Adaptation is Key: How to Pivot Your Food Business and Find Success with Jen Liao
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How to Adapt Your Consumer-Product Goods Business…
COVID was a hard time for everyone, food business owners included. There was so much uncertainty and hardship during that time. But it also afforded some people the space and the timing to innovate new ideas and products. Business pivots can be a beautiful thing to come out of that dark time. Don’t be afraid to make changes to your business model and adapt if that’s what you’re called to do.
In this episode, Jen Liao, co-founder and president of MìLà, shares how COVID forced her to pivot from restaurant owner to CPG food entrepreneur, how she pivoted even further from D2C to selling in retailers and grocery stores, and what it’s like working with her husband.
Jen also talks about how entrepreneurship has changed her for the better as a leader and a business owner and how soft skills are just as important as hard skills.
Subscribe to the Food Means Business Podcast with Hudson Kitchen founder Djenaba Johnson-Jones to hear the personal stories and “secret ingredients” of abandoning your day job and starting a CPG food business.
In this episode, you’ll learn...
[00:37] Jen’s story of leaving the cubicle and becoming a food business owner, and what it’s like working with her husband
[03:45] Jen talks about starting out with a restaurant and then transitioning to a restaurant quality frozen product
[06:29] How she pivoted from direct to consumer to selling in grocery stores, and the challenges associated with that
[10:01] Jen’s decision to rebrand, the story behind the name MìLà, and their famous spokesperson
[15:03] How entrepreneurship has changed Jen for the better, and how her corporate experience informed her entrepreneurial journey
[18:22] How Jen and her husband incorporate self-care into their lives
If you want to learn more about making pivots to your food business, be sure to tune into this episode:
Links mentioned in this episode…
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About Jen Liao:
Jen Liao is the Co-Founder & President of MìLà, where she’s responsible for product R&D, marketing and brand design, and overall strategy, among other areas. MìLà (formerly known as Xiao Chi Jie) is a modern Chinese food brand bringing restaurant-quality dishes, made with premium, all-natural ingredients into consumers' homes. In 2018, Jen and her co-founders started the concept as a brick-and-mortar eatery in Bellevue, Washington. After expanding to offering frozen, direct-to-consumer products in 2020, MìLà now offers a range of soup dumplings, noodles, sauces and ice creams. The brand celebrates third culture through its products and flavors, exemplified in its new name, MìLà, which means honey (mì 蜜) and spice (là 辣) in Chinese, telling a story of being both Chinese and American, not either/or. MìLà products ship directly to doorsteps or are available at select retailers on the west coast.
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[00:00:03] Djenaba You are listening to the Food Means Business Podcast, which features the personal stories and secret ingredients behind what it's like to abandon your day job to start a CPG food and beverage business. I'm Djenaba Johnson-Jones, former marketing executive turned entrepreneur and founder of food business incubator Hudson Kitchen. Join our community of fellow food business owners and subject matter experts to learn and laugh with us as we explore a startup world that's a little more culinary and a lot less corporate these days. Jen, welcome to the Food Means Business podcast. I'm so happy that you're here.
[00:00:35] Jen Thank you so much for having me.
[00:00:37] Djenaba Absolutely. So before we talk about your business, we'd love to hear about you and your story from going from the cubicle to food business owner.
[00:00:47] Jen Yeah. So actually, before MìLà, I was at a health tech company, which is very different from the food industry. So essentially, after college, I really wanted to be in the health care life sciences space, and I was at the previous company I was at for about six years. So pretty a long stint there as well. And I started on the business development team and then I was running the direct to consumer team before I had gone and done MìLà and actually had started the restaurant while I was at this health tech company.
[00:01:22] Djenaba Oh, wow.
[00:01:23] Jen So it was a little bit on the side in the beginning because when we started it, it really was intended to be a restaurant where we could go eat our favorite foods. So it really was born out of a selfish desire for us to go eat our favorite foods and to go hang out there. And that was kind of it. And there's obviously a lot of work that still goes into that, but we hadn't necessarily planned for it to scale and become a full time thing.
[00:01:53] Djenaba You're in business with your husband, is that correct?
[00:01:55] Jen Yep. Exactly.
[00:01:56] Djenaba So what's that like working together?
