Welcome to Season 11, Episode 2, of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Jennifer Steiner Pool, president and creator-in-chief of Steiner’s Baking Co., about how to turn a special family recipe into a commercially viable brand. Sponsored by Puratos.

In this episode, we’re going from startup to scale and learning how Steiner’s Coffee Cake has grown its customer base … and how production is growing with it.

Learn more about this season here, and tune into Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple or Spotify.

Joanie Spencer: Hi, Jennifer! Thanks for coming back to join me again this week.

Jennifer Steiner Pool: So excited, it’s gonna be great.

Spencer: We had such a fun conversation last week in just learning about the Steiner family, how the brand started and your relationship with your mom. It’s a cool, cool story. Now we’re going to talk about scale, and going from startup to scale. But one thing that I want to talk about first is your background, because I’ve heard this story before: marketer turned baker. Your background in marketing and advertising is relatively common, and it’s really useful when you’re an entrepreneur and building a bakery brand. So can you just walk me through a little bit of your background? Since you got into it for a totally different reason? I mean, in a short and relatively crass way, you did it to piss your mom off!

Steiner Pool: Facts are facts!

Spencer: Tell me about your marketing and advertising background and where your areas of expertise are. How did you take that and dive into this?

Steiner Pool: I have always been obsessed with marketing and advertising. When I was young, I used to go to the bank and take all the creative assets, like the brochures and the deposit slips and stuff. I would take them home and organize them in my room. That’s what I used to do. Like, I’ve always been obsessed with marketing and advertising. And that’s has been my career; I had my own company in Denver for a while. And I’m just obsessed with consumer behavior. How do consumers interact with brands and products? And why do some work and why? Why do some fail? What motivates a consumer, it’s just fascinating. If you ever want to to people-watch, which we were discussing, go to the grocery store. Watch how people sort of investigate the products that are around them. It’s really fascinating.

So I have this passion. As we discussed in the last episode, I quit my job, my mom is furious. And I know immediately that we have to get samples out into the market. Now to do that was very tricky, because we had a proprietary flour blend, right? It’s not as if we were just taking a recipe, I could go to the grocery store, get all the ingredients we needed, and here you go. We had to have the flour; that was a no-go item on the list. So I was doing all of the basics like creating the website. As you and I discussed, I had the brand locked down, I was registering the company name and I knew how to do all these things because this is my professional background, but what I didn’t know how to do is bake. Just a small issue.

So we put that aside and I said okay, I’ve got to get the flour. How am I going to figure this out? And I just went on Google and I researched blenders: what does that really mean, how do you find one. And ours has to be gluten-free so it can’t just be any blender. I was looking at all of these food safety things, like are these flours certified kosher? So now, this funnel is getting narrower and narrower as I’m trying to vet out and find someone to blend the flour, which I do keep secret.

Then we find this group. They’re such great people, as I’ve mentioned before, so now we send the flour to them — our little bowl of flour — and we send them the recipe. Now they have to replicate it. Here’s my first lesson, right? How are we going to scale this? Jennifer went to the grocery store and bought a bunch of ingredients and Nancy had to sift them in a bowl is not the same as 5,000 pounds of flour tumbling in a giant cauldron. Just imagine the difference. These guys are fabulous partners. We had to go through a lot of iterations to make it work, and what I will always say about any successful food product is that there’s three legs to the stool. The recipe: Not all recipes are like, people think they are. But they’re not. Sometimes the reason why your food doesn’t taste good is not you, it’s the recipe. No. 2 is the methodology: You could have a great recipe, but if you’re not baking it at the right temperature or the right time or mixing it correctly in the right order, it’s not going to be good. Therefore, it kind of is you and the rest is good. And then the third is the ingredients: Ingredients matter. And this is my second lesson that we learned the hard way, and we’ll come back to that. Don’t let me forget!

So we find this blender, we go through this whole process, we finally get the flour right. But now I, as the marketer, and apparently someone who now has to learn how to bake, we have to get enough product out to find out if it’s scalable. Can I make hundreds of coffee cakes? It’s nthe same thing to make one as it is to make hundreds.

Spencer: And hundreds where every single one tastes the same.

