An Interview With Martita Mestey
Ability to Adapt-Things will go wrong, strategies will fail and priorities will shift. Your ability to evolve and adapt will allow you to navigate the hurdles you face and survive in a highly competitive environment.
As a part of our series called “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Danica Dias.
Danica Dias is the Founder and CEO of Grown Folks, the first black-owned and female-owned hard selzer brand inspired by soul food flavors. With over 20 years of experience in the food, beverage, and hospitality industry, Danica has the skills and knowledge to drive sales, expand retail, and forge strategic partnerships for her brand.
Danica grew up in a Louisiana Creole family that passed along the traditions of soul food, which originated from the scraps and leftovers given to slaves. She decided to create alcoholic beverages that featured these familiar flavors, such as peach cobbler, after cooking her late Grandma’s recipe with her son during the COVID lockdown. She saw an opportunity to fill a gap in the market and cater to consumers who wanted to support multicultural products. Her mission is to celebrate black culture and soul food in true “grown folks” style.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I come from a big female-driven family. My mom’s family is Louisiana Creole and my dad’s family is Cape Verdean. My sisters and I grew up with both our Grandmothers in our lives. They cooked for us, cared for us, took us on trips, and we spent time with lots of cousins. They shared many stories with us of their own upbringing and really helped shape us culturally.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
Having worked in food & beverage for decades, I saw a complete lack of alcohol products that spoke to me and my cultural background. The flavor profiles represented by existing brands didn’t resonate with me. In 2020, during COVID lockdown, I was at home with my 2-year-old going through an old accordion 3 x 5 card catalog recipe book with my late Grandma’s handwritten recipes. As I was recreating her famous Peaches N Dumplin recipe, the idea to create an alcoholic beverage featuring these familiar flavors came to me.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I have made many mistakes…the funny secret no one shares with you is that starting a business is full of failures and then some success. For an alcohol brand, it is very important to plan appropriately when tasting your product. One funny mistake I made early on was not spitting when tasting several rounds of my liquid iterations. I was fairly intoxicated in the middle of a work day, which was not my plan.
What are the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they start a food or beverage line? What can be done to avoid those errors?
One common mistake I see early food & beverage Founders make is that they build their products utilizing very niche, hard-to-source ingredients. It seems like a great idea at first, until you realize pricing, lead times and availability for those ingredients is not favorable for your COGS or production schedule at scale. It’s important to consider from the beginning, where are all of my raw material suppliers located? What are their lead times? And to find backup suppliers for the same ingredients for when one is out of stock or something happens that is beyond your control (ie, bad crop season for peaches, etc.).
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Google search and see who else, if anyone, is already doing this. Study your competition. What does the current competitive set do well? Because you have to do it better. Find where there are gaps in their current offerings. Validate that you have a solution that solves a problem (a problem that is important), and if it is a saturated category, ensure when building your solution that it is highly differentiated from the competition.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
Get the support of a team that can help get you from ideation to an MVP. And for early stage Founders, this is where your trusted Team of Advisors comes in. You can also join online communities with other like-minded Founders. Ask them how they took their idea to market. What steps did they take? You don’t know what you don’t know. But get out there and mingle, network and surround yourself with people that can help you move your business forward.
There are many invention development consultants. Would you recommend that a person with a new idea hire such a consultant, or should they try to strike out on their own?
A Founder needs to know their business inside and out, so I would recommend trying to accomplish as much on your own as possible with the help of trusted advisors, mentors and allies. I’d be wary of any consultants that early on…perhaps there is value there, but I’d only go that route if you received a referral that was thoroughly vetted. Trust but verify. There is no shortcut to entrepreneurship.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
For many early-stage Founders, there is not much of a decision to be made because without an MVP, proof of concept or some decent Traction, it will be very hard to get venture money, especially in CPG and with the current economy. So many Founders will have no choice but to Bootstrap until they reach certain milestones. Friends & Family and Angels are also options for early stage as well as crowdfunding. What’s best for each Founder really depends on where they are in their start up journey and how much they are willing to give up in terms of equity.
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to file a patent, how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer and how to find a retailer or distributor?
I can’t speak to filing a patent, but I can speak about trademarks. Engage with a sophisticated attorney very very early on to secure your trademarks and save yourself any potential opposition later in your journey, though that is always possible at any time.
For raw materials for food & beverage, there are many options and trusted sources. But, again, always trust but verify. When working with respectable formulation houses, they will advise and give some insights into the availability of raw materials and suppliers. Tap into your startup communities within CPG to share resources on supplier sourcing as well. The Slack Startup CPG channel is amazing for this. Same goes for manufacturers and co-packers. Trust but verify. You want to find partners that are going to be invested in your business for the long term. And as you grow, you may need to move on to a better suited co-man that can handle your volume more efficiently.
As for retailers…that is all sales, and as an early stage Founder, you will be doing the majority of the selling. So having a target list, knowing when retailers have category review and are accepting new product submissions, budget for sampling, sell sheets, retail sales deck…all those things come into play.
Distributor partners can be a somewhat hard relationship to forge as a new brand. But referral is a great way to get your foot into the door, and coming to a distributor with a list of accounts you already have commitments from will help.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand,” and why?
- Capital-You will need a significant amount of money and resources to get any venture off the ground. Often new brands spend 2+ years and six-figures just to get to an MVP.
- A Winning and Highly Differentiated Product. What attributes and product features make your product standout from the competition? What is your secret sauce? Is it something another company cannot just rip off and duplicate?
- A Winning Team- No one can do this on their own, and when trying to raise investment later on, investors will want to see that you have a team of experts in your specific industry with decades of experience and network to support your growth and accelerate growth.
- Marketing Spend- Events, digital marketing, celebrity seeding, samples and slotting fees… all these things to get your product in the hands of your target audience, build brand awareness and push sell through.
- Ability to Adapt-Things will go wrong, strategies will fail and priorities will shift. Your ability to evolve and adapt will allow you to navigate the hurdles you face and survive in a highly competitive environment.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
People love authenticity. If you can make something from a place that rings true to you or bring forward compelling customer stories that resonate with a large captive audience, you will win hearts and minds.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
I try to utilize diverse talent, suppliers, creatives and partners wherever possible. We want to create more opportunities for diverse communities to thrive as entrepreneurs.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Building off the above…offer someone a job who has the skill set you are looking for and perhaps not quite the experience or network. Then mentor them. Uplift them. And then keep repeating the cycle.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Danica Dias Of Grown Folks On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.