Navigating the Beverage Industry with Robert Cogan

We're in it, Sam. We're live.

We are.

We are live. Welcome to Drink Up Saturday Morning. It is the 11th of October. Robert Kogan, welcome. We call him Cost of Goods. Welcome to the show.

We're very much appreciative. It's always cost of goods sold.

Cost of goods sold. So I'm sure we'll get in that today. I know we have a whole list of stuff that we want to get through, but before we get started, we're going to call out our supporters of the show. On the Rocks with Ryan Hellman. Hellman, thank you for sponsoring us, by the way. Didn't even know you were sponsoring us, but you are. Jay Williams. I'm out of water, man. I'm still waiting for it to be sent to me. You know, Freebird, I talk about it every week, so get me the water. Adam with Alias Advising. Thanks again for supporting. And then Alicia Vargo. Always thanks for supporting us with Bev Assets. So let's get into it, man. So Robert, why the heck would you want to come on this show with us?

Well, guys, like, you know, the podcast rotation is, it's a lifeblood. It's a connection to what's going on. But more importantly, it's a connection to people. There's a bit of a, I don't know what you call it on LinkedIn with all the, yeah, yeah, love you, way to go. And a lot of the engagement is social media fluff. So like all of us, we yearn for the contact, the communication. With Wade and now Gavin at CPG Vibes. I've been working with those guys for basically a year plus, and I just gravitate Peter and Jeff at the Where the Dogs of Society Howl, if that's not a direct name. And then you guys, like I was telling you earlier, Saturday morning, this goes back to my childhood. It's like a Saturday morning Wall Street Journal experience.

So incredibly kind. Yeah.

So there's, there's, there's why I want to always listen, as you guys know, and tune in and then And there's the nuggets of intelligence. You can't beat that. It's, it's free and you don't have to pay consultants. And, um, I guess lastly and most importantly, homage, homage, not homage, homage. Right. And, and foyer, not foyer. Okay. Just so we're, we're straight on. No, but that's a whole other topic about how ironic it is.

It's a whole different job.

You said homage earlier about the different products out there. And really it's, I'm going to pay homage to YouTube. Because you guys are just approachable and approachable is my language and I'm approachable and it's important to be approachable and be comfortable. So there's the long answer.

I mean, I think that's already a, yeah. I mean, let's get into it because you said, which first of all, I want to call out, I loved your point of all the rah-rah that happens on LinkedIn. I think we all feel this, like when you only got 30 seconds to say something to somebody. You want to default to it being positive and being a cheerleader, which I think is great. And I think a lot of us are trying to exude positive energy, but that can't be the entirety of the conversation. Right. I think that's a phenomenal point that you made, even if you weren't trying to necessarily go that deep with it. So yes, you had a wonderful list that Sam and I both really enjoyed that you took the time to put together. And so where do you want to start in telling people, we know a little bit about you, but telling people who you are, How you got here, what you're doing now, and then yes, giving us, us, you know, uninformed Americans a crash course on Canada.

Well, yeah, first thing I will straighten out is the cost of goods sold thing. The nickname Coggs as a short form for my last name happened long before me or my friends even knew what cost of goods sold were. I also used to joke around with that old brand RC Cola. I didn't want to, but you know, my buddies would come to me and say, hey, hey Coggs, I've got your cola. It tastes okay, but I'd rather have a Coke or Pepsi. So that explains the Coke thing. And how can a sassy guy who's played a million innings of baseball, because in baseball you got to yap, not say cost of goods sold? Doesn't that mean 60, 80% of every sale comes to me? I haven't been getting all the checks, but every income statement I look at, my name's right there. And I don't know, I thought I was going to be getting all that 60, 80, 90%. But anyway, to start off with that, the list that you guys are referring I thought it was an opportunity with some extra time. Usually there's a 5-minute segment I join in. Nobody really knows, how did this happen? Why is Robert in this business? Robert doesn't really fit this business. What's going on here? And I guess the bullet point story to explain that, covering like maybe, I don't know, a good 35 years, is real estate-centric and big real estate. Not because I did big real estate. My late father did the biggest. Real estate, and when I say the biggest, literally the biggest in Canada. Canadian history record-breaking deals and all that stuff. So I was I'm the fourth of four kids. So I was sort of slotted in as the gopher boy. Get things done. Find this. Take care of these VIPs. Do this. Do that. And that career stretched right up into the early '90s, where I got to live the dream with the Jays, the Blue Jays. Winning 2 World Series after my late father was heavily involved in the facility, the SkyDome, that was the first retractable roof on Earth. And, and got to experience and be exposed to so many different things. So fast forward a few years later, that guy Steve Wynne, he called a friend who knew my dad, and my dad single-handedly got gambling on the provincial election referendum in '96. So from that experience, I got more Starbucks and drove more presentations back and forth between here and Niagara Falls, Niagara region. Then I went to school, took the bus to school. I just was down there and back and forth, and I learned so much about real estate business. And then fast forward now a few years later, I'm literally driving back from Michigan. Since '08, I've had the, the miracle of reuniting with the first girlfriend I ever had when we were kids in Michigan. And that's a big part of the business that I have because I'm back and forth because of my lady, not because of I love going to Tigers games or any other business thing motivation. So a buddy call. Okay.

Hey, you're recording. Yeah, you're good.

