YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Norton

lines on the record: 78
first: 2023-10-23
most recent: 2023-10-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't know about you, Mark, but when the announcement was made, I bought as much ketchup as I could. On Amazon, I still have a stockpile”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I attribute a large amount of what we have accomplished to Locke most definitely. I also believe that we have worked very hard and that we've been focused and that we've put a lot of effort into what we do, but we are extremely fortunate. I mean, like Mark said, so much of what we did was right place, right time. This is like in the changing tastes of America, it was the proclivities of our ultimate acquirer and the fact that we've both come from some means, right? We had a little bit of a leg up just socioeconomically. All that is very much luck. But I always go back to, again, my dad, he has this great saying, which is the harder I work, the luckier I get. But I do feel like I'm a lucky guy.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deeply in my bones, I could never agree with that sentiment and my official on the record statement is that it just hasn't been sufficiently challenged yet.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People wasn't. Oh, yeah, like you tried and you failed, but it was instead like all this outpouring of passion for the product, for the brand, for the other products. And it helped me realize that the ketchup served its purpose. Yeah, it doesn't exist anymore. But you know what does exist is the culture that we had created and all now the team members that we had that have gone to start their own food companies, right? Or become leaders at other food companies or leaders in other industries. The ketchup served its purpose, right? It was the seed that was planted and all the flowers that have bloomed from there.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aside from having our hopes dash that we would one day best Malcolm Gladwell in that argument. We felt really sad. Look, business is hard. Companies serve a lot of masters. And at the same time, too, we had gone through inflation pandemics, international war that impacted the food system. But, you know, ultimately it's sad to see this original baby that we had created and we concept and we put so much time in ultimately get snuffed out when that news came out that the product was being discontinued. I felt ashamed that I had 10 years to get this product right, to get it to scale, to prove that it could succeed, and prove that it could be better. And we had almost like squandered that opportunity, right? And that it was somehow on me. And I remember posting what I called this catch-up eulogy to LinkedIn that Mark and I had worked on together. And what I heard and what I fell from”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mickey Mouse was literally coming over to take pictures with us while Mark was breaking the news to the North American food. Yeah.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Mark and my job changed from sort of piloting this independent ship together to all of a sudden it's more about broken these relationships and like the level of diplomacy and helping people simultaneously feel psychological safety, but also treating them like adults and recognizing that we are living and change, right? And change is our business.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We hadn't worked with Costco at the time. We hadn't worked with Walmart. We hadn't worked with Target. Right now all of a sudden they had.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, you know, in our case, it was very interesting because no doubt there are so many benefits that we saw. And we said, hey, we went from having a retail sales team of four people to Unilever's sales team of 400 people spread across these 50 states. And so together with the team and with Unilever's fantastic team, the size of Sir Kensington's tripled.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. What's really interesting in these cases is that you're not really dealing with like a single board of like four people. You're starting to now work with something that was pretty honestly like foreign to Mark and I, which is like a whole swath of a multinational company and everybody has all these different assumptions of exactly what things are going to be like, right? So yeah. Oh, okay, great. You've joined. And oh, so it's just going to be like the seventh generation integration. Oh no, it's going to be more like Ben and Jerry's. Or, oh no, it's going to be, oh, but you're part of the Hellman's, you know, sales organization. And so really, you know, what started out as pretty clean. Ultimately, it gets complicated. And things start to fold in in unexpected ways.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All this on my mind about the legacy and my newborn son and what were we doing and what would Unilever be able to offer us? And by the end of that trail run, I was like, it's time. This makes sense. Like if we can do this, we should do this.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They needed brands and businesses that spoke to a younger generation. Supported their mission around good food and healthy food and businesses that were growing. And growth was something that we had. At this point, I had just had my first child, and so it was early February of 2017, and I was going to go on a trail run. And I remember at the beginning of this trail run, I got a call from Mark and he's like, Unilever wants to buy us. And I think they're serious. And I'm like, okay, that's very interesting. But like, you know, I'll talk to you when I get back. And I had just read Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And before this point, we would talk about having a good culture as a company, but we didn't actually have any words to describe that culture. Like we didn't have a list of values. We didn't have a mission. We knew that we had less sugar, right? And we knew that we were non-GMO verified, but it was kind of this collection of things that had emerged over time rather than a coherent system. One of the things that I then brought back to mark and that we really volleyed on together was, well, what would that actually look like to formalize this kind of stuff? And I came back to the business with Mark's support and with a renewed sense of fire and a renewed sense of fierceness about this. And we started to create the story about who we were.