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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And in the very beginning, we actually had packed these frozen soup dumplings and clear ziploc bags in a brown paper bag and started to drop it off on people's doorsteps after collecting orders through Google forms and sending a PayPal link. So it's like, definitely not an official setup. And then I think as we were going, there was just a lot of word of mouth referral, and that kind of spread outside of our local radius around the restaurant to Greater Washington, then Pacific Northwest, the west coast, and we eventually expanded to nationwide BBC shipping by the end of 2020. So that was a fun journey.

Were you able to leverage the trust of the name in the restaurant for your food because you had the Google forms. But how did you even get people to fill out those Google forms in such turbulent times and be able to trust you with frozen food?

Yeah. So I think in the very beginning, my mom, so the first place we did a Google form was WeChat. So WeChat is a chinese messaging platform, and how it works is that you can create groups. So my mom literally went around to other neighborhood groups and pulled people into her created group for us, and then she sent out the Google form. So it was like, know within this neighborhood that was loosely connected to her. So she really was our first ambassador, if you will. And then we also had posted in a Seattle Facebook restaurant support group. And that was kind of the second push.

And that really gave us the start at the very beginning. And when we saw that there was immediate interest, which we didn't expect, then we did very quick testing on meta. So it was mostly Facebook ads at that point where we did stock images, stock music, like nothing that looked good at all. But at that time, it was very cheap because all the advertisers had pulled off the platforms during COVID And so we were able to just do a lot of rapid testing around pricing bundles. Like, how did we talk about it? Shipping thresholds. And it was easy for us to make the unit economics work at that time. So when we went online to do those ads, because that wasn't really local anymore, that really didn't have anything to do with, I think, how it took off. But I think knowing that we had a restaurant and it came from a restaurant background and we were really holding that threshold of restaurant quality, that's definitely the gravitas that helped us to get going.

And then I think as people got their first shipments, this we've continued to see they get it, and they don't really expect frozen food that's shipped online to be very good. And they got it. It was actually surprisingly good. And it would come back into the comments to let people know their experience. And I think that was the validation people were looking for to get them over that hump.

Awesome. So have a lot of questions, but maybe we can start with one thing you mentioned, which was, like, creative testing, so early brand, you're bringing a new product to market, you're going to Facebook, and there's a couple different things you're so a what types of budgets were you working like in terms of spend to find that initial glimpse of early traction? And then also in terms of the bundles and product sets, what were you selling? Was it just like one bag of. Were you changing the quantity of dumplings that were being sold? Were you changing the products that were being bundled? What were you seeing working on the actual side of things that were yielding orders?

Yeah. So at the very beginning, let's say it was maybe May 2020, where we did our first ads, it was $5 CACs, which, I mean, that would be obviously a dream right now, but $5 CACs was great. We had a budget of like $100, $200 per day, which was like, that's all the capacity we could handle anyway to make the bags, since we didn't really anticipate this to take off at all in the very beginning. So very low budget. But we were obviously able to get 20 orders, 40 orders a day, which was, like plenty, I think, to start ramping some of our operations. And then for the bundles, it was like one bag of soup dumplings, one bag of soup dumplings and sauces, two bags of soup dumplings, two bags of different variety of soup dumplings. And we looked at shipping thresholds of like $40, $60, $80, and to see what that drop off would look like. And at that time, we could support, let's say, like a $65 shipping threshold because of the unit economics that we were seeing from the low Cacs.

And then we did have to kind of increase the threshold over time. But we really worked from the very beginning to maintain our shipping costs as low as possible. So for local shipping, because you're kind of dispatching taskrabbit or some last mile logistic partners that was really cheap, and you could get away with just packing ICE with a little bit of foam, for example, or really not much, because it was a same day drop off. And then as you got a little bit further out, even for the whole of Washington, then you had to be able to make sure it was frozen for up to two days since it had to go to a hub and then get transported somewhere else. And so that's where I think there was a big shift in terms of how much packaging we had to do, and then we had to make sure that still worked with increasing CACs over time. And the only way that can happen is if you have a higher AOB.

So you mentioned earlier that your previous skills didn't translate into all of this that you're talking about. And so you mentioned it was your mom, your co founders, your husband. How were you distributing the responsibilities to be able to learn logistics, learn the unit economics of all of this supply chain, how you have to get ahead of the scale, you might have to get to. How were those early days in terms of responsibilities?

