Samir Balwani 0:00

I'm Samir Balwani, host of Chief Advertiser and Founder of QRY, join me as I talk to industry leaders about their strategies, challenges, and successes in managing their advertising and marketing. On our episode today, I have Greg Vetter, the former CEO of Tessemae's, and the author of Undressed. I'm really excited to have you, Greg. It's you've in our pre call. I had so much fun just chatting with you. I love your energy. I'm so excited to have you share kind of all your thinking. Thanks for joining us. I am excited to be here. So let's actually get started with the simple stuff. Tell me the origin story of Tessemae's, what inspired you to make a homemade recipe into an actual business?

Greg Vetter 0:49

Well, I was selling insurance, and it was over top of a bodega overlooking a cemetery, and I thought to myself, this is this is not great. This is probably not my path. And so I would go home every day, and I would stand on my head waiting for an epiphany. And then when no epiphany came, I would go downstairs and make myself a big salad with protein on it. Then I'd go back cold calling for insurance, and one in one day, I went downstairs in this two liter bottle of salad dressing that my mom had made for me was missing, and so I can't find it. I'm looking over my little townhouse, nothing's there. I finally call my wife. I'm like, Hey, did you take this dressing? She suggested somebody may have broken into our home and taken it. And I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever heard, but I started calling neighbors, and I finally got this one guy, and I go, Hey, man, crazy question. Have you seen my salad dressing? And he goes, and he's like, Yup, woke up this morning. Was Jones in for it, hopped on the scooter, knew the code to your house, and now I'm crushing a salad, and I just sat there in shock. And then I thought to myself, What kind of man steals another man's salad dressing? That's so funny. And then I go, what kind of dressing is good enough to be stolen? And so I decided I was going to start a salad dressing company right then and there. And that was in 2009 and that is how the whole journey began. 

Samir Balwani 2:27

That’s amazing. I love that if you want to know if you have demand for a product, if someone comes and steals it from your house, you're good to go, right?

Greg Vetter 2:37

That's that's really the universal test. 

Samir Balwani 2:41

That’s amazing. So tell me, like, give me the story of Tessemae's, like, how did it come to be where, and then kind of help me transition into this new book that you create and why you wrote the book.

Greg Vetter 2:54

So I just started cold calling local grocery stores, and I just wanted to see if somebody wanted it, I didn't know if it was gonna be anything. So I was calling

Samir Balwani 3:04

even have a product at this point. 

Greg Vetter 3:07

You were not like, yeah, there's no company. We're not a brand. There's no name. It's just Greg on the phone. Does do people want great tasting salad dressing in 2009 Yeah? And so finally I get a guy, and I'm like, Hey, I'm a world famous food manufacturer, and you must try my magnificent dressing. And he goes, bring it to me in two hours. Okay, well, great. I'm like, that's a challenge. Okay, all right. So I call my mom, and I'm like, I need you to make the greatest batch of salad dressing ever made awesome. And she's like, why I go, I have this meeting at this grocery store. She goes, What are you talking about there? You're not a company. There's no name. I go, just make the dressing. I will take care of the rest. And so she makes the dressing. I put it in a little, a little Tupperware container with crunchy romaine lettuce. I walk into the meeting the guy goes, where's your product? And I go, Well, you're busy. It's lunch. I brought you a salad. And so he takes this piece of wet lettuce out of this Tupperware container, licks the dressing off, stares at me, and goes, this is the greatest salad dressing I've ever had, you need to call the regional office. And so then I say, meeting in the regional office, they give me 200 pages of paperwork, because now I actually have to be a food manufacturer. I haven't told them I'm not one, yet. Google my way into becoming a food manufacturer. And then we got our official start at the grand opening of a grocery store in Annapolis, May 5, 2009 and I set up a demo there, and, you know, put on an apron, had samples slang those suckers out, and the response was amazing. And I. We began to methodically grow it. From there, one store to five stores to 10 stores to every store in the region, in the country, all the major retailers, etc, etc.

Samir Balwani 5:13

That's awesome. Yeah, talk about hustle man. It's how you kind of get a business started, for sure. That's awesome. So tell us about the new book. So Undressed. What's it about? Why did you write it?

Greg Vetter 5:26

Yeah, so I lived the actual pursuit of the American dream. You know, I don't come for money. I didn't have a background in food. I didn't have a background in food manufacturing. Had the idea, decided to try and make it work. Figured out a lot, not everything. Built it to be the number one organic salad dressing company in the country, and then the whole thing basically came crashing down, investor in fighting lawsuits, a mixture of COVID and the supply chain crisis and just, you know, it was insanity for two straight years. And so they had valued the business at a at a giant number, and then we end up basically giving this thing away for nothing. And so in my reflections, I sat back and I thought about, what did I do? What went well, what didn't go well, what can be replicated, what can't What lessons did I learn, good, bad or indifferent in the next thing I knew, I was just kind of writing the story down every morning, and I had 350 pages written. Never really planned on it being a book, showed it to an editor that I really like, and she came back to me and goes, this is absolutely phenomenal, and this needs to be a book. So then for the next year, we basically turned it into a real book, and now it's out for the world, and it is the unfiltered story of my failed American dream and how it led to success. And it was a wonderful, interesting journey, just like the salad dressing company was, yeah, I,

