Successfully Commercializing Emerging CPG Brands into Household Names
Deb Holt, CMO and CIO at Our Home, reflects on her extensive career in food marketing and shares key strategies for launching successful snack brands that balance consumer demand, product quality, and profitability in a highly competitive marketplace.
Deb Holt is the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Our Home, a portfolio of better-for-you snack foods that includes brands we all know, such as Real Food From the Ground Up, Popchips, RW Garcia, and the Pop Secret brand. Deb is an experienced and passionate leader in all aspects of brand building—from concept to consumer—for emerging brands, both pre and post-equity investment. She has a strong understanding of consumer and market dynamics and is known for being able to break new ground with product and category innovation.
Deb has had a long career in food marketing, having previously worked as the General Manager of Kopper's Chocolate at Nuts.com, Chief Marketing Officer at barkTHINS, where she launched the concept of snacking chocolate, and Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Ciao Bella Gelato Co. Inc., where she led sales and marketing, new business opportunities, and product innovation.
The Continuum recently sat down with Deb to talk about a career that includes ice cream, chocolate, and chips; the challenges of marketing in a crowded field with low profit margins; and the factors that go into launching a new snack food.
How did you get your start in marketing?
I left college thinking I’d go into public relations, my major was communications with a focus in PR and a minor in economics. I had completed a few internships, but after graduation, it was not a strong job market. I applied for a job that said it was a marketing management trainee program at Progressive Insurance. I ended up being a trainee as a claims adjuster. Honestly, I had no clue what I was getting myself into, but I worked there for about five years, moving up through customer service, operations, and claims management. I was doing well, but I wasn’t happy in the role. The idea that the decision to approve or deny claim coverage in my professional job really impacted somebody’s personal life didn’t sit well with me.
I was still young and realized that it was a good time in my life to try something new. I tried on a couple of jobs. I worked in sales and marketing at a financial institution, and then I moved into sales and business development for a software company. I loved that job. I was selling CRM solutions, so I was working with marketers and IT executives to develop websites and create customer relations and workflow solutions.
But that company was leaving New York, and I got married and moved out of the city as well. I had to look for something new. Monster, if you remember that site, had a “search within five miles” feature. I found a marketing job at Ciao Bella, the gelato company. I was certainly overqualified for the job requirements, but I was thinking about having kids soon, so it seemed like a good fit for both the company and me. Plus, I figured if I could sell an intangible product like software, I could definitely sell a tangible one like ice cream.
That sounds like a dream job. Do you love ice cream?
Honestly, I’m not a crazy ice cream person. Though after working in that field for so long, I’m kind of an ice cream snob. If I’m going to eat it, I want it to be high-quality ice cream.
Fair enough. Tell us a little more about working in the ice cream business and the food industry as a whole.
I was at Ciao Bella from 2003 to 2012. When I started, it was primarily selling to the food service industry, like restaurants, but the goal was always to expand into grocery stores with a larger scale retail footprint. It is a difficult transition for growth. The margins were not as strong. A key driver to success is scaling with volume, as the cost to do business at those retailers is high, and you’re competing with large publicly owned CPG companies. In ice cream, it was Nestlé and Unilever, which owns Haagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s, respectively, as well as other brands.
Commercializing a small brand is very tricky. It may work on a local level, but when you start distributing nationally, the profitability of these products often doesn’t scale. There’s limited flexibility in price. Ice Cream is an affordable indulgence, and consumers have a threshold for how much they will pay. You really have to know your costs and set the right price in the beginning so that you can navigate elasticity and fluctuations in the market that impact consumer’s consumption budget.
I led our natural sales for Ciao Bella, so I was selling to stores like Whole Foods and Sprouts Markets. Ingredients matter at these stores. Eventually, the brand also became my responsibility. I was in charge of the brand’s look and feel. This involved defining and guiding our unique position and the value we added to the category. This was foundational marketing work, and I mostly learned it on the job since I didn’t have a traditional marketing background or an MBA.
“You really have to know your costs and set the right price in the beginning so that you can navigate elasticity and fluctuations in the market that impact consumer’s consumption budget.”
Do you think you have a different perspective on branding and marketing because you didn’t have the classic training or career arc?
I’ve realized over the course of my career that there are two main types of marketers: those who are classically trained in brand management and those, like me, who come from a sales and trade execution background. Both have value, but I always emphasize to my team that cross-functional exposure to both is really important.
I understand the challenge the sales team is in when they're sitting in front of a retailer, right? I understand that the sales team has to explain to a buyer how our brands add value for that retailer. So, it’s not just about marketing a new product or flavor consumers will love but also about explaining to the buyer that our item will help you meet the demand as well as the threshold for success in selling units the retailer may expect. Understanding that dynamic between sales and marketing has been very important in my career.
My years at Progressive really helped, too. They invested the time in training and taught me about the discipline of policy and procedure. This is something that larger CPG companies have, but emerging brands often struggle to establish early on.
Your next job was really launching the brand barkTHINS, which has since been sold to Hershey’s. Can you tell us about that?
When I came on board, the company was primarily private and white-label brands. The product Lakeville Fine Brands was a really great commercially viable product in what would become barkTHINS, but it didn’t have a strong brand presence. The owner really wanted to start creating brands, and barkTHINS was the perfect entry.
