Hovik Azadkhanian - The #1 Selling Coffee at Sprouts Nationwide

On this episode, we're joined by Hovik Azadkhanian, CEO of Heirloom Coffee Roasters - the fastest-growing coffee brand in the natural channel and the first nationally available 100% regenerative organic certified specialty coffee. 

Hovik has been in the coffee roasting business for over 30 years, starting alongside his dad as a kid and spending years in private label and toll roasting before launching Heirloom.

We dive into how roasting millions of pounds of coffee for other brands gave Hovik the data to develop Heirloom's proprietary Culinary Roast - a technique that manipulates time, temperature, air pressure, and gas flow to unlock specific flavor profiles at scale. That process led to winning the Good Food Award against 1,700 coffees, a first for any regenerative coffee.

Hovik walks through the realities of the coffee supply chain, including a USDA study that found 43% of certified organic products tested above the legal limit for banned substances. He breaks down Heirloom's triple-testing protocol across 311 synthetic pesticides and the story of rejecting tens of thousands of pounds of glyphosate-contaminated coffee.

We also get into Heirloom's direct trade model, which cuts out 15-20 middlemen and pays farmers three to six dollars per pound versus 30-60 cents under the traditional model. Hovik shares the Pacayala cooperative story, how Sprouts took a gamble on an unknown brand, and what's next as Heirloom eyes mass retail.

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Episode Highlights:

☕ 30+ years roasting coffee (started at age 8)
🏭 From private label to building a national brand
🧪 The Culinary Roast (manipulating time, temperature, gas, air pressure)
🏆 Winning the Good Food Award against 1,700 coffees
⚠️ 43% of organic products failing pesticide standards (USDA study)
🔬 Triple-testing protocol for 311 synthetic pesticides
🌱 Direct trade model (farmer to roaster, no middlemen)
🤝 The Pacayala cooperative story in Honduras
🛒 Going national at Sprouts and becoming the #1 selling coffee
📊 Using SPINS data and shopper surveys to drive velocity
🎯 Land and expand in natural, then break into mass retail
🔧 New form factors in the innovation pipeline for 2026
👀 Brands to watch: Simply (legumes) and Painterland Sisters (yogurt)

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Table of Contents:

00:00 – Intro
00:33 – Origin story and why behind the brand
04:17 – Reacquiring the Oakland roasting facility
05:25 – Developing the Culinary Roast process
08:29 – Iterations and the Good Food Award win
10:20 – R&D and SKU strategy
12:41 – The glyphosate contamination story
15:25 – USDA organic study and the limits of certifications
17:37 – What CPG brands should do about independent testing
19:39 – Vertical integration and cutting out middlemen
20:45 – Building direct farm relationships
23:06 – The Pacaya cooperative in Honduras
26:00 – Farmer economics (30 cents vs $3-6 per pound)
28:45 – Retail trajectory and going national at Sprouts
30:58 – Tactics for driving velocity in natural channel
31:56 – Retail expansion plans and breaking into mass
32:22 – Food service as a brand awareness channel
33:13 – Brand identity and packaging design decisions
34:43 – 2026 goals and new form factors
35:29 – Brands Hovik is watching

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Links:

Heirloom Coffee Roasters – https://heirloomcoffeeroasters.com/
Follow Hovik on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/hovik-azadkhanian-a2404830/
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 https://www.kitprint.co/

Transcript

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welcome to shelf help today we're speaking with hovik azadkanyan co founder ceo of oakland based heirloom coffee roasters heirloom is the first national coffee brand offer a hundred percent regenerative organic certified specialty coffee roasted with a pretty cool proprietary technique that beat out seventeen hundred coffees in a blind taste test which we're definitely gonna talk about by the way kalum is the fastest growing coffee brand in the natural channel number one selling coffee at sprouts nationwide so they're definitely doing a lot of things right yeah hovic first off just for the listeners that um are not all that familiar with heirloom love to just get a quick lay of the land just in terms of kind of origin story why behind the brand what makes the coffee really different and then if you want to just call out maybe a few places that newer places that that the listeners can get their hands on the coffee these days and then we'll go from there sure i've been in the coffee roasting business for over thirty years i started roasting with my with my dad when i was like eight years old and i've been in love with coffee ever since most of my career primarily was spent on the private label and toll roasting side of the business so we would roast coffee for other companies and that's kind of where i first was introduced or i should say i witnessed so many coffee brands kind of derail from the original messaging of the brand and turn into just another marketing brand or another brand on the shelf and so they would paint these beautiful pictures of like direct trade vertical integration focus on organics focus on the farmer on the packaging but the products inside of the coffee was kind of nowhere near what they said and so as the industry evolved a lot of these larger brands consolidated