Entrepreneurs know the path to success is rarely smooth. There are countless challenges—product development, funding, distribution—but what if you added sustainability and inclusivity into the mix?
That’s exactly what Sarah Hartmann, the founder of Vêsucré, did when she launched her plant-based dessert brand.
In her conversation on the Spilled Salt podcast with Maureen Ballatori, Sarah shared the key lessons she learned in building her frozen dessert brand from the ground up.
From Dining Tables to Icicle Tricycles
Sarah’s entrepreneurial journey with Vêsucré started in her kitchen. After adopting a vegan diet to improve her health, she found that there weren’t any frozen desserts that met her standards as a vegan foodie.
So, she started experimenting with recipes, eventually developing her signature product, a cousin to ice cream that she calls Plant de Crème. It’s a frozen dessert reminiscent of the classic French crème brûlée or pot de crème that combines creamy and crunchy textures as well as sweet and salty flavors.
From there, Sarah focused on brand awareness and consumer feedback. She took Vêsucré on the road to any event she thought would be attended by her target market. Selling product from her icicle tricycle, she was able to capture responses from those initial consumers that would inform her future relationships with retailers as well as wholesale deals and distribution deals.
Brand Values: Sustainability, Inclusion, and Zero-Waste Production
But Vêsucré isn’t just another dessert brand. It’s also a mission-driven company that hires individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) to work in food production. For Sarah, building a sustainable and inclusive business model was just as important as creating a delicious product.
A key part of Vêsucré’s sustainability focus is their zero-waste production process. They make their own oat milk in-house, and rather than discarding the oat pulp, they reuse it in other products, such as their espresso brownies. This closed-loop production process ensures that nothing goes to waste, aligning with the company’s environmental values.
Scaling a Frozen CPG Brand: Lessons Learned
Starting any consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand comes with its own set of challenges, but frozen desserts present unique obstacles. Sarah highlighted several key takeaways for entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their own food or beverage brand:
Packaging Matters: Early on, Sarah tried to save costs by using generic packaging and adding stickers for each flavor. However, this approach proved ineffective, especially in stores where consumers couldn’t easily identify the product. The lesson? Don’t cut corners on packaging—it’s a critical part of your brand’s identity and consumer appeal.
The Importance of Market Testing: Sarah’s team spent their first year getting out into the field—literally. They brought their product to farmer’s markets, festivals, and other local events, using an eye-catching yellow “icicle tricycle” to grab attention. These face-to-face interactions provided invaluable feedback, helping Sarah refine not just the product itself but the language used to describe it.
Navigating Frozen Distribution: One of the biggest hurdles in scaling a frozen food brand is distribution. Frozen products require specialized logistics, and any mishap in transit can ruin the product. Sarah stressed the importance of understanding the supply chain and being prepared for the risks involved.
Getting the Right Support: Vêsucré benefitted from several resources, including a Small Business Development Center (SBDC) advisor and grant programs that helped fund equipment and staffing. Sarah’s advice to other entrepreneurs is to tap into local and state resources early on, whether for funding, networking, or business guidance.
Building an Inclusive Brand: In addition to sustainability, Vêsucré is committed to inclusivity. The company partners with local organizations that provide employment opportunities for individuals with IDD. Not only does this provide meaningful work for these individuals, but it also sets Vêsucré apart as a brand that consumers feel good about supporting.
Moving Forward: What’s Next for Vêsucré?
Vêsucré’s future looks promising. The brand is currently expanding its reach in New York State, with plans to move into larger retailers like Hannaford and Price Chopper.
But scaling comes with its own challenges. For now, Sarah is focused on proving that Vêsucré’s desserts can move off the shelves, while also ensuring they stay true to their values of sustainability and inclusivity.
Sarah’s journey with Vêsucré offers a wealth of insights for any food or beverage entrepreneur. Whether it’s understanding the complexities of frozen distribution, the importance of getting consumer feedback, or the need to invest in proper packaging, her story is full of actionable takeaways.
At the heart of it all is a commitment to building a brand that makes a positive impact—not just for consumers, but for the world.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries.
Today’s guest is Sarah Hartmann. She has started Vêsucré, which is a woman-owned company crafting delectable plant-based desserts. And I can tell you I have eaten this. It is delectable. It’s absolutely incredible.
The company’s signature product, which they’re calling a Plant de Crème. And Sarah talks about that on the podcast today about why they call it that.
