Food and beverage businesses are complex.
We build tools, systems, and procedures, for companies that want to scale wisely and profitably.
Our team has spent 20+ years in food, hospitality and consumer brands, managing hundreds of humans across various stages of growth and even scaled our own company through six straight years on the Inc. 5000 list.
We’ve delivered $20MM+ private and control label programs for some of the world’s largest retailers.
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We created our site as if you are a “fly on the wall” in a room with our founders. Get a “read” on us. We’re pretty transparent with what we know and how we can be helpful. We look forward to exploring together.
Our Focuses
Business Architecture & Governance
Clean books, real board minutes, one version of the cap table — the difference between winning the deal and losing it.
If I’m going to look at two companies — let’s say two pizza companies — Company A is growing at a similar rate to Company B. All things considered, their products, brand, look, and feel are exceptional. The teams are good, they’re nice people, they’re capable, they’ve been delivering their products on time.
But then we get into due diligence. We have to look at a data room, because we have to get things through legal and close the deal.
Company A’s books and records are a mess. There are a million versions of the capitalization table and they’re in conflict with one another. There’s no record of shareholder meetings.
There are no minutes from board meetings. It’s not clear they even had board meetings, or if they did, they were intermittent. The architecture of their board might not have had committees, or outside folks, or independent board voices. It’s all insider voices. There was insufficient fiduciary responsibility taking place across the board.
Company B wins the investment because Company B is net cleaner than the other.
If we can help companies make it seamless and keep it seamless through the lifespan of the business, then when it comes time to sell the business, this is an area they don’t have to worry about — because it’s all buttoned up.
Product life cycle
“Speed is only important insofar as people tell you it matters.”
I think it can be the thing that kills you, too. Actually knowing your shit is pretty fucking important.
In the context of creating a product, you have to recognize that based on statistics alone, the odds of your initial creation being the thing that makes you successful are pretty low. So how do you get better? By doing lots of testing. You can do that at the most local level —whether it’s a farmer’s market, an isolated geography, an isolated channel, an isolated retailer. You should be creating products in a more controlled environment.
There’s nothing more terrifying to me than watching the CPG news out there, or LinkedIn feeds of people celebrating their authorizations in literally thousands and thousands of stores, when they know deep down — when they put their head on their pillow — that their product isn’t where it needs to be yet. It might even be flat-out not tasty.
I see concept to shelf as a bit of a cycle. You put version one on the shelf in as few stores as is feasibly possible to create a marketable and sellable version of what you have. Then you get it on a few shelves and you listen. You listen, you listen, you pay attention. And silence sometimes is the biggest indicator that you’re not there yet. There’s nothing that’s going to grow more slowly than something that just sort of tucks into its category without being mind-blowingly interesting.
Having created hundreds of SKUs that have been on shelf over the course of our lifetime —and written some songs as an independent community rock and roll guy — you never actually know what’s going to resonate with the market. Back when we had High Road Ice Cream, never did I believe that Bourbon Burnt Sugar — this sort of esoteric, niche, local thing — would take off as our top national-selling foodservice product, and then be the top- selling ice cream among our brand for literal years. I couldn’t top it if I tried.
So much of this is serendipity. You have to be willing to take things off shelf, be constantly replacing them. And the more interesting part of this is: within your brand, maybe don’t pigeon yourself into a particular category. If your expertise is in a particular culture, or a particular flavor profile, or a particular technique, spend a lot of time asking yourself: What would my company look like if I was forced to discontinue everything that I’ve put out to shelves so far?
If you’re not asking yourselves those questions, you’re putting your company in a very vulnerable position.
Agentic AI
Never in my life did I think I would be as annoyed and interested in something at the same time. Secondarily, AI can be used for far more powerful means than your personal brand or amplifying your brand. That stuff should be bespoke — stuff you write by yourself. In fact, all of this text on the screen is brought to you by us speaking into a microphone and using our own voices.
AI can give you the opportunity to work on the things that make the most difference in your business — which is your product excellence, being in real life with your customers, creating actually compelling content about your business or your product, and getting out there in the real world.
We have created agentic solutions that have replaced the need to have a bookkeeper. We’ve created agentic solutions that completely solve gross-to-net margin dilution realities. We’ve created agentic solutions for customer care, and for shipping samples. What we’re finding is that most of the day-in, day-out functions within your business that can be automated can be automated using AI.
And in a world where you have private equity looking at every dime, unnecessary SG&A expenditure within a business is going to be scrutinized more than ever. It is true that that number should go way, way, way down — as powerful as AI is today. We’re already harnessing and creating tools to make AI a significant part of your business at a very, very low cost.
TRUEMARGIN
TrueMargin was born of me spending three years trying to trace back the steps of why my ice cream company didn’t make it in the long run. I came to the conclusion that it was a lack of discipline around margins and margin preservation — not being uncompromising enough about this area I call the economics of one. The economics of one unit. If your economics of one unit are not exceptional, you shouldn’t be spending time snowing yourself into believing that when you’re selling a million of these units, somehow your economies of scale will improve. Generally speaking, that’s not the case.
What I’ve seen across all of the businesses we’ve consulted with and investigated is that between zero and a million in revenue, and then again from a million to five million in revenue, controls around cost and bills of material actually get to the point where they’re borderline out of control.
