Matt McLean:
Hi Fabian. Thank you very much. Appreciate you having me on today.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m super thrilled to have you on. You ventured into the organic choose business 25 years ago, and you really had one goal, which was to fuel families with uncompromised nutrition. You named the brand Uncle Matt’s organic. Since you are an uncle to 10 nieces and nephews, it’s amazing. But all of this was after Naked Shoes already came onto the market, which on a personal side note was founded by Jimmy Rosenberg, who I later had the chance to work with on his evolution, choose Brand for a couple of years before it sold to Starbucks. But that said, you jumped into the organic market rather early, yet it was already a moderately competitive landscape at that time. Tell us a bit about the early days of Uncle Matts and why you decided to start the brand. I know it ran through your family, but usually people like to escape that, but you kind of came back to it, so what happened?

Matt McLean:
Yeah, awesome. Well, first off, congrats on a good run with evolution.
I have a lot of respect for what they accomplished and what Jimmy did. So kudos to you guys. Yeah, so Uncle Matia, we have, geez, 25 years, so we were there before organic actually had regulation from the NOP, the National Organic Program in the USDA. Wow. So we were kind of earlier adopters, but actually when I started, there was plenty. There was a large enough organic market that was already there that gave me the confidence that, hey, there’s enough data out there that customers want organic and I believe that they will continue to demand it. I had my first real thrust into organic when I got out of college. I grew up in the citrus business. I’m four generations Florida citrus grower, and when I got out, I actually went to college to get out of the business, said there’s got to be something better than agriculture out there for me that were hot summers. And I started an import export business selling juice to Europe in the Middle East, and one of the customers was German. Well, there

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You go.

Matt McLean:
And he was into organic and he asked me for biologic at the time, could I find him some biologic juice? And that’s how

Fabian Geyrhalter:
We called it, right?

Matt McLean:
Yeah. I was like, huh, that’s interesting. But I knew that if things were trending over in Europe, those food trends typically made their way across the pond to the us. And so if they were starting to see something in Europe, maybe it would have legs in the US and all entrepreneurs, you come back and at some point you have that aha moment like, this is it. I’m going to be rich and famous. There’s a huge opportunity. And when I came back to try and find some organic juice for him in Florida, I also looked at the retail market and remind you I had no CPG experience at all at that time. I literally was just buying raw bulk juice, putting it in 55 gallon steel drums, and we’d ship it in the middle of the break bulk in the hole of a ship to get it to Europe.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Still no small feat. I mean no small

Matt McLean:
Feat, but it was a lot of fun. And so when I looked at the retail market, I said, geez, there’s no organic orange juice out there. And this was probably 96, 97, 19 96, 97. And so I went down that path of like, Hey, what would it look like for us to do an organic orange juice company and brand and be like the organic Tropicana? So that was a lot of fun as a young guy out of college having this visions of, geez, could I be this big brand? Could I do it? There seems to be an opportunity, and it took me down a whole path for a couple years. I had no idea how to do it. How do you even start it? What do I call the thing? I definitely didn’t want to be the spokesperson. I really didn’t want to be the uncle Matt of uncle. Well, here you are.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How did that work out for you?

Matt McLean:
Right. It worked out great, but everything happens for a reason. It was just from that standpoint, the culmination of what I was doing at the time, exporting juice to Europe and the Middle East had one of the customers. It really showed me the opportunity that was in Europe that also translated to the us. And at the same time, it tied in my roots to agriculture and growing with my father and grandfather. And going back to how farming used to be before pesticides were invented, which is organic farming and going back to more natural methods for putting out compost and fish, emulsion, seaweed, things that grown cover crops that they did before, pesticides and synthetic fertilizer and stuff became prevalent after the forties and fifties. And so that was just, for me, it was one of those moments beyond aha, when I figured out there was a need, it went much deeper and rooted into my history as Florida citrus grower. And it just completely made sense when I got to the end of the journey that, okay, I think I’m meant to do this, or at least meant to try and fail to do it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
One could say it came together organically, right? Correct.