It’s a single-serve creamy frozen dessert made sustainably by individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). I’ve been involved with a number of organizations that serve IDD individuals with developmental disabilities. And it’s such a special way to build a brand in a sustainable and in a just a well-rounded way.
Sarah talks about that, of why she made that choice, how she’s incorporated that approach into the business. And most importantly, why I wanted to bring her onto the show in the first place is to talk about what it’s taken for her to start and scale the brand. Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey there, Sarah, how are you?
Sarah: I’m doing well, Maureen. How are you doing?
Maureen: So good, great to see you and very pleased to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for agreeing to jump in.
Sarah: My gosh, thanks for asking. I love talking to you and now we get to do it on a podcast.
Maureen: I love it. Well, as I said in my email, inviting you to join me today, I love an opportunity to talk to a founder about what it takes to start and to scale a CPG brand because there’s just so much complexity to it.
I’d love to, before we focus on that, I’d love to back up. And I always like to talk about the history of your career leading up to what you’re doing now. So start there for us if you would about your career leading up to the work you’re doing now.
Sarah: Super, so this is maybe career 14 for me. Most recently, before I launched Vêsucré, I was working in sports and nonprofit and was working with the Paralympics, specifically the US Association of Blind Athletes. Go Team USA! And that was an amazing job.
Some of the athletes are in Paris right now, actually. I am loving watching them at the Paralympic Games. But that job was a lot of travel. And I had moved from Brooklyn, where I’ve spent most of my professional life with stints also in LA and Chicago and Tampa.
I moved from Brooklyn to a small town in upstate New York called Oneonta. It’s in the Western Catskills. I would put it three hours north of New York City, an hour to Albany, an hour to Binghamton, if that makes sense. It’s actually where I was born and raised. But my parents are of an age where they need help.
So I moved from the city upstate to help care for them. And the Paralympics job just didn’t work because I was traveling constantly.
I took a little time to figure out what I wanted to do. And a couple of years before that, I had started eating a vegan diet. And I was pretty much in a medical crisis. And my doctor was like, okay, hands up, like, let’s just try eating vegan. And it worked really well for me. I was able to get off all of my high blood pressure medication.
Maureen: Wow, that is wild.
Sarah: I mean, I don’t know if that happens for everybody. I’m not trying to give any medical advice, certainly, but I’m really grateful that I had that experience. However, I am a foodie and I could not find a frozen dessert that I liked.
So I got to work in my home kitchen, creating a formula, which eventually became our signature product. We call it Plant de Crème. It’s like a cross between ice cream and a crème brûlée. It’s a single-serving cup. It’s frozen and creamy on the bottom and it’s crunchy on top for texture. And there’s some science that I was able to devise for its super rich and creamy texture.
The things I can tell you about it are that we make our own oat milk. And that is a big part of our brand story because we are a zero-waste operation. And anybody who’s made oat milk knows that there’s some pulp leftover residual oats, if you will, and we take that pulp and we reuse it in other things.
So nothing goes to waste in our kitchen. So we’re combining oat with sesame and we sweeten it with dates. So that oat, sesame, date combination creates this really rich, creamy texture in the Plant de Crème.
I’ll tell you a quick story about why that name. So when we started, we tested first a salty and sweet frosty treat. And boy, that’s a lot of words and really confusing. So then we started saying, it’s vegan ice cream.
At events, especially down in the city, people were like, hold up now, this is not ice cream. If you told me, if you gave me this in a restaurant and said, it’s ice cream, I would send it back.
And so we just really aligned on, it’s a unique product. And so it needs a unique name and thus Plant de Crème. So, oat, sesame, date, the flavors we had… We’ve developed nine different flavors, but we have four core flavors that we sell in retail now.
The OG is toffee crunch. So it’s creamy and buttery on the bottom and then crunchy, salty, sweet on the top. And that one actually came to be at my dining room table.
I had been working on the formula and I had a foodie friend over for dinner and I was like, darn, what am I going to have for dessert? So I just went in the freezer and I scooped some of it in the bowl and then I put the toppings on and we both took a spoonful and went, whoa, we, this could be something. And literally the recipe has barely changed since that first dinner party.
Maureen: Tell me more about that, about the product development and how you went from, I’m going to play around and make something for myself because I want something to, I think I’m going to do this. Like I think I’m going to actually do this. Tell me about the product development through that and your own sort of self-talk or mindset about that shift from it’s for me to it’s for others.
Sarah: Thank you.