Where I'm where I'm at right now, Sam, is something that is right in line with your lane—the alcohol—but it's a little fringe. It's a fringe off the lane. After the Niagara experience, pretty much everybody and their brother gravitated towards my dad's office. So I became friends with a lot of people, and one guy named Steve was a true friend. And he's what I call a wine lifer, lives on a vineyard. His wife teaches oenology. Oenology, that's a wine term. Viticulture, another wine term. And he told me, after we were good friends from the first decade of the century, working on all the Niagara Falls and the gambling and the real estate deals, He invented a new product. Now, you know ice wine, right? Yeah.

I don't.

Do you know that the number one region in the world for ice wine is Niagara Region due to the fact that it's got reliable annual production? Unlike the other parts of the world that do have ice wine, it's not guaranteed that every year there'll be frozen grapes to create legit ice wine. Province of Ontario treats— yeah. And the Province of Ontario treats ice wine Like the province of Champagne in France and Modena in Italy treats their trademarks and their intellectual property for that. So ice wine can only be— the grapes have to be frozen for 3 days minimum at -7 degrees Celsius, and supervisors from the ministry come and supervise at 2:00 AM in the morning to make sure the juice is squeezed there in the vineyard. That's the way it has to be. So my buddy noticed a little stickiness on the spigot and he invented ice syrup. So moron over here gets into the food business with a product that is new and invented. Doesn't even have an HS code. An HS code is applied to every product for import and export. HS, Harmonized Sales. I say, I'm not even sure. All I know is it took a year to get an HS code and it was hilarious. The hoops we had to jump through. So I'm down at a trade show in Miami and across the aisle is a brand called Blossom Water. So I broke my rule again, fruit or flower extracts. And I started working on Blossom Water. My boss partner said, as far as ice syrup is concerned, it takes 6 months to use a bottle. Go sell something that gets consumed in an hour, a drink. So RTD, here I am. So Blossom Water became my minor leagues, my single-A, my double-A, And then AAA. And then finally I got it listed with LaPerry Foods and ran into something that we all ran into, the catch-22. Distributor, take my brand. How many stores do you have? I got 3. I got a friend and a friend of a friend and my sister's husband's daughter at her ice cream shop. That's what I got. Uh, 8, 9 days in Toronto, get in the car, 4 or 5 days in Michigan. It's been going on 15 years. Yes. And around the US and from Canada to the US as well. And around the world into Canada and the US too. I would say, um, you know, going down, it's basically the progression. What I was just yapping about was close. I almost got to close the circle on that, Sam. Uh, no problem. No problem. I see that. Peace and love to everyone in the world. Anyway, closing the circle on that, it landed me, uh, in this spot. Which answers your question of like what I do. How does— do we clarify this ambiguity of products going back and forth? And what I realized is I went to a cash and carry because I was bringing in LaCroix sparkling water. Cash and carries are where independent stores gravitate to. They do not have GFS, Gordon Food Services, UNFI.

I don't. So please.

Cash and carry is a big secret out there. They are. Open market retailers go there and get their dollies like it's Costco and they load up all the stuff they need for their little stores. Big stores show up there too. Good. So in the US you have Jethro's, which is a big chain of cash and carries.

Oh, okay. I've seen 'em. I didn't know what they were, but I've seen, okay, sure. That's what they are. So, and I don't mean to derail this, this is, I'm going to learn a shitload on this episode. From a, from a brand perspective, if I'm RTD can product A and I'm selling to a cash and carry who's then gonna have product available for a re— an end retailer to come get, the price model for a cash and carry is the same as distributor. Like I'm selling to them at the wholesale price. So it's another, it's another link in the chain. It's a—

Yeah. The cash and carry is a distributor in the cost model, but they only make 10% cuz they gotta They have to buy from the distributor, the supplier. The supplier has to suck it up and take a lower, get a lower margin to give the cash and carry that room to put their 10% on it. So stores can come by, come by and buy it wholesale.

Interesting. Okay. Thank you. Interesting. Sure. Interesting.

