PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Jessica Hughes (00:00): Hey everyone. We are back. And today, we are kicking off season two with Cindy Poiesz. Cindy is the founder of Supernola, and CEO of its parent company, EVOLVE Brands. As a former wall street banker talking about a career change, Cindy applied her analytical and research skills to solve her health issues stemming from food, sensitivities. Her unique approach created a snack that allows consumers to enjoy eating healthier anytime, anywhere, and to feel full longer. Welcome to the podcast, Cindy.

Welcome to the Fork and Lens podcast, brought to you by Viscul. Ooh, smells delish.

Well hey, congrats on being named as a top pick for Expo West and Venture World Magazine.

Cindy Poiesz (00:58): Oh, thank you. I know I was super happy, and I honestly couldn’t have asked for a better review.

Jessica Hughes (01:02): Well, especially with Expo West, and that really happening too.

Cindy Poiesz (01:05): Yeah. No sales have come out of it yet.

Jessica Hughes (01:10): But you’ve been in Walgreens. You’re in a couple of different grocer chains. You’re exploding. It seems like you’re having this overnight success, but I know all too well, the grind that you have been in for the better part of five years.

Cindy Poiesz (01:26): Yeah, seriously. I can’t believe it’s been that long.

Jessica Hughes (01:29): Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you’ve grown Supernola, and then how EVOLVE has come along, and all those different things.

Cindy Poiesz (01:38): Growing up, I was always sick and in and out of doctor’s offices with no answers as to why I was feeling really run down, always upset in my stomach, a bunch of issues. I just accepted it and gave up on doctors. Then fast forward, I was working in New York, based to do investment banking. First day on the job, my boss yelled at somebody in front of everybody, for taking a sick day. That was the moment that I realized I need to figure out what’s going on, because I’m sick all the time. It was literally, I was sick all the time. I really got serious about health. The one thing that my mom always taught me was, food is the healing element and everything, but I didn’t put two and two together that really the issue was food. And it wasn’t just the foods. The healing thing is that food’s the issue.

I got obsessed with nutrition and figuring out myself, and self-diagnosing through an elimination diet. Along the way, my problem was really snacking. With my job, I was at my desk for endless hours, or it was on the road for endless hours, but I just really needed a go to snack and I could have any time anywhere, and gave me energy to keep going, and had as much goodness in it as possible, that I actually wanted to eat over something else because I enjoyed to eat it. It was delicious. Obviously I couldn’t find any of that. So I started making it myself.

It took me about two years of just testing, and getting obsessed with ingredients and super foods, and doing a ton of research about different, kind of exotic ingredients, that we don’t typically see at the grocery store, and eventually Supernola was born.

Jessica Hughes (03:30): Yeah, and I think I first came across you when we were at a local chamber event, and it was food related and you had some tastings, and you had granola on top of a homemade lemon curd that was out of this world. It blew my socks off. You really did work that farmer’s market local food scene route until you began to grow.

Cindy Poiesz (04:01): Yeah. I originally started out, I was living in LA at the time, in LA farmer’s markets. That’s where I got all of that really good, super honest, opinions. You need that when you’re creating food brand.

Jessica Hughes (04:17): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (04:17): You need to just be open to people and what they’re saying, and big data only shows you so much. Every single, crazy thing I’ve ever heard based upon one little word that I put here, and what that made people think, and stuff like that. Just things that you can’t, you don’t know until you’ve been there and done that.

Jessica Hughes (04:39): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (04:41): That, and all the samplings that I did in Pennsylvania and everything, it really gave me a much better view of what people like, and don’t like, and want, and don’t want, and things like that.

Jessica Hughes (04:53): Yeah. It’s like a grassroots version of focus groups.

Cindy Poiesz (04:57): Yes, over a much longer period of time.

Jessica Hughes (05:00): Yes. But it also allowed you to make tweaks along the way. Like, okay, I’ve got that fixed, now what? And you could just make those really small, rather than coming out of a focus group and being like, okay, they don’t like this, this, this, this, and this. But if I took out one of those, would it make the difference for everything else?

Cindy Poiesz (05:19): Yeah, exactly. It’s taking the tech startup approach to it. You start out with a product that you think is decent enough, and then you continually make tweaks along the way. Even today we’re making tweaks.

