I Can't Shop Like a Normal Person Anymore

I can’t shop like a normal person anymore 😑

When I hand my son a Perfect Bar right out of the box at Costco (we don’t wait for the checkout), I don’t see a snack.

I see a family of 13 kids who turned their dad’s homemade recipe into a business to keep their family afloat after he got sick. They convinced their mom to sell the family bed and breakfast to buy a packaging machine. The oldest slept in his car for a month demoing bars at a single Whole Foods Market.

By 2019, they were doing $70 million in revenue, going on to sell a majority stake to Mondelēz International. Today they’re in over 50,000 stores.

Because behind every product on a shelf, there’s people navigating a lot more than most consumers will ever see:

Private label is eating into their categories and they’re trying to figure out how to make the brand matter more, not less. How do you justify the premium when the store brand is “good enough”?

Retail is still the engine. They’re expanding doors, pitching new chains, trying to win over buyers who have 200 other brands asking for the same shelf space. One meeting with a buyer at Target or Costco Wholesale can change the trajectory of a year.

Supply chain is a headache. Ingredient sourcing, co-packer capacity, lead times that make it nearly impossible to move fast. And every time costs go up, the margin conversation starts all over again.

They’re investing more in retail media and marketing but struggling to measure what’s actually working. The dollars are going up but clarity isn’t getting any sharper.

Amazon is important but complicated. It’s a discovery engine, a sales channel, and a brand risk all at once. Pricing parity, unauthorized sellers, content that needs to be aligned with other channels but not 1 to 1.

Speaking of DTC, most brands know it’s not going to be their biggest channel. But it’s the only place they fully own the brand experience, the data, and the customer relationship. So they’re trying to figure out what role it plays without under or overinvesting.

New SKUs, limited editions, collabs. There’s constant pressure to innovate just to hold shelf space and stay relevant. Brands that can move faster on product development have an edge. DTC can be a great place for that.

Everyone wants to build community but few have figured out what that looks like beyond a loyalty program and a referral code.

Regulatory and compliance requirements keep getting more complex. Claims on packaging, FDA guidelines, state-by-state rules. It’s important but slows everything down.

And underneath all of it? This tension: grow fast enough to keep investors or leadership happy, but don’t dilute the brand in the process :)

I always appreciate talking to the brands who see all of this as a long game. Much like the Keith family did. No single channel, no single campaign, no single retailer makes or breaks them. They just keep showing up, solving the next problem, and compounding.

That’s how brands, and good things, are built.