Chris Wendling - Transforming Carbone’s Restaurant Lore Into a Premier CPG Brand

On this episode, we’re joined by Chris Wendling, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Carbone Fine Food, the fast-growing brand translating the iconic Carbone restaurant experience into the grocery aisle. Since launching in 2021, Carbone has quickly become one of the top-selling premium pasta sauce brands in America, expanding into club, mass, and specialty retailers.

Chris shares how his sales leadership background helped build marketing structure around a rapidly scaling business. We talked about the journey of implementing a formal marketing strategy, refining brand storytelling, and aligning the team around north start metrics. 

We dive into how Carbone leverages restaurant expertise to inform innovation, the thinking behind its new Italian Simmer Sauces line and the philosophy that guided the recent label refresh.

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Episode Highlights:

🍝 The story behind Carbone Fine Food’s rapid rise
📈 Building a scalable marketing structure from scratch
🤝 Lessons from leading marketing after years in sales
📊 Using restaurant data to guide retail innovation
🔥 Launching the new Italian Simmer Sauces
🎨 The strategy behind Carbone’s packaging refresh
📍 Defining and tracking true north-star metrics
👀 Emerging brand and consumer trends Chris is watching

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Table of Contents:

00:00 - Intro
00:48 - Carbone Fine Food origin story
04:11 - Implement a formal marketing strategy / structure
12:16 - Leading marketing after years in sales leadership
20:51 - Leveraging restaurant data to drive product strategy
24:42 - The Simmer Sauces lines
29:33 - Label refresh
33:30 - North star metrics
37:04 - Brand and trends Chris is watching

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Links:

Carbone Fine Food – https://www.carbonefinefood.com/ 
Follow Chris on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherwendling/ 
Follow me on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/adam-martin-steinberg/ 

For help with CPG production design - packaging and label design, product renders, POS assets, retail media assets, quick-turn sales and marketing assets and all the other work that bogs down creative teams - check out KitPrint.

Transcript

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welcome to shelf help today we're speaking with Chris Wendling EVP of marketing at Carbon Fine Food CPG brand born out of the world renowned restaurant brand carbon prior leading marketing at Carbon Chris played various sales leadership roles at carbon for a while as well as some other big name brands like once upon a Farm Plum Organics just to name a few so yeah really excited to get into it Chris just first off the listeners that that aren't that familiar with carbon which is probably a somewhat limited few quick lay of the land just in terms of the carbon group on both the the restaurant and then the CPG side and then maybe just a bit about kind of why behind the CPG line what LED the company to launch that and then and I know it's found everywhere but maybe just a few places you can get your hands on it and then we'll go from there yeah yeah thanks for that the kind introduction um Adam that was great uh yeah so we I think we gotta take a step back so obviously you know carbon fine food is the you know the brainchild of this of this consumer good product that takes homage to to what's being made inside of the restaurants that you know I would say a good a good chunk of Americans know or have heard of right so you you've got a a restaurant group that was founded I think at this point 12 13 years ago I kind of get my timelines confused a little bit but I think the original carbon in New York City is celebrating its 12th year of being around so really all this started you know primarily from Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi which are you know on our founding team they're one of the three co founders of Mfg which is Major Food Group which owns the restaurant group and and all those rights of restaurants like Carbone the grills the Dells you know Carbone I think now is up to I I can't even count the locations they've got one in New York City the original they've got Miami which has become second home base they have um Las Vegas Dubai London um I think there's one other in the Middle East as well there's one in Hong Kong Mario just launched I mean he launched essentially London Dubai and his new Las Vegas concept all within 12 weeks of each other so he's just rapidly expanding that food business but anyways so that's the restaurant empire they're doing amazing things over there and and we're essentially the the sister company within within Mfg of of of kind of the consumer goods products really the start of this brand really started and and ended with obviously you know Mario Rich and Jeff Jeff is kind of you know the the the financial partner with with Mario and rich in the MFT venture and really sitting down with a man named Eric Skye about uh at this point five years ago in 2020 um and really starting to understand how do you launch a CPG product right like they they wanted to get into it you know they they've seen the success behind Rayos and kind of the premiumization of the category you know they have a lot of brand equity out there because of the restaurant group right they've got this built in equity behind the brand and they really wanted to key in on that on how you how you activate within CBT and retail and then obviously leveraging the network that is Mfg and carbon so those conversations happened um you know a number of years ago at this point and then it LED ultimately to the creation of carbon fine food which is again the three of them are obviously on the board and and and and own the majority of the company which is amazing and great cause they're very integral on all the decisions that we make as an organization and then they brought in Eric Skye who you know formally ran things at REOs and LED them through acquisition at Sobos brands and really he he's just a wealth of knowledge and and was a huge asset for them in in in forming this company so um you know fast forward to March of 2021 it was when we sold our first case um on DDC and then I think it it might have been in a northeastern grocery call don't quote me on who it was but I I do know was a northeastern