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I spent a month and a half in what I'll call the desert, like conceptually the desert. Literally, I went to a cabin in the woods for three days. After I had talked to a whole bunch of different entrepreneurs, our team members, some of our investors. And I posed this question to them, which is like, what is Sir Kensington need now? Because if I can figure out the overlap between what's holding us back from greatness and the way that I'm actually suited to contribute, then there might be a path forward.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But a year from now, you might be writing him a thank you note no matter what happens. And I said, you know, I hope that's true.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And look, I knew that I wasn't the perfect person for the job, but I understood that none of us were the perfect person for the job because we were all trying to figure this out as we went along. And I have a very strong sense of personal responsibility that I wasn't really able to put my hand up and be like, oh, I can't own this or I can't get better enough at this or I want to cede more responsibility to you because I felt like it was my job to take that responsibility and own it. You know, I love putting on fries of New York, but the idea of constructing a national field marketing enterprise for me is mind-numbing. And at the time, I was gutted. I was shocked. I was so much of my identity was tied up in this. I was very confused. And I remember talking to my dad and he said, you know, you're probably really angry right now. And you're probably kind of pissed at Mark.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we had this restaurant that was two blocks from our office that we would fire people at. So we wouldn't fire people in the office. We'd fire people at this restaurant. And Mark was like, I want to have a meeting with you at this restaurant. And I was like, that's weird.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's funny, right? When you raise money and you have money to spend, actually, the opposite thing happens to the bottom line, which you spend it, right? Yeah. And I think that we started to. Really ask the question of who do we need to bring on to scale this business and professionalize this business?”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was in the talk of the town. It was in the Guardian. It was in the New York Times. It was on Chinese television.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guy, next time I'm in Northern California, I'm stopping by your place. He's coming to my house for dinner. I'm going to cook for you. Let's make some mayo.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and it would have an artist statement. We developed a taxonomy, right? Because there's only so many different sort of mother shapes of fry. There's the Alumet, which is kind of like a standard fry. There is the waffle fry. There's the elusive palm souffle that maybe two or three.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, let's get 100 different restaurants to give us a single French fry. And we will put those french fries on display. We'll figure out a way to preserve them, to coat them in resin. We'll tell the history of condiments. We'll tell the history of French fries. And what we thought was that we would basically be hanging out in this beautiful gallery for the three days and the weekend that the pop-up was open. And we'd be lucky if we got some press around it. And it turned out to be just a wild success. So from the minute it was open to the minute it was closed, it was full of people. Like there were points where you had to limit the capacity in there.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This campaign is going to have to earn media. And so let's do something that's really inexpensive but that people can't help but talk about. And what they ended up coming up with was the idea of creating a museum of French fries. We were going to create in New York City an exhibit about French fries just as the way that the Museum of Natural History would do a show on butterflies or dinosaurs.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We pushed it as far as we could. And so, this is where we started to recognize that in order to really grow a brand in this industry, you need a strong air game and a strong ground game. And so this was our ground game. But what about the air game too? And it was about this time that we had basically arranged an investment and did kind of a special deal with a really fantastic award-winning ad agency called Mother New York where they would invest and they would get shares in the company, but they would get a discount because they would deliver for us also an advertising campaign. Now, the catch was when we sat down to brief them, we said, oh, by the way, we, of course, have no budget for this campaign. And they said, well, you got to give us some number. And we said, okay, we can spend $50,000 on this campaign. And so what that meant was we weren't buying any billboards, we weren't buying any TV slots. We said.