The Startup CPG Podcast


In this episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, host Daniel Scharff sits down with Matt Merson, President of Once Upon A Coconut, for a deep, practical primer on retail pricing: how to set a shelf price, what it means for your wholesale price, and what actually lands in your pocket.


Matt has spent about 35 years in food and beverage. He started with 15 years of classic CPG at Dannon Yogurt, Sara Lee, and Coca-Cola, then joined his first startup at Glaceau Vitaminwater and has focused on better-for-you, disruptive emerging brands ever since. Daniel’s first CPG role was global pricing and promotions at Mars Chocolate, and he shares his own research methods alongside Matt’s on-the-ground experience negotiating with retailers and distributors.


Daniel and Matt walk through how to do store and online price research, why you should price-slope across every channel you might one day sell in, and how to model your cost of goods at scale. They break down the pocket price waterfall (retailer margin, distributor markup, trade spend, and marketing), how promotions work with distributors like KeHE and UNFI, and how to handle price increases and buyer pushback.


Listen in as they discuss:

  • Why Matt says to think broadly across channels and long term, and why price missteps in the first couple of years cause pain in mass and club later
  • How to do day-one research with store checks and retailer websites, logging weights, SKUs, price points, and facings
  • What “magic price points” are, and why pack size and common formats matter
  • Why you should model your costs at 10,000, 100,000, and 1 million units before you launch
  • How the pocket price waterfall works, from retailer margin and distributor markup to trade spend and marketing
  • Why Matt says brands will not survive on sub-50% margins, and why you need a clear path to 50%
  • Why retailers and club buyers check your website price first and Amazon second
  • How to model higher and lower price scenarios, and how NIQ Byzzer data can show expected promotional lift
  • The difference between off-invoice and scan-back promotions with KeHE and UNFI, and why an anchor account can protect you from heavy promo commitments
  • How to change prices, from distributor lead times to how buyers react

Resources mentioned in this episode:
  • Startup CPG Retail Tracker, with retailer margins, store lists, and estimated distributor markups: bit.ly/4idan1T
  • NIQ’s Byzzer™, with three free reports through Startup CPG’s partnership: bit.ly/4jAHAl9
  • Circana: bit.ly/4yafl5h

Want to connect with buyers, investors, and industry experts in real time? 
Join our free Slack community with over 40,000 members. Get access to exclusive events and trade shows where you can meet buyers and investors in person, plus free resources and more. Just text CPG to 833-605-7002 and we’ll get in touch.


Episode Links:

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Creators and Guests

Host
Daniel Scharff
Founder/CEO, Startup CPG

What is The Startup CPG Podcast?

The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.

Matt Merson
Know where your product is going to sell best or know who your target consumer is. Most importantly, know where they shop and really have a broad view. If it's product that's right for all channels, have a broad view that someday you would be in all those channels. Do your homework on the pricing and also look long term. You know, if you're not gonna be in Costco today, but someday you will. Missteps in pricing in these first couple years will really cause you a lot of pain in masks and club down the road. So it's important to price slope everything. But also equally important is your margins and a path to really healthy margins. Brands are not gonna survive on sub 50 margins. So if you're not at 50 today, don't worry about it.

00:49
Matt Merson
That's what investment is for. And the great conferences that you hold and bringing brands together with investors, but you gotta be able to get to a 50 down the road and you gotta be able to show the investor like I have a very clear path to 50. 10,000 Units, 100,000 units, million units, 5 million units. I'm at 50. No big deal.

01:09
Daniel Scharff
Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. Today we're tackling one of my favorite and also most challenging topics which is pricing. This means what is your shelf price going to be and what does that mean about how much you sell the product into wholesale for? There's so much complexity around it. But lucky for us today I've got Matt Merson, who is one of the deepest sales experts that I know. He is the president at once spawn a coconut, which is absolutely killing it these days. And we are going over all of these topics in a way that I think will, if nothing else, just help everybody understand all of the considerations they should take into account when they are setting their pricing. I think this is a really great primer, but also just the beginning of your pricing journey.

01:50
Daniel Scharff
So, so I'm really excited for all of you to hear this because it is one of the most common questions we get in the Slack channel is around pricing. And I think that this is honestly one of the most useful pieces of content that I've ever been involved in around it. So I hope you enjoy. Please let me know what you think and good luck to everybody. Here we go. Welcome everybody to I think what will be a very technical and perhaps one of the most useful episodes we've ever done on here. I have been working in and around this industry for a long time and I've never once seen a really quality piece of content on pricing and I personally have a lot of experience on pricing. I actually used to do that for a living.

02:32
Daniel Scharff
But what I didn't have as much of was the on the ground experience of how you put the stuff into practice and really execute it and negotiate with wholesalers and distributors and all that stuff. And so I'm really excited to have Matt Merson on the podcast here today who I think is just one of the foremost experts on CP retail. Matt, could you just hit us with the introduction for anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of listening to one of our previous episodes?

02:55
Matt Merson
Absolutely. Daniel, thank you for having me. Great to see you. Thrilled to be chatting about this, but I'm Matt Merson, currently president of Wants a pot of Coconut. We're a shelf stable beverage and been in the industry here for about 35 years. All of it in food and beverage. First 15 years classically trained CPG where 10 years at Dan and Yogurt, Sara Lee and then Coca Cola until I joined my first startup at Glass O Vitamin Water. And the rest of my career has always been on better for you disruptive emerging brands.

03:29
Daniel Scharff
All right, and I just want to highlight Matt has experience across so many different categories, beverage and food and different temperature classes as well. And he's the president now at Once Upon a Coconut. But he's been in many different kinds of roles that often incorporated not just sales but also strategy. And so that's one of the reasons that I really like having him here because he does think about this stuff very holistically. So just on that note, I wonder, do you have any overall thoughts about pricing as we're getting started here? Like when you've started with brands, even on the earlier side, like what did you really feel was important to get right about pricing at the onset?

04:06
Matt Merson
The two biggest things I would say, Daniel, is to think broadly across lots of different channels and to think long term. You know, a lot of founders get excited about the here and now and I have a great widget and I have a local chain that's going to take it, but they're forgetting that they may want to be in Target in three years, in Costco in seven years. And so the upfront work about what I would call price sloping and really figuring out what your price point is by channel. If you have a product that's applicable for all channels, if you have a natural foods channel product, great.

