Episode 19: 

COLD OPEN
Ben Rudman   00:04
We ended up building the largest meat snack manufacturer in the United States of America, from 2018 to 2023.
People should care about salt. There’s this ludicrous thing happening where we care about all the ingredients in our food, but then we just put pure sodium chloride… …get from glory to glory, and strength to strength. But it was pretty hard-earned. So I would say the big one was, I just kind of broke the business, being too ambitious and growing too fast, and assuming that what had gotten us as a business to one point would get us to the next point. And that’s just not how it works.
Think about it. If you care about your food, you should care about your salt. If you care about your electrolytes, you should care about your salt. … The actual worst crime is people sending those 10-page reports, and then somebody who receives it uploading it to AI and saying, “What does this say? Make me a response.” So we have AI talking to each other. It’s AI-on-AI crime. So anyway, I say that’s how not to use it, but how…
Zak Cassady-Dorion   01:00
AI on AI crime. I like that a lot.
EPISODE
Zak Cassady-Dorion   01:14
Welcome to the DTC Revenue Rocket Podcast. Today I’m joined by Ben Rudman from Celtic Sea Salt. Ben, welcome to the show.
Ben Rudman
Hey, Zak. Good to be with you.
Zak Cassady-Dorion
Good to have you here. Good to see you again. Ben, before we jump into Celtic Sea Salt, could you give us a little bit of background on yourself?
Ben Rudman   01:30
Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been privileged to have about a twenty-year career in consumer packaged goods. It’s kind of all I’ve known. I’ll say I’ve traversed different terrain throughout the industry. I started as an investment banker just out of undergrad, working at this small firm. I was actually doing pet food and pet treat work.
The company was basically advising companies who wanted to sell or raise capital in that industry, and so I got to know a lot of people. Through that kind of work, you get to know what’s going on in the industry, but you actually don’t know how anything happens. I’m just one of those people who, if you give me an opportunity to dive into the weeds, I really want to do that. I can’t help myself.
I’ve always been more of a “how does the world work this way, and why does it work this way?” person. And then maybe there’s an opportunity if you learn those things and earn the right to have a perspective.
After about eight years there, I built what I thought was a hard-earned perspective, and I wanted to dedicate my career to the natural food industry. Mostly because, in general, there’s a lot of narrative about the American food system being broken and terrible and all that, which I actually think is a little overblown to some extent. But on the other hand, there are a lot of things that could be done better.
Pardon the pun, but I think there’s even low-hanging fruit, and the larger companies are not incentivized or well positioned to execute on those things. Smaller companies are, and those smaller companies, by definition, need help scaling their businesses. I call what they have scaling problems. So I said, I just want to work on companies with those scaling problems in this industry.
It’s my first company. I had a point of view on meat snacks in particular in 2018. I was saying meat snacks are going to be the next big thing. Sorry, not meat snacks, meat sticks in particular. And I had this kind of wonkish perspective that actually owning the manufacturing capacity in that industry, the means of production, if you will, would be the way to build that category.
Ben Rudman   03:36
In partnership with brands like Chomps, Archer, New Primal, and Sweetwood, who makes The Fatty, and some others, we said, we’ll be the manufacturer. We’ll figure out how to formulate and grow these products at scale and make them. We’ll figure out which formats and packaging types will go into retail, and we’ll make those, and you guys go to market. That’s what we did. We ended up building the largest meat snack manufacturer in the United States of America from 2018 to 2023, and that was my first opportunity as a CEO. I was well underqualified for that opportunity, but we were able to make it work.
From there, I had a business in the coffee industry that I’d done on the side with some partners. We acquired this small business, built it up, and sold it to a strategic called WestRock Coffee. With some friends, I helped start a ready-to-eat soup business in the refrigerated category. I overstate my involvement there. There are two really great, real founders who’ve done all the operating, and I’ve been a board advisor the whole way.
And then lastly, back in early 2025, we’re about 18 months into this, I partnered with the founder of Celtic Sea Salt, because I thought the brand had tons of opportunity, and she was entering her seventies and wanted to wind down her day-to-day involvement but still be around. So I partnered with Selina to help build Celtic Sea Salt. She’s still a big shareholder and just a good partner for us.
So yeah, that’s what I’m doing on a day-to-day basis.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   05:05
That is an awesome story. There’s a lot to unpack, and I want to unpack some of that. My son’s eleven, and I’m constantly finding meat stick wrappers all over the house and all over the yard. So I guess I have you to thank for some of that, at least.
Ben Rudman   05:29
Yeah, sorry about that. As soon as the oxygen-barrier technology evolves enough for us to keep stuff like that fresh, we need to get out of plastic so that we can have it out of our yards and in nature. But yes, I do agree. We’ve had plenty of those around the house as well.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   05:46
I love that. Ben, you said you grew the manufacturer to be the largest meat stick manufacturer in the United States.