[00:01:59] Jen It's actually pretty good. We get this question a lot from friends and acquaintances, I think, because it is I think it's more common now, but still very unusual to do so. And I think for us, what works is that we have very split responsibilities. So I take care of the product and the marketing side of things. And then Caleb looks at the sales, operations, finance part of the company, and then we work together on strategy and business development. So because we have more defined roles kind of even from the very beginning that really helped us to work together. And we're very complementary, I think, in what we're interested in. So it might go something like, Oh, I have a random idea, and I'll say, Oh, here's an idea. And then Caleb is great at picking that up and saying, okay, here's some foundational work to see if this idea is viable unless I get the financial impact. Let's see what it would take to get this off the ground and how do that work. And then once he kind of figures out that little kernel of whether this is possible, then I kind of like to take that and run with it and start to lay out an actual plan for getting it off the ground and really being pretty persistent in pushing it through. And then once it has gotten off the ground, I think he really gets excited about like how big it could be. And so then he takes that over and then I like to close the loop on those pieces. So it's a lot of this type of behavior. So it works really well that way.
[00:03:34] Djenaba That's actually kind of crazy and really cool that you're so collaborative together and that you both can kind of like fill in each other's strengths and weaknesses. That's amazing. Yeah. So talk about the business. You started out as a restaurant. Give us a little bit of background about the restaurant and then kind of how you're able to transition into creating a restaurant quality product that is frozen.
[00:03:57] Jen Yeah. So we started the restaurant. October 2018 is when we opened. And then after a year and a half, COVID had hit. So we had to close the restaurant for a few weeks. It was actually a fairly short period of time. But our chef had gotten COVID right at the start of it, so we had to shut down, obviously, all of the mandates we had to shut down as well. And then after he had recovered, he started to experiment a little bit with soup dumplings. So in the restaurant, our hero product was something called Zen Jumbo, which is a pan fried soup bowl. And it's like a cousin of the soup dumpling. And then when he started experimenting with the soup dumpling, because the filling and the flavor is quite similar, that was an easy kind of tangent into what type of product we could explore. And a lot of dumplings are frozen. We had seen soup dumplings frozen before as well in Asian grocery stores. So we started experimenting to see if our version of it could withstand freezing and delivery and shipping to people's doors. So then we just started with our two bags. That was it. And we sent out a Google form with a Venmo link on Facebook group and on WeChat groups. And we just kind of put it out there to see if there was any interest. And we obviously, since we only made two bags, we had a waitlist right away. So so then we're able to have our chef come back in and have anyone who wanted to keep working and, you know, not be furloughed, for example, they could come back in and start producing some of the bags. And so we did that and we kept kind of putting the Google form out there because it seemed like there was still more demand and we kept getting more orders. So then we slowly started to expand and then we started to see referrals come in as well because people would tell their friends and then we would get asked if we could deliver outside of the radius we were in, which was in the beginning, like ten miles from the restaurant. And then after that it was all of greater Seattle. Then it was all of Washington, then it was Pacific Northwest. And then by the end of the year 2020, we were technically nationwide. So from a mix of ground shipping and air shipping, we did cover all of the US.
[00:06:22] Djenaba What a way to pivot that, amazing. Wow.
[00:06:25] Jen It was a fun period of time.
[00:06:29] Djenaba So how did you I guess you were delivering and so were you strictly direct to consumer And when did you get into grocery stores and things like that?
[00:06:37] Jen Yeah. So we did pivot for a few weeks, but technically our restaurant still opened. So it opened back up after a few weeks. And, you know, it was a slow trickle of business. But then by the end of the year, things had picked back up again. And we are always like a fast, casual, counter-service takeout type of spot. So it wasn't impacted as much as, you know, fine dining, sit down restaurants. But then on the D2C e-commerce side of things that had really started to scale quite a bit. I would say 2021 until now, that was where things really expanded a lot for us. And it was almost all D2C until the beginning of this year. So a few months ago we started to experiment rolling out in retail, which is just a different channel, different audience and different, you know, product format and packaging. So we did start to roll out in retail and launch in Costco a couple of months ago, and then we're now in a few different chains. So excited to see how that will pan out for us.
[00:07:43] Djenaba That's amazing. So what kind of challenges did you face when you were kind of, you know, deciding to move forward and make this frozen product for DTC and grocery?