Samir Balwani 7:13

you know, I will say I in our conversations and just everything it's I appreciate the candor and sense of humor as you can, like, for many people, this would, this would be a crushing, soul, crushing experience. And yet, you've been able to have this, like, perspective on it, and been able it speaks to your hustle and your your grit and persistence around you. Know, this thing happened, and it happened now what's next? And I appreciate you being able to be open with that story. Because, like, as a business owner, I I look for these kinds of stories, to understand how to navigate through them, and to make sure and to learn, right? Because that's the goal. So you know, who is the book for like, when you are writing it, who are you like? I really hope these people are reading it. Yeah.

Greg Vetter 7:58

I mean, the joke is like I needed to read that before I started Tessemae's, yeah. Then I needed it during the height, yeah, you know, to be like, Hey, man, be careful. This is what comes next, yeah. And then I really needed the lessons when I was in the trenches, in the thick of it, for perspective and to be very aware of the situation that I was in. And so the book is really for younger dreamers or anybody that is thinking about going after their dream or pursuing a goal or launching a business, because it's, it's a wonderful pressure test, yeah, of am I thinking about this correctly? Am I prepared for this journey? Is this the journey I should be going on? And so if you read the book and you come back and you go, I'm not willing to liquidate my 401 K, sell my house, take out 20 credit cards for freaking salad dressing, then don't do it. But if you read it and it, you're like, Yes, I am willing to do this now. I'm gonna learn from the lessons, and it's not gonna be as bad as as Greg dealt with great. That is the actual purpose of the book, because the purpose is not for you to not do it right. The purpose is, if you're going on this journey and you need a rain jacket and matches and a compass and an ax, and you don't have any of those pack them,

Samir Balwani 9:37

right, yeah, like, be prepared, right? You're gonna get into so so I do want to talk like some of the marketing stuff, because you guys did grow, you grew considerably and and the marketing started with you at that store in an apron, you know, one on one. Yeah, I'd love to have a better understanding of, like, when you were building testimonies, how did you guys approach marketing and brand? In those early days, you know, you're to your point. You were budget constrained. You had to be really thoughtful around where dollars were going.

Greg Vetter 10:05

We realized that anybody that tried it bought it. And then we also really understood that if you had an authentic experience with the shopper, they would begin to put you on their grocery list, and they would tell people about you because the product was so good, we knew that the brand was somewhat irrelevant at that stage, and we needed time to build the brand. So we knew the flavor would win people over, and then over time, we could bring people into this lifestyle brand of clean eating, and the brand would begin to take on a life of its own. So everything we focused on was these individual one on one connections with our exact target demographic, having meaningful conversation, and then hoping to get on their grocery list. And we knew if we did that, that they would tell other people. And then, then we could start selling more, then we could start basically infiltrating their you know, so our target demographic was the Millennial Mom. So then we started getting into all of their quote, unquote mommy bloggers and the food tribes and all of these thought leaders that they were going to and we would have them develop recipes for us while we were demoing in store. And so it was very much this kind of authentic grassroots campaign to have a wonderful tasting, clean, organic alternative to crappy dressings that that were existing at that time. Yeah,

Samir Balwani 11:56

I think that's really interesting, because one of the things that I think a lot of people do is they start build brand, building way too early and investing in brand. There's still this early stage of word of mouth marketing that needs to happen, like you need to ensure that your product is so good that people want to talk about it. Yes, if they don't want to talk about it all, the brand building in the world is going to be such an uphill battle. Yeah. So I love that you guys realized early on that it's all right. How do we get the product in the right hands? How do we get people? How do we build the category too? Because you guys were category building at that point, right? Yes,

Greg Vetter 12:26

we basically became an innovator in a dead category, which was refrigerated fresh salad dressings. Yeah,

Samir Balwani 12:37

yeah. I mean, he had to, like, revisit that and, like, make it an interesting thing also, because I think at that stage, salad dressings were starting to get a bad rap, right? Like it was, oh, you're adding calories to your salad. Why are you doing this? And so kind of, there's this trend that you're you're kind of working towards and against at the same time. So managing all of that must have been important. It

Greg Vetter 12:59

was very important. And having such simple ingredients, having our own manufacturing, and then partnering with all of the right food tribe leaders, yeah, was very, very important in the beginning, because when we first started it, you're right, it was calories in 2009 that's all anybody cared about. And we're like, Yeah, but ours is only five ingredients, so don't worry about the calories. This is just real great tasting food. And so we were really the first leader in bottled dressing or sauce that was able to participate in every food trend and help kind of gain mass adoption of these diets, you know, like paleo, the whole 30, gluten free, sugar free, vegan, keto, every single one that popped up when you only have five ingredients in The real and it's great tasting. You get to participate in every one of those. And we never tied ourself to any specific trend, which I thought was really important as we grew, yeah,

Samir Balwani 14:12

you built this longevity to the to the business, versus kind of being tied to a trend where you have to reinvent yourself, right? And so that really helped a lot. And it's interesting too, because I think the one thing that you guys did really well was this concept of storytelling, and you guys were leaning in on influencers early on. How did you manage the stories, I guess. How did you make sure that the influencers and everybody was speaking the same language and not kind of going their own direction and kind of creating this dissonance for the brand.