Matt McLean:
Yeah, I think it is as divine intervention for sure. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I mean, amazing. And just for the listeners, when you said before when you talked about you chairman client and they wanted biological and what that means. So obviously my accent and myself, we both come from Vienna, Austria, so I speak German. So in Europe, a lot of Europe, definitely in the German speaking countries, organic is actually labeled bio. So bio means organic over there, and that’s what you learned the hard way. You’re like, I don’t know what biologic is, but we can figure that out now. Amazing. And today, just for our audience today, uncle Matt’s organic produces the number one bestselling organic orange juice in the nation. So the idea of I want to become the organic version of Tropicana, I mean, you made that happen. That is really remarkable.

Matt McLean:
It was a wonderful team effort with a lot of family and great employees and great suppliers. But yeah, it’s been a fun ride over 25 years and we’re now doing really what I think I’m meant to do or what I definitely been meant to do for the last 25 years. For sure.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and you brought up that you never wanted to be in the spotlight, so you didn’t want to be on a podcast, you didn’t want your name associated with the brand. So what happens, I mean the name Uncle Matt’s seems equal amount on the nose since it is proven that people like eating grandma’s apple pie more so than a brand name apple pie. So sticking to a family oriented trust, evoking names is good logic, but for you, it seems very authentic given the history of your father and your grandfather. But what did they think when the name was derived and who came up with the name? Was it you or was it the family?

Matt McLean:
So I came up with some really bad names, fab. And I’m going to be honest with you, my leading candidate was Healthy Farms, snore City, generic, terrible. But that’s all I could come

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Up.

Matt McLean:
Okay, that failed, no doubt that would’ve failed. There’s no story behind that. And it’s basically, I’m glad I didn’t go that path. But when I talked about divine intervention, my sister-in-Law, she’s a person of faith, and she believed that God told her to call it Uncle, and it was for the next generation farming better for the next generation without pesticides. And I’m like, wow, okay. I came up with healthy farms that was nowhere close to what God spoke to you said to do.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and what are you going to do if God tells her? Where are you going to say, well, I don’t know if he’s right. And I don’t know, it’s just someone on the street. It’s like, yeah, no, let’s do that. Let’s go ahead and do that and look how it treated you. Pretty amazing.

Matt McLean:
Yes. So that was kind of like, alright, well I think we probably should go down that path,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Divine intervention. Well,

Matt McLean:
And I’ll tell you what, when she told me about it, and I paused for about 10 seconds, like, ah, geez, okay, let’s see the ramifications of me being Uncle Matt, the rest of them. And then I thought, actually it makes perfect sense because at that time I only had two nieces and nephews, and I did care deeply for them. And I thought, yeah, organic. When I talked to my grandfather about it, it pulled up methods for him of like, Hey, this is how we used to farm and this is how I think we should be farming for future generations and to farm better and healthier and et cetera. And so for me it just was like, wow, that’s actually a really good idea. And I think that’s the passion I feel when I think about why do I want to do this business? It’s beyond just a business opportunity. It became something much more deep rooted in family and heritage and then protecting the next generation. So every day I still come to work with that, Hey, this is where I came from, this is where we’re going and this is why I’m doing it, and it’s fantastic. And so it drives me every day. So I’m very thankful for her divine intervention.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I am really glad that we talked about this small part of your brand because very often I started that conversation. I’m like, well, it’s really smart to call it something family oriented. It sells well, but really it is really what drives you, that idea of the next generation, you do it for the next generation. So that generational aspect that is in your name is actually one of the big driving forces. And I think you even talk about this on your website to this day where it is about the next generation and how we feed feed our families.

Matt McLean:
Correct. Absolutely.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Really amazing talking about divine intervention or choosy tidbits, your brand, something happened with your company that is very unusual. I heard of a couple others where it happened, but not often. Not only did you sell your company in 2017, I believe to Dean Foods, but years later you decided to buy it back. So here’s someone who officially exited yet, then you bought your own company back. How did that come about? And more importantly, I feel like what have you learned from those two significant transactions that might shape the company today or that might help guide you day to day as you go about your business now that it’s like a second coming of the business? It’s like, here we are again.