and shifted most of their coffee roasting activities to massive roasting houses that acted as like these large white labeling and tolling facilities and so that really disheartened me um and what most of the larger specialty coffee brands have turned into throughout the years of these large white label companies that they just became marketing companies and so they've kind of lost the messaging and they've lost the promise and they've ignored the supply chain in general and so that's why we started uh heirloom coffee roasters we wanted to create a a a coffee brand that was totally different we wanted it to be a coffee brand that was truly built on a platform of direct trade where we purchase coffee and source coffee directly from farmers we wanted to cut out the twenty something layers of middlemen involved in the business every layer of middlemen that exists in the coffee business takes margin away from the farmers themselves and so that's something that we wanted to that we wanted to fight against and the second is we wanted to create a coffee that was truly clean and healthy we wanted it to be totally clean free from pesticides synthetic chemicals fertilizers and we didn't want that to just be a claim we wanted it to be totally validatable and so we started to source coffee that was farmed on regenerative farms where they never use mechanical agricultural practices they only practice regenerative farming no synthetical synthetic chemicals pesticides fertilizers etcetera and we wanted to roast coffee that was truly delicious we wanted something that was more than just like a good cup of coffee we wanted it to be special and every time you drink heirloom we want you to say wow we want you to look at your cup and say this is truly a sensory experience and so after we launched the brand we became the first one hundred percent regenerative organic certified coffee brand in the nation all of our skews with the exception of decaf cause that isn't available yet but it's also not on our our our main offerings list source from a hundred percent rock farms and so we essentially created a brand new category in the retail space around clean healthy regenerative coffee that totally that's a great overview man you touched on a lot of stuff i was gonna ask about initially but you and your partner rick you guys acquired reacquired the factory and you guys were doing a bunch of you know private label contract roasting for for other brands which i think is some of the learnings that you got which led you to launch erelum when you guys you know decided to to re acquire the factory and right when you made that close did you guys already have this kind of clear plan in mind of launching erelum in this regener organic certified plan or just kind of you kind of you kind of the journey of of doing all this private label stuff and all the other stuff you start working with other brands kind of led you to the conclusion this is what the next step should be well when my partner and i decided to buy the company so let's just rewind my dad started a company in the nineties and he sold it to his business partner um in the mid nineties and then that business partner sold it back to us in the uh in twenty eighteen so november of twenty eighteen during the diligence phase rick and i knew that our number one goal was to create a brand that was scalable that was truly different than everything else in the market and that was a hundred percent clean healthy and verifiable and we wanted to create a standard that solved one of the biggest problems in cpg and that was this like fogginess of white labeling the consumer doesn't actually know what they're buying so so we knew that was essentially the goal and that was the end goal when we purchased the facility we did kind of this reverse triangle merger we moved everything and all of our production into our oakland facility where we are now we were heavily involved in private label and white labeling and we were also involved in cafe restaurant supplies so we were roasting coffee for cafes and restaurants but we knew for sure that the end goal was to create what would eventually become heirloom coffee roasters got it cool the culinary roast kind of process which i think is some proprietary to you guys and you guys develop this by leveraging so much data from roasting i think millions of pounds for all these other brands i guess you know without you know giving away too many trade secrets love to just kind of get a sense of you know walking me through the development and kind of innovation process i think you know you described it i think is when we chatted a few weeks ago is kind of treating coffee like a fine dining ingredient manipulating time temperature gas air pressure bunch of different stuff so like yeah what does that actually kind of mean in practice and how is this like really different from the typical specialty roaster and what they're doing yeah when we roast our coffee we have to combine kind of this world of technical skills and this world of artisanal roasting but we also have to define it in a way that's replicable and so we had to create a new standard the standard eventually became known as the culinary roast but to get to the culinary roast we had to roast millions of pounds of coffee really for other people and so what we did was collect all the data around roasting for other brands uh time temperature and how it affected the flavor profile of the coffee based on the density of the coffee itself before