The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mike Stamper, Kayco Beyond Business General Manager

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

The Chris Voss Show Podcast - Mike Stamper, Kayco Beyond Business General Manager Kayco.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, this is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show dot com. Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast.

We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to go see the video version of this at youtube.com forward slash chrisvoss, hit the bell notification button. Also go to goodreads.com forward slash chrisvoss. We're giving a Goodreads giveaway program we're doing for the new book. There's hundreds of people signed up for that. And then you can go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those different places where the Chris Voss Show is held and promoted. Today, we have an amazing guest on the show. His name is Mike Stamper. He's the general manager of the Keiko Beyond division, and he works for a company that is a leader in specialty foods

and beverages. And he began his professional career with the Coca-Cola Bottling Company based in Northern California. After a successful eight-year career, he held several leadership roles in sales and distribution. He moved to Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream. I'm going to get hungry reading this. At the time, a regional privately held sales and distribution company based on the West Coast. Mike held various roles in the several West Coast markets before transitioning to Nestle. Oh, it gets worse. In 2004, as part of the acquisition, my stomach is growling. Mike then moved to Los Angeles, California as the Division Vice President of Sales and Distribution

for the direct store delivery ice cream and frozen pizza business for the West Division at that time in annual sales, exceeding $1 billion and employed over 1,200 valued associates. After a career that spanned over a combined 30 years at Dreyer's and Nestle, Mike departed the company in October of 2020. In November of 2020, Mike joined Keiko in his current role and has embraced the business culture, the challenges, and the hard-fought victories as together the Beyond Sales team works hard to win in the marketplace the right way. Aside from my growling stomach now that I'm hungry, Mike, welcome to the show. Well, Chris, thank you. It's an honor to be here. And that introduction was, wow, it was amazing. I'm hungry as well. Yeah. I mean, we did the whole thing with pizza, ice cream, and yeah, it's like I'll have to try and focus on my show, but I've got some of your goodies here. Anyway, welcome to the show.

Give us your dot coms where people can look you guys up on the interwebs and find out more about you. Yes. So www.keiko.com is our main company's handle. And then in addition to that, the products I'll be talking about today will have their own website. We're redesigning all of our websites, Chris, and some of the different brands. And as I talk to the brands, I'll give those out as well if that's okay when I do that. Plug away?

Yeah, the main opportunity. You can see all of our products on keiko.com. And again, a great background. It's been tremendous. The nice part about working for food and beverage companies is people got to eat, right? So it's a sustainable business model. I've certainly probably supported half of those businesses. I'm wearing them right now.

I always had a philosophy when I sold ice cream. Never trust a skinny ice cream salesman. That's true. So I could always eat one. You're a fairly skinny guy. So evidently you did pretty good. I don't know. Hell, I work for a health and wellness company now. It's all about health and wellness, so you got to walk the talk, so to speak, but it's all good. See, if I were for Nestle, I would be like, I got to try another one of these candy bars.

And you know what? Everybody says that, but about three years ago, Nestle actually in the U.S. sold the candy division. So it's always interesting, and I'll talk a little bit. I'm not going to talk a lot about that, But my background is very diverse. When I got out of school, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do. I landed with a great CPG company, learned a lot from Coca-Cola. But the time came for me to do something different, a little bit entrepreneurial. And so I moved to Dreyer's at the time as a privately traded company. And we grew over the next 20 years rapidly. And that was the goal.

And then they sold to Nestle in 2004. Joined that organization. It was phenomenal. Learned a lot. It's about building brands. And the company is tremendous. It's a great place to go build a career. But at the time, at my career, I wanted to do something a little different.

And so what attracted me to K. Chris was really the brands and the people, the leadership. I'll talk a little bit about the Herzog family, but I met with the CEO, Morty Herzog. And one thing that he said to me, he said, Mike, we're about building, when CPG companies are about building the next quarter, they're talking about the next quarter of the year. We're about building the next quarter of a century. And so for us, it's about the legacy. And if we want to build brands, we don't want to buy and sell brands. And so we do that through our brands and our people. It's ninth generation family. Keiko came here in 1943 as a wine company out of Czechoslovakia. And then in 1993, David Herzog, part of the Herzog family decided, look, we want to get into the specialty food business. We have the wine business, but we want to get into kosher specialty food. So they

expanded. And today we have over 6,000 SKUs across 150 different brands throughout the store, but we're primarily in the specialty food, kosher food business. And so what attracted to me was having the chance to take items that are crossover brands. We feel like they fit into the kosher world, but they can go more mainstream. So we want to get them into the mainstream part of the population where people can see, touch, taste the product versus just going down a specialty food aisle. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. Some of the brands that we feel can cross over. And that's what attracted me to the organization. That's why I'm so excited to be here. Yeah. You guys sent us a lot of really cool stuff. Thank you very much, by the way.

