in that capacity, but I don't think I was totally off.
I don't think you were off at all now that I'm at the, here at the very end of our conversation. Catherine was right about every damn thing. That's why I'm here. Just wanna be told that I'm right. Thank you, Ray. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Catherine