Ben Rudman   05:58
Yes. Pure-play meat snack manufacturer overall, actually. And now the business is far and away the largest. We sold our stakes back in 2023, and I’m still close with the folks on the management team. I worked with all of them for so long. They’ve continued to build it, and I think they’ve got nine sizable production plants now, and they’re doing jerky too, and I think even pet food and stuff like that. They’ve really expanded.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   06:28
That’s really cool. And I love how you got into that, too, right? You started in investment banking, you were there for seven years, advising companies on how to raise funds or how to sell. So essentially, you were looking at tons of businesses, seeing which ones had opportunities and which ones didn’t, and then you took everything you learned and went for it with the meat sticks.
Ben Rudman   06:53
Yeah, exactly. And you know how it can be. Sometimes you have a point of view on a space and you don’t really know until you’re in the business. But that was one of those times where you pleasantly found out that you were right as you went along, which doesn’t always happen. In that case, we really did think the consumer was going to be there if we met him or her there.
We really felt they were ready to buy meat sticks in places that weren’t gas stations, and we were right about that too. And we thought that people wanted maybe cleaner-label ones than some of the incumbent brands, names I won’t name. Again, all things we were very fortunately right about. Because if we were wrong about any one of those three things, I think it would have been a tougher slog.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   07:42
Because you were just doing the manufacturing, you found the companies to manufacture for and to do the marketing. How did you pair up with those companies? How did you choose?
Ben Rudman   07:54
Well, it actually happened before anything. Whether I’m trying to start a business or buy a business (I didn’t list off some of my failed ventures as well), I first start with the fact that I feel there’s nothing more powerful than demand that just exists. It’s one thing to have to go create it, and I really admire true innovators, which I would not consider myself, at least to date.
You look at someone like Grüns, who said multivitamins need to be in gummy form. They introduced that form and that habit. I was looking for something where I thought the habit or format would exist if you just got the product and just got the distribution. So I was asking myself, if I have conviction that this is coming, what’s going to be the best part to own to actually enable this thesis to come true? Do I want to own the manufacturer?
Do I want to own the brand?
So I went around and started talking to the brands. I said, “What are you doing? Is there a way to partner together?” I was thinking maybe I’d become a private equity guy, raise money, and invest in these companies and help out or whatever. I think some of that was a little misguided, but nevertheless I thought there had to be some angle to play here.
And as I got into the weeds, I started to learn that jerky and stick production were fundamentally different: jerky production existed at scale, but stick production did not, and there were a bunch of reasons why. If you can get into the reasons in terms of how the clock works, you can start to determine whether you can be the guy or gal who works on that issue, and whether it really is an issue.
I started to feel like, man, the demand is here, and this is not scalable for the jerky people. So I can go dedicate my hours to that. And if I can build something that delivers the solution the brands think they need to get the consumers, and that the consumers want, then I can build a winning business and make the road of the category run through me, which is what we were able to do successfully at that business.
That tends to be how we look at things. Salt’s the opposite. We now own a brand.
Ben Rudman   10:12
But we felt like, in the salt category, people should care about salt. There’s this ludicrous thing happening where we care about all the ingredients in food, but then we just put in pure sodium chloride with anti-caking agents and silicon dioxide and sucralose, sorry, dextrose. You think, wait a minute. We did all this work to curate the best ingredients, and then the most simple, most important ingredient, we just throw whatever in there. So we felt that owning a brand to educate consumers, while also providing sourcing rigor, was going to be the key. That’s how I got into Celtic Sea Salt. It was really the same process, all the way around.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   10:49
I love it. And I’m a huge fan of Celtic Sea Salt. It’s an iconic brand for me, because we’ve had it in our house for a while. My dad had it in his house. My stepmom is a big foodie, and she always had it. I remember the first time I saw the brand when we were talking. It was one of those warm-feeling brands that gives you reminders of being a kid.
Ben Rudman   11:20
I love that. I love hearing that.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   11:22
Yeah. But you said something there that I think you kind of glazed over. I knew exactly what you were talking about, and you knew what you were talking about, but let’s dive into this more. What’s the difference between Celtic Sea Salt and the regular table salt I’m getting at a restaurant?
Ben Rudman   11:44
Yeah, absolutely. The difference is that Celtic Sea Salt is hand-harvested. Essentially, there’s nothing taken away and nothing added. Let me step back. The table salt you buy has been refined. Pure sodium chloride doesn’t generally just form in the earth with nothing else attached to it. Minerals in general come clustered together in various chemical compounds, in rocks, in seawater, and things like that.