Steiner Pool: Every single one has to be perfect. And then thousands, right, and then tens of that. That’s where my head is, and I want to go there very quickly because I don’t actually want to bake, but clearly I’m going to have to. So the entire time my mind is, ‘I don’t want to bake if we’re going to make this work. I have to get out of the kitchen.’ That’s all I can think about. Before I’ve even got in the kitchen, I’m trying to figure out how to get out of it. That’s why I was so hellbent on finding scale. So I’m making hundreds of coffee cakes, and I happen to live in a place where you are not allowed to bake at home. I live in Nassau County, New York. You cannot sell food products made from your home, so that is now an immediate problem. You can make muffin samples and go to your school’s bake sale or what have you, but the minute you want to slap your business license on it and be out there selling it, that is forbidden. So now I have to find a place to bake. And remember, it’s gluten-free.

Spencer: So you can’t just go to your neighborhood commercial kitchen and knock on the door and ask for some space.

Steiner Pool: Yes, I live in a place where there are no neighborhood commercial kitchens, so what are we going to do? So we get the flour and . Now I’m baking hundreds of coffee cakes in my mom’s kitchen. They’re all over the kitchen, I mean, hundreds, I can’t explain to you how many coffee cakes I pumped out of my mom’s kitchen. And I’m wrapping them by hand and I’m taking them to farmer’s markets and I’m sampling them everywhere. And remember, I’m miserable because I don’t like baking. She’s already telling me there’s two more products she wants me to start making because now she’s realized she doesn’t have to bake because she made me bake! Like, just pump the brakes, sweetie! Slow down.

Spencer: It’s a good thing you’re skilled at ignoring your mother.

Steiner Pool: I am really good at it. And unfortunately, my son has inherited the same thing. So I realize we also happen to live in a place that’s a little bit of a bubble. When you’re trying to pressure-test a new product in the market — and this is my marketing background; a baker wouldn’t necessarily know this — there are certain zip codes in certain areas of the country that aren’t really going to tell you the truth and reveal the reality of the viability of your product. Before I could go to scale, I really had to have a good sense of price point and palate. Is this a New York thing or will coffee cake resonate across the continental United States? I didn’t know.

The only way I could really figure out how to get the product out to a more objective test market was Amazon. It was the only way. So now we’re in May 2016, I’ve quit my job, and by October, I have the flour. It’s packaged and ready for resale … which also pissed off my mom. That was our biggest hurdle was, ‘She’ll never get the flour made.’ So now she’s just crumbling over in the corner. Now, I have to figure out if we can ship these coffee cakes after they’re made. Like what is gonna happen to this coffee cake? I’m gonna make these coffee cakes, they’re adorable, they’re kind of fragile, and they have to have a shelf life. I mean, what are we going to do? We don’t want to waste any food. We don’t want to throw things out. So we start freezing them. What do I know? I’m like, just put in the freezer. What could go wrong? We’re freezing the coffee cakes.

Now the other thing you have to know — and as a marketer, I know this — consumers, especially my mother, are very susceptible to the power of suggestion. I have so many stories that I’ll share with you in another episode. It’s just unbelievable and my mother is very guilty of this. So because I know this about her, I never told her when I was baking something and feeding it to her or freezing it and nuking it and feeding it to her. Her role was, ‘If I don’t like it, you can’t sell it.’ That’s what she always says to me. I’m like, ‘You have dry mouth and all these issues and you’re so picky. You’re not like a normal person! You can’t be the taste tester.’ But I would do that; I would always lie to her and I’d mix them up. And I’d label things with Post-It notes, like if you use a red Post-It note, she’ll tell you she doesn’t like it. She’s just a marketer’s dream, in some ways, because you know exactly how to manipulate her in terms of packaging, signage and language.