[00:07:52] Jen Yeah. So when we started experimenting with the product itself, I think because we had started as a restaurant, we really wanted to maintain this restaurant quality piece of it because the restaurant has started off as we want to make the best jump out in the U.S. and it didn't really exist in the format that we knew it could in China where we had tasted it. That was kind of a North star for us. And so when we made the soup dumpling, the same thing happened where we went to go look at co-packers, coat manufacturers to scale. And they wouldn't. I mean, we were obviously very small at that point, so they wouldn't have changed their operations for us or the way that they did any of it. So then we did have to manufacture our own product from the very beginning and figure out how to scale that without, you know, a manufacturing background in doing any of it. But because that was such an important core thing for the company is maintaining that like chef crafted restaurant quality nature of the product, we kind of kept pushing forward to make sure that we could adhere to this product threshold quality that we established.
[00:09:05] Djenaba When you were manufacturing yourself, were you manufacturing in the restaurant, or did you find a place like a kitchen outside of the restaurant to do the manufacturing?
[00:09:13] Jen So we actually started manufacturing on the side of the restaurant. There was an empty space and the landlord was very, I think, kind to us in allowing us to kind of take over empty space because obviously everyone was just trying to survive at that point. And then we moved into an empty food hall that had extra kitchen space for a little while. So we're producing out of this food hall, that commercial kitchen that wasn't being used. And then we found a warehouse manufacturing facility that, because of COVID folks has shut down their operations. And so we were able to take over the new space actually pretty quickly. And so we moved into that in the middle of 2021. To start expanding.
[00:10:01] Djenaba Well, and you recently went through a kind of a rebranding. Can you talk a little bit about that decision to rebrand and kind of how you happened upon the name MìLà?
[00:10:10] Jen Yeah, So we started with the name chelsey ja, and that means Street Food Avenue, and that was very appropriate for the brick and mortar kind of fast casual restaurant that we had since it was really meant to be a like street food oriented place kind of night market type of feel. And those were the types of food that we had started with. And then as we went to the DTC side of things, I think we wanted to test pretty broad Chinese category, not just street food. And I think for Schlessinger, that is very appropriate for a restaurant that you go to and you can learn this in person. But I think for an online type of presence, I think that's very difficult to educate on. SCHLESSINGER And, you know, how do you find us? What does that mean? And so we actually very early on were looking at a different name, which we came up with, MìLà. It just took, you know, almost over a year to actually roll that out. And so for MìLà, this means honey and spice. And I think we really liked it because then embrace this duality of being Chinese and American and their words in Chinese, and it's obvious in English speaking pronounced word as well. And I think that is us. And so it felt like a very appropriate fit.
[00:11:33] Djenaba Mm hmm. Talk to a little bit about marketing. So you have like a very famous spokesperson that you're working with. So can you please talk a little bit about how that kind of opportunity came to be and like how you're capitalizing on it?
[00:11:48] Jen Yeah. So when we had raised our first round, our investors at the time, they had found somebody who found somebody who knew somebody, who knew somebody and then where it well.
[00:11:58] Djenaba That's always how it goes.
[00:11:59] Jen Exactly. So we were able to ship him a package just to, you know, shoot our shot. And actually, when we got the package there, his parents had cooked the soup dumplings and ate all of them. Oh, wow. So he didn't actually get to try the soup dumplings, but his parents said that they were really good, obviously, because they finished them. And that was enough of a, I think, stamp of approval first email. So he decided to put in a small angel investor check in our first round. And we hadn't met or talked to him at that time, but we kept in touch with his team throughout the year. And then there was an opportunity to sit down together to just talk about, you know, what we potentially wanted to do and what he wanted to do just generally as separate entities. And I think immediately when we sat down, we started to talk about what a collaboration could look like and what the synergies were and what we each wanted as like a mission. And those, I think, came together really nicely. So we very quickly started to talk about a partnership and what that would look like.
[00:13:02] Djenaba So how has Simi been working with your brand?
[00:13:05] Jen Yeah. So he is quite involved in several different areas. Of course, his main area is on the content side of things. So I think for us and we already shot a TV commercial ad spot together and we did a brand campaign and then we are talking about doing some type of content series that really will be able to highlight storytelling about the culture, the cuisine, the food and what that means to us. Since he has a platform to be able to put that out there in a different way than we could.
