Hello! I’m starting a dip company and am going back and forth if I want to invest in good branding now (6K for everything) or put together a simple logo and color scheme now and wait to invest a bit more until later. Any advice out there from seasoned entrepreneurs? The logo and label is going to be a big part of my brand but I’m not sure if I want to make such a large investment so early on.
Most investors read the income statement and balance sheet, but miss critical details hidden in the 10-K about where a company actually makes its money.
This guide walks through exactly how to find and analyze geographic revenue breakdowns in SEC filings, including:
• Which sections to check
• How to interpret country and region exposure
• Why geographic concentration risk matters
• Common pitfalls to avoid
Full step-by-step breakdown here:
https://metricshour.com/blog/how-to-read-a-10-k-filing-for-geographic-revenue-data-2/
Have you ever dug into the geographic revenue notes in a 10-K? Worth the effort?
Most B2B sales processes are built around competitive differentiation. Why you are better than the alternatives. What you do that the others do not.
But in most deals that stall or die, the reason is not that the buyer chose a competitor. It is that they chose to do nothing. Keep the existing process. Push the decision to next quarter. Wait and see.
The no-decision outcome is harder to sell against because there is no clear alternative to position against. You cannot explain why your product is better than inertia. The buyer already knows their current situation is painful. That knowledge is apparently not enough.
The deals that tend to close are ones where something changed on the buyer's side that made doing nothing more expensive than making a decision. A new regulation. A team change. A cost that finally became visible. The product did not get better. The cost of inaction went up.
Curious what others have seen actually move a stalled deal, and whether it was something you did or something that changed on their end.
I keep seeing blogs, posts about AI use cases in F&B but a lot of it reads like press releases. Demand forecasting improvements, waste reduction, supply chain optimization etc all sounds great but I never see the specifics of what actually made it to production vs what got piloted and quietly shelved.
What are people seeing in the real world what's the AI application in food and beverage that's actually delivering something measurable?
Hello community,
My wife has 8+ years experience in CPG in various roles up to brand manager. She has an engineering degree and an MBA.
She is open to commercial role. She is so passionate about growing brands, revenue and market share.
She is able to start immediately.
Kindly assist with any available opportunity or advice.
Thank you
Hemp advocates are celebrating a White House letter to Congress that, tucked inside an $87.6 billion supplemental budget request largely for funding the Iran war, urges lawmakers to revise federal hemp regulation "in a manner consistent with Amendment #54 offered to H.R. 8646." That amendment, Rep. Andy Barr's bipartisan Lawful Hemp Protection Act, would set up a regulatory framework for selling hemp products. As an alternative, the letter floats an extension of the hemp ban set to take effect November 12. It goes further than the administration's earlier call to carve out full-spectrum CBD, extending the carve-out to all hemp products, and the U.S. Hemp Roundtable called it "the strongest signal" yet of executive-branch support, one that "puts the ball in Congress' court." The wrinkle: last month's roughly 200-page National Drug Control Strategy named "unregulated psychoactive derivatives of hemp" like delta-8 a "growing concern" and urged enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute, so the administration is pushing regulation and a crackdown at the same time.
This is the clearest federal lean yet toward regulating intoxicating hemp instead of banning it, but it sits right next to a drug-control strategy calling for delta-8 enforcement. If you're building or buying in hemp beverages, does a White House letter de-risk the category enough to commit inventory and capital, or is "framework or delay" still too thin to plan around with a November 12 cliff? And if a framework does pass, who captures the upside: the beverage upstarts, the cannabis MSOs, or the alcohol distributors waiting to take the shelf and the route to market?
Source - BevNET
By 2032, CA will no longer accept non-recyclable materials (by their definition), which currently includes ALL Flexible Plastics - ie, polybags.
I’ve been struggling to find alternatives that won’t scuff and scratch up products with nice surface finishes…. And can be purchased affordability.
Fiber based bags seem to scuff our product finishes and cotton bags are an astronomical cost up when multiplied across the company. Plus, I’m not even sure cotton bags are an ‘acceptable’ alternative for CA as they don’t seem to consider them ‘recyclable’.
What alt material are you planning to switch to?
Hormbles Chormbles, a functional chocolate built to deliver a snack-sized block of chocolate without the usual sugar load, is now in Costco. The wholesale pack is 36 quarter-sized bars for $14.99, an individually wrapped variety of 18 Milk Chocolate and 18 Salted Fudge. On the brand's own website, a box of 12 full-size bars runs $39.99 in Milk Chocolate, Salted Fudge and Peanut Butter, and the brand frames the Costco bag as roughly half price and a way to put the product in front of new shoppers.
