#239 - Carter Jensen, General Mills: How The CPG Titan Takes It’s Brands DTC

What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Carter Jensen, who is the global lead for D to C at General Mills. So, Carter, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, General Mills and your role with the company?

Yeah, thanks, Blake, for having me. It's great to be here. And it's going to be hopefully a ton of fun to talk a little bit about what we're up to here at General Mills. So, as many know, General Mills is a manufacturer of some of the world's biggest food brands. Think Cheerios. Honey Nut Cheerios, but also think Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Reese's Puffs. Think Pillsbury.

Think Betty Crocker. Think Nature Valley. Think yoplay. I could go on and on over 100 brands globally, and it's just amazing to be a part of that family over the last two years. I joined in June of 2020 in the midst of my basement as the food industry was going through an incredible shift, thanks to the pandemic. Like I said, I've been there for a little over two years, and my team, we're a lean, mean team of five of us. We sit globally, we oversee new and emerging channels in commerce, aka direct to consumer. D to C is a core focus of ours.

It wasn't when we joined. We built it kind of from the ground up. And today we launch over 35 sites, or 35 D to C experiences each and every year across the globe. So an incredible opportunity. I feel very lucky to be there, and I think we're doing something a little different. So excited to talk a little bit more about it today. Yeah.

And we were really excited to have you on because I think you guys bring such a different perspective, right? Like, you guys have all the scale, you're as big as it gets in terms of a holding company that owns all these brands, but you guys are launching these products, D to C, you have learnings across these brands. So I'm really excited to just be able to get that sort of perspective on how you guys evaluate markets, what you're seeing across your different brands, and just the whole story of what it really takes to become one of these household name brand. Because I think in DTC, we're always talking about, oh, we're competing with the big guys who have all the shelf space. Well, that's you excited to really excited to be able to jump into this. But before we get there, why don't you walk us through? What's your background? How did you find your way into this role? Where are you from? What's your training? Where have you worked? How do you find yourself running D to C for all these brands?

Totally. Yeah. So, compared to my coworkers, I have a little bit of a different background. Being a part of a big CPG company, you have a lot of people there, 20 plus years, which bring incredible amount of wisdom to the table. But I came from the agency world, I was in advertising, in and out. I came from a couple of tech startups, ran a couple of D to C brands and ultimately ended up at General Mills, like I said, in June of 2020, taking on this really unique role. And I think when I look back at those ten years, whether it was the agency, if anyone's worked in the agency world or tell the founders who are listening, it's like boot camp, right? Like, you are dealing with something different every day. You have this really interesting, whether it was good or bad, rounded experience from kind of trial by fire.

And it's been a ton of fun, sometimes, frustrating, as you can imagine, bringing that into a big corporate kind of enterprise. But I think it's done an incredible wonder for the work that we've been able to do, simply because we can bring that experience. We haven't specifically focused in brand building or supply chain or technology. Let's say we kind of have that full 360 experience. So that's how I landed at General Mills and like I said, been over there a little over two and a half years, which seems like forever from someone who came from the agency and startup world. But at GMI, it's a pretty short tenure, so we're just getting started.

So why don't you tell us a little bit more about your guys'specific role there, right? Like, you guys have a massive portfolio of brands, you have retail distribution internationally, and you oversee this whole portfolio of different brands, opportunities, product type, SKUs et, cetera. So as you start digging into the opportunities, how do you decide what goes D to C first? What was the first brand you took D to C? Why don't you just tell us a little bit about all of that?

Yeah, for sure. So, like, two and a half years ago, when I joined, d to C was a little bit of a swear word, right? If you think about Blaine, you just described it, right? We have distribution. We have the best partners in Kroger, whatever it might. So we're backing into it a little bit compared to really kind of the incredible founders who are starting from the ground up, where we do have this distribution. And so when I joined, as I mentioned, D to C is a little bit of a swear word. It's almost cannibalistic you're going against your partners. Why would you touch that if we already have distribution? And there was a shining kind of light on the hill, which was Epic Provisions, which we acquired, I think, back in 2015, 2016, credible D to C story. It had a really incredible D to C engine, and obviously we brought that into General Mills and kind of elevated distribution in our traditional channels.