[00:13:38] Djenaba Got it. So you guys sent me some products, so thank you very much. I really do appreciate that. But I also received a steamer. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of that steamer and making the product at home?
[00:13:51] Jen Yeah. So soup dumplings are meant to be steamed. It doesn't have to be a steamer basket necessarily, but that's the traditional way of cooking in Chinese culture. So this is interesting because I hadn't really put this together until my mom had pointed it out, but she had mentioned that in China, ovens were not a thing for a very long time. And in American culture and cuisine. Ovens are, you know, a pretty standard way of cooking things. But steamers are actually the way that everyone in Chinese culture had steamed things and cooked things. So you, of course, have the pan and a wok and all of that. But steaming was the other format of cooking. And so steaming I think is a pretty central way of cooking for Chinese cuisine and food. And so the steamer basket itself, what is interesting is it's made of bamboo and that allows steam to come out of it and be able to evaporate out of it in a pretty even way as well. So it does have a slightly different result than if you used a metal steamer type of setup, but any kind of steamer works.
[00:15:03] Djenaba Awesome. Talk a bit about how entrepreneurship has changed because you mentioned you were working in a corporate job until you launched the restaurants. I'd love to hear, like how you're different, how you changed for the better.
[00:15:13] Jen Yeah, I think it's very different. So your first question was around cubicle to I think starting a business and I think when you're working at a company, and especially if it's a larger company, it's hard to be able to understand all the pieces that go together. And you are looking at what is your own path of growth? What's your own career growth? And look at how you can optimize that, of course, with the bigger picture of the company and what's good for it in mind. But it's still somewhat centered around like your sphere of influence and what you can see directly and immediately and what context you have. I think as an entrepreneur it's a little bit different because you are looking at all parts of the business and the company as a whole. And a company is you and you are the company and that is a very big shift. And I think that change for the better is that you do start to empathize with everybody and where they're coming from and why. I think they're asking for the things that they're asking for or why they're reacting or behaving the way that they're behaving. Because you do start to see all the different pieces that come together and a very different lens. And I think that is very important to just keep building empathy and understanding where people come from.
[00:16:33] Djenaba Yeah, I completely agree. And I can piggyback on that. Working a corporate job like, you know what the big picture is and you kind of know where things are going, but you don't really focus on it because you're just like, let me just stay in my lane. I worked in marketing, so I'll do this marketing thing and go home for the day. But like being an entrepreneur, you definitely have to see the full 360 picture of everything. So yeah, that's really cool. Can you talk about how your corporate experience has informed your your entrepreneurship journey?
[00:17:02] Jen Yeah, So I would say obviously health tech as an industry is very different from food, as an industry. So I think there's very little transfer of direct experience or expertise and subject matter. But I think what was very helpful is seeing different ways to work with people because that is a soft quality that I think is kind of key to building any company is the people behind it. And so at this corporation, which was also a startup and we did get to growth stage while I was there and that was great to see that growth. But I think through that growth and time, I was able to try out different management styles. I was able to work with lots of different teams, scale different teams and interact in different ways at down across to peers. And I think that really developed and honed in on who I am as a person and what's effective. And I think that carried a lot over to how things are informed at our company and how we set things up and what type of culture we want to build and what we want to incentivize or optimize around or really kind of make sure is a core value, for example. So that was highly informed by the job before.
[00:18:22] Djenaba What are you guys do for self-care? Because like, you know, you work with your husband, Like is there is there some point in the day where you're like, okay, it's 5:00 or it's 7:00 and we're not going to talk about know work anymore. Or in how are you guys able to kind of take a breather from working in the business and go do something fun or something to take care of yourself?
[00:18:41] Jen Yeah. So we also have a ten month old, so pretty much work and the baby is 100% of our life. So I think it is a little bit difficult to step outside of that just from, you know, a time constraint perspective. But what we do work in to our day is we do try to do 5 to 10 minutes of quality time. That is neither talking about the baby nor talking about work. It is a short period of time, but 5 to 10 minutes of concentrated time is yeah, is actually very meaningful. And so we might walk to the mailbox, which is very far away from us. Okay, So we'll walk to the mailbox and back, which is about 5 to 10 minutes. And that is kind of our own time that we know is set aside. And if we don't do that, then it is like before we go to bed will very pointedly say, hey, this is our 5 to 10 minutes of catchup quality time and spend time talking about something else.