04:39
Matt Merson
You know, you're selling in Whole Foods Sprouts, fresh market, fresh time, farmers market, and maybe progressive grocers like Wegmans and Raley's but if you have a mainstream product that you hope to sell in conventional grocery, natural channel, mass club, drug and convenience, that's thinking broadly about where your product fits. And the most important exercise you can do upfront, even though it may not be relevant for seven years, is really work around a price sloping model to understand what your price point would be if your product sat on the shelf in all those different channels.

05:14
Daniel Scharff
All right, I think that's a great overview. My background on this, by the way, comes from my first role in CPG actually was doing global pricing and promotions for Mars Chocolate. It's a very different environment because it's such a massive established brand. In those kind of environments it's probably different from category to category. But at least in the US in that chocolate category, what I typically saw is that those brands are going to change price maybe once every three years, something like that, unless there is some intense pressure one of their ingredients like cocoa, in which case they will have to pass that price along.

05:48
Daniel Scharff
But typically like, you know, it happens every couple years and you go around and do a really deep analysis and you look at elasticities and you think about the price at all the different major retailers and how that stuff all flows. But I was really excited then when I got to the better for you world to then start getting to work on price right from the onset and do all of the analysis that helps you understand what you can start with. And so I really like your point about thinking about it long term. And by the way, that is really hard for a brand at the beginning, as you know, because you often aren't going to really understand your cogs when you're just starting out.

06:23
Daniel Scharff
Like, we're going to do this, it's going to be great and we're going to be really competitive with the whole category. You don't know if you can be. And, and also I think what you see is a lot of brands in their more mature stages than trying to actually bring price down. And I think twice this week I've heard from a different brand like, yeah, our velocities are good, they're not where we want them to be. We're actually at the end of this year going to be doing a price decrease to get those velocities up because we want to do better, especially in mass channel stuff like that. So that kind of stuff can happen later on. But changing price is hard to do. So it is really good.

06:54
Daniel Scharff
If you could try to get yourself set up with a good price from the beginning that will help you be competitive, but also really give you room for the margin that you need and to actually support the business. Because as we're going to talk about today, there are a lot of considerations and I think overall my goal today is for you guys to understand all of the considerations that go into this. Everything that is worth keeping in mind. And pricing is an art and a science. It is not exact. There are a lot of different roads and outcomes and you'll never know exactly what was the right answer. But like Matt's talking about understanding all the different curves and all the different like channels that you need to understand the impact of your pricing.

07:33
Daniel Scharff
We're going to talk through a bunch of that stuff today and you'll also find on today's podcast, I'm going to talk a little bit more than I normally do because I actually really wanted to just share a lot of the learnings that I have over the years and that'll be complemented by Matt's experience. Usually I'm mainly just asking the questions to get Matt's experience out there and we're going to do a lot of that as well. But I'm also just going to share a lot of the work that I've done here because I think it will be helpful. So in my, the way I like to think about pricing from the start is a little bit of like, you know, cost plus as a lot, you'll hear it from a lot of business school majors.

08:06
Daniel Scharff
But also then tied in with that like top down competitive analysis, looking at all the channels kind of approach. Because if you don't consider your costs, you're going to be in a world of hurt short term or definitely long term. And you also might miss the opportunities. But also there is a reality out there of what could possibly work in the market and what the market will not bear. And so just to start into that, then there are a couple dynamics that are really interesting as well. And so if you're just at the beginning of this journey, my homework for you, day one is number one, go into stores, go look at your category in a bunch of different stores, in different channels and understand what does this set look like.

08:49
Daniel Scharff
If you're a beverage can, let's say, and you're in like a 12 ounce set, sleek, and you have a, let's say it's like a sports hydration drink, something like that. Go look at where you actually would be merchandised and see who's there and look at what is the predominant pack size, what is the most common thing that people are selling at and what do those price points actually look at, look like? And also take a note of are there heavy promotions happening? And you'll see that more in some channels versus others. But it's really nice to like go look at a gas station, go look at Whole Foods, go look at Target, different channels, right? So that you can start collecting what does that price point look like in the different channels.

09:25
Daniel Scharff
And you're going to find, for example, natural channel is going to be more expensive than the conventional or mass. But there are some differences because some retailers have really high margins, some have lower. You go into a Costco, you're going to see a great price. And that's, you know, a whole nother thing. But basically checking all of these things and also understanding there are very substantial differences regionally, even within specific stores. So there's no rule that says the price of a product at Whole Foods in Florida has to be the same as Whole Foods in California or Walmart or anywhere. They're going to be doing a lot of dynamic pricing, looking at pricing regionally, and there are some states that are just more expensive and that's going to be reflected.

10:04
Daniel Scharff
So, you know, I think one thing that can be helpful is doing that store check, but also look online, because this wasn't always true, but now you have access to such great information. Even if you just go to walmart.com and set your local store with different zip codes, you can actually do great pricing research. You can understand the price of a product in California vs Ohio vs Florida and note all of these things. And when you're creating your spreadsheet to note all of these things, you want to log how many, what's the weight of this product, you know, what's actual sku, is it and what is the price point? Because there are going to be also some differences where the things don't always match up exactly. Like, oh, with that one's 13 ounces.

10:44
Daniel Scharff
So you're going to be looking at like, also note how many facings each of these SKUs have so you can understand which are like the more dominant SKUs. This, by the way, is in the absence of you having the retail scan data, because you can pull a lot of this stuff if you have access to an IQ or cp. And that will have a lot of like base price information. It'll have promoted price information that you can look at. If, depending on the data that you buy, whether you can cut it by region, that stuff can all be really helpful. But even if you don't have all that Stuff at your fingertips, the store visits is just a really good place to start.

11:16
Daniel Scharff
Obviously, with the sales offtake data, you'd be able to also understand who has the biggest share and kind of start with who you think your real competitor is. But really just think about where is this going to sit on shelf ideally, and what is the price point of things around it. And by the way, you could actually do this whole analysis and arrive at the conclusion that it's not going to work for you because the thing that you had in mind, the ingredients are too premium and it's going to be too expensive and it's going to sit next to a really good market leader and you're going to be two bucks more and no one's going to buy it. And that's a great learning because you can do something about it.