So in Toronto, there's several large ones. There's many smaller ones. And a lot goes on at the cash and carries. You know what I just realized, Sam? Remember we talked earlier about Where do we draw the line on war stories? Some stories are not for public consumption, but this one is. The cash and carry. Yeah, but this one, this one is, is actually educational. Like Adam said, he wants, this is gonna be a great download. You guys, some people don't know what a cash and carry is. And it astounds me because it's as much as people not being aware that Toronto is the 3rd largest census metropolitan area, CMA. It's a real estate term. It's the 3rd largest market in North America. And it is frustrating. So frustrating that Toronto, Yeah. So anyway, but this war story is absolutely hilarious. It's movie-worthy. Maybe not a theater release, but the cash-and-carry world in Toronto has a special wrinkle to it. It's the import-export. So I only knew what a cash-and-carry was because I got discount cigarettes from a buddy whose office was across the street from one. That's all I knew. Then as I was struggling with that Lacroix brand, I realized cash-and-carry, maybe I should go see those guys at this one. Over at Lawrence and Dufferin in Toronto, and I did. So when I looked in the cash and carry, I saw all of the U.S. product, no bilingual labeling, which is what you see in Loblaws, Metro, Sobeys, Shoppers Drug Mart, all of our Kroger, CVS type chains. And okay, great. I can put the LaCroix in here. I want to test it out. It's exempt from the language rules because it's kosher, which is a bit of a loophole. And let's go, let's go. Then as my buddies, not only the cash and carry, but a baseball teammate were cluing into me back and forth from Michigan every week and a half, they asked me to get stuff. So a year later, I'm bringing in truckloads of Fanta non-orange, the grape, the peach, the strawberry, the berry. And we all know stuff flavored or colored blue sells a lot more than stuff not blue. The cash and carry environment in Toronto, like many other businesses, is akin to selling weed in high school. There is a huge amount of stealth. There are secrets, there is skullduggery. And I come from real estate where our commissions are on the first page of the agreement. And I also want to look in your eyes after we do business and do more business. And real estate has a guardrail. So they first asked me to get Old Time soda during the pandemic because the blue and the cotton candy was— and the bubblegum flavors were huge demand. They were being sold out in a minute. So I'd made 3 calls, found Joe, the head of sales for New England Beverage, and I brought it in at $14 a case US, put my 10% margin on. It goes right to the cash and carry. Yeah. And then I found the ginger beer, the Old Time ginger beer, which has been around since I was a kid. So I thought I had my ticket to go to mass retail. Ginger beer, we got it bilingual. Meanwhile, all the Old Time soda SKUs and their blends, their sugar juices are coming in and everything's starting to grow with me being asked to bring in stuff from the US. So what's going on with this English only, no French English, and it's all over the place. So I got faced with this question. If I don't bring in the US product, someone else is. So as things progressed, this cash and carry, I call it like prison yard, high school style. I— Well, it's, it's, it's basically when the guy who's 6'7 asked me to get Mike and Ike soda, which is licensed to 8 counties in Jersey and Pennsylvania through a craft soda manufacturer. He literally in the loading dock area while we were having a smoke, Leaned in with his phone and said, I need you to get this. Just like that. I call the company up, the truckloads show up. But then what happens is like high school weed. No, that's New England Beverage. They're a pretty big company. This one is A Treat. They have their own brand out of Pennsylvania and they also do 2 flavors of Mike and Ike soda. So Mike and Ike soda, typical coveted product for the exotic world, even though it's just Cherry and strawberry soda, but it's got Mike and Ike on it. So there's a great example of everything there. Now, ironically, or surprisingly or not, the owners of the cash and carry were in a fight. One of them asked me to go get US product. And next thing you know, I'm bringing in about 15 trucks a month, but no, not the cash and carry, because my name's Billy, not silly. So if I brought the 15 trucks a month to the cash and carry, there'd be distributors who I'm messing with. Just like we try to get a product in the store, our buyers at the store say, well, to get you in, we got to get somebody out. So I have a buddy who I knew was importing and selling to the cash and carries. So I took what I call the step back and became the importer for my buddy Gary. Gary sells to the cash and carries. No, I know. I know who sells the weed, Sam. Gary sells the truckloads of Fanta Berry and peach and all that stuff. Well, yeah, I did. I was in the cash and carry bombing LaCroix. But my, yeah, the Billy Not Silly expression is I'm not stupid and I'm not going to go and try to disrupt a flow in business, especially in an unregulated, synonymous with selling weed in high school. I don't want to go piss off the big dealer just because I stumbled upon a source. So I'm going to provide that source of truckloads of vanilla Coke. Fanta Berry, all this stuff. And I'm as confused. I was as confused as you guys are trying to figure this out. But with Canada, we're different because we have that border. So it just led to me hustling and getting these grocery stores. I came up with, I got like 15 in Michigan, so I can turn the key and get a brand into 15 stores in Michigan and then qualify pretty much the same day that I get asked.

Or the next day. I want to, I want to jump back on something you said, because it's been 7 years since I tried to get something, anything into Canada right now. Yeah. Cobes, you said something about the, the French-English, the language laws, brands being exempt from it if they were kosher. Can you say more about that? Because I've never heard that before, but that is fascinating information.

Let me try to cover the other 7 questions that would follow in the conversation.

Okay.

There is a group of people like me that show up at trade shows or US brands and say, give me a pallet. Let's get it in and get it into the independents before we start spending money. There's another group of bullshitters and I, it's, they're not their fault. It's their job. Their job is to go to the same suppliers and say, no, Robert was here and he wants you to send a pallet. Oh no. If you're not French English, you're subject to being Report it, which is anonymous reporting. And there's no police force that goes and looks for non-compliant because health risk is really the issue. So when I bring stuff in, there's a food import license. It's called an SFC, Safe Food for Canadian Import license. And now I'm thinking about what you said, Sam, in the introduction. And this is a great segue into answering some of that stuff and what I brought in. I did my first shipment full smuggler. Then the next one, I get my Safe Food for Canadians license. When I bring that in, it comes through Canada Border Services Agency, which is integrated with FDA. Your question, what happens if there's a recall for one of those brands that Vincenzo's orders, 2 cases of oyster crackers? I get notified by LaPerry, FDA, and CFIA right away.

Mm-hmm.

We're integrated. We got satellite scanners on everything. But ironically, the only time language comes into play is when a jealous, envious competitor or somebody feeling like they're importing this brand and putting the French English on it. And some asshole like me is meeting demand and bringing in a SKU that's not here. It's health risk assessed by me and it comes in through CBSA.

Mm-hmm.

