Every founder I work with can tell me why their brand matters. They have a story. A cause. A conviction about what’s wrong with the category and why they’re the ones to fix it. That clarity of purpose is real, and it’s valuable.

But here’s what I’ve learned after years of advising food and beverage companies: having a great mission doesn’t mean you have a great business. And confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a brand can make.

Simon Sinek’s Start With Why changed how a generation of brand builders thinks about positioning.

If you haven’t read it, the argument is elegant: people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And there’s truth in that. Purpose-driven companies do tend to attract better talent, build more loyal teams, and earn a different kind of credibility with retail partners who’ve heard every pitch under the sun.

But when you’re standing in the energy bar aisle at Whole Foods, or the snack section at Target, or scrolling through a DTC landing page at 10 p.m., most people aren’t buying your why.

They’re buying your what.

And more specifically, they’re buying whether what you solve is something they actually care about, right now, at this moment, for a specific occasion.

Or they want a quick meal that’s healthier than what they ate growing up.

Mission Is the Wind in the Sails. It Is Not the Boat.

Let me be direct about what mission and purpose actually do well. They attract and retain employees who want to work on something meaningful.

They give retail buyers a narrative to bring to their category managers. They generate press coverage that performance marketing can’t buy. They create a foundation for community, for storytelling, for the kind of organic word-of-mouth that makes a brand feel like a movement.

That ain’t nothing.

In fact, for a young brand with limited marketing dollars, mission can be the most cost-efficient way to get earned attention. If your brand genuinely stands for something, you have a story. And stories travel.

But here’s what mission cannot do. It cannot save a product that consumers don’t find compelling enough to repurchase. It cannot fix poor velocity at retail. It cannot sustain distribution once a buyer sees that the turns aren’t there.

Retailers are running businesses. They are not in the business of supporting your cause. They are in the business of selling products off shelves, and if your brand isn’t doing that, the mission statement on your website is irrelevant to the conversation.

I’ve watched brands with genuinely beautiful missions lose distribution because their products weren’t solving a sharp enough problem. And I’ve watched brands with no particular ethos beyond “we make good stuff” build loyal repeat customers because their products hit a nerve.

The market is not sentimental.

In a recent interview that Guy Raz did with Daniel Lubietsky, founder of KIND bar, he said:

His first business was called Peaceworks.

PeaceWorks, launched in 1994, was built around the idea that Israeli, Palestinian, and Arab neighbors could create food products together, using the business itself as a vehicle for Middle East peace. The problem was that consumers found the mission compelling but didn’t actually buy the product, teaching Lubetzky the hard lesson that a powerful social purpose can make people feel good but it can’t make up for a product that doesn’t stand on its own.

What Actually Wins: A Product That Earns Its Shelf

The brands I find most compelling right now are those solving a real problem that an existing product ignores or creating a genuine occasion that nobody has thought to own. They’re not just better.

They’re different in a way that matters.

They didn’t just improve the product. They reimagined the occasion for it.

Tinned fish went from emergency pantry backup to charcuterie board centerpiece. That’s a completely different job to be done.

Goodles did something similar in a category that most serious food brands had written off. Kraft Mac & Cheese is a cultural institution.

You don’t compete with it on nostalgia. Goodles didn’t try. Instead, they asked a sharper question: what does the consumer who loves mac and cheese but feel guilty about eating it actually want?

The answer was a product that delivers on the emotional promise of comfort food while meeting a modern demand for cleaner ingredients and better nutrition.

Same occasion, new product, different consumer permission structure. That’s smart.

And then there’s Smearcase. Frozen cottage cheese in the freezer aisle is genuinely novel. It’s not a line extension. It’s not a flavor variation. It’s a format that didn’t exist for a consumer who already loves cottage cheese but wanted a different use occasion.

That takes real product thinking. Not just “what do we believe in” but “what job is nobody doing yet, and can we do it in a way that consumers will actually pay for and come back to?”

The Danger of Leading With Why When Your What Isn’t Sharp Enough

There’s a pattern I see regularly with early-stage food and beverage brands.

The founder has a compelling personal story. They experienced something, overcame something, believed in something, and built a product around it. The mission is authentic. The values are real. And the pitch to investors and retail buyers centers entirely on the why.

The problem is that when consumers encounter the product on a shelf with thirty competitors around it, they are not reading your origin story. They’re reading the front of the package. They’re looking at the price point. They’re making a quick judgment about whether this product fits a moment in their life.

