B-Schooled Podcast Episode #304: Suzanne Ginestro on Building a Marketing Career Across Iconic CPG Brands

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length. Timestamps refer to the audio.

Stacy Blackman: Suzanne Ginestro is a seasoned CPG executive leader with over 27 years of marketing experience across the food and beverage industry. She is currently the Chief Marketing Officer for Califia Farms, and she leads a 35-person marketing organization that encompasses brand management, creative services, communications, and consumer engagement. Suzanne’s previous roles include CMO at Quest Nutrition, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer for Bolthouse Farms, and marketing leadership roles at Red Bull North America, Pinkberry Ventures, Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, and Kraft Foods.

Suzanne currently serves on the board of Zevia and has previously served on other corporate and nonprofit boards, including Hum Kombucha and Village School. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree from Northwestern University and her MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Welcome, Suzanne, or Shu, as I’ve called you for the past 20-something years, since I met you at the very beginning of our first year at Kellogg.

Suzanne Ginestro: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Stacy: You’ve always been smart and creative, with a real brain for marketing, so it doesn’t surprise me that you’ve systematically built this incredible career and brand. I find it so interesting, and I love hearing about what you’re working on, the ads, all of it.

Stacy: So let’s go back to the beginning, even before business school. Tell me a little about your pre-MBA career, and what sparked your desire to apply to business school.

Suzanne: Sure. That was a long time ago. I’d actually say I knew before I even graduated from undergrad that I was going to get my MBA at some point. I have a very strong and inspiring father who has coached me along my entire journey of school and work and career. Early on, when he saw where my capability was, which was one part left brain, one part right brain, very much a balance of analytical and creative, he taught me about the world of brand management and what it is, even before I graduated college.

So in college, I always knew that was ultimately what I wanted to do. I always loved brands. When I was really little, I used to write to brands and hope they’d send me stickers, which they did, like Sunkist sodas.

Stacy: Oh, my gosh.

Suzanne: How funny. I was a very creative kid, but academically I was also very analytical, very good with quantitative information. In undergrad, I was a math and art major. I did fine arts as well as math. So I had that left-brain, right-brain thing, and I always intended to go to business school at some point, because I knew that was the path into brand management. When I graduated from college, I did a small stint in consulting. It was really systems consulting, at PricewaterhouseCoopers. But I wasn’t happy, and I wasn’t feeling fulfilled, because it wasn’t creative enough for me.

Stacy: I didn’t even know about that, and it doesn’t seem aligned with the person I know. Not at all.

[04:19] Suzanne: I did that for a little under a year, and then I ran into a friend from college who was working at an ad agency. She told me what she did, and my whole face lit up. She was in the research department, doing consumer research, quantitative and qualitative, to write the strategies for the briefs that went into creating advertising campaigns. I thought that sounded amazing, so I jumped from consulting into advertising and spent the next two and a half years in a research role.

That’s a great role to have before going back to business school for brand management, because it taught me the importance of consumer insights: understanding your target consumer, their mindset, their beliefs, and how you take that information and turn it into a strategy for a brand to communicate. That was my foundational learning before heading back to Kellogg.

Stacy: And what brands did you work on at the agency?

Suzanne: I worked on two major accounts. One was P&G, Procter & Gamble, across many brands. I worked in hair care, on Vidal Sassoon and Head & Shoulders. I had a great mentor there, the brand manager I was supporting, who ended up writing my recommendation for business school because she had the job I wanted. She went on to run Netflix later in her career and had this amazing run. I also worked on Bayer, the pharmaceutical company, on vitamins. So One A Day and Flintstones vitamins. I knew all sorts of things about dandruff.

Stacy: It’s so crazy, because those are such old-school brands that are all being disrupted now.

Suzanne: Completely. One second I’d be talking about dandruff, and the next about kids getting their nutrition and living their best life. It was a broad swath of consumers to get my feet wet. Then I applied to business school. By the time I went back, I’d been out for three years. I applied to four or five schools, not a ton. I was living in Chicago at the time, since I’d stayed there after Northwestern, and I wanted to be either back on the West Coast or in Chicago. So I applied to Northwestern, and everything else was in California.