And the CFIA only jumps in if somebody does an anonymous report. Which is absolutely hilarious. We're not going to get into some of those war stories because they involve brands that are worth billions of dollars. And we're just going to skip over that and stay on point with the brutal truth that when Restoration Hardware, you know, the store, they have more restaurants now, but at the time they had Chicago, Palm Beach, and Toronto. And they had to have the same consistency in the menu. Each Foreman and Sons is the official supplier to Buckingham Palace. of smoked salmon in England. The nephew in Chicago asked me to get some smoked salmon up to Restoration Hardware. As usual, I did it once, smuggled $800 worth in the back of my truck. Then I got my fish import license the next day. And then frozen smoked salmon, which is worth a whole separate podcast of what I learned. Not in, I do what's needed, but for the need, I went and got my salmon, my fish import license, and they inspected it. They gave me a random inspection. I had some interesting CFIA training on random inspections, right down to, oops, it already went to the store. Hi, restoration, put the yellow tape on that freezer, please. They're coming to check. That all happens. You have to use one of the alcohol importers that have their alcohol import license. It's loosened up a lot. Wine was already loose. looser than hard liquor, and then beer loosened up, and now alcohol is available in convenience stores. But that's above my pay grade on importing alcohol. That's one of the categories I do not deal with. I pass it over to guys I know who are experts in importing alcohol. It's very difficult in Canada. You might've heard every province has their own registration requirement. It's typical for an alcohol company to choose Alberta first. So you can take advantage of their 6-month timeline. The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, which I'm sure you've heard of, one of the biggest consumers of alcohol on earth, made a lot of news with the tariff bullshit when it had to be mentioned to our American friends that, yeah, you want to screw with the LCBO, you're not going to have too many happy producers in Kentucky. Yeah, that was dark. Okay. There's a, there's the NAFTA agreement, which changed to CUSMA, Canada-US-Mexico Agreement. So. When the tariff war started, all of the product that went into the States that was already USMCA compliant did not get affected by that extra 25%. All of my products are compliant. So I never ever suffered a 25% tariff of sending product into the States. But Canada retaliated with a 25% tariff on everything. So a shipment comes in for 10 grand. The CBSA would charge me 25%, but then I smartened up. Like I posted on LinkedIn a few times, I realized that the 10 grand I'm paying for the product is not the true value of the product. I'm paying for the marketing value, the name that we were talking about, you know, how valuable a name is from a Chinese company to a European company. And I just looked in their eyes and said, this $10,000 order is really worth $3,000 in terms of raw goods, cost of goods. Right.

And?

The tariff went down to 25%. I just would submit the invoices as is with a little disclaimer and explanation. So the $10,000 purchase order didn't get nailed for $2,500. I got nailed for $800 because I would reduce the invoice based on a brutal truth reality. You know where this came from, actually? The drug dealing, the drug dealing at the, at the cash and carry, because a customer said, why are you so cheaper? I don't know. Why does he charge you so much more? Send me the invoice. He charged a profit margin on the freight. That's where I got the idea from. If I deliver something to you for $15 a case and tell you, yeah, my margin's, I'm adding $2 a case. You know, that's my percentage. $15 divided by point whatever, right? No, $1.80 of that $15 was freight. So it's really a $13.20 sale.

That's wily.

And importers in drug land, in cash and carry land, will just hustle a Sprinter van across the border. And you remember Prime Hydration? It broke up families, guys. Prime Hydration absolutely devastated people. People got stuck with truckloads. Prime even got stuck with about 1,000 pallets sitting in a warehouse right now because of their big, big, big hype dive spike.

Still around.

They're, they're what a good distributor buddy of mine refers to as a hot item. And then he says, this one's just another stock item that's gonna be— so Prime is now like a stock item. It used its hype to get into the CoreMark planogram at all of the CNGs across Canada. That's probably like 15,000, 20,000 showed up with Lionel Messi backing it to go after Prime and Coca-Cola Pepsi with their BodyArmor, Vitaminwater, Powerade, Gatorade. They did not shake. Like George Carlin said, you can do whatever you want to planet Earth. Planet Earth don't give a shit. Coke, Pepsi, and KDP do not give a shit. They will watch you. They will buy you. They will laugh at you. You get shelf space in their zone. So Prime, very interesting use of social media. And it's a new realm, the social media marketing, which Prime, Poppy, Olipop, and a few others Have benefited from, and they've done it very well. I'd be generous if I said 50/50. The failure rate is probably like 65/70 with about 30% actually staying there for the next year and a half, 2 years later. I'll use baseball analogies. They keep getting hits. They keep getting that magical move to this move here, the customer in the store doing that. And it's, yeah, but you know, this is, yeah, Richard Moniz and I, I try to talk to him as much as I can. I bribe him with bagels to come have lunch with me and all that stuff. He is really the number one scientist that I know in this realm because he deals with the actual science of eye tracking, where we look, why we buy things. Why is this 26 so big on the core power? Richard can tell you. Okay. As we bring in Sati Soda, Richard will be eyeballing this. We'll be looking at what the features are and he will give a critique. Of if, if a Relax Healthy Energy, you know, the Celsius Solani NuVibe, is this, he will then analyze why and where it's being conveyed and make suggestions as we do a re— Yes. It's okay. I went, I went off a little bit from the answer to the question, more like, you know, when you were asking me about the 30% that stay, I don't know. There are so many examples because there's a lot of artificial out there. So without getting into any personal stories, let's take Olipoppy, for example. We have brands that have exploded based on what I believe is bought social media engagement. So exactly. Well, that's, that's bought art. It's a little artificial. Sometimes we should buy things, but okay. Now let me go before I start making criticism. I want to, I want to go to one of these lines on my notepad at the bottom, which is very indicative of how we all should be. Me no speak English. Me bring box. Somebody want box, more box. I bring more box. That's all we can do. And if you're making the box and it doesn't sell, don't look at me. There's gotta be marketing. There's gotta be support. Are you giving me shippers to put in the stores? Are you forcing me to fight for shelf space? Are you going to do a Facebook thing? Are you going to give me 100 cases to go donate to an event and hire the team? And I think that was appropriate. I sort of forgot where the question was, where we were at. Oh yeah. The 30% that stay there. Yeah. Can't sell Prime. It's not me. It's the organic demand for the product. Every product can get a bit of a bump and it's artificial. Sustainability and repeat buyers will dictate whether you keep getting reordered.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

He's definitely right. That reminds me to bring up Gingerbugs and give a big shout out to Steve, who you guys know. Steve D'Antigny, couldn't pronounce his last name. D'Antigny. Anyway, he works with Gingerbugs. There's another young lady in Toronto named Juliana. She has a sparkling water called Balloon and she's on her trying to get up to 10 stores, 15 stores, 20 stores. And the stickiness that you're talking about is critical because once you get an established loyalty from a group of stores, they all know each other and talk to each other. Then you're in position to get a distributor and Gingerbugs has UNFI. They're in UNFI. They're still small, but they're gonna be growing rapidly because guys like Steve and me can't stop, can't shut up about them. Do you wanna do the, this is a good thing since we, we will be running outta time soon. I wanted to show you guys what it's like for someone to receive a Powerful Energy Box.

Please, please. I would love for us to do show and tell.

Okay. So what I do is it's very difficult with all the brands and then I run out that I gotta get samples. Every week, my ops partner, Naeem, who's sleeping in the cottage, the main house over there. I'm in the bunkie, as you can see by the wood, not a sauna. He makes up about 50 of these a week and I grab them and make sure that I can hand them out wherever I can. So here's the first one. I love this one. It is not cotton candy. It's not. Okay. But when you open it up, it looks like cotton candy. It tastes like cotton candy and it's 100% Fiber. Hmm. Hmm. I think what, I think there are, one is on, Naeem has a list. You're, you guys are both on the list that are going out next week. You know that mochi stuff that's frozen? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, we think it's frozen because we're in North America. Mm-hmm. Shelf-stable mochi. Okay. And these guys, here's an example of language stuff. You see this sticker? Mm-hmm. My buddy who imports this is what I call savvy. So what, what my buddy Damien does is he orders containers. No, this is the, this is, but it's pink. So it looks candy-ish. Yeah. Look. Okay. Then we got, I'm drinking one of these right now. They will get the satsi soda. We all know about this, but these babies, these babies are great. Once in a while I'll put in this Canadian brand. I was just going to ask, who does this go to?

And what is the, I mean, does it just show up on their door and then you schedule a call or how do you approach it?

It goes to people, everybody, people that are just nice to me that actually give me 10 minutes of feedback in a grocery store, because I can't go to grocery stores without talking to complete strangers and interviewing them and why they do what. Grocery store managers, people in hotels, food service, my buddies down at the Rogers Center who handle all the VIP. So we love these guys. It's a half, half Swedish organic brand that we've all heard of, 7Ts.

Um, Will, uh, Will Neitz.

Uh, yeah, I think it's Nizza.

Nizza. Okay, sure.

Yeah. But Will and I, we're, we're, we're, we're associates, I guess, because I buy his product and bring it in and, and pumping it into independent stores right now. And we're working on some bilingual options because as I'm sure you're not surprised, me bring box. If you like box, I'll bring more box. They're calling me to bring more box. Hard to say because With the ones that I do to retailers, it's probably about 90% get the call and a box goes, and I'd say about half of them end up ordering and it gets on their shelves. It is great. It gets great reactions. And it often does lead to, even if it's not a retail store that calls me, I'll get a nice young lady who I have just north of Sarnia, right across the border from Detroit. For Port Huron, Michigan, actually. And I'm going to be going to drop off 2 cases of Melting Forest because she was at the show. She's a health practitioner. I will make sure those 2 cases get to her house. There's people that just find me for IQ Bar, Melting Forest, brands that— I have a thing where I'm not meant to deal with most people because I played shortstop for 10 million innings and I don't have patience to have conversations for more than like 10 seconds. Catch the ball, throw the ball. Let's go.

Absolutely.

So I have a distributor whose name's Adam and his cousin John. They run elementary produce. They're very efficient. They don't give a shit about gloss. So I made the gloss for them. So here's the Moosh sales sheet, right? And we get one-pager, they go in everything. But if you look at the bottom, see, not me, Adam and John. Okay. And then if you look, yeah. So in every box we have the one-pager and again, Simple. Adam and John's contact information at the bottom. So they're the independent distributor. Melting Forest is going mass retail through Eco Ideas, who is one of my favorite distributor, co-packer, regulatory people. Those who follow sports know what a 4-tool, 5-tool player is. Eco Ideas is that. And I'll emphasize something that everybody needs, a co-packer guy who you can call on Sunday, meet at 9 o'clock. And get 5 guys in to do an emergency shrink wrap, shrink sleeve on a pallet that needs to be at someone's warehouse tomorrow morning. That is million-dollar efficiency. I just get, I think we touched on almost everything.