So anyways, while I’m making all these coffee cakes, I’ve got to figure out how to ship them all across the country, because Nassau County is not the place to test this. I figured out we can freeze them, which is a whole other big epiphany for me and the baking industry, and we can discuss that another time. I set myself up on Amazon, but it’s not easy to set up a business on Amazon. I’m jamming this in like an hour, like, I have to do this right now and I have to start shipping coffee cakes immediately. And as you’re setting your business up on Amazon, you have to have all this paperwork because it’s food. Every time I come to a different part of the onboarding process in Amazon, they want this document. Oh, crap, I don’t have this document. Okay, I have to go over here and register this thing, right, bring it back. I’m just doing it in real-time as I’m going through this thing. No one works for me, I don’t have legions of people just Jen. So I’m getting this all together and then I finally launch it. We push it out on Amazon. My brother’s like, ‘You’re out of your mind. You know, we need insurance, everything.’ Just imagine the list of things, right?

Spencer: I was wondering how bad was your brother, the attorney, freaking out?

Steiner Pool: He’s just running behind me and he’s like, ‘Jen, you need insurance.’ Okay, I’ll go get that. So I have this philosophy professionally, that ‘no’ just means you have to start selling or you have to start doing. No doesn’t actually mean no. This is how I approach my professional career. My brother and mother don’t share that particular sentiment. So every time I run into ‘no’ or ‘that can’t be done’ or ‘nobody does that, nobody freezes baked goods, how can you freeze this,’ I just said, ‘Well, you just ate it and you’ve licked the plate. Like, apparently it’s not a problem.’

I don’t know why people don’t freeze their baked goods. They should. It would save a lot of food waste in the world if everyone just froze this stuff. And I have a friend who I just talked with about this: It’s the same thing with sushi. This stuff is frozen. People think the bluefin tuna that they’re eating in Kansas is fresh, like … that’s not possible, guys. It was frozen, it came to you frozen. They defrosted it and gave it to you fresh, but it was frozen. So you know, I guess unless you’re Warren Buffett and you brought it in from point of origin, it’s frozen. I’ve quickly learned that I had to lean into that being a positive, which it is, because we have a zero food waste policy. So we freeze our baked goods and then we sell them. Nobody has ever had a Steiner’s coffee cake that was made and sold to them within the hour. And I did that from the get-go because I didn’t want to have to fight some sort of palate differential down the road. I didn’t want to have consumers who were getting it fresh out of the oven and then other consumers who were reheating it, and have some perception issue there. So the product is always fresh frozen, right out of the oven into the freezer.

Now we have the flour on Amazon. Now people are buying coffee cakes on Amazon and I’m shipping them all over the country. And suddenly I get very nervous and I pump the brakes. I put the Amazon inventory down to zero. So now we’re in March of 2017.

Spencer: Holy smokes, hold on! So your mom perfected the flour in 2016, and by 2017, the Amazon business is growing too fast. You’re manufacturing the flour. That’s fast!

Steiner Pool: It makes me nervous. I mean, I’m very nervous, but I had to know. There was no way I could justify a business plan or really look at how we were going to package and scale if I didn’t know for sure that consumers liked the product. Amazon is a great way to do that. Now we’re really selling coffee cakes and I better be able to make them. So it does turn out that there is a commercial baking facility in Glen Cove, which is four blocks from where I live, and I happen to know who owns it. So I strike up a deal. I say, ‘Listen, you don’t use the facility on this day, right? Can I come in and use it? I’m going to clean it, you know, I have to do the whole thing for food safety reasons, etc.’ And he wanted a tenant. I mean, it was just luck. And he said yes.