We've been giving it away. We got so much stuff. We got tahini, creamy, squeezable. What do we got here? The tahini whole seed spicy. Ah, yeah. That's squeezable. And then these things are like liquid gold. These are just wonderful. These little beetology, beaten cherries, 100% juice. Yes. Which is really good here. And they're not that much in calories.

I was really surprised and looked at the back. I was like, wait, that's not a lot of calories. That's pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Not from concentrate, 100% organic juice. Here's the watermelon. Whoops, that blows out on the green screen. Watermelon, cucumber, basil.

I think I have that as well. Yeah. Yeah, so I have it here. You can see it as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We had the wonder, that blows out as well, wonder lemon, cold-pressed lemon mint. Yeah. That's really good.

These are really tasty. And like I said, they're not a lot of calories considering they're 100% organic juice, not from concentrate. Non-GMO, USDA organic, all the good stuff. Is that a kosher label I see there? Yes, it is a kosher label. And yeah, I was like, wow. And they are tasty. They're tasty. I have to limit myself to one and then we got some of your absolutely gluten-free crackers these are a

little too good i think i ate half a box of one in a sitting but these are also gluten-free dairy free no no soy corn or rice you're doing my job for me this is great this is awesome i'm just gonna do the whole hand wave. Yeah, there you go. Do up and down there. Yeah, but really tasty stuff. These things, I could eat like 20 of these a day. These little lemons and beets.

And Chris, we didn't send you this one. This is a frozen item. It's called the Rope Gardens. We'll actually send it. It's frozen. We had some kosher holidays, so we'll get stuff out to you. Try that as well. I'm going to talk about that product as well.

But, yeah, you did such a good job. I don't know what to talk about. I'm going to start with the juices that you talked about. Yeah. This new item, Wonder Lemon, is a new innovation this year. It just came out. We're actually on the cover of the September edition of Food and Beverage Magazine. So it's going to be on the cover.

And these items are made with 100% juice. So to your point, there's 110 calories or less, 8.4 ounce bottle. It's glass bottle. So we're trying to protect the environment. And it's all made with 100% juice. So the sweetness comes from different juice blends that we have within the product. There's no added sugar to any of the products. So healthy, you think about health and wellness and what we're trying to do. That's right up that alley. The same thing with Wonder Lemon. All 100% natural, a little different.

We're doing very well with these products where we have them. We're growing distribution. And then you think about beetology. A lot of people either love or hate beets. But I tell you, when you try this product, it transcends. It's very different than just eating beets, right? There's beet and veggie. There's five different flavors. And again, all 110 calories or less, 100% juice. These products are all imported from Turkey and they're doing very

well. We're growing distribution as we speak and everybody loves them. I haven't found anybody that doesn't like that product. They are super tasty. Almost too good. I have to be like, okay, you can only have one for now, Chris. You got to wait an hour or something. Because, you know. But the beetology, it's hard to find a good beet drink. Yes. Beets are so good for you.

They clean your blood. They do all sorts of great things. Steve Jobs, one of the things that he cited has helped him live for a long time with his pancreatic cancer was beet juice. He would drink beet juice constantly. It's really healthy for you. I used to try and blend up beets raw in a blender when I was doing the whole foods thing. And that's really hard to do. It really is. It really is. And we take that job away from you. You don't have to put it in a blender. You got everything right here. And I know people that have actually used this product with other things in a blender. I know people that have

used this and added a little alcohol to it. Oh, yeah. All kinds of different things. You just gave me some ideas. There you go. There you go. Hey, Keiko sells, we sell vodka and tequila. Oh, wow.

Isn't that convenient? Yeah, it is convenient. Yeah, so they're very tasty. So now you have the Keiko Beyond division. How is that different than the Keiko Kosher division in the way of target market and obvious? It seems like that might be obvious to the Jewish folks. But you tell me. Yeah, it's different because, obviously, again, the specialty section of a grocery store is very limited.

And people that are shopping that aisle, we're trying to get more mainstream. We feel like these brands that you just talked about, Wonder Lemon, Beetology, those go mainstream. They're not really isolated to kosher. So we're trying to get those products in the ready-to-drink section, along with cold brew coffee items and other juice items. The nice part about this lemon product is it's not like other lemonades that have a lot of added sugar to it.