At this point, with experience on the sales and marketing side, I knew that to get this product in front of buyers, it had to have a unique reason for being. At the time, the product wasn’t all natural; it was mostly milk chocolate, and it wasn’t fair trade. Like ice cream, chocolate is indulgent. It’s not a functional food. Nobody really needs it. They want it but don’t need it, so we needed a hook.
I dove into a lot of consumption and sales data that was available through what was then the National Candy Association. They publish reports on trends, behaviors, and flavor variety. I also used past learnings from consumer behavior research I’d done at Ciao Bella.
Then, we started testing products and looking at the whole process of eating chocolate. Most candy comes wrapped, so you have to unwrap it. Then you end up with a pile of wrappers that lets you see just how much you’ve eaten, which might make you feel guilty. This is how we came up with the concept of snacking chocolate, which was meant to give people permission to snack on it the way they’d snack on pretzels. Open the bag, have some, and reseal the bag. That's the way the consumers engage with snacks. But if people are going to snack, it must be a good snack. So, we also renovated the product. We worked in ingredients like fair trade chocolate and dark chocolate, took out the corn syrup, and made it a natural product.
Then we worked on the pricing, which, as I said, is so hard in retail food. Obviously, the more profit margin you have, the more you can invest in building your brand so that you can do promotional activities like displays and ads. Since it was a brand-new product, we had a real opportunity to set the price, and we realized that when renovating for better ingredients, there was room to charge a higher price. So, instead of $3.50 for a five-ounce bag, we could be $4.29 for slightly fewer ounces. Once you understand the pricing threshold for what the consumer will pay, you can set an appropriate price to support promotions. That’s what happens in most grocery stores. There might be a suggested price of $4.29, but on promotion, consumers can get two for $7. Consumers like to engage in promotions, and it becomes an activation to get consumers to try the product.
That was a really unique and fun experience to launch a brand from scratch. We were able to create a snack that people liked and then build a brand around it and watch it get acquired.
“Since it was a brand-new product, we had a real opportunity to set the price, and we realized that when renovating for better ingredients, there was room to charge a higher price.”
You’re now the CMO/CIO at Our Home, which owns popular snack brands that everyone knows, like Pop Chips, Parm Crisps, and Pop Secret. Can you tell us about your experience with this company?
When I joined, we were one brand called Real Food From the Ground Up. We sold cauliflower snacks. It was when cauliflower was trending as the king of foods. There were still questions about whether you could make cauliflower snacks accessible to everyone. I came to the team to help lead a packaging redesign, a new launch, and a go-to-market strategy. This was in 2019, we did a lot of sampling activations and market tours in the years following.
We have since received an investment in the company. We’re still an independent, privately owned company but have acquired a few different snack brands along the way. We rebranded our portfolio company to Our Home, and under this company, we sell Real Food From the Ground Up, Food Should Taste Good, Popchips, You Need This, RW Garcia, which is a tortilla company, Good Health, ParmCrisps, Sonoma Creamery, which makes cheese snacks, and the Pop Secret brand.
My job has evolved from leading one brand to multiple brands (plus private label), and our previous head of innovation retired, so I also now oversee our innovation and commercialization teams. It’s an interesting challenge.
In a field that’s as crowded as snack food, how do you decide what to launch?
It’s like anything else; you look at where there’s an opportunity in the market to add value. If we're looking at a flavor extension to grow the brand presence, we might say, okay, we already have sea salt and barbecue flavors, but the third largest item in this subcategory is a cheese flavor. If we launch a cheese flavor, we might bring more consumers into that sub-category, but how do we do it uniquely at the same time? You have to look at where you’ll add value to this brand without taking away from the overall category, right?
Maybe it’s better to expand your reach by extending it into another subcategory. If I have a shopper who likes multi-grain food and is already buying our multi-grain tortilla chips, I don’t necessarily want them to trade that for another flavor of chip. I want them to keep buying the multi-grain tortilla chips. What if, instead of a new flavor, I also bring in a cracker? Then consumers might buy both. Incrementality is essential.
Like anything else, decisions should be based on data. One option we use is a consumer’s shopping basket data. We look at what else is in their basket. If a consumer buys fresh vegetables, they might also be more likely to buy a better-for-you snack. Then, we look at behaviors, like trials, that can create the opportunity for the consumer to engage with our new products. And we test and learn constantly. This is also important.
“Then, we look at behaviors, like trials, that can create the opportunity for the consumer to engage with our new products. And we test and learn constantly. This is also important.”
You’ve now had a long career in food. Do you think you’ll stay in this space?
I think so. I mean, it's been 21 years now that I've been in food. I like the opportunities that have come across my plate. I've done ice cream, chocolate, and now snacks. I like that it's something tangible, and I love working on products that I see out in the store and that I know involve consumer preference. People are fascinating. I also like that most of the products I've sold in my food career have been under $5. It’s accessible to everybody, but the brands I’ve worked for have all prioritized healthy eating without compromise. It’s a challenge to deliver snacks that have both great quality and great value, but I’ve really liked doing it.
Before we let you go, we have to ask. If you’re not an ice cream person, what is your favorite snack food?
I guess I would say salty snack food. With salty snacks, there's enough variety, but if pushed, I would probably say tortilla chips are my personal favorite. And cheese. I really like cheese.
January 23, 2025
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