it goes into the roaster the water content the age of the coffee which regions it came from the mineral content of the soil in the general area and so we have this ability to roast coffee on like the specialty coffee scale but we knew that we needed to turn it into something that was much more technical and scalable and and repeatable and so we learned if you manipulate time temperature air pressure gas flow at certain stages of the roast you can change the way the coffee tastes by either increasing or decreasing the ability to taste sweetness or tartness or fruitiness you're able to manipulate the body of the coffee and create kind of like a syrupy texture and that's all down to the way that we manipulate that roast from beginning to end in the roasting process it gets a little more technical and the technical side becomes more proprietary but a good way to look at it is you can start with the same ingredients and you can have one chef create a meal with the same ingredients and have it taste great and you can have another chef take those exact same ingredients and create a work of art that's memorable something you'll never forget one of the best meals of your life and that's all in technique and so the technique is where the culinary roast comes into play we're able to take coffees that are grown using a very specific set of requirements from the regenerative farms no chemicals pesticides they usually grow it in some of the best soils most mineral rich soils that exist in the regions and because we source some of that incredible unroasted coffee we're able to take it to another level when we roast it at scale the other thing is because of our size we have to be able to roast coffee at a pretty large scale so you know it's a lot easier to make incredible coffee on a five pound roaster it's a lot harder to do it on a six hundred pound roaster and do it consistently four times an hour every day so that's part of the that's part of the process that we had to create yeah how many think it back like how many iterations or batches do you think it took for you to kind of knew that you had nailed the the culinary roast and like what thinking back was there kind of a clear this is it moment we roasted millions of pounds of coffee to get it right we were really lucky because we were in the toll roasting space so we had a lot of opportunity to practice yeah totally but when it came to our own coffee we practiced so many times the thing is we just couldn't sell it because we didn't have the business yet so we ended up donating a lot of coffee we ended up using it up for for other purposes i guess the aha moment the this is it moment is when we we came to a point where i thought we had it right and we had roasted our i don't know batch number ten trillion of our sugar phoenix blend and it came out it smelled right we followed the roasting the roasting program to the tea it smelled perfect and i just took a scoop of that coffee and i said i think this is it so i scooped out like a pound put it in a bag and handed it off to our team to send it to the good food awards and that's where it was entered against seventeen hundred other coffees in in a blind tasting is i think is the largest coffee uh competition in the world for for for a single award and we ended up winning the good food award and that was kind of the this is it validation yeah the other thing that that is interesting is that was the first time a regenerative coffee had ever won the good food award and it was also the first time that a coffee that was not from like a micro lot or a um one time only kind of a lot won the good food award and so to me that said that i can choose a i can create a coffee that's scalable and replicable and create this incredible culinary experience time after time and so once we won that award that was kind of that was kind of it for us we knew we had something incredibly special and we also knew that it was not something that others could replicate yeah cool that makes sense and like i'm not sure how many kind of like flavors or you know blends you have at this point maybe this question may or may not make a whole lot of sense but curious how kind of r and d works for new skews and this kind of a vehicle for you guys as brand in terms of how you decide on new kind of single origins or or blends and i'm sure there's so many different options you can go with what is that kind of decision making process look like in terms of r and d yeah there's two kind there's two paths that kind of exist simultaneously the first is the qualification of new coffee and so that goes through a very rigorous process we have an entire qa team that's dedicated to maintaining what we call the heirloom standard so not just from the clean healthy side of the product but also the taste uh consistency and the coffees that we choose must be something that will uh continue to be supplied by that farmer or that co ops or camp we don't buy one offs it just doesn't work for us once the coffee goes through that extremely rigid process which could take two to three weeks we send it off for for lab testing and once we lab test the coffee to make sure i think it goes through a test for three hundred and eleven different synthetic pesticides chemicals molds toxins glyphosate and all all sorts of other nasty agricultural chemicals so it has to pass that test too so once we've cleared the coffee to see if we are allowed to use it then we do the quality tasting and the the like the repeated quality