So I think that evening, that dinner was a really important event on the timeline. My friend and I spent the whole weekend, which was supposed to be like visiting and going to the opera. Instead, we spent the whole weekend putting together a business plan. It tasted that good.
From there, I’m very fortunate that I went to college with a man who has created, scaled and sold multiple food brands, all in frozen. So I called him and I said, can I just talk to you about this thing and whether you think it has any potential to bring to market and scale?
I got maybe halfway through the pitch and he was like, time out. I think you definitely have something here. You’ve checked so many boxes.
And when I was coming up, some of the bigger brands mentored me. And so if you would like me to be your advisor, I would jump at the chance. And I was like, okay, let’s go. So shout out to Kirk. He’s a dear friend and he’s my Mr. Miyagi and I’m the karate kid, or my Obi-Wan Kenobi in deciding to create the business. He has been on my shoulder and in my ear, helping me avoid some of the common mistakes when scaling. He has just also been a really good sounding board because I’ve been able to take my years of experience in business, et cetera, and kind of switch it into CPG, which is interesting.
Maureen: Going back to the work that you were doing in sports and nonprofits, what was your role?
Sarah: So at the USABA, I was in biz development. So partnerships, sponsorships, the money person. So sales is my deal. I was the Executive Director of a few other nonprofits.
Prior to that, I worked at a tech startup for about 15 years and from the ground up. So I’ve put some miles on the tires, working in startups and that business today is extremely successful.
Maureen: Well, that’s exactly why I always like to talk about the background too, right? Because from that experience that you just mentioned, you experienced scaling from the trenches and you are also experienced in an Executive Director role and business development.
You’re experiencing running the ship. There’s not somebody there on your shoulder telling you what to do. There’s somebody that you’re tapping to advise you as any successful and smart entrepreneur and business person does, is, has a cohort of people that they can tap.
You went from, my God, this is amazing. We’re going to write a business plan. And you did that for some time. And then you tapped your friend who has expertise in frozen, which is clutch. There’s a whole other supply chain there. There’s a whole other logistics channel that it needs to go through. And so that I’m sure was critical.
Sarah: Totally.
Maureen: Then what happened?
Sarah: So I got my first commercial kitchen, working with a vegan coffee house and bakery actually. And it was there that I hired my first intern.
And this is another key part of the story. There are multiple organizations in this region who serve people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
My first partnership was with the organization called The Arc Otsego. Through state-funded programs, pre-vocational programs, employee training programs, I was able to bring a young woman named Gwen into my first commercial kitchen.
Together we figured out what she was really good at. She didn’t have a lot of kitchen experience, didn’t have any cooking experience, and had a problem with texture. SWhen she had the toffee crunch, for example, and had all the crunchy, that’s no bueno for her.
So she actually developed her own flavor. Our milk chocolate is Gwen’s. She did a beautiful job with it. It’s just super smooth and creamy.
Maureen: I love that.
Sarah: I knew that at this stage in my career, if I’m going to build something, I want it to be exactly what I want. And I want it to be sustainable and I want it to be inclusive.
Now we have 15, I think, different people from not only The Arc Otsego, but also Springbrook, and soon Pathfinder Village. Those are all organizations that are huge and they serve this incredible population of participants who are having a great life, but are discovering through operations like ours that they’re actually really good at cooking things and they’re not just doing custodial work. They’re doing full on food production.
That was a big part of our timeline – that I got a commercial kitchen and Gwen came aboard.
Maureen: And was that rented, Sarah, that your commercial kitchen was rented space?
Sarah: Yes, we grew that within a couple of months. I also got my 20C from the Department of Ag and Markets at New York State.
Maureen: Yes. And explain for anybody who’s listening who doesn’t know what that is. Just give a brief explanation of what that is. The 20C.
Sarah: There’s a couple of critical pieces of paper that you have to have in order to go into business.
I’m going to say right now that I am very fortunate to have an advisor from the SBDC in the office that’s here in Oneonta through SUNY Binghamton. Her name is Michelle Caton. And basically the SBDC for small startups, will give you the checklist of things you need to do.
I would absolutely say the first stop in your journey should be to connect with your local SBDC and then just start that dialogue. Besides getting you on the right track for getting your sales tax certificate and getting your 20C and getting all the other things that you must have in order to do business legally in the state, they’re also going to connect you with funding.
That’s one of the things that happened to us when we moved our kitchen into the city of Oneonta. That opened up a bunch of grant opportunities and we ended up getting a micro enterprise grant from the City of Oneonta.