We start manufacturing there, but it’s just Jen. I am making every single thing by myself. So I’ll go back to lesson No. 2, which I mentioned earlier. What happens is that we’re baking and baking, and the ingredients are critical. We don’t use any additives, no imitation flavors, no natural flavors, just the real deal. How you would bake in your home is how we bake, and the ingredients you would use in your home are the ingredients we use. We’re very, very proud of that. So since Jen is not a baker, Jen doesn’t know that all ingredients aren’t created equally, I had no idea. So I’m going along, and sour cream is a very important ingredient in a German sour cream coffee cake. So we’re going along and suddenly, I’m getting feedback on Amazon that the cakes are dry. Now for gluten-free products, that is the death knell. For someone to write and tell me a cake was dry, I literally would burst into tears. I’m like, ‘It can’t be dry! How is it possible?’ I’m at my wit’s end. So then, since Jen doesn’t ever accept no — and in my mind, if someone doesn’t like the product, that’s kind of like a ‘no’ — I have to deconstruct this. It can’t be that some of the cakes are fabulous and some of the cakes are dry, right? Because now I’m thinking scale. If I can consistently make the product, if every other cake someone thinks is dry, we have a major problem. Unlike my mom, I take notes. So I’m looking to all of my notes. And I’m like, ‘Huh, this is interesting.’ The one ingredient that I was not consistently buying the same brand was the sour cream. I go home and look at the sour cream, and lo and behold, to all you home bakers out there: Some sour creams have additives in them and some don’t. So what was happening was, in the cakes that I was using what I’ll call sour cream B, which is not the one I should be using, were dry because there were all these additives and preservatives. First of all, we didn’t want that in our product, but secondly, they weren’t playing nicely with the gluten-free flour. It turns out that pure sour cream, which of course we should use anyway, is great. It’s got the right fat content, there’s nothing in it. This was a huge learning for me, I had no idea. And this rolls forward into our chocolate fudge brownies, that all chocolate is not equal. So that was a major learning. Remember, I don’t know anything about baking, but I’m running this company and selling these cakes and making these products and I have to learn about these things on the fly. This was a huge win for us because once I figured that out, the cakes were beautiful.

Spencer: Then you got a wholesale customer shortly after that, right?

Steiner Pool: Yes. Then we had our first retail location in April 2017. So now, I had a nice dynamic going on. I could do demos and be in front of customers in a retail environment, and watch and see how they chose and why they chose our product. And we were testing on Amazon across the country and getting feedback about price point and palate and shipping and how was the product holding up. I was also testing sizes. We had many more sizes because that’s part of price point. When we launched the company, we had three sizes; we now have one size. All of that was happening at the same time. It was a lot. I’m just handling it all myself and then Nancy absolutely wanted the chocolate fudge brownie. It was a full-on fight.

Spencer: She was still hung up on the brownies?

Steiner Pool: She wouldn’t let it go. And I’m like, ‘Mom, we’re not even in this a year. We still don’t have packaging for the coffee cakes, and now you want to start with the brownies?’ And she’s like, ‘Yes, I want them.’

Spencer: You have created a monster.

Steiner Pool: She’s a monster!

Spencer: Sorry, Nancy! We love you, Nancy!

Steiner Pool: So first of all, it’s so we start experimenting with the brownies. Again, I don’t know anything about baking. It turns out that all dark chocolate is not created equal. We use 100% cacao chocolate, which we’re very proud of. When we strayed from that, unknowingly, the recipe just wouldn’t taste as good. So I finally figured that out. And now this one happens to be my grandmother’s recipe. And she called them on her recipe card ‘Bossy’s Unusual Brownies.’ They are chocolate fudge brownies and they are phenomenal. They’re crunchy on top and fudgy in the middle. My mom, of course, is a taste tester. The way that you make them is, after you bake them, you have to flash freeze them immediately. That’s how you get the contrast of the textures, which is part of what makes them so awesome. So now I’m thinking, I have to bake these brownies and get them in the freezer en masse. Remember, it’s not one little 6-inch by 12-inch pan of brownies that you would make at home. We’re talking about sheets of brownies! I’m making all the brownies myself, I’m rolling racks into freezers, then taking them out and hand-cutting them all. I really want to kill my mother at this point. And now people want the brownies! Salesmanship 101: You want this? I’ll make it. You’re never going to turn away an order.

Now it’s the summer. Now I’ve got brownies and coffee cakes that I’m making all by myself. Now I’m at a farmers market, we have a retail location and we’re selling products on Amazon. And it’s just Jen. We’re also selling the flour on Amazon, but that’s less work, obviously. This is all unfolding very quickly, and now I’m in this commercial kitchen, which of course means food safety is locked down and perfect, which I love. However, I can’t take full advantage of the capacity available to me in this setting, because it’s just Jen.

