Caroline McCarthy is the Co-Founder at Starday Foods. She started her career at Google in the AdWords arena, worked with clients like ClassPass on marketing strategy, and helped build out the performance marketing function at Slack. She also worked for a data science firm that worked for the Obama campaign, followed by working for the banking app One Finance that has since merged under the umbrella of Walmart. Throughout her tech journey, she has been exposed to strategic branding and design initiatives that aid her current work with Starday. Starday is focused on building a next-gen food conglomerate and has two current products: Gooey and All Day. 1:48 - Taking a data-driven approach to CPGStarday’s data engine uses first and third-party signals to identify gaps in the CPG market.“One of the things that is really important to our model is we have what I call like an in-house data engine that we've built that parses through third and first-party data signals to help us understand where we think that there are gaps in the market, based on either existing or ‘not popular’ foods that we think we could build a really strong brand and product around, that also is able to meet sustainability principles. And also, frankly, something that we think will taste good. We don't want to make a healthy product that no one actually wants to eat. With Gooey, without going into too many of the details with the data model because I don't want to bore everyone, we saw a fair amount of signal around a couple of different attributes. Low-sugar being one, dairy-free being another, sustainable, eco-friendly, plant-based in some capacity as well.”4:51 - Seeking mass-market appealMost CPG brands are led by strong founder stories. Starday is taking the opposite approach: foregoing the emotional appeal in favor of pure mass-market appeal.“There's often a really strong founder story behind a product that has really spoken to people. And I say this as someone with a nut allergy, I've always been very passionate about creating a nut-free cookie brand. It will happen one day, I swear. But the idea was to take a little bit of that sort of emotion out of it, and actually be like, okay. What does a wider swath of consumers want? Because the idea behind our products is that they should really be mass market. We're not trying to be in a really niche group…Part of that plays into it as well when we're looking at these products and the different data. Do we think we can actually build a product that's going to appeal to a larger mass of humans? Is this something where when we talk about going into retail, we're saying we can talk to Kroger, we can talk to Target? Or is this really a product that would only make sense at an Erewhon or a Whole Foods? If it's the latter case, there are plenty of amazing brands that are being developed and incredibly successful in that sort of arena. It's just the approach that we're trying to take.”5:44 - Keeping a similar consumer profileFocusing on products that cater to similar demographics has helped Starday avoid starting from scratch each time they launch a new product.“I oversee all aspects related to growth and marketing. So as you can imagine, I spend a lot of time thinking about our brands and the efficiencies that we can find between them. I would say first, we've maintained similar consumer demographics between our first two brands and expect to do so in the future. It's not just in terms of the cross-branding opportunities, but also in terms of how we are understanding our own data. We're not starting from scratch every time, and that's something that's really important and does go back into how we choose our products as well, back to that sort of consumer demographic that we're looking at. If we launch our third brand and we are talking to a completely different type of audience or consumer, that's a whole lot of work and learnings that we are going to have to start from scratch really. And I would prefer to sleep at ni