Frozen Food Empire-Building
Behind the scenes of a Walmart product pitch + the burrito manufacturing process!
Many of you may have noticed that there wasn't a newsletter sent last week.
Last weekend was a crazy one, which included 4 days traveling around the country, 8 flights, and many hours on the road (I'm currently living in the mountains in Colorado, and getting to an airport isn't exactly the easiest thing in the world).
Though it was A LOT of time moving, it was also one of the most fun/exciting weekends I've had in a while. This trip was entirely focused on building the future of Counter, a macro-friendly frozen food startup. We have a lot going on behind the scenes, so I figured I'd share what we got up to last weekend.
The first stop (on Friday) - was a trip to Bentonville, Arkansas. AKA, where Walmart & Sam's Club are headquartered.
The reason for the visit was to meet first with Sam's Club (general business catch-up and discussing potential products for the future).
After that, we headed straight to the Walmart headquarters for our first meeting with the frozen meals buyer.
The way these meetings work is you essentially get set up in a test kitchen, you prep all the meals you plan on presenting, then the buyer/their team comes in and taste tests the products while you pitch the business and products.
It's always a bit of an uphill battle - even if the product tastes great, has a great concept, etc - there are so many variables that have to fall perfectly into place for a deal/partnership to become a reality. There tends to be a lot of questioning around pricing, margins, ability to ship/deliver at scale and on time, discussions around product assortments - basically what matters most in these meetings, is that the numbers and business makes sense for them. Our general goal is to simply get a foot in the door, because we know we can prove ourselves when given the chance.
All in all, it was a great trip. It's always super energizing coming out of those meetings.
After that, I flew back to Colorado, got back after midnight, slept for a day, and then headed back to the airport on Sunday for our next meeting.
This time, instead of meeting with buyers, we were heading to our new frozen burrito manufacturing facility for our first production run.
These trips are always extremely interesting - simply seeing how food is made at mass scale is incredible.
One surprising insight I've found after being in many different food facilities - it's not as "industrial" as you would think.
It's actually just a huge team of people, using extra large cooking equipment (like ovens the size of an average persons entire kitchen), all working together extremely efficiently.
It's real people cooking real food.
There are people working on grills cooking chicken to get a sear on the exterior, people stirring giant pots of vegetables, people blending sauces and adding fresh seasonings. Our burritos are literally rolled by hand, one-by-one (this is the case with every burrito product we're aware of, by the way).
It's pretty eye opening and you gain an immense amount of respect for the people and labor that goes into the food we take for granted in grocery stores.
On this specific day, we were running our "Beefy Queso Burritos". The recipe is one I developed and the R&D team at the facility was able to recreate perfectly.
The process for making the burritos is pretty simple - they cook all the beef mixed with the vegetables and cheese, mix it all together, let it cool overnight, then dispense the filling onto tortillas on a conveyor belt, then they get hand-rolled, before they pass through a flash freeze tunnel (which is -150 degrees), and emerge 15 minutes later completely frozen and ready to be wrapped in our packaging.
It all happens extremely fast.
We grab a few burritos right after they're packaged, and take them to the test kitchen for quality control. It's always a nerve wracking moment, thankfully these came out perfectly on the first run.
All-in-all, it was a major success. We're slowly piecing things together and have never felt more confident in our future than we do now. Hope you enjoy hearing a bit about the behind the scenes! I also made an Instagram post about the weekend if you haven't seen it and want to see some footage from the facility.
So that's why there was no newsletter last week - but working to stay consistent from here on out! The beginning of this year has been a lot of building in the background, but I'm excited to get back into the flow of developing/posting new recipes.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week!
- Tom