grocer and um yeah the rest is history yeah you can totally correct me if I'm wrong here but I think a little while ago back in another interview you said something along the lines of the truly impressive part about this brand is that we've gotten to where we are it's number two in in US natural um general retail climbing household penetration more with what did the marketing organ strategy look like before and I guess what are the key ways that it kind of looks different today yeah I think to fully understand like we've got to we've got to take a little step back and I'll probably compare us to a few other companies that were kind of in the similar set in terms of like founding year with you know I you can kind of publicly go and see the kind of you know capital we've raised it's it's not out there right like we haven't raised a Series a so we're very self sustained obviously we've got a group of you know investors that we rely heavily on that are pretty much private and let us and Eric run things the way that they need to but we're not out there raising you know 20 30 million dollars that's not this company right so when I say that like the majority of capital that we raised during those first few years were for sales tactics it was for paying for slotting fees and you know getting getting on the shelf nationally at Whole Foods and getting people out in the street and and resetting shelves and focusing on store supports I would say you know historically this company was founded in a sales capacity it was about those those 4 PS right like that was it it was it was getting it was getting jars high level placed it was being a dollar more than Rayos every day it was about you know backing everything up with quality customer service and making sure we're not cutting cases and obviously we have the best product on shelf so like that all blended well to itself and you know from there obviously we did some things in marketing I will say the brilliant thing about this company and and I I say one of our biggest competitive advantages when you take us versus some of our peer set or especially the ones that have historically been around obviously we're the youngest on the block right but what we have and what we kind of spoke to earlier is this this organic ecosystem of this this brand and this company that nobody else has especially in center store also people on beverage and maybe snacks have it especially when it's like a celebrity founded brand having worked for a celebrity founded brand totally get that but this you know this is a restaurant founded brand that has celebrity allure and is in the zeitgeist and that's how we were founded right so you think about when we launch first thing we did is we access that network that we have with the restaurant relationship there's not many brands out there that are founded and immediately have you know references to their brand and even though you know carbon the restaurant and Carbon Fine Food is two different brands it's all carbon so you go into a brand forming it and you you're listed in two Drake songs like that automatically is pop culture relevance from day one and we leverage that fully so like we send out seeding kits to every celebrity that's been inside of a carbon you know one of the things candidly that really helped us build is like carbon restaurants did not have an Instagram page up until six months ago so the majority of things we were getting tagged in were people going to a carbon restaurant and saying like hey I just went to Carbon Miami best meal of my life here's all my pictures here's my you know Instagram reel dump right they tag us in it and what do we do we send them product right so like they've gone to the restaurant now they're getting at the home product and they're gonna post about that too so I'd say from like a marketing tactic standpoint first couple years of this organization were 100% organic marketing it was not is it was influencer seeding no paid ads no meta boosting no white listing content no paid influencers no media buying it was mostly either sales driven shopper marketing tactics that are either in store focused or demo focused or that organic kind of network that we had through the Restaurant Association so yeah that's what it what I mean and I'm glad you asked that because I can kind of qualify the statement but we weren't doing the things that a lot of brands start out doing today now in CPG like if you look at you know a Poppy or an Ollie Pop or a Groza we just weren't doing the type kind of marketing that they were doing yeah outside of the organic stuff we just weren't hitting a lot of the executionally focused stuff in marketing that typical companies start with in terms of I don't know if you want to call it a mindset shift but at some point you said okay it's time to you know oomph behind an actual kind of yeah I would say the transition for us was a lot of trial and error right so I think it was obviously we relied heavily on organic up until we're in 2025 up until probably late 2024 so majority of our marketing playbook was heavily shopper marketing which we all know the landscape of shopper marketing today we're not gonna comment on it because we don't wanna make anybody mad but a lot of it is in retail media right like that's just that's just where marketing is today so a lot of retail media we did run a a brand campaign I wanna say it was in late late 2023 we went ran our first brand campaign and it was all our all that at home campaign it's a great campaign from a product awareness standpoint it really shows an activation between tying in Mario Carbone who's the genius behind this brand and then incorporating the restaurant and then what does that mean at home right so we shot it with our our wonderful friends over at supernatural who helped develop the campaign we launched a big robust CTV campaign about it where we had placements on Hulu and universal and Peacock and everybody else we had some outdoor marketing that was going on in big cities like New York City and Miami spent a large portion of the marketing budget for that year on that campaign and um obviously generated awareness but like the sales lift was not there like it just did not activate the consumer and I think the marketing can always are always long lead time right you you do an awareness campaign in October you could not see you might not see a sales effect for that until you know six months down the