And if the product positioning isn’t instantly clear, if it doesn’t click into a recognizable occasion or solve an obvious problem, the mission doesn’t get a chance to land. Blending into the category is the kiss of death. You can’t be the eleventh salsa sauce on the shelf that uses the same category tropes and images and expect it to turn.

Purpose becomes a liability when it substitutes for product clarity rather than complementing it. I’ve seen brands use their mission to avoid the harder question: why would a busy shopper reach for this and then reach for it again next week?

That question has to be answered by the product itself, by the flavor, the format, the occasion it fits, and the problem it solves. The mission can reinforce that answer, but it cannot replace it.

The Both/And That Actually Works

The best brands I’ve worked with don’t choose between mission and product. They build the mission into the product’s logic. The why and the what become inseparable.

Fishwife’s mission around sustainable sourcing isn’t a separate story from the product. It’s embedded in why the product is worth the premium. The sourcing transparency is part of the product proposition.

Goodle’s commitment to nutrition isn’t a cause that exists alongside the mac and cheese. It is the mac and cheese. The mission is product differentiation. That alignment is what makes these brands durable rather than just buzzy.

When I’m advising a founder on positioning, I push hard on this integration. Don’t tell me what you believe, then show me a product anyone could have made. Show me a product where the belief is structurally baked in, where the mission is the reason the product is different, and the product difference is the proof of the mission.

When those two things lock together, you have something genuinely hard to copy.

That’s also the version of your story that resonates with a retail buyer. Not “we care about the planet” in isolation, but “here’s a product that does something nobody else does, and here’s why we built it this way, and here’s the consumer who has been waiting for it.” The mission gives the product a richer story. The product gives the mission commercial credibility. You need both.

Velocity Is the Report Card

Here’s the part that no founder wants to hear but every founder needs to internalize early.

Retail is not a charitable act. When a buyer gives your brand shelf space, they are betting that your product will move. And when it doesn’t move fast enough, they don’t call to discuss your brand values. They call to let you know you’re losing the slot.

Velocity, the rate at which your product sells per store per week, is the metric that determines whether you hold distribution or lose it.

A brand with a powerful mission and weak velocity is a brand on borrowed time at retail. A brand with a clear product proposition, a defined occasion, and strong repeat purchase has leverage. It can grow. It can tell a story of momentum to new buyers. It has proof.

This is why occasion-based and jobs-to-be-done thinking matters so much in early-stage brand strategy.

If your product owns a specific moment clearly enough that consumers reliably reach for it in that moment, you have the foundation of velocity. Add a mission that makes people feel good about their purchase and encourages them to share it with their network, and you have a flywheel. But the flywheel starts with the product doing a job worth doing.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Mission earns the room, but product closes the sale. Purpose and mission give you access to conversations you couldn’t otherwise have with employees, press, and retail buyers. They are genuine assets. But no amount of mission will sustain a brand that consumers don’t find compelling enough to repurchase. Build both and make sure your product is doing heavy lifting on its own before you ask your mission to carry the weight.

2. The most durable brands make the mission and the product inseparable. When the reason you built the product is structurally embedded in what makes the product different, you have something much harder to copy than either a great mission or a great product alone. Fishwife, Goodles, and Smearcase aren’t just purpose-driven companies. They’re products that exist because a specific problem needed solving and a specific consumer was waiting. That’s the intersection worth building in.

3. Velocity is the score. Everything else is commentary. Retail is a performance business. Your product needs to move off the shelf consistently enough to justify its slot, earn reorders, and build the kind of proof that opens new doors. Occasion-based thinking, a clear jobs-to-be-done proposition, and a product that earns repeat purchase are the ingredients of velocity. Mission can accelerate the flywheel. It cannot start it.

Start with why. Sinek wasn’t wrong about that. But don’t stop there.

The consumer standing in the aisle needs a reason to reach for your product that they can feel in three seconds or less. Give them that, and your why has a chance to matter. Make the why the whole pitch without a sharp what underneath it, and you’re building a mission statement, not a brand.

The why matters. The what is what gets you reordered.

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

The post What Matters More – Mission or Velocity for CPG Brands? appeared first on The Marketing Sage.

Most food companies start with a consumer insight, a trend report, or a gap on the shelf. Row 7 Seed Company started somewhere else entirely. They started in the dirt.

Founded in 2018 by chef Dan Barber, Cornell University plant breeder Michael Mazourek, and organic seedsman Matthew Goldfarb, Row 7 was built on a premise that most of the food industry had largely ignored: flavor starts with the seed, not the kitchen.

The company breeds vegetables for taste first, then grows them with regional organic farmers and brings them to market. It is one of the more unusual food businesses you will come across.