So the license that you need as a food maker is called a 20C. You have to have a commercial kitchen. So there’s some interesting loopholes that occurred, as I understand it, during COVID, where certain products can be produced in a home kitchen, but certainly not a frozen non-dairy dessert.
We are required to be in a licensed commercial or commissary kitchen. We did that on Market Street in Oneonta for a year and that was at the Green Earth Natural Food Store. That building is quite large and it has a whole commercial kitchen and storage space like behind the natural food store.
That was our shop for quite a while, but that grant funded all of our big commercial freezers. It allowed me to hire Chef Charlie Shaw, who is our Operations Director.
Charlie is amazing. Today, ironically, is his one year anniversary at the Vêsucré. He’s great. He is also a professor at SUNY Oneonta and teaches in the culinary program there.
Maureen: I love it.
So you’re now in this kitchen space, you’re still renting your kitchen space and the micro-enterprise grant that you got from Oneonta is helping to essentially underwrite the cost of some of the employees that you need in order to get the product out the door.
Sarah: Yes, and equipment and packaging and ingredients. There are certain things you can’t spend it on, but we would not be where we are without that grant funding.
And it is the kind of thing where it’s a reimbursement. So you have to put the money out. We were bootstrapping at this point. That got us to a place where we are in retailers throughout the state.
I would say in year one, our focus was really down towards the city. So that Hudson Valley corridor, Woodstock and Kingston and Ackert and Fenicia. And so we’re getting picked up at natural and specialty food stores. Some of those folks don’t have freezers. So there’s a bit of a barrier there.
In addition to the toffee crunch, there’s four flavors that are our core flavors now. The toffee crunch, the espresso brownie, Gwen’s milk chocolate, and a golden milk.
I wanted to make sure I gave an example of the zero-waste thing. So we take that oat pulp and we bake it into the brownies that are on top of that espresso brownie flavor.
And now that’s getting turned into all kinds of different things, but year one was really about brand building.
We know that our target market is folks who will spend money for something that’s locally made, is sustainably made, that is inclusively made. That people are very interested in eating plant-based, perhaps they’re plant-curious because this is so yummy and creamy and delicious that it’s a small barrier to entry.
We have found that our product sells the best in metropolitan areas.
In year two, we were selling a lot in Albany, Binghamton, Ithaca, Syracuse. And now we’re doing a bunch of business in New York City. .
Maureen: That’s great. So I want to go back. You just mentioned year one was focused on brand building.
Tell me more about what that looked like for you in your first year. You had countless demands on every dollar, right? That it’s for people, it’s for product development, it’s for space, it’s for labels, it’s for packaging, it’s for product, it’s for marketing, all of those things.
So when you say you were focused on brand building, what does that mean?
Sarah: So there’s multiple answers to that question. If I talk first about the product itself, all the dialing in of the formula, the shelf life, that was absolutely impacted and improved by our participation at Cornell.
We got a scholarship to do the Food Spark program, which is their commercialization program. I highly, highly, highly recommend. At that point, when we did it, we were already in the market, but it didn’t matter.
Going end-to-end through that whole course and then getting to go to the campus in Geneva and meet all of the rock star food scientists and being part of the Center of Excellence at Cornell continues to be very beneficial.
I just got an email from them this morning. We’re going to go up to the lab and do some testing and talk to them about an aspect of our product. But, just as an example, in dialing in the formula and determining our shelf life by doing the food spark program at Cornell, we doubled our shelf life. So it’s now one year, which is great for frozen. And it actually got our product creamier.
And so in terms of building the brand, we really dialed in what it is and what it looks like. When we first started, we didn’t have a seal underneath the lid. So now we’re very grown up and that was definite.
Nobody ever complained about that in year one as we’re building the brand, but we learned about consumer expectation. And we’re meeting that expectation.
Another example is product packaging. I thought I would try and save some money by creating one generic package and then labeling it with its flavor. Don’t spend the money on generic. Just spend the money on the specific packaging because what I learned the very hard way is, number one, I don’t know where our retailer is going to place the product. In ice cream, sometimes it’s the kind of freezer where you slide the door open and you’re looking down.
So I’ve got four flavors and every lid looks the same on the top. It’s not going to move, right? Nobody’s going to go and pick it up and then here’s the thing, because of the lack of real estate for the sticker, they had to turn their head to the side to read the flavor and it’s something they don’t know. It doesn’t say ice cream. There’s so much education involved.