line but when you're in a small company and you're fighting the race to build in a category that's super competitive sometimes your lead times can't wait that long right so you know what we ended up doing is transitioning a lot of that money over into shopper because we had money already allocated and we just lean more heavily into into shopper marketing and and that's kind of how we built things up until you know let's fast forward to let's call it November October ish 2024 that's when we started leaning more into social media in terms of like you influencer content not relying on organic you know media postings and and really going after paid influencer and finding the right partners and and and and and those sort of things so yeah when I took over this desk in January those processes were already in process so the first thing that I did coming in here was like we gotta get back to brand here we can't rely on retailers to build our brand we've got to pivot away from that like that is the reach to the you know and and I think the best insight for me was obviously having been on sales the entire time for the organization up until January of this last year you know I had a meeting with Kroger and we ended up getting national placement at Kroger which was awesome for a brand that was two years old to get you know national placement at Kroger but my buyer who I've had a relationship with in the past he's um a fellow by the name of Jeff Stowe he said to me in one of my presentations he's like Kroger is not in the business of building your brand you've got to build your brand outside of our doors and you can't rely on our marketing tactics to build your brand and I carried that into marketing cause it's like we were relying so long on the retail network to build our campaigns and to build our brand that we needed to just take a step back and really start building this brand for what it is and that's you know mid century modern brand that's in the zeitgeist that's geared towards millennials and Gen Z and we have to speak to them in a way that's not just a retail media network so right first thing we did is we reallocated more money over the brand side doing more events doing more influencer things so the first time taking those amazing influencer posts that we're paying for and white listing them and making sure that we're using that content for 30 days and that we're boosting it on meta and we're hitting our consumers and our demographics you know UGC haven't done UGC at all up until six months ago so doing things like UGC moving forward and hitting our consumers where they are so you know that and in addition to some of the brand partnerships that we're going to be starting up and that we've done this year and will be doing next year we're much more brand focused than we were and again to me it comes back to that that philosophy of you can't rely on a retailer to build your brand yeah there's there's avenues you can take that help that they can help certainly generate those but at the end of the day the amount of money that you spend in retail media and shopper marketing you've really got to allocate good brand dollars to help build your brand and have a solid brand foundation before you start going to market yeah totally yeah I think that totally makes sense you kind of alluded to it a bit a few minutes ago you stepped into to lead marketing after I think it was four years or so on the on the sales leadership side of things what did that transition look like and I'm just more kind of curious like how do you think your approach to to leading marketing has been because of your strong sales background versus a more and how you feel like as that has benefited you yeah I mean I you know I started with all all aspirational goals in college was to be in a marketing like that was my goal you know I was previously a music major in in college and then I got to the point where I was like I'm not gonna make any money doing this I don't want to sit in a practice room for 12 hours a day as much as I love doing this I can't see this being a career right so I already started out like I'm a creative person just who I was so I was like I'm gonna get out of business or get out of music and find a way to do something in business and I didn't want to do finance cause I hate numbers um and I don't like the rules around finance and everything's gotta be you know on this line and this journey so you know marketing made sense and you know I got into a spot where I started doing internships in college with some you know large cap CPG companies like Kellogg's obviously opened the door for me in CPG and I wouldn't be in CPG today without you know that background but you know you get pigeonholed in sales and then you get to the point where it's like you're just you're a sales guy you're a category guy you're a sales guy this is what you're gonna do so and that's what we ended up doing for a while so um we had some some departures that happened on our team obviously having lived this brand for four years I think Eric felt very very confident that I could go into marketing and get some functional things done but I was I was gonna be a project and I'm still a project like listen I don't know all the answers today and there's still acronyms and stuff that I don't understand but eventually you know we're gonna figure it out and get there but for me it was obviously that really solid sales background helped a ton and and we kind of said said this in the last point is so much of a brand's marketing budget anymore is dictated to retail media I think it's I think it's an instrumental asset to have somebody in your marketing organization that has a sales background when you know 45 to 50% of your total money is going to shopper and retail media you need to understand that not all retail media is equal right like there's three or four players that are amazing at retail media and yes go spend your money there but then there's another three or four that are big companies that don't do it so well and it's like you have to be able to discern what that reality is and have those conversations right yeah so you know I had that background made a lot of sense I walked into a team that is absolutely brilliant you know I've got a somebody on my on my shopper marketing team named Emily who's got a great background coming from cliff who is amazing right she understands the shopper landscape understands where and where not