So, at that time, I was still at a full time job at this health tech company. So I was just kind of supporting as much as I could. Kilo hadn't anticipated this to be a full time job either. I would say by the end of the year, it had become one. And so he was really the default person to just figure all of it out. And then I would help support, brainstorm, like, oh, okay, here's this idea. Let's pressure test it. Why are we doing this? What is the result? What are the different configurations or tests that we can do? And then he would do all of the execution in the early days.

So, basically, it's like a one man show a little bit in terms of the planning and execution piece of it. The two of us would strategize, and then we did have our chef, and he was the one that was producing the soup dump wings, and our restaurant partner as well, who was also supporting on how all of this could get executed. So it wasn't really a split of responsibility until, I would say, the middle or end of 2021. So middle or end of 2021 is when we went to our own manufacturing facility, and then we started to look at potential investments, and that was when we had very clear rules.

So if you don't mind, whatever you can share, whether it's how many doors, how much volume, or how much revenue you guys are to date.

So I can say that last year, we sold more than 20 million soup dumplings.

Okay, so when you made the decision to quit the job and go full time in, what was the revenue at then?

I was fully full time at the very beginning of 2022, and our revenue was about a million. So pretty different scale.

So what advice do you have for people that are like, did you have a plan? What advice do you have for people? There's no standard answer for, okay, at this exact revenue, you can go full time on this and quit your job. But any advice that you have for people who might be considering what benchmarks to look at and how to derisk, especially in a CPG brand, if anyone is doing it and wants to go all in.

Yeah. So it's definitely more qualitative. There's not, like, an exact threshold, I would say. But for us, we ran a lot of tests. I think that was just something that we incorporated right from the very beginning. And so we're looking at, like, okay, let's say we are supply constrained, but we can still see what the potential market for this is. So let's just take one day where we push, spend ten X up and see if it caps out. And if we pushed it ten X up, it did not cap out.

We're like, okay, well, we can grow at least ten times from where we are theoretically, if there's no changes, and this is sustained every single day throughout the year. But let's say it could potentially be sustained and it could grow ten X. That's a pretty good future for looking at this. And I think there are tests we ran around surveys of things we ran, like testing around pricing, as I said. And all of those gave us confidence that we had product market fit. So I think the product market fit piece is really what derisked a lot of it for us, where we saw there was built in demand and we did have to educate a lot of people, but there was already that latent demand for, I think, authentic chinese food that we were able to tap in somehow. Tap into somehow. So I think that was lucky for us that we chose an item that immediately we saw that.

And I think for some people who are on the fence, if you see product market fit and you're able to run some tests on what the potential capacity or TAm is, then I think that's probably a good sign that this is something sustainable that you can focus full time on. I think for us, it's also an intersection of need. So in the beginning, we didn't need two people to be 100% full time focused in order to keep expanding. And then it got to a point where we had to hire a team, we had to expand, we had to manage a facility. And so then the need was that we needed two full time people on it. And so that was the reality that we had to choose. I think it also made it easier that obviously we had an investor come on board at that time. So then there was a pretty stable financial outlook for how we could build the team.

Jen, my other question was going to be, you mentioned product market fit. How did you know you had product market fit? And also, why do you think that you got product market fit? The reason I ask that is, was this product, like these bows, could, were they typically sold in your local chinese market in the frozen section, or was that product quality, or was your product quality so much better than that and so much more accessible that it led to people literally wanting to buy their dumplings online?

Yeah. So product market fit, I think we could tell it was a thing because we kept getting requests to expand. So it wasn't like we were forcing the issue and needing to expand because we tapped out on our market. It was like somebody saying, hey, can I pick up 30 bags? I'm going to fly to Alaska with it in a cooler so I can bring it to all my friends. Or at one point we actually serviced like 10% of one of the islands of Seattle called Bainbridge island. And they just told all of their neighbors and we would do a drop there every single week. And so they were definitely pushing, I think, that cycle of referrals and word of mouth. So we couldn't keep up with it.

So I think that's a pretty clear signal that there's like some product market fit. You don't know how large that market is. And that's kind of what I was saying around the testing. I think you can do some initial testing to see what the boundaries potentially are. And I don't think we tested further than that because we couldn't see a line of sight of being able to supply it anyway beyond what we had. And then why did we have product market fit? So I think frozen soup dumplings have been available for some time. It's not been available for that long either. But it has been in chinese grocery stores.

It has been available in China. I think it also has been in chinese restaurants. So that's definitely been there. I think Ding Taifong really set the bar in terms of like, here's a soup dumpling, here are how many folds, here's how thin it is, here's how gourmet and delicate it is as well. So they really helped to set that bar and educate the market on this particular product itself. And for us, people understood this as like, it's not easy to find, it's not that easy to make. It takes 24 hours to make this. If you're to attempt this at home and you're not going to get a good version of it.

The chinese grocery stores, they do have it, but again, it's not that accessible. Like a lot of people in more suburban, rural areas would have to drive 2 hours to go to a chinese grocery store, which is just untenable from a practical, daily standpoint. So I think that worked to our benefit. And then beyond that, I think the product that's in chinese grocery stores is pretty good. I would say ours is a little bit better. I don't think it's like two X better necessarily, but let's say it's 20% better and it embodies some of the things that other people are looking for, like the meat quality, for example, or how much soup there is, or how thin the skin is, and the scale is tipped just far enough that you can appreciate this in its own category almost. And I think we saw that this was the case even for our parents. Like, our parents would have bought it, their friends were buying it.

Our grandparents really liked it. So that's a clear indicator that even within our core audience, or like the toughest critics, it still was a good product.

Yeah. I love how you measured the product market fit from a word of mouth standpoint. You can easily lie to yourself with the CACs just, well, CACs are really low. This is product market fit. You can get a bunch of sales, but then how is that looking from a recurring sales point of view? And what is the word of mouth sort of spread of the product can indicate even a lot more than what you can see in unit economics, as those tend to change over time. So when I think about competition from, for example, these chinese markets, et cetera, a lot of it probably comes down to the distribution that these people might have. And you decided to take an early bet on the brand itself. And Mila, and you've been really strong with brand.

You have a very beautiful brand. You've hired a chief content officer, so it seems you've put a lot of emphasis on the brand. Walk me through your decision process of how you're going to differentiate yourself through brand rather than so much distribution. And maybe you were going after both, but I'd love to learn more about that chief content officer role in your overall thesis on content for the brand.

Yeah, so I love that everything seems like it's planned out, but I think the repeated pattern for us is that a lot of it wasn't planned out. And I think you just are. Sometimes you get lucky and you have to take advantage of that luck, and then you're also just very aware of things changing and react very quickly to it. And so for us, we did not have anyone on the marketing team until probably midway through 2022, I would say. And like I said, we had that stock image, stock music, running ads, and then we had a nice brand for our restaurant to begin with because I had a friend from middle school that I skated with who is a fantastic designer. She made our logo. I'm like, this is awesome. This is ten times better than anything I could have done.

So great. We're rolling with this. You're our brand person. And she was just like doing this for fun, for us as a friend and we were paying her, but it was just like a cool project to do together. And we got very lucky with finding her, who helped set some of the tone and it was clearly resonating with people and she knew what she was doing. So then in the middle of 2022, what we saw was because we were starting to scale, we couldn't support the ads and how many we needed to come up with, it was starting to fatigue. So then how do we combat that? We have to hire a marketing person to create assets so that we can put it into ads. So then we hired our creative director, head of brand, and then she kind of helped take over things and she started to produce assets for us.

And then she became kind of that brand voice. And then as we went into a rebrand from Tzujia and Tamila, then she was also establishing like, okay, here is how we're going to do the branding, here is how we translate it. And I think because we had put out so many videos of how do you steam soup dumplings? Since that was like the number one question. Another thing here is we've really put listening to customers and customer experience first. So we're literally just taking all the questions that our customers are asking us and translating those to videos because those are clearly what people want to know. And so we're just reacting to what we see and it works. So we lean into it further. And so this brand piece I think worked really well for us.