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More and more. And so we ended up creating was very low tech and very offline, but we could go to these grocery stores and say, hey, we know that we sell best when you put us in a special display. And they would say, Well, that's a ton of inventory, and you're not a beverage, you don't move very fast, you move pretty slowly, so it's going to sit there for months. And we would say, okay, well, we'll guarantee you that we'll sell through it because we'll keep doing demos in your store until that inventory is gone.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's so much hulloo about digital marketing and about scalable tactics and targeting. And this was just at the time where a lot of these direct consumer business were starting to get spun up, but we didn't have a product that really worked direct to consumer because of the price point. And it was a glass product and it was expensive to ship. And so we had a member of the team on named Pat Jame who had built the field marketing program for the legendary honest tea company. And so what he did with us was spin up a plan to start doing hundreds and then ultimately thousands of in-store demos that wouldn't really scale on their own. But when you get these down to a science and people can really try it in the store and they buy a jar or two right there, then they'll come back three months later, six months later and buy.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But in mayonnaise, all of a sudden, oh, well, now let's make it with avocado oil mayo. Let's make it even more different than. Hellman's are best foods. Sales went up. Bizarrely, right, the market is communicating to us. Hey, like, I know that you got your starting ketchup gentleman, but mayonnaise is really where you can let your freak flag fly.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, we make a lot of noise. We're going to prove Malcolm Gladwell wrong. The Heinz doesn't belong here or there. Yeah.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And then the other thing that we did that year was that up to that point, we still had these short, squat little scooping jars that were highly impractical. If I'm at a barbecue and I've got literally a hot dog in one hand and a jar of ketchup in the other hand, I need a third hand to scoop it with. But then we move to these taller glass bottles and sales went up. And then eventually we went to squeeze bottles and sales went up. And so one of the things that ultimately, you know, we eat humble pie on this is that the closer that we got to category convention and ketchup, the more it would sell.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. The other thing I think that is really important to talk about here in the evolution of the ketchup, the other thing that we did over and over again with the ketchup is think about, well, how can we make it more palatable? How can we make it more attainable? Yeah. We got feedback from people hey, it's too chunky, it's too acidic, it's too earthy. All right, let's take out the apple cider vinegar. Let's mill the onions, you know, and the tomatoes more finely.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was the business would obviously not exist without that lifeline because Now we had product market fit. We had growth. We had a reason for retailers to take more products. We had a bigger base of business to finance.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We only wanted to get into categories where we felt like we could really disrupt them and be additive to them and bring something totally new. The reason why to this day we don't make a hot sauce is because there's plenty of delicious flavorful, wonderful, unique, authentic hot sauces. We to this day haven't felt like we can improve on it.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because mayonnaise carries flavors so well, all of a sudden we were making a siracha mayo and we were making a chipotle mayo. And so we really created in Whole Foods and in grocery stores the first successful flavored mayonnaise. So now what we were doing was we were actually growing the category. We were expanding what the merchandising assortment could be for these retailers. And that was a winning strategy because it invited the partnership for us to grow with these grocery stores.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Partnered with Whole Foods on creating a mayonnaise that we knew that they would be excited about. And they said, can you create something that is really the highest goodness grade mayo that's on the market in America? And we did that. And launching the mayonnaise transformed our business nearly overnight. Now, 50% of our sales are mayonnaise. Now 60% of our sales are mayonnaise. And then pretty quickly we realized that we are indeed a condiment brand. that mayonnaise had the frequency of how often people eat it because it goes on sandwiches which is something that people eat daily it goes in salad dressings it goes in deli salads but for some reason historically in america mayonnaise is demonized mayonnaise is high fat mayonnaise is going to get bad if you leave it in the sun and so all of a sudden having a mayonnaise that was even premium people were”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We talked about ketchup, we talked about revolutionizing ketchup, we called ourselves Sir Kensington's ketchup. But 2011, 2012, 2013, it's super hard to sell to restaurants. You know, grocery stores are saying, okay, you're a two skew, a two item ketchup brand. Like, what do we do with that? How do we merchandise you? Where is this going? People would ask us, you know, are you going to go into other condiments? Are you going to make mustard? Are you going to make mayonnaise? And we said, oh, you know, the market structure isn't quite there. The opportunity isn't there. The market is big enough for ketchup, right? We just have to keep cracking this nut. And ultimately, we said we need to make a change here. We either need to do something really wild, right? And we actually experimented with should we create, you know, canned coffee that would be sold in vending machines and in grocery stores like they have and other countries? Or should we do something a little bit more predictable and make mayonnaise? And we actually really...”