But Epic was the one that was hanging on. And so everyone used this as an example. It's like, well, we don't do D to C, but what about Epic? Right? It's like, well, yeah, Epic is a great case study, but I believed, or I was able to prove that I think there was a lot more. Now, it might not be always traditional going for profit and sales, but we knew or I knew or I believed that D to C had a place within the big organization, and it was 2021 at the time. I was like, if we can't do D to C, to some degree, we're behind. Right? We saw our competitors playing with it. We weren't even touching it. So we quickly kind of mobilized to build this capability and kind of deploy a really kind of unique strategy around it.

So was epic. Provisions. Was that one of the first ones that you guys launched? And was that the model for saying, hey, we can apply this to others? And what were some of the first brands that you were in house, that you were like, okay, these are the ones, and let's spin it up into a D to C instance.

Yeah. So the first thing we have to look at when we were kind of debating this was why Epic, right? And Epic was launched as a D to C brand from the beginning. Right. The founder story is pretty incredible, and we actually acquired it after it got quite a bit of velocity. But it was a great experience or a great kind of experiment to look at Epic and say, Why that? And actually came down to some pretty basic math, like, if you think Epic provisions you think of beef jerky or other products that are similar, you're thinking more of a higher dollar item, higher average order value, higher margin. Right. In addition to that, the kicker also is the fact that their products are a little smaller and they weigh less, right? So shipping and logistics isn't as big of a deal if you go to the complete other end of the spectrum. If we were just to look across the hundred brands that we currently have, you look like a box of Cheerios, right, where our margins are razor thin.

And as everyone who's listening knows, imagine shipping a box of Cheerios across the country. It is a big package that's lightweight, but it's huge. And so if we look across, we've done some different we've tried different fulfillment models, and we knew we weren't even close. The cheapest I can ship a box of Cheerios across the country, as your listeners know better than I do, is like four or $5 usually. Well, there goes the margin, right? You can see the blood right under the brand manager's face when you bring that up in the first conversation you have. So what we did is we looked and we said, we have to find something that has a little bit of margin or some margin that we can at least play with and we can at least manipulate through order value or bundles or things like that, and obviously the weight. But we also knew that some brands were just ripe for D to C. Like, you talk about some of the items and you look at the consumer need, right? It's like, all right, bars, jerky, supplements, and things like that that aren't within our categories.

But we looked across and we started saying, oh, like Lara Bar, Nature Valley Ratio, right. We have a couple of brands that were really ripe, and we started to see some of those spring up kind of in the more traditional strategy that we've deployed. And we just launched Ratiofood.com the other month, a couple months ago, which is a bar brand specifically around Keto. Lara Bar continues to come in and out of kind of the D to C fold, depending on what year it is, whether it's holiday, et cetera. But that's where we're seeing the traditional deployment of D to C within the Is. Again, those categories that make sense. Yeah.

And I think what's really cool here is one about how you guys are evaluating opportunities, right? You have all the products and you have your pick of the litter in terms of what products you want to take to the D to C market. So it's kind of your job to say, okay, let's focus on the ones where D to C as a channel makes sense. Knowing that we A can provide a good experience and becomes a good experience for our customer. But B, that from a margin perspective, we're actually going to be able to deliver this and this is going to be a worthwhile investment. As opposed to, like, oh, we're unclear if this is green or red or if it's a marketing cost or what. We're going to have to write it down as I think it's really cool being able to have that optionality and going forward to choose which products you are going to take to market and as well as being able to learn across some of your different brands in terms of the characteristics of these brands that help a brand perform. D to C. The next thing that I think is really interesting just in terms of for our listeners and how we're thinking about this is like you've got all these D to C brands who realize, okay, D to C is a wedge.

They're able to get started. They build their business on D to C. Now they're thinking retail and expanding through distribution there where you guys already have the product solved, the retail distribution solved. And now your challenge and what, you're responsible if it's like, okay, now how do we do that whole D to C side of things, right?

Right.

So when it comes to launching a brand, what are your first steps? Because I think a lot of what you do right, minus the supply chain, minus the fulfillment, minus the product development, let's say that stuff's already taken care of because you guys already have the products. They've already been tested, they've already been validated in market. But from a technical side of things, you guys are still having to do all the same things that any D to C brand is doing, right? So why don't you walk me through your best practices, how you actually get set up digitally to be able to sell your products D to C?