So the third lesson … I like to say a person shouldn’t have regrets in life. A person can make mistakes and learn from them, but don’t regret it. That’s kind of sad, because then that starts to stack up on your shoulders and that’s a tough way to go about life. So I would say, in my carefree, risk-taking, ‘no does not mean no’ perspective on life, the mistake I made was not driving harder to book working capital at the front. So as we’re going along through this process, we’re using all the money from sales, it’s going right back into the company. To this day, I still don’t earn a salary or personally get paid. And I’m not pulling working capital into the company. And given that my brother and mother are risk-averse, we are not accruing any debt. And to this day, aside from some family-friendly debt, we don’t have any debt. We don’t have any credit cards, we don’t have any serviceable debt. That helps me, in some way, slow down because I don’t have money to spend. It also hurts because I can’t invest where we’re succeeding, I can’t invest against it. I have to just do this slow roll.

So we’ve learned that ingredients matter, we learned that we need to take notes. And then we learned that we really should have pulled in more working capital at the front. That continues to be my biggest struggle, is working capital. So now we’re on our way to scale. Where I start to get worried is if I pull in part-time employees, how am I going to pay them? And I have a methodology for how I look at cost of goods sold and how I manage the gross profit margin for each cake sold. That’s how I manage my budget. So I said to myself, ‘Okay, just 20 cents of each cake sold or whatever it is, and add all that up, and I know what I can spend.’ And since I know I don’t have any waste aside from marketing, because the best marketing tool we have is the cakes themselves and doing demo days, then that’s how I factor my budget to figure out if I can bring on part-time help. Then it’s not just Jen in the kitchen so we can leverage the capacity we have available to make more product to sell more products. It’s a cycle. That’s how we start the journey to scale. I mean, and that’s pretty quick.

Spencer: Shocking, honestly, how fast. In my opinion, I would attribute that to the flour. You had to make that flour at scale if you were going to start this company, so you’re kind of forced into it really quickly, as it was. So in the profile that Annie wrote for the Commercial Baking printed magazine last year, she identified three things that you said you had to do in order to grow the business: scale (we talked about that), replicate consistently and make the product defensible. Can you talk to me about what does that mean? What do you mean by ‘make it defensible?’

Steiner Pool: So in marketing and advertising, we talk a lot about a defensible position as a differentiator that you can really hold onto and drive against in your messaging and the growth of your business. For us, that was the quality of the baked goods tied back to the flour. We knew and still to this day know that the flour makes our product superior. The taste profile, whether we’re making chocolate fudge brownies, ginger snaps, now three flavors of coffee cakes … there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by where someone doesn’t say to me, ‘I had no idea this is gluten-free.’ That to me, along with a clean ingredient list that we have, makes our company defensible. Now a more positive way of saying that is we are on the offense. We have positioned ourselves to push forward. And I often say there’s a great bread company out there right now who’s really doing some some great work with gluten-free breads — Schar — which many people are familiar with. I admire them. And I look to them as a peer, if you will, in terms of having created a position for themselves, and they’re holding it. That’s where we want to be. And that comes down to the three things I spoke about earlier: recipe, methodology and ingredients. The ingredients for us are key. That is where our defensive position or offensive position, if you like, sits.

Spencer: Alright, that makes sense. Okay, I want to ask about something you mentioned last episode, and that was getting the attention of Mondelez International in their SnackFutures CoLab program. And I’ve seen a lot of action happening around these incubator programs. We actually wrote about it in the magazine a couple months ago. What was your experience with Mondelez and how did it help you grow?

Steiner Pool: I can’t say enough about the team at Mondelez International SnackFutures. It was an extraordinary opportunity that we were very, very lucky to have. The first thing that they said to us when we got to the kickoff day was, ‘You are here because of your flour.’ Of course, my mom burst into tears! So I can’t say enough about them. So again, since I come from a more of a professional setting, I knew as an entrepreneur what I was hungry for that I didn’t have on my bench from a management perspective. I had 12 weeks, and to be honest with you, still today I can call them anytime for anything that I need. For those 12 weeks though, I had an entire team of seasoned professionals working with me, by my side, in every aspect of my business, from new baking pans that we needed and trying to figure out how to source them and where to go, which took them 15 seconds it would have taken me okay, maybe only an hour because I like Google, but still. It’s much different when you can call up a person and they can help you engineer and architect the solution because they actually know what they’re doing vs. just Jen who who isn’t a baker. The resource end of financial modeling, which I’m always keenly aware of, is critical to the ongoing success of the business. The breadth of expertise is just extraordinary. They will end up influencing our new packaging. Once I raised the capital to run it, we got to work with a company called SellCheck.