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that point, not really quite yet anyone of any scale, but I think there was something really important that happened in 2013. Because for the first two and a half years of the business, we're only catch-up.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And ultimately, it was really hard to crack big national chains and restaurants that were really of any scale just because it's such a hard business and because they're so tight on profit margins. Yeah. At the end of the day, they're not really willing to reprice their products for a better catch up.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had this other side of the business, right? We were in more and more grocery stores every year. We went from one region of Whole Foods to two to four, to national. Then we were in bigger grocery stores. And the fundamental difference of the business of a retailer and a restaurant is that for a retailer,”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In as many places as possible, we would do whatever it took to present the brand there. So for instance, for people that didn't want to put the jars on the table, we designed these custom ramekins, which were little dishes that were in the shape of a tiny top hat and that had the Sir Kensington's logo on them.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Undoubtedly, it was slow going at first. We had to work on the relationships. We had to work on the merchandising. We had to put the time into the demos. We had to lower the price point over time. And we needed to show improvement over that year.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were very fortunate that a Whole Foods invests the time in finding and pioneering local brands especially. And so luckily really it was at the end of our first year in business that we were accepted into Whole Foods and we launched at the beginning of 2011 in that just the New York region of those stores.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so people would have gotten a mysterious indelible black dot over, you know, some sort of a symbol of rabbinical approval that we didn't deserve at the time.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we sat there with a Sharpie and we put a dot over every single kosher logo on every single label for that first run that we had for William Smith.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kosher, or you know, we have done kosher before, which we took to assume like, oh, like you can just put kosher on the label.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You still have a lot of trial and error on the manufacturing side. I'll give you an example. So we meet with a co packer. You know, we went through a long list of their capabilities. Okay, can you do the shape of glass jars? Yes. Okay. Can you put the label on? What type of cooking and processing capabilities you have? Can you be kosher certified? You know, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And so we design all these labels for our first run with William Sonoma. And of course, we had talked to them about being kosher certified, so we put the kosher logo on the package. And, you know, we overnight it like a holiday in. We show up, I think, at six in the morning for the first run. Everything's gearing up. And the lead of the manufacturing plant was looking at our labels. And he's like, talking to his colleague, he's like, is this run kosher? And then he's like, what are you talking about? No, this isn't, you know, this isn't a kosher run. This isn't a kosher line. And like they had answered this question of like, yeah, we can conceptually be.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was rejiggered multiple times. Mark emailing me being like, you know, if I go full time, how the equity splits would change. And I was basically like, yeah, this makes sense. And then probably three months later, he then kind of reproposed it to make it real and actually ink it. And I'm like, oh, well, no, I think this makes a little more sense. He's like, but three months ago, you said this made sense. And I was like, yeah, it makes sense in concept. Not the actual numbers, right? To the decimal point, but like in concept. And I think we learned a very important lesson, which is once you give someone something, you cannot take it away. The experience of having it being taken away is a very difficult emotional experience at that point.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were going to raise it $1 million a valuation, and then I met with someone who said you should raise at $10 million. And I said, $10 million seems crazy. And so Mark and I agreed on two and a half”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember there was a woman who Mark met at that first fancy food show named Maggie, who was essentially a scout for”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, but again, I didn't really expect it to be the catch-up until I got a phone call from Mark and I remember being absolutely shocked that he had decided to go Whole Hog and to go full time on Sir Kensington's. Because I had known Mark as someone that was so intelligent and so logical, and I almost interpreted that as being risk averse. And I thought, wow, you know, if this guy was one of the smartest people I know is going to do it, like I should probably do it too.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My group and I went to another Japanese bank until I then decided to quit that and I traveled around Asia on a folding bicycle for 10 months.”
2023-10-23 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Sir Kensington's: Scott Norton and Mark Ramadan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT