Exposure & Local Events | Margot Micallef

Just out of curiosity, is the PR firm taking— are you paying them to do the PR for you, or are they taking a cut of money?

No, we pay them a monthly fee.

So there's different models. There are some who will take a retainer. Some will take a retainer and an hourly fee for special projects. And some will just take an hourly fee. The firm that we use is a young firm. They're very aggressive. They try all sorts of really interesting things. They're very heavy in social media. But they also have the connections with the traditional media as Well, and we pay them a retainer, monthly retainer of $5,000 a month, which on the one hand is, you know, when you're a startup is a lot of money, but the kind of exposure we've gotten has been, you know, millions of eyeballs, and so it's really been worth it for us. One of the things that we did as a PR tactic was we went on Dragon's Den, which is the same as your—

Shark Tank.

Your Shark Tank. So I'll just show you.

In season 9, Margot McAuliffe entered the den hoping the Dragons would have an appetite for her line of healthy pastas.

It's got all of the good things that you like about pasta. It's got the taste, it's satisfying, but it's got very few of the things that we don't like in pasta.

While Margot says her product has more protein and fewer calories than traditional pasta, it didn't pass the Dragon taste test.

It has a little bit of that chalkiness to it that would not come from a pasta.

And David dished on Margot's involvement in the business. Are you doing this on a full-time basis?

I don't do it on a full-time basis, but I'm as involved as I need to be.

I've been in the food business for a decade, and I would never invest in a company that didn't have a full-time operator. She couldn't get the Dragons to bite, so she left the Den without a deal. One year later, we caught up with Margot at her Skinny Pasta production facility in Toronto.

It tastes even better than it looks. I'm sure of that.

I've eaten it enough times.

Despite a rejection from the Dragons, Marco used her exposure on The Den to drum up other investors.

We didn't get an investment from the Dragons, but we did raise $2 million in capital from other sources, and that really launched us. So, we redid all of our packaging. We rebranded everything as Skinny Pasta.

With the major cash injection, Margot made huge gains with retailers.

Hi, José. So since pitching on The Den, we've now gotten into a number of major banner stores throughout Canada, including Loblaws, Whole Foods, Sobeys Quebec, Metro, Longo, and Federated Co-op in Western Canada. How do you like our new packaging? We went from 300 stores in Quebec and Ontario to now over 700 stores throughout Canada.

After tasting homegrown success, Skinny Pasta made a big push into the U.S. market.

We recently launched in the United States. We started in the Los Angeles market with a food truck campaign so that we could get people to taste our product. And Skinny Pasta is now available in over 700 locations in the United States. When we pitched, we asked for $125,000 for 15% of the company. Had the Dragons taken us up on that offer, today that investment would be worth just under $3 million. If the Dragons came to me after turning me down and wanted to invest in my company, I'd say sure.

Skinny Pasta!

But the price is a lot higher.

So we took a bit of a risk going on Dragon's Den because of course you can't control how they edit it. And you can't control what they say about you.

You can't control the dialogue.

So just, and I don't know if any of you have ever thought about Shark Tank or the equivalent. It's great exposure. We had 1.5 million people watch the first episode where they turned us down. 1.5 million people watched the second episode where we got to show how much we had progressed. And it was great exposure. The first time we aired, Our website crashed from the number of hits that we got, so we knew we had resonated with the consumer, and that's what we cared about. What you don't see—so I was up on stage for about 45 minutes interacting with the dragons. I'm pretty comfortable responding to their questions about money and you know our IRR and all of that because this is what I do for a living—is raise capital and build companies. So I held my own there, but they portrayed. The exchange much more negative and aggressive than it really was. And the East Indian fellow who was on the Dragon— who was a Dragon who said he didn't like the products that tasted chalky— what they don't tell you is that he's in a competitive food line, right, that's also frozen, that's, you know, side by side with ours. So you can't— and you can't say anything about that, right? So that's one of the risks of media, but the payoff, in our case, I would have done it all over again, and I've encouraged other people to do it as well. We were lucky because we also got the second episode where we got to show how well we were doing and got a second lift from that. But in my mind, it's worth the risk, and I would recommend it if you get the opportunity to do something like that. This is another— so one of the other things we do, so That was one of the PR moves we did. One of the other things we do is events. So, you know, we always talk about competing or selling our products globally but marketing locally. So we do a lot of events, a lot of local events. Now this local event was the Academy Awards, and it was really great because through the food truck and the exposure that we got, either, you know, through the traditional media, through our blogging community, through our food truck and just, you know, getting that demand and that excitement around our products, we got approached by the people who do the swag bags for the Oscars asking if we would participate in one of the Oscar swag bags. And so we did. So this was the gifting suite. So we went, we sampled our product, we had baskets of our product that we gave away to these different celebrities. And these are some of the celebrities that we fed. I actually am really bad with celebrities. And the funny thing was that when my team, who are much younger than I am, would see somebody coming in, they'd be really excited and they'd say, oh, it's whatever, so-and-so. And I've got some of the names, you know, Jeffrey Tambor from Arrested Development. I have no idea who that is or what the show is.

Yeah.

And they'd say, oh, there's Jeffrey Tambor. And I'd say, okay, great. And he would come up with his handler and I'd say, hi, I'm Margo McCaleb. And they'd say, no, that's his And I'd say, hi, I'm one of the kids. So it's like, it worked really well. I probably wasn't the best person to be doing this, but I had a great team that supported me. We got a ton of publicity from this. We were able to— and we still talk about it— we were able to get into a number of different pieces of media where we talked about this. We had all sorts of social media around it, and we're still getting, you know, a lot of that press even though it's a year later. It's a great opportunity for us to showcase in a very high-profile way. This is another major event that really got a ton of exposure through. So that is Pope Francis and that is my mom. And it's— I definitely have paved my way to heaven in getting her an audience with Pope Francis. But what happened is one of the things that we do, and we're I'm going to talk about it is corporate social responsibility. So, you know, one of the charities that we support is called Stem for Life Foundation, and Stem for Life is about regenerative medicine. And food is all about— it is a necessary element of regenerative medicine. It's all about feeding your cells to heal your body from within. And Pope Francis in the Vatican is very interested in regenerative medicine and in stem cell research. And those kinds of tools. Pope Francis is also really interested in making sure that we have health equity all around the world, and he actually advocated to us when we were there and to all of the different researchers that were there not to forget the developing countries. And a lot of the research that's being done is unattainable not just for developing countries but even for the average consumer. Consumer in North America. Food, however, is an element of health that we take for granted, and it is available to everyone, whether it's in the developing countries or in North America. So our product and what we stand for was used as an example at the Vatican of a company that was advanced, that was looking for ways to really contribute to health and regenerative medicine through food and as an advocate of health equity. So we served our several different kinds of our pastas over 3 days. The products were made by the Pope's chef. It went over very, very well, and my mom got an audience with the Pope as a result of that. And a lot of press. We got a lot of press from that.