Barber is best known as the chef behind Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the celebrated farm-to-table restaurant outside New York City that helped redefine what American fine dining could be. But the idea behind Row 7 grew out of his frustration with a system he felt was stripping vegetables of their flavor.

Commodity agriculture optimizes for yield, uniformity, and shelf life. Taste is rarely the priority. Barber wanted to flip that equation.

It Started With a Squash

The story actually goes back to 2010, when Barber challenged Mazourek to breed a butternut squash with more flavor. The result, years later, was the Honeynut squash. Small, intensely sweet, and deeply nutty, it became a culinary sensation. Chefs photographed it, put it on tasting menus, and talked about it constantly. It went from academic experiment to kitchen obsession in a matter of seasons.

That success gave Barber and his collaborators a model. What if they could repeat it, systematically, across a whole range of vegetables? Not just squash, but beets, tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, and beyond. What if plant breeders, chefs, and farmers were working together from the very beginning, before the seed even went into the ground?

Row 7 now has a catalog of nearly two dozen varieties, each with a story. The Badger Flame Beet is mild and sweet enough to eat raw. The Habanada Pepper carries all the fruity complexity of a habanero with zero heat. Sweet Garleek is a garlic-leek hybrid that took a decade to develop after executives at an industry seed company initially dismissed the concept. It is now on shelves at Whole Foods stores nationwide.

150 Chefs as Product Testers

One of the things that makes Row 7 genuinely unusual is how it develops its products. While most brands test with a focus group of a dozen or so consumers, Row 7 has built a network of roughly 150 of the world’s most decorated chefs, including Thomas Keller, Alice Waters, Daniel Humm, and Alain Ducasse. These chefs trial new varieties in their kitchens and send back feedback from the field and the stove. It is participatory plant breeding, and it produces varieties that are already chef-proven before they ever reach a grocery aisle.

The company also partnered with Sweetgreen in 2018 to create what became known as the first “designer vegetable” bowl, centered on the Koginut squash, a cross between a butternut and a kabocha. It was an early proof of concept that a seed company could also be a brand.

From Seeds to Shelf to Tin

Row 7 has grown considerably since its early days, from a seed catalog to a handful of restaurant partnerships. Last year, the company sold 4 million pounds of fresh produce, with grocery and seed sales approaching double-digit millions.

Fresh vegetables are now available at Whole Foods, Sprouts, and other retailers. The company is backed by notable investors, including JPMorgan and Ray Dalio, and plans to at least double its planted acreage in 2026.

But the most interesting recent development is the launch of Row 7 Tinned Vegetables, which hit Whole Foods stores in the Northeast in February 2026. This is the move that signals the company is entering what it calls its “seed-to-CPG” phase.

The tins are not what you picture when you think of canned vegetables. Ingredient lists are minimal: salt, a touch of olive oil or vinegar, and nothing more. Barber calls them “naked.” They come in pull-tab tins, sit in the produce section rather than with canned goods, and are priced at $7.99 each. The launch lineup includes Badger Flame Beets with extra-virgin olive oil and white balsamic vinegar, Sweet Prince Tomatoes with olive oil and red wine vinegar, and Sweet Garlic prepared confit-style.

The tins are produced in partnership with Massachusetts-based Island Creek Oysters, which recently opened the first cannery on the East Coast since World War II. During the weeks when Island Creek is not packing seafood, Row 7 fills the gap with vegetables. It is a clever supply chain arrangement that probably only works because Dan Barber has the kind of relationships in the food world that make calls like that possible.

A test run at fifteen Whole Foods locations last spring sold out completely before the trial even ended. The timing also coincided with what the internet declared “Sardine Girl Summer,” a surge of enthusiasm for tinned fish that turned an old pantry staple into something fashionable. Row 7 was ahead of that wave with vegetables.

Why This Business Model is Worth Paying Attention To

Row 7 sits at the intersection of several things that are happening in food right now. Consumers are eating more fruits and vegetables.

There is growing skepticism about highly processed food. Provenance and flavor are becoming selling points, not just novelties. And the tinned fish trend has quietly opened up space for other preserved foods to be repositioned as premium pantry items rather than budget staples.

What Row 7 has done is build a defensible position from the bottom up.

They do not compete on price. They do not compete on convenience in the traditional sense. They compete on flavor authenticity, and they can prove it with a story that starts years before any product hits a shelf. That is a hard thing for a competitor to copy quickly.