testing to see if the coffee will work in our blend or if it's something that's incredible can we use it as a single origin now we don't want to fill our library with hundreds of skews we actually kind of operate in like a eight to ten skew at any given time world and so the coffees that we choose need to be something that we can use in different blends but also as a single origin if we need to we try not to introduce new skews very often if there's a major request from a major retailer we'll consider it but it has to be values aligned and it has to somehow positively impact the farmer for a longer term it's not like a one one and done kind of a thing and so um once we clear everything and we start the negotiations we see how long the farmers are willing to supply that specific coffee and if there's a really long runway we will either choose we'll either introduce a new single origin or we will add it to an ingredient an approved ingredient for one of our main skews or one of them cool that makes total sense um on the topic of of testing three hundred different plus pesticides is uh is pretty amazing when we chatted a few days ago you you mentioned there was an example of a lot of beans that you guys came across that ended up testing positive for glyphosate yeah walk me through what happened there and kind of what what that means in the broader context of your understanding of the supply chain and some of the challenges there we lab test our copies three times during the supply chain once when it ships from once when it's about to ship from the farm once when it arrives at the port of oakland but before it enters our facility we have a holding facility that's separate from our roastery um and so it's tested before it enters the holding facility and then once periodically well it's every quarter we test the roasted coffee from each queue and so this particular batch that we had tested tested negative uh from the farm so we knew the farm was clean the soil was tested at the farm um and the coffee itself was tested so everything worked out and somewhere in between the farm itself and the port of oakland there was some sort of a contamination for a significant amount i mean we're talking tens of thousands of pounds of coffee um from from a specific uh um from a specific uh crop and what was interesting is the other coffee that came from the same crop didn't test positive at all all the way to our facility so we started an investigation the investigation is actually still ongoing but what we think happened is there was some sort of a wind drift situation either in transit from the farm to the exit port or in transit somewhere and so what we do as a company and this is why it's so important to have such a rigid standard is somebody immediately pressed the emergency red button we rejected the coffee it never entered our holding facility goes into like quarantine and then a rejection process it gets sold to or it gets offloaded to depending on the quality of the coffee the companies that don't care whether their coffee is sprayed with pesticides or not and so the coffee was offloaded never entered our facility but it was critical that we maintained our standard because you look at it from like a high level there's multiple certifications on these coffins they've gone through a rigorous standard the farmer has upheld their end of the bargain but how does a consumer actually know what they're getting is clean and healthy they kind of don't and so it falls on companies like heirloom and other pioneering brands that really maintain this standard and create something that's radically different in terms of testing to validate that the product that enters your home that's like in the same pantry as your kids food and snacks is not covered in sticky nasty agricultural pesticides that have been linked to chronic diseases and all sorts of terrible things yeah yeah on that front i think you you mentioned um you referenced some usda study that i think you had found that like forty three percent of certified organic products tested above the legal limit of banned substances which was shocking to say the least for me like what does that mean for the average consumer in terms like what that should tell them about organic seal what it actually guarantees and if they wanna be conscious about this what is what should they do yeah the the the study was really concerning because it it was i think it was a twenty eleven usda um study on organic products and what it found was forty three percent tested positive but above the legal limit so the the products that were certified organic had the usda seal on the actual product that was gonna go to retail was not allowed to be called organic because it was sprayed or had heavy amounts of pesticides on it i think there's i want to say it's thirty nine percent or thirty eight and some change percent of the same tested products tested positive but were below the legal limit to be pulled from certification so those products were allowed to be sold as usda organic that's super concerning especially when you're a consumer who's relying on the the brands to protect them the the usda seal to protect them against these horrible chemicals and pesticides um there's there's like a lower limit that's allowed and to me that's just wild and so very few of the tested materials were actually free from chemicals and pesticides i can't remember exactly the number right now but and so that was very eye opening for me and that's kind of