It's a little bit more healthy. The Beyond Division, and that's what attracted me to Keiko. If it was really around kosher, I'm not sure I would have been attracted to the company the same way I am. It's about building brands outside of kosher and getting our products into mainstream consumers

because that's gonna be the growth and the future of the company is because we can continue to innovate and grow in the kosher world, but that business is only so big. And so as people become more into health and wellness, into sustainability, we can innovate with products outside of just kosher that attract to the more mainstream consumer. And that's really what we're trying to do. We're trying to innovate, try to gain distribution outside of kosher. And that's what my role is. And the crackers are absolutely gluten-free. I guess the brand absolutely gluten-free.

Tell us about that and why that's important for consumers. When you think about it, a lot of people have gluten-free allergies, celiac, all the other things that go with it. But gluten-free now is it's about taste and quality before people would eat a lot of this product it didn't taste great but they had a need for it what we're trying to do is take that beyond and we have gluten-free crappers yeah flat flat breads and we also have coconut chews and some other products as well so we have some other product macaroons as well that we're trying to take, again, outside.

They're gluten-free, so they fit that gluten-free diet, but really more mainstream. So if you want to eat more mainstream but still have the health benefit of having gluten-free, then if you've got stomach ailments, then it works. And so that's what we're trying to do with that product. That product's been around the longest of the brands we represent. It has the most distribution, and it's a pretty staple item.

I took some of this over to my mom, and she ran off with the coconut chocolate stuff because she was really into chocolate. I got two of them out of her, and that was about all she was willing to part with. And they were real. She loved them. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's great.

Yeah, it's good. It's a great quick snack, individually wrapped in the bag, and so it works perfect. Put it out for our guests when they come over. Now, you guys have the Mighty Sesame brand. Let's see if this will show up. There we go. It's not black, blowing out like the other one. Yeah, and I noticed a lot of products have some spiciness to them, like some of the drinks have some cayenne in them.

Yeah, yeah. What's that about? Yeah. Again, we want to make a point of differentiation, right? So for us, we want to stay in our element, more Mediterranean and not just mainstream, but we still want to make it so you think about what these products represent. And so you think about tahini and we have that in Harissa. A lot of people don't know red chili paste and tahini and we have that in harissa a lot of people don't know red chili paste and tahini but if you think about this particular product again this product is made with 100 organic sesame seeds out of ethiopia so one ingredient you think about how many products in a grocery store you can find

that have one ingredient not very many it's one one ingredient and then if you look at it it's since it's a nut you you actually, it separates. So you think about peanut butter, you have to stir it. Most tahini products in the store that you can buy come in a jar and you have to stir it. This particular product, you shake it and you use it. So the tahini itself is finer. You could actually put this organic tahini on a salad and actually improve the health benefits of a salad versus another dressing. You could use that as a dressing. So we created Harissa. This actually goes great on a burger.

We've done some plant-based burger things as well. Absolutely. Instead of ketchup or mayo, in the Middle East, tahini outsells ketchup and mayo. So you think about these products in the U.S. And so for us, we're trying to educate people on how to use these. This bottle is proprietary. So again, you shake it up and you use it instantly. You don't have to stir it. No mess. Easy to use. You use less. It's more concentrated. It's a finer tahini. It works great for us. And you can actually use this on food. You can use this baking. You can use it dessert. You can use it on other types of stuff. And, again, it's really more about educating people on how to use it and what it's for. Yeah. This is amazing when you look at the ingredients.

Roasted, peeled, organic sesame seeds. And that's like. That's it. That's it. And then we have. Yeah. And we have the organic and we have the whole seed. The whole seed is the whole shell.

It's all together. And the organic is the shell yeah and then harissa so you know other companies are coming out with some mainstream stuff we're trying to keep our roots around where we came from but we're working on other innovative items like similar to this and it's pretty low in calories especially when you compare it if you ever look at what you put on salads dressing dressing, sometimes you look at the calories, you're like, holy crap. That's right. That's right.

Yeah, this is 190 calories. And then, yeah, you add it to a salad. Organic is, yeah, 200 calories. So you add it to a salad. You have that, but again, it's one ingredient. So it'd be like putting sesame seeds on your salad, only now you have a condiment to go on that. That's funny. You don't even have to refrigerate.

I threw it in the refrigerator thinking for sure it needed to be refrigerated. No, it doesn't have to be a refrigerator. Yeah. You don't refrigerate peanut butter. And then you have the, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing this right, the Dorot Gardens. Yeah. Dorot Gardens. So this product right here is phenomenal. This product, and again, we've gotten great distribution on this product, but there's still a lot of opportunity. A lot of people don't know what this is. And so it's a very unique product. And so it's merchandised in the frozen vegetable section of a store. However, it's really not a frozen vegetable.

