Navigating Natural Friday Edition
If you are having trouble reading this email, read the online version | | From frosting to seeds: A CPG founder tries again Entrepreneur Jessica Hamel walked away from the CPG grind nearly a decade ago after her brand FROST'D shuttered. Now she's back—smarter, scrappier and powered by seeds. Read more about her CPG journey. | | | Douglas Brown, Senior Retail Reporter |
| | It wasn't supposed to happen again: devoting hours in kitchens to manufacturing; puzzling over profit margins; navigating licensing mazes; hunting down packaging; branding; social media; trade shows and more.
Jessica Hamel had said goodbye to that blizzard of headaches and challenges nearly a decade ago, after folding her shelf-stable vegan frosting brand, FROST'D. The brand launched in March of 2015, and shuttered 30 months later.
FROST'D enjoyed some success along the way, with distribution at retailers including Whole Foods Market, Erewhon and Uncommon Goods. But over time, Hamel's passion fizzled. As an endurance athlete in Boulder, Colorado, icing never fully resonated—it doesn't exactly scream ultrarunner. And managing a CPG startup, too, tested her formidable grit.
"To this day, the smell of chocolate is rough," she says. "When you are putting so much time and effort into building a company, you want it to come from the heart. And icing wasn't coming from the heart."
Now, however, she's welcoming the return of many of those same steep hurdles—and potential frustrations. In February, Hamel launched PlantChi, a blend of seeds designed to empower consumers to add their own healthy sources of protein, fiber and nutrients to everything from salads to yogurt to fruit, pasta and more.
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| | | About a year ago, a doctor advised Hamel to sprinkle hemp seeds onto foods she already was eating, such as salads and yogurt, to boost her protein. As a vegetarian and a jock, chasing protein sometimes verged on all-consuming. She followed doctor's orders and, soon after, began to have visions of CPG success.
Aiming for a broader nutrition profile, she created a blend of hemp, flax and chia. After toying with that for a spell, she started adding herbs and spices, to craft different flavors.
Friends received samples. They oohed. Her endurance runner pals inhaled them. A busy California mom sprinkled Hamel's little samples of seeds on her daily kale salads—and became an early convert. A rugged horse rancher—far from a superfood enthusiast—championed them: his doctor ordered him to add seeds to his diet. She began to believe the product had legs beyond wellness-obsessed Boulder.
For this second spin on the CPG merry-go-round, Hamel leveraged the many tough lessons she learned building FROST'D to get PlantChi off the ground rapidly.
"With FROST'D, I had no idea what I was doing," she says. "This time, I knew what licenses I needed, how to approach manufacturing and what my distribution strategy was even before starting. Now I know you always have to make room for mistakes or delays, just to make room for things to go wrong because they will, and you have to learn how to pivot quickly."
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