Field Notes from the First Better Bites Food Forum

Getting on the shelf is the invitation. You have to earn the relationship with the customer.

Getting into the club is step one, not the win. Sell-through matters more than sell-in. Repeatable and scalable beats big and splashy.

Earn the second purchase before you chase more distribution. Velocity is what tells you whether the consumer chose to come back, and without it you cannot tell a credible story to the next retailer.

Household penetration went from 3% to 21% since 2023, and the repeat rate climbed the entire way up. The repeat number, not the door count, was the one they watched.

Getting on shelf is the easy part. Build awareness and demand before you enter retail, and make mistakes small enough to recover from.

Three criteria: differentiation with a meaningful value proposition, demand signals showing customers want it, and a supply chain that can scale. “Different” must mean new occasions, new buyers or increased frequency, not incremental change.

Over-promising is the fastest way out of the running. Leading with “we have the best price” signals shelf-stealing rather than category growth. A slide of recommended competitor deletes is an immediate red flag.

Four filters: an unmet consumer need, a founder with real vision and existing consumer connection, the ability to scale across 500 diverse stores, and the operational legs to execute.

Merchants want a clear point of view on the customer, incrementality rather than shelf-shifting, club-appropriate value, and a one to two year roadmap. Not just a day-one launch plan.

Structure the intro email around four things: the goal of the email, the problem you solve, a data snippet backing it up, and your solution. Lead with category growth potential, not a distribution ask.

The OTV framework: openness, transparency, vulnerability. Brands that openly share weaknesses get better collaboration. Kinder’s proactively discontinues underperforming SKUs rather than defending them.

“Call Walmart first.” Regional or limited tests of 100 to 500 stores are a learning tool, not a fallback. Off-cycle shelf resets are now possible for brands with a clear customer need, so you do not always wait nine months.

The best partners come early, when they are eager and have an idea, not when they are fully ready to scale. Two hundred or five hundred doors is a valid and honest starting point.

Going regional first in the Northeast, where Whole Foods velocity runs roughly double other regions. Launch where your brand awareness is strongest, not everywhere at once.

A 4oz bag lands at $5 to $6 in convenience after distributor and retailer margin requirements around 56%. They are developing a 1.6oz impulse pillow bag as the C-store entry format instead. Pack size innovation can be more powerful than flavor innovation.

Both tested extensively in independents and franchisees before approaching corporate. Low and Slow ran roughly 275 stores in DFW with a shipper before expanding.

Hard lesson: do not push distribution before velocity justifies it. Go deep in one region first, then scale incrementally.

Their black bag is the only black bag in the cheese snack category. That is the differentiation, and it pairs with a real product truth: they are the only one using real smoke for flavor.

Packaging has to communicate clean ingredients and great taste at the same time, because consumers still associate clean label with inferior taste. Solve for only one and you lose the sale.

You get 48 inches of billboard on a pallet versus roughly 4 inches of facing on a standard shelf, and the same palette space regardless of brand size. Use it to tell the story, communicate claims and drive discovery.

Packaging updates coming this fall: brighter and bolder, dropping the white background, and switching a “real wheat” callout to “gut happy ancient grains.” A founder studying her category and evolving the pack accordingly.

A shipper goes into every C-store test. It is the best way to tell the brand story when there is no staff present to tell it for you.

The badge’s job is to build trust, not to teach. Certifications are a trust shortcut. Deeper education comes after trust, not instead of it.

America has a food information crisis, not a food crisis. There are 267,130 ingredient names in the US food system, including 286 ways to say sugar, mapping down to 8,631 actual ingredients. Roughly 200 million food and nutrition questions are asked daily.

A barbecue sauce brand had two of three SKUs pass non-UPF verification. The third failed on a single co-packer ingredient the brand did not know was in there. They reformulated and are now fully verified.

Consumer demand, government regulation (California just passed non-UPF verification legislation), and in-aisle apps giving shoppers real-time ingredient truth in about four seconds.

