An Interview With Martita Mestey
Messaging is hard. People have shorter attention spans and there are so many brands out there fighting for consumer consideration. I would suggest you have one thing that your brand is completely committed to, whether it is being health-conscious, convenient, best tasting, or most cost effective.
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 Larry Wu.
Larry is a New Jersey native who grew up in a town without a lot of Asian influence. As the son of restaurateurs, Larry grew up watching his family connect with the community over food. The restaurants would customize food to be thickened, sweetened, fried, and with fun and engaging names to encourage more people to get a taste of Asian food. This is exactly what WUJU Foods aims to do now, but with packaged foods rather than food service.
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 grew up in the Asian restaurant business. At one point, my parents owned six restaurants serving anything from Chinese to Japanese, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese cuisine. My parents were always in the restaurants, making them like a second home to me. When my parents were working, I would often spend time at friends’ houses, growing up around families whose only real familiarity with Asian culture and food was from their experiences in my family’s restaurants. Growing up being immersed in both the American and Asian cultures, I fostered a genuine first hand understanding and appreciation of both.
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?
I was spending time with a friend and his family at their home and his father brought out his homemade hot sauce for dinner. At the time, I was months into my first job out of college, building what I thought would be my dream career at a big company. But, it turned out that moment would be fuel for me to find my calling. His hot sauce was unique and had some powerful spices, like curry, cumin, and chili powders. It was 2014 and Sriracha was the sauce-of-the-moment trending in American households. To me, they were all red, watery, and vinegary. That’s when I realized there was a hole in the market and that hot sauces with more body, a prominent sweet side, and Asian flavor could really stand out.
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?
One of the first sales pitches I made for WUJU Foods was over the phone for a Whole Foods store in Madison, New Jersey. At the time, purchasing decisions could be made at the store-level, though not anymore, and there was some solid interest in our brand from the buyer. I explained that I was a local vendor and gave him all of the information needed. I was thrilled when he told me to come to the store the next day to meet in-person.
I showed up in Madison, New Jersey only to find that there was no appointment. I was so confused. As it turned out, the day prior I had called the store in Madison, WISCONSIN, not New Jersey. It was a totally embarrassing moment, but it taught me to be careful with everything and not get my hopes up too quickly. Rushing can cause easy mistakes.
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?
People assume they can start with a lower gross profit margin, and that it will grow as they get more sales and turnover. I had that issue. It is so important to get strong economics right from the get go. It’s better to gain from the benefits of efficiency as you grow, rather than start really in the red, assuming it will get better in the future. As we all know with the pandemic, so many things can go wrong that are completely out of our control.
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?
Evaluate the capital you have by creating a budget in 3 ways — one with conservative assumptions, another with medium assumptions, and finally one that is optimistic.
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?
Starti small. When people imagine their own business, it feels (at least in my experience) that they are often envisioning their business at a more mature stage. It can be overwhelming. Taking a step-by-step approach is less intimidating, but can also be a good test of whether or not you like the business enough to commit to building it. Become a sidepreneur! Many times, people create problems that do not even exist yet. So, focusing on what you can control can help lower that barrier of entry.
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?
Working with an invention development consultant can be useful. However, I would recommend trying to develop a first version (even if it is not the best) on your own, so that you can identify some of the issues and ask productive questions.
Also, when you do work with consultants in general, it is important to be decisive, take the reins, and guide them. They are consultants, but because you are the owner, you need to drive the development. You are the one to dictate a cohesive story and how to market, so you need to give them perspective based on the things that only you would know.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
This is a tough one. It really depends on your personality and the opportunity you’re being presented with. If you are okay with bootstrapping, it’s a great way of evaluating potential, seeing real costs (because even if we budget, there will always be differences with what is actual), and getting a feel for how much you actually like the business.
On the other hand, venture capital is a great way to minimize personal financial risk and can be key for taking advantage of an opportunity. Some things, like trends, need to be taken advantage of because the windows of opportunities can be small. Whether the objective is to become a second mover in a new market or trying to hop on the latest almond-butter-food-craze, there are a lot of scenarios where you may need to scale fast and VC backing can fuel that.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you are comfortable with, how much control you want, how quickly you want to grow, and finally how much capital you expect to need based on the first two factors.