to spend the money knows where to challenge people so we wanted somebody that could walk into this role day one and kind of understand the team and let them excel and let them be individual contributors that worked well in their expertise right and that's what I did like I came in and I gave Emily the power that she needed to succeed on the brand side we have somebody named Caitlin who's phenomenal as well all of those organic media placements that you see from us whether it be Hailey Bieber posting about pizza toast or you know LeBron James showing up literally to almost to the day of this year in this carbon fine food sweater on Monday Night Football that's all her but when you give the team the ability to open up and run their kind of respective job roles without having the oversight or cramping their creativity yeah it's just you see the dividends paying it off immediately so that was the first thing as I did as I came in and let them kind of run their desk and obviously I I have oversight but I want them to be the experts in their subject matter in terms of like the transition period I mean I still called on Whole Foods up until I think a month ago two months ago so yeah I mean I came into the company really to build out the natural channel and I you know built out national placement at sprouts and Whole Foods within our first calendar year you know my last claim to fame with Whole Foods is we had 28 items on the shelf up until I mean we still have 28 items we're getting even more incremental items but you know I I was still managing that natural portion of the desk up until very recently so yeah I a transition process has been it was a big workload but hey when you're an emerging brand and you're and you're fighting for space and you're trying to build a brand and you're in year four like you'll you'll put in the hours and get it done luckily I've had a team in place who has been extremely understanding as I get up to speed on the brand and on the marketing side and has been able to functionally carry out their duties and their roles without missing a beat so it's been amazing the biggest learning curve you know I think for me I think coming into the marketing team you don't realize how long things take right like yeah OK that's fair something in sales sales is very is very transactional right like you're even like let's just say you're a national account manager and you're just calling on Kroger you're in a large cap CPG company that's your only customer you live in brief Kroger like it's it's not I don't want to say it's easy but like you have one relationship to maintain you have maybe quarterly check ins with your buyer if you've got a good relationship you have one yearly new item appointment and then it's all execution after that you've got a broker running your contracts you've got you know they're doing all your paperwork they're keeping you informed of what you're doing you're not handling procurement and shipment cause your customer service team's doing that or your operations team so really you're just functionally working within sales and it's all results oriented right like it's all timeline based depending on what's going on coming into marketing my biggest learning lesson was like I wanted to move quick I wanted to keep things moving quick I wanted to to move as fast as we could on partnerships I wanted to draw up partnerships I wanted to draw up campaigns I wanted to draw up events candidly I probably pushed my team too hard for the first year um and accelerated their working speed and I think luckily they adapt with me and move with me but it's helped build out the future of this organization of what it looks like next year so I think had I looked back now on like what I've done here at carbon obviously the momentum we've we've kept through this year has been crazy busy and we've seen the household penetration growth and we've seen the engagement on social media growth but looking back on it I probably pushed harder than I should have and move faster than I should have just because things in marketing take longer right like you sure you go in and you have a call with like you know let's say we just did we just did an activation with a K pop group called Lesera FM and you have a kickoff call it sounds like a great concept you think there's a potential there for something to be big you say yes to it but you don't really think about all the stuff on the back end that it's gonna take because you're just in execution mode so for me it's like I gotta slow down more I gotta think about how long it takes to run an influencer kit how many weeks is it gonna take how many weeks is approval process gonna take lead times are a lot longer in marketing than they are in sales cause like you get that new item request or that new item appointment you work for two weeks on a deck and then you're not doing anything after that and marketing these projects take much longer than you know a couple of work hours a week so that's been the biggest learning lesson to marketing leadership transition any like you know maybe is one is just knowing in sales like I said it is a little bit slower in sales but you move quickly and more purposeful right like you're you're you're going at it harder for a shorter amount of time I think in marketing when you make that change you just gotta take a step back and evaluate and constantly evaluate right like that's been the biggest thing it's like there's been partnerships that have come our way and I've said yes to stuff and then it's like you take a step back a couple weeks afterwards and you're like well is this the right thing for the brand and that's that's the biggest change right it's like it's not even about like what's right for the employees or what's right for you or within your job role but it's like is this right for the brand right does this fit the brand and I think sometimes we don't think about that especially somebody who's not a classically trained brand manager by any means you know I'm a sales guy so like if I get an opportunity I wanna run with it like that's just who you are as a salesperson like if somebody comes to me as a salesperson and says hey I need five new items go create them and work with your marketing team I'm doing it immediately like that's an opportunity that only comes up once in a while but in marketing you've got people calling you at least I don't know if this is the case of most companies it could