Greg Vetter 14:41

We had three or four buckets that people liked. So if you wanted to talk about the American Dream bucket, that was great. Here it is, it's all true. If you wanted to talk about being, you know, the trailblazers of clean eating, here it is, here's here. Here's the narrative, here's the story. It's all true, if you wanted to talk about a good old fashioned just fun story to tell of you know, brothers and their mom's recipe, boom, do it? And so we understood one story wasn't going to be told, because our story was deeper than just a single narrative. And so we allowed people to kind of participate in the different buckets of the story that fit best for however they were trying to talk about our brand at that time. And I think that was really helpful, because, again, all of those stories were true. They were authentically correct. It just came down to, how did this person want to talk about it because a smaller, newer, younger, you know, food blogger wanted to talk more about clean eating in the American dream. And then an older recipe developer that had kids wanted to talk about how wonderful it was that three sons took their mom's dressing and brought it to the masses, all of which was true.

Samir Balwani 16:03

Yeah, that's really cool. You had so many facets that somebody could kind of work through. I'm curious. I know you guys started with storytelling, story with influencer. When did you start to, like, turn on advertising and what worked, what didn't work?

Greg Vetter 16:16

So we did advertising towards the end, when we launched the shelf stable brand of Tessemae's, which was called Tessemae's pantry, we realized that we needed to get more people into our brand. Now that kind of the main frequently asked question had been solved, because so often people were like, we went to the salad dressing aisle. We couldn't find it. We're like, it's fresh once we came out with a shelf stable dressing. Then we realized, Okay, it's time to really put on advertising brand work and get the masses into the grocery stores, into the salad dressing aisle to give them a clean eating alternative that tastes great. And so we did a massive national campaign. It was a mix of TV, digital ads and radio and Pandora, and we did it in targeted regions that had all of the products and all of the retailers. So if someone decided to go to Walmart, it was there they wanted to go to Target. It was there if they wanted to go to Whole Foods, it was there. And it worked unbelievably well. I mean, it was a 40% increase in shelf sales. And, you know, the world was our oyster. We were just seeing limitless growth. And then it was COVID, and then it all ended. And so we took this massive, you know, advertising campaign for us, which was initially it was like $3 million you know, which we were freaking betting the farm on that, yeah, and it worked. And the data was amazing. And then all of it basically ended up being almost for nothing, because we couldn't leverage it. We couldn't sell in additional products into retailers. We couldn't take those data points and meet with buyers and kind of outline our innovation pipeline and and why it matters to them. It all just went to survival. But when we did that national campaign, it was, it was really, really successful. Yeah, it's

Samir Balwani 18:27

interesting. I love that you were thinking about it from a bunch of different ways, not only from driving sales, but being able to look at point to buyers and say, hey, look, there's investing and all of those. So I think the again, the multiple pieces of how you're looking at things was really interesting. I you know, I think your story from like, start to end is fascinating. And so as you look back on it, as you've written this book, and now, you know, you're working with aspiring entrepreneurs, what's like, the number one piece of advice you would give them, don't

Greg Vetter 19:00

overthink it. You know, I think one of the field guides in the book after chapter two or three, which is just trust your basic ass knowledge. And for us, we understood people were buying the product because it tasted better than everything else, and the ingredient label was real simple, and the story hit the heart strings, and we didn't need other people to tell us that actually what they want is this, this, this and this. And so we we knew we were in a sleepy category. We knew sales growth had never historically been there, and so we really just needed to observe from our demos and go, I mean, we're selling 100 bottles in four hours, and the other brands aren't doing that in, you know, two months. So we need to go about this in a different way, and we need to trust our gut, and we need to use common sense. Sense, and we need to just observe what's happening in strategically improvise. Because I think people just, they overthink it too much. Yeah, I

Samir Balwani 20:10

think that people get really rightfully so. People get nervous, right? And then they try and solve every, every possible outcome. And this is what I will say. Entrepreneur, entrepreneur, the outcome that you will deal with is always the one that you never plan for. You might as well just be prepared for be prepared as much as you can, but be ready to switch and make changes and pivot and see opportunity and go after opportunity, because that's the only way you can move forward, no doubt, well, Greg, thank you so much for joining us today. I really loved our conversation. If someone wants to find you online, where can people learn more about you?

Greg Vetter 20:49

Social media, I'm back on after about seven years, and then gregoryvetter.com 

Samir Balwani 20:57

Oh, that's perfect. Thank you so much for your time, Gregory, thanks for coming. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Chief Advertiser. If you enjoyed today's conversation, please subscribe at chiefadvertiser.com, share the episode with others who might find it valuable and consider leaving us a review. Your support helps us bring more insights with each episode. See you next time.

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