Matt McLean:
Yeah, so it’s very rare. That is for sure. And it was a long journey at that point. We sold it at 2017, and I had started it in 1999. I had mom, dad, a brother, brother-in-Law. My wife were all, and Sister-in-Law were all in the business either working full-time or part-time. And so when we came to the final conclusion like, Hey, you know what? I think it’s a good time to exit. And it was tough because thought maybe this would be multi-generational business. We had a variety of things we were faced with at the time with citrus greening disease coming in. We had a private investor or private equity group that came in in 2012, took a minority stake, it had been five years, so it was time for them to move on, and they were very professional about it. They were a fantastic partner.

Mont out of Colorado, a couple of their board members that they put on are still really good friends of mine today. And when we went out to replace them, it became pretty obvious that the size company we were and some of the challenges we were facing, there wasn’t many people. There weren’t many companies that just wanted take a minority stick. They were like, Hey, well if we’re going to do it, the majority is wanted. And so we said, you know what? We just got a very good offer from Dean Foods. They were a public company, 8 billion traded on Nasdaq, and we were this little tiny thing that they said, Hey, we want to put you on our trucks. They have 6,000 trucks, we have 70 plants. We’re going to try to integrate you into our system. And milk is ubiquitous, it’s everywhere. So for me, my dream was to see Uncle Mats be ubiquitous and be everywhere.

And I thought, wow, this is a great opportunity. So we exited as a family, a little bit of prayer and thought and like, Nope, we had peace. And off we went and it was a great exit we had. Dean took my wife and myself and said, Hey, you two need to still stay on board and run the company for us as we transitioned. So we had a three year deal with them just to help run the company. And I wanted to do that. I wanted to be a good steward for the brand. I wanted to be a good steward for our customers that have relied on us and our grower partners. And so we did that. But two years in, Dean Food’s a milk company heavy to dairy. They just had too many assets, too many big plants, and the dairy industry was declining pretty rapidly.

And so they had financial issues and struggles and they filed bankruptcy. So at the beginning, the end of 2019, they filed bankruptcy. And then in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic, we bought the company back, which was unbelievable because when we sold it, I would’ve never thought a public company was going to go bankrupt. And then the second part, I never thought I’d have the opportunity to buy the company back at a bankruptcy. So pretty crazy. It was fast and furious when it happened. And then us trying to hire a bankruptcy attorney, hire a regular attorney, then we went out and said, Hey, we don’t want to risk all of our money again. How much would we be willing to risk only about this much? Okay, well then let’s find investors to put the rest in. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You had some pretty big name investors too out of the organic. We did, yeah. Pretty amazing.

Matt McLean:
Yeah, we did. So Gary Hirschberg right out of the gate, he’s a good friend and the founder of Stonyfield Yogurt, so he knew the business really well. We’re just going at that point through organic for decades together. So he got on board along with some of his close friends that are also Michael’s good friends. Nicole Daws, who’s the founder of late July organic or tortilla chips and now Nixy Organic Sparkling Water and Sodas. Andrew Abraham with the organic protein powder. He’s on board. John Forker, the gentleman that founded Annie’s

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. He’s

Matt McLean:
One of our investors. So really good group,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
A like-minded group that just said, Hey, let’s get this big startup back into the startup game.

Matt McLean:
So it was easy. We were aligned from the same mission, which is great. We had a good private equity person in there that’s friends with Gary, brought in renewal, who led it from their side, which is good. And they’ve been wonderful partners. And so since that time, we’ve more than doubled the business, which has really been quite astonishing and exciting. The organic industry continues to grow even in a really tough category being orange juice. Orange juice has been demonized over sugar. And really now the last three years been very high priced with short supply and greening and all kinds of turmoil within the industry. But our little engine is the engine that can and still does. And so we continue to outperform the category. We’re one of the few growth stories in that category, and it’s consistently great. We taste delicious and we take a lot of pride in what we put in the bomb.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and let’s talk about the category as a whole, right? Because the success of organic as an offering across everything from produce to skincare, to I’m sure gummy bears for all I know, it has not only been a good thing. I mean, we hear stories about how much of the supermarket producer eggs labeled organic are no longer produced with the true ideology of organic in mind. And there’s just a lot of talk about how important it really is and what it really means. And it’s been almost like back then when things were greenwashed, almost like organic washing going on, so to say, what’s happening in the marketplace? How has that affected Uncle Matt’s, where organic for you means something very, very true. It’s a very different kind of label. How has that market perception of the word organic affected you guys at all, if at all? Right.