11:47
Daniel Scharff
You could make a smaller pack size, you can make change to your ingredients just so the whole thing is actually viable for you from the start. But that's the kind of stuff that I want you looking at when you actually go out and do your research and put it all together and take a hard look at it. The other things that I want you to look at, magic price points, I think they're really important because you're going to notice when you browse that category for the set for your category that sometimes, and it's not in every category, there just might be some like general number that nothing goes above.

12:16
Daniel Scharff
And if you are in a category where every product there is like 9.99 or less and you're premium, but you're going to go over 9.99, there could be like an exacerbated impact on sales because that, like, you might find that's actually a magic price point acrossing 10 and think about, okay, maybe I should have a smaller pack size. So you'll see it sometimes where, like if there's just no product over four bucks or over five bucks, like just at least think very carefully about it because you can charge more for things that are premium and better for you and have attributes like organic. But just understand that these things are out there where people will really notice if one thing is not like any of the others. And again, taking really note of the most common packaging formats.

12:57
Daniel Scharff
And that's for the pricing, but it's also just because sometimes consumers associate a particular style of packaging with a category and you might be thinking about something out of the box. And then consumers might not understand what the product is because it's packaged so differently or in a Different format or a different size than what they're used to. So love that for all the store visits. Another thing I think really understanding your target consumer, like who is this product for? How are they going to use it? Why are they going to buy it? Because that will validate what we're talking about. About really what is your competitive set? Who is this for? What are they willing to pay for it? What are the things that they care about? Are those things in my product? Would they pay a premium for those kind of things?

13:35
Daniel Scharff
Do they shop in these different channels? And you know, like Matt said also about the cross channel pricing. We'll talk about this a little bit more later. But just really like the reason I want you to do this all in a spreadsheet is because I want you to check, let's say you're going to go and check the Gatorade price. Like I want you to check it across all the channels because then you'll see like, okay, if I look at a gas station compared to this other place like there it's typically like a $50 more or something. And you know, in Target it's typically this price. You'll see the curve of how they do their pricing across all the channels from a shelf price perspective. And in a second we're going to talk about how that trickles down to like what you would actually charge.

14:09
Daniel Scharff
But then obviously though, the main thing you need to do is understand your costs and that's going to be a lot of work for you to do because most of us have been there of trying to understand what the cost is for a product that you might not have even made yet. And you definitely haven't made it at scale or maybe you have, but you like understanding the costs of how much it costs you to like make and ship and store and all that stuff. And also how that's going to change in the future. Like these are all the inputs that you're kind of need. Matt, do you think I'm missing any major ones just in terms of like how to set up your research at the beginning before we dive into a lot of the specific line items here?

14:44
Matt Merson
No, but I think in the beginning you mentioned something and you're just closing with it now that is equally important exercise is around your margin and your scaling. So we know when you go to your suppliers and you say, hey, I need 10,000 cans of this run, they're going to give you a price for 10,000 pieces of ingredients, 10,000 packaging and 10,000 tolling fee at the same time they're doing that you should have a handle on, well, what if I did 100,000 pieces? What if I did a million pieces? So you know where the price breaks are and how much margin improvement. Because you're never going to get to your best margin when you first start, right? The tolling is going to be too high, the ingredient costs are too high. But start to look at your product before you launch at scale.

15:30
Matt Merson
Can I get there over time? If this grows the way I see it growing, If I do a million pieces, what would be my margin in that scenario? So that's upfront exercise that you should work on with your vendors before you consider launching.

15:45
Daniel Scharff
I love that as a starting place because I actually just met a brand a couple of weeks back who showed me a product that it was a good product for sure, premium product. And then she told me the price and I, like, my mouth hit the floor. I literally could not believe it. And it's probably three times the price of any other product in that category. And she had already gotten some pretty tough feedback from retailers that she was talking to. And I think, you know, in her mind it probably is being very financially responsible to have a price like that. She's like, no, you don't understand. Like, here's the cost of these ingredients and here's what it's costing me to make this thing. And she's probably at the point where she's running about, I don't know, a thousand units, something like that.

16:23
Daniel Scharff
But it's very tough to start in a place like that for your pricing because just nobody is going to put you on shelf. No one can do that to their customers. And if it is there, no one's going to pick it up. And so like, you need to be financially responsible but also have a healthy dose of realism here of like, I may just lose money on pricing in the early days until I can actually get the volume up to where this makes more sense for people. And you can't just ask consumers to eat that for you until you do because they're not going to like literally not eat it. So there is a balance there.

16:57
Daniel Scharff
But it's really important to just to have the full picture and really understand it and ask exactly what Matt is suggesting, which is when you talk to your coman, not just how much could you make this for me today, but it might even be a different co man you have to talk to because you might be just, you have found a co man who can do like, you know, not just pilot runs but early sales runs for you. But you know you're going to have to move when you scale talk to those other people in advance. There are a lot of people who are very happy to give you information like that.

17:23
Daniel Scharff
There are great consultants out there who can help you understand like yeah, here is going to be your tolling at this volume and then when you get to a million units it'll be this amount. You're everyone is going to need that info. You're going to need it for the pricing. Your investors are going to need to understand that. And it's not fluff. This is real money. When you go through it, you will see what I'm talking about where like you know, you double your volume and all of a sudden the cost per can goes down by 25% like your ingredients go. Cost can go down like all of these. But especially the tolling at the coman can go way down when you get the volume.

17:58
Daniel Scharff
So you really need to understand what that looks like at scale and give yourself a strategy, a pricing strategy to pick up the volume to get there. Okay, just to go a little bit deeper into this first point about building up your cogs. So there are plenty of models out there that you can google to pick one up. But just kind of the premise of this is you need to understand how much your product costs to make, ship, store all of these things. And there are additional things you need to factor in there. Like there's going to be wastage of ingredients. It's not always so straightforward.

18:27
Daniel Scharff
But just really try to factor in everything because when it comes to especially supply chain, the one thing that I can guarantee you is that there will be unexpected things and they will cost you and like you know, you'll also figure out your margin and then you'll have to throw an entire run out because there's something wrong with the product that is the cost of doing business. So I just hope you have more cash than you think you're going to need because you will need it for things like that will make you cry. But everybody has gone through it. So yeah. And then just understanding the efficiencies and the efficiencies are going to happen across everything. It's going to be on logistics and warehouse, you know, and obviously the coman but just really trying to understand that always at different volume assumptions.

