Things Have Changed
Things Have Changed
Taste the Revolution: The Wild Foods' Impactful Journey with Patrick Hardy
There is an alarming trend taking place in South America : the steady rise in obesity rates. Despite all the ads and talk about eating healthy, the truth is that getting access to nutritious foods is still a struggle.
In response to this growing health crisis, The Wild Foods has emerged as a game-changer. Our guest today is Patrick Hardy, the Chief Operating Officer of Wild Foods, is at the forefront of this revolution. Hailing from Chile, WildFoods is a consumer packaged goods company committed to disrupting the entire food and beverage industry by producing healthy and sustainable food products.
Patrick takes us through Wild Foods' remarkable journey, sharing the CPG company's strategies that include:
- Focus not just on Healthy products but one that is easily accessible, delicious, and appealing to consumers
- Leveraging unique digital marketing and bold ad campaigns, to set itself apart in the competitive food industry
- Growth to new markets like Mexico by adapting to local tastes and regulations.
Join us on the Things Have Changed Podcast to hear from Patrick Hardy and find out how Wild Foods is making healthy eating fun and doable, turning things around in a world full of processed food, and setting new standards for what's on our plates.
Helpful links:
- Patrick Hardy, COO The Wild Foods
- The Wild Foods Website
- US website — https://thewildprotein.com/
- Supermarkets pushing junk food
- Obesity in South America
About Wild Foods:
Wild Foods is a healthy food company focused on developing tech-enabled products with the aim of disrupting the Food & Beverages (F&B) industry in Latin America. They have developed a portfolio of +200 SKUs that has allowed them to capture +30% of the market share in Chile in the bars category, on-top of multinational incumbents such as Kellogs, Pepsico, Nutresa, among others. They have a business model based on innovation in product development, digital brand building, digital marketing, technology and talent acquisition. Wild Foods has built a strong, profitable, high-growth business that has experienced 2-3x yoy growth for the past five years with consistently positive EBITDA. Wild Foods continues with its growth and international expansion plans with presence in Chile, Mexico, USA, Colombia and Peru.
Imagine this familiar scene. You're wandering through the supermarket. Alice bombarded by an overwhelming array of choices. From whack-a-mole. To soda. To chips, making the right choice seems like a difficult task. This trend has played a pivotal role in an alarming issue facing the America's today. The steady rise in obesity rates. Despite the push for healthier diets access to nutritious foods, still lags behind the availability of less healthy options. But in response to this growing health crisis. Wild foods emerges as a game-changer.
Patrick Hardy:Right now in Teale, we're probably one of the hottest food and beverages startups in, in the country every single year since our founding triple digit growth year in year with positive ebitda, which makes us super proud.
Jed Tabernero:Our guest today, Patrick Hardy. The chief operating officer of wild foods is at the forefront of this revolution.
Patrick Hardy:we're not only going to produce protein bars, we're also going to make sure. That they're incredibly healthy.
Jed Tabernero:Hailing from Chile. The land of the Patagonia. Wild foods is a consumer packaged goods company, committed to disrupting the entire food and beverage industry. We're basically a hyper grossing, fast growing nutrition company from Latin America, specifically from Chile. With a massive portfolio of over 200 skews and a significant presence in key markets, wild foods is not just a company. It's a movement. Reshaping the way we eat and think about food.
Patrick Hardy:If you look at our ads online, they're just completely different. You'll see our co founder, like our founder, Piet Paolo with a chainsaw ripping through one of the one of the labels
Jed Tabernero:join us on things have changed podcast. As we unraveled Patrick's journey will the wild foods. And the future of healthy eating in a world, dominated by processed foods.