Having a ton of discipline up front about the economics of the product, how it’s manufactured, the costs that go into it — plus the logistics, minus every single possible conceivable deduction — helps you architect a price for your product that will keep your nose above water. And if you don’t spend a ton of time on this — what I think is the most important activity outside of making sure your product is delicious and your brand is compelling — the chances of you failing are very, very high.
We’ve created a tool that helps you put your margins on autopilot so you can sleep well at night. And then we can point you to other companies who have products to help you track those deductions, to make sure you’re achieving the target margins you designed without being compromising up front.
identity and creative
Keith: Nicki, you’re good at taking people’s vibes, energy, and words and translating them into symbols and images and packages that blow people’s minds. What’s your approach?
Nicki: It’s important to take founders and heads of companies through a series of — it’s really like a workbook. A process book. Take folks through what matters to them, what matters to their company, their values. Where they are with their competition. Where they see your brand flourishing.
We look at colors that resonate within the space. We look at words and typography. We look at patterns. We look at culture and language. Once we get a vibe for the brand, we carry it through the whole company, the whole being — the brand messaging, packaging, merch, internal communications, external communications. We make it all seamless and feel easy.
Keith: I’ve also seen you reject the status quo that’s out there. You’re a deep critic of “Me Too” brands and “Me Too” brand images — stuff that becomes trendy to the point of being caricatured. You’re a staunch believer that each mark and each brand should feel like an original. Why?
Nicki: Because you only have one chance to catch someone’s eye, or to tell your story, or to sell what you’re all about. So if you’re trying to be like somebody else or like something else, your audience is just going to see you as somebody else, and you’re not going to resonate.
You’re not going to resonate without being unique.
Mirepoix Brand Identity
supply chain and compliance
Brokers don’t optimize for you. Regulators don’t either. We sit between you and both – planning, watching, keeping you out of trouble.
From a cost and time standpoint, this takes up a tremendous amount of an emerging team’s time and attention — particularly if their scale is not yet at full truckload all the time. That’s maybe when you can rest easily that your costs are under control.
But when you have pressures from different regional distributors, pressure relative to your minimum order quantities, rush orders that might need to go out — it’s not really wise to just set it and forget it with a broker. Brokers aren’t aligned to make sure your logistics costs are under control. Brokers want to make as much money as they possibly can and get as many loads as they possibly can. So they’ll move fast on your behalf, but they won’t necessarily architect the logistics cost-control program on your behalf.
So we act as a planning mechanism and an intermediary to that world. Along with that — obviously, if you’re going cross-border at all, or interstate, and you have a highly regulated product like meat or dairy, there are rules that come into play. In addition to being really intentional on the business architecture, governance, and standard operating procedure side up front, there’s this compliance bookend where we take a look at everything from possible recall protocols to all of your food safety certifications and gaps.
All of the little nitty-gritty things that could get you into trouble if not buttoned up — from bioterrorism, to Food Safety Modernization Act compliance, to tariff-related issues in today’s political climate, you name it.
There are a lot of things to pay attention to. It’s our intention to help founding teams spend as much time as possible on growing their profitability, growing their brand recognition, and developing relationships with their customers — and have all of this back-office stuff taken care of on their behalf, without them having to hire full-time folks in this arena, particularly when they’re not $100M-and-above revenue-sized businesses.
who should work with us?
We’re great for pragmatic, reasonably well-funded founders — the kind funded to the point they might consider hiring a #2 or COO. Hire us instead and you get more skill, more productivity, and a deeper bench for around the same or less.
We’re great for organizations where the founder has slid back into the founder role and brought on a hired gun — someone to mature processes and apply larger-industry expertise inside a smaller business. That’s a perfect stage for us.
And we’re great for lower-middle-market PE. Brands that need turnaround. Brands that have plateaued, are losing money, are stuck and stagnant. We can be super, super helpful there.
We’re not great for early-stage, persona-driven founders who are jamming their foot on the gas pedal, hoping the world will respond favorably to their inventions. We love them. But they need to go out there and make those early mistakes on their own.
We’re also not a hype machine. It’s a mistake for any firm to say, “choose us and we’ll make the entire world need you, and we’ll magically make your margins better.” There are a lot of agencies out there lighting people’s money on fire — overpromising results that may or may not be achievable.
What we actually do is stabilize businesses. We improve the insight of the leaders of those businesses. And when we’re not needed on an everyday basis, we become indispensable information, resources, and advisors as they grow those organizations or create new ones.
We’re also crafty motherfuckers. Our background as founders who scaled from zero to $30M means there’s a grittiness — a get-your-hands-dirtyness — about us. We’re not just consultants. We’re people actually creating our own things concurrently. So not only have we learned from our past, we’re learning from our present every single day. And we share those insights via Right Lane Brands.
We have the unique ability to look at your idea on the back of a napkin and say, “All right, where can we take that?”
You want to make sure you have everything done properly — whether it’s product nutritional facts, getting an operational factory up to FDA standards, selecting the right packaging, making sure your margins are right. Because we don’t have to go spend another 20 years learning all the things we’ve learned along the way.
This is as simple as: When you need something that requires highly experienced people, you call highly experienced people. Yes, we might be expensive, but we get it done fast and right.
OUR BRANDS