Matt McLean:
Yeah. I think any new entrant into the marketplace, it goes through its own cycle of eventually it becomes a norm and accepted. And I think organic has finally got to the point where it’s a norm and accepted, and now you have a lot of competitors that are coming to try and dilute it. So the non GMO verification, you have a variety of others that are just additional, somebody described it as kind of the NASCAR car. You got all the brands on the side, all the sponsorships and so on. The label now organic is one seal of 10. And so how does it not just get washed out? And that’s what we continue to just harp on as an organic company that, hey, these are our practices. We talk about agronomy at Uncle Matt’s. We have from the Grove Blog that talks about why organic is different, the things that we do in the soil, how it is better for the planet, you name it.

So we’re dedicated to the organic piece of it, I believe one, because we’re organic, we continue to get new customers that care about the same things. We care from organic farming and the health of themselves and the health of the planet. And then also one, we just always have the bar that it has to be delicious. It has to be consistently great tasting. And if you start there, that’s the first for anybody. Like, oh wow, that tastes fantastic. And then you’re opening the door for whatever other messaging you want to push. And we lead with organic because that’s our main mission in life.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and it’s interesting. Well, and that mission in life goes then back to the next generation and health and all of that. But looking at your company, you were known for 25 years as a juice company, right? An organic juice company. Correct. And just a few days ago you launched something quite different from Juice, but it is organic. You introduced an organic line of refrigerated teas. How does that fit into your overall philosophy? I think I know the answer because again, it is written all over it, but that is really interesting to see how that shapes a brand that used to be known for choose and suddenly goes into a different category. How did it treat you the first couple of weeks, and how do you see that affect the brand as a whole? What do you stand for, how you move forward? Well,

Matt McLean:
For us, it’s really if you listen to the customer and the consumer, they will lead you of where you think you can go with your brand one. Do you think, and I tell anybody this, any of the entrepreneurs or the small startups that I work with, you need to find that one thing you do really, really well and make sure you’re doing that first right before you then want to branch out into 2, 3, 4, or five different categories potentially, or other items that you think that you also can do because you’re going to get spread way too thin. So the old inch wide mile deep philosophy start there first. And so after 25 years, I think we were pretty good on the mile deep. We may have gone 10 miles deep. So the category has obviously got more than potential, and our brand now has more potential because of what we have built over the last 25 years of having trust within that consumer.

And so what does Uncle Matt’s mean for people? We didn’t venture out too far outside of the refrigerator category, the premium, organic and beverage. So we stayed within that realm. We had some of our customers asking, Hey, we know you do. You’ve got outside of juice, you’ve done lemonades and you’ve done punch. What about tea? Have you ever thought about doing organic tea? And we said, well, let me do a little research on it. Let me see. Personally, I grew up in the south, so I drink black tea just about every day, probably at lunch. I’m also, I love green tea, so I’ll have green tea periodically in addition to a little glass of oj. So it was a natural, pretty easy transition for me to then go into brewing organic tea. And when we looked at it, we just said, Hey, if I think we can do a premium organic that is flavorful to tea as our flavor is to the OJ category, then I’m interested and I think we’ll have something.

And so that’s what we did. We played around, I was very fortunate. We have our own facility now in Texas that’s new for Uncle Mats. That
happened last year after 24 years. Oh, wow. So instead of using using Copak partners, we finally consolidated and put it all under one roof, which has been very fun, also challenging it’s manufacturing, but it’s also been a lot of fun. And the plant manager that we hired had not only juice background, but he had a lot of key background. I didn’t even realize at the time we hired him that, Hey, we’d be getting into tea. This would be fantastic. Perfect. And the same with our purchasing director. He had a lot of tea background in the past working at some leading tea companies along with juice. So it just was a natural. Those two came in and we sat around the table and talked about, okay, let’s talk about what would be a premium brewed tea.