Jessica Hughes (05:32): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (05:33): We had a food safety meeting yesterday, where I brought up all these ideas about different things that we can do, and little tweaks to the product that other people might not notice, but it’ll infer that the product gets to them the way that I want it to get to them. Constantly doing version, we’re probably at version 250 by now.

Jessica Hughes (05:54): Well, what is the grease, WD40, the reason why it was that specific number, it was that version of them experimenting to create something that stuck? And that was the recipe they went with.

Cindy Poiesz (06:10): Exactly.

Jessica Hughes (06:11): So.

Cindy Poiesz (06:12): I wonder if they tweaked it since.

Jessica Hughes (06:15): Who knows, right? It’s like, once they trademarked it, and had all the packaging done, they’re like, oh, we can’t really go to 41.

Okay. How did EVOLVE Brands come into play then?

Cindy Poiesz (06:28): Yeah, the other part of the story, once I created Supernola, my dad was diagnosed with ALS. That was really the trigger that made me want to jump into entrepreneurship. Because before that, I had a nice cushy job and everything, but I wanted to have the flexibility to be with my parents. I realized I wanted to figure out how I could make a difference in the world, versus just be a greedy banker. That’s when I moved back to Pennsylvania with my parents and really started Supernola full time, and immediately I realized I had no idea what I was doing. I’m pretty sure you met me when I was in that spot where I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I had no idea, so at least I knew.

Jessica Hughes (07:16): You’re safe. The first step is acknowledging.

Cindy Poiesz (07:19): Correct. That’s when I was just networking like crazy. Luckily, the Hershey company is right there, and I got into the Hershey network, and that’s when I met my partner now, Frank, who had all the experience and connections and stuff to help bring this product to really the mainstream consumer was the goal. In that, we knew we couldn’t keep manufacturing out of my 800 square foot space that I shared with the juice company in Harrisburg. We started looking for co-manufacturing, and for the specific process that we do, it just doesn’t exist.

Jessica Hughes (08:02): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (08:03): Eventually we found Gorilly Goods, and they were in a spot where they were looking to sell the business. I can’t say that I ever imagined I would own a manufacturing facility, but we quickly moved, and the conversation, went from call me in, to purchasing the brand, all of the assets, all the manufacturing facility, everything.

That was when we decided to form EVOLVE brands as the holding company, with Supernola as the primary brand, and then the Gorilly Goods brand that we bought, underneath.

Jessica Hughes (08:37): Which is amazing, because you went from just trying to figure this out, to acquiring another company, creating a holding company, becoming a manufacturer. It just opened up a whole new world for you.

Cindy Poiesz (08:50): Yeah. It was really the kick that I needed to really have things start to go, and move forward, that I wanted them to.

Jessica Hughes (08:59): How did you go about that growth? Because obviously you were doing the organic growth thing for a while, and then this opportunity hit you, and you switched over to more of a venture capital model. How did you make that decision to go one way or the other? What were some of the pros and cons that you weighed?

Cindy Poiesz (09:17): At the time, I did not think about it.

Jessica Hughes (09:24): Okay. Well, hindsight’s 2020 literally.

Cindy Poiesz (09:26): I don’t think I realized what I was getting myself into fully, but it was just like, we need to do something, and this is the key to get us there, that’s the opportunity that’s presented itself. I’ve always stayed nimble throughout this whole process, which is so important, especially right now, during COVID and everything.

Jessica Hughes (09:47): Yeah.

Cindy Poiesz (09:49): But I don’t think I realized what I was really getting myself into. The financial background of me, I guess makes sense that I would be more interested in this path than in a organic growth path, and grow slowly. But I did not plan this.

Jessica Hughes (10:13): If I were someone who didn’t know the difference between the organic growth path versus what you’re doing, how would you explain that? Especially since you come from that financial background, I feel like you have some really good insight there.

Cindy Poiesz (10:25): Yeah. The organic growth path is really, it’s much better if you have a product that has higher margins, because it allows you to be able to do that much more easily. If your product is inherently a lower margin, specialty natural food product, then it’s very, very difficult to do that. If you have higher margins, then your path to profitability is going to be a lot quicker than otherwise.

