Why Customer Feedback is the Secret Ingredient to Your CPG Product’s Success with Megan Klein
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Using Customer Feedback to Guide Your CPG Brand…
Even the best product ideas need to be tested with research. The consumer feedback received from that research on your consumer product goods is invaluable. Does your product function the way it’s supposed to? Are your customers loving the flavors, the ingredients, the messaging, the packaging, etc.? Don’t skip out on this important part of the process.
In this episode, I’m interviewing Megan Klein, CEO and founder of Little Saints non-alcoholic plant magic mocktails. Megan shares how she became a food entrepreneur, how she incorporated adaptogens into her beverages, and why doing in-person research was so important in tweaking her products and ingredients.
We also talk about how there’s no manual for the challenges you’ll face as a business owner, but being able to adapt and figure things out is vital.
Subscribe to the Food Means Business Podcast with Hudson Kitchen founder Djenaba Johnson-Jones to hear the personal stories and “secret ingredients” of abandoning your day job and starting a CPG food business.
In this episode, you’ll learn...
[00:38] Megan’s nonlinear, 8-year journey from corporate lawyer to founder of Little Saints mocktails, plus the first steps she took to start her business
[07:30] What adaptogens are, how Megan incorporated them into her products, and how she did in-person research to tweak her offerings
[12:35] Megan talks about building her team and also shares her predictions for the mocktail industry
[16:41] How entrepreneurship and its challenges have changed her
If you want to hear more about how to use research to perfect your products for your CPG food business, be sure to tune into this episode:
Links mentioned in this episode…
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About Megan Klein:
Megan Klein is the CEO and founder of Little Saints. She is a longtime advocate for plant-inspired living. As an environmental lawyer early in her career, Megan fought against frackers and factory farm polluters. Later, she became a modern farmer, running the country’s largest vertical farm and playing a role in the burgeoning local food movement in the Midwest. As an extension of her work in local foods, in 2017 Megan founded Field + Farmer a plant-based food and beverage brand sold in grocery stores throughout the U.S. Megan founded Little Saints in May 2021 in Detroit, and has since moved herself and the company to New York City, where she hugs trees daily.
Connect with Megan klein:
Follow Little Saints on Instagram
Visit the Little Saints Website
Connect with Megan on LinkedIn
Stay Connected with Djenaba Johnson-Jones:
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[00:00:02] Djenaba You are listening to the Food Means Business Podcast, which features the personal stories and secret ingredients behind what it's like to abandon your day job to start a CPG food and beverage business. I'm Djenaba Johnson-Jones, former marketing executive turned entrepreneur and founder of food business incubator Hudson Kitchen. Join our community of fellow food business owners and subject matter experts to learn and laugh with us as we explore a startup world that's a little more culinary and a lot less corporate these days. All right. So, Megan, welcome to the Food Means Business podcast.
[00:00:35] Megan Thank you, Djenaba. I'm so happy to be here.
[00:00:37] Djenaba I'm so happy that you're here as well. So before we jump into all about Little Saints, we'd love to hear about your story of going from employee to founder.
[00:00:44] Megan So, I mean, my story is not linear and it took a long time. So anyone listening to this was not like I quit my job, but I created Little Saints and that was it. So I was a lawyer from 2006 to 2013, and I didn't have any business training. I didn't use any business skills after college until my first business. So I was a big corporate lawyer and then I did environmental law, which I love for Earth Justice. I fought fracking and factory farms, but I am not great at fighting and I wouldn't say I love it, and I didn't think that I could serve the environment in the best way as a lawyer. I started to think that my own consumer choices were how I was really making a difference in terms of like protecting the environment. And I wanted to create products that would, you know, inspire some sort of change in a joyful way and other people. That was what inspired me to leave my legal career and start trying to be an entrepreneur. But as many lawyers know, you feel like you don't have any business goals. Like you feel like you don't have any practical skills. And so I volunteered for a vertical farm. We grew basil and microgreens. And when I say volunteered, I mean I did free legal work trying to beg them to pay me. I was trying to make them believe I was indispensable, which I ended up being. So that company was farmed here is on the southwest side of Chicago. That was the first and largest hydroponic basil farm in the country. We grew basil and microgreens in a 20,000 square foot warehouse, and we sold to Whole Foods. And it was a beautiful company. And I was not one of the founders of that, but that's where I really, like honed my food business skills, which was hard growing, basil growing. God bless anyone on this call right now that's listening to this that grows like perishable things and tries to sell them. I'll never do that again.