Yeah, well, it's funny because when I joined, right, how hard can it be, right? We already have the product. We got the hard stuff done right, which I think a lot of your listeners are going to be like, wow, you already have the engineers and the packaging and the supply chain. You got the hard stuff figured out. And I won't try to minimize that. That's a huge amount of work. But thanks to being a 150 year old manufacturer, we've been working at that for quite some time. But what was fascinating is how hard just like some of the things I think, again, your listeners are going to think are so basic. It's like, how do you stand up A.com? Where do we ship this stuff? How do we take the pallets apart? How do we email people after they order? Right? And what we were up against is we were up against these traditional enterprise tech stacks that weren't used to moving at the speed of D to C brands that weren't used to doing this.

And so it's like, well, we have this enterprise system over here. It doesn't talk to this enterprise system oh, you want to send an email six months later kind of thing. And that's the type of conversation as these teams we were up against. And so what we actually did is we built an entirely new tech stack kind of in parallel to the enterprise system. So we went to the tools that your listeners know so well and we're a completely shopify enterprise. We own 100% shopify. It powers all of our DDC storefronts. We're using Klavio for email and SMS and even some consumer data and journey mapping kind of types of things.

We're using Yappo, we're using these tools that are so native to your audience, but we brought them into the organization. Now behind the scenes we've had to wire them up and obviously all the data is going to a central location. We have our security teams that are reviewing and everything, but once that system was set up, we can now launch a brand in a matter of days or weeks because really the hardware from manufacturing perspective is locked in. We now have made a turnkey solution for the technical aspect. They come together and you can launch a brand pretty quickly. And that's what we're really proud to hold on today. And that's what allows us to launch at like the Velocity I mentioned, 30, 40 sites a year because the tech stack is built and it's kind of a copy of paste across the board.

Yeah, I think it's super cool. And it's such a great opportunity that you guys are able to go in through tech, because now you're able to also, from a customer perspective, you're able to provide them with a better customer experience. Because if they want sure you guys don't really care where they're buying, whether they're buying in the store, whether they're buying from a different marketplace, or they're buying direct from you. But if they are buying direct from you, you are able to oversee that first party relationship with your customer and then you have a whole suite of other brands that you can slowly bring them into the fold for. So you're able to ultimately down the line, build these powerful relationships with customers in a way that you wouldn't get in the grocery store call it. And then you have all these different products that you know, these customers might like based on their purchasing behavior. So as a business it makes a whole bunch of sense to be able to start scaling these out from a first party perspective.

Yeah, and that's the data angle, right? It's perfect. I mentioned it really quickly in passing. The fact that all these are centrally tied back for our CDP systems and our data lakes the data that we collect on a ratio keto bar consumer. Might not be the data set, might not be the size of Betty Crocker. But the point is that set of users is an incredibly valuable set of users to hold information on. And now once we put them all centrally, all of a know Betty Crocker might be using that data to better target new keto recipes to a broader audience. Or the, you know, data set might help us target our performance media for a different user set. We have the power kind of of and I hate to use the word synergy, right? But if you think about it, all these brands are connected centrally, right? The data centers are collected.

So regardless of how big small left, right, the D to C brand is, it's contributing and benefiting from the central organism that we've built. And I think that's what's actually got us a ton of traction where, hey, the profits might not be big. Right, the profits might not be huge. But from a first party data perspective and from a UX perspective either, just serving the consumer in a different way, which we can talk about, it's worth its weight in gold.

No? Absolutely. And I think what's really cool about this initiative also, it seems like a lot of times in the corporate world, some of these things get lost on being able to like when it comes down to actually executing and being able to pull something like this off. Totally. So what's really impressive to me is the agility at which you guys are moving and how you guys are approaching this. Because, yeah, this is one of those things where it's like, well, duh, they should do that. But then sometimes in the corporate world, actually taking those projects to fruition isn't as easy as it would sound in theory.

