New Primal - Revenue Is Vanity: The Hard Truth About Scaling CPG

You know, that's the trap, isn't it? Because none of the decisions sounds irrational in the moment when there's growth opportunity.

A retailer asks, consumer buys, there's revenue.

We all know not all revenue is equal.

And then the next adjacency, most of the time makes sense.

And suddenly you have a business you never conscientiously decided to build.

And personally, I've watched good companies get diluted one reasonable yes at a time.

Complexity almost never walks into the room and introduces itself as complexity.

It usually shows up dressed as opportunity.

And

so when did you realize all of those individually responsible yeses or reasonable, I should say, yeses, had collectively become a problem and what was the real cost of that complexity

i i couldn't even add up the real cost of it but it was years and it was probably years of time in millions of dollars um if i had to guess i'm probably afraid i'm actually afraid to go add it up and really look at it but it was years and millions how about that um you know i think it really hit us coming out of covid it was you know in the in the height of covid fortunately for us we had We had two parts of our business.

We had a snacking, call it a snacking division and a pantry division.

And people stopped snacking in COVID and started cooking.

But coming out of COVID, people started snacking and stopped cooking.

So it, you know, we saw the business kind of have these like natural macro trends that impacted it.

But, you know, you had to look at like, you had to get really real.

We had to get really, really real with ourselves and go, okay, what, what, what is happening in the business that like, what's, what's like an enduring trend versus like what was like this like momentary black swan event driven trend that's probably not real.

So I think coming out of COVID, looking at all the categories we were in, all of the products we were in, you know, serving all of these different consumer occasions, we had to really like humble ourselves a bit and say, okay, I know that...

And for me, it hurt because there were great products in other categories that we...

I mean, our buffalo sauce... still to this day, I would argue, is the cleanest, best tasting buffalo sauce that ever hit the market.

There was an argument that we could have just created a sauce brand and focused there.

But that wasn't our core.

That wasn't where we began.

And that was a further stretch than who we were.

And, you know, protein snacking had all of the momentum coming out of COVID.