Don't underestimate yourself - Emanuel Storch Blackbird Foods

My Biggest Lessons with Chris Meade

Chris Meade used Gorgias to generate over $1,000,000 in retail sales, learn how he did, and you can too.

Emanuel Storch is the founder of Blackbird foods, based out of NYC the OG plant protein and frozen pizza. Based Now the fastest growing pizza brand. Prior to this, he was the founder of Simpli gum.

Key moments in this episode

0:00 Intro and how Blackbird Foods became the best plant based pizza and fastest growing pizza brand in the world.

3:00 Getting started with plant based meats to restaurants for plant based meat. 60% of the business is selling into food distributors.

5:00 Increasing sell-thru instores through sampling, and allocating budget into in-store samples and trade spending and going up to 20% trade spend.

9:00 Horror stories rolling up into retail. Bad promotions like individual slides and trying to get new ideas to shop.

11:15 How Blackbird Foods has changed from their first iteration, and growing from a plant based audience to a more wide appeal for flexitarians and adventurous foodies.

12:45 Selling on platforms like getter and Uber Eats.

14:30 How they were able to get into Whole Foods with regional and national buying. Emanuel started regional focusing on the North East including their home town of New York. They also launched in the South West region including Texas where the Whole Foods headquarters is.

16:30 Lessons learned from bringing Simply gum into Wal-Mart, Target, and Whole Foods. 17:00 Funding the business and keeping things simple including the best things being done in-house, and finding the right hires early on.

21:00 Lessons learned from product line expansion. Just because something is good for restaurants, doesn’t mean that it will be a great fit for a restaurant.

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Chris Meade is the co-founder & CMO of CROSSNET, the world’s first four-way volleyball game. Chris was honored with Forbes 30U30 for the 2021 Sports category. CROSSNET combines elements of the childhood game four square and volleyball in a competitive game to 11, win by 2. CROSSNET is now available at 3000+ retail stores such as Walmart, Target, DICKS, Academy Sports, Sam’s Club and 20+ other retailers.