just be because of our brand that we have we got people calling Us Weekly for partnerships and it's like I'm sure yeah I'm sure I tend to say yes more than I say no so now it's like I need to learn to slow down and say no and I would say that from anybody if you're going from sales into marketing you really gotta work to understand brand and not move as quick because god forbid like something happens and you do something detrimental to the brand luckily we haven't done any of those things which are great but you really gotta almost treat your brand as an employee and not as a commodity if that makes sense yeah interesting you guys have such a great testing ground as well prove out product ideas with those restaurants I'm kind of curious when you guys are building out how did and how has restaurant data played a role in product development and kind of deciding what skews to launch yeah I would say you know first go to market not a lot because you know candidly speaking you typically have your top performers in pasta sauce right and you can look at what ours were like our first use that we launched were marinara got out of marinara I would say up until recently yeah you got out of marinara tomato basil roasted garlic arrabbiata or something that's spicy those were our first four that was the Rayos playbook those were their top performing items so we had to have as as the brand that was founded to come in and essentially take the awesome job that Rayos did establishing a super premium category and taking it to the next level we knew we had to have those products we're gonna launch those products and that's that I will say like from the rest like where restaurant comes into play for those is you've got Mario who's a Michelin star chef and James multiple James Beard nominee you got Rich Teresi who again multiple Michelin stars of a risk career and a James Beard nominee both operating fantastic restaurants in and of their own rights they were there for every test batch that we made right like they they we knew we wanted to use premium ingredients and everything cause that's what they use in the restaurant so you know we're importing Italian San Marzano tomatoes and regular cans that you would get on the bottom shelf at your local grocery store that was important number one gotta do that right gotta gotta keep that process as clean as possible that's restaurant quality so you're not discounting yourself from what you're selling in the restaurant versus what you're selling in CPG yeah totally same thing with ingredients right like we're using whole ingredients in every cooked we're using whole onions we're using whole garlic nothing's coming into our our co manufacturers pre processed or pre chopped all of it's being done on site Basil's being hand stripped from the stem we're not using you know pre chopped basil or anything like that so that's kind of the romance behind the ingredients in the restaurant like you've gotta play that up you gotta like lean on that I would say from like an innovation standpoint on top of them just being there for every production run and really working to create this product to as close to what they could do in the restaurant as possible um yeah there are avenues where we've taken you know data from the restaurant you know when we launched our spicy vodka we had to launch that right like we when I came into the company in in in June of 2021 that was just a whisper at that point like we knew we're gonna launch it at some point but when you have the most Instagrammed and photographed dish in in in the world frankly um you've got to launch that in retails right we obviously took that launched it in retail made some changes to it you know what we do in the jar is as close as we can do to the restaurant there are a couple of differences between our dish and the restaurant dish because manufacturing wise you can't replicate everything but there are things that we did that were different right like we knew that people wanted the freshest thing possible so we chose to delineate from what the category does on that product and we don't include cream in our vodka sauce we really leave it up to the consumer to add whatever type of cream they want however much they want whatever kind of butter content they want we want to make sure that they're being inclusive there you know one of the differences is like our vodka sauce has vodka in it whereas the restaurant doesn't and we have to because we call it a vodka sauce and it'd be weird to call it a vodka sauce in CPG and it not have vodka in it so that's where we kind of change I will say from like an innovation standpoint yeah like we take obviously any recipe content we do is directly from the restaurant we take stuff that Mario and rich make and even our culinary chef Scott you know he's creating recipes that he's done in kitchens you know in New York City also um but yeah I would say any innovation that you see coming from us in the future will have some tie into the restaurant because we think that's an important and it pays homage to what the restaurant does but I I would say like where the restaurant influences us most is just like quality and care of ingredients like yeah any ingredient that we're using in our jarred sauce would 100% be found inside of the kitchen of the back room at carbon as well yeah yeah you guys recently launched the um what was that uh formulation and R&D process look like yeah so I mean luckily working in a small organization even when I was sitting in sales I was helping you know sit on the innovation team so every every jar that we've ever run from an innovation standpoint I've tested at some point or tasted so I've been you know ever since day one I've been super integral in that process of helping ideate and innovate so yeah that was that was a fun one because what we wanted to do obviously we wanted to do something still on pasta sauce there's just so much runway and pasta sauce but there's not a lot of sure there's flavor formats that are incremental and like innovative you know I think there's some really good players out there doing some cool innovation in the category right now that necessarily carbon wouldn't do but there's no usage occasion that's different in this category right you've got your pestos you've got your marinara's or your red sauces you've got your vodka sauces you've got your cream based sauces and then you have your Alfredo's you've maybe got some toppings