If I could do that over again, I would have taken my time with the packaging decision. But I felt like I had orders coming and I needed to get something going.
Maureen: I’m glad you mentioned that because that’s such a good lesson for anyone who’s listening who wants to start.
I can’t tell you how many times people have sat on the opposite side of the desk for me and said exactly that. I would love to have one universal package that has a sticker. Now there are some scenarios where it can work. They are rare. And you still have to solve for a number of use cases.
If your purpose in that is cost effectiveness, that may not work. That might not actually be cost effective because even though you can buy those blanks or those standards in bulk, you still have to buy multiple other stickers to do exactly what you mentioned. Make sure that it goes on the top and it’s on the side and it’s readable.
And it doesn’t work for every package because if yours is small, like yours is small, then you still have to have the real estate to get that across.
And if the ingredient deck is different, now it’s a different sticker for the ingredients and for the nutrition panel and all of that.
I’m glad to hear you say, I wish I hadn’t compromised on that because that’s a good lesson for any of the listeners, because really what’s the goal? It’s for someone to buy it. And so it’s not going to move through the retailer.
Your first sale is to the retailer. Your second sale is to the consumer and it’s not going to move through that store if the consumer doesn’t know what it is.
Especially for something like yours where there is a bit of education. The end customer needs to know that it’s not ice cream, it’s different from that. There’s so much more of a story to tell on that front.
Sarah: Yes, and so, packaging the product is one aspect of brand building. I would say the second is education and reach. Where are we going to spend our money? And so we invested in this custom design, it’s called an icicle tricycle. They’re made in Portland, Oregon.
It was such a cool day to have this. Our brand colors are yellow and so we have this bright yellow bike with an umbrella showing up and it’s a showstopper. It is a total magnet.
We decided to invest in that and it worked really well. And last year we booked ourselves at every event. Any event where we thought our market would be, our target market and customer would be there. Anywhere we thought that there would be enough foot traffic where we could get a feel for take rate.
We wanted to see how many people when they spent the three seconds evaluating whether they wanted this or wanted to try it, how many people would actually purchase? I wanted a data set that I could begin to work from. Because that in turn informs what kinds of retailers and wholesale deals and distribution deals I’m going to go for.
It was really interesting. A key learning: big boozy events don’t work for frozen vegan desserts, because people want salty and greasy. They are not interested. It doesn’t matter whether it tastes like the richest French ice cream, because it does.
You’ve had it, it’s decadent. But it doesn’t matter. If you’re tipsy, you want salty, crunchy, So we learned that. I mentioned earlier about the event in New York City where people were like, this is not ice cream. Don’t call it ice cream.
You have an amazing opportunity to meet people and test things in the field. And so we took advantage of that. We played around with our descriptors. And so we had to get really good at that because we got to do the Fancy Food Show this year at the Javits Center. And so, by the time we were there and our thanks to Cornell because we did that Food Spark program, they invited us to be part of their Incubator Village. That was a huge gift and I’ll talk a little bit more about that later.
My point is there’s education involved with our product. It’s hard to launch frozen. Wow, I’ve learned a lot about that. The supply chain, the distribution, the sales piece. Somebody said to me very recently that frozen is like 25 to 50 years behind the rest of CPG. And nobody has invested time in changing how things are transported.
Maureen: Why?
Sarah: There’s still a lot of risk involved. You know, if somebody buys a pallet from us, and it gets on a truck and the truck’s freezer breaks, who’s responsible for that pallet, right?
I have found there’s a lot of risk aversion, which is not a problem I can currently solve.
I would say that the first year was the brand, the packaging, the product, and then our messaging and our following.
Maureen: I will tell anyone who will listen that the farmer’s market, and by that I mean any sort of event that you can get in front of your customer, is time well spent, especially when you’re at a very early stage. Because it’s getting that direct feedback from people in those experiences where they’re standing in front of you, and instead of tweaking your website based on what is or isn’t converting.
There’s ways to do feedback. There’s A/B testing. You can set up various experiences and all of that to understand what’s resonating. But when it comes to speed and understanding too, is the vibe of the customer in front of me, somebody that I feel like is my core customer that is going to convert, but just doesn’t understand it.
