The buyer conversation most CPG founders get completely wrong — and what to say instead.

Opal Rowe started Stush Patty during COVID, delivering hot patties out of her car.

Today she's in Whole Foods, RABBA, and four provinces across Canada. In this episode,

she breaks down exactly how she got there:

• two rejections from RABBA before getting in
• landing Whole Foods at her very first trade show
• the co-packing nightmare behind a product that looks simple.
• the one mindset shift that changed how she talks to buyers.

If you're building a frozen CPG brand or any retail brand, this is the episode.

Guest: Opal Rowe, Founder of Stush Patty

Website: https://stushpatties.com/

Instagram: @stushpatty

New episodes every week.

Subscribe for conversations with CPG founders on distribution, retail and the real mechanics of scaling a physical product brand.

Paul Weedman has spent 26 years on the ground in Shenzhen sourcing products for brands from the West.

He says 60–80% of Vietnam factory inputs still come from China.

So what is China + 1 actually solving?

In this episode, Paul breaks down

• the manufacturing ecosystem concept — why a factory is the smallest part of the supply chain
• why industrial clusters make China nearly impossible to replicate
• what actually happens when a brand finds a "good factory" and thinks the hard part is over.

He also explains the human side of sourcing: why AI can teach you everything and still get you burned, why a translator is the wrong hire, and how a $10M business still comes down to two people walking a street in Shenzhen and sharing a beer.

GUEST

Paul Weedman — Victure Group

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-weedman/

Website: www.victuregroup.com

SHELF TO SCALE

Weekly conversations with CPG and FMCG founders on distribution, retail,

and scaling.

Hosted by Devesh Tilokani

Miriam built Delicious Without Gluten from her basement to coast-to-coast distribution, an 8-year Boston Pizza contract, and a Wegmans pretzel that their own buyers couldn't tell was gluten-free.

In this episode:

• Why the word "gluten-free" killed her Costco demo sales (and what she said instead)
• How a distributor exclusivity blocked her from Metro for years, and why she's still standing while that competitor isn't
• The pivot from retail to food service that saved her business after COVID
• The Wegmans private-label deal that almost died when Trump's tariffs hit
• The one financial mistake she made on day one that cost her 13 years of clean data

Miriam started in fashion, moved into packaging design for food importers, then opened a peanut-free bakery for her daughter. When her two kids were diagnosed with celiac, she rebuilt everything from scratch. The factory had to have drains in the floor and lockers outside the production room. The certification took six months. The pretzel that pulled her into retail came from a kitchen experiment her kids actually wanted to eat. If you're a CPG founder who has been told the same retail playbook for years, this episode is the other side of the argument.

Guest links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miriampearl/
• Website: https://www.deliciouswithout.com/

Shelf to Scale is a weekly podcast for CPG and FMCG founders navigating distribution, retail, and scaling.

Hosted by Devesh Tilokani.

Peanut butter is down 30% a year.

Pistachio butter is up 500%.

Utsab Roychowdhury and his partner quit investment banking to bet on the gap.

In four months he went from a blender in his New York apartment to live on Amazon.

Two-person team.

No mass retail.

$20 a jar.

Sold out for two months straight.

This conversation breaks down the exact moves:

• how he found a co-packer in 20 calls
• why he turned down big retail on purpose
• the pricing rule that keeps his margins alive while other CPG founders bleed out at the shelf.

GUESTUtsab Roychowdhury - Stesh Pistachio ButterLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/utsab-roychowdhury/Website: https://steshbutter.com/

SHELF TO SCALE

Weekly conversations with CPG and FMCG founders on distribution, retail, and scaling.

Hosted by Devesh Tilokani

David, 21 years old, just built three full UGC ad campaigns for Olipop, Feastables, and Rhode in under an hour.

No creators.

No studio.

Just one product image and an AI prompt.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why the $150 to $500 UGC creator model is officially dead
• The Pixar trend that's flipping AI ad strategy on its head (it works because it doesn't try to look real)
• How Petco Labs is running 100% AI ads at scale, right now
• The "context rule" that's the difference between a viral ad and a broken one
• The 13 formats every physical product brand should be testing
• Why one operator with AI now does the job of ten

David, founder of StarPop AI, walks through live demos of Feastables Mr Beast bar ASMR ads, Olipop fridge-grab voiceovers, and Rhode lip balm cinematics, then breaks down a Petco Labs ad where every single frame was AI generated.

If you sell a physical product and you're still paying $5,000 to test 10 ad hooks, this is the episode that ends that math.

Guest links:

• David Ishag, co-founder of StarPop AI

• Try Starpop - https://starpop.ai/?via=shelftoscale

Links that David mentioned on the episode

Claude Prompting System YT video - https://youtu.be/f83UH-qmNUs?si=LQQN3jzw3cDjmsKq

Claude Agent - https://starpop.ai/claude-agent

Shelf to Scale is a weekly podcast for CPG and FMCG founders navigating distribution, retail, and scaling. Hosted by Devesh Tilokani.

A customer opened a bottle of Lost in the Sauce and it exploded.

Fresh mangoes were fermenting inside sealed glass. Karthy pulled every bottle, went back to the drawing board, and rebuilt. Eight years later, he's sold over 100,000 bottles across retail, DTC, and farmers markets in Canada.

Karthy started making sauce in 2017 after his best friend Brandon passed away. Brandon's Trinidadian father taught him the recipe. Blank bottles, e-transfers, cash sales to friends.

Then retailers came calling.

Then TJX wanted 20x his production volume in a single order.