To get to regular old table salt, and even, for the most part, Himalayan pink salt (though Himalayan does have small amounts of minerals in it), they take the product out of the ground or out of the sea, essentially reconstitute it, and strip out all those minerals so that you get the pure thing. The question is, why do they do that? It’s really because there’s a much larger industry behind it, for food we don’t eat: an industrial industry.
We need sodium chloride as an agent for a lot of chemical industrial processes, and then they also just feed us that, basically. That’s literally what it is. Morton is a great company. The umbrella is iconic, and I have a lot of respect for them. But they’re part of a business where the branded food company is a very small part of the company, and they have a large industrial complex that they service, and they’re great at what they do.
For our part, we say, for human food, why take away all those minerals? When we say hand-harvested, we have these channels where the water flows in and is gradually evaporated, and what’s left is the minerals that are inside the ocean and inside the water. We still test for purity, so we have to be very careful, because there are parts of the world where not removing anything would maybe be bad.
You definitely don’t want to source from polluted ocean waters or anything remotely like that. So we literally scour the earth for these ecosystems, and we find places where maybe there’s plant life that helps purify the water, or it just tends to be a safer place for things like this. We partner with those suppliers and help them build up their businesses, and as a result we find high-mineral sea salts that are hand-harvested.
It’s the same kind of harvesting, the same process, throughout the world.
Ben Rudman   14:06
The only thing that is happening is the sun and the wind are evaporating the water, and what’s left, again, is this hand-harvested, high-mineral sea salt.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   14:15
That’s awesome. Tell me a little bit more. This sounds really exciting. Tell me about the harvesting. So you have the channels, the water comes in, the sun comes down and melts it out. That sounds really cool. Talk to me about that.
Ben Rudman   14:30
Yeah, blink twice if I get too wonkish. I get excited about stuff and say too many words, but I’ll give you the short version. There are basically these channels that come in from the ocean. We source primarily from France, Spain, Portugal, and Guatemala. We source from different places around the world, but the process is the same. You have these oceanic spots where the water is relatively pristine, and the farmers build these inland channels.
Literal channels, just a little trench where the water flows in. They get shallower and shallower until you reach what are called salt marshes. Inside the salt marshes, it’s just nature. They’re literally holes dug in the ground on top of clay, and the water gets shallower and shallower until it’s about an inch deep.
Once it’s about that deep, there are these salt farmers who have rakes, and they agitate the water with the rakes. The agitation provides enough energy to accelerate the evaporation process, and the rakes also pull the salt out after it evaporates. What happens very quickly (I’ll give you the quick rundown, because it’s cool) is that the salt crystals form on the top and make these little flower-like crystals.
That’s where the word fleur de sel comes from. It’s a very fancy type of salt, and we skim those by hand, and we can sell that as fleur de sel. If you let that go for a while, more crystals come up, and that salt all collects and falls down to the clay, which is how we get the high-mineral light gray salt that we have. It ranges from light gray to sort of off-white sometimes, depending on how you’re looking at it.
That’s harvested with those rakes and by hand, and then sent off for packaging.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   16:17
Interesting. Okay, so you’re making a ton of salt, and the first iteration is essentially the fleur de sel, and you skim that off, and then everything after that, you can’t get fleur de sel again from that same salt. That’s interesting. It’s kind of like maple syrup: really light maple syrup is the first batch, and then as the season goes on you get the dark amber maple syrup. You can’t go back and get that same light maple syrup from the trees.
Ben Rudman   16:48
Yeah. Aesthetically, there’s this principle that I love. This is a nerd moment, but I think one of the defining characteristics of nature is irregularity. If we study ourselves closely, I don’t know if you notice this about yourself, but I noticed that one eye is a slightly different shape than my other eye. Our salt crystals are all irregular in that way, versus things that are refined. Refined salt is not irregular; it’s uniform. And I think there’s beauty in that, just to piggyback on what you were saying.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   17:22
Yeah. But then also, are there more minerals? Fleur de sel is good for you, it’s healthy for you, but are there more minerals in the salt that comes after the fleur de sel?
Ben Rudman   17:37
Yeah, there are marginally more. A couple things happen there. One, it’s a bit of a misnomer to think that it just comes from the clay, because the salt falls to the clay below. Actually, what happens is those crystals get big and they trap water on the inside. Things like magnesium chloride are suspended in seawater, and even during the evaporation process they don’t fully evaporate, so those bigger crystals form and kind of capture it.
You have more chlorides captured in, which bring more minerals into the compound, which is actually why it’s high in minerals. So those bigger crystals capture more of the minerals. Fleur de sel still has some minerals, but those flakes are so light and delicate that it’s marginally lower.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   18:21
Okay. Sorry, I’m totally nerding out on this, because I love food and I love salt. Flake salt: so fleur de sel is flake salt, but not all flake salt is fleur de sel. Is that a true statement?