Stacy: You knew you were going to go back to school, but what were you hoping to get out of business school? Was it the stamp on your resume, or specific things you wanted to learn?

Suzanne: Honestly, it was the stamp, and it was the entry point. At that time, and I think it’s different now, you could not go into brand management, into an associate or assistant brand manager role, without an MBA. There just was no path. And back to my father, he always said, “I don’t care if you sell t-shirts on the beach, I want you to go to business school.” He knew that once I had that in my pocket, as a foundational part of my educational journey, nobody could ever take it away from me, and it would be invaluable regardless of what I wanted to do. And he was right.

Stacy: Yeah, he was right.

[08:18] Stacy: Okay, so you get to Kellogg, I meet you. Tell me about the MBA experience for you. What surprised you? What were the big takeaways and benefits? Give me the highlight reel.

Suzanne: Those two years were some of the most magical years of my life. You come back into a school environment after working for several years, knowing how hard it is to have that monotonous rhythm of getting up, going to work, coming home. To have this two-year period where you go back into that school world, taking all these different classes- operations, marketing, finance, human behavior- exploring different topics, and doing it in an environment full of people doing the same thing, sharing the experience, people you didn’t know before who become your best friends.

You think you make your best friends in college. Well, I’m here to say you can have a whole second life of discovering your lifelong friends in business school. We’ve been on such a journey all together. Honestly, the academic part and the network were most valuable to my career, but for my personal growth and relationships, the people I met and the network we created were the most invaluable thing I took away, more than what I learned in accounting.

Stacy: That you’re now outsourcing to accountants. Any surprises from that time?

Suzanne: No notable surprises. I expected it to be a great experience, and it was.

[10:45] Suzanne: The big surprise for all of us was that the whole dynamic of the working world changed while we were in business school and coming out of it. We were in the middle of the dot-com bubble, where people would leave business school and go work at startups, a completely different mindset than what people historically did, which was go to a big company like Kraft Foods, or investment banks, or consulting. It was a very unique period.

As we graduated, everyone around me was getting big-title jobs at startups, VP of marketing here, chief marketing officer there, having had no marketing experience. I instead went to Kraft Foods as an assistant brand manager. I had some conflict about that, wondering if I should be doing the other thing, but I stuck to my roots and my original goal: get the MBA, get broad-based foundational training from a big CPG company, and then go do what you want. Once you have the training, nobody can take those skills away from you.

Stacy: Did you do your internship at Kraft?

Suzanne: No, I did my internship at Mattel, which was a surprise and a learning. I took it because I wanted to be back in LA. The toy industry, I learned, is a very different beast than consumer packaged goods. In many ways, that internship taught me I wanted to be in traditional CPG.

[13:10] Stacy: So you came back, stayed within brand, but went to Kraft. What brand did you start on?

Suzanne: Kraft Macaroni & Cheese. And I sat alongside one of our good friends, Paul Earle.

Stacy: Who has been on this podcast.

Suzanne: Yes, the founder of Goodles. We sat next to each other in our little cubicles. He worked on the base business, and I worked on the kids’ side, the shapes. I launched Pokémon mac and cheese, Scooby-Doo mac and cheese, Blue’s Clues, which had blue pasta. So I worked on licensing partnerships with external brands to bring them into the Kraft Mac & Cheese franchise.

Stacy: I’m just so fascinated. You’ve worked on amazing brand after amazing brand. There’s not a name on your resume that everyone hasn’t heard of, and you’ve systematically built up your pedigree. But you started with Kraft and bigger, established companies and moved into newer, hipper, smaller ones. Can you walk through that timeline and talk about the reasons behind your various pivots?

Suzanne: Sure. After Kellogg, I started at Kraft on mac and cheese as an assistant brand manager, got promoted to associate brand manager, and was there about two years. Then I really wanted to move back West. Kraft is in Chicago, and while I loved living there, I had an itch to get back West.