Right? Yeah. The hoops we've had to jump through in order to make it as turnkey as I make it sound are massive. And the idea is we could do that work in the upfront so that we could move at the speed we're moving today. And I think the work is paying off. But yeah, it is not as easy though. We have great distribution, though. We have product manufacturing, all that stuff, which is again, nothing to diminish or minimize the challenge of bringing shopify in and the challenge of bringing Klaviyo and has been no easy.

So the next question that I have for you guys is as it pertains to like marketing, for example, right? All these different brands, they all run their own different sort of campaigns through every channel that you can imagine. Is D to C advertising part of the strategy or is that kind of just a separate thing where D to C is just like the channel for you, you're operating the brand and you're getting bleed off from all the different global marketing that each one of these brands is doing? Or are you guys doing your own D to C marketing?

Yeah, it's a great question and I would say yes and yes. Right. So some brands choose to take D to C and use it as a kind of like business unit in itself, right, where they'll deploy marketing strategies against that channel. Specifically there's objectives. They can do some really interesting things. Other brands use it as one of many channels, right? And if you think about it, as your listeners will know the amount of kind of possibilities that open when you do have a full funnel kind of system. Comparably to a system where we lose our users after they click through the ad because they land at Target or Walmart or Kroger is mind blowing this idea that we can kind of do these full funnel performance marketing type activations because now we know the entire consumer journey. So I think some of the brands who are doing it best are bringing D to C in as a channel, right? They're putting it next to all their retail providers and they are not necessarily looking at it exclusively in their marketing strategy but they're building in kind of the tactics that your listeners think about that we haven't even touched, right? Like we start with awareness Media and go from there.

That's where most of our money goes. But all of a sudden now the tools are there for our marketers to do true performance media, optimizing for purchase. What does that mean all of a sudden for a brand that's done it one way for the last 30 years and all of a sudden now you're like, hey, actually you can see the whole consumer journey. You can see who it was, you can see it was Bob and you can see that he clicked on this ad and got here and in 28 days he's going to want some more products. So what are you going to do about it? And the possibilities there are huge. And for your listeners you're like, well of course that's just what you do. But for us as kind of historic mass media marketers, it's brand new and so we're trying to figure it out and with this great power comes kind of new challenges and we're working through that right now. But I think we're more excited to even have these at our fingertips than kind of daunted by some of the organizational shifts that are going to have to happen around it.

And what are some of the challenges of operating that many brands in this new arena?

Right?

Because like D to C is obviously not quite as simple as finding a new marketplace or a new retailer that you're distributing in where you're just sending a bunch of product and saying, okay, you deal with it, right? You guys are actually managing the relationship like you said, from everything from emails to the ads to the fulfillment to everything, right? And when you start to scale that, it's hard enough to do it with one brand. But as you start to scale out, how have you guys solved the operational challenge? Do you have operators who are working across your different brands? Do you build out teams for specific brand. How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, totally. And it's all part of a scaled system. So on one side in the very most minimal world, we do our best to arm the brand marketers. The people who own those brands, who know those brands the best with the new tools and weapons they need to go out and make things happen, right? Hey, this is Klavio. It's drag and drop. It's pretty easy. It's pretty awesome. Like go crazy, use your agency partners, use whoever you need in order to make this happen.

Call us if you need help. If you remember 20 minutes ago when we kicked this thing off, we're only a team of five of us and we're global, right? And we have to manage all of these things so we have to find a way to scale it, right? So not worst case scenario but in the kind of most turnkey way we arm the brand teams, the brand marketers that are often traditionally trained in kind of this new weaponry for lack of better terms. On the full other side you have dedicated teams who are going after it, right? So a brand is going to launch a digital channel like D to C. You're going to say, okay, we are going to arm them with a fleet of team who's built and sole purpose is only to manage that. Right? Now often that comes from like a site management, marketing kind of product management perspective. What we have done is we have identified kind of key groups or individuals who kind of operationalize some of the logistics, right? Hey, if you want stuff out of SAP, you ship a pallet to this address and you go here and here are your four three pls and there are systems and people who kind of have excelled and been able to kind of oversee kind of the holistic journey. You can see it's kind of a tiered model. So we have us as the core kind of our first ring defense which is kind of our experts in shipping and logistics and things like that.