Ben Rudman   18:34
Absolutely. Flakes can be achieved a number of different ways. There are various mechanical evaporation processes. Most brands that use flake salts, and I’m not disparaging competition, I actually buy some competitors’ flake salts, and I think they’re really great. I’m not going to do them the service of giving them a commercial here on the air, but I do buy some, and I think they’re worth buying. They’re great for certain finishing occasions.
You put it on top of a focaccia or something like that, and it’s pretty sweet. Don’t get me wrong, I do like it. But those salts across the board are typically pumped in from the ocean. Some of them even say hand-harvested, but they’re really not.
They’re pumped in from the ocean and mechanically evaporated, which just means they apply heat inside a production plant and evaporate it, and then they have various processes and expertise to get to those flakes.
Fleur de sel, on the other hand, is a delicate, nature-formed, generally very irregular flake. If you go to Europe, you’ll often see a little cup of salt in the middle of the table, in France especially, but it’s common throughout Europe. That’s typically fleur de sel, because it’s very delicate. The implication is that the chef seasoned the food quite well, but just in case you want a little bit more, you’ll want something delicate to put on it, and that’s what that’s for. So fleur de sel is the natural and original flaky sea salt.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   20:01
Cool. I’ve got a bunch of questions about Celtic Sea Salt, but I want to back up a little bit. You said something earlier about the manufacturing company that you ran for seven years. You were the CEO, and you had never been a CEO before. What was the hardest lesson, where you thought, “Okay, this is more difficult than I thought”? Does anything stick out in your mind?
Ben Rudman   20:29
Yeah, there were tons of lessons that were more difficult than I thought. I knew going in, I have a bunch of life philosophies, and I’ve had the benefit of at least having lived some life. I always like to say you’re not entitled to opportunities, and you’re not entitled to smooth seas. So, throwing entitlement out the window, just embrace the fact that life is going to be full of trials and tribulations.
I like to say we live on the same terrain that Lewis and Clark did when they set out from Camp Dubois to travel to the Northwest, and everything tried to jump out of the woods to kill them and eat them. This is the same terrain. If you’re going to set out on a journey to build something, it’s going to be hard. Otherwise, everyone would be billionaires and successful entrepreneurs.
With that said, I went in knowing it was going to be hard, and my initial approach was: don’t change anything until you can explain fully how it’s done, and you can at least have a civil conversation with the person who set up that process about changing it. To me, they may not agree, but if I can’t sit down and enumerate my rationale to them, then I haven’t earned the right to make a change. So generally it’s going to take a while.
You have to come in and learn the business, ask questions, and earn the right to have a point of view. I think humans are generally that way. If you’re in an organization and a new leader just shows up and starts changing things, you’re going to be, at a minimum, very skeptical, if not cynical.
But if this person comes in and starts asking a lot of questions and shows that he or she values the perspective of people who have been living this thing for a long time, then when they do make changes (maybe you’re not comfortable, maybe you don’t agree), there might be some trust there, because that person has earned the right to a perspective. That was the first thing I went in and did.
I still got punched in the mouth like 50 times throughout the whole thing. Honestly, it makes for a nice PowerPoint slide: in four and a half years, we built the largest manufacturer of meat snacks in the United States. The way we got in was that we partnered with a guy named Kevin Western.
He had a regional meat processor, one facility in Missouri, and he had already partnered with Chomps to make sticks, but he didn’t have sufficient capacity to satisfy their growth. And the jury was still out on whether, from a regulatory perspective, what he was doing was going to work. I won’t bore you with USDA, but that was the reason sticks had trouble getting off the ground to start.
Ben Rudman   22:50
But this guy’s an innovator, and he’d built this little meat processor. Most of the business was still other stuff. They were still doing hams and summer sausage and even deer processing for local hunters. So we got rid of some of that other business and really bet on sticks when we partnered with Kevin.
The arrangement was that Kevin was going to stay CEO and I was going to step in as president or something like that and learn how to operate alongside him, and that’s what we did for the first six or eight months. Kevin ended up having to step down for some personal reasons. All good, he didn’t do anything bad. He’s a wonderful human being, and actually one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met.
But he had to step down, and he agreed to say, “Hey, man, I’ll look over your shoulder, but you’ve got to run this thing.” That’s what we did, and I was very, very grateful to have him looking over my shoulder. He’d kept a significant equity stake in the business, so in my mind we were still business partners.
But now I had to learn how to do the job he’d been doing since he was a kid, because he had inherited the business from his dad. When I got in there, I wouldn’t change anything I did for those first three months, except I started to get stars in my eyes. I saw there was a tremendous growth opportunity.