My family’s from Los Angeles, but I was open to San Francisco or LA, and a lot of my friends, like you, were in San Francisco. So I said I’d take any headhunter call with West Coast opportunities, but I wasn’t actively looking. I got a call for Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, which is Dreyer’s on the West Coast and Edy’s on the East Coast. It’s based in Oakland. What appealed to me was that it wasn’t owned by a big CPG food company. It was independent, with a very unique culture.

Stacy: Dreyer’s isn’t owned by—

Suzanne: It wasn’t owned by anyone then. Not Nestlé, not yet. It was independent. I was having fun and success at Kraft, but I ultimately wanted to be at a smaller brand where I could be more nimble and creative and put more of my fingerprints on it. So I took the job at Dreyer’s, and I loved it. Interestingly, the CMO there, Tyler Johnston, was a Kellogg alum. We bonded over that, and he took me under his wing even though I didn’t work directly for him. His office was right next to mine. He’s still a mentor of mine today.

Stacy: That Kellogg connection, and I know it’s true with other schools too, it’s like when you find out someone went to your school, there’s this instant connection, even now.

Suzanne: It’s been decades, and he’s always been a mentor. I think it’s also because of how I’ve worked with him, at four different companies. I just saw him at Expo West, and we walked the floor and talked. The person I work with now, I also met at Dreyer’s, and I’ve worked with him at four different companies too. It’s the meeting of people that can lead you to your next opportunity, and a lot of it is about finding your people. At Dreyer’s, I found my people.

[18:02] Suzanne: I was at Dreyer’s for about seven and a half years, and I was promoted a bunch, from associate brand manager all the way up to brand director by the time I left. During that time, Dreyer’s was sold to Nestlé. This was the first time I was part of an independently owned company being sold to a bigger CPG company. Given my role, it didn’t directly affect me, but I went from working for Dreyer’s to working for Nestlé, just by happenstance. That was the first time I felt the swing: from big Kraft to smaller Dreyer’s and now back to big, because we were part of Nestlé.

I worked for a man named Dave Ritterbush, who, ironically, I work for now. Dave grew up at Dreyer’s, then left to go to Red Bull. I was very sad when he left, because he was the greatest boss I’d ever had and I learned so much from him. After he left, it was bittersweet. I got promoted and moved into his office, which was great, but he was gone, off to Red Bull, and I was figuring out how to be a leader in this Dreyer’s-Nestlé world.

Many months later, he called me. Red Bull North America is based in Los Angeles. I was at Dreyer’s in San Francisco, my family was in LA, and I’d just had my daughter, Sydney. With a young child at home, I had a strong desire to be near my parents. Dave said, “Next time you come to LA, I want you to meet the CMO of Red Bull.” So I met her when I came home for Mother’s Day one spring. I told her, “I really like you, but I don’t know if I’m ready to pick up my family and move, I have a baby.” And she said, “I really like you, but I don’t have a role for you, so I was just excited to meet you.” But we hit it off so well that after our meeting, she called and said, “I created a role for you.”

[21:02] Suzanne: She basically wooed me to come work for Red Bull. This is where it gets interesting, because Red Bull is a very unique company. It’s independently owned, very creative, they do crazy, different things. They’re not a traditional brand-management company; they didn’t have brand management as a function in the US. So she created a role for me, head of brand marketing, that had never existed in the US.

That’s where it got interesting, because I got to take what I’d learned at Kraft and from my MBA and apply it inside a company that didn’t have anyone with that expertise. In my first meeting at Red Bull, they were talking about all these programs, and the first thing I wrote in my notebook was, “What’s the return on investment on that program?”

Stacy: They were having fun doing promos, but not looking at the numbers.

Suzanne: It’s a different kind of brand, and by the way, they’ve had great success doing it their way. But I was trained and wired to think about the P&L and the return on investment, a general manager’s view, knowing every marketing dollar has to drive behavior and be a good return. At Kraft and even Dreyer’s, I was the creative one, the out-of-the-box thinker, the shiny person doing crazy things.