If your A/B testing landing page doesn’t convert, that doesn’t tell you the same things as a person can. There’s so much that you learn from those experiences. And I think also in, scaling a CPG and being prepared for experiences like the Fancy Food Show at Javits where you have an opportunity to get in front of so many buyers, to get into larger retail stores, the more that you can explain and help them understand and see that you’re actually talking to your customer, which they can feel from the way that you talk about the experiences that you have in front of people, the more they’re going to feel confident that they’re a right fit if you feel like they’re a right fit.
It’s such a critical thing that I think some brands don’t know. I don’t do the farmers market. I want to scale fast. You know, and then we’re having a very different conversation. About, how are you planning on getting that feedback from your customer and all of those things?
So you’re doing it all right. And actually it’s interesting. When you said, at the top of the call, that you wanted to get out of the work that you were doing previously, one of the reasons was because of the immense travel. But I was looking at the calendar on the Vêsucré website where you are at events nearly every day. You’re somewhere very, very often.
What is that like for you in terms of the balance of building the brand and the time that you’re putting into it and the time you’re spending at these events and how that differs from travel in a previous role?
Sarah: It’s different in that we’re in startup mode and still very early on. It’s all hands on deck all the time. You know, my mom and dad do the kitchen laundry for Vêsucré. I’m lucky that Charlie can hold down the fort here.
And let me just describe to you where we are now. So we outgrew the kitchen at the Green Earth and we’re so delighted to be invited by Springbrook to rent the commercial kitchen on their day-hab campus in Oneonta.
This building, where I’m coming to you live, was originally a school and now it is a preschool, but then it’s also a day-hab program for the individuals with disabilities that they serve.
There’s a massive commercial kitchen in the back. And so it is luxurious to have all of this space. And then the folks from the day-hab program who work with us just come down from their classrooms and work their shifts. It’s fantastic.
It’s allowed us to scale even further. Now we’re at this really interesting point in the timeline where, actually later today, I have a meeting with Hannaford.
Maureen: That’s incredible. Congratulations. I hope that goes well.
Sarah: Thanks. I’ll keep you posted.
It’s been a long time. I’ve learned so much and our brand and the product is in a place now where we can seriously start to get case packs into freezers and do things that I’ve come to learn are essential for having the momentum in the store.
Because it doesn’t matter if you close the deal. People have to buy it. They have to like it and they have to come back and buy it again. Otherwise you don’t get to stay.
There’s nobody at the store who’s going to do that for you. I’ve learned it’s my responsibility. And so here’s where that investment of time and energy and brand building and our language and how we connect with the customer we could convert or I love that you use the word curmudgeon. That was so polite. I have another word, which I won’t use right now.
We have to do in-store demos and we have to get a hang tag and we have to take a hit on doing a TPR, a temporary price reduction. And all of this information that I have acquired over the past year, we are now hoping to put in place with a big retailer like Hannaford. We’ve had meetings with Price Chopper. We’re hoping to talk to Wegmans.
The big dance was the Fancy Food Show, which happened this summer. Charlie and I went, we brought hundreds of samples, small tastes of Vêsucré. We brought a freezer to keep them cold and we designed a little pop -up shop. I think I said that we got to go thanks to Cornell inviting us to be in the Incubator Village, which for my money was the most exciting part of the Fancy Food Show.
If people haven’t been, I usually describe it as Willy Wonka meets the Super Bowl. It’s literally like four football fields worth of food makers and it’s where deals get done. The buyers, the retailers, the distributors, institutional buyers, they’re all there and you hope to write some orders.
We were kind of in the super energized debut district. And I had a couple of goals going into the Fancy Food Show. One, I wanted further proof of concept. The stores where we’re in, our customers, we think we’ve got something special. We had to really make the sound bite quick.
“We’ve created this unique dessert that’s like a cross between ice cream and a crème brûlée. It’s made sustainably and our kitchen staff are all people with intellectual or developmental disabilities.”
Just that little sound bite really resonated with a lot of people.
I did meet with Walmart. I did meet with Whole Foods. On and on and on. My mind was exploding the entire time. I had really good discussions and met with several distributors.
My goals were proof of concept. So I checked that off the list. Met with several different distributors. So this is a whole part of the game, if you will, where Kirk, my advisor, was so great. He is the king of spreadsheets. And so I have, I continue to dial in my COGS, cost of goods sold. That is how much it costs for me to make one unit of Vêsucré, including the packaging, including the labor and all of the overhead that’s involved.