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?
Filing a trademark is pretty straight forward on the USPTO.gov website. In my experience, our recipes (just like Coca Cola’s original recipe) are trade secrets and should be protected enough. Why trademark over patent? Applying for a patent would mean disclosing the secrets behind our recipes.
For me, attending trade shows, such as the Private Label Manufacturers Association and others where you can find manufacturers and ingredients sellers, has been the most effective way to find the right partners. Hopping booth to booth is a great way to find people who are clearly investing to grow their business with new customers. Those face-to-face opportunities can really help build some relationships.
Also, specialty food trade shows, such as the Fancy Food Show and Natural Product Expo, are other great shows for potential exposure to retailers or distributors, whether directly or indirectly, such as sales brokers, other food colleagues, mentors, etc.
Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
- A true understanding of your brand’s ideal target audiences.
For me, we had an identity crisis for a long time. We were trying to build out products that were cost effective, healthy, premium, and the most flavorful. When we refined our story and based on who exactly we wanted to speak to, we were able to make decisions easier and show a completely different level of consistency..
2. A good story.
Our story helps remind us why we are doing this. It also helps bring more credibility to the brand. For us, when we finally figured out our story, it flowed from the origin of my parents as Asian fusion restaurateurs to me as a 2nd generation Asian American expanding their legacy locally to drive Asian fusion nationally through packaged foods.
3. Pick one key feature you want to focus on.
Messaging is hard. People have shorter attention spans and there are so many brands out there fighting for consumer consideration. I would suggest you have one thing that your brand is completely committed to, whether it is being health-conscious, convenient, best tasting, or most cost effective.
You cannot be all things to everyone. We learned the hard way by trying to say that we were everything at once, but we were not really showing that. So many people also say that they’re everything to everyone. We had so many positive traits, but were masters of none. Once you pick who you will be (which comes after you define your target audience), it makes decision making, selling, and future brand extension a lot easier.
4. Don’t always assume being at the lowest price yields the best results.
We started off with less than ideal profit margins thinking that one day we would have enough business to offset that gap. We were caught in a trap, especially when we had an opportunity to reduce our price from $3.99 to $2.99 with our hot sauces at one of our key retailers. I assumed that we would sell a lot more at $2.99. I was wrong. Retailers look at revenue driven and when we went down, we would have to sell a lot more to make up for selling $1.00 less than before. We actually made less revenue for the retailer when we took the price down. That was a big lesson learned. Our best selling product is our most expensive product, which currently typically retails for $9.99.
5. Make sure you have enough profit margin, especially when dealing with big retailers and distributors.
There are a lot of deductions that can be taken off of the invoice — breakages, marketing fees, general fees, discounts, and spoils. You may often find that you invoice a big client, only to end up receiving a payment for only 60–70% of what you invoiced them for. From my personal experience (and I’ve had many) and from the feedback from colleagues and mentors, this is especially the case with a lot of larger clients. These surprises can hit you hard without warning. Disputing these occurrences with bigger companies can often take a lot of time to go through all of the approval departments. We try to budget extra into our profit margins for this reason.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
We have launched a lot of products and we continue to learn from each launch. From those experiences though, I can tell you that narrowing in your audience and testing products to find what those types of consumers like will give you a ton of insight. Giving free products out to people within different communities through platforms like Facebook and Reddit can also provide valuable feedback. Before I started WUJU full time, I sent over 1,200 full sized hot sauce bottles out to the freebies section of Reddit and after getting positive feedback, I had the confidence to jump into the business fully.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
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.
- With our brand, I hope to grow the Asian food category as a whole. I want to influence people who don’t normally eat Asian food, are intimidated by it, or who only eat it on special occasions, to find ways for them to savor it more.
- WUJU can be a platform to encourage Asian fusion, whether it is American Asian fusion, or even Asian Mexican, Asian Italian, and everything else that can be imagined. I think there is a lot you can do with the flavors and there are a lot more people who may be open to the flavors if presented in the right way.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Larry Wu Of WUJU Foods 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.