It felt like the more sticks we could feed to these brands, and the more thinking ahead we could do in terms of retail formats, that we could innovate ourselves and go to them and say, “Hey, how about selling this type of package into a grocery store? How about these flavors? How about this protein?” The more we could do, the more options they’d have, and the more growth we’d all experience. And that was right.
Except I just thought, okay, we’ll just build more space, hire more people, buy more machines. What I learned was that this business had been around for a long time. They had a lot of people in this rural place in Missouri called Greentop, just outside of Kirksville. Those people are really smart and really hardworking, but we only had 60. That journey from 60 to 100 was really something.
It taught me that the people who are the OGs in a business are super, super valuable, and we need to double down. That move from 60 to 100 worked because we really backed those people as leaders. But then we had to go from 100 to 200. And it’s just like…
Ben Rudman   25:05
It’s just like a hydration stick, right? You pour it in and the flavor’s really strong at first, and then you keep adding water and the flavor gets weaker and weaker as you go. We weakened and stretched and stretched those originals to where the whole thing just started to break. I doubled headcount from 100 to 200, and you would expect that you’d experience some growth. We actually grew zero during that period.
Revenues slightly went down, and our profits went away. All my investors, who had said, “Yes, we will back Ben to run his first business,” that month were like, “I don’t know if we backed the right guy. What are you doing?” And that was the right thing to ask, and so was everybody around me. I viewed myself as entirely accountable for that situation. I had caused it, and I had to spend a lot of time digging out.
It took us all of six months to dig out of that. We eventually did get from glory to glory and strength to strength, but it was pretty hard-earned. So I would say the big one was, I just kind of broke the business by being too ambitious and growing too fast, and assuming that what had gotten us as a business to one point would get us to the next point. And that’s just not how it works.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   26:14
I get that, though, right? You saw the potential, so you were staffing up so you could scale, because you can’t scale if you’re not staffed up. You wanted to staff up before you got the demand. But there are too many issues with doubling headcount in a small town. Yeah, I get it.
Ben Rudman   26:34
It’s not rocket science, right? I think seasoned operators would roll their eyes and say, “Dude, how did you not see that coming?” And I wasn’t seasoned yet, and maybe sometimes I’m still not. Honestly, it’s the same hubris that said, “Hey, I can go be a first-time CEO and build the biggest meat snack manufacturer.” Sometimes that hubris and gumption to go out and take big shots tends to work for me, but sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it bites you in the ass.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   27:03
Yeah. Sometimes our best qualities can bite as well.
Ben Rudman   27:12
If you knew you would suffer at the hand of your strongest qualities, you wouldn’t ever achieve anything. So you kind of have to go suffer and just believe that there are going to be things I don’t know or understand that are going to jump out of the woods to try to kill me and eat me, and I will fight those fights when they come up.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   27:26
And you just gotta win a little bit more than you lose.
Ben Rudman   27:28
You do have to win a little bit more than you lose. I agree. Once you bring in other people’s money, which I had (I’d raised capital from investors to do this M&A transaction, to buy half the business, or a little more than half; I’d convinced Kevin to do that deal and roll his ownership into it), I didn’t feel like I had to win a little bit more than I lost. I felt like I had to go undefeated.
So I had a third quarter where I was trailing, that’s what it felt like, and we had to make a comeback. Sometimes you find yourself there, and everyone who probably listens to this podcast who is an operator is the type of person who doesn’t take no for an answer and goes in there and goes thirteen rounds, or however many rounds there are in boxing. You have to commit beforehand to that fight.
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Zak Cassady-Dorion   28:25
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EPISODE RESUMES
Zak Cassady-Dorion   28:41
Yeah. All right, so you said something else. You said you saw all the different options for the meat sticks, and that’s what got you really excited, seeing all those different options. Let’s jump to Celtic Sea Salt. Some people, when they think about sea salt, think, “Okay, there’s salt, and that’s all there is, just one type of salt.” But you’re changing that. You actually just launched a new product recently that is a completely different option than something you put in your food. So talk to me about how you’re thinking through taking that great product and creating additional options with it.
Ben Rudman   29:24
Absolutely. My job is to get people to care more about salt. If you think about it, if you care about your food, you should care about your salt. If you care about your electrolytes, you should care about your salt. There’s a lot of salt that goes into these products. Whether you’re salting your food, which is the oldest ingredient and the most important thing, we have a chef we partner with named Sohla El-Waylly, and she always says there have been good dishes made with every methodology under the sun, but not one single good dish in human history has ever been made without salt. So you should care about your salt.
So we asked, where else does it really matter? If you look at electrolyte products, there are some really prominent electrolyte mixes that I use too, when I go for runs and do hard workouts, that are mostly sodium chloride and sodium citrate. And they are effective. I’m not saying sodium chloride and sodium citrate aren’t effective. But if you care about your electrolytes, shouldn’t you care about your salt?