And we went from there and we looked at different regions around the world. Tea can be supplied from all over the place. And we came on a region in India that we really like for black tea. The Assam variety has enough boldness and really a good body and flavor and color and all that. So we started with that as our base and we’ve added some other regions to it. And we think our little proprietary blend there is perfect. And then you got to get what’s the right temperature to brew for and how long you steep for those all kind of bring out the bold and body of it. And that was the experience that the other two gentlemen that we hired came together. So it was a really fun project. I think we have put out a very tasty, flavorful black tea. If you can believe black tea is flavorful for people that aren’t tea drinkers. They’re kind of like, what?

But it is, I mean, I think when you drink our, you won’t think you’re close your eyes and you think it’s water. It is actually going to taste like tea. And we added our own little functionality to the tea piece. So our sweet tea is not your traditional southern sweet tea, which is 35 to 40 grams of sugar. Oh, I’m sure. For 12 ounce. Instead, it’s only eight grams of sugar. We sweeten it just enough with agave and then a little touch of stevia. You won’t taste the stevia in it, which is awesome, but it tastes like 30 gram sugar sweet tea without the guilt and calories, which is awesome. And then of course, it was an easy thing to do a half and half. We already do a fantastic lemonade from not from concentrate, fresh squeezed lemons, and we did the same thing there. We put a little bit of agave and a little bit of stevia, so it’s got some sweetness to it. But yeah, it’s been exciting and we pivoted pretty quick to be able to do it because it’s our own facility, and that

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Helps tremendously. Right. Yeah. It’s like you’ve got a playground now, right?

Matt McLean:
Yeah, we definitely have our own little playground, which is awesome.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s amazing. And further, as a company, you’re a B Corp, right?

Matt McLean:
Correct. We are certified as a B Corp,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Which is an amazing thing to do and a lot of work. But you also run Matthews Hope Ministries that support the needs of the homeless population. You feature local organizations that give back to the community on the label, on the back label, obviously, of some of your OGA bottles, and you donate then portions of the sales to those featured charities. I mean, talking to you now for almost 30 minutes, I have a pretty good idea of how all of this came about, but how does this philosophy of doing good is good business? How do you feel about this? How did it cement itself into your company? Did a lot of that happen after you repurchased the company or always? Was that something that was always instilled into your philosophy of running a business?

Matt McLean:
I think it was instilled from the beginning. However, we have emphasized it more after the buyback and we had participated. We’d always given to the local community and given back and to different charities, but now we just were more, I don’t know. I think we’re just more purposeful about it and really more organized about it. And so with our company and with our employees, we let them choose, Hey, what local charity? And we do local because our donation size isn’t going to be in the millions and the size we do, most of our checks are around $10,000. But to a local charity, these small charities, that’s a lot. It can really impact them, which is great. And it’s in our backyard, so you can see it, you can touch it, you can feel it. So when you go to Matthew’s Hope and it’s the homelessness, it’s 15 minutes from my office, so I can go there and we can volunteer at their soup kitchen and the $10,000 you donate to ’em really helps expand their pantry. It helps with their offering when people are coming by, the educational services they give to the homeless and things like that. So I’d recommend people, I mean, nothing against national larger charities really, it makes a bigger impact mentally for you and your employees. If you can see it, touch it and say like, Hey, we funded that. That’s pretty cool. Yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It is. It is. And I could just add to that, Matt, when I started my design agency, which I know longer run now because now it’s a consultancy, but when I ran an actual design agency, we were one of the first, I think 10 members of 1% for the planet. I think there was Chuck Johnson and then there was us. It was really funny. And at the time, at the end of the year, I was busy writing checks to these smaller organizations, and I remember I wrote this one check and it was just about $10,000 like yours to an organization in the Sierra Nevada. And I felt like it’s a good organization. I read up about them. I’m like, I’m going to give a little bit to them a little bit. I mean, it’s a lot of money for them. And then I mean, the person running that charity, I mean, he called me, he wrote me letters.
He was just like, for them, that was a completely game changing amount of money where you and I would think you just said, right? It’s really making a point again, where if you give what could be seen as fairly small money to huge organizations, if you give it to small organizations, you leave a real dent and it inspires them and they’re driven and they’re like, where did that come from? It’s like a gift of God. Suddenly there’s a check of $10,000 in the mail. I don’t know these people. Why did they do this? Which is really, really powerful.