Right off the bat, we do organic products that are single serving, so low dollar amount, single serving organic snacks, it’s very hard to have high margins in that. Inherently, your product will determine it, but you could always just keep slowly growing. You have your startup capital, which is likely what you contributed, or maybe like a friend or family that helped you. Then you just grow each year based upon the cash that you can put back into the business that it generates.

 Then if you go another route, to where you have investors, whether it’s venture capital, or angel investors, or private equity, you’re raising funds to kickstart that growth and really take a step forward, versus slowly growing year after year. But then you always have to think about, what’s your exit strategy. Two very different ways of growing.

I started out with that organic growth pattern, but I guess the finance person in me kind of [inaudible 00:11:58].

Jessica Hughes (12:01): There’s nothing wrong with that. You talked about the rounds of investing. You’ve been through a couple of rounds. What has that process looked like for you, and what’s the difference that it’s made for you at the same time?

Cindy Poiesz (12:19): Yeah, it’s so different because it’s not something that you know about until you’ve gone through it, I’d say.

Jessica Hughes (12:28): Yeah.

Cindy Poiesz (12:28): No matter what you read or hear about from other people, you don’t really understand what it entails until you go through it.

We started out just self-funding the company ourselves. Then we wanted to really understand what we had, before we went out and did a friends and family seed funding round. We waited about six months until we really understood. Who are our customers? Why do people buy these products? How in the world do you run a manufacturing facility? Pretty big thing.

Then we went out to the friends and family, and we really targeted their industry people because, Frank and I were a two man team, and there was an unlimited amount of things that we didn’t know, and that we couldn’t do. The best way to leverage that is have really active investors, or at least one, to help bring something else besides money to the table. That’s so important early on. The advice that we’ve gotten from these people, and just the things that they hear in the industry too, it’s invaluable. That was a long, tough process, especially when you’re dealing with friends and family, it’s a long courting process, and very different from institutional investors who do it professionally, because you’re working around their schedules, it’s not a top priority, and they don’t quite understand urgency in your company as much as you would hope so.

Jessica Hughes (13:59): Right. Right.

Cindy Poiesz (14:03): That was definitely frustrating. Then, with so many people like, oh, this person don’t you know and trust me, the personal relationships get into it. So it’s a little bit of, definitely hard way to do it. But a good way to start because you get to have people who know you ask questions about other things. Besides, are you capable of doing this yourself?

Jessica Hughes (14:27): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (14:27): Questioning who you are. So that didn’t come into play really until our series A funding. When it’s okay, who are you as an entrepreneur, as a business person, can you actually execute this?

Jessica Hughes (14:41): Yeah. What kind of impact has that made, in terms of your ability to manufacture and grow, now that you’re up in Milwaukee?

Cindy Poiesz (14:51): Wow, we are finally getting some new equipment, which I’m so excited about. But I’ve never [crosstalk 00:14:56] engineers before in my life.

Jessica Hughes (14:58): It’s crazy, the little things that makes such a big difference that you get excited about, and everyone else is looking at it like, okay, it’s just a machine.

Cindy Poiesz (15:14): Best machine. Equipment. We’re able to really fund marketing programs too, which is huge. All those expensive fees for grocery too.

Jessica Hughes (15:26): Yeah.

Cindy Poiesz (15:27): That’s been huge. You’re always constantly worried about money when you don’t have any, and nobody wants to give you money when you don’t have any.

Jessica Hughes (15:37): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (15:37): But if you have some, people are totally willing to give it to you. It’s definitely been much less stressful on that front. I’m not up all night thinking about how we’re going to pay bills or anything, so that’s good.

Jessica Hughes (15:49): Right. Yeah. It seems like it just boosts you, and catapults you into a different level. Once you hit that series A funding round, and you move forward from that, you were able to buy new machinery, invest in marketing, and that’s where you started to see some of those larger retail partnerships come in too. Of working with Walgreens, and different grocers, and different wholesale opportunities that you probably otherwise wouldn’t have been able to, I don’t want to say get, because I think you could have gotten them without a shadow of a doubt, but at least create the supply that their demand is causing.

Cindy Poiesz (16:26): Exactly, yeah. Execute it is the problem.