So you think about waste and sustainability, and a lot of people will take a clove of garlic or an onion or turmeric, and they'll have to cut that up, and then they don't use the whole thing. And then our data shows that about 30% of that fresh herbs end up going to waste here you just flip it over you pop out one of these cubes yeah when you use it there's 16 in here you just pop one out and that's what you use to cook with so if you want garlic or you want onion we have eight different flavors cilantro basil ginger any of that you You just pop that cube out, you cook with it, and that enhances your meal. The nice part about all these products, tahini, darote, they're incremental for the retailer because they're buying other things to go along

with these things. They're not just buying this particular product. So they're buying pasta, or they're buying meat with this, or they're buying other things, a salad. Kale salad was what our survey said that the number one item that people use tahini on. So they're buying other things. So what we've seen is about a 25 to 30% lift in the size of the grocery basket for people that are shopping in stores for those particular items. That's pretty brilliant. And you guys really thought it out. So why do you think these products are so well received in today's world with the marketplace as it is? Yeah, I think because I think about sustainability and health and wellness and what people are trying to do. The Rowe Gardens, as far as convenience, right? You go to a restaurant, people are at restaurants.

I've known restaurants that have closed because they can't have labor. So the last thing they want to do is spend labor on cutting up other things, use this bigger product. So from a convenience standpoint, from a quality standpoint, vegan, gluten-free, simple to use, all the products. For us, our responsibility is sustainability and coming out with innovative products that taste great and making sure that we don't compromise taste. I think in the past, a lot of people have tried products and they've adapted to the taste. We want products that taste great. It's like you said, with the juices taste great. They have health benefits that you may not find if you bought just plain lemonade that has a lot of sugar in it.

You won't find that in this particular product. So I think that's what the benefit to people are. And I like the mixes, like the lemon mint. I'm like, ooh, that sounds good. I've never seen anybody do that. The watermelon, cucumber, basil. And then I think there's one that has cayenne in it. There is. I like something that's a little, I like a little spice.

And there was several versions of the beetology. Just really great drinks, really tasty, healthy for you. And drink this instead of one of those carbonation things that have the high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, there you go. This flavor is lemon basil jalapeno. This is phenomenal. And again, you may not drink the whole thing. You may drink a half of it or whatever, but yeah, it's got a little kick to it.

So again, for us, it's a point of differentiation. We don't want to just come out with something that somebody already has. Because right now, innovation is the key. And you think about what COVID's done to the marketplace. It's really changed the game for a lot of reasons. In a lot of ways, it's helped on the grocery side of the business because more people are staying at home eating frozen food. But on the other side, from an innovation standpoint,

customers, retailers have hunkered down a little bit and they're not taking as much innovation. They're expanding on items. And so it's harder to get new items on the shelf. So you got to have a point of differentiation. If you just come out with another Me Too item that everybody has, it's going to be hard to get shelf space for that. So if you have a point of differentiation, something that adds incremental to the category, that's what we're thinking. That's pretty smart because I didn't really think about how the pandemic really affected people's lives and, of course, food consumption.

People, I think, have gotten a little bit healthier, at least I hope they have. I know I did. I lost weight during the pandemic. I started paying more attention to what I was eating. You start realizing life's a little fragile and maybe you should take a little bit better care of yourself and your loved ones. And I definitely started eating better over that time. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. And I think people are looking at some of these items are, how can I create, stay in healthier? So we've actually sold more derote ginger and turmeric. People are actually putting it in a blender and using it as a prevention, a preventative

health thing. And so we're doing different things with different products, but you're absolutely right. The majority of the people have done exactly what you said. And so they're watching what they eat. People typically are living longer. And so for us, that's a good thing being in the food and beverage business. And so for us, we owe it to people to come out with innovative products that are around health and wellness. Awesome sauce. So what do you see are some of the hottest food trends and how do you see Keiko Beyond line up within them? Yeah. Think about it, Chris. That is great. So you think about 2020, really

during the pandemic, kind of going into 2020, people were buying, it was all about buying local, right? Staying local, buying local items, zero waste, plant-based food, mindful eating, and going into 2020, healthy eating. 2021 is really continuing to see plant-based food expansion. People are going to continue to do that. That doesn't mean they're going to give up meat. That just means that maybe they'll have a meatless Monday. Maybe Monday they don't eat meat. They'll try to do something different.