19:08
Daniel Scharff
And if you aren't sure about how to do the volume assumption, I really recommend using our retail sales tracker. It lists all the stores out there. You can do a bottoms up sales forecast. If you want to jump into an episode that just goes deeper on forecasting. You can look on our YouTube, we have plenty of CPG forecasting exercises there that can help you understand how to build a bottom up forecast. But the premise of it is you just decide how many stores you're going to get, what your velocity is going to be at those stores, what the timing is of all of those things. And when you add all that stuff up with the timing, it gives you that kind of a volume forecast year by year.

19:41
Daniel Scharff
And also the one thing I can promise you is that it will probably take longer than you think, especially when you're talking about activating distributors. So that's just on the kind of cost of goods side. And then also I really encourage you to think about other things that are going to impact your overall cost structure here, especially broker fees. That's a big one. Not everybody is going to go out and hire, you know, a 15, 20K a month kind of broker going big. But many of you will have some kind of broker fees.

20:08
Daniel Scharff
I'm not a finance expert, but I believe technically the broker fee will actually go below net sales because like the way you, an accountant will structure this is you have your gross sales and then in between that is a lot of like the trade promotion stuff that comes out where you get net sales, which is like the net amount of revenue, the broker fees technically goes below that, but it's still, it is part of this. So it's really important to understand. So I just want to lay out for a second like pocket price waterfall. So the way that I typically would do this, I mentioned all these store checks is I would be starting with like a dominant channel srp, the suggested retail price.

20:43
Daniel Scharff
That means like the way I would start this exercise personally and other people will do it a lot different ways is I would understand like, okay, the place that I really need to get this price right to begin with. Let's say it's Whole Foods. And that's the, I just have my eye on it. That's the only thing I really care about right now. Okay. Like I'm trying to understand what should my price be at Whole Foods. And I've done all those other exercises and I've looked at like if I think about this price, I think it'll sell X amount more or less. Okay, let's say I've decided my price there at Whole Foods. Just remember from there, like there's a lot of stuff that comes out to understand what your actual pocket price is. So number one, there's a Retailer margin.

21:19
Daniel Scharff
And that is how retailers make money in addition to things like slotting fees, but mainly the margin off of your product and it is hefty and a lot of people complain about it. But they built the store and like they get to charge for that. And they built the store and they built the people coming into store through all of their, you know, growing their brand over the years. So that's it. If you want to work with them, you have to pay their margin. And it's different for each category. By the way, all of those category margins are in our retail tracker. We've built in tons of them by retailers. You can understand that retailer margin that's coming off your price point. Next you have the distributor markup. Product has to get there. They deserve money for actually getting your product.

21:55
Daniel Scharff
There's and so understanding and that also can change depending on like it can be 8% at a Whole Foods, it can be 33% at small independent store. So understanding those things and then your trade assumption is really important to understand as well because you're going to need money to do promotions. And we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. But people do build in a pretty hefty assumption there to support the actual business. And then let's talk for a second about the cross channel pricing. So like understanding your price at all these different places and what their margins are to understand like the pocket in each of these scenarios, but also Matt, how much do you think about like your online pricing like on your website and Amazon when it comes to your retail pricing?

22:34
Daniel Scharff
Just like because I know you've been in so many retailer discussions like how much are they looking at that kind of stuff and to make sure that you're not undercutting them or whatever.

22:41
Matt Merson
It is absolutely coming to focus within the last year not only for major retailers like Walmart.com and Wholefoods.com but they are really ramping up their online efforts. And if you're calling on a Costco or any retailer for that fact, they will go right to your website and look at your price point first and then they'll check Amazon second. So we have a strategy where Amazon matches our website price. But lately I've got a lot of big box inquiries around my price point online and where I should land up in the club store channel. So that is absolutely another dimension when you're price sloping across channels to have E commerce on there and make sure you understand the pros and cons of your pricing scenario.

23:26
Daniel Scharff
That's really interesting to Hear, I didn't know that. But it makes a lot of sense if you just think about who the big players are these days and what are they actually doing with their online channels. And I will just say anecdotally, all the major retailers that I've been talking to lately have been talking about their.com business and the importance of it. That's super interesting to hear. So one thing I wanted to double click on a little bit is like, okay, let's say I've done all these analyses and like, I am the CEO or I'm the marketing person and I'm talking to the head of sales or someone else and we're trying to figure out, like, okay, are we going to go at 399 or 499 for our shelf price?

23:59
Daniel Scharff
And obviously, like, we understand what that means about how much we're going to sell it in for. But for me, typically, like, the way I would try to make that decision is there are different margin scenarios, right? And like, okay, do I want to go with the higher price that gives me a better margin out of the gate. I had more to invest in things, but there will be some loss in velocity. Or do I go the lower price point and I can get better velocity, better volume? Maybe I get those cost savings faster. For me, I would model that out. And the way that I would model that out is I would make some volume assumptions. And I would say, like, there are a couple ways that you can do that. One, you could run a digital test online.

24:32
Daniel Scharff
And like, I love doing that, especially for larger businesses where it's a little bit more established and you have budget to actually get kind of blind panel responses to create a digital shelf, put a lot of products on it the way it looks like on an actual shelf. And you just ask people, which would you buy? Or like, would you buy this? And you look at the overall responses and you can almost impute an elasticity. These are things, like sometimes you'll hear them referred to as like a digital conjoint test, something like that. That's one way to do it. An easier way to do it is you talk to your sales team. And your sales team often has a really good intuitive sense about how much things will sell at different price points and what the volume impact would be.

25:08
Daniel Scharff
So I personally would probably start there and just like, try to trust my sales team about, like, what's the velocity of this price point? What's the velocity at this price point? And create two different models where I can actually understand Matt, what Do you think is that like a fair. If we're on the team together and I'm coming to you with that approach, does that make sense or how would you be looking at it?

25:24
Matt Merson
Yeah, one what I would say is, you know, a lot of emerging brands probably don't have sales teams yet. But what I would also add is that, you know, Nielsen Beiser has incredible data that you can gauge the lift you would get off of various promotional spends. So if I'm going to discount a quarter, what would my expected lift be? If I'm going to discount 50 cents, what would my lift be? And then really find through analysis on data where you will get the maximum lift for the lowest amount of promotional spend.