Barber has described Row 7 as the “Ellis Island of vegetables,” a place where crops rejected or ignored by the mainstream food system get a second chance. That framing resonates because it is honest about what the company is actually doing. They are not reinventing vegetables from scratch. They are rescuing flavor that industrial agriculture left behind.

The tins are the latest expression of that idea. A vegetable grown for flavor, harvested at peak season, preserved, and made available to a home cook on a Tuesday night in January. It is the farm-to-table promise, extended into the pantry.

Three Key Takeaways

1. Upstream innovation is a legitimate brand strategy. Most CPG brands compete at the product or packaging level. Row 7 competes at the seed level, years before a product reaches market. That gives them a story and a supply chain advantage that is genuinely difficult to replicate.

2. Chef credibility can scale. Row 7 turned the world’s best chefs into both an R&D team and a marketing engine. The same network that tests new varieties also talks about them publicly, puts them on menus, and creates demand that flows downstream to grocery retail. It is an influence model that most brands never have access to.

3. Category placement is a brand statement. Placing tinned vegetables in the produce section, rather than with canned goods, is a deliberate signal of their nature. Where you sit on the shelf tells the consumer what you are before they read the label. Row 7 understood that and made a choice that reinforces everything else about the brand.

The can has always been the consolation prize of the produce aisle. Row 7 just made tinned vegetables the main event.

What’s next for these tin men?

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

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The post Better Veggies, The Tin Man and the Seed appeared first on The Marketing Sage.

Why food and beverage brands should take foodservice seriously

Most food and beverage brands treat retail as the finish line. Get on a shelf at Whole Foods or land a regional chain, and you’ve made it.  Foodservice, if it comes up at all, gets dismissed as too complicated, too low-margin, or a problem for bigger companies to worry about.

That thinking is costing brands real money.

Foodservice, which includes restaurants, cafeterias, hotels, hospitals, K-12, universities, and any outlet that prepares food for immediate consumption, is a massive market. But beyond its size, it offers something retail often can’t: a path to profitable, steady revenue without the endless cycle of promotions, BOGOs, and demos that eat into your margins before you’ve even paid your broker.

I had a chance to talk with my friend Ed Zimmerman, founder of The Food Connector, a marketing agency that specializes exclusively in foodservice. Ed and I go way back to our bakery industry days in the 1980s when we first became friends, although technically we were competitors, too. Ed managed Ms. Desserts while my wife and I made Rachel’s Brownies.

Ed has spent decades helping brands navigate this channel, and his perspective is a useful reality check for any brand that thinks too narrowly about where its products can go.

The Retail Trap Nobody Talks About

Here is the uncomfortable truth about retail: you’re not just selling to consumers. You’re selling to the retailer first. That means slotting fees, promotional calendars, scanning allowances, and constant pressure to fund in-store events. Your trade spend can easily run 20 to 30 percent of revenue before you’ve moved a single unit off the shelf.

Of course, the consumer has to take the product off the shelf, but the retailer owns the real estate, and you sell through them. The consumer buys one unit (jar, box, or bottle) at a time.

Foodservice doesn’t work that way. 

When you sell through foodservice, you’re typically dealing with a distributor and an operator. The economics, expectations, and cost of doing business are fundamentally different.

As Ed puts it: 

“Retail is a great brand builder, but foodservice is often where brands actually make money. The trade investment is much lower, the volume can be very predictable, and once you’ve earned a spot on a menu or in a kitchen, operators tend to stay loyal. It’s not as flashy as a Target endcap, but the P&L often looks a lot better.” Ed Zimmerman – The Food Connector

Manufacturing Efficiency: The Argument Most Brands Miss

One of the strongest cases for foodservice has nothing to do with sales strategy. It’s about your production line.

Most food manufacturers run their facilities below full capacity at various points in the year. Retail demand is lumpy, seasonal, and hard to predict. That means you’re paying for equipment, labor, and overhead even when the orders aren’t there.

Foodservice volume can help fill those gaps. If you’re producing for a regional restaurant chain or a university dining program, that’s a known, repeatable order that you can plan around. It’s not glamorous, but it makes your manufacturing economics work a lot harder.

Ed sees this pattern repeatedly with emerging brands. 

“A lot of our clients come to foodservice thinking it’s a sales problem. But once they’re in it, they realize it’s also a manufacturing solution. When you have a foodservice customer ordering 500 cases every two weeks like clockwork, your production team can plan. That predictability has a real dollar value.” Ed Zimmerman – The Food Connector

For co-manufacturers and contract packers, this argument is especially compelling. Every hour your line sits idle is money you can’t get back. Foodservice volume, even at tighter per-unit margins, can generate a contribution that covers your fixed costs and keeps your team employed.