what sparked the whole movement internally to start testing all of our ingredients and then we said well you can test at once but that doesn't mean anything because i bet you most of these tested brands and most of these tested agricultural products would have tested negative at at the at the original farms but by the time they made it to the retailer they could have been cross contaminated somebody could have switched labels there's a lot of tricky business in a supply chain where there's thirty different touch points or twenty different touch points so that's really what kind of sparked the testing movement for me personally and and and ended up becoming part of the heirloom standard yeah just to to i guess to close the loop on this a bit for other cpg brands and operators that rely heavily on certifications is kind of a core selling point and maybe the ones that don't like should they be investing more in independent testing like what should this look like across the board maybe not just coffee but in general so far i've learned that you cannot rely fully on certifications they do a lot of the work but at the end of the day it's a brand's responsibility to protect their customers against what they claim to keep out of their products yeah you can be a brand and not make any claims and not source organic or clean or healthy products and that's fine but the second you put that badge on your product you're making a promise to your customer that what they're about to ingest and what they're about to take into their homes is clean healthy and free of toxic chemicals what should brands do i think it's very important to test it's also extremely expensive and could be very cost prohibitive when you can't do it at scale and so it's you know it's a question that has to be asked i'm not sure i have the the the the the best answer for every brand out there but they should be relying on their suppliers to not just make claims but stand behind them and validate them as a consumer you have to do your homework you can't just trust every little every single nice looking badge that's on every package i think if you're gonna dedicate your health to the promise that a brand makes you have to do your homework on the brand you have to understand their sourcing strategy and it's not a crazy thing to ask the brand for lab results or testing results we get probably fifty to sixty messages a week asking for our lab results and we display them we just send them directly to to whoever asks because it's so important to build credibility in like this really opaque market where everyone is is blinded by flashy marketing yeah yeah that totally makes sense um eye opening but i guess it's something that people should hear shifting gears a little bit talking about vertical integration supply chain you mentioned at the beginning i got a high level touch on it that there's typically fifteen to twenty touch points between in the coffee cherry is picked off the tree for the cup of coffee that i'm drinking at home in the morning um you've basically cut that to farmer heirloom consumer like walk me through how you went about actually kind of building these direct farm relationships from scratch how you kind of found your first farm partners maybe you want to talk about i think it's the paki all co op in honduras as an example yeah um so the traditional model is broken to say the least you know it the system that exists takes advantage of the people who do all of the work and so the farmers who grow the coffee who dedicate their lives to growing incredible products who purposely dedicate land to being clean and healthy and not sprayed with chemicals and not mechanically tilled you know they they have the most skin in the game but at the end of the day they get paid they get paid the least under the traditional model like i said there's like fifteen twenty sometimes thirty different touch points between a coffee cherry being picked off a tree and the end user and so we wanted to change that and what we did was we had to get introduced to regenerative farmers cause that was kind of the baseline for us a regenerative organic certification already does most of the the heavy lifting for our validation and so what we see is farmers that practice all these different things to get rsc certified we've already done most of the most of what's required we have a couple relationship partners that we rely on to make the introductions to these farmers or these co ops there's not very many of them and right now they only exist in about six countries i think for coffee many for other categories but for coffee not many we're also the largest rock certified coffee brand in the world at the moment i'm sure someone will outpace us at some point but right now we are the largest and so we've built a reputation and a name for ourselves to a point where the farmers are coming to us directly um and if they don't come to us directly they just ask and it's doesn't take very many asks to get the name air room and so what they do is they'll reach out to us and say hey i'm either considering becoming regenerative organic certified or i just became regenerative organic certified how does it work and then we walk them through our profit process the great part is if you're a farmer and you're considering becoming regenerative organic certified and you meet the quality specifications that we need for our coffee the mineral content of your land is perfect the quality and taste of the coffee before certification