At Red Bull, I was the square, the quantitative marketer trying to make sense of things. It was a great lesson in applying my skills in a very different environment, on a truly iconic brand. I felt like a fish out of water at Red Bull, which was good, because it was different and uncomfortable, and that’s where growth happens.

What I didn’t love was that this iconic brand was so big, with so many programs, events, and initiatives, that hundreds of people were touching it. As head of brand marketing, there was no way to see every touchpoint. What you learn at Kraft, on mac and cheese, or at Dreyer’s, is that when you run a brand, you’re the keeper of it. You know every activation, and you make sure every activation ladders up to the same brand idea. I didn’t have that purview, and it was very hard to get my arms around the brand. I had a really big advertising budget and got to work on really cool things, but I didn’t like the inability to manage it holistically.

Stacy: It’s interesting, because now there are all these new soda brands, funky and different, with fun names and can designs. But Red Bull felt like the very beginning of that, different from Coke, Pepsi, 7Up.

Suzanne: The original challenger brand in the beverage space.

Stacy: Are they still independent? I don’t even know if they’ve been acquired.

Suzanne: They’re a gigantic global company, so it would be hard for anyone to acquire them. At Red Bull, I had my second child, and after I came back to work I decided it had been a great experience but probably wasn’t the right place for me long-term. Back to the idea that your network is the most important thing: the CMO at Red Bull, my boss, Amy Taylor, became a very dear friend and mentor throughout the rest of my career. Now I sit on her board, because she’s the CEO of Zevia.

Stacy: And what’s Zevia?

[25:26] Suzanne: Zevia is a healthy soda. It was one of the first zero-sugar sodas, taking on Coke and Pepsi with clean ingredients, well before Poppi and Olipop and all the rest. It’s been around a while. It’s a public company, and I’ve been on that board since this past January. I give that example because it’s full circle, all through the network.

Stacy: Nurturing those connections. You just never know. That’s what I feel like I’ve learned through life: keep the doors open, you never know.

Suzanne: You never know. And you need each other. People who were my managers call me for advice, or ask, “Do you know someone who does this? Have you worked with this agency?” We’re all constantly sharing information, referring and helping each other.

Stacy: It’s not calculated, like keeping your Rolodex organized. It’s just great people you enjoy and respect. Every once in a while, even this interview: we had dinner together two weeks ago, not because I wanted to recruit you onto the podcast, but here you are.

Suzanne: One of the great things about Expo West, the natural products show, this gigantic trade show in Anaheim every year, is seeing all the people you’ve worked with and haven’t seen in years, and reconnecting. That’s the magic of it. It’s great to see all the brands and startups and food trends, but the best part is standing at your booth and having someone you worked with 25 years ago tap you on the shoulder.

Stacy: That seems like a lot of fun. Even for me, and I’m not in the industry, just all the trends and new brands.

[28:14] Suzanne: So after Red Bull, where I felt like a fish out of water, I saw an opportunity at Pinkberry, which was hot frozen yogurt.

Stacy: It was so hot. In LA, red-carpet lines for miles. A big deal.

Suzanne: I saw a job posting, and I think the guy who hired me at Pinkberry also went to Kellogg. I found it on the Kellogg job site, now that I think about it. There was a posting for VP of marketing at Pinkberry. Even though Pinkberry was very hot, it was still extremely small, owned by a private equity company, and it was a franchise business, retail shops, not consumer packaged goods.

What I liked was that I had ice cream experience from Dreyer’s and knew that category well, so this would expose me to a different channel and business model. It would also give me experience at a small brand, a startup that didn’t have a lot of money. It’s a very different way to apply your skills.

When you’re used to selling to a grocery store that puts your product on the shelf, that’s a very different route to market than getting people to walk through your doors when it’s raining outside to get frozen yogurt. Very different mindset, very different skills, very small and scrappy. We had no money, so I couldn’t do a big research study. I’d literally stand in the stores with a clipboard and ask people questions. It built a different muscle for me.

