Key Lessons From Delighted By Hummus

I posted earlier this week for the first time since I had been with the company about Delighted By Hummus and how that experience shaped my viewpoint around salespeople converting vs. creating opportunities.

In the post, I touched on the self-doubt that I had before joining Delighted By and my realization after joining the company that the brand makes the salesperson much more than the salesperson makes the brand.

I had a great stint at Delighted By, it taught me so much and also allowed me to meet Aaron Rodgers at the 2018 IDDBA show, a picture that my wife never lets me live down.

With that being said I am always hesitant to talk about the company because of the work environment that the brand had, but I think there is a way to outline some lessons from the company in a way that can be respectful to everyone.

One comment on my post hit me hard and I ended up deleting it because I like to keep Linkedin relatively light and positive, but someone mentioned that dessert hummus is not an actual thing.

This is something we heard a lot. I think because hummus is a Middle Eastern staple and making a chocolate version can seem like you are ruining a traditional food item, many people felt strongly about this.

I remember specifically waking up to a viral post about our product and the caption was something like, “White people ruin everything.” It was an objectively funny post and like any press whether good or bad, it led to a bump in sales.

I replied to the LinkedIn comment that the polarizing nature of the product was what made it successful and that the best products elicit strong positive and negative responses. They rarely fall in the indistinct middle.

That’s when the person commented that if the product was successful it would still be around and it was at that point that I decided to just delete it and move on.

But, it did make me realize that I don’t talk much about Delighted By and that experience. Also, success is not that cut and dry, you can’t simply state that because a brand or company is no longer around it wasn’t successful at some point.

So I wanted to take this newsletter and point out the top things I learned from my sales director role there and how it has shaped some of my views on how CPG brands should handle growth.

1) Consumer Demand is a Tangible Thing.

My first week at Delighted By was coupled with our first airing on Shark Tank. The response and engagement following the episode was amazing to see. We saw a huge spike in traffic, but most importantly we saw a huge spike in store-level requests.

I remember that one of my first meetings at Delighted By was with Safeway East. We ended up opening the account because two people walked into the deli department and asked for the product. That request made its way to the buyer and shortly after we were approved.

This experience is what led me to start WeStock, but whether you use WeStock or not, you can weaponize consumer demand. You want to always be creating FOMO between your brand and buyers, and the best way to do that is through the consumer.

It can be a customer DM or a review, really anything that you can repurpose and show to the buyer as a proof point.

I think many brands discount the size of their audience, but I promise that having 1-2 people ask for your brand is more impactful than a full syndicated data breakdown to that buyer.

2) Innovate or Die.

The brand innovated too slowly. Within a year of our airing, every major hummus brand had a chocolate SKU.

I was working on WeStock by the time Delighted By was dealing with the headwinds of larger players moving into the space, but I can see how the buyer’s mentality most likely switched from this is an innovative brand that I need to carry ASAP to this is an incremental SKU that I can simply carry through one of our established brand partners (at a lower SRP).

I often warn that brands innovate too soon, but with Delighted By, I don’t think we realized how hard it was going to be to compete with larger companies in this category who already owned the shelf space.

Did stores need to approve a new brand and carry 4-5 SKUs of dessert hummus?

Yes, at the time they felt they had to because the brand was new and popular, but as the novelty of the product ran its course and when that happened, we needed innovation to support future growth.

It would have been great to have other chickpea-inspired desserts ready to ship so that you could make the transition from dessert hummus into healthy desserts seamlessly.

3) Velocity Over Door Count.

We opened A LOT of stores in my first year. Over 5,000 new points of distribution and I believe I remember the brand had raised ~$1M to date.

At the time, I thought $1M was a lot of money for a brand to raise, but we did not have the money or resources to support that level of new activations.

You have to be honest with yourself before going into a new retailer and truly break down if you have the financial capacity to support that account. If not, you're doing a disservice to your brand and the retailer.

I can assure you that when you get pulled (and you will) it is 10 times harder to get back on the shelf than it is to get on the shelf initially. But, those were the directions I was given, to increase door count, and that’s what we did. In hindsight, I should have pushed back.

4) Know What You want.

This is my last point. You need to know what you want as a founder and you have to know what your brand is.

A lot of founders feel like their brand can be the next big brand, but if you peel back the layers around that feeling, there isn’t much that supports that.

I believe that if founders know what they want from their brand and can be honest about the potential of their brand, it will make it so much easier to make the right long-term decisions regarding their business.

You might want to sell your brand after you get to $1M in sales for a smaller outcome, you might want to sell your brand after you get to $100M or you might want to run your brand forever and pass it down to your kids.

Any of those options is great, but you need to know what you want and be honest about if your brand can accomplish that. If you can be honest with yourself, then you can make the best decisions possible for long-term success.

Whenever a brand goes from rocketship to non-existent, there are a handful of factors.

Without touching on team, leadership, and things that I would just be guessing about - I feel confident that during my time there understanding these four points better would have put us in a better position to success.

Going back to the person’s comment on my LinkedIn post.

A brand does not just continue to exist because it is successful, so many things happen that lead to the success or failure of a brand, and learning from those can help all of us.