here and there in category but like nothing really used to occasion different outside of like pasta you know right and and and and putting stuff on on pasta or as an ingredient or um you know what have you but the biggest difference for this brand that's different than like you know Oreos or Prego or ragu or one of those other guys we found from consumers like and and and honestly the content we get tagged in like we're used as a recipe builder man it's not and and it's nothing against people who take spaghetti and put sauce over it cause there's a usage occasion for that and that is this brand to an extent but like from day one the majority of content that we see is somebody taking our sauce and making a lasagna or making something innovative and fun so they're making a meal with our sauce so that really clued us in on like where do we go next from sauce right like where do we go from next traditional marinara and what do we launch that's innovative in the category it's differentiated and brings incremental dollars to the category right cause like how many other tomato basil can you have on the shelf right like we need to launch something that's different to the category that nobody's done yeah um we took this concept of simmer sauce and you know I I think originally there was some pushback from buyers like where does this exist in the store does this exist in meal solutions yeah it's a meal solution yeah um and our feedback is like hey we're in a 24 ounce jar we want this to be in Italian sauces because we think it's incremental for your set um it's gonna perform better in Italian anyways cause this is how they're already using products of ours so we think this makes a lot of sense so from there what we took is we took you know recipes that are classic Italian recipes with Bolognese and puttanesca and fagioli and really leaned into those concepts right so we and and then they're drastically and that's the the number one question we get with those products is how is this different than marinara cause it's in a 24 ounce jar it's it's red it's got tomatoes in it and it's got onions and garlic how different can this be and culinarily speaking it's completely different because it's starting with a completely different base you know and and typical you know Marinara World you're starting with sweating down onions and garlic and then adding in tomatoes and it's the same thing you do at home right you let your aromatics go and then you know you build from there yeah on this product we're taking you know that sofrita of you know carrots and celery and onion that's a completely different base and it builds out a different completely different product so totally you start by cooking that then you add your tomatoes and all your aromatics and stuff like that and you build a completely different base so and then you know on top of like just that recipe driven insight that we've gotten from consumers around using our product you know we know that our our consumers are overwhelmingly primarily you know millennials and Gen Z and the number one insight that we get from those is like especially Gen Z is that you know either Gen Z grew up in an atmosphere where they're not being taught how to cook or they don't you know they don't have the time to cook or they don't value it or they you know grew up in this Doordash and and Uber Eats culture where to them a meal could be as simple as like ordering it from a phone click away right we wanted to create a restaurant quality dish that anybody can enjoy at home with any background of cooking skill right so we you know Bolognese for example perfect example you take your ground meat and you whether it be you know veal or pork or beef or a combination of all those you brown it up you optionally can add milk to it to help tenderize the meat a little bit typically your your best Bolognese and your local Italian joints gonna have milk in it you can add the milk or you cannot add the milk and then you add in the sauce so we've done that three hour prep work work of cooking that sauce for you all you're doing is Browning meat you're adding it to the pan and then you're cooking your pasta on the side so literally you I mean if you're somewhat capable in the kitchen you can make this finished dish in 15 minutes yeah you would swear that it comes from your best Italian place in your local cities that was the insight there on top of just being a great basket builder for the category and for our retailers has been um it's been great and I think the products stand by themselves and are amazing as well yeah I'm excited to try them what was the why behind the rebrand like meaning what what LED to the decision to go through a label rebrand in the first place yeah I think a lot of it was inadvertent if I'm being totally honest with you we obviously had our core four items that launched originally which were the four that I mentioned um and then we launched Spicy Vodka don't quote me on the exact year cause I'll get it wrong at this point since I'm bit of the company for so long even though it doesn't feel like it's that long where we essentially took the spicy vodka name wrote it in that that beautiful script you see with a metallic label on it and launch that we did that for both vodka and then spice so we did spicy vodka first and then we did a vodka skew that looks a little bit different that doesn't have the spice in it because Midwesterners don't like that spice so we did a non spicy version and they really look sharp on on the shelf like they they they there's a point of disruption there with that script on that beautiful white label that really I mean our label's great like it's it's it's got a nice tactile feel to it it feels premium and that that that that script across the front with that metallic sheen looks awesome too where we started to get into kind of consolidating is like hey we know those and all all four of those items performed well but it's like do we do we make this brand cohesive so that everything is the same right so then we had dialogues about that for you know I would say probably six to eight months and trying to figure out what to do with that we I wanted and then what we ended up doing is we ended up going with it because it solved a couple of different you know opportunities for our brand you know as we continue to get bigger and we scale more in the mash channel you know you start seeing how your product appears at you know