We’ve discussed this, I’m obsessed with consumer behavior, and they really help rein me in, which is also important as an entrepreneur: You need to be willing to hear from others. We talked about this before. What you don’t want to have is, and it is the death of any company, the founder who thinks only they know what’s right. Now, as a founder, you have to know where to dig in, where you’re holding onto what the essence of your company is, vs. I may not really know this particular subject area, I need to collaborate and hear what other people have to say. So, while I love marketing and I love consumer behavior, I’m not a graphic designer. Our logo, which I love and people have told me they love it … I never could have done that. I inspired it, I knew what I wanted it to feel like, but I couldn’t have made it.

And so the resources like SellCheck that Mondelez brought to the table, they were able to say to me and I was able to hear, ‘Jen, here are the problems with the packaging. You’ve got to roll this back. This needs to be more prevalent. You’ve got to redo your photography, you know, all these things.’ I mean, the resources are phenomenal. And the people, like, my mom couldn’t stop talking about how nice everyone was. We got to work with people from all over the world. You know, I can answer more specific questions about it, but it really impacted the entire business, every aspect of the company. And I only applied because I was talking to a potential investor and we were talking about resources for capital. And he said, you know, you really need to get in an incubator program. So immediately I start Googling that, and there’s like 10 for food specifically. And we were so small, and I say, ‘They’re never going to take us.’ He’s like, ‘You never know unless you apply.’ So no doesn’t mean no, no means start selling. I applied.

As you can imagine, there’s interviews and they’re reviewing the books and they’re really vetting you. Jackie emails me, she says, ‘Jen, we have to set up this last interview. We have a few more questions to go through.’ Great, no problem. So it’s a little nerve racking. And so I get on the Zoom and, ‘Surprise! We’re picking you!’ She just tells me and she’s like, ‘Jen, we’re recording this.’ But it was so exciting. My mom burst into tears, she couldn’t believe it. It was really an extraordinary experience. Really fabulous.

Spencer: I’m going to start to wrap up this episode with this question: Do you think you would’ve gotten to that program if you hadn’t been able to scale as quickly as you did? And then how did this program help ride the momentum that you had created? Because was it three, four years from the time you started to the time you went into the program?

Steiner Pool: Five! There’s no way they would have taken us if we didn’t have a product that was replicable and in market. Absolutely not. And quite frankly, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable being a part of the program if we weren’t at the stage we were at. Because how could I leverage any of it? If you’re going to go through an incubator program, you have to be prepared to leverage what you’re going to learn. There’s two issues. One, if you go into it thinking you know everything already, then don’t waste their time because there’s plenty of companies who want to learn from them. So if you’re gonna have that attitude, and all you want is the check at the end of the thing, don’t do that. So to be ready to leverage everything you’re going to learn you have to be in market. I mean, you have to be moving. There was no way we would have been accepted, nor would I have applied, if we weren’t already at scale and already in a co-man relationship, which we can also talk about at some point. That was critical. So what I was able to do was very quickly, and again, when you’re small and you’re nimble, I was getting feedback on some particular strategic decisions I’d made that changed my course.

When we originally launched the company, now, this is something you might want to speak about later … we did not tell anyone the products were gluten-free. That was my litmus test for success. Consumers are susceptible to suggestion, so since all the products in the marketplace taste not good, we didn’t want to be up against that. I didn’t want to have to sell over the idea that we were gluten-free. I wanted to sell despite the fact that we are gluten-free. And you’ll look at our packaging, and people would say, ‘Where does it say it’s gluten-free? I don’t believe you that it’s gluten free.’ Well, the patch is on the back because we’ve always been certified by the Gluten Intolerance Group. But I had the badge teeny tiny on the back of the boxes. One of the first things that they gave me a hard time about when I got into the program was that I wasn’t leaning into it. Again, you have to be open to hearing stuff. And I had my whole rationale for why. Well, the frozen and fresh baked good market is something like $35 billion in the US. It’s humongous. The gluten-free baked good business is $900 million, so much smaller. So they’re looking at me saying Jen, which part of the pond do you want to plan?