As you get bigger, you can buy more volume of ingredients, which means you’re driving that cost down. But then there are the margins, right? And so I have a whole spreadsheet where I can look at my margin where I go direct to consumer when I go direct to retailer, when I have to go through a distributor, and even if I have to go through a broker who goes to a distributor who goes to the retailer, right?
That was a whole bunch of calculus that I had to learn. And I’m so glad that I had that in my back pocket at the Fancy Food Show. I knew how to answer some of those tough questions.
I think this sounds weird, because I really wanted to pick up a distribution deal. And we think we’re pretty close with at least one that I really like a lot, who works on the East Coast and New York State in particular, has a lot of accounts in the city.
But I want further proof of concept. I want to get into some stores like a Hannaford or more stores down in New York City and prove that we have velocity in the freezer. I’ve gotta be able to prove that before I’m going to go and ask a distributor again, this is frozen conversation, please take a risk with me, right?
They’re not going to sell. I’m going to sell. I can tell the story and so I want to be in demand, I think. I want to keep it, I want to distribute myself for as long as I can. And the third piece on the Fancy Food Show and then we can move on to another topic, but I wanted to try and gain some media.
I think it’s a valuable lesson that every opportunity, everything you do is an opportunity for media coverage and you never know who’s going to read it or listen to it or see it. so I was super fortunate.
So the Specialty Food Association produces the Fancy Food Show. They had put out a thing to all of the gajillion brands who were there: send us your stuff and apply for a five minute pitch meeting before the show. And you might be selected to get five minutes with a member of our media team. Which means then you could get in front of the 800 members of the media who are coming to the show.
Well, we were lucky enough to score a meeting. It was love at first sight and first bite, she loved it and she decided to make us one of the featured products at the Fancy Food Show. It was such an incredible opportunity that, to this day, we’re still doing interviews and getting calls off of pieces that have happened and just super grateful for that opportunity.
Maureen: That’s amazing.
That also goes to show, too, that as a Founder, really, it’s so hard when you’re pulled in a hundred different directions. You really have to have your goals straight, right? And be ready to jump on an opportunity.
That is a perfect example of if you hadn’t had the time because you were too stretched in other areas, you hadn’t had the time to fill out the response for the five minute opportunity. Because you’re trying to get ready to go to a show.
I can only imagine the things that were on your list in preparing to go to that. And this was just one more thing, but you saw the long game, right? If I know that if I can, I just do this, then it makes it possible for me to get this, which could lead to that, which could lead to that. And so you have to be able to see multiple steps ahead instead of just, I didn’t have time for that.
That’s one thing that I sometimes find that I hear from CPG founders, kind of not knowing where to allocate attention. What should I be spending my time doing? And so it sounds like you’ve got that pretty dialed in, in terms of focus.
Sarah: I don’t know. I mean, thanks for saying that. I think being in a startup, being an entrepreneur, your focus, the only answer to the question, where should I put my focus is everywhere. And you got to take care of yourself and you got to take care of your family. You’ve got to take care of your staff. You’ve got to have a good life.
I will pause and say all of the things I’ve done in my career have served me very, very well. And so I have to be, I’m full of gratitude for the adventure that I’ve been on over the years and the things that I’ve been able to do.
Because some things come naturally to me, the calculus and all of that, I had to figure that piece out. But I then tap on the shoulder of somebody smarter than me. And I look to people, yourself included.
We’ve had multiple conversations and I always learned something. I went to Grow-NY and got to have lunch with a wonderful round table of people who were kind enough to taste Vêsucré. I was collecting a lot of data from you guys as we’re seated around the table and how one person is looking at the package and then I’m watching them taste it.
The thing that I think almost everybody has in common is when they take the lid off, and now you have to peel the paper off. It’s so beautiful. It is an artfully crafted dessert and very pleasing.
I love to see the surprise. And then I love to see what people do when they put the first bite in their mouth. Like there’s just this eye rolling, I wasn’t expecting that. Like, what is this?
Now we’re at this really another interesting place on our timeline where I want further proof that we can get in freezers and we can turn over. And so there’s a lot of focus on the New York City market this fall. We’re launching in the Park Slope Food Co-op on the 16th of September. So if you’re in the New York City area…
When I lived in Brooklyn, I was a member at the co-op. It is the largest member-run food co-op in the United States. I’m very proud that we’re in there, because I was a member a long time ago. And we’re doing just a huge, huge sales push.