your Myers and your Walmart's and and and and people that will and and retailers that will pack out in case right Costco for example right like Costco everything sits within that tray and if your flavor name sits below that tray nobody knows what they're picking up right and that was a big insight that we saw especially coming out of Walmart is I would say majority of Walmart stores even though we're not a red not not in a ready to display case will pack it out as ready to display so what ended up happening is a lot of times that flavor name would not be seen anywhere on the shelf unless you picked it up so piggybacking off the success of vodka and spicy vodka and how they look we were like hey we have a really opportunity to make our brand cohesive across the entire platform and we solve the need of this packaging issue that we're seeing as we get bigger and start going into mass and more you know as we go into Aldi and as we go into Costco it gives us the ability to show off our brand and our label and our flavor a little bit more and then we have the ability to do some fun stuff down at the bottom that we historically haven't done because that's where the name's occupied so right luckily Mario blessed us that we interrupt cause that that front display on our jar is literally the restaurant menu so if you ever go to the restaurant it's it's iconic because they give you this menu that's almost comically big and it's on everybody's Instagram when they go and that's the first picture they take in the restaurant and it made the perfect first white label for us right so we he let us disrupt that and and put some words over top of it which I know took some convincing but he bought in on the vision and then I'd say secondarily what it also allowed us to do is it allowed us to add a little bit more color to our label by disrupting that middle section right so there's definitely a sea of yellow and white in most stores right now between us and Rayos and by adding that little bit of color blocking through the center on some of these flavor names really set us apart on shelf and as we're seeing velocity increases already on those items that have transitioned over because it's becoming clear what it is and now we've leverage that bottom portion of our label to talk about those hero ingredients right so like Mediterranean marinara is the best example of this it's called Mediterranean marinara it's in this beautiful purple I think it's purple script on the front and then on down the bottom it describes what it is where normally would have said like marinara or tomato basil it says a marinara with capers and olives right um so we've been able to really build that out and be creative with it we'll have our Alfredo lines starting to refresh here in the next couple of months the images that I've and the proofs that I've signed already look fantastic so we're really excited about what that does just to bring more brain and cohesion to shelf one of the kind of core metrics that you're focused on is how do we get the consumer from one trip to three trips to the store to buy a carbon why is this kind of a been one of your North Stars for you like household I mean I think we take a step back let's talk about household penetration at least for right now so we're at the point now where our household penetration is actually greater than Rio's was when they sold the first time we are the only brand in this category that is growing households quad week over quad week for the entire year I mean on average we're growing about 160 to hundred and seventy five thousand households every four weeks um which is crazy that we're still generating that in year four and and it's only it's only exponentially gone up since like March of this year like we really turned some activation corners and how we're talking to consumers back in March and switched track tactics pretty substantially and it's generated very positively in household penetration you know where we go from there is like it's just to me it like it's the basics of marketing it costs so much less to retain customers and keep building customers than it does to bring in new customers and that's not saying we're shifting our tactics completely 45% of our purchases are still from new to households like just new to brand households which in year four does still have that number speaks to the volumes of like you know where this brand's gonna go over the next two to three years um for us now it's about what tactics do we tie in to not only get that first purchase but to get that second purchase then that second purchase to third purchase cause all that does this drives loyalty it drives purchase when you're not on deal and it drives more base volume and it gets us candidly to where we need like we want we know at some point in the next I don't know when it's gonna be you know I could still be here who knows we we will be bigger than Oreos within pasta sauce at some point over the I believe over the next five to six years yeah but to have that conversation we start to have to start driving conversion like they do and really what we're doing is taking their conversion numbers and trying to extrapolate it out to our brand you know we know you know for the most part you know they're getting you know 2.1 visits per trip typically consumers are buying them you know I think five to six times a year across all platforms and and that's their brand right like they're not growing households incrementally at this point they're kind of flat and maybe up a little bit but they've got that solid core behind them of who their household is and where they're converting so focus much more on conversion this year much more on loyalty we're at the point now where we're actually seeing at Walmart specifically which we get really good robust data from a number a number of buyers buying three and more times is actually higher than our number of people buying twice which to me is phenomenal we'll continue to gain buyers we want those one time buyers we don't want to get away from one times right but we want our number three and plus more times to be more than number two so that's the ultimate measure of success right now conversion for us is just driving more purchase frequency throughout the year you know we'll continue to be a brand that obviously we won't optimize that number because you know half of our volume is still coming from new to brand purchases but anytime we're