Then that environment got a bit challenging, and I realized it probably wasn’t my long-term gig. I left, and at that moment I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. I had two small children. When you go to a couple of places that don’t feel perfectly right, it gets in your head, and you start to wonder, “Am I not good at this anymore? Am I over it? Should I do something different?” For me, whenever I don’t feel right about something, I take action on it. So it was a growth period of figuring out what I wanted to do next.

[31:28] Suzanne: What ended up happening was that the guy whose job I took at Pinkberry, who left when I arrived, was working as a consultant for Bolthouse Farms. He called me because he kind of knew I’d come out the other side of that challenging environment, and said, “I want you to meet Jeff Dunn.” Jeff Dunn was the CEO of Bolthouse Farms at the time. He’d had a long career at Coke, and he was a West LA guy. I had a coffee with him, and it was similar to meeting Amy at Red Bull: he didn’t necessarily have a job for me, but after connecting, he decided he wanted me.

Bolthouse was headquartered in Bakersfield, by the plant. Bolthouse Farms is a carrot agriculture business: they grow roughly half the carrots you buy in the United States. The other half come from a company down the street called Grimmway. It was a produce company that also had CPG products, anything sold in the produce section: smoothies, juices like the Naked Juices of the world, protein drinks, and salad dressings. So it had agriculture on one side and consumer packaged goods on the other.

Jeff’s vision was to move marketing out of Bakersfield to LA, because he felt you couldn’t get creative talent and resources into Bakersfield. He hired me to open an office in LA, build out a brand marketing team and capability that didn’t exist previously, and develop an entire part of the organization that could serve as stewards of the brand, innovation, and marketing communications.

That job was so much fun, because I was literally picking out furniture and decor while interviewing candidates and teaching the organization what brand management is. I felt very proud every time I thought we were fully staffed, and then something would happen and I’d have to grow more. It was like a startup inside a bigger organization. We expanded the office, did renovations, made it bigger a couple of times. I’d hire three brand people, then need more, and it kept multiplying. It felt like a real builder opportunity.

Stacy: What I think is so cool: if you just look at your resume, it’s “Suzanne went to Kellogg and worked in marketing for different brands.” But talking to you in depth, you see how much you pushed yourself, got uncomfortable, and grew. Ice cream, then ice cream in shops, then agriculture. You’re always taking different pieces, and I see how you’re now such a marketing wizard, with this ginormous toolkit. It’s really inspiring and impressive.

[35:16] Suzanne: At Bolthouse, I became CMO, and then we got acquired by Campbell’s. That was the second time I was at an independent company acquired by a big food company: first Nestlé with Dreyer’s, then Campbell’s with Bolthouse. I stayed and worked for several years after the acquisition, running the fresh division of Campbell’s.

Eventually, my old boss and current boss, Dave Ritterbush, called and said, “I’m taking a job at Quest Nutrition. I need you.” I said I couldn’t leave right then, because I’d agreed to stay a certain amount of time at Campbell’s. He said, “I’ll wait for you.” He went and hired the rest of the executive team, and about ten months later, when I was able to, I quit and went to Quest.

At both Quest and Califia, where I am now, I’ve worked with Dave, who’s my CEO, as well as my CFO. In both cases, I came into a founder-led, independently owned organization and built a brand-new brand management team and capability because it didn’t exist, and trained the organization on what a brand manager does, the stage-gate process of managing ideas into innovation, and all the foundational elements to run a brand in a business. I did that at Bolthouse, then Quest, then Califia.

Just like Bolthouse was sold to Campbell’s, at Quest we fixed the business, scaled it, made it a flywheel, and then got bought by Simply Good Foods, the public company that owns Atkins. We sold Quest, and I stayed an extra year. Then Dave, the CEO, myself, the CMO, and Mike Castle, the CFO, all left Quest and went straight to Califia, taking over from the founder to fix the business, stabilize it, grow it, and create a flywheel of