Jessica Hughes (16:29): Yeah, exactly, exactly. It comes down to just machinery, but also manpower. I mean, if you can’t get through it, then-

Cindy Poiesz (16:40): Yeah, it’s a lot of stuff.

Jessica Hughes (16:40): … it doesn’t do a whole lot for your brand.

Cindy Poiesz (16:42): Yeah. Between buying your ingredients, paying people, even set up fees and stuff like that, that you have to pay up front to get into some of the bigger retailers. And then you won’t get paid till 30, 60 days on the backend, after you flip the product. It’s a wide gap that could be three, four months, maybe even longer.

Jessica Hughes (17:07): Yeah. You did a really big order for Walgreens right before Christmas, I think it was.

Cindy Poiesz (17:13): Pretty much.

Jessica Hughes (17:15): Right at Christmas, you’re like, I spent my Christmas day filling orders.

It takes a lot out of you to fulfill those big orders, and without the funding, there’s no way that you could have been able to pull that off.

Cindy Poiesz (17:31): Oh, there’s no way.

Jessica Hughes (17:32): Yeah.

Cindy Poiesz (17:35): We were lucky that we got such good supportive investors too, to work. It was, okay, here’s the funding, now leave us alone for a couple of weeks while we fill this order, and then we’ll come back talk about everything.

Jessica Hughes (17:49): That’s awesome. Because I mean, that is the key to success is surrounding yourself with people that are going to help you, mentor you, support you, and work alongside you when you need it the most.

Cindy Poiesz (18:00): Oh, completely. I hate watching those TV shows like Shark Tank, or other ones, where the investors are just so mean and combative with the people, because at the end of the day, you don’t want an investor that’s like that at all, because it will be bad for you in all fronts.

We love our investors now, because they’re so supportive and helpful, and they really get down to issues, and they just try to help fix them. They tell us when we’re doing good, and tell us, very nicely, when we’re not doing good enough. It’s very productive.

The TV shows really make it seem like investors are, you don’t want those kinds of people as your investors.

Jessica Hughes (18:48): Well, that, but the thing has always gotten me with investors like that too, is the fact that you watch them, and I’m going to use Shark Tank as an example, this has nothing to do with the personalities necessarily on there, but a lot of investors are there, they throw money at it. Then, they’re not there as a partner. They’re just a bank and they’re there to make money off the money that they’ve put in. Whereas-

Cindy Poiesz (19:11): There’s no way they can possibly have the time with all [crosstalk 00:19:15] either.

Jessica Hughes (19:15): Yeah. Yeah. Like the recap videos. I just sit there and chuckled to myself, because I’m like, yeah, they didn’t really show up and help you do this. Someone from their team did, if that. Instead, it was just working capital for you, and you’ve done the hard work. I think that’s where it comes back to.

You want investors that are going to be there to spitball with you, to help you through hard stuff, to tell you when things aren’t going well, to help you troubleshoot when things aren’t going well. You really want a partner in an investor, not necessarily just someone to write a check.

Cindy Poiesz (19:53): Yeah. And who thinks about your business from a different way than you think about it.

Jessica Hughes (19:57): Yeah.

Cindy Poiesz (19:57): How many times, our investor, our chairman of the board, he doesn’t have a background in the food industry, but he’s a professional investor, and he just thinks about things differently. He thinks about our company, when he’s talking to other companies he’s invested in, and just thinks about things from a very different perspective that brings to light some other things that we would have never come up with ourselves.

Jessica Hughes (20:22): For sure. Yeah. No, it’s very important. What else have you learned since you brought on investors to speed ramp your growth? Between working with them and bringing on these bigger agreements and purchase orders from large companies.

Cindy Poiesz (20:39): Yeah. You can never predict the unpredictable.

Jessica Hughes (20:46): Like COVID?

Cindy Poiesz (20:51): Thankfully we closed when we did, which was before this hit, and thankfully our investors are as supportive as they are, because when something like this happens, there’s no way you can plan for it. Even your stress case model will not plan for something like this. Just having them be supportive and understanding that, it’s not just us, it’s everybody, and how do we move through it? Yeah. It’s definitely been interesting.

