Making a CPG Business
In praise of tangible products, and the beauty of manufacturing
Many of us have had the experience of dreaming up a million-dollar idea that we’re convinced would absolutely take off. Sometimes, months later, we find that someone else had the same idea and actually made it happen. We feel a twinge of validation. We also wish we’d have done it first.
Last spring a dear college friend and I were sharing our toddler battle stories, and we found ourselves snagged on a shared thorn — the lack of diverse, convenient food options for our kids.
As a result of that conversation, Andrew and I teamed up with our friend Debby to pursue our own million-dollar idea: Petite Palates, savory meal pouches for babies.
It’s been an enormously humbling experience – Consumer Packaged Goods (CPGs), and the food industry are new arenas for us. As with any field, it seems to have a language all its own; one that we are learning in sometimes exciting, sometimes painful bursts. From research and development, to supply chain sourcing, to legal, to packaging and shipping, it’s all an interrelated web with a million potentials for delay and revision.
Last week, we had a milestone moment: Debby and I visited our manufacturing facility to observe feasibility testing of our products. We were also able to tour the factory where our products will be made.
Andrew and I have started a business before: built up the scaffolding, and rebuilt it again after the pandemic reduced it to rubble. That’s not the aspect that feels different here: it’s the material quality of it all.
In our day jobs, we creative-direct special projects and shows. This has, in the past, always seemed like a “more tangible” output than many of our peers in desk jobs — for whom work often seems ongoing, incorporeal, and infinite. Our work onstage and onscreen has a beginning, middle and end. People can come to physically see and hear the work we have produced.
However, with the new, parallel experience of building out a CPG company, it becomes clear that there are degrees of palpability to work output. There is nothing, it turns out, more visceral than manufacturing a product. After our visit to the lab, we held the first prototypes of our products in our hands — a physical beating heart of the last year of planning.
More than just receiving the prototype of our product, there is the experience being on a factory floor. I found myself filled with the ingenuity of human invention, and the grandeur of the not-so-simple miracles that make our modern human lives possible. Being in the room with the elaborate manufacturing machinery, so highly automated, and yet so clearly and directly authored by human touch, was both mundane and magical.
We flagged down an engineer who had been part of designing and implementing these systems, and peppered him with questions. Why are the flow pipes so small if the fill tanks are so large? Where do the microwaves enter the system? Why are the coils stacked horizontally in this line, but vertically in the other room? Every part of this complex automation had been clearly engineered and constructed with thoughtful, human work.
As we continue down this ultra-practical, tangible road, it’s impossible not to be periodically floored by the poetry, elegance, and raw power of manufacturing.
…We’ll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, our co-founder wrote thoughtfully this week about how the current political climate has affected our supply chain. I hope you will give Debby’s post a read and appreciate the very real effects that federal policy wreaks upon small businesses:
This week’s playlist:
Rooting for this!!!
This is a really good idea and I feel like I read about it somewhere.