Shikher Bhandary:Navigating the food and beverage retail industry isn't easy, right? So much competition. Just go to supermarkets. Every aisle has like a hundred products. You don't know which is the right guacamole to like pick. Like you just don't know which soda, which. Chips, nothing. Changes are happening all the time, especially with the internet and the rise of the online shop or e commerce D2C brands are just mushrooming everywhere. But in all of this, there is a really interesting trend, kind of concerning. Now Jed and I were reading some material from the UN actually. In supermarkets, there seems to be a trend of promoting junk food more than they do healthy food or healthy alternatives. And so what's this caused is, this is caused It being a lot easier for, um, the everyday consumer to pick up the more, the less healthy version of the food that they can get many of us, even our friend Jed O'Heir can vouch for the fact that junk foods are quite addictive. I mentioned this on the podcast many times, we used to, we used to be roommates together in Phoenix and literally every single day I used to walk in at this, there was only one constant thing, curing Jed. Crunch on chips every single day, every single hour of the day. Right. Cause he used to work from home. He used to be working loud music, but I could still hear the crunching. So, If I was Superman, my kryptonite would be chips. yeah, so we have all seen this need for better transparency. Within the ingredients that we consume in the foods that we like, right? There's a big push for like healthy sustainable diets and this is where the wild foods comes in and our guest today Patrick Hardy Patrick is the chief operating officer of the wild foods a consumer packaged goods company cpg company hailing And this is where we love what we do, hailing from Chile. The company hails from Chile, growing incredibly. And one that stands at, the forefront of producing healthy and sustainable food products, disrupting the whole food and beverage industry in Chile and now in other parts of Latin America. So Patrick, it's an absolute delight to have you on THC.
Patrick Hardy:Thanks for having me here. And I think that was a great introduction. I couldn't agree more with what you mentioned on, on the abundance of just junk food on supermarket aisles. And I think that is, that is the biggest call of action at the wild foods, costing, an impact in the food and beverages industry and changing what aisles actually look like. Um, so sure. I mean, as a, as a quick intro, I know there's tons of listeners that probably don't know about the wild foods and.
Jed Tabernero:We're basically a hyper grossing, fast growing nutrition company from Latin America, specifically from Chile.
Patrick Hardy:And we're dedicated to developing and marketing innovative, healthy, and tasty products. Specifically for consumers that are concerned, consumers that are related to the health and wellness space. And in a time frame of around five years, since the company was formally founded. We've built a massive portfolio. We've got over 200 SKUs, um, and also a regional footprint. We're present in Chile. Which is our first market where we've reached over 35 percent market share in a cereal bar category. We're now also present in Mexico, which is a local operation where we, all of our operation there is end to end from manufacturing all the way to distribution. We're also present in Peru, in the U. S. Um, and very shortly we're gonna be in Columbia as well. Right now in Teale, we're probably one of the hottest food and beverages startup startups in, in, in the country every single year since our founding triple digit growth year in year with positive ebitda, which makes us super proud.
Jed Tabernero:Awesome. Thanks for that intro, Patrick. I'm super excited to have you on the show. We haven't had a lot of founders from Latin America, so we're always excited to get some from this region. Um, rewinding a little bit to the problem and what we talked about in the intro, it's not just junk foods. Generally, I think I was looking at Obesity rates in generally America, and I'm shocked to see since 1999, obesity rates have been growing across our regions, both our regions, Latin America and North America. Um, and it's shocking for me to think that. After all of like the health conscious ads, all of these, the push for whole foods, um, there's still this growing obesity rates. It seems like it's a problem that needs to be solved from multiple arenas. Like after we check, we're just mentioning it. We read the UN report and I thought, Oh, this, this looks like an old page. This report was in January of 2023. Like it's that fresh access to healthy foods just isn't at the same level as junk foods. And so I guess just rewinding back, could you tell us a little bit about the driving force of, starting something like this in Chile? Yeah, that's a huge issue of BC rates and globally, but specifically they tend to be worse in Latin America. After the us, Latin America is probably the region of the world that has. Some of the worst rates and actually Mexico and Tita tend to lead those ranks. So I don't think it's a coincidence that this company started in Tita and then our second kind of largest market where we're expanding is actually Mexico right now because. There are markets where we can have a massive impact, and I think one of the biggest issues right now is, on one side, there's, health and wellness awareness, seven years ago, all the trends that you see in Europe, in the States, in terms of protein rich foods, clean label products, low carbs, these trends weren't, really arriving to Latin America until just recently, okay, and then second, even if people are aware, there just wasn't the access. To kind of healthy products, I think that's where kind of, the founders of the, of the wild foods