Counterbalancing Seasonality: A Strategy, Not a Fallback

Seasonality is a real problem for many food and beverage categories. Ice cream is the obvious example. The bulk of retail volume happens from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Beverage brands see the same thing. Energy drinks, iced teas, lemonades, and functional waters all spike in warmer months and slow down in the fall and winter.

Foodservice can even that out.

A hot beverage program on a college campus runs year-round. A dessert offering at a casual dining chain doesn’t disappear when the temperature drops. Institutional buyers, hospitals, corporate cafeterias, and schools have consistent, year-round demand that doesn’t follow the same seasonal curve as grocery retail.

Ed makes this point directly: 

“Think of a better-for-you ice cream brand that is killing it at retail in the summer but struggling to maintain volume in the fall. If they get into a handful of college dining programs, the whole revenue picture changes. All of a sudden, they had a base volume they could count on, and the summer retail spikes became upside-down instead of a lifeline.” Ed Zimmerman – The Food Connector

This is a smarter way to think about your brand’s revenue architecture. Instead of riding a seasonal rollercoaster, you build a base of predictable foodservice volume and let retail layered on top become the performance variable.

Common Channels and Where to Start

Foodservice is not one channel. 

It’s a category that includes everything from fine dining to vending machines, and each segment has different needs, different distributors, and different buying processes. The key is to identify where your product fits naturally and work from there.

Some starting points worth considering:

• College and university dining: Large, consistent volume, strong interest in better-for-you and mission-driven brands, and a student population that becomes your future retail consumer.
• Healthcare and hospital dining: Heavy emphasis on nutrition and ingredient transparency. A strong fit for functional, clean-label, and better-for-you products.
• Casual and fast casual restaurants: Higher margin potential, strong brand exposure, but longer sales cycles and significant competition.
• Corporate cafeterias and workplace dining: Often overlooked, but decision-makers are accessible, and volume can be surprisingly large.

“The mistake brands make is trying to go after everything at once. Pick a foodservice segment that makes sense for your product, find the right distributor partner who knows that segment, and go deep before you go wide. Foodservice rewards focus.” Ed Zimmerman – The Food Connector

Three Pieces of Advice Before You Start

If you’re a food or beverage brand that’s been focused on retail and you’re considering foodservice for the first time, here’s what to keep in mind.

1. Don’t let perfect packaging be the enemy of a good sale.

Foodservice customers don’t care about your retail packaging. They care about specs, pack sizes, shelf life, and whether your product performs in a kitchen or a serving line. Be ready to offer foodservice-specific SKUs or bulk configurations. The operator doesn’t need the pretty box. They need the product to work.

2. Understand the distributor’s role.

In retail, you often deal with buyers directly or through brokers who have relationships with category managers. In foodservice, distributors like Sysco, US Foods, and regional players are the gatekeepers. You need to understand how they work, how products get listed, and what kind of support they expect from the brands they carry. Don’t assume the retail playbook applies here.

3. Build for the long game.

Foodservice sales cycles are long. Getting from a first meeting to a menu placement to a standing order can take six to eighteen months. The payoff is stability and loyalty, but you need to be patient and resourced for the process. Brands that walk away too early because deals aren’t closing quickly are leaving long-term, profitable revenue on the table.

The Bottom Line

Retail will always be important for building consumer brand recognition. But if your entire go-to-market strategy lives in the grocery aisle, you’re taking on unnecessary risk and leaving money on the table.

Foodservice won’t eliminate the challenges of building a food brand. But for the right product in the right segment, it can fill your manufacturing capacity, smooth out your seasonal peaks and valleys, and generate the kind of clean, predictable revenue that lets you grow on your own terms instead of the retailer’s.

That’s not a fallback strategy. That’s a smart business plan.

About Ed Zimmerman

Ed Zimmerman is the founder of The Food Connector, a marketing agency that specializes in foodservice strategy and business development for food and beverage brands. He can help with strategy and tactical marketing services for the foodservice industry. 

Connect with Jeff at The Marketing Sage Consultancy. Interested in setting up a call with me? Use my calendly to schedule a time to talk. The call is free, and we can discuss your brand and marketing needs.

Would you like to read some testimonials about my work? Click here.

If you want to learn more about my new offering, The Trusted Advisor Board, click here for details. Feel free to email me at jeffslater@themarketing sage.com or text 919 720 0995. Thanks for your interest in working with The Marketing Sage Consultancy.

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