and sampling meets our requirements we'll dedicate the first couple purchases and we'll promise to buy your first lots as long as it meets all of our qualifications and so we incentivize the farmers to become regenerative organic certified the first rock certified coffee we ever purchased was from nicaragua and that was like that was really hard to find because when we first learned about regenerative agriculture there was no rock certified coffee and so we reached out to like the rodale institute the roa that certifies roc and just about every single copy broker distributor reseller and trader that i knew and we just got crickets and then finally the roa and the rodale institute both pointed to a crop that was coming from nicaragua that was gonna be the first actual rock certified copy and so we jumped on that as fast as we could i think there were two containers that were shipped from the farm was the first two containers ever and i believe we bought the first container and so i went i remember they landed at port i went to the port to like the um the consolidation center and i asked to get the very first sack of coffee off that container threw it in my car uh brought it back to the roastery and we ended up roasting the first batch of rock certified coffee ever so that was really cool i roasted it on my dedrick ir five roaster this little sample roaster we use um so that was really cool the pacaya cooperative which is the first rock certified coffee producer in honduras there it's an interesting story but it's like really an amazing story um it was started by a brother and sister in the marcala region city of marcala in the la paz region of honduras and this was a a an area that was kind of completely ignored and forgotten the unemployment rate was sky high most of the men in the region had actually left to go find work elsewhere including the united states and they were sending money back to their families and so it was just a few few rungs from the ladder away from being uh just a completely barren town and so this brother and sister decided to stay and practice coffee farming which is what they were used to when they were growing up and they started to do regenerative agriculture and they started to grow regeneratively grown coffee they ended up achieving rock certification and they um the the coffee was so incredible that they sold out of their first batch and their second batch and they they kept doing well and so their neighbors and family members wanted to join in and said what are you doing that's so different they ended up starting a co op and so this like one to two family like club of farmers ended up starting a co op that last i checked had four hundred fifty different farms and impacted thousands of workers mostly single women that um that didn't have any any work and so this form of agriculture ended up becoming an economic engine for the community and we visited last year i think it was last summer maybe two years ago and we saw the before and after and it was it was it was wild the streets were paved uh stores were full all of the grocery stores had products in the shelves you saw school children walking around in in school uniforms and it was just a really alive and vibrant city and i was talking to the brother and i said this place is amazing i keep hearing horror stories i said yeah the horror stories were before we started regenerative farming and regenerative coffee farming and so everything you see here is built on coffee and bananas and we did it in the last i mean it was like eight years it took just just this incredible story of how um shifting your practices and changing the way you grow product and not relying heavily on agrochemical companies and doing everything the right way the clean way can completely transform your entire community and it's a success story that other communities and producers in other countries are replicating that's amazing i mean it's part of just like these close much more close relationships you've had with these groups and investing the time you know eliminating like twenty different touch points on the supply chain and one of the things that really jumped out when we chatted was you said that you know these farmers historically were getting thirty to sixty cents a kilo maybe ten percent ten cents more uh if they have the fair trade sticker but because of your guys's model now they're getting three to six dollars which is like insane how big of a difference that is which i just was like super impressed by and i imagine that's totally changed these communities that you guys work with yeah the example i just gave is like the best example of what can happen when a farmer sells directly to a roaster yeah it depends on the farm it depends on the co op but in the traditional model the farmers get the smallest portion of the price paid by the roaster um and there are middlemen everywhere i mean anyone who can get involved in between the farmer and the roaster they take advantage so like local consolidators they're the ones who drive around farm to farm and buy coffee from these small they're tiny small plot farmers it's not like they have hectares of land these these guys drive around in these trucks buy coffee from each one of these small producers then there's export houses there's brokers distributors last mile resellers and they paint a very pretty picture like from a marketing perspective especially in the us but you know you don't actually see what happens in the supply chain and