So can we bring our whole spectrum of high-mineral, hand-harvested sea salts to this category? And if so, maybe we should explore being there to serve consumers. Really, it’s just about serving people. So we said, let’s launch Hydrate by Celtic Sea Salt, and let’s make sure we stay true to our values. We’re going to bring these unrefined sea salts, and we’re going to add some extra electrolytes to provide the function for the occasion.
But we’re not going to add sugar, we’re not going to add artificial sweeteners, we’re not going to add artificial colors, and we’re not going to add artificial flavors. So it’s all going to be natural, natural, natural, natural across the board, and it’s going to have our sea salts in it instead of sodium chloride and sodium citrate. We think it’s a pretty compelling product. So far, so good.
The launch has been very buzzy, and word of mouth has spread like wildfire, and we’re doing a little more from an e-commerce perspective than we expected, so we’re trying to hurry up and catch up on the supply chain side, which is a good problem to have. We’re just happy to be in the space.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   31:26
So it sounds like your e-commerce agency must be doing a good job marketing it, huh?
Ben Rudman   31:32
Absolutely, absolutely. These guys know a thing or two about Shopify and Klaviyo and social, so I’m glad to be working with them.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   31:40
And just for full clarity, ECD is my company. We do the marketing for Celtic Sea Salt, so it’s a lot of fun. Something else I find super interesting: people may look at these two different companies and say they’re really similar, but in a lot of ways they’re drastically different. You had a manufacturing company first, and then you went to the distribution side, and manufacturing as well. Was that on purpose?
When you were looking for the next business, did you want something where you could control the whole thing from beginning to end, including distribution? Or did it just happen that you saw this opportunity, you liked the product, and you wanted to go with it?
Ben Rudman   32:28
I tend to think control is an illusion. Right now it actually is fashionable for CPG brands to go back up the value chain and either build or buy their manufacturers. Maybe that makes sense in certain places, but I don’t think it ever makes sense for its own sake. I think it’s an illusion to think you can control an entire value chain and then control the outcomes.
I do think it’s important to be very clear on where the most value is added between the raw material and the consumer’s mouth, in the case of food, or maybe belly. If you’re clear on what those things are, that should guide what you should own. And obviously I’m speaking as a CPG food guy, consumer packaged goods, food, because that’s what I am. But at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is: are you serving consumers?
Are you clear on what they need? Maybe you don’t know what they need, but can you offer them something compelling to improve their lives? Because that’s why we buy goods. And then the question becomes, what are you doing to enable that? My mind has always been, I love this industry, I love food, I love people. And I believe natural food should be a hundred percent penetrated. I don’t think we need all this food with all these chemicals anymore.
That was necessary in the 1970s to figure out how to defeat starvation. And we’ve figured out how to create obesity in the poorest chunk of our population in the United States, so, pat on the back for us, I guess. But we don’t have that problem anymore. We need to figure out how to make natural food affordable for them. We need to figure out how to get people the best.
It’s just one step after another: blocking and tackling, laying bricks, building this business. It’s a low-margin space. Everyone thinks all these food companies and retailers are fat, happy cats, generally speaking. This is an industry of misery and trial and tribulation and thin margins, and figuring out how to squeeze a penny out of the bottom so you can stay in business. But it’s really about, hey…
Ben Rudman   34:47
Can I attract capital to this so I can grow it? Can I attract consumers to this, so that I know I’m working on a worthy mission? And then, what’s the best way to do it? That’s just how I view things.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   34:58
That’s well said. Talk to me about your different distribution channels. You have your DTC e-commerce website, but what else are you doing for distribution?
Ben Rudman   35:11
Absolutely. I’ll speak to the whole business overall. You can find our salts nationwide across several retailers. We’ve partnered with Walmart, and you can find one, soon to be two, items across the country in all Walmarts. You’ll be able to find our coarse sea salt there, which is called Light Gray Celtic, and very soon our fine, in the form of a shaker. We also have legacy partners like Whole Foods and Sprouts.
When I say legacy, I mean these are the OGs. We’re huge fans of them and huge fans of the people who shop there. That’s a lot of our core consumer, who we always want to love and take care of. You can find a more full assortment at those places. We’re also in most regional grocery stores.
Up where you are, assuming you’re in New York today, you can find us in places like Wegmans, and throughout the Northeast we’re in Hannaford and places like that. In the Southeast we’re in Publix, in Texas we’re in H-E-B. It goes on. We’re also on Amazon. Most of our product catalog is available on Amazon, to meet Prime shoppers where they are, and knowing that salt has a very long shelf life, that’s a great place to get product.
And then of course on our website, CelticSeaSalt.com.