started to click, um, and it was, it was pretty much back in 2015, where the founder, who's Paolo Colanello he was coming back from a trip in the States and. Just to give you a bit of context, Pierpaolo is a outdoor sports adrenaline junkie, he does massive big wave surfing, rock climbing, parachute jumping, and he was coming back from a trip from the States and he brought all this bunch of different protein and energy bars. And he was just so impressed by the amount of breads and, and how many options there were available there. And he would come back to Chile and he would come back to Chile. And he would be like, I just can't find any good, protein or energy bars here. And whenever I am able to find them, they're at a three, 4 price per bar, which is just a bit ridiculous. And he felt it was super unfair. People in Latin America should be able to access to healthy food at a, at a decent price. And he decided to do something about it. And at the time he had a startup, like an outdoor clothing startup called White Llama. And he decided to launch a specific product line, which is going to be an energy bar. That's where he brought in co founder Felipe Hurtado, currently our country manager in Mexico. And they started developing our first bar. Our first bar was called Weigh Bar. It was Inspired by Clif Bar, a fantastic bar from the States, and they tried to do something very similar for the Latin American market. They were two years developing and putting it out there in the market. And it was kind of like one flop after, after another, the product was just not rotating. There was something wrong about it. And we continue to have it in our portfolio because we love it, but it was just not getting anywhere. So after two years of continuous trial and error, they decided, what. We need to kind of, at that time, the clothing business was kind of subsidizing the business of the bar. And they said, this is kind of enough. We need to kind of spin them off. And they did a very small, um, capital raise. For the wild foods separate the bar business from the clothing business. And that's when they brought in the third co founder, which is Javier Castro, our current CEO. Um, and of course, just like the commercializing of the bar hadn't gone well, the fundraising didn't go well either. They had to kind of recur to a crowdfunding platform from your Chile and they were only able to raise 100, 000. And that was pretty much just the amount of money they needed to be able to develop a new bar from scratch. Um, and kind of like buy all the, like buy all the packaging and design the packaging and be able to manufacture the first purchase order they got for this new bar. From the first supermarket here in Chile, and this new bar was a protein bar instead of an energy bar and it's currently called wild protein, which is the most like the top selling bar in Chile right now, and that this was, around 2017 2018. And from then on, it was just a huge success that bar actually hit the market. It was right. It was exactly what the market needed, what the consumers here were yearning for. Um, and ever since it was been just kind of like a massive growth two to three year, two to three X growth year on year. Um, and we've been able to position this bar. We've expanded into eight different flavors. Positioned in the market currently have 35 percent market share in the cereal bar industry. And that's like including all the low cost regular cereal bars, not just protein bars in the protein segment. We've got around 70 to 80 percent market share. And it's been just massive success. Here in Chile for the past five years, and then just early this year, we decided we're going to take the success, rebuild the story somewhere else. And we said, Mexico, that's the place where we're going to do it. But I think it's, it's a fantastic story of actually kind of, failing for two years in a row. And then kind of finally understanding what was, what was it that the market was looking for. And, and there's a couple of like interesting parts of the story there, like during these two years of failures, Felipe and Pierre kept on looking at different trends in the market and they started looking into different type of like food and beverages that were being imported into Chile. And I started seeing. maSsive amount of protein supplements being imported into Chile. And that was a bit of a precursor to say, there is a demand. There is a demand for protein rich products that is finally starting to arrive to this part of the world. And then from an awareness perspective, especially from a health awareness perspective. In 2015, Chile was the first country in the world that actually launched the front of packaging label law so you've got your packages and big stop signs saying, this product is very high in sugars or very high in calories or very high in sodium. So people, and that law came into effect in 2017. And as a mandate, we said,
Patrick Hardy:we're not only going to produce protein bars, we're also going to make sure. That they're incredibly healthy.
Jed Tabernero:So we define a set of guiding principles. We said, we're never going to work with any added sugars. We're never going to work with any added oils. We're not going to work with any added fats. We're not going to work with any artificial colorants. And our products are always going to be front of package label free. And I think that kind of set us apart also from a nutrition perspective. So we were able to develop, the first protein parts. Locally here in Chile, because we went with local manufacturing and we said, we're only going to have an impact on, on people's nutrition. If you're able to do this, and build this product and make it accessible, we're going to beat a dollar, a dollar 50 per bar. That was just
Shikher Bhandary:Wow.
Patrick Hardy:And that changed the entire dynamics.