so for example a roaster who's gonna pay like three to four dollars i guess that was before covid prices have changed after covid for a pound of coffee and the farmer would get as could could get as little as five to fifteen cents for that same pound of coffee but in the direct trade model we cut out every single middleman we go directly to the farmer or the co op and we end up paying them better than farmgate it's a term used in in coffee i don't know if it's used in other categories but better than farmgate prices so the deal is made with the farmer funds get transferred to them through an intermediary and they reinvest that money that we spend or that we pay them right back into the community right back into the farms which continuously grows and gives us an opportunity to to secure future supplies of the coffee that we need to build our brand it's life changing for farmers and it kind of puts it all into perspective like why are so many people involved like i get it because they're just taking from these people that do all the work right and then you know after we roast you know there's typically many different touch points in our case because of full vertical integration because we buy the coffee directly we manage all the logistics the roasting we distribute directly from our factory so there's no co packer no white labeller no third party manufacturer there's no tpl that has roasted coffee sitting on shelves for months it goes directly to our retail partners or our distributor partners that'll send it out to the retailers yeah that's awesome on that topic talking about retail our trajectory pretty awesome pretty remarkable has launched late twenty twenty one i think when national within six eight months became the number one selling coffee at sprouts um and then a leader in the natural channel overall yes walk me through that journey to to sister sprouts in terms of how you got that first buyer meeting what was the pitch what drew them in so well and then yeah what kind of what's the go to market strategy look like since and and how's how's it been going it was not a typical pitch with sprouts we actually applied online when they're accepting applications for new brands and that same year we ended up winning the khe golden ticket and so that was it's like the on trend brands award and we actually didn't know that we were we were even going into sprouts until we received like a tidal wave of massive po's and everyone's sitting there like what is this about and we reached out to our category manager and at the time it was a different category manager and she's like oh i forgot to tell you you guys are going national with sprouts what but the buyer was was incredible i mean she she a buyer at the time at sprouts she took a major gamble on a brand that nobody had ever heard of that had no brand recognition that had no market penetration and they took a major gamble on what would become the future of clean healthy coffee and regenerative coffee and it worked out really well because the the customers love the product and ended up growing really quickly i mean we took we took the number one spot on the non functional coffee side relatively quickly and we've maintained that position for quite some time but at the end of the day the sprouts shopper they're not discount shoppers they want high quality really good tasting clean healthy products and sprouts delivers on that promise with the brands that they carry on shelf yeah what have you found in terms of kind of core tools tactics you can speak to sprouts or just kind of natural channel in general specifically in this coffee category that you found have the most impact from really driving velocity this could be get up interesting right promos demos on site getting people to taste the coffee you know shelf talkers eye violators you know floor display type stuff like what what have you found has been the most impactful from that perspective can i have to back up a little bit the most valuable thing that has driven velocity for us that we've heard because we survey our customers all the time just the value proposition of the brand is something that the customer aligns with and they end up trying the product once once they taste the product they love it so much it's very hard to go back um other tools we've used other than leaning on our industry partners like we we lean on data a lot so we use a lot of spins data we use a lot of shopper marketing surveys and then of course floor displays and shelf talkers have driven success you know we don't rely heavily on discounting we're not we're not a discount brand we feel like the product speaks for itself and once we get some sort of trial driven for a customer they tend to come back and it's proven itself time after time retailer after retailer we just feel like the product is so good on so many different levels that the customer sees that right away yeah what's the next phase of retail expansion look like through let's just say the the rest of twenty twenty six well we've penetrated most of natural at this point there's still a few key retailers that were um that were buying and have been in talks with for for quite some time and so as we kind of kind of land and expand in the natural category we're looking to break into mass with the right partner and that's kind of gonna be the next evolution for the brand yeah makes sense that totally makes sense i think you also told me that food service has has become uh a pretty great channel for you guys