[00:19:43] Djenaba Awesome. Any any other things that you guys do? I know you know, you mentioned work and your time was 100%. But I'm just curious. I've talked to a couple of people today, actually, and some people are running or, you know, doing yoga. And I'm just wondering if there's something else that you try to work into your your routine.
[00:20:00] Jen Yeah, we're more weekend activity people. So we'll go last week we had actually gone sunflower and blueberry picking. And so I think the weekend activities are really where we try to remove ourselves a little bit from the day to day. So we'll go hiking or skiing in the winter. Those are our activities. So it's definitely more like concentrated time for longer spans rather than, I guess, daily things.
[00:20:31] Djenaba What are you thankful for?
[00:20:33] Jen I'm pretty thankful that we had the opportunity to do this at the time that it happened. I think a big portion of success comes from luck and timing, and so I think we got very lucky on when we did it, which was, you know, during COVID, which I know was very difficult for a lot of people, but it did afford us the opportunity to test this product out. There's product market fit, and I think the environment was conducive to us being able to put something out there and test it and that in a way that allowed us to scale. So I'm very thankful that we were set up at that exact moment to be able to do something like that. And I think I'm very thankful for the people that we have found to work together with us along the way. I think we sound like the exact right people at the exact right time to get us to that next stage. And I think everyone has always been very, I think, caring about the company, which you're just really cast for more.
[00:21:35] Djenaba Yet you're actually the second person I heard say that today. I was interviewing someone else that has a meal prep company. They actually work out of our kitchen. He was saying the exact same thing. So that's amazing. So at Hudson Kitchen, we have what we call the money bell that we ring when we're celebrating something. So I'm wondering, what are you celebrating right now?
[00:21:57] Jen We just signed a new lease on a new facility, so we're very excited about that. It took a very long time to find and close the space, but it allows for us to, I think, go into our next phase of growth. So that is definitely the number one topic of conversation right now.
[00:22:19] Djenaba God, that's really exciting. Oh, I brought your sauce here. I know that this has the old branding, but I just wanted to, like, kind of show your product, and I thought you had the soup dumplings, you also had the sauces, or something else you're thinking about making right now?
[00:22:31] Jen Yeah. So we have this. You've dumpling sauces. We also have a noodle line already that's out. And then we are releasing a limited edition soup dumpling flavor the first week of November. So we're going to be a little bit more consistent with our limited edition flavors that are coming out. And then we're exploring a couple other product lines to release and test out as well.
[00:22:55] Djenaba So with the limited edition flavors, how do you come up with those? And is the November timing specific to something that's happening? Or I'm just curious as to how you came up with that.
[00:23:04] Jen Yeah. So for the limited edition, it really is. We have a pretty broad brainstorming time period where we'll say, okay, what flavors do we think could do well for a soup dumpling, in this case a soup dumpling, And then we'll try out a few different recipes because they might not always translate in a soup dumpling. And then we'll narrow that down to, okay, these are like the top three let's develop them and see how far we can get in the format and the taste. And that's kind of how it's determined. But everyone on the R&D team contributes ideas on what that could be. And then on timing, it was more we wanted to release it before the holiday time period and we were coming up against it and we're like, This is the drop deadline. We need this. So that one was not as thoughtful, but we do try to release one online or an near as well.
[00:23:58] Djenaba Oh, got it. Okay. Okay. So, Jen, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate it. Please let everyone know where they can find out about you and MìLà.
[00:24:07] Jen Yes, our website is www.eatmila.com and all of our products are there and then we are starting to roll out in retailers. So we'll keep everyone updated on our social media or email.
[00:24:20] Djenaba That sounds great. Congratulations on all your success.
[00:24:22] Jen Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. It was great to chat with you.
[00:24:26] Djenaba Absolutely. The Food Means Business podcast was produced by Hudson Kitchen. It is recorded at the studio at Carney Point and mixed and edited by Wild Home Podcasting. Our theme song is by Damien de Sands, and I'm your host, Djenaba Johnson-Jones. Follow Hudson Kitchen on Instagram at thehudsonkitchen and to get food business bites right in your inbox, sign up for our newsletter at thehudsonkitchen.com/newsletter. Listen, follow and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. Until next time.