Target proposed removing synthetic dyes across all cereal, putting $800M+ of assortment at risk. Better-for-you had grown from 5% to 23% of their cereal assortment over four years, which validated the bet. Other retailers followed despite Target holding only about 5% cereal share.

Functional claims are moving numbers: no and low sugar up 88% in dollar growth, vegan and vegetarian in triple digits. Better-for-you keeps gaining share while permissible indulgence loses ground.

Better-for-you is growing faster than ever in condiments: organic, low calorie, no seed oils, cleaner ingredients. Nutrition panel data will increasingly filter shopping lists through AI, making clean labels more important.

13% of consumers are using AI to shop, up 4 points in four months. E-commerce is still only about 10% of food and beverage but is driving the majority of growth.

Sparky, Walmart’s AI agent, handles meal planning, dietary restrictions, errands and gifting from a single prompt. Being live on Walmart Marketplace is now close to a prerequisite. Merchants may end the meeting if you are not there.

Google AI overviews are reducing clicks on top organic results by as much as two thirds. Brands lose control of voice and accuracy when a third-party AI summarizes them. The fix is making sure the product data being scraped is accurate and complete.

Shoppers will increasingly search by use case and mission, not keyword. Adopting the Universal Commerce Protocol lets brands interact with Gemini, ChatGPT and others directly.

AI is an enabler, not a strategy. Start from the business outcome. The hard part is never the pilot, it is getting store 490 to adopt it. Only 1 in 10 supply chain leaders would let AI make a critical decision without human review.

Brands need to actively feed accurate content into AI systems rather than waiting for a distorted version to be told for them.

After eight weeks it was the most productive breakfast item at Target in dollars and units, and roughly 85% of buyers had not purchased cereal at Target in two years. A 13-month development timeline and 150+ taste samples across three co-packers got them there.

The filter for creator partnerships was sole focus, all-in commitment and hunger to build. They walked away from a creator with 300M+ followers who spent the first meeting trying to cut deliverables.

Nick founded and majority-owns Osmo rather than being brought in afterward. His “mom test” filters every brand deal. Walmart’s reason for the listing was authentic food credibility plus strong repeat purchase, not launch buzz.

Called TikTok Shop the biggest missed opportunity for early-stage brands. Their affiliate program drives hundreds of videos monthly and 30M+ views with zero ad spend, and it is on track to be one of their biggest channels. Build brand heat before entering retail.

Consumers can sniff out inauthenticity. The brand has to be within the partner’s DNA, and they must invest physically, financially, or with serious time.

Funded through brand marketing budgets rather than shopper marketing dollars. 80M views on day one, now 538M. The pitch was reach comparable to a Super Bowl spot at a fraction of the cost. The closing advice: activations do not have to be massive, and small brands can drive regional foot traffic the same way.

Set to launch at Walmart in January and had to pull from the modular. Co-packer ingredient delays worsened by an ice storm, then packaging failures. She went back to the audience publicly to explain, and the newsletter got 120,000+ opens with overwhelmingly supportive responses.

Now looking for a co-packer that is a true growth partner rather than a vendor. The previous one lacked transparency, and earlier visibility would have avoided the delay entirely.

Pulled an entire batch that was “fine but not amazing” during a supply-constrained period. Hard call internally and with retail partners, but they were back in stock in four weeks and partners respected it. You’re nothing without quality.

Merchants are problem solvers. They can work with a problem, not a surprise. Bad news needs to travel faster than good news, and you should bring options rather than just problems.

Potato seed propagation takes five to six years before commercial production begins. A pea protein plant is roughly $65M and two years to build. Once a crop is in the ground it cannot change, so surprises are unsolvable in a way that problems are not.

Fill rates are a hidden make-or-break factor. Franchisees control ordering, missed deliveries lead to being dropped, and it requires daily monitoring of VOIDS reports.