25:56
Daniel Scharff
Yeah, that's a really good point. Because there's a lot in their data set and by the way, we have a partnership with them. If you guys want, you can get three free reports from them including that kind of stuff. We'll put the link in the show notes here. But it's really valuable stuff. And yeah, that can give you especially insight around the promo stuff, which sometimes also helps you understand what if I were priced at these different price points for good, but some kind of directional thing. So if you don't have a salesperson, yourself can try to also take a guess on it. But it's good to understand the baseline velocity per store and yeah, you can get that from those kind of reports so you understand how to build this model, like what a typical velocity is for your product.

26:31
Daniel Scharff
So anyways, that kind of an approach I think is generally fair. People are going to tweak it and do it in different ways. Some people might just, I don't know, really go more the cost plus approach and just try to figure out what the margin is that they want. All of these, like hard to say exactly which is the right one. But again, I'm just trying to give you guys a lot of that consideration. So just to talk about a specific example for a second because that's how I learn. Let's say for example, Matt, that I'm like, okay, I'm going to launch this thing and I'm so interested in Whole Foods. And in this inflation world, this price point doesn't exist really this way anymore. But let's say it's like a shelf price of a dollar that I'm talking about. Like that's how much.

27:07
Daniel Scharff
I don't know what kind of product I'm talking about in this scenario. Maybe a piece of gum. But let's say it's like a Dollar just for the sake of a round number. Then let's say in a great category, maybe the retailer margin is just going to be like, you know, 30% or something, which means the retailer is paying 70 cents for that product and then selling it for a buck. So there's their margin. Walking back further from that, you would have like the distributor's price, you might call that like the invoice price, something like that. How much is the distributor actually buying the product for to sell to the retailer? It might be something like 60 cents. Really depends on what the account is. And again, you can look at the range for all these retailer margins by account.

27:45
Daniel Scharff
And also it's going to change. If it's like frozen, it's going to be higher, that kind of stuff. But then the distributor might be paying 60 cents for it, something like that. So that's how much like you might be looking at going into your pocket. So from something that costs a dollar on shelf, maybe 60 cents is getting paid to you, but there's more. So first major bucket here is like the deductions that we talked about. And so a lot of people might be budgeting, like I don't even 20% of sales for these kind of promotions. And it's going to go to. Okay, if you're not familiar with this, but you know, you've walked into stores and you've seen promotions like, guess what brands in most cases are paying for those things. And in some accounts, these promotions are very frequent.

28:26
Daniel Scharff
Like, I remember walking into a Safeway once and just looking around and seeing nothing but yellow tags and then looking in the data and seeing like, oh, wow, in this one category, 80% of the volume is sold on discount here. So it really good to understand, like if you're the only one not on sale and you're trying to get people to try you for the first time, good luck. So for things like price promotions and free fills, like having a nice deductions bucket. So from that 60 cents we talked about going in your pocket, let's say like ideally maybe only 10 cents. But the point is, for something that was a dollar on shelf, like really at the end of the day, you're going to end up with less than half of that as like your money really net going in your pocket.

29:04
Daniel Scharff
Is that. Matt, what do you think about that generalization? Is it like, fair? Is it worse than that?

29:08
Matt Merson
That is spot on. You got 30% retailer markup, you got your distributor markup to move your box from point A to point B, then below the line you have your trade spend bucket. For mature brands, it's going to be in the 14% range of spend. Most retailers are going to require you to do 16 weeks of promotion, which would be four or four week periods where you discount it by 20 or 50 cents. The thought process is there. Yellow tag, highlight the brand, get more people into your brand. But you also have this marketing budget. You know, if you're coming out with a new product, you either have an incredible point of differentiation or you have such an enormous value on a product that's out there that you're making it cheaper and better for a lower price.

29:52
Matt Merson
And most of those are going to require sampling. And sampling costs money. And that's part of your, you know, marketing spend budget, which can, in an early stage brand can be 25 to 30% of your total revenue. In a mature brand, it should also be around 14%. So you got a 14% trade spend, 14% marketing budget, both below the line. That's 28 points of your revenue in two buckets. And we didn't even touch SG&A. Right.

30:17
Daniel Scharff
Yep. So, hey, if it was easy, everyone would do it. Matt, while we're on this topic, I wonder if you could just share some promo best practices from your many years of doing this. Like, you know, let's say you have that budget and you're just trying to figure out, okay, we know if you work with, let's say Unifi or Kahi, they're going to ask you for those quarterly off invoice things. But like, yeah, what would you recommend to a brand that's growing of like, with that budget, here are the top things that you could do to really support the business and try to grow.

30:43
Matt Merson
That is a great question. And the first watch out. That I would say is when you do a promotion with Kahee and Unfi and let's say you're going to do four weeks at Whole Foods, Kehi and Unfi, and in this case Whole Foods is supported by unfi. They will buy in two weeks ahead of the promotion and allow for two weeks after the promotion their entire loads. So if you have UNFI servicing multiple customers that may not be on promotion and you do it through an off invoice with UNFI, if they order 500 cases, every single case is going to be 10% off invoice. They only may pass 30, 40, 50% of that product onto Whole Foods to get the promotional tag up. The rest of that money really goes into their pocket.

31:27
Matt Merson
So when you think about strategy, I think one of the Things you want to consider is the mechanism, whether it's off invoice, bill back, scan back that you want to use to support that promo so that you're really not getting crushed on your promotional spend. If 100% of what's going through UNFI is going to Whole Foods, great, put it off invoice. But just know that they're going to get four weeks of extra purchasing power. That is not going to benefit the brand or the consumer on the back end.

31:55
Daniel Scharff
And just while we're on this topic, to keep extracting more of your good experience here, do you have favorite mechanisms because you mentioned like build back, you know, scan all that stuff. Like, what is your ideal way to run promos? Use it with those different options.

32:09
Matt Merson
I like to be billed back.

32:10
Daniel Scharff
Can you explain it out a little bit for people?

32:12
Matt Merson
Sure. I have multiple customers. Let's just say I'm being hypothetical here. I have multiple customers that are being serviced by Khe Sprouts Fresh Time Farmers Market. I actually get to CVS through Kahe. You can get to Safeway Albertsons through Kahee in their natural sets. Let's say that I only want to run unless you have every one of those customers in the exact same time frame running your oi. You want to do it through a scan back, which means you're still going to sell Kehe at the full price. And then Sprouts will capture how many units they sold and then bill you back for that plus a fee. And in the long run, that may be more economical for you as a brand than saying you are Kehi. I'm just going to give you 10 or 15% off your entire load for these eight weeks.