[00:02:38] Djenaba I love that you are so resourceful and offered pro-bono legal work in order to get them to to hire you. That was amazing.
[00:02:44] Megan Oh, thanks. When you think about it, it's like, are you really passionate about something? Not that I think that entrepreneurs should work for free, but sometimes a lot of people come to me and they want to change careers or something. Just do a little bit of volunteer work or something on the side and see if you really do like it. And it ended up that I really did like it. So then through farmed here, my partners and I farmed here, ended up founding the Field + Farmer Brand, which is plant based dressings and juices. And then after that, I founded Little Saints on my own. But that whole process was eight years.
[00:03:19] Djenaba How did the partnership come to be? Before we kind of get into Little Saints, we'd love to hear about the other business first.
[00:03:25] Megan Oh, sure. It was not traditional. So I was at a farm here and I was there like general counsel, and I was doing food safety stuff at the time, and I was helping the founders raise money. And the founders were brilliant. I mean, they did something that had not been done before. And then the venture capital fund that funded us ended up putting me in charge as president. And then they were my partners and they're great guys and we ended up shutting down the farm. So as an entrepreneur, I have the experience of shutting down a company, unfortunately, and fortunately, because we learned a lot and all of our team members got new jobs, so everyone was fine. But then it was my partners from Farm here that we started Field and Farmer in the Fresh Factory together.
[00:04:08] Djenaba Wow, that's amazing. So you're a corporate lawyer, then you kind of work your way into being a food entrepreneur. Talk about, like, your transition into beverages.
[00:04:18] Megan Well, we had done beverages with Field and Farmer. They recently discontinued their juice line, but the Fresh factory was the umbrella organ. It is. It still lives. It's thriving. It is a food incubator and co-packer that makes like fresh HPP dips, dressings and juices. And so the Field and Farmer brand was one brand of the many that we made. So that company actually made a lot of juice. We made juice. We made tea. So I did have experience making beverages before, and I wanted to take it one step further with Little Saints science and really get into like the nonalcoholic nighttime drinking that I was really craving by myself personally. So I've been an entrepreneur in the wellness space for a while now. I eat pretty healthy. I'm pretty conscious about what I put in my body. And yet until 2022, I was slamming negronis at night, let's just say, especially during the pandemic.
[00:05:17] Djenaba I mean, yeah, there's a lot going on. I mean, it was just a stressful, anxiety ridden time for sure.
[00:05:22] Megan It was stressful for all of us. We were all doing the best we could. But I started to see that like, okay, all of the like kale and mushroom adaptogen powders and all that good things I was doing during the day were really being canceled out by the alcohol that I was drinking at night. And I love a good cocktail. I love going to a bar. I love, like, ordering a fancy, strong drink. And when I did my first dry January and when I would take months off from drinking, I wouldn't find anything that was close to a cocktail in terms of like, taste, smell and mood. I mean, there are a lot of products out there that are great, but they are mostly water and flavors, and those don't hold up in a cocktail. And so I wanted to create something that was closer to the taste of a cocktail than what I found out there.
[00:06:10] Djenaba So what were your first steps? What did you do first?