Shikher Bhandary:Yeah. You had mentioned two big inflection points. The one probably more consumers from Chile being able to now know what's out there, right? Considering they are importing a lot of, they, they want access to more protein. So they are probably more in tune with what goes into their body. Now you have the regulation in 2017 where now consumers are. even more aware of what's in their packaging, right? No more high, high fructose corn syrup, a lot more natural stuff, um, so that was a big one. And then the second one, I think we had mentioned it earlier in the call, healthy food is so expensive in the U. S. and it probably is across the world just because it's not like mass manufactured, right? The gap in the market is consumers needing something at the price point that they consume at.
Jed Tabernero:The first time I heard. Of a sugar tax, I think was in Chile also, and not necessarily the tax, there was some kind of ban in schools for sugary drinks or something like that, which was adopted in the UK. That's how I heard about it. Um, kind of a big effect on how the population thought about. Um, health awareness, but regulators are going out there saying, Hey, listen, these are the new rules that you need to abide by. Clearly everybody was aware that there was a problem. How did your brand fit into that problem? What were those initial channels?
Patrick Hardy:So it was back in 2018, and the initial channels were actually supermarkets. We're selling a little bit online, selling a little bit on, no, quite a bit, actually, on, on specialty stores, convenience stores, but it was actually supermarkets that were able to kind of Give us the volume that we needed to continue to scale the operation. We operate a hundred percent asset light. All of our production is done through co packers. One of the first challenges was actually getting people to try out the products. We did massive amount of sampling. All the co founders were, regularly in the supermarket speaking with the consumers and getting them to understand that they needed to, prioritize having products with least amount of these labels as possible. Getting them to try out these new products and at the same time doing, you Differentiated marketing campaigns through our digital channels. And I think that's, that's another element that really set us apart from a traditional CBG companies. I believe that traditional CBG companies don't do digital marketing all that well. They have a huge capability gap. They're very strong in distribution. There's like no doubt about that, but actually getting to the consumer through digital channels is not their greatest strengths. And we use that on our favor, we had built already a tons of, of digital marketing capabilities. While Lama, which is a retail and apparel company focused on sustainability and that had a massive digital channel. And we said, well, we've got this capability. Can we start using it for selling foods as well? That actually started going very, very well. And we said, okay, what can we do to actually do marketing different? And there's a couple of interesting things. First of all, our content is completely disruptive. Traditional CPG food and beverages ads are going to be very kind of family based, family having a nice picnic, um, in the field and everybody's happy, it's like a whole different direction. If you look at our ads online, they're just completely different. You'll see our co founder, like our founder, Piet Paolo with a chainsaw ripping through one of the one of the labels, the three co founders getting, buckets of. Greases or oils on their heads with tons of different, like with all the ingredients that we will just never use. Um, because we very quickly realized that our consumer, who's your consumer? It's not persons that are going to like a nice picnic on the field. It's actually people that are between 20 to like 40, 45 years old. Um, and they're consuming digital media all the time. And if you think about what, like the stop scrawlers, what's going to stop you, it's not going to be a family or doing a picnic. It's going to be something completely disrupted. That's going to catch your attention. And so we said, that's what, that's what we're going to market. That's the way we're going to start doing all of our content creation and all of the content creation is done, in house because of course. We're a very young startup and we couldn't afford any kind of very cool marketing agency or anything like that. And we started building all these capabilities in house and then from a packaging perspective, I mean, our packages were completely different from anything else in the market. You'll find the word protein there in the top of the, of the, of the package, very large. You can see it from probably like 10 feet away. You know exactly what you're buying. Um, it calls your attention. What are you going to consume? I'm going to consume protein and you know, that you're going to be consuming a wild, a wild protein bar and we took over the category. Um, and then from, from actually kind of from a performance perspective, we built a fantastic team of, right now it's around 30 people that are just doing performance marketing all the time, optimizing the funnel. So, from, from Google and we do this, nonstop all day long. And we were actually able to reach, massive amount of people was just a very little amount of money because digital marketing is just. So accessible for new companies. And I think that also played in our favor. And probably 20 years ago, the wild foods wouldn't have been able to be as successful as we are right now because we wouldn't have had, you know, access to massive amount of digital marketing. Digital marketing actually leveled the playing ground for small startups to be able to compete with the incumbents, David and Goliath story. And to give you a couple of statistics, just last year alone, 2022, we reached 10 million people in Chile. So that's one in every two Chileans saw a Wildfoods ad at least once a week. And in nine months this year, we've been able to reach 25 million people in Mexico. So understanding that from day one. Actually helps you so much to be able to get your brand out there. No, I, I, I traveled to Mexico every month to, to like, see how the operations go in and growing. And every time I meet somebody outside the organization, they're like, Oh my God, you're the guys from the wild foods. I continue to see your ads on Instagram. And, having that amount of reach. With, we're a bootstrapped company. It was, limited capital is something that just, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, you would have never been able to do that in Latin America.