32:57
Matt Merson
You pass whatever part of that on to Sprouts. So I get a yellow ticket for four. But if Sprouts is not a significant portion of that overall customer mix, you're going to lose a lot of money. Leave it on the table, which will go right into the distributor's pocket.

33:10
Daniel Scharff
And in that scenario, like you don't already have all the negotiated OIs with a kehi or unifi, which they'll probably ask you for because they like having those. Obviously that's margin, you know, for them in general. But.

33:21
Matt Merson
For sure,.

33:21
Daniel Scharff
You would kind of typically push back and try to minimize then the number of OI weeks or periods, which for an early brand is going to be a discussion with them for sure. Because often like you have your category manager and you're creating plan with them and they're going to ask for stuff and commitments from you to support the business. So, like, how would you recommend people navigate those kinds of discussions?

33:40
Matt Merson
I think it's highly unlikely for an emerging brand to secure distribution without anchor account. If there's brands out there pitching Khe and saying, well, we don't have an end user yet. We haven't sold it into sprouts or Fresh time farmers market, but we want you to distribute it and maybe through the strength of the K team, we'll capture up and down the street business. It's 100% likely that Kahe is going to say, if we do that, then you're going to have to give us 16 weeks of promotional periods that we can then pass on. Plus all these other buckets like, A, customers get their first case free. B, customers get 50% off. C, customers get 25% off. The better way to do it is to get the anchor account, let the anchor account pick up the phone and call the distributors.

34:23
Matt Merson
If I was Sprouts, for example, and I'm bringing in your new emerging brand, great. They will pick up the phone and call Kahee and say, we're bringing in this brand. At that point, you can then sit down and say, maybe I want to do sprouts through a scam back. So Khee is not buying the entire load on discount if it's going other places. So it's just an upfront thinking that you got to go through for KE and Unfi. But, you know, recently a lot of brands have cut back to 12 weeks of promotional spend because it was across a very broad portfolio and they were losing a lot of money. All those promotional dollars weren't being pushed to the shelf. So I would strongly consider think that through before you sign up for promotional weeks with Kahi and Unfi.

35:04
Daniel Scharff
I love that advice, Matt. And I know I hear a lot of things about this, but I don't know why. I don't know if I hadn't really heard it that way or if it didn't sink in that way, but, wow, that's good advice. That really makes a ton of sense. And I think it's true in a lot of ways, like across a lot of things. Like when there's a retailer that is anchor that wants your life is more downhill in a lot of ways. But that's a really interesting way to think about it. I never thought about that way. Thank you. Okay, so a couple other just considerations I want to rip through here. First of all, like, we're talking about this kind of like, nice, easy number to use for Shelf price here.

35:35
Daniel Scharff
But like you kind of need to speak the language with people the way buyers understand it, which means some of them will talk to you and like be happy to engage with you in terms of a per unit cost. Others are only going to talk to you in terms of like case cost. And so it's good to know both of those things just kind of right off the bat. And they're like, you know, obviously your shelf price, but in terms of the like price into market these different pricing tiers that we're talking about.

35:59
Daniel Scharff
And if you're talking to somebody who pulls from Kahe often, they will ask you in a way where they expect you to know how much they pay Kehi for the product, which actually requires some information that you usually will not have because there are different markups that Khe is going to charge to different accounts. And if you're someone like Matt, you probably know what that number is, but most people will not know what that number is. And you could ask them and try to calculate it on the spot or whatever. But more often though, if you actually at least can just tell them, here's what I would be selling it into Kehi for, they can actually then calculate it like, here's what I'm selling it in for. Here's the suggested shelf price.

36:33
Daniel Scharff
They can kind of do the math on that usually to figure it out. Is that fair, Matt?

36:36
Matt Merson
That is fair. You could also get it off the CPG tracker if you don't know.

36:40
Daniel Scharff
Yes. Which is as good of a job as we could do. Although I wouldn't call it like 100% on the money for everything. But yes, we do estimate that. And that as always was really helpful with us for that also. So thank you. Cool. Okay, so another thing I want to talk about here is like there are other variables here on the pricing and other fun little games you're going to get to play to figure things out like pick up versus delivered. And one of the questions we see a lot in the slack is like, hey, should I use Khe freight program? And a lot of these things. The premise of it is like, should I be trying to deliver my product to a distributor or should they be picking it up from me? And there are different ways of doing this.

37:19
Daniel Scharff
But Matt, you'll have much more info than I will here. But typically, like me as a brand, I would have a pickup price and I would have a delivered price. And in an ideal world, like you're going to start thinking about like, oh well, gosh, it's so different though, because if I have to deliver one pallet of something that can be really expensive and oh, wow. Actually, yeah, delivering 10 miles from my warehouse to where the DC is easy, but, oh, if I have to take it across the country, well, that's enormous. And so, like, you can actually spin out into creating a huge matrix where you have a set of pickup prices and a set of delivered prices. And this is how much it is. If it's one pallet, if it's four pallets, it's this amount.

37:58
Daniel Scharff
If it's eight pallets, it's this amount up to like a whole truck where there's a big discount on it. You can do that. And some brands do that. They will just have these pricing tiers with different volume breaks. And it's designed to give people a discount if they're ordering more, which is mainly what you want as a brand. And you can pick up or we can deliver. And I know some people will do delivered pricing that is also based off tiers like regions. Like, if it's here, it costs this much. If it's here is this much. My view on that is it's actually more trouble than it's worth because you end up with just this ridiculous, this array of pricing and your sales team doesn't know what it is. What do you think about all that stuff, Matt? Like, in the real world,.

38:35
Matt Merson
It would be honestly a great podcast episode, the intersection of finance and logistics, you know, but you're absolutely right. There can be zone pricing, there could be bracket pricing. KHE offers some different services. But I would ask you to think about it this way. Let's say you do get an authorization with Whole Foods and you want it to end up on the shelf with one national price. You don't want it to be 5.99 in California, but 3.99 in Atlanta and $799 in New York. You know, typically you want one uniform national price at Whole Foods. If you had to define the kind of company that Kehi is, I mean, Kahe is a logistics expert. They move boxes from point A to point B. So is unfi. They're in the logistics business. They're trucking and warehouses. They don't build brands. They're logistics experts.