Matt McLean:
And so that’s been fun. We do a quarterly giving campaign, and so we pick one a quarter and we put ’em on the back of our label with a QR code that goes to our website and their website. So we always say, Hey, our donation is the best we can do, but we hope there’s somebody who is got a whole lot more capability than us that sees you on the label and can donate to your charity. So we given that exposure, given that to have other people say, Hey, wow, that’s a really good thing. I didn’t know that charity even existed, and we want to help and give, so we’ll give anything for the homeless, the foster care and adoption locally, which is in big need. Also, we did one thing for books for Babies. You wouldn’t imagine the underserved and what a book and reading to a baby. There’s all kinds of data on literacy rates in the future, and then success from those literacy rates, which you’re like, wow, that’s pretty amazing. So yeah, it’s been pretty neat. And our team comes together. They all choose the different charities and yeah, it’s fun. It’s been a lot

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Fun, fun. And I love how you say, look, we can only do that much, but we have reach, right? And why don’t we use the reach of the packaging and see where it gets us? That’s really fantastic. When you look back at the 25 years of running your business, do you remember a moment or a time where you felt like, oh, that little OJ juice company of ours is actually turning into a brand that people know that people, when was a moment where you felt like, oh, this is actually, it’s turning into a brand, something is happening here. Do you remember? Can you put your finger at it or was it just over time or was there a specific period that you remember?

Matt McLean:
Yeah, I mean for us, every sale feels like that moment. Yes, especially in the early days, right? I mean, the one healthy store, I’m on the map, but the biggie for us down here in the southeast is Publix, and they have now, I think over 1400 stores. Back then I think they had 900, but it was a huge, huge moment for any company. It still is today. When Publix calls and says, Hey, you’re in. That puts you on a map, but more so for us because you can’t go a mile in Florida without running into a Publix across the state. They’re just everywhere. And being seventh generation, Floridian, fourth generation Citrus family, that was it. That was the moment. And that was, I won’t forget that moment. It was on nine 11. I was literally sitting there and I just watched the second, the first tower fall and like, holy moly, and we were at the office and the buyer from Publix called and he said, Hey, Matt, this is Raul. Like, wow. Hey Raul, how are you doing? And he said, well, on a really, really bad day, I’m going to give you some really good news. Oh,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Wow.

Matt McLean:
Have accepted your product to come into all the public stores. And I was just kind of quiet for about 10 seconds. I knew that it would change my life, and I knew it would put us on the map, and it completely changed my business model. And now we really had a chance to thrive and succeed. And that was a couple years into the business. And after I’d been calling on ’em for two years, I’ve been knocking on that door forever. Oh, I’m sure. Whole emotion of just like, wow, we’re under attack as a country. The lives being just all that emotion that day. You never forget that for so many different reasons. And had one employee, I literally only had one employee, and the one employee that wasn’t family, she left an hour earlier crying, sobbing because she was from New York and she had some friends that potentially were in the tower, and so she couldn’t get ahold of them. And I’m like, oh my gosh, you need to go home. Please take care of what you need. So I was already emotionally amped up, and then he called with that news. So yeah,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Unbelievable. Unbelievable. It’s like you see life’s just evaporate in front of your eyes while you know that your life is never going to be the same afterwards. It’s such an emotional rollercoaster. Unbelievable.

Matt McLean:
It still gives me goosebumps thinking about it today, to be honest with you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh yeah. I’m sure. I’m sure. I’m sure. Well, switching the topic very quickly, we talked about the success and that moment where you got that phone call and you’re like, wow, this is going to be very, very different for our company. Was there a big fail, a big brand fail that you went through where you tried to launch something or where you had a big marketing campaign idea? Was there something that you did where you felt, not you necessarily, but the team and the company where you felt like, oh, wow, that really, really did not work and maybe people can actually learn from that?