in terms of sell old run tap to campuses corporate accounts those types of things as this channel become a like a pretty meaningful revenue driver or is it more kind of like a flywheel people try it in the office and then they go buy it at the store as well yeah it's interesting we kind of started in food service but we started in food service to drive awareness of the brand and to get eyes on the brand and so all of our partners that we work with in the food service space um hey they've been great partners but they're mostly forward thinking companies that really care about sustainability removing plastic from the supply chain and delivering on incredible quality to their to their employees it's not a category that's major growth for us it's something that we rely on to just connect the uh the shopper with our brand in the workspace yeah that totally makes sense clearly you guys have built a really differentiated brand here and it's showing in the numbers from a brand identity packaging standpoint to really convey all that you've told me about what's so special about this brand thinking back to when you guys are developing the brand identity and the look and feel of packaging and the and the brand from a visual identity standpoint what were some of those key variables that were top of mind for you in terms of maybe in the context of whoever you worked with to actually build it out like what do you remember you kind of included in the brief that was the most important i said earlier we're heavily reliant on data and a lot of the um customer cohort analysis analyses that we did uh kind of painted the picture of the the perfect heirloom customer and created a profile of the customer that would most i want to join our movement towards like a clean healthy future for food and so we provided our designer was extremely patient and built helped us design an incredible package but we wanted to speak to the consumer and tell them what you're about to buy is not typical and it's not a discount brand it's something that's gonna deliver incredible quality and it's something that's gonna be radically different than what we're used to clean healthy pesticide free but also delivers on flavor and quality so everything from the texture of the product to the design is is is built around validating our claim as top quality product on the show yeah that totally makes sense that definitely it aligns with what my thought would be the rest of the year just you know you touched on kind of blend and expand looking at potentially the right mass partner this year other than that what else is kind of on the radar for twenty twenty six in terms of where you want the business to be by the end of the year well we're always i said earlier we don't release a lot of new skews but we have a pretty comprehensive innovation pipeline so we have different form factors that we have been quietly innovating in our lab and our r and d space we are likely going to take the next step in the form factor space for heirloom and it's most likely going to be something that enters the market this year yeah i think one factor is really the answer for sure you don't have to release more i can i can make some guesses but that's that's gonna be exciting for sure oh yeah this was an awesome last question especially you're such a great take on the cbd world brands or just kind of trends in general like say outside the coffee space you know i've kind of peaked your interest things you've been just kind of tracking for fun things that really kind of yeah peak interest at all yeah um i'm not really interested in trends um i kind of you know we've seen them come and go all over the place you know we built a movement and we're doing pretty well in that movement and we kind of created a new category so trends aren't something that i'm really that i really focus on but if you want to talk about brands that are kind of killing it in the space right now yeah like addicted to simply they're just doing an incredible job the legumes and lentils and in bean space and they're a big proponent of regenerative agriculture so they're doing an incredible job and painterland sisters like in the yogurt space they're just oh my god they're doing such a great job and the product is just it's so good it's amazing it's so good yeah and and they're also dominating their category so i'm really proud of what those two brands have done it's been really exciting to watch them bro grow in their category and become leaders in their uh respective spaces so um big fans of both yeah likewise i'm on the same page we are hoping this has been awesome um so many great insights here what's um what's the best place to follow along with with you and uh as you're building the journey and then what's the best place to follow on with heirloom these days as well yeah um i tell my story pretty uh vividly on linkedin so you can find me there um and um the brand itself you can find on instagram at heirloom coffees and that's where most of our most of our communications are and of course you can find us in store at sprouts nationwide just about every natural retailer and specialty retailer in the country most regional retailers and of course of course our website heirloom coffee roasters dot com where you can buy our coffee directly from our coffee roastery and get it delivered like a day or two after it's roasted awesome love it we hope you appreciate the time this has been awesome i think that's the pod my pleasure thanks for having me