Shikher Bhandary:of the internet. You mentioned something so interesting. Old David versus Goliath story, right? All of us know Jed is, was raised in the Philippines. I was raised in India. The big brands in your supermarket, wherever you go, are the Kelloggs, the Coca Cola's, the Unilever's.
Jed Tabernero:Not local.
Shikher Bhandary:Multinational 40, companies, right? So it is so hard going up against them, but you're seeing this trend where, and this was the big unlock over the last 10, 15 years, where you have these CPG companies where they're focusing exact product. And niche that they are marketing to two big factors is like product and brand. And when you nail that, it's just a home run.
Patrick Hardy:If you think about like, there's also probably a piece around innovation capabilities, and I think young startups are able to be extremely innovative on their, in their product development and in their brand building capabilities. And I think large. Multinational companies, just because of the way that they're set up. Sometimes it takes them a bit longer to get the right products, into the market. Their time to market tends to be a bit of a little bit longer sometimes. So what they end up doing, and we've seen quite a bit of this, especially in the health and wellness space. It's actually acquiring innovation. Um, and there's quite, there's quite a lot of fantastic examples of, large companies acquiring innovative and fast growing, smaller companies. You had RX with Kellogg's, you have Cliff Bar with Mondelez, um, Nestle recently acquired Pura Vida, which is a health and wellness company from Brazil. It maybe plays out a bit in their strategy, because to be able to innovate well, I think having a strong kind of. Digital marketing or D to C channel allows you to have very kind of quick and instant feedback loops from your consumer. Yeah, I think something that in our case, we've built a, a followership base of over 400, 000 people between Chile and Mexico and With that, we're able to kind of very quickly try out different products, uh, that we see that, that are being, manufactured in different parts of the world, in the world. Bring them to Chile, launch them very quickly on our, on our e-commerce and, day 30, day 60, day 90, we understand, what to and a consumer's reaction to their product. We see there's kind of a good opportunity with that product or not. If there isn't, we, we ditch the product. If there is.
Shikher Bhandary:Just fast iteration.
Patrick Hardy:Exactly. We started them looking for local manufacturing and put it into the markets. And I think having that information is always going to give you a little bit of an edge versus the, the large companies that just don't do digital marketing all that well.
Jed Tabernero:That's really rapid user testing. You're like learning a ton from the users when you're doing this for determining what product is successful within a certain area, right? You mentioned, look, take a bunch of products. You put it out there. You see what works. What is, what is what works like sales that would. Triple, quadruple from the other products that you have, that you laid out in this specific area. What's, what are those things that you're thinking about as, as like moving to the next stage of let's bring this to the bigger supermarkets.
Patrick Hardy:So any sort of product we say, okay, what are we going to benchmark this product? And we say, okay, well, let's, we already have a success case with X, Y, or Z. And, in the first 30 days, 69, it sold this amount. This is a way that. The sales curve kind of behaved, we have reviews, we have NPS and we say, okay, perfect. Let's see how it behaved. And if it's, equal or better than that benchmark, we'll start saying, okay, we actually feel this product will probably have pretty good reception in the, in the massive channels, the supermarkets. And then we kind of build, a small group of products that's performed were very well online and we'll go to the supermarkets and say, guys, these are kind of products that are kind of killing it on our D2C. What's the space and super like on your aisles for this, where could we actually put this? And I think after having such a great kind of success case was while protein was a supermarkets where we actually have the Nielsen number one and Nielsen number two in the category. We built so much credibility with the supermarkets that usually company of, our size. Would have taken, 10 years to build. We were able to do that in three, four years. And now they're actually always like donking on our doors and saying, what's a new innovation you're going to bring to us? And we're like, okay, let's just,
Jed Tabernero:It's a good problem to have, man. It's a good problem to have.