I just liked that Jeff commented, Robert with a box cutter is the scariest thing I've seen all week. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That, I mean, it is October, Halloween's coming. No, the, the, the question that we always ask, which I assume is what you're alluding to, Sam, is, uh, Robert, for you, what's the difference between success and failure?

People. Not hard to put the brand out there. It's the people. Unfortunately, we have issues, all of us. I'm 58 now. I stopped road rage in my mid-40s and I came up with a very good understanding of unreasonable behavior. Half the time it's not their fault. So I go easy because they're just under pressure. And the other half the time, Maybe I'll try to give them a little leeway, like they grew up in a prison yard and that's why they act like it. But it really is the people. I'll skip over ugliness, ugliness, brand ugliness, brand ugliness. Melting Forest, Sean and Dave will take care of my newborn granddaughter if I need them to for a week. You know what I mean? Like the smile you see on, on your, everybody watching that smile you see on Adam's face. Sam's casual vibe. You guys are an example of people that make things work because we're— you gotta be honest. You gotta be brutally honest. Remember how funny that you thought that post was where I said, I ask people when they escape the mental hospital, when they have $100 grand to lose on the first year or 2 of trying to support a brand. You need to have that type of bluntness and you need to care. Care is important. And team, be on the team. Together. I have one brand I'm about to just tell this week, dude, you haven't returned the call for 3 weeks. Bye. Love you. See you later, but good luck. So people, absolutely. I have a big issue with that. I hope that answers the question of what the key is, Adam. Obviously the brand's got to be good. Obviously there's got to be some intelligence and there's got to be some money too. And I've got a little bit of money to put in as well. And I want to see that the brand's going to be putting in some money and be there to swing the bat.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I know Ryan Halliman's, uh, he's driving somewhere with the family this weekend. I think he's going to DC or maybe it's, I don't know. Anyway, he may or may not be listening, but we were talking a lot about this the other day of, of just, I think, especially when you're, you're new to consulting as he and I are, you know, the desire to want to, you know, you get a lead, you start a conversation and you want to chase people a little bit on, oh, hopefully Sam will come back. You want to chase people a little bit on like, oh, this is an opportunity. Like, I want to make sure I close this business. I want to make sure I start this new partnership. Sometimes, not always, most people are pretty responsive, but sometimes you just send that out into the ether and there's, there's no response, right? You go, hey, I sent you a scope. What'd you think of it? And there's no feedback. Or, hey, can we get a call set up in 3 days? And there's no feedback. Ryan's looking at me and he's like, what do I do? And I'm like, move on. Like, if they don't care, there's a whole list of people who will. Like, it's, there's gotta be that, that mutual willingness to have a conversation.

Hasn't been told to let them, you know, the Mel Robbins cycle, let them just move on. I have had a major problem with letting them. I go to the store and I respectfully say, I, I sent you $800 worth of product that demands respect. See the face? Demands respect. And then I do this. What happens is people then tell other people, man, that guy Robert Kogan, man, he showed up to the store and he looked at me like this. And really it's because I'm embarrassed, alienated, and I don't know what else to do.

Right.

When a guy slides into second base and like tries to hurt me, really?

Right.

Is the face. Yeah. Right. So I don't know anything else. I want to tell this story. I know we have 8 minutes left. But, um, that distributor who I yapped about, um, Adam, he's great. He's like me. He's like a ballplayer. Talk, talk, talk, boom, boom, boom. Let's go. Give me a deal. Shut up. I don't want to deal with that shit and let's go sell. So he had a booth at the CHFA show, Melting Forest on the end, Eco Ideas over there. I want to be at every booth at the end of the show, but I can't. So I'm walking from aisle 700 to 21. Adam and John come down the aisle. Adam says they want it all. Who? Fiesta Farms, a great grocery store in Toronto. One-off, 60, 70 years of tradition, but they don't want you there at the store. Adam, I don't go to Fiesta Farms other than having to pick up a check that they refused to pay me one time for 6 months, or to tell them about a recall of something else because I knew about it because I was at Eco Ideas that day. So what are you talking about? Well, yeah, they came to the booth. They want everything. Don't go to the store. I don't want to go to the store. Maria, second generation owner. She yelled at me. I give her leeway. She's a second generation Italian owner of a grocery store. And I'm a guy who played shortstop and was grown up as a spoiled Jewish kid going to a private school. So we're not going to mix. And I told her the way she spoke to me is only allowed for my sister, my girlfriend, and my mom. Didn't yell at her, but I told her, maybe that's yelling at her, but that's that. And he says, just don't go to the store. Adam, how about this? Tell me I won because I have been abused and disrespected by so many of these stores. And when you walk away, you slam the door and you think one day you'll need me. Why don't you just say, Robert, you won? They want every damn product of yours that is in my booth. And then I turned my head and his cousin was right in my face and he says, just don't go to the store. And that is, I want to name my movie, Just Don't Go to the Store. And I think it illustrates so much because there's a lot of stores that will tell you, oh yeah, Robert. Yeah. But the truth is Beth went and got Kerrygold butter at Costco in Michigan for some of their important customers. And I smuggled it. I'm dropping it off at 8 o'clock at night. And one of their staff says, sorry, we're not receiving now. So you guys know me well enough to know what I said to that guy while there was butter in my car. I'm not taking it into a fridge and coming back tomorrow. So there's a few little tidbits about the whole relationship that is needed. And back to that question about your question about loyalty, people. So all of this stuff that's working is because of good people. And now it's finally working. And like I say, it takes 10 years. To get somewhere in this business. It's been a hard 10 years, but I think the fruit is now going to start falling from the trees.