We established this team and it served a very, I think, concrete purpose. So it wasn't like branding just for branding sake, it was like branding because we needed to rebrand, branding because we needed creative assets, branding because blank, we needed to educate people on steamers. And this is a scalable way to do that versus answering every single question. For Simu, we had brought him on because obviously he can tell a much better story than us, he can broaden some of that reach and that audience. And we were starting to launch in retail. So for us we wanted to make sure that launch could be supported successfully. And so then that's when we started to look at brand marketing potentially as a different layer than performance marketing in direct response. And so that was kind of our first foray into a little bit more brand level spending as well, which we haven't done as much since then, but those are kind of the motivations behind it.

So I just wanted to clarify because I think a lot of people do branding for branding sake.

We are really excited to announce that DTCPoD is officially part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals. And we're really excited about being part of the network because we're going to be able to keep growing the show, bringing you guys amazing guests, and obviously helping you guys learn from the best founders, marketers, and builders of the most successful consumer brands. So anyway, keep listening to DTC pod and more shows like us on the HubSpot podcast network at network.

Yeah. For how. When did you do that hire?

That was March of last year.

How has it worked out for you? And the reason I'm so curious about it is know Blaine and our co founders in Assass. And we were just talking about this earlier, before this call, where creative is. I mean, it's an art, right? Like, you need someone fully focused and thinking on concepts, creative strategy. And you mentioned the lack of team members earlier. You can't just be like responding to emails and like, okay, let me come up with a few concepts for content as a task and check off that box. And so it's something that's hard to measure. But I'm curious, how have you seen the success of that so far over the past year?

Yeah, so I think specifically working with CMO has been great. I think it's just a very different level of looking at brand and how we can tell a story. So I think it's both an opportunity and a forcing function to think about it that specific way. So I think that's been really good for us to be able to tell the story on different platforms to different audiences in a different way, which is awesome. I think for the creative asset piece, we just think about every part of the business as an engine. So for the creative assets, same thing. It's not the same people who are generating all of the ideas. I think we all generate ideas.

A lot of it comes from me sitting in bed before sleeping and I'm browsing TikTok and I'm like, okay, this is a cool idea, let's try it. But ideas are so easy for people to come up with and very hard to execute, where it's like, you have a very clear vision of how this translates. What are the different components, how do you actually shoot it, and then what's the hook and the storyline that makes it actually compelling and successful? And so those are not necessarily always the same person or one person doing it end to end. It's a very collaborative effort to get that engine going.

Yeah, for sure. Especially with contractors, et cetera. You can have great video editors et cetera. You can have all the support, but at the end of the day, from a strategy standpoint, it just needs so much creativity and focus on that one role. One thing I want to talk about is you have this pattern of reacting quickly. And based on this conversation, I've noticed you've done it more than once. So you did it initially with the restaurant. You saw that that's a challenge for most people.

You turned that into an opportunity. Then here you are doing direct to consumer frozen foods. Most people would say, this is too complicated, this is expensive to ship, I'm out. But you turn that into an opportunity and you continue to scale and then not having enough people on your team, you also sort of found this new role and created an opportunity out of that to be able to create a brand and creative from a higher level. So the other one is you took advantage of the market and were able to fundraise as well. And so I would love to learn more about your fundraise, the thought process behind that. And what type of fundraise was it?

Yeah, so we've raised two rounds total. And I guess, unsurprisingly, our first fundraise follows a little bit of the theme of what you just mentioned. So what had happened was at the end of 2021, somebody had seen our ad on Instagram, and then they bought our soup dumplings, and they sent it to an investor friend of theirs. And then this investor, who became our investor was like, whoa, this is so good. Do they even know this project is good? Which obviously we knew everything just looked like we did not know what we were doing at that point. So he gave us a call, and I think he was just surprised that, oh, you actually do have things scaled out. You do have operation. You have started to plan it.

And so that led us to a pretty serious conversation very quickly. I think it was like around two weeks total from that first conversation. And basically, we just worked very quickly to gather all of the data points and everything and how we thought about it, how we could run some tests to show again that next level of scaling and potential and what we could potentially do. So that was our first round of kind of taking advantage of an opportunity that came to us and really being able to get the right data and test in front of that person and move quickly on it to get to that next round. Coming out of that, we did keep in touch with a few other investors who had gotten in touch after this round because we hadn't announced it. And over time, it's kind of telling that story of, hey, here's what we're trying to do, here's how we're going to do it. Here are the numbers we're trying to achieve, here are the milestones qualitatively for what's important to the company. And I think we were just hyper realistic about what we could achieve.