That forced him to scale from kitchen blenders to a HACCP-certified co-packer, and nearly broke the business in the process.

This conversation covers the real math behind retail margins, every hidden cost most CPG founders miss, and why Karthy believes revenue without profit is the fastest way to kill your brand.

GUESTKarthy Subramaniam - Lost in the Sauce (LITS)Instagram: @litssauceWebsite: https://lostinthesauce.ca/

SHELF TO SCALEWeekly conversations with CPG and FMCG founders on distribution, retail, and scaling.Hosted by Devesh Tilokani

Daniel Carson almost deleted the email that put his cereal on the Artemis II mission.

The Canadian Space Agency picked Goldy's strawberry lavender flavor and orders started pinging in during live TV interviews.

This episode covers the real mechanics behind getting from a commercial kitchen to 700+ retail doors and a Walmart launch in August 2026.

Daniel breaks down the

• CPG pricing chain most founders don't understand until they're already losing margin
• why getting INTO Sobeys was the easy part
• the co-founder dynamic that lets him and his best friend Schreiber tell each other to shut up with zero ego.

If you're building a consumer brand and trying to figure out what comes after the first listing, this one matters.

GUEST

Daniel Carson - Goldy's

Website: https://goldys.ca/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goldysjustright

Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@goldysjustright

SHELF TO SCALE

Weekly conversations with CPG and FMCG founders on distribution, retail, and scaling.

Hosted by Devesh Tilokani

00:00 — The email we thought was spam (from the Canadian Space Agency)

06:24 — Running events at Drake's house every two weeks

08:36 — The David's Tea of oatmeal that almost existed

14:14 — Mixing oatmeal in a commercial kitchen until 2 AM

17:41 — How Sobeys said yes before we'd even launched

19:27 — The pricing mistake that kills most CPG brands

34:20 — Watching our cereal launch into space

39:42 — Why Walmart in August is the real test

45:25 — The one thing I'd tell myself on day one

She walked out of a federal prison with no money, no manufacturer, and no retail relationships.

Today Comeback Snacks is in 4,500+ stores across Canada and Walmart is next.

Emily O'Brien built the entire foundation of her brand from inside Grand Valley Institution for Women in Kitchener.

No internet.

No laptop.

Just handwritten letters, a prison library, and a business partner mailing her logo sketches through the post.

In this conversation, Emily breaks down the full journey: from popping flavoured kernels in a prison kitchen, to walking cold into a Mississauga factory with no appointment and leaving with a manufacturer, to navigating her first Sobeys listing and learning that getting on the shelf is only half the battle.

She also covers

• why she renamed the brand from Cons and Kernels
• how tariffs killed their US business overnight
• the brand licensing deal she stumbled into through a podcast appearance
• why employees with criminal records often outperform those without — backed by research.

4,500 stores. Built from a mailbox and a library card.

Shelf to Scale is a weekly podcast for CPG and FMCG founders navigating distribution, retail, and scaling. Hosted by Devesh Tilokani.

Comeback Snacks Instagram - @comebacksnacks

Emily's Instagram - @emz.obrien

Website - https://comebacksnacks.com/

For a month in 2025, a Dubai chocolate brand outsold Cadbury Dairy Milk in the UK .

They launched just months earlier, with nine flavours, zero retailhistory, and a founder who'd failed six times before getting here.In this episode, we discuss:

• The distributor strategy that contradicts everything the big FMCG brands taught him and why it got Meltz to 48 countries faster
• What a signed distribution agreement actually signals about the person across the table (it's not what most founders think)
• The story of a founder who handed over North and South America before selling a single unit and the 16 months he'll never get back
• Why building a premium product isn't enough — and the brutal lesson six failed brands finally taught him
• The exact threshold that told Mohit it was time to stop contract manufacturing and buy the factory outright

Mohit Mirpuri spent 15 years in FMCG trading before building Meltz — a Dubai chocolate brand now in 48 countries with 12 million bars sold and 62 SKUs in its portfolio. He launched in four months, hit 200,000 bars a week in the UK alone, and reached the 12 million bar milestone by February 2025. This episode is the unfiltered version of how that happened — andwhat almost stopped it.

Guest links:- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meltz_dubai/- Website: https://meltzdubai.com/

Shelf to Scale is a weekly podcast for consumer brand founders navigating distribution, retail, and international scaling.

Hosted by Devesh Tilokani.

A software engineer turned e-commerce founder walks through how Claymoo scaled from $5–10K to $100K a month in under two years and why his technical background was the first thing he had to stop relying on.Matthew Wong covers:- the creative production ladder they use to test every ad before spending real time on it- the meta ad strategy that drives their growth- how manufacturing in-house became a strategic advantage- where AI is actually useful for a brand at this stage — and where it's still a distraction.GUESTMatthew Wong — ClaymooLinkedIn: @ithinkwongWebsite: claymoo.coSHELF TO SCALEWeekly conversations with consumer brand founders on distribution, retail, and scaling. Hosted by Devesh TilokaniTimestamps: 00:29 — From software engineer to selling clay kits — the pivot nobody saw coming04:11 — $5K to $100K/month in under two years: the honest numbers08:15 — How they de-risk every product launch (and the mystery kit trick for dead inventory)11:56 — The meta ads strategy behind all their growth15:00 — The static ad system: one customer review becomes three steps of content18:48 — Stop making polished videos until you prove this first23:31 — You're advertising to the wrong person — the targeting shift that changed everything25:38 — Why his tech background was a distraction, not an advantage36:30 — The one piece of advice for early-stage founders: maniacal focus