Patrick Hardy:I know it is, it is be true and stick to that, to that discipline because you can very quickly. Get tempted and start launching products in the supermarket, from day one without that information. And sometimes it will be a success, but sometimes they won't. And if they're not, you can misuse a whole lot of working capital, which is always such a precious resource. Company has bootstrapped from the start.
Jed Tabernero:By doing tons of this customer research that you're doing, you're burning off a lot of capital. But I think the one differential that you have is this strong brand. That's the thing, right? You said, look, we have credibility with the rest of these folks that we do business with. And so they believe that whatever product you give to them will sell. And so I think those two things, it allowed that brand allows you to be able to do this tons of, um, market research, which is great, honestly,
Shikher Bhandary:Bigger companies, larger companies, supermarkets see consumer trends on a timeframe, which is a lot longer than what you see within your company. You figure what. Is working and then go to the big supermarkets and say, Hey, this is working, you have to partner with us. And they are like, Oh, wow, this is a great source of knowledge for us. And now they want to keep onboarding more products of yours, which is incredible. So how did that, um. sUpermarkets are hard to like break into because it's such a, you need access into these, these shells, shells cost so much based on whether you're direct eye level or lower and things like that, right? So how did those relationships build with. The supermarkets themselves. I, I read some articles where you're expanding to the Walmarts and other big, massive chains. So would love to hear that side of things.
Patrick Hardy:yeah, sure. I mean, we're, we're already in Walmart here in Chile, past two years. And I think, yes, supermarkets is always a challenge getting in there. I think our team did a fantastic job in getting, in being able to get in, get in the aisles from the start and doing that directly, a lot of companies, our CPG companies, especially startups will tend to work with a distributor or, an agent broker in the States. And that's also very typical because it tends to erode your profit margin. And. Because you need to give away part of your margin. And if you're doing that on both sides of the, of the value chain, because we're also co packing, we work with co packers. Suddenly your margins start to kind of get very squeezed and it becomes very difficult to be able to kind of finance the growth of the company. I think doing it direct was a fantastic, fantastic move by the founding team, at the start. Um, in terms of the relationships, I mean, it is a very easy easy and difficult at the same time market to, to penetrate because. First of all, there's only four big, supermarket chains here in Chile. And the two biggest are, Walmart on one side and St. Cosud on the other, they tend to dominate the market. And I think we were quite lucky at the time that the entire, you know, the, the local regulator was pushing. For greater health and wellness awareness, Cinco suit also developed a huge space in their supermarket dedicated to, to, health and wellness predated brands. They needed to be SMEs, small midsize enterprises, and then also. Ideally local and we kind of fit, all of those three check marks very well. So that gave us, a bit of an edge on actually being able to, enter the supermarkets. And then when you compliment that with fantastic brand building on your online channels. The product started seeing, massive level of rotation. And then of course you need to have a fantastic product. We have a very good product. We're very proud of our product. Um, and I think the combination of those three things helped us to get the product rotating very, very quickly. And once a product starts, seeing, very high velocities, um, it's, it's same, supermarket that starts giving you more and more facing on the aisle. Um, because for them, it's just, it's, it's, it's an equation of, what's the contribution margin that your product is leaving, for the supermarket. Times how quickly does it rotate, which is your velocity? Um, and when when that equation is good, they'll be able to kind of they'll be incentivized to give you that additional space. And I think in our case that worked very well.
Jed Tabernero:in this kind of Latin American market, I'm curious to how you're tweaking. The product in the different countries that you're entering. For example, like you mentioned Mexico a lot on this call already. Like what are the types of things that you pay attention to when you break into a market, you have. a pretty strong brand and pretty strong presence. You care about sustainability. You care that it's built naturally. Um, you care about health, right? Like when you go into a country like Mexico, or let's say in the future, we're going to go far up north and, and hit America as well. What are these little tweaks that you're finding that you have to make to the products?
