How to Build in Public and Launch a Food Brand | Cotto
About this episode
Kendall Kransdorf shares her journey of launching Cotto and the challenges of building a refrigerated food brand.
She was blending cottage cheese in a rented New York commercial kitchen and meeting strangers in parks and Starbucks to hand off the dips they'd bought online. That unscalable model is exactly what got Cotto onto shelves at Fairway Market and West Side Market. Kendall Kransdorf started Cotto after health issues forced her to cut foods out of her diet and cottage cheese became her main whole food protein source. She built a social audience before the product existed, used it as a free focus group to lock her packaging before printing a single case, and sold through a commercial kitchen so she could iterate the formulation week to week instead of waiting on a co-manufacturer. In this episode she breaks down the parts of the refrigerated CPG business nobody warns you about: free fills, who actually pays for promotions, the distributor markup between you and the retailer, nine to twelve month retailer review cycles, and why a late freight truck costs you a week of shelf life you can never get back. If you are building a refrigerated food brand, or trying to get from specialty stores into chain grocery, this is the operational reality. GUEST Kendall Kransdorf — Founder, Cotto…
People in this episode
Host: Devesh Tilokani
Guest: Kendall Kransdorf
Topics covered
- building in public
- food brand
- refrigerated CPG
- entrepreneurship
- retail distribution
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Cotto, Fairway Market, West Side Market, Instagram, TikTok
Places: New York
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