[00:06:13] Megan Well, first I put together the values of the company, honestly, because I think that's really important to have from the beginning. So our values are celebrate joy and fun, not drinking alcohol. It's still got to be fun. A lot of us, including me, relied on alcohol for fun. So I was like, okay, this is going to be fun. Honoring feminine energy and business. Which means like trusting our intuition, trusting the way we feel in our bodies, and not being afraid to treat our team members with love. And then like source consciously and with intent. As a former lawyer, I really care about my business, its impact on the environment, and then just giving back to the communities that are integral in helping us grow our brand. So values first and then I reached out to a food scientist with her master's in adaptogens because I could say like, I want a canned mocktail that tastes like a Paloma, which I love, or a negroni spritz and I can tell her I want it to be sugar free. I want it to have like a never seen before, a plant magic blend of CBD, terpenes and reishi, all of which I know work together to lift my mood. But I don't know the ratios and stuff and I don't know like how to source the most effective adaptogens. So I worked with a food scientist with her masters in adaptogens to create the product.
[00:07:30] Djenaba Can you step back for a second? Just tell us what adaptogens are for people that don't know?
[00:07:33] Megan Oh, thank you. Yes. So adaptogens is an umbrella term, I would say, for ingredients that help us reduce our stress levels. So an example of an adaptogen would be ashwagandha. It would be reishi mushroom, which we use in Little Saints. CBD would even be considered an adaptogen within the term because it reduces stress and anxiety.
[00:07:57] Djenaba Got it. Thank you. So you create your values. You found someone to help you develop the recipes. What was the next step that you took?
[00:08:04] Megan Then I had to find a co-packer, which in CBD beverages is quite difficult. So I found.
[00:08:10] Djenaba I can imagine.
[00:08:11] Megan Oh my Lord, we're in it right now. I had nothing. So I was living in Detroit. I moved to Detroit alone during the pandemic. And I love Detroit. Go Detroit. And I luckily found a co-packer on the western side of Michigan that would do small batches with me. And that was 2021 when there were like insane supply chain issues. And so all I could get was these ugly 12 ounce cans. If you've seen Little Saints, now they're in these like, adorable little eight ounce lake and it's beautiful. Yeah. Thank you. At the time, all we could get was, like, ugly 12 ounce cans. And I was like, I'm not putting those on the Internet, but I will try them with the people. So I bought a used corn vending trailer from Wisconsin and she got to glam up. Her name's Baby Mint. She's like a mint green vending trailer. And I sampled those 12 ounce cans and sold them all throughout Detroit and Michigan throughout that summer of 2021. So I launched at the Movement Music Festival in Detroit outside this amazing club called Spotlight Memorial Day weekend 2021. And then I just continued to go to street fairs and music festivals and sell and sample, and I really wanted to get feedback from my people were Midwesterners. I grew up in Wisconsin and make sure our Little Saints really resonated with Midwesterners before we brought it out to the coast, which is not generally like the approach that most CPG companies take.
[00:09:39] Djenaba It's not. It's like is it going to work in New York? Is it gonna work in L.A.? Okay, fine. The rest of the country will follow suit, which may not necessarily be the case, but that seems to be what people think. Yeah.
[00:09:48] Megan Yeah, I think so. And as a midwesterner, I do see that. And so I know that my people like their cocktails. Sorry to generalize if you're Midwestern and you don't. So I wanted to make sure that it was going to taste good to them. So I sampled with thousands of people and many people would come up to the trailer holding a beer in their hand and say, like, I want to drink less, or I want to have a second drink that's not alcohol. And I made the product so much better through all of those interactions. I got such great feedback. Specifically, we reduced the sweetness. We launched with stevia, but then took stevia out because I learned that a lot of people don't love the taste of stevia. We decided on the two flavors that we launched with, which were Ginger Mule and Paloma were the most popular ones. And then I really got better at just telling the story. I mean, I'm such an ingredient geek that I could get lost in it. And then after talking to hundreds of people, I was like, They don't know what I'm talking about. They were like, What in the hell is a terpene? What are you dressed like? I was dressed up like the terpene queen. So I just really made my language more accessible and focused on like it's a sugar free mood lifting mocktail with a lot of good stuff in there for it, and it's going to make you feel good.
[00:11:04] Djenaba I love you took the time to research and like that whole, like face to face interaction with one person and getting their feedback is so important and it's like crucial to developing a brand for sure.