Patrick Hardy:That's a great question. I think we're kind of learning it on the way. We kind of launched ourselves into Mexico. And when we decided Mexico, it was actually quite an interesting process. We said, Okay, First of all, Mexico is just massive market compared to Chile. The cereal bar category is around four to five times bigger than the one here in Chile. Culturally wise, it's actually quite similar. Even though we're probably two countries that are furthest apart in Latin America, we're actually quite similar from, from, from a taste perspective, from a communications perspective. Um, as a matter of fact, Mexico tends to be The largest market for Chilean startups, as a second market, where they go after they start a company in Chile, it's just fantastic. It's just when, whenever I'm there, there's just tons amount of different founders are living there. Certainly Mexico started the front of packaging law around four years, four or five years after Chile. So we kind of realized that there's this huge market out there. It's kind of untapped right now. And when we look at the, like when we look at the Chilean market, around 35 percent of the cereal bar category is composed by protein bars. When we look at Mexico, we're talking about a category that's about. 400 to 500 million a year, and around 2 percent is protein bars. So it's an untapped market. It's our responsibility to get in there quickly, before anybody else does, and develop the category ourselves. That was what made us successful here in Chile. When we started here... There weren't any coding bars in the supermarkets. They were all in specialty stores in Mexico. It's, it's the same story, but we're starting to see, we're starting to see in a specialty store, they're starting to come around, starting to see, quest bars around and other bars. And I think we've, we've made the right decision in getting into that market, early. And, and be the one, be the brand that's going to develop this, the, the segment. Um, and then from a product perspective, we have to be quite, picky on which products we're going to take to the market there. While protein, which is our biggest brand is of course a flagship product is, the one we, we chose to enter with. But we needed to understand the local regulation, especially on what puts, a label in your product or not. And based on that understanding, if we needed to tweak our products, change the recipes a bit. So that was one thing we did. Second thing we had to do is, because we do local manufacturing, we had to start sourcing ingredients. Either from the same place we source the ingredients from here, Chile, or finding local distributors that would, provide an ingredient that was just as good as the ones that we're using in the bars here in Chile. So we had to actually have a product development, fly over to Mexico quite a few times and do quite a bit of industrial trials of the, of the manufacturing of the bars to, to make sure that it's just as good from a nutritional perspective, as well as from a tastiness perspective. Always remember you, you can have the healthiest product, the most accessible and pricing product, but if it's not tasty, people are not going to consume it and, and, and the impact you're going to have on society is zero. So you need to have that, that triangle needs to work perfect.
Jed Tabernero:We talked to you about a lot of our listeners being, in very different industries. Shaker works for Microsoft. I work, I work for Amazon and one of our biggest pain points as a business is Whole Foods. Um, it's just a very difficult industry to be in. We can afford. To, to be in this type of industry where everything's super, super tiny margins, everything's healthy, but tiny margins for Whole Foods, right? Um, wanted to understand what you're looking for in external partners. You're doing a ton of expansions around the globe. And, for our listeners benefit would love to understand what you're looking for, for external partners, um, brands that you want to partner with, et cetera.
Patrick Hardy:Yeah, sure. I mean, our, our soul bars, which is, part of wild soul, our clean label brand, we had them in all domestic LATAM airlines flights. Here in Chile, which is, they're the predominant air carrier here in Chile and people were trying them out, and it was fantastic. It got our brand out there and people were actually starting, getting much more conscious into kind of healthy food and nutrition, because that's a really healthy brand brand and bar. But after a while, once, we kind of already built our brand out there. We already had tons of rotation, the supermarkets, and right now we're always having to kind of, do a little bit of, of understanding, a trade off between, any dollar I put or I invest into a partnership or collaboration, is it going to be more profitable than an additional dollar I put into my performance marketing machine? And that's something that goes varying at different stages. I think, in the early stages. Collaborations is a very effective way to get out there. Right now we've got such a wide follower base on our digital channels here in Chile, that it's maybe a little bit less attractive right now. Different story in Mexico, Mexico. We know that we've got two big challenges. One is generating brand awareness. And second is actually getting the Mexican consumers to try out protein bars, because we know that. There is a need of people that are super into fitness and, have higher levels of income that they've been having protein bars for a while. But I'm talking about the mass market. We need to get those people to start trying out the product. And in a market like Mexico, of course, collaborations and partnerships are much more attractive for us right now.