And then our final round which is the marketers which we do our best to train and kind of enable through the new tools. But again, that's why we're thankful to have shopify and Klavio and things like that, because these marketers are thrilled to have these tools at their so, you know, you can be pretty dangerous in those tools if you just take a couple days to do some research. And that's what they're built for. And so that's why we're excited to bring them to the table.

No, that's amazing. So the next question that I have is moving to the retail side, right? Like you guys have obviously done when you're around doing CPG for 150 years. You obviously dipped your toes into retail and of course you guys have clearly have major success there. So why don't you talk to just tell our listeners a little bit more about the scale at which you guys are in retail, who some of your partners are, what that volume looks like, and how that becomes a real competitive advantage for you guys as you think about building out your D to C brand.

Yeah, so obviously our retail partners are the most important partners we have, right. That's how our consumers end up purchasing our products and D to C makes up some volume. Right. But in compared to our business with our core partners like Walmart, Target, Kroger, et cetera. Negligible right. And we're not afraid to say that. And I think for us, what's interesting is, to your point, early on, we're kind of backing into this D to C world while other brands are coming forward. So if you go to your local Target store, Walmart store, you'll see we have pretty prevalent shelf space.

Right. Oftentimes Cheerios will take up an entire wall. It's hard to miss where we know that we have some digitally native competitors. I wouldn't call them competitors yet, but like people who are in similar spaces, who are starting to get shelf space. Right. And what's fascinating, I think and we've talked about this before, but we are trying to figure out what they do so well, right. These startups and what your listeners do so well. Collect data, optimize media, connect with their consumer in an intimate way, really kind of maybe tackle that niche, right.

Where we are more mass market shelf space, et cetera. Now, everyone's kind of got their own advantage, especially in the world we live in today. And so we're kind of coming at each other to a degree. Now, some of our competitors, we won't dive into names, but they're very niche like kind of people, right. They are looking at a very specific diet, a very specific type of consumer where we are more mass. And I think right now we have this kind affection for each other, right. We're not really competing to a degree, but I think we look at each other again in affection. Right.

We are very envious of what these competitors can do from a consumer connections point of view. Or I'm sure that it's probably not fun to look at a wall of Cheerios and know that we maybe have a little bit of a different advantage within that space. Yeah.

And that's another question that I have, is for you guys, right? Like you mentioned, some of your brands like Cheerios or Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which is obviously one of my favorite cereals and it has been forever. But you know, when you guys are launching different products, I've seen so many different for example, like you said, you have like Honey Nut Cheerios, you have normal Cheerios. You have all these different flavors.

We got Pumpkin Spice, we got a lot going on right now. Exactly.

So when you guys have the relationship with the retailer, how are they. Thinking about variation, right? Because you could almost swap in going niche as one of these different product variants that you're introducing. So how do you guys think about variation? Is there a strategy there and are you trying to go super niche or just say, oh, we already have all this shelf space so we're just going to keep testing and testing out our mix and seeing what's performing, adjusting it seasonally. How do you think about that?

Yeah, well we're always introducing new flavors and new innovation in terms of our products, right, and doing our best to deliver ultimately what consumers are looking for. I think what the best example of this is if we even get outside the world of Cheerios and our major brands and look to some of our incubator brands, right? We have kind of this internal incubator which is constantly not only turning out new products from a flavor perspective or from a form perspective, but from an entirely new brand perspective. And could we probably leverage our retail relationships to put those on shelf? Sure, but those brands have a long way to go, right? Just like a new flavor innovation probably has a long way to go. And I mean that with the most notoriety. They're new to the world, they have to see if their form factor and their flavor works and their fit meets the consumer need. And so when we look at D to C, that's one of our core pillars, right. And of course we have established brands who might use that for flavor innovation. I have some of these here but you look at this is the Reese's Cause special edition box.

This box was not launched in retail. This was a special edition setup that we did via D to C only. But the point being is that we can deploy without a ton of risk, right? And we can learn a lot and then we can use that as ammunition and use that as really kind of learning whether we go back to the drawing board and try a new form factor, new color, new flavor, whatever it might be. Or we go to our retail partners and say, hey, this isn't as big of a risk as it seems. Look at this distribution we've got, look at this consumer feedback. We're coming in with 300 ratings and reviews coming just from D to C. This is how we think it should go to market. And yes, though we could probably lean on our history a little bit and try to kind of get some distribution without proving that we still believe it's really important.

