How Bumpin’ Blends has successfully scaled within the aisles of Walmart and Costco

“We went from doing five figures a month to doing six figures a month and seven figures a quarter,” said co-founder and CEO Lisa Mastela. “It was very huge immediately, which was very cool, but also a huge learning curve.” 

Mastela joined this week’s Modern Retail Podcast to chat about the changes Bumpin’ Blends has made to its packaging, messaging and ad strategies to gain a foothold in the competitive frozen CPG category. She also shared how the company has been able to grow by carefully watching ad spending and by being selective about what it puts in curating mass retail. In addition, she discussed the serendipitous meeting with a Mattel executive that landed her a licensing deal.

Bumpin’ Blends sells frozen smoothie cubes that can be popped into a blender with milk for easy, quick prep. But it took some trial to error to figure out how to communicate that value proposition. The company’s first retail partner was Costco, with the product sold in large bags of cubes that had a photo of a smoothie bowl on the front. Mastela recalls hearing from Costco shoppers that they thought the bags held some sort of free coffee.

“There’s nothing on the bag that says coffee. There’s no picture of coffee. So we tweaked some of the photography on the bag to really push that, like, this is not coffee,” she said. “We switched it to a front-facing cup with a smoothie with a straw.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been lightly edited for clarity.

What Costco taught Bumpin’ Blends about packaging
“We learned everything we needed to change about our packaging, [including] everything that a consumer thinks when they look at our product on the shelf — why they buy it, why they don’t. I was literally in Costco stores, just finding people who touched our product and put it down or picked it up and bought it or walked by it. ”I was like, ‘Why’d you walk by that?’ ‘You didn’t notice that?’ ‘Was that packaging not cute enough for you?’ ‘Why’d you put that back?’ ‘Are you allergic to peanut butter?’” I learned a lot about what consumers think when they look at the product. And I just got to talk to people in the store. And I think that was truly invaluable for us.”

On controlling marketing spend
“I think there’s a lot to be said about mentally staying really small in your head with what your budget is for and ignoring the fact that your bank account is huge, which I think is really hard to do. But it’s so, so, so important to stay afloat because it can get out of hand very quickly, in terms of spending. Like if you feel like you need to be doing merchandising, which everyone tells you you need to do merchandising all the time in every store, that adds up quickly.”

Why licensing deals are worth careful consideration
“My experience having launched with Barbie, I can’t get licensing deals out of my inbox. I will say to any brands really wanting to get into licensing that once you have one licensing deal, don’t worry, the rest will follow. They’ll be in your LinkedIn, they’ll be in your email inbox. Things like Barbie or TV shows and movies, they want to partner with you. They only benefit from it. It’s like a win-win for them. And you’re the one doing all the work and spending all the money on it. But it’s something that I think is not that daunting once you’re able to find the right people for it.”