Jed Tabernero:I'm learning a ton in this conversation. I'm, I'm also learning that I need to, I need to buy some of these bars, man. Instead of snacking, instead of snacking at night, but
Shikher Bhandary:I think it's really important for our audience to also realize that Patrick, his team, the co founders, um, the leadership team have done all this by bootstrapping. Ultimately, you're seeing the ones that have stuck with it without taking the easy money. And just learned a ton and figured out a way to use their existing cash flow as a way to keep funding the business and keep growing and keep learning is the most sustainable way of creating and scaling businesses. So I have to absolutely take a minute to give Patrick and his team the kudos money's not free anymore in the US and the rest of the world Interest rates are higher. So Patrick how this whole bootstrapping Adventure has been and what how you're looking at it in the coming years, right? Because your ambitions are large your ambitions are global international so, um at what point are you like, okay, maybe Getting some partners on board helps the flywheel a lot better.
Patrick Hardy:And I think bootstrapping a business is definitely not, not easy. And I think the team here at the Wild Foods, a fantastic job at doing that. And I think that's built a discipline. In the culture of the people and we're 180 people that work here in the wild foods between Chile and Mexico, and there's this very well set cultural that, every dollar matters because they're not free, and I think sometimes that culture is not all that like well instilled in other startups that have been financed by, round after round after round that I think that really sets us apart, but it doesn't need to be like that. Yeah. Always, I think kind of in the, in the expansion stage that we're right now. And right now, I mean, Mexico is a huge market that we're, we've just been nine months into that market and we're already doing well, but we know it's going to require a massive amount of capital, after Mexico, we're very interesting in understanding Brazil, another massive market. I mean, these are markets, these are Latin American markets that don't have a predominant protein, um, protein brand player. But this is going to definitely require greater amounts of capital that you can easily bootstrap your way into. And then secondly, I think that gross equity funds, for example, are a, a fantastic partner that we could speak with because they've done this. 2, 3, 4, 5 times before, which is taking a great success story in one market and helping them navigate into their regional expansion. And to be honest, when we look at our management team and we discuss between the leadership, we, we, we hope we're taking the best decisions that we can with the information we've got. But we don't have it all figured out. And if we can, like, partner with a fund that has done this before, I'm pretty sure they're going to be able to help us spot, five, six pitfalls that we could potentially avoid. And, if bringing in an external partner into the property of the company that's going to help us navigate this and maybe avoid one in every two pitfalls, I think that would be a fantastic opportunity.
Shikher Bhandary:actually a great point. There's a balance bootstrapping brings the discipline, but then getting advisors on board where they have been through this journey, been through scaling in the markets that you want to scale. And so there are these know hows, these industry connections that really help unlock the next wave of the growth that the wild foods. We'll get through. So on that note, Patrick, we want to give you the stage to kind of give a shout to your entire team, the incredible work that they've done and what you're looking for as a company going forward.
Patrick Hardy:Yeah, sure. I'd like to use the opportunity to give a shout out to, all the wilds from the wild food. It's 180 people between Mexico and Chile that are, every day, showing up to work and just trying to make a huge difference at everybody's houses, on, on, on the way that they consume and on the products that they have. I say we have a. A fantastic team, they bring tons of energy and they love what to do. And I'm super proud of what we've been able to do, which is build an infrastructure for, great talent to be able to develop and perform at its fullest potential. And if we continue to do that, I'm sure that we're going to continue bringing the best innovations, continue to grow our DTC channels and continue to grow our, our brand presence everywhere across the region.
Jed Tabernero:Through our conversation with Patrick Hardy, we've witnessed how wild foods initially faced with challenges has transformed into a force for change in the food industry. Advocating for better. More informed choices. Every item we choose to consume is a vote. For the kind of world we want. Wild foods reminds us that our choices have power. The power to drive change in the food industry. One conscious decision. At a time. Thanks for tuning into things have changed podcast. And as always. Stay curious.
The information and opinions expressed in this episode are for informational purposes only. And are not intended as financial investment or professional advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making any decisions based on the concept provided. Neither the podcast, nor is creators are responsible for any actions taken as a result of listening to this episode.
