You should treat everybody like they're the most important customer because collectively

they all could be, right?

You know, you're in a space where your most important buyer could be there, but you're

also dealing with people who are most likely to be visiting natural food stores.

And you know, we spend all this money doing

demos in stores. Well, this is the most effective demo you'll ever do.

Welcome to the Startup CPG podcast. I'm your host, Jesse Freytag. Today marks the first episode

of a very special new podcast series. Seth Goldman, Startup CPG's Entrepreneur in Residence,

will be joining us once a month for the

next few months to talk about hot topics in CPG. Today we kick off by talking all things Expo West.

With 21, yes, 21 Expo West events under his belt, who better to answer our community's

Expo West questions? You may know Seth as the co-founder

of Honest Tea, an author of Mission in a Bottle. And Seth is now the co-founder and CEO of

Eat the Change, co-founder of Plant Burger, and chair of the board for Beyond Meat. Listen in as

Seth covers how to stand out among thousands of brands, how to craft your 10-second pitch, a simple yet game-changing follow-up lead tracking plan, why you should treat everyone like the most important buyer and more. Hi, Seth. Welcome to the show today. How are you? I'm great, Jesse. Really nice to be with you. Awesome. Well, I'd love if you could, since this is the first episode in a series that we're going to be doing with you, I'd love if you could just give us a quick little intro about yourself and how you got connected with startup CPG.

Sure. Yeah. So I've been in the food business since 1998 when I launched Honestee out of my house in Bethesda, Maryland. And I stayed with Honest Tea through the end of 2019.

And along the way, also got involved with lots of other really great startups. I was a founding

board member of Happy Baby, Happy Family. And then I became a board member and then chair of the board

of Beyond Meat. And I'm still chair of the board

of that company. And by most busy work these days is as CEO of Eat the Change, which is

a planet-friendly snack company, and also as a founder of Plant Burger, which is a new restaurant

chain. We just opened our 10th outlet New York City

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