Charlotte Cruze has built Alice Mushrooms into a breakthrough wellness brand, creating functional mushroom chocolates that make mushrooms mainstream. Since launching in 2022, she's secured investment from L Catterton and celebrity backers like Zac Efron, scaled to over 400 retail locations including Erewhon, and is projecting eight-figure revenue with 175% year-over-year growth.
🔧 Category Education Framework - Approach to teaching consumers about products they didn't know they needed
📊 Complex Product Development - Process for balancing functional efficacy with consumer palatability and regulatory compliance
🤝 Specialty Manufacturing Management - Framework for finding and managing co-manufacturers for complex formulations
⚙️ Retail Category Navigation - Strategy for positioning products when shelf sets don't exist yet
📈 Creative Marketing Execution - Methods for balancing education with experiential brand-building on limited budgets
🎯 Regulatory Compliance Strategy - Framework for navigating evolving functional food regulations while making compelling claims
Whether you're developing functional products in emerging categories or creating entirely new wellness segments, Charlotte's frameworks will help you educate consumers, navigate complex manufacturing, and scale breakthrough products.
Perfect for: Functional food entrepreneurs, wellness brand founders, category creators, regulatory-heavy CPG operators
Guest: Charlotte Cruze - Co-founder, Alice Mushrooms
Host: Samantha Rose - Managing Partner, Hologram Capital & Founder, Endless Commerce
This episode was recorded live and is part of our series on operational frameworks that drive real business results. Subscribe so you never miss an episode.
What is Commerce is Chaos?
Look, we've all heard the polished founder story—the perfect pitch, the seamless scale, the overnight success. But what about the time you oversold by 100K units? Or when your 'seamless' integration crashed right before Black Friday?
Host Samantha Rose has been there—from founding her first consumer business, GIR, managing fulfillment and industrial design for your favorite brands, or acquiring distressed brands on her own.
Welcome to Commerce is Chaos, the podcast for founders who knows that building a real business is beautifully, chaotically messy.