[00:11:15] Megan Yeah, I'm really grateful for it. Little Saints would not be where it is if I had not spent that summer making everyone in Detroit and surrounding Michigan suburbs try Little Saints.
[00:11:25] Djenaba Did you also look at other nonalcoholic brands? Because as you mentioned, there were some on the market at the time.
[00:11:30] Megan Oh, yeah, totally. I bought everything. My kitchen table had every brand. There are so many great ones that I have so much respect for because they paved the way. Sugar was an issue for me. Most of them have at least like nine grams of sugar in them, and I didn't think anything tasted as much like a cocktail as I would like.
[00:11:51] Djenaba So talk to me about the flavors because you have a few. And from what I can tell, they're very, very close to an actually alcoholic beverage. So I'd love to hear about that.
[00:12:00] Megan Yeah. So we've had a bunch of flavors. Right now we have the two OGs, which are Ginger, Mule and Paloma, and then we have a Negroni Spritz and a Spicy Marg. They are called by those cocktail names because nonalcoholic is a growing but very new category. And, you know, I want my customers to know what they're drinking and to kind of understand what the use case is. So instead of like an elixir or whatever, it's like, this is a Paloma. You probably want to drink this at the times where you a drink a Paloma like at night after work, like on a boat during the day sometimes when you want to take the edge off.
[00:12:35] Djenaba So you've been able to kind of grow your company, I think pretty quickly. And I understand, like you have actually previous experience of creating CPG brands and which probably helped to accelerate that growth. But can you talk a little bit about your team? Who are you working with? Who've you hired to work with you, or what type of contractors do you work with to run your business?
[00:12:51] Megan I now have the best team. It took me a little bit, but I'm so happy with the team I've built. So I have Katie, my head of marketing. She's full time. I have an operations manager, Anne Marie is amazing. She's full time. Funny enough, I met them both as friends beforehand and just saw the genius in both of them and got them on board with me. I met a really wonderful person, Ashlyn, through the startup CPG Slack channel and she does like advisory stuff on financial model and operations.
[00:13:20] Djenaba They're such a good resource start CPG like they're great. I've actually posted jobs on there as well and gotten some people.
[00:13:25] Megan So like Slack CPG changes the game and then we outsource PR, we outsource social media, we outsource digital ads. So small, lean and mean team with pulling in contractors.
[00:13:38] Djenaba Absolutely. Absolutely. Where do you see the industry going next? There's been like this trend towards people that want to be sober or not drink as much. Can you just talk a little bit about where you see it going?
[00:13:48] Megan Yeah, I've been having a lot of great conversations recently with actually a bunch of bartenders giving inbound kind of requests for things, and I think the industry is going towards more functional and like a big, better punch with the flavors and smells. And so the reason people drink alcohol is because it alters our state. Like, I don't drink alcohol anymore. I quit since I started Little Saints, a lot of people are like used to that take the edge off feeling that a cocktail or a glass of wine or beer or whatever it gives you at the end of the day. And so they want some sort of like a mood lifting ingredient in their nonalcoholic drinks. So there are many nonfunctional nonalcoholic drinks and I think the future is functional. I also think the future includes a more well-rounded sensory experience. One thing I didn't mention that was really important to me was to add smell to Little Saints. Subconsciously, the reason that we like wine or anything is because it smells good. It has some sort of a smell that we associate with a positive experience we had when we drank it the last time. So we have a positive experience when we smell the smell again. Many nonalcs don't have any smell in them, so we add what's called terpenes to our mocktails. They're just that's all it means is like the natural smell molecules that lift your mood. Are derived from lemon rains and hops and lavender. We put those in the mocktail, and then our new nonalcoholic spirit has natural terpenes in it from the palo santo.
[00:15:16] Djenaba So you started out driving around and sampling the product. What are you doing now for marketing? How are you getting the word out about the product?