And so then along the way, every time there's a check in, we are hitting exactly what we said we were going to. And that's obviously very confidence inducing. And so then by the second fundraise, when we had gone out, they were ready to kind of commit immediately. So we didn't do a large round of conversations. We actually started with just a few people, and two days in, we got a term sheet, I think, because we had put in that work along the way. So it really was a one year process, but two days formally and Jen.

Thinking about raising the capital, what were the biggest needs for you to deploy? Was it inventory? Was it manufacturing? How'd you put the capital to work?

Yeah, so it was both of those. For our first round, as I mentioned, we had just moved into a manufacturing facility, so we did need to, I think, build inventory and then continue to build out that manufacturing facility and team. And then I think from a marketing perspective, that was like one of our bottlenecks. So that was also a big thing, was to hire a team for the marketing and creative side to build that out. And then for the second round, again, we're supply constrained. So we are now moving into another new facility to expand. So that was another clear thing of, like, we're supply constrained. We need to build inventory and facility expansion.

So that's a very clear thing to put the dollars to use for. And then we're now going into retail. So for the sales team and inventory build and expanding those conversations strategically, that was what we used it for.

Yeah, I was going to say what was the size? If it's public information at the first.

And second round, 10 million for the first one and then 21.5 for the second.

Got it. The reason I just wanted to paint the picture for the audience is because we have a lot of people that reach out to us in terms of, like, right now, a lot of brands and companies are going out for fundraising. But I think the biggest lesson here is that fundraising is about achieving milestones and not about running out of money, where these are relationships that are just built over time. And if reality is that you need to race because you're going to run out of money and you haven't established that network, and those clear milestones you're asking somebody to give you a lot of, it's really, really hard to just show up to a table and get funded with that approach. And so, Jen, I'm sure you've had a lot of people to ask you about advice for fundraising right now. What are your biggest takeaways? Probably what you just mentioned, but I'm curious if there's anything else, somebody that might be listening, looking to fundraise that didn't take the time to do that? Are there any?

I mean, every sector is very different. I think food investors, CPG investors are very different than tech investors. E commerce is know a subset of some of that as well. For our first round, kind of like what you said, I think what really worked to our benefit was we were in a position of strength where we did not need to fundraise. So at that point, actually, we weren't actively looking for investors yet. We were running the business very, I think, responsibly, where everything was first order, profitable, or at least break even. And so then, even if we had to scale much slower, we were able to do that without raising any money. And I think that would look very different now if we hadn't taken any dollars.

But for us, we weren't like, we have to get there, otherwise it won't work for us. So I think we just ran the business that way from the very beginning. And the second time, it was actually November 2022, that we went out for fundraising. And that was exactly when a lot of investors were pulling back dollars, especially for growth, because of everything shaking up. And so during that time, I guess our observation was that a lot of investors, because they weren't expecting a deal, they were a lot more laid back in terms of their deal cycle and their willingness to kind of chase a deal and activation energy around it. But I guess from talking to other companies that got funded, it's not that people weren't making investments, they were just being a lot more selective and investing in a lot fewer number of companies. But I would say, like the ones that did lay the groundwork and I think were attractive from a data and market perspective. There was competition for getting funded, and that was favorable, I think, to the top players.

But then there's a long tail of people who weren't very obviously there yet or hadn't put together the right data to show that piece of it. That that was where it got really hard for a lot of folks. So I think here it's like, you just have to be super buttoned up in terms of all of the data that you're showing, hitting all the milestones that you promised, showcasing all of the growth that you potentially could get there on, and being very realistic about it, and then finding the right fit for investor and probably the right dollar amount, too.

Jen, the one question that I have to ask is just about the business in itself and the operations and logistics side, right? You guys have scaled a ton. You've seen a bunch of success. And like you said, you guys went to d, to C. You're shipping frozen dumplings and other products as well. But starting out in that, how did you guys tackle the supply chain side of the frozen, perishable sort of goods?