39:21
Matt Merson
So KHI and UFI offer a couple different models. But as a young startup brands, my first area of advice would be let the logistics experts handle it. You know, it's highly unlikely that you have the capacity to go out. What's going out of your building is probably all ltl. To start, which means you're going to try to get one or two pallets on a truck, which means you're going to have to go get freight estimates from various companies to see who's more efficient versus calling Cahi and saying, hey, look at my business. Here are the stores I'm going into. Let me know what it would cost. They will do it on a, hey, this is your price to Texas, and this is your price to California, and this is your price to Seattle.

40:01
Matt Merson
And they can make it uniform for you and bill you back the difference. So there's a lot of different routes that can go, but I would leave logistics to the logistical experts.

40:10
Daniel Scharff
I love it. Yeah, you're totally right about, like, intersection of finance, logistics and salespeople. Like, there are things that'll make a lot of sense to a CFO also. And then in reality, it just absolutely hamstring the sales team's ability to go out and just sell things. So it's really good to think about that balance. But thank you for the real world view on how that actually works. Just a couple other things I wanted touch on, but, like, I'm really happy that we've gotten through so much of this. Buyers, I don't underestimate how much they can actually help you with their feedback. So especially as an earlier stage brand, I find that buyers are actually totally game for just giving you feedback on things.

40:48
Daniel Scharff
And you can, like, you know, talking to the buyer for your category and talking about, like, here's what I'm thinking about doing. Here's the size of the pack and what it looks like and the positioning that we have in the market, whether it's premium or whatever. And this is the price point. Like, you can either ask them for feedback or you can also read it on their face if they, like, are nodding along and don't, like, physically throw up at the price point you're throwing at them, like, okay, maybe you're okay. You'll see if they're like, ooh, you'd like. That's something to consider, right? And you can talk to them about it before you even officially set your price. Just to, like, really try to gauge that a little bit.

41:20
Daniel Scharff
If they're in the region that you want to focus on and, you know, you understand what's in their store. Like, they typically are very happy to give you feedback in that way. People like to give their opinion. You know, sometimes I think a lot about if you're a more expensive price point, it may not actually impact people's interest in Trying the product, but it could impact their interest in buying it again. And if you think about it like all of us as consumers, like, okay, yeah, there's that like new fancy product out. I'm curious. I want to try it. Oh boy. It's not going to be a routine product for me. I can't afford that on a daily, weekly, whatever basis depending on how people consume your product when they buy it, if it's habit forming, all of that stuff.

41:59
Daniel Scharff
But I think it's a good thing for you to just understand. And if you're going to ask people their feedback, ask them that also. Like, yeah, would you try it? Okay. Like, could that be part of your routine? Does that make sense in your budget and specifically people who use your kind of product or people who are your target consumer? Because those are the people you care about, not just like, you know, your cousins or you're on. A couple other things before I come back to Matt for any overall wisdom. So just the resources I mentioned, retailer websites are gold for checking pricing and to also understand if they've changed price, which happens a lot slower than you would think.

42:34
Daniel Scharff
Like maybe there's a little more activity during the whole like a high inflation period, especially the tariff stuff had things kind of going a little wacky. But those are great for understanding pricing around the country. You can look at places like Instacart, but sometimes there are markups that you may not understand. Exactly. So really I just like going directly to the retailer site and putting a different zip code. Probably some of the tools like ChatGPT and stuff can actually just go ahead and check that stuff for you. If you build up a nice little instruction input thing there. And the retail tracker, we've said it a couple times here, use it. It's the best tool we've ever delivered. Put a link to that in the show notes as well. But it really is the bible. It's the best of the best out there.

43:13
Daniel Scharff
The last one on changing price that I wanted to cover is like, you can change price. You may have started somewhere and not understood your costs fully or and you just need to increase it. Or maybe your competitors change price and you're thinking it's time for you to change price also you can do it. It's a little bit of process and like, you know, one example is typically there will be a contract that you have with a distributor that actually specifies how much lead time you have to give them when you change price. And because they have the inventory that they're sitting on, that's at one price. And so it might be like a 90 day period that you actually have to give them. And remember, you're also having to coordinate that with all of your retailers as well.

43:47
Daniel Scharff
So you're going to be communicating the price increase directly to your retailers and also to the distributors. And all of those things just have to be done gently. And if you want to see how it can go wrong, just walk into your local Kroger right now and try to find a Red Bull. Probably most people have read about this right now, but as of this recording, Red Bull is not on shelf at any Kroger. And I guess they've reportedly been pulling all of the coolers because of a dispute around what I read. And you know, don't no one sue me over this, but what I read was that Red Bull was taking price, which people do on occasion, and Kroger did not agree to the price increase.

44:23
Daniel Scharff
So I think typically you would just be communicating the price increase and you would have a rationale for why you're doing it and when it's going to happen and all those details about the SKUs that it's going to impact and you would send that over to the buyer, like notification of a price increase. This is what's happening and why. And you would hope that they will say, okay, thank you for letting me know and we'll get the changes implemented in our system and I understand the mechanics of this, but they can also say no. And they like, you know, they're not required to carry your product either. They may negotiate with you. And you know, I think we'd all hope to believe it's because they really want to keep prices low for their consumers.

44:58
Daniel Scharff
But they may also just feel like at that price, I don't feel like this is a viable product in my category. And there are other competitive products that I think will do better. So. So that is a potential reaction. You just have to like understand all these things and try to be doing things that are reasonable, that makes sense for you and your business and will make sense to a buyer. And you're communicating it the right way. And if you're doing it because of the cost of an input, they explain that to them. Most of the buyers that I know are reasonable people and they're empathetic and they will understand, like, look at the cost of my input. This one ingredient is going nuts. I gotta change price. Like, yeah, they'll get that.

45:30
Daniel Scharff
And they might have already actually gotten the same letter from other people in the category. But I don't know, sometimes there are some crazy things in this world. Like, maybe I've told this story before, but, like, at one business that I was at, once upon a time, we tried to increase the price at Costco, and there was a regional buyer. We're like, cool. So we have to increase the price of this to this amount because we're losing a lot of money. And he just said no and, like, really tried to screw with us a bunch. And then he's like, that's too much. How much was it? Like, he didn't really even know how much were talking about. He just had this instinct just to say no to it and has to be less. And there's a really funny guide that you can read.