Matt McLean:
Probably the first week that I launched. So it took me forever to finally figure out, Hey, what’s this product even going to be called? And then, Hey, what’s it going to look like? I had no CPT background. I got hooked up with one lady who was a graphic designer, and she had done packaging, food packaging. And so she started coming up with some concepts and it was like, all right, well, who’s your core demographic? Who are you going to go after? I was like, natural. I said, well, the mom, we want the soccer mom in the family because it’s orange juice and it’s around the table, so we want to go after that. And so she designed something specifically for this soccer mom and a woman, and it’s lime green, it’s purple, it’s got kidsy cutesy written all over this package. And so I’m like, well, it looks good to me. I mean, that’s who we’re going after. That’s what we should be doing. That

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Shouldn’t work. Yeah,

Matt McLean:
My gosh. We launched this joker. So my first carton is this lime green purple Kidsy cutesy, and on the side of it, it’s got my little niece in holding an orange, and she’s two years old and a little nursery. The little fairy Terry story on the side is she’s the healthiest kid, or she wants to win the healthiest kid on the Planet Award, and it completely hit our target demographic that mom. But within the first week, I brought some home and I was still a single guy, and I had some of my buddies over, and it happened to be in the fridge, this cutesy little purple lime green carton. And my best buddy opens the fridge and he’s a manly man, and he looks at this thing and he grabs it and he picks it up and he just goes, what the F is this? And he just looks, you’re like,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
This is my life’s work.

Matt McLean:
This is a culmination of multiple generations, maybe what the emphasis is. I had to laugh. At first I was shocked, like, holy crap. And then it just totally hit me. I left out a complete demographic, the men

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And the rest of the world, I

Matt McLean:
Completely missed the other half of the world of the population. I was just solely focused on the mom and the kid, and I made this great kidy cutesy thing. Oh,

Fabian Geyrhalter:
What a fantastic Brent Field story, which it didn’t even feel per se, because I’m sure moms loved it for a certain amount of time until they bring it home. And then dad’s like, I’m not sure I like that oj.

Matt McLean:
There is no man, definitely no single man that was picking that thing up with the bridge. So we missed right out of the gate, and I knew, alright, I eventually got to navigate my way back out of the Kidsy Cutesie, and I already had a hokey name Uncle Matts. I’m like, oh my gosh, what have I done?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, so good. So good. Well, and this is a good transition to the big philosophical question. Well, now that you went through this packaging design disaster and now that you ran successfully after that, a brand for 25 years that is in so many American households, what does the idea of branding mean to you? Because it’s not only the logo and the packaging, but it’s a philosophy. And what does the idea of branding mean to you? I know it’s a big question and I know I didn’t,

Matt McLean:
Yeah, no, I mean, the brand experts tell you what, it’s the promise and if you do it right it, it’s a good promise that they’re going to keep you and the consumer are going to keep together. So I think for us, our brand, what a brand means to me is the value you’re giving somebody, the need that you’re giving them and the club that they want to be part of. Like, Hey, I love that brand so much that I want to tell a friend about it. I want to go out of my way for it and I want to kind of hoard it for myself when I have it. It’s my guilty pleasure to not want to share it. Don’t tell anybody that. I want to not share it with people. And that’s from a brand standpoint, that’s what you want. You want that reaction. You want to have like, Hey, I promise that I’m going to give you something that is what you believe is very valuable. So a valuable promise would be what a brand would be, and if you do a great job at it, then they tell a friend, they tell many friends, they influence others, and they become loyal followers for a lifetime.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I really like that. I think you absolutely it on the nail. Hit the nail on the hat. Absolutely. If you take your brand and you put it through a funnel and out comes one word, what would that word be? It can be a vibe, a feeling, a claim. What would best describe your brand in one word?