On formulation, the bars were originally made with EPG, the novel low-calorie fat, but the brand relaunched a few months ago without it, leaning on milk and whey. The current version carries 10g of protein, no sugar, 11g of fat and 150 calories per piece.
This is RXBar co-founder Jared Smith's new brand, so the channel choice is worth chewing on: is launching into Costco this early, behind a deep-discount mini variety pack, the right wedge for a better-for-you brand, or does it set a low price anchor and a brutal velocity bar that's hard to walk back? And on the formula, dropping EPG took the bar from roughly 100 to 150 calories for a cleaner label. In protein candy, does clean label beat the macro, or did they give up their best number on the shelf?
Source - Stack3d
I'm a marketer by trade (in the CPG industry) and I have been toying with the idea of launching my own product for YEARS. I have a good idea and a formulator willing to work with me. I'd love a gut-check from people who've launched before.
The product is an RTD coffee. There's a bit more to it than that, but we don't need the details here.
I have some supporters already and can likely get some funds raise for the launch.
Where I keep going in circles is how wide to launch:
My gut says #3: launch the coffee in two sizes, keep it tight, earn the right to expand. I'm worried about spreading a first production run across too many SKUs and learning nothing.
For those who've done it:
Appreciate any war stories.
As it has been said many times over, the quality of your prompts will affect the final result that you get from the LLM, however, there's no need to complicate it using all sorts of frameworks. Just being clear in your instructions is more than enough when generating images. Here the prompts (you can customise them for your own preference):
• Asset 1 - Hero Product Shot (Marula Oil Serum)
Minimal product photography of a premium organic skincare serum in a tall frosted glass bottle with a gold-tipped glass dropper, set against a raw plaster wall in warm off-white. The bottle has a simple cream-coloured label with "VELDT" printed in a thin dark olive sans-serif typeface. Next to the bottle, a small pile of dried marula kernels and a single fresh marula fruit sliced in half, revealing the golden flesh. Soft natural window light from the left, casting a gentle warm shadow to the right. Muted earth-tone colour palette: warm cream, olive, gold, terracotta. Shot on medium format camera, 90mm lens, f/2.8. Shallow depth of field, focus on the bottle label. Editorial product photography, organic skincare brand aesthetic. No text overlays.
• Asset 2 - Dark Botanical Hero (Treatment Range)
Dramatic product photography of three dark amber glass skincare bottles (a serum, a facial oil, and a mist spray) arranged in a triangular composition on a dark slate surface against a deep charcoal background. Each bottle has a minimal label with the word "VELDT" in muted gold foil. Between the bottles, scattered dried rooibos leaves and small honeybush flowers in muted reds and golds. A single overhead spotlight creates rim lighting on the glass bottles and casts defined shadows downward. Rich, moody, luxurious. Colour palette: deep charcoal, amber, muted gold, dried-blood red accents from the rooibos. Shot on Phase One, 120mm macro lens, f/4. Commercial product photography, premium apothecary aesthetic, high-end organic skincare.
People who have experience in the photography space (and some product developers) can generate such prompts due to their knowledge of industry jargon and what not. However, that doesn't mean that you need that kind of experience or exposure, a quick search of photography scene descriptions can help you out a lot, including alt text used for accessibility reasons.
How do you generate your image prompts? Do they ever come out exactly as imagined, or do you have to tweak non-stop?
Gleezy closed a $2 million seed round led by Denver's Old Tom Capital, a firm that invests in the golf ecosystem, following an earlier $500,000 angel round. Former attorney Bryce Rech founded the North Carolina company about three years ago after, in his telling, eating "a really bad hot dog at a really nice golf course." The product is a double-smoked beef brisket dog positioned as premium and "built for the golf course."
The wedge is working so far. Ahead of the raise, Gleezy reported eightfold year-over-year growth in retail locations, more than 1.5 million hot dogs sold, and over 350 active foodservice customers across 45 states. It's in Target, Harris Teeter, Food City and Heinen's on the retail side, with Sysco, US Foods and Performance Food Group carrying the foodservice business. The brand has also stretched past the dog itself with a Carolina Dog Sauce condiment, branded merch, and a co-branded Attaboy lager with Hi-Wire Brewing.
Hot dogs are a scale, low-price, center-store category owned by Oscar Mayer, Ball Park and Nathan's. Is "own a premium occasion first, then go mass" (golf course to grocery) a smart way into a commodity aisle, or does the occasion cap the brand? And does a vertical fund like Old Tom Capital give a food brand a real distribution edge, or is it just a themed check?
Source - Nosh