So maybe they have a beet salad and they put tahini on it. Who knows? But that's going to impact us. We have responsibility to continue to develop products like that. I think people are going to continue to eat fresh and frozen. A lot of people think frozen is not healthy for you, but it actually seals the nutrients in that product. And so it's actually in a way healthier for you and lasts longer in your freezer. And so a lot of people don't know that we're trying to educate people around that. It's going to continue. Pre-immunization, like I talked about,

people are trying to eat items that they think will make them healthier, going into some of the other potential things that they could get. Increased demand in spices and condiments and right up our alley. And then making sure that we have sustainability, making sure that the items and the products were good for the environment. A lot of customers ask us, what are you doing about plastic? One thing of this Dero product is plastic, but it's clear plastic, not black there's opportunity for us we got to continue to get better but we have a responsibility we're clearly the leader in in the kosher world and we have a responsibility of those consumers to lead that category on these other products we want to be the leader to the consumer and that's why we have a glass product versus plastic on the bottles. But we want to continue to make sure that it's sustainable health and wellness in exceeding the trends as we

continue to innovate. There you go. And it's a healthy brand all around technically when it comes to the earth. Yeah. So how can people find your products in stores or order them online? Great question. So each of these have their own website. So derotegardens.com. Again, we're changing that. And each of our websites, there's a finder. So you can actually find the product. It'll tell you, you put in your zip code, it'll tell you exactly where you can go to find the product in the neighborhood. Some of the easiest way, and I think this is one of the biggest impacts that COVID's had, is e-commerce expansion, right? More people are ordering and buying food online than ever.

I think it changed the game. It accelerated e-commerce about five years. So more people are ordering in advance. You can find our products online at every major retailer, Amazon. So you can buy that way as well. And so I have a meeting later today, as a matter of fact, to try to continue to develop our presence online with Darote because it's a frozen item. So we got to make sure that we're doing that. But that's a big focus point for us to make it easy for people

to find the product and grow the product. So if you can't find it in your grocery store, you can certainly find it online. But our job is to get it in every grocery store. That's what we're trying to do. There you go. There you go. I know it's always a fight for shelf space. It's always trying to do stuff. So what's next for Keiko Beyond Division? Yeah. So I think, again, it's more about innovation. You never know on acquisitions if there's opportunity for an acquisition that makes sense. But for us, you think about these, we developed Wonder Lemon this year. We can expand beyond that, right? So we can go into different fruit and veggie platforms here. If you look at tahini, a lot of people don't know what tahini is.

So we're trying to educate people on what it is, but there's a lot of opportunity. We actually have a tahini bar out. It's out in a snack bar. It's available in limited stores today, but we're also working on a cup type item that has tahini inside. So we're trying to expand outside it, but it's really important for us to spend the time to educate people on what tahini really is before we start expanding. Because you start expanding, they don't know what it is. They're not going to buy it. For us, it's continuing to be to educate people on what our brands are aggressively. We've changed our PR company,

social media company. We're doing different things with influencers. So really it's about communicating to people what our brands represent and then expanding innovation. We're working on some innovative products as well, but it's got to fit the health and wellness platform. And for us, I always use the term speed of a cheetah. I want to move fast, but at the same time,

you want to be smart on how you do it. But the nice part about us is we're not afraid to fail. And some companies are afraid to fail. They don't want us to do it. So they think about things and it takes too long. By the time you launch it, the opportunity is gone. For us, we're going to try to ready, fire, aim a little bit. There may be some things out there that we think are going to work. We're going to try it. If it doesn't work, then we'll go back and do something different. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's the future. People just seem to be getting more healthier and interested in doing better with their lives and the environment and everything else. So Mike, give us your plugs for

people and find you on the interwebs. Yeah. So again, if you look at it, MightySesame.com for this particular product, DeroteGardens.com as well here. And then I talked about Cake.com as well. And again, you can find us on all that. And once you go to the CACO site and you plug in what you're looking for, it'll take you right to where you need to go. That's awesome. I'll put a plug in it for as well.

They are really tasty products. I really like them. Like I said, I had to hold back. Don't drink all 10 of them at once, Chris. They're that tasty. Well, there's more where they came from, Chris. And we'll have to make sure that we get distribution in Utah as well. But at the same time, happy to do that for us. We want to demo. COVID's prevented us from demoing the product. But to your point, where we can get people to try the product, taste the product,

we feel that they'll purchase it. Definitely. Definitely. Thank you very much, Mike, for coming on the show and sharing all this great stuff with us. No problem, Chris. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in.

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