And I think it's probably the same to a lot of your listeners where as they're looking to break into retail, you got to show up with some really solid proof. And in the world we live in today, it's not just a beautiful box and a pitch deck, right? We have all this data and I think we notice that and we look at founders and say, wow, they're really coming to the table with some serious selling power because of that data. It probably would help us if we did that, too. And it helps our relationships really kind of further because we are coming with some proof that this is something the consumers want, and often we can really leverage that in a beneficial way.

So one way that a lot of the founders or brands that we've had on the podcast, they think about D to C, especially when they're retail oriented brands like Think Drinks or like heavier sort of products that maybe don't do so well online. One way they think about D to C is a way to test out new products, reward loyal customers with exciting product drops, and basically use it as this channel to not only provide great experience to customers and do these cool product drops, but also, like you were saying, be able to gather that first party data. So is that a team that you work closely with in terms of your incubation team in terms of because you guys on the D to C end obviously could probably do a lot to help them, whether it's like launching product variants or, like you were saying, gathering that data. Is that a relationship that you're looking to build within the organization?

Yeah. So you actually hit on the third category. We talked about sales, we talked about learning, and then we kind of talked about promotions. You talked about rewarding your largest fans, your fanatics of the brand. Right. And again, this one I have in my desk, right? This was like a limited edition Reese's Puffs cause collaboration, right? And yes, there were normal orange boxes of this on the shelf at Walmart. And actually, before they actually released, they leaked on Reddit, and it was really this kind of viral sensation. Well, that's awesome.

And any family can pick up a version of that, but only a certain amount of our fanatics who are following us on Instagram and really were connected to the brand had access to get this right. And yes, there's a data story behind it, of course, right. We can obviously use that data in really interesting ways. But what I love to tell is I like to think that there are thousands and thousands of these boxes sitting on shelves like I have over here right across the country, and rewarding our most avid fans who are following us on Instagram and are constantly looking at what we're releasing. To actually reward them with a solid piece of the brand is a really interesting way to pay off a very digital first campaign with a really awesome physical product that shows up in their front door the day after they entered into their information. So it is that second pillar. It is rewarding fans. It is looking at our most iconic brands.

I mean, Reese's. Puffs. Right. And saying, how do we take this to the next level? How do we really kind of build this fandom? And how do we use our D to C engine, which is traditionally used for sales or whatever, to make that happen quickly and in really unique ways? And this is honestly probably a lot of the work we do year in and year out is like looking at stuff like this, or we'll look at like this one's, the SpongeBob Cinnamon Toast Crunch version, and we got a ton of them. But the point being is it looks childish, it looks gimmicky, but at the end of the day, it's a really big part of the program and we're doing new and different things throughout the year to really kind of pay off these what were digitally only promotions. Yeah.

And the other thing that I think is really important for our listeners to kind of take note of is I think there's been an obvious explosion in CPG over the last couple of years. Everyone's coming up with their own brand. There's a lot of innovation happening, but I think a lot of people are like, oh, we're just going to go disrupt the old retailers, and it's going to be really easy, right? And so I think one of the most valuable things, or one of my valuable takeaways from this conversation is that the bigger brands that have massive distribution and have a lot of shelf space, you guys are showing up to the party, right? This isn't just like, oh, we're sitting there and like, yeah, any DTC or CPG brand that once can come take our shelf space. No. And I think what's important for founders to really understand when you're growing a brand and you're thinking about it is if you're going to be able to compete in that environment, you need to be even more aware of going into a product niche where you think there's an emerging market that one of the bigger conglomerates doesn't have a foothold in. So they aren't just going to be able to scale up and kind of take market share shelf space from you. And you need to operate from the mentality, like, I need to bring my A game and I need to move, and I need to move fast because I think a lot of people think at the enterprise level, oh, it's going to take this company years and years and years to dirt. Like, I don't need to worry about product mode.

I don't need to worry about this, I don't need to worry about that because they're so big and they're sleeping.

Right?

