The high rate of failures make you wonder why anyone with basic math skills and some common sense would start a food brand.
According to Suzie Yorke, a revered builder of consumer packaged goods brands, the data is a recipe for disaster. Of 30,000 new CPG natural products launched annually, 99 per cent will fail within the first five years.
Yorke is an entrepreneurial trailblazer who defied the odds and won. Frustrated by consumer misinformation surrounding fats and sugar, she started Love Good Fats at 50. She couldn’t have picked better timing. In 2017, she launched her healthy fats concept just as keto was on the brink of becoming a global phenomenon. It took off, generating $100M in revenue in 36 months.
After breaking growth records for a Canadian startup, Suzie decided it was time to take on new challenges. This time, she’s on a mission to bring healthy chocolate back with FourX Better Chocolate. This puts her on top of another emerging trend with the global functional food market valued at $189.5B in 2021, and projected to grow to $285.3B by 2030.
FourX Better Chocolate checks all the boxes: flavour, function and sustainability wrapped into one tasty, chemical- and guilt-free treat. It’s made with essential vitamins and minerals to support health, energy and more, using fair-trade practices, originating from a small community NGO supporting family farms.
FourX Better Chocolate also tastes really good. That’s because it’s made with the best cacao beans in the world, and the “Bean-to-Bar” way. This means no processing in the traditional sense. It uses a simple and controlled method to preserve as much of the nutrients and benefits of all the beans’ ingredients as possible.
Sharing knowledge with fellow founders
Amidst all this, Yorke’s also cooked up a side hustle with Founders Helping Founders to help fellow founders capitalize on their competitive advantage with much-needed marketing skills.
“Culturally, big CPG is not set up to be able to compete with a scrappy bootstrapping founder.
A new brand can do really well because founders are out there and pivoting quickly. They’re connected, listening to all the feedback again and again and again,” she says.
Yorke doesn’t dish platitudes. She’s a living example for founders.
During our interview, she shared her travel plans like they were a routine office commute. Between calls, she was getting ready to showcase FourX Better Chocolate at the Natural Products Expo in Anaheim. Then she was catching a 6900 km flight to her manufacturing facility in Peru.
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With 300 members and 120 founders active on WhatsApp daily, the Founders Helping Founders community is a burgeoning hive of innovation, hungry for Yorke’s vast knowledge.
Prior to becoming a founder herself, Yorke worked at CPG titans where she was reserved for the toughest challenges. For 25 years, she was brought in as the fixer, successfully turning around declining brands like Heinz, Weight Watchers, Doritos and Downy.
Foundation of Startup Success Inspired by the 4Ps
Founders Helping Founders teachings are inspired by the 4Ps. Traditionally, these cover Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Over the years, Yorke’s done some fine tuning.
“First and foremost, I get founders to focus on positioning which includes packaging, then product, then price-value and P&L which includes awareness, trial, and balance sheet/cash flow,“ she says.
According to Yorke, 90 per cent of the time a founder’s challenges stem from an imbalance in one of the 4Ps which serve as a roadmap. With them, she can gauge the best timing for big moves like US expansion faster than most people can check the weather forecast.
“Many founders haven’t started in marketing. If you don’t grow up in that environment, you don’t even know what to write on a paper,” Yorke says.
She also says earned media, or PR, supercharges startup growth thanks to the credibility factor.
“Earned is massive right now. Earned can be one of the most powerful building blocks – and as a founder you have many. A lot of brands break through the clutter because of earned. But once the dust settles, you still have to have the sustainable competitive advantage of the 4P elements,” she explains.
An Unexpected Path
Yorke may be regarded as royalty in the consumer packaged goods realm, but it all comes as a bit of a surprise to her.
She says she was a “nerdy” engineering student who moved from Quebec to Ontario where she taught herself English. She eventually married and had two kids with the partnership ending once Yorke embraced her true identity as a LGBTQ woman. Now 57, she has an adult diagnosis of mild autism spectrum disorder.
“It hasn’t been easy, but it’s gotten me to where I am today and it’s a big part of my story,” she says.
Get in Touch with Founders Helping Founders
Founders Helping Founders supports startups that often wrestle to find funds for costly consulting firms with complicated processes. Instead, Yorke fast-tracks founders so they can swiftly get into action, teaching them the fundamental basics they need to build a rock-solid brand plan based on her 4Ps.
For more information about Founders Helping Founders, contact: Samara@thebetterchocolates.com. To reach Yorke, connect with her on LinkedIn.
Get in touch with Victoria Kirk, Verified Communications, a boutique PR & strategic communications agency at victoria@verifiedcomms.com or get your PR questions answered by booking a chat here.