A lot of what I talked about was, like, luck. And also a lot of what has happened is because we didn't come in the industry, we made some unusual, potentially stupid choices that worked in our favor. So when we started this, we did not realize how hard frozen shipping was. And actually, soup dumplings is even more sensitive than ICE cream. And a lot of vendors won't even take ICE cream because of the melting issues. And then we went into it, we're like, oh, no, what is going on? We were forced to figure it out because we already made the choice to go ship it. And so from the very beginning of COVID one of the challenges was just that the networks had to switch from commercial shipping to residential shipping. So their guaranteed delivery rates went from like 98% and then to no guarantee.

And their on time fulfillment was like 70% or so, which is very bad for frozen goods. So for us, the only thing we could do to combat that was we implemented a melt free guarantee because the most important thing was a good customer experience. We want to make sure that they can experience the product correctly. And it's very hard to reacquire a customer if they've been burned. So that was very important to us. And then beyond that, we did a lot of the legwork to collect the data. So our warehouses didn't really run on data. Our partners that we had started with, they didn't run on a lot of data.

We put together the infrastructure and the systems and the data and did the work up front because we needed it and it was a forcing function. And then we pushed it to them and helped them get it set up, which benefited their teams. So they welcomed it. But we did all the legwork in order to show like, hey, here are all the missed picks, here are all the on time. Here's what's going on with the shipping times and we proactively reached out. So if we guaranteed two days and it was three days and we saw that and we checked literally all the tracking numbers, we would reach out with an email asking if the shipment arrived okay and if it was melted or not. So the only thing you can do is what's in your control. And that was what was in our control.

So that was like early days, and then now it's just all about scaling. So you have to continue to find more partners six months, a year out to increase the volume and shipping time, shipping rates, like all of that, and it's just a continuous improvement cycle.

Awesome. And as we kind of wrap up here, Jen, my last question was just going to be about what's next for you guys in Mila. I know you hinted at retail, you're scaling D to C, you're on top of all your logistics and shipping partners to make sure they're delivering on time and it's coming out the right way. So, yeah. What are you guys focused on from both a product development perspective as well as like a business expansion perspective?

Yeah, I think from a product perspective, we're always looking at innovation pipeline. So we already do a lot of limited edition drops, but we're also continuing to explore what else is there outside of soup dumplings. We do generally see from the market that there's a desire for chinese food, pretty broadly an authentic chinese food. And so then we'll test out other products this year to see if there's something outside of soup dumplings that's just as attractive. Or maybe it's not as sexy, but it has more frequency in terms of somebody being able to eat it as a daily meal, for example. So we'll keep going on the innovation pipeline for a product, and then for us, it is really starting to nail that retail expansion out. Last year was about testing in retail and seeing which retailers really worked for us the best. And this year we want to keep scaling that piece.

Awesome. And what worked the best in retail for you? Were there specific retailers that outperformed others? Were there specific locations? What worked for you as you guys tested retail?

I won't name too many names. I think most of the retailers did better than we had expected. I think our number one concern was like, this is a frozen raw soup dump wing. Are people okay with that? Will they do the work of steaming it? Can they figure out how to steam it when they don't have an entire website and social media thing that they're going to to educate on? And so far that has been okay. We were also worried about this frozen product, somebody taking out of the freezer, taking it home. Maybe it melts on the way. And so far we've seen those are okay and people are maybe seeing enough online that they aren't encountering that problem. But a lot of the retailers have done well.

I think there are a couple of retailers. And our hypothesis is that for our online presence, it's not reaching this audience as naturally. And so the retailers that skew more towards audiences that we don't already reach online, those don't perform quite as strong. Like, it's still above average, but it's not as strong as some of the other retailers that we've gone into.

I mean, even in restaurants, even restaurants don't have such a high bar for quality dumplings. It's even hard to find. Well, at least maybe because I'm in Florida.

That's what I was going to say. They need to be targeting Miami because there's no good chinese food here and I am an online order away from my next batch of soup dumplings.

Yeah, exactly. So even from a retail standpoint, it's hard to find in restaurants. So I could see why people are gobbling it up. I'm for sure going to place my order right now. So, Jen, for anyone who's listening who might want to keep up with you and everything at Mila, where can people find you? Learn more about you or Mila.

Yeah, so our website is the best place. Eatmila.com, eat Mila.com and we have all of our latest and greatest product offerings there.

Sweet. Thanks so much for coming on the show, John. We had a great time.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.