I will say that as I look into the future, I’ve identified some other gaps here with CPG and that is obviously there’s a ton of support for us to start up these incredible grant programs and SBDC and Commercialization programs like Cornell. But then there’s this massive step. Before you’ve scaled and you’ve got distribution and you’re in the regional grocery stores and then natural national grocery stores, there’s this big jump.
A lot of it has to do with co-packing or co-manufacturing for frozen in particular. So I think I’ve shared with you some of our conversations and struggles.
I love talking to Pauly at Craft Cannery about this. And he and I were both at an event, I think it was in June up in Herkimer that was produced by FuseHub called Vitality in the Valley. It was a wonderful event. Our friends from Cornell were there, friends from SUNY Cobleskill and their Institute for Rural Vitality were there. And I had met them early on.
We participated in their entrepreneur expo and won our very first award, Best Confectionary Product. So a lot of really great, great voices in the room.
I expressed my experience, as I’m going to continue to co-pack myself because I can’t find someone who manufactures. I will manufacture. So fast forward. I’m now working on a project concept called the Makery. It’ll be based in Oneonta.
Maureen: You’ll continue to manufacture yourself because you can’t find a co-packer, right?
Sarah: Yes.One half of the operation is called the Co-Makery. It will be a co-packing business specifically for frozen and refrigerated food. It will also have rentable commercial kitchens so that other food makers can come and develop their products there.
What we’re hoping is that both SUNY Cobleskill and Cornell will become involved and do some kind of mobile certifications. That they’ll come down and teach in our classroom and let people get their ServSafe, their license this, license that, do the commercialization, do the testing, that sort of thing.
The other half of the operation is called the Maketeria. And it’s a large scale food hall with rentable kiosks or counters for people who are making stuff in our kitchens or elsewhere. But if you’re small, and you’re a startup, probably don’t have, you don’t want to take the risk nor do you have the funding to do a brick and mortar. So why not rent a counter for a little while?
Vêsucré As you continue to develop that concept, I’d love to talk more because there’s other places around New York state that have done that well. One being The Commissary Kitchen in Rochester. That would, that is an excellent model for that. In fact, they’re connected to The Mercantile on Main, which is in the same building, which is all this historic 200 year old Sibley building in downtown Rochester.
And the businesses that are in the Sibley Mercantile on Main, which would be similar to the cafeteria concept, the food service that you’re referring to, they are on a really interesting model.
They don’t pay flat rent. They’re all on the same POS system and they pay a percentage of their sales to that entity or organization. Instead of paying a flat rent, meaning that they do well as the whole does well.
They’re also able to make it work with their numbers and everything. So I thought that was an admirable concept. I think that works for them because they’ve got tons of apartments upstairs. So they’ve got like a built-in audience that’s already into the businesses that are already coming and utilizing the space. I’m a huge fan of shared spaces and concepts.
You touched on economic development, too, with the micro enterprise grant that you’ve gotten. I’m sure that there’s a vehicle from economic development with this concept as well. I’m sure that they would love to help because it just is right up their alley.
I’m on the board for New York Kitchen, as well. And they do ServSafe certifications.
Sarah: And jobs for people with disabilities. You know, that’s one of the main goals. I’d love to make a field trip up there and go to that place. It sounds very cool.
Maureen: I’m not sure if the travel makes sense, but just wanted to throw that out there. So anyway, we can talk more about that offline.
All that to say, there are immense resources while there are gaps in the ecosystem. I love that you’re trying to solve this, not just for you, but for others. I’m a big fan of that. I think that the region as a whole has such strong resources in so many different areas. And the fact that you’re contributing to that is incredible.
I’m a huge fan of what you’re doing. I look forward to continuing to see Vêsucré thrive and scale. I’m here if I can help at any time.
I appreciate you taking the last 50 minutes to share with our listeners about what it has meant for you and taken for you to get the brand here. And then we’ll have you back in five years when you can talk about it as a continued success.
Sarah: That sounds so cool. Thank you so much, Maureen, for all your support and everything you’re doing for us out there in CPG and helping us build our brands. It means so much.
Feel free to share my contact info with your audience if I can be helpful in any way. Please reach out to me. I need to pay it forward. And I think I would just say whether you’re building a brand doesn’t matter what part of this industry you’re in. You’ve got to believe that’s, or be willing to believe and know that it’s going to be hard, but it is worth it.
Maureen: It’s that much better with people in your corner, which I think was also clear in today’s chat. So amazing. Thank you, Sarah. Looking forward to continuing to watch you. Thanks a lot.
Sarah: Thank you, Maureen. Thanks so much.