DTC POD - #321 - How Mila Nailed Success: The 20 Million Dumplings Club

DTC POD #321 - How Mila Nailed Success: The 20 Million Dumplings Club

Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:45

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Blaine Bolus 00:00:45 - 00:01:39

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Blaine Bolus 00:01:44 - 00:02:01

What is up, DTC pod? Welcome to this week's show and today we have the pleasure of speaking with Jen Liao, who is the co founder and president of Mila. So, Jen, I'm going to let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about the brand you guys are building at Mila and a little bit about your background as well.

Jennifer Liao 00:02:01 - 00:02:26

Yeah, sounds great. Thanks so much for having me on. So at Mila, we aim to make the best possible chinese food and we deliver this straight to your homes. We started to roll out in retail. We actually started with frozen soup dumplings and then we expanded from there for our portfolio of chinese food products. So that's how we got started and what the company focuses on.

Blaine Bolus 00:02:26 - 00:02:44

Awesome. What's your background? What brought you into this space? Why, I guess not just chinese food, but why specifically the type of food that you were making, which is more of a frozen fresh sort of food.

Jennifer Liao 00:02:44 - 00:03:36

Yeah, great question. So I was actually in health tech before this, so in a very unrelated industry, very little carryover in terms of skill set industry knowledge. But during that time, I had the opportunity to open a restaurant. So we actually had opened our fast casual restaurant, October 2018, in Bellevue, Washington. And that actually started more as serving chinese street food. So we started with an item called jinbao, which is a pan fried soup ball, and that's my co founder and husband's favorite food item. So really it was just driven by our selfish desire to eat really good chinese food that we were missing from China when we would go back to visit our parents'families, for example, and we started that. And then during COVID there were a few weeks of shutdown.

Jennifer Liao 00:03:37 - 00:04:35

And during that time, we started to experiment with frozen soup dumplings, since that's a cousin of the Xinjianbao, and that's kind of always been known as a delicacy for chinese food. We really like dumplings, generally speaking. We kind of just tried it out to see if it was possible to freeze it and have a good quality soup dumpling. And since we had a restaurant background, we really cared about the quality of the food and just creating something that was as close to restaurant as possible. Since everyone was stuck at home at that point, I think it was important to us to deliver that customer experience, and I think people were looking for a slice of escapism at that time. And so it had frozen soup dumplings, there was a steamer basket. It was this whole thing that you could do at home together with your families and experience a bit of that restaurant food at home. So that's how we got started.

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