And that’s where you can mostly find Hydrate, our new electrolyte mix. We also just launched something for the holidays called the Savory Brine Blend, which we partnered with Sohla El-Waylly on. She’s a celebrity chef, and she’s pretty incredible. She helped us formulate this Savory Brine Blend, which is for turkeys, but I’ve been using it as a dry rub for a lot of poultry. It’s got a cool, citrusy, herbaceous quality to it, and there’s of course a lot of salt in it. So…
Zak Cassady-Dorion   37:06
Very cool. Those are some big-name retailers that you have, and I obviously see it when I go shopping around. Hannaford is the main place where I see it, here in upstate Albany, New York. Okay, so you were talking about a couple different types of salt, and that sort of led into my next question. You talked about Hydrate, and then the brine, which has some seasonings in it. What’s next? What are the next options? Are there flavored sea salts coming? Talk to me about what the product roadmap looks like, if you can.
Ben Rudman   37:47
Yeah, absolutely. I’m always torn between two things. We’re actually still a pretty small business. We happen to now be the number three player in salt in the United States, and you would think, man, that’s got to be a huge industry. It’s really not. If you think about it, it’s pretty small, and we’re a precipitous drop from number one and two.
We’re only in about two and a half million households across the US, and there are a hundred and ten million households in the US. So in a lot of ways we say, all right, we’ve got to get people thinking about salt and caring about salt, and we’ve been on a heck of a journey to do that. We are growing, which we’re blessed to be doing. Part of the journey is just to keep growing these core products and getting them into new households.
But things like the Savory Brine Blend let us meet people where they’re at and provide them with something where the salt really matters. And the holidays, man. I don’t know about you, but you have a turkey and it’s wet, and you’re reading a recipe like, okay, I need a teaspoon of this spice and a teaspoon of that, and wait, do we even have this one? Do we even have oregano honey?
Versus a nice blend that has organic and natural ingredients in it and has high-quality salt. We felt like we could do that. So there’s going to be some more of that coming down the pipe, for sure.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   39:13
Anybody who brines their poultry knows this and is going to say, “Yeah, this is obvious.” But for anyone who doesn’t brine their poultry, whether it’s chicken or turkey, you have to start, because it transforms the meat you’re cooking. You can’t get that same juicy fullness if you’re not brining your poultry.
Ben Rudman   39:38
A hundred percent. I’m both a meat guy and a salt guy, so you’re talking to… I won’t nerd out on you too much, but you can’t have moisture in the product, especially if you’re going to bake a turkey. You’re just going to suck the moisture right out of it. So you need something in there for water molecules to bind to, and you’re going to need some salt. Ideally you let that sit on that bird for 24 hours or more. We fortunately have some recipes on the package and on the website, so whether or not you buy the pack, at least check out the recipe.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   40:16
I’ve got like six pages of notes that I took, and I’m looking at the time thinking there’s no way I’m going to get through all of these. But something we haven’t chatted much about yet, and I just want to ask a couple of questions about this: from your last company to this company, the biggest change in the world has been the implementation of AI. You seem like a very process- and systems-oriented guy. How are you using AI internally to help you with the company, in ways that you couldn’t the last time you were doing it?
Ben Rudman   40:56
Yeah, absolutely. I think of AI as a multiplier of productivity. In a lot of ways, maybe at least for me, the most helpful way to think about it is that it’s a tool that helps us interact with computers. If you think about it, that’s really no different than, for people on Microsoft, Outlook and PowerPoint and Excel. Those are really just tools for visualizing what a computer is doing, and they help you organize and leverage that capability.
AI is that, just a potentially more sophisticated version of it. So what we’ve said to our team is, let’s make that incremental training. Maybe not “here’s how to use Excel more effectively,” but “now, how do you use Copilot to do a thing?” What we’re really looking to teach people is to multiply their time with it and multiply their effort with it.
But the key is to multiply their effort and their time, not to have AI create things out of thin air. One of the biggest crimes, actually, and not to get on a soapbox, is that all of a sudden there are people who never sent me a 10-page report before, and now I’m getting 10-page reports out of them every week. And I’m like, “Hey, I’m not reading this, because I know you haven’t read this.”
And actually the worst crime is people sending those 10-page reports and then somebody who receives it uploading it to AI and saying, “What does this say? Make me a response.” So we have AI talking to each other. It’s AI-on-AI crime. So anyway, I say that’s how not to use it, but how to use it.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   42:37
AI on AI crime. I like that a lot. I’m definitely using… You’ve got a lot of good sayings you came out with during this call.
Ben Rudman   42:44
Yeah, well, anyway, I think AI is this wonderful tool. Obviously information security is really important, so find ways to make sure you can implement it with that in mind. Those have been the calling cards for us so far. There are probably much better ways to use it, but we have used it really heavily. There were some holes, we’ll say. Any small business has some nuances and niches relative to its business model, and we do some niche things.