Whereas one of my big takeaways from this conversation is like, no, at the enterprise, you guys have economies of scale. You have the relationship, you have the shelf space, you have these plays, and when you get the right people with the right operational chops to solving those problems, you guys can move fast too. So I think the lesson for founders is like, okay, great. You should take this knowledge and not be ignorant about it. You should say, okay, there's definitely opportunities for me to disrupt that General Mills isn't going into right now. So maybe those are the types of opportunities that I should think with. And I should think with the same kind of mentality that you were saying. Think about the products that ship well, have good optics for D to C, have good unit economics and all that sort of stuff, and build your brand authentically your way.

Don't think about it like, oh, I'm not worried about this brand coming in, or, I can totally get that shelf space. No, you need to be thoughtful and build your brand kind of how you're thinking about it.

Yeah. And that's an awesome like, when the day does come and you do start getting some distribution, how does DTC not just go away? How does it morph into a growth channel, into experimentation channel? And how do you continue to kind of nurture your, maybe retail brands or your retail products, your retail SKUs with new and innovative ways to use this incredible DTC channel that you spent so much time on? And I think, again, we're backing into it, but the founders and the teams who are listening to this are doing it best, and I think everyone's kind of got their advantage and everyone's kind of playing to their strength while also working to fortify their weakness. And I think the list you described is a perfect kind of summary of our conversation.

So as we look forward right now that you guys kind of have your playbook in terms of which brands you choose to launch D to C, and you've already seen some success, and you've got the operations sort of figured out across a lot of the brands that you're launching, what are the next things on your agenda? Like, what are the things that you're really excited about to bring? Is it launching new brands? Is it optimizing your current brand strategy and growing those D to C? Is it looking at new online channels, a little bit of everything? Where are you thinking over the next couple of years?

Yeah, I think it's twofold. So the first one is we are dead set on launching new experiences. Right. New brands, whether that's a brand new brand or if it's a brand that does choose to go D to C, who might be ripe based on kind of the pre qualifications we talked about early in the conversation. And I think we're dead set on that. And we love to hand the tools off to the teams who know those brands the best to nurture and grow that as they see fit. Right. The second thing is related, and we've talked about it actually in the conversation, but it's really finding or nurturing back to that word.

Right. The capabilities that D to C tends to unlock, right? We talked about that's a new way of performance marketing. This idea that we now have full funnel analytics, that we have this new one on one communication with consumers, as weird as that sounds, some of that's pretty new to some of these brands, right, where they're used in doing these mass marketing kind of traditional media campaigns. And now we kind of unlock this whole new world of marketing. In addition to some of the new things that also D to C enables, such as like social commerce, finding new ways to intersect consumers, how are we creating a really great path to purchase regardless of they're buying D to C? Or maybe we can use some of the D to C like tactics to bring them into a retail partner. But what D to C is doing is it's enabling and forcing the conversation of how to show up in a more digitally first way and how to show up in a more modern way. And regardless of the state of D to C that they might be in, it's exciting for us to see those I would call them, I guess, second order effects. But at the end of the day, it's kind of this new wave and it's a new wave of commerce.

It's a new way of marketing. It's a new way of kind of connecting with the consumer called whatever you might, Will. But I think that's what excites me the most is that, yes, we're launching a ton of D to C sites, but the ripple that that is creating within the organization of doing things differently on a marketing, commerce, whatever perspective is what's exciting to us.

No, I've been pretty blown away by this conversation just in terms of how you guys are thinking about it, how fast you've moved. It's like really impressive. So props to you guys. We're rooting for you. And I guess for our listeners who are tuning in, maybe they have questions about how you guys are thinking about things and maybe there's some learnings they want to get. Where can they connect with you? Are you on Twitter? LinkedIn. Shout out?

Yeah, for sure.

Socials.

Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to find me. Carter Jensen the only one at General Mills. You'll see a little serial emoji in my headline there and yeah, reach out. I mean, we always love talking to new and emerging brands because actually we're probably going to learn more from you guys than you might learn from us. But we would love to hook you up with whatever teams internally you might like to kind of bounce ideas off of. I think everyone at Mills is really excited about where this industry is going and we're excited to kind of continue to network and share as opportunities arise. So yeah, definitely reach out on LinkedIn. It's the best place to find them.

Sweet.

Well, thanks so much for coming on the Pod. Loved having you guys and can't wait to see your continued growth.

Yeah, thanks buen appreciate the time.