seeing that other 50% the majority of which being three and more times is a very good indication of what this brand's gonna become over the next three to four years totally yeah and it's fun it's not category stuff like it's right you know totally it's brand health stuff I I did the category stuff I don't philosophy and all that's great but I want solid brand health and what's gonna drive brand metrics into the future this is great you've got so many good insights I'm just kind of curious kind of last question for you just in terms of getting your general take on what's happening in CPG like any out outside of Carbone any any specific brands or just trends in the CPG space in general that has been taking your interest lately things have been yeah but you're particularly excited about it all yeah I mean I I think obviously we're getting into a CPG culture where things are finally about the ingredients like I think that there's there's more and more brands that are being evaluated for their ingredients and I I think I think it's an amazing thing right I think we're getting to the point where you know some some things are in a vacuum some things aren't created equal right I think there's some education that's required along the way especially when it talks you know specific ingredients but I I think you're seeing more and more brands that are founded on ingredient basis and using the best ingredients and creating that premium culture I think that's amazing I think we're getting into the point where I I don't want to say we're in covid we're obviously not in covid but I think financially we're in covid again like we're getting there right like where people are dining out less you know disposable incomes going down grocery costs are going up the coolest thing that I see and and you look at Rayo's success before we were around like Rayo's company doubled during covid and they doubled because they were in stock because the others couldn't keep up with supply um and because people were dining out less right and if you're gonna dine out less and you're not gonna go to your local Italian joint for two people and drop 80 to 90 bucks with drinks go buy that ten dollar jar of sauce with a nice premium imported pasta well we'll see what happens with premium imported pasta after the hundred 15% tariffs but you know people are at least dining at home more and yeah and I don't want to say like categories are recession proof but I think that brands that are starting to get it are the ones that are premiumizing right so for me I look at somebody like Fish Life amazing like the the team over there really creating a premium product within 10 fish that's culinarily best in class speaking and sourced well I think that's amazing anybody that's doing anything innovative with flavors and ingredients I love especially I think the next big thing for me seeing is like just the continued premiumization of categories right like I think frozen for example I think there's a good yeah a runway they're still specifically with an ethnic food of like premiumizing that right like what does the next premium meal solution look like in frozen I think that's gonna be a big thing fresh I think it's still doing well I think it's fresh is starting to move towards frozen because you can do more in frozen in terms of like innovation and culinary stuff but I think you know frozen is a big is a big avenue and then I would say like from a marketing perspective outside of that the biggest thing that I've Learned since being on the desk from like a I would say just like an industry thing right there we're at this point and it goes back to ingredients so you'll fall you'll follow me here eventually when I get there it'll take me a second though but so many brands are using food marketing as kind of their sense their sensory marketing right now especially in cosmetics and culture and lifestyle and and clothing yeah like that's just the thing now right like you know Haley launching something with road and and and with Krispy Kreme or you know brands finding ways to include food that historically haven't within lifestyle whether it be you know fashion or entertainment like those things are happening now yep so I think brands that find a way to take those cues within food and almost flip it on its head right so like here at Carbone we're gonna embrace lifestyle marketing for the next couple years we're gonna find good brand partners you know outside of food that activate brand and drive loyalty and drive awareness so I think the brands that figure that out within this lifestyle space and premiumization space are gonna be the ones that build brands that last for the next 20 to 30 years oh yeah Chris it's been awesome really appreciate the times shared so many valuable insights here what's the best place for people to to follow along with you these days and then I know you're focused on a lot of stuff and you know different channels what's the place you wanna direct people to follow along with carbon these days too yeah I would say obviously find us on Instagram at Carbon Fine Foods our website just got renovated which I'm super proud of that was one of the first things that I worked on coming here it's cool it's awesome our website was much more DC focused and now it's lifestyle branded focus so I would encourage everybody to go check out our website I think it's beautiful alright we had a great partner with a company called Glitka Plus out of Chicago who helped us launch that TikTok we're getting bigger on TikTok historically hasn't been a big platform for us but we've developed some good UGC over there and creating content so everything in the know for us regarding event activations brand partnerships you know events we're gonna do a lot of events this year you'll find all that news on our website and on Instagram and TikTok so yeah go follow us there and please engage with us and buy our products awesome sounds good wasn't great Chris appreciate the time yeah are kind of pitfalls to try to avoid yeah I think that's the biggest thing for me is like to really validate and like in terms of the innovation track you guys some are recently rolled out a label refresh so I think it's it's all rooted in insights right I think that makes a lot of sense I think a little while ago close to top five in like without a traditional marketing focus putting some more you know what did you feel like was the big tips or like might have for them