Now the other thing that’s important for business is, you have to solve a problem. If you’re going to be successful, I don’t care what you’re doing — McDonald’s, convenience; Volvo, safety — you have to solve a problem to be successful in your sector. We solve a problem for people who are gluten-free. They are sick and tired of eating stuff that tastes like crap or is full of crap to make it taste somewhat good. And we needed to lean into that and stop being afraid of it and stop worrying that other people wouldn’t buy the products because they say gluten-free. If the products are good enough, which they are, people will love them. They will tell other people 97% of purchases are made from word-of-mouth. If people are saying, ‘Don’t touch my brownie, those are mine,’ and are coveting them, and kids are at the lunch table and they can share their food because they’re not embarrassed of it, the brand will grow from there. That was a huge learning right out of the gate, that I needed to walk away from that strategy and lean into gluten-free. And I started doing that. The next day I was on social media, I changed our email language. Anything that I could do immediately to change that perspective, I did.

Another thing that was really interesting: When we originally started the company, the legal name of the company was Steiner’s Coffee Cake of New York. I did that because I felt, as a new company with very little capital, I needed the product to really sell us. I needed everyone to know immediately what we made and why they were buying it. New York old school diner nostalgia coffee cake. There could be no gap between that understanding.

And my brother, which is interesting because he’s not in that background, he’s like, ‘I don’t know, it feels too narrow. But we’ll go with it for now.’ I said, ‘Listen, we’ll go with it for now, we can always change it. But I have no anchor, I have no marketing budget. So I’ve got to leverage the name of the company so that people know what we’re selling.’ So now you roll forward, I get to Mondelez and we have ginger snaps, flour, coffee cake stuff in the pipeline. They’re like, ‘You can’t keep with this name.’ You know, I know I have it in the marketing plan in a couple years, but they’re like, ‘No, no, you have to change it now.’ And that makes sense. It’s totally rational, right? But when you’re in it, you can’t see it.

Spencer: Right? And that’s one of the pitfalls of starting a new brand or starting a new company. You have no crystal ball. I mean, why isn’t there a counter where everyone who starts a new company can walk up and say, ‘I would like my crystal ball now, please?’

Steiner Pool: Exactly. It would save me a lot of time. I’m still very close with the person who created the logo for us, so I called him up, literally right after we get out of the session, I call him up and tell him we’ve got to change the logo immediately. He’s like, ‘Wow, you know, I love our logo and everyone loves the logo.’ I said, ‘I think we can hold onto the corporate identity visual, but we have to change the name of the company. So in this smile underneath, you now see Baking Co. instead of Coffee Cake of New York. And that gives us room to breathe. Mondelez was very proud of us. I mean, we’re moving. They’re giving us information and we’re putting it to work. We haven’t even left Chicago, and we’re already putting it into motion. And listen, that’s great for them too. One of the reasons why the teams come together, and it’s a coveted position to be able to work on the SnackFutures team, is because they get to work with small companies, which isn’t an experience they have in corporate. I mean, Mondelez is humongous, right? So to work with a company where they’re just, ‘Oh, you think I should change that? It’s strategically on point. Okay, I’ll do it.’ Like, that would take them probably a year to pull off. That’s also what we gave to them, is that ability to experience what it’s like to be in a startup. And I think they really value that as a team.

Spencer: I’m sure they do. Okay, Jennifer, that is going to wrap up this week for another incredible conversation. It’s not just your story, I love your energy. You are so fun to talk to.

Steiner Pool: I mean, I make cake for a living, you know!

Spencer: It’s pretty fun. I love it. I love it. Okay, so we kind of dipped our toe in the gluten-free conversation, and the next two weeks, we’re really going to focus on that. First, we’re going to talk about the challenges that come with producing a gluten-free product from an operational and production standpoint, then we’ll get to revisit the marketing side of it. So I can’t wait to talk to you about gluten-free production next week. Thanks again for this week!

Steiner Pool: You bet. Take care!