46:07
Daniel Scharff
It's this, like, old Carrefour manual. Carrefour, like, you know, one of the leading retailers in Europe that is a guide for negotiations for buyers. And it has those kind of things in the manual. Like, whatever they say no. Bring more people to the meeting than they have. Don't sit this way where they are there. Like, make them feel adversarial, all these things. And it almost felt like it was right out of that playbook. But I believe that's actually the exception. And most of them are like, they're your partners for the long run and they want to work with you and they. They're not trying to put you out of business, especially if they understand your situation. Okay, Matt, for in your experience, anything around price increases, I'm sure you've had to do this in your day. Like, when is it usually more straightforward?

46:44
Daniel Scharff
Is it ever contentious? How do you smooth things over?

46:46
Matt Merson
Well, the first thing I would say is that, of course the buyer's first line of defense is going to be no. Right? I'm taking a price increase. No, this is my price. Even without a price increase, this is my price for the product. Too high. Right? That's just their first line of defense. That's what they're trained or throwing out to do their buyers. They want, you know, lowest cost is price. I am very interested to see and got to follow very closely this Red Bull Kroger dust up. Lots of people take price to your point, but Kroger's new CEO is really focused on value. And they're down. Their stock price is down about 8%. You know, they're primarily concerned about Walmart is their biggest competitor. If you ask Kroger, who they track against, it's Kroger tracks against Walmart.

47:26
Matt Merson
So I understand where they're taking a stand on Value. But the flip side of it is if I'm an I don't drink random energy drinks. You know, I don't flip flop Red Bull for Celsius or Monster or C4. If I'm a Red Bull drinker. And if I can't get it at Kroger, I am going to go somewhere else. They've done an amazing job over the last 30 years building a brand so these two forces, opposite ends of the magnet against each other. It'll be very interesting to see how it plays out. Unfortunately, it hit an impasse and it's playing out in the media now. Now. But you know, we'll see.

47:59
Daniel Scharff
It's kind of funny to think about, like if you're not an energy drinker, to understand the loyalty that people have to these drinks. It's funny because like, you know, you could think about it almost like Coke and Pepsi where I think probably most of us, if you order like all of a Diet Coke and they're like, we just have Pepsi here at this restaurant, like, yeah, that's fine. Usually like, I feel like usually we say okay to that. But if you're a Coca Cola drinker and you go to the store, you're buying Coca Cola. And if they don't have it, you're probably like much less likely to buy a case of Pepsi effect because that is who you are.

48:26
Daniel Scharff
Same with like my first job ever was at a drugstore and people come in and they buy their pack of cigarettes back in the day when drugstores made a lot of money off selling the cigarettes. And that's just who they are. They're buying Paul Malls, they're buying Marlboro Lights, whatever. They're not buying something else just because the store doesn't have that. That is what a lot of us would call like a trip driver, a destination driver. Right. Of like that will actually take them somewhere else if they can't get it there. So most brands at the early stage are not at that point. But it is good just to understand a lot of these dynamics and also again, just to like really understand the pricing strategies of these different chains.

49:01
Daniel Scharff
And like MC Kroger is like a magical beast in a lot of ways where they get like really good if you're a consumer, like maybe not as good as your brand, but like really low pricing. But then they also have a lot of promos on top. Whereas, you know, Walmart, obviously much more of the everyday low price, although they have the rollbacks on top of that whereas if you look at some of the Safeway chains out there, they may have like a really high base price, but then 80% of it is sold on sale. And so it looks like a really good deal to consumers because they see like 499, but it's on sale for 399. That's a big deal. But actually the 399 is still more because at Target it would have been 324. So good for consumers to understand all that.

49:35
Daniel Scharff
Good for you as a brand to understand all of that. And I think if nothing else, I hope this has inspired all of you to like do your research and have all these considerations in mind before you set that price. It's not going to be perfect. Not all of us can be Matt Merson, but we can definitely do our best and try to get as close as possible. So Matt, just wrap up here. Any other like last words of advice for brands as they start on this pricing journey or things that you want them to have in mind just from overall strategic mindset as they are, you know, setting sail and looking at growing their brands across these different channels.

50:09
Matt Merson
Couple things just to summarize here. Know where your product is going to sell best or you know who your target consumer is. Most importantly, know where they shop and really have a broad view if it's product that's right for all channels. Have a broad view that someday you would be in all those channels. Do your homework on the pricing and also look long term. You know, if you're not going to be in Costco today, but someday you will. Missteps in pricing in these first couple years will really cause you a lot of pain in mass and club down the road. So it's important to price slope everything. But also equally important is your margins and a path to really healthy margins. You know, brands are not going to survive on sub 50 margins. So if you're not at 50 today, don't worry about it.

50:52
Matt Merson
That's what investment is for. And the great conferences that you hold and bringing brands together with investors, but you gotta be able to get to a 50 down the road and you gotta be able to show the investor like I have a very clear path to 50. 10,000 Units, 100,000 units, million units, 5 million units. I'm at 50. No big deal.

51:10
Daniel Scharff
I love it. Very wise words. Matt. Thank you so much. It's always such a treat to have you here on the podcast for there's no way to even like, I guess quantify the benefit of all the experience that you have actually doing this on the stream. I just, I love talking to people who have such deep especially sales experience because it is just such the real deal. Like this is how it actually works in this industry of ours that we all love so much. So thank you so much for all of this incredible advice. I hope this was helpful for everybody. I know like we'll probably have to do follow on episodes where we actually go into Costco pricing and then like price pack architecture for when you launch additional SKUs.

51:49
Daniel Scharff
How much of a discount should you have when you have something looking at per ounce. But hopefully this was a really good primer for everybody and I would love to hear everybody's feedback on this for sure. Won't be the last time that we talk about it. So thank you everybody. Thank you. Matt, you are the man. I appreciate it.

52:04
Matt Merson
Great to see you. Thanks for having me.

52:08
Daniel Scharff
Well, my friends, we've now arrived together at the end of another episode of the Startup CPG podcast. The top globally ranked podcast in cpg. As you may know, we're not just a podcast. We're a community of brands and experts and you should join. You can sign up@startupcpg.com you'll then get an invite to our online Slack community. You're going to hear about amazing events near you, all of our special opportunities to get you in front of buyers, investors, brands and more. It's a free community. So what are you waiting for? I will see you there or on our next episode. Bye Bye.