[00:15:23] Megan I can't do that anymore. That summer took it out of me. No. Listen, 2023 our goal was we really want to build a brand, right? Like it's a movement. We're creating joy. It's not just a beverage, it's a brand. And I think 2022, we did a lot of events. We were I mean, I think I did an event at least every week. We were really out of the building community in person, and that was important to us to like see what parts of the brand resonated and make sure we were talking to our customers in the way that was resonating with them. 2023 we've really focused on optimizing our e-comm, so we've grown our email list by 300%. We have increased our returning customer rate. We've really grown our Shopify sales and all of the metrics associated with that. And so that's really like our primary marketing focus. Because a business to be sustainable, it's got to make money and that's really what's driving revenue and the events. Of course, many people see us at events and then they might buy us at some other time, but I've found that it's the easiest, shiniest, most fun thing to do. I love events, I love socializing, but it's not often a revenue driver.
[00:16:37] Djenaba That's a really good point. I never thought about that before. So great for brand building. Not necessarily a revenue driver, interesting. So I'm going to switch gears here just a little bit. And I'm wondering, how did entrepreneurship change you?
[00:16:49] Megan I feel like every day being an entrepreneur is just a process of self evolution spiritually. I meditate and do yoga every day. I have like a really strong practice, and entrepreneurship is hard, especially right now. It's been really tough. Like so many unexpected curveballs have been thrown at me, and I think the reason that you have a spiritual practice is to put it into practice when shit hits the fan. Because if you can't, then what's the point? And so I think that entrepreneurship makes me a better person because I'm constantly improving my self, being a better person and loving myself, loving my team, even when things get tough and just growing in general. We were joking. We were like, We think in the past three months we got an extra MBA and we had like a couple ayahuasca ceremonies, but not really ayahuasca just work.
[00:17:49] Djenaba It's so interesting. Like, I know you can get an a degree in like entrepreneurship and I have a MBA also, but it's there's nothing like actually doing the work and kind of working through all the tough things that happen, being an entrepreneur.
[00:18:01] Megan And that's what's so fun about it being an entrepreneur. Like all the stuff that's happened to us in the past couple of months and we have like been victorious. Yeah, but no one teaches you that in school.
[00:18:12] Djenaba Not at all.
[00:18:13] Megan There's no playbook, and that's the fun of it.
[00:18:16] Djenaba I completely agree with you. I honestly wouldn't change it for the world. As hard as it is sometimes wouldn't change it at all. It was great. It's great. So we have what we call a money bell at Hudson Kitchen that we bring when we're celebrating anything. So I'm wondering what you're celebrating, like personal or professional.
[00:18:36] Megan Two things. Number one, two weeks ago, we surpassed our 2022 revenue.
[00:18:41] Djenaba Oh, yeah. Like, okay, before the end of June. That's so fantastic. Yes. At the end of June. Amazing. Congratulations. Yes, yes, yes.
[00:18:50] Megan And also, we are opening up another pre-seed round, like a little mini bridge round for friends and family. And I got my first check yesterday.
[00:18:59] Djenaba Amazing. Congratulations.
[00:19:02] Megan Thank you.
[00:19:04] Djenaba Megan, thank you so much for being with us.
[00:19:05] Djenaba Please let everybody know how they can find out all about you and about Little Saints.
[00:19:09] Megan Sure. So follow us on Instagram at littlesaintsco. I'm at meganjoklein. Our website is LittleSaints.com. And we would love for you to send us messages and we'd love to meet you.
[00:19:22] Djenaba Thank you.
[00:19:22] Megan Thanks, Djenaba.
[00:19:23] Djenaba The Food Means Business podcast was produced by Hudson Kitchen. It is recorded at the studio at Carney Point and mixed and edited by Wild Home Podcasting. Our theme song is by Damien de Sands, and I'm your host, Djenaba Johnson-Jones. Follow Hudson Kitchen on Instagram at thehudsonkitchen and to get Food Business Bites right in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter at thehudsonkitchen.com/newsletter. Listen, follow and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Until next time.