Jessica Hughes (21:23): It has been interesting. I think the one piece of relief that I keep in the back of my mind is, it’s not just something that I’m experiencing, it’s not just something that my state is experiencing, my country’s experiencing; it’s been experienced the whole way around the world. And everyone at different capacities probably. But to a certain extent, we at least saw the wave coming towards the US, whereas, I think of China and the fact that they didn’t even get advance notice, it just happened.

Cindy Poiesz (21:55): Although, they might not have believed it.

Jessica Hughes (21:58): This is true. This is totally true. I think for me, it hit the West coast and it was in my thoughts, but it wasn’t completely frontline and center of, hey, I need to start thinking about this. Actually someone that is a mentor to Randall and I, made a comment of yeah, I’m stocking up on my vodka, and my face mask, and my hand sanitizer, and toilet paper, and all these different things. And I’m like, you’re insane, we’re not going to need all this. Then not a week later, am I standing in the grocery store, because I’m seeing the pictures of no toilet paper at the grocery store. And I’m like, I don’t want to be this person, but apparently I have to be because otherwise I’m not going to have toilet paper.

Cindy Poiesz (22:42): Oh yeah. It’s changed everything. Now to the point where, well, what changes are sticking, and what changes are going back to normal?

Jessica Hughes (22:52): Yeah. How has your investors helped you navigate all of this?

Cindy Poiesz (22:58): They’ve been able to bring really good insight into what banks are doing, for example. We’re in a couple banks, and they’re giving us the whole economic picture through what they say, what we hear from other people in the industry. That’s really the valuable insight that you need during this time. What’s constantly going on? How are [inaudible 00:23:27] feeling? How are other CPG companies feeling? How are retailers feeling? How are consumers feeling? What’s split traffic in different channels, and how that influences our strategy. Then thankfully, we’re small and nimble and not a big company, because we’re able to change things at the drop of the hat.

Jessica Hughes (23:47): Right.

Cindy Poiesz (23:52): You need all of that intel, and there’s no way you could possibly get that on your own now.

Jessica Hughes (23:57): No. It just goes back to that partnership mentality, quite honestly. Yeah.

Well, is there anything else you’d like to add?

Cindy Poiesz (24:07): Pick good investors who are good people.

Jessica Hughes (24:11): Tell me about that for a second. How did you go about vetting investors to know that they were a good fit for you?

Cindy Poiesz (24:19): Yeah. I think you go through stages of it. It follows the stages of grief or not. But you start out, and you’re like, okay, we need money coming up here soon. Then you meet some people and you’re like, nah, they’re not the right fit. Or they’re not interested in you. It goes both ways. Then you start to get closer and closer to your date. And then you start to freak out, and then you get a little desperate, maybe, maybe you’re talking to people and you’re like, well, but they’re all we have. What else are we going to do?

Then it gets to a point where you’re like, okay, now we really need to pick the right person, the right investor. I think if you can just skip to that part where you’re like, it has to be the right fit for both of us, and they have to be the right person. For Frank and I, it was just like, we want good people who are smart. It’s funny. I always joke about it. But I came to fundraising with this basic assumption that all investors are intelligent, and that was completely false.

Jessica Hughes (25:28): Not so much.

Cindy Poiesz (25:30): No, no, no, no. People are not as smart as you think they are, for sure. No matter how many companies they’re invested in, they can still be an idiot.

Jessica Hughes (25:43): Then it makes you question, how did you become an investor in all those companies?

Cindy Poiesz (25:48): Exactly. How are those companies really doing?

Jessica Hughes (25:52): Too funny. Well, thank you so much, Cindy. I appreciate it.

Cindy Poiesz (25:55): Yeah. Thank you.

Jessica Hughes (26:19): Please feel free to follow Cindy on LinkedIn and Instagram. Supernola, under @eatsupernola on Instagram. And also check out our product at https://evolvesnacking.com.

Supernola can also be found nationally in Walgreens, and in other regional retailers across the United States, as well as on Amazon and at eatsupernola.com.

As always, every snack is better shared, including Supernola. So feel free to share Fork & Lens with your team, colleagues, and friends. If you enjoyed today’s message, please subscribe to get weekly access, as well as leave reviews. You can also check us out at forkandlens.co, or viscul.co. Until next time.