At Female Founder Collective's The 10th House, we know that breaking into the $5 billion frozen pizza industry without food experience sounds impossible. In our exclusive conversation with CAULIPOWER founder Gail Becker, we discovered how she transformed a personal need into one of the fastest-growing frozen food brands in America—reaching $100M+ revenue and 25,000+ stores in just a few years.
Inspired by her sons' celiac diagnoses and frustrated by the lack of better-for-you frozen options, Gail left her high-powered career in journalism and corporate communications to tackle a problem that affected millions of consumers who "hadn't eaten frozen pizza in so long because there was nothing for them."
With 90% of CPG brands failing to reach scale and founders losing thousands on retail missteps, understanding how to navigate grocery without an industry background has never been more critical for food and beverage success.
The Strategies That Actually Get You on Shelves (According to Someone Who Went from 30 to 900 Stores in 8 Months)
Here's what Gail revealed about winning at retail when you're the underdog:
- Retailers want Davids to win because they need innovative brands to bring incremental consumers back to frozen aisles. "That is gold" to retailers. Your personal story beats any corporate pitch because "there's no one there who can put their name on a box, face on a box, story on a box."
- Reliability is everything—there's "no bigger way to piss off a retailer than leave an empty space on the shelf." In CAULIPOWER's early days, Gail would call stores daily pretending to be a customer, then drive around with a cooler personally restocking shelves to ensure availability.
- Build real relationships, not transactions. Share every win with retailer contacts—awards, media coverage, influencer posts. This personal touch gives smaller brands a massive advantage over big company sales forces that don't do relationship work.
- Get national brokers early to ensure shelf placement at scale. Product sitting in stockrooms doesn't count—verify actual shelf placement and stock both initial orders and reorders.
- Your advantage is speed and authenticity. Big companies can't move as fast or tell stories as personally as founders can.
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