Vincent Kitirattragarn, Dang Foods: Selling shares of your company is much more complicated than selling your products
First we spoke to Vincent Kitirattragarn, co-founder and CEO of coconut snacks brand Dang Foods.
What keeps you awake at night?
Lately we’ve been fundraising, which is a lengthy and laborious process. Selling shares of your company is much more complicated than selling your products, especially if you want to retain autonomy as the company founder.
Better-for-you snacks like Dang coconut chips, dried fruit, and nut mixes face the problem of consistent in-store placement. Currently there is no consistent destination for our products – they are sometimes placed in grocery aisles, other times in the produce area. Each retailer has a unique store layout and as a result it can be hard to find our products, even if someone is specifically looking for them. To solve this problem, Dang is teaming up with other healthy snack brands to create a coalition that looks at creating consistent planograms using robust sales data. It’s an exciting venture and one that will not only help the snack brands, but hopefully solves a problem that our retail partners are facing.
What trends are you tracking?
Within snacks, seaweed is growing quickly. We’re starting to see it in chip form in addition to the sheets I’m used to buying in the Asian section of supermarkets. I see baobab growing as a functional ingredient, along with mushrooms – even though the latter is an expensive raw ingredient.
A question we have is whether some of the snacking population is turning to prepackaged fresh produce instead of packaged better-for-you snacks like dried fruit. We’re seeing growth in the ready to eat produce area whereas overall packaged snacks are only growing marginally.
One non-snack ingredient we’re excited about is basil seed – it’s similar to chia seed and widely taken in Asia as a digestion aid.
Any other thoughts?
Similar to “natural”, the term “innovation” has been beaten to death and no longer has meaning.
At Dang, we avoid using the term “innovation” because it’s so over-used. In our industry, innovation typically refers to line extensions, new pack sizes, and different attributes on the same base product. What brands need to stand out is vision, with unprecedented products that are truly novel rather than marginally better than what exists in the marketplace.
Here, we use the word “inspiration” because it implies true differentiation and authentic origins. We want Dang to be first-to-market rather than a me-too brand, so we need to use terminology that respects this position.