Matt McLean:
Yeah. And boy, you want to, it’s hard, right? It’s hard to figure that piece out. But as I tossed around and think about that in my head, because we’re food and we’re beverage, and I am pretty fanatical about being consistently great, I tell all of our employees every position, every job description, everything that we have here, I don’t care if you believe you’re at the bottom of the totem pole, whatever you’re doing, we serve the customer and we have to be consistently great at it. And each job needs to be consistently great. So when you open that bottle of Uncle Matt’s, you taste it and you go, wow, that was delicious. And so that’s my word. One word would be delicious

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Because if you don’t hit that, everything else organic and your philosophies and all of that does not matter, right? Because otherwise you don’t, back to the idea of what branding means, right? There’s a certain value prop, and if you don’t hit that, nothing’s going to happen.

Matt McLean:
Totally. And so we want to be the gold standard. We want organic to be the gold standard product out there and from just organic as an industry, we want it to be the gold standard of whatever it is, whether it’s milk or cheese or juice or cotton for fibers and things like that. So that’s my one word. It would be delicious.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love it. That’s fantastic. Talking about deliciousness, what’s next for the Uncle Matt’s brand? What are you excited about in the next six months? I assume it’s all about tea.

Matt McLean:
Yeah, I mean, we’ve got some awesome, we launched a super fruit punch to go along, and we also are just launching a ginger honey lemonade, which I’m pumped about.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh,

Matt McLean:
Sounds really good. Yeah, the ginger honey, you got the healthy property of the lemon, you got a healthy property of the ginger. And then we do organic rainforest honey from Brazil, which it’s got a great little sweet note on it, but it’s not too much. We don’t kill you with calories or sugar because we always want to be health conscious. I have two kids and so I want to give them guilt free stuff. But definitely those two items. And then of course the tea really itis for the next six months to just see how far can we get in distribution with those items. We’re kind of the first organic, refrigerated, premium tea that goes in that case. So that’s kind of exciting to be a first mover in that case and not necessarily a fast follower. It’s much easier to be the first mover. And so we’re really trying to execute well. The Sprouts is the first customer that we’ve got, and then after that it’ll be a fresh market and Whole Foods and then a whole bunch of other regional accounts. Fantastic. They’re coming on board and so far Sprouts is doing great. We are doing our best to keep up with the request for orders and keeping that promise to our customer.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
This conversation filled me with a lot of joy, but one of the main reasons why that was is because here you are 25 years in and you are talking about the hustle that’s about to happen, and I think it’s so great. It’s so great to hear. For anyone out there who’s maybe a month into their startup or five years into their company or they’re 20 years into the company, just that grit that it doesn’t, if that flame goes out, that’s when you know you’re in trouble. But that idea that you’re still hustling and excited about the opportunities and what you need to do and seeing a new product go up in one store and then the next store and just unbelievable. So now that people got to know the actual Uncle Matt, where can they find Uncle Matt’s? Should they go to your site? What are the places to visit?

Matt McLean:
So the best thing is to start at our website. We have a product locator page on our website. If you type in your zip code, it will tell you the supermarkets and stores near you that sell us, and it’ll tell you down to the item which items they have. Because not everybody has our full lineup of 20 plus products. Right? And if there is something that you can’t find there, then you can always order it off of our website. We will ship it to you nationwide, anywhere in the us. I will warn you, it’s not going to be near as inexpensive as going to your local supermarket because it’s a parish refrigerated product, but we can get to every nook and cranny in the continental US. If you want order us, we can definitely deliver and get it to you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely amazing. Matt, thank you so much for taking 45 minutes out of your super busy midst of launch kind of life right now. We really appreciate it.

Matt McLean:
You’re welcome. I love what I do. So it’s been 25 years, but it literally feels like it’s been two and a half years. We’re still love, and I tell every entrepreneur, when you start a business, if you can find something that you really passionate about and you love, it’ll never feel like work. So do your best to try and lean in, and if you’re fortunate like me, to have some divine intervention in the beginning, you’ll have a really clear path and something that you’ll enjoy for the rest of your life.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Love that. Nice last words. Thank you so much, Matt.

Matt McLean:
You’re welcome. Thank you. Fabian,