And nothing's a success overnight. A couple of comments in here. First of all, I just want to call everybody that joined us in the live chat. Andrew Nelson, Rosa Williams, Gavin Conkle, Alicia Vargo. Who else is here that I can see? Richard Moniz.

Moniz. Moniz. Sean was in the Riverside chat. Sean from Melting Forest says hi. Let's Let's see who else. Carrie, not sure on last names in the Riverside chat. Carrie, Brianna, or Brianna, one of the two is here.

Any questions from everybody? I know there was a statement from Rosa. Rosa, I love what she said this morning. She goes, brands are not successful overnight. Some of these brands assume since they come back to market, it's going to blow up. It's not. To me, brand, brands, not enough support and way too much pressure. Margins are thinner than ever. Everyone is fighting for the same place. I thought that's pretty powerful. Everybody thinks that, well, I have the greatest formula. My brand is like, well, you said earlier, Robert, is what are you doing to support it? Like, what, what is your social media? What is your, how many tastings are you gonna do in the market? How many samples do you have available? You know, what are you doing to activate your brand? 'Cause I can get it on the shelf, but I can't get it moved off the shelf. That's up to you.

Well, I want to kind of— this question comes up because of the box of goodies that you shared. Like, it's not a world I live in, but it's something I'm going to think about having had this discussion with you. Like, how can brands, um, what am I trying to say, take advantage of or make the most of, I guess, shared, shared impact, right? So like, for example, if, if, and don't get me wrong, like Will and the IQ Bar, I mean, I see those guys everywhere. I assume they're doing very well on their own. If you were sending people out just boxes of IQ Bar, they'd be like, this stuff's still amazing. Right. But I have to also assume if you're sending boxes out of like a Q-Bar and that it's not cotton candy and like, there's a, there's a, the sum is greater than the parts, right. Of like, oh my God, everything in this box is amazing.

Does that make sense?

And so like, how, I don't know, maybe there's an answer to it. Maybe there's not, but it's got me thinking then like, how can new brands You know, again, I work a lot in beverage, but how can they find the, the, if they're the beverage brand in Pennsylvania, like how do they partner with the, the granola bar startup that's also in Pennsylvania to say, well, let's send our stuff together to a few places. Cause then maybe we get a combined lift. You know what I mean?

I love how you just extrapolated that from the surprise. I'm trying to preach that all the time by the, there's Team. You are so much stronger with a team. I got IQ Bar playing first base because they do everything and he can go play outfield too and catch and pitch. That guy, Will, he does. He is great. He's got IQ Mix, IQ Joe, and Methodical Pace. We all are a big fan of IQ Bar because Will, I'll say it out loud, he does not subscribe to the bullshit gloss. He is who he is. And he also puts himself out there with his philosophical Willisms that we get to look at every morning and think about and ponder. And but it's, it's just to combine things and be on a team. Will at first base. Jay, another great guy who makes us all feel like we're part of the family and we're all still going to university and in a frat. Exactly. I haven't been doing much posting and engagement, but I got to tell you, every time I do look, like last night, there's Jay Friday night. What other idiots are here with me? 85 people are posting. It was like a, it was the most attended party. On Friday night, except the one in Seattle for that crazy baseball game that went till 2 in the morning. So I think it's a, it's a great team of people, but back to your point about teaming up products with each other, 2+ 2= 9, 9+ 9 17. And, and there's no way you're going to get the attention just being one thing. One thing. Here's my one thing. It's baseball. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like I said, I think it's a, I don't know. Again, I think the default for any business, whether it's a product or a consultant or, or accountant or whatever it is, right? Like the default assumption is like, oh, I have to pitch myself. 'Cause if I'm pitching somebody else, that'll dilute my message and so on and so on, which, okay, sure. There might be a fair amount of logic to that. Like if I'm a, you know, a blueberry energy drink, maybe I don't want the other person I'm pitching with alone to also be a blueberry energy drink. Right. Fine. Yeah.

But you gotta do, like I said, baseball team, you can't have 4 first basemen.

Yes.

We try to put 9 to 10 items in a, a bag, by the way. And you know why? Because we're a team and you're more relevant when you go in. And I might pitch one brand that's not gonna fit with that account, but another brand in that bag will. Then I go to the next account and I pitch the 9 brands again. And again, I might get 3 of the 9. And at the end of the week, those 9 brands at least are gonna probably get, you know, 5 to 10, you know?

Yeah.

Distributions or sample event or You know, uh, another opportunity to be in a feature or an ad, whatever it may be. But if you're just going with one, it's really hard. So I love the box.

Yeah. And back to the, on other topics that we've covered, this applies to one of them. Hello, brands. Are you looking at my face? Look, when we call and we want to invest our time and don't charge you a retainer, call back. I'm going to tell everybody that I tried to call and you didn't call back. That's gonna be— I've gotta go to the next one down the line. I'm just the manager of a ball team and all I want to do is win. I want the best players there are.

Ryan Halliman, that's our clip of the week. We're gonna just take that cutout of Robert.