So we’ve had to build ourselves some tools, which is cool. We live in this age where there’s almost no reason to say, “I wish my ERP did this, otherwise we would do that.” It’s like, no, just go build it. You can really build stuff. We’ve built our own apps to help us service Amazon better, to help us service UNFI and KeHE, who are our distributors into natural retail, and to service some of the big-box retailers that we serve. It’s pretty cool.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   43:44
Yeah, it is. Internally, as an agency, we’re leaning super far into it. A lot of what we do for our clients is execution, and it’s repeatable. That’s not what drives the most value for our clients, the repeating of the execution of the task. What drives the value is high-level strategy. So we’re trying to automate as much as we can, so that our team can focus more on higher-level strategy that’s going to drive even more additional revenue.
Ben Rudman   44:19
I think that’s smart. I think that’s super smart. To your point, if you think AI is going to generate your strategy for you, that’s not going to happen. It has not been trained on your brain. But if you give it what you want and have it accelerate things, like generating content related to your strategy to share with your team, or you can even say, “Hey, here’s our strategy. What questions should I be asking? What questions would you ask?”, you can do those types of interrogatory processes and improve on the margins, for sure, which I think is beyond powerful, actually. It’s…
Zak Cassady-Dorion   44:53
Yeah. And oftentimes, what we were seeing is that certain roles on our team were spending a lot of time on very tedious, low-level tasks, tasks that absolutely, one hundred percent had to be done and that you couldn’t really speed up anymore. I was looking at it thinking, this is crazy that we’re spending so much time on this. That was one of the first things we automated, all of those processes. Which is neat.
Ben Rudman   45:24
Yeah, that’s true. There’s no more need to hand-key something from a PDF into Excel or something like that. People should be able to crank it out.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   45:32
Exactly. Or entering data into a spreadsheet. If you go to an event and you have a hundred names written down with their email addresses, historically you had to transcribe that into a spreadsheet. It just had to be done, and no one wanted to do it. But now you just take a picture, throw it into Claude or GPT, and it adds it to a spreadsheet.
Ben Rudman   45:55
Yep, a hundred percent.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   45:57
All right. Ben, we’re down to the rapid-fire close. We’ve got a handful of questions here. You ready? One habit a CPG founder should drop tomorrow.
Ben Rudman   46:10
I don’t know what it would be, other than maybe building your company for fundraising or acquisition. I think you’ve got to build a really, really good business, and in my mind a really good business is essentially a hypothesis to be tested: am I serving a consumer something valuable, and do they validate that by paying a price that supports a viable business model?
If you can build that, then you’ll be able to fundraise, and you’ll exit if you get it to scale. But always asking what investors want, what private equity firms want, what strategics want when they acquire, it’s sort of like, I don’t even golf, but I’ll say it’s like showing up at the first hole and saying, “Well, I’m going to play this hole because I know what the eighteenth hole is going to be like.”
You have no idea what’s going to happen between hole one and hole seventeen, so you might as well just play golf.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   47:18
One of my best friends, who built an extremely large company (everyone listening to this would know the company, but that’s not the point), one of the things he always says is: do not build a company to sell it. Build a company to continue growing it.
Ben Rudman   47:40
Well, why would the buyer buy it? If the mission is fully satisfied and there’s no more headroom, no one’s going to buy it anyway. So you’re going to have to build something durable.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   47:50
Yeah. The first number you check every Monday morning.
Ben Rudman   47:57
Right now, I log into Amazon Seller Central and Shopify and our distributor tools and our Walmart dashboard, sometimes in various order, and I just check how the weekend went. But I’ve gotten really good at being more balanced, because I coach my son’s sports. Unless some fire is happening over the weekend, I don’t touch it over the weekend. So that’s what I touch on Monday morning.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   48:20
Good for you. That’s great that you don’t touch it over the weekend. But Ben, it sounds like you need to get in Claude Code and build a dashboard that pulls all those numbers for you.
Ben Rudman   48:29
Yeah, I definitely do. I definitely do. I have a long story that I won’t bore you with on that, but yes, we need to have that.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   48:36
This has been awesome. Last thing: where can people find you?
Ben Rudman   48:42
Best place to find me is LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/benrudman1, with the number one, I believe. You can also just Google “Ben Rudman Celtic Sea Salt” if you want to find me and shoot me a message. I love talking to other operators. If you’re trying to sell me something, you’d better make sure it’s really, really valuable and your sales pitch is compelling, otherwise I’ll ignore it. But otherwise, I love talking to other operators.
Zak Cassady-Dorion   49:05
Awesome. Ben, it was great. Great seeing you, great chatting with you.
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