No, don't. It'll be taken out of context. It'll be taken out of context.

No, no, no, no. I might do this, uh, Cole. Uh, well, let's do this. Let's, uh, Adam, why don't you wrap us up? Um, you do the wrap.

Yeah, yeah. Cog's, uh, Phenomenal conversation. Personally, I learned a lot. I think people in the comments did too. It was great to see some of the brands you're working on and hear a little bit of your story. Where can people find you? How do they work with you? Uh, that, and I'll start with that. Where do they, where do people find you if they want to know more about you or about how to work with you or to learn from you?

LinkedIn, obviously, despite the 20 or 30 spam messages offering me TikTok services, I still look at every message on LinkedIn. I think on LinkedIn, I've been coached properly by Reza from Darwin Fulfillment to make Sure. My contact information is there. My phone number, my email address, everything is there. And pfedistribution.com is the website. robrcogan@pfedistribution.com. And do a little search and you'll find me somewhere.

Perfect. pfedistribution.com. Put that in both spots.

Just a little landing page because I gotta stay sort of stealthy and keep things on the down low a little bit.

Sure. So final, final question before I let us go. I'll start with you, Kogues, and then we'll do Sam and I'll, I'll, I don't know. We'll see if I can come up with anything. I feel like I've, I've, my brain's full. Any parting words you want to leave everybody with before we get to our weekends?

Yeah. The parting words I want to leave is the Jays started in '77, a lot of pain in the late '80s with a couple World Series in '92, '93. My friends in Detroit had a very bad night last night, just like my friends in New York had a very tough night. The other night, which I enjoyed very much. I'm only bringing up baseball because baseball's a part of my soul. We are very lucky that we are in the Final Four and I attribute— I convert that over to never ever stop trying, refuse to lose. One of the signs up in the Seattle Stadium last night, a friend of mine came up with that quote when we were like 18 years old and I'll never forget it. And just be patient. Spain took 800 years to get the Reconquista done. And this business can take 10 years. Little victories need to be reveled and don't get discouraged of When you get alienated and rejected, because there is always a team of people there to support you and always send out a box.

Man, I love it. I love it. Uh, Sam, what do you want to add?

Well, first of all, I love baseball. I actually quit playing junior tennis at 16 to go play baseball. Uh, just to let you know. And then the coach's wife was the head coach for tennis. So you can imagine how that went down. Uh, with the whole situation. So, but, uh, it is baseball. It's in patience. I find myself personally, and I love the word that you word patience. Everybody we talk to now, I always ask this question, what is your patience? And they're like, well, why do you ask me that? I'm like, because we're the tortoise, not the hare. We just like one, one account at a time, you know, one display at a time. And everything we talked about is, I love it. Send the boxes out. Not everybody's gonna reply to them, but, uh, Really good learning, man. It's so great to have you on this today. And, you know, uh, we should probably just get on the phone and talk this week for sure. A whole bit.

Absolutely.

I'll be, I'll be at a conference. I haven't been to a conference in a while, but I'm going to NBWA this week. So maybe we'll see some of your friends that, you know, that you mentioned. I think some of them will be there. So.

Yes, they will.

Jealous. That's a good show. Very cool. My, uh, yeah, I mean, I think for me, right, like being the novice, the industry novice at 8 years to the, you know, You gentlemen's, uh, longer tenure. I'll put it that way.

It's only 2 more.

Yeah. Right. I think it's, it's, uh, it's, yeah, it's, I'll go back to what I said before. It's an interesting exercise to think about, you know, when I, prior to this conversation, if you had said like, hey, it's a team effort, I would've been, yeah, of course it is. Like, you gotta have your ops person and your marketing person and your salesperson and your so on and your finance and blah, blah, blah. And that's true. I had never really considered prior to you saying it, like, no team, other brands, like other people that you may see as competitors, but who are also in that startup space with you. Like they can be team members. They can be, you know, the relief pitcher or the, the, you know, the pinch hitter or whatever, you know, whatever analogy you want to use. I think that's brilliant. And it's definitely something I'm going to noodle on. So with that—

And I've also, I forgot, I mean, there's an hour. I thought I could cover everything, but I do want to do that. Like, you know, the way they squeeze in names at the end of accepting an award while the music's playing. Yeah. Jim Slomka and Larry Bonakowski from Grocery Business Magazine. I'm a customer, but what they give back is intelligence, especially Jim Slomka, always there to take a call whenever he's golfing or doing whatever he's doing. Reza Bafanda, a contact of Jim's. Darwin Fulfillment. George Maya, formerly at Longo's and now is beside me helping take Melting Forest. To the world and every, every brand that I have in my, in my dugout. And there's other names that I forgot to mention. Rafiq at Eco Ideas, TC at Eco Ideas, Emma, and a lot of other people, Dave and Sean from Melting Forest. And I'll stop there. It's pretty much—

I know Dave, so obviously Dave, he's at NBWA next week and Sean said he'll be there as well. So I'll hook up with those guys and we'll take a picture. Actually, I'll just call you when I'm with them.

I'm standing with him. I'll love that. So I will stop there. We're a little overtime, but after last night's extra innings, it feels right.

Yeah, it feels right.

All right.

Well, what beautiful—

I'll remain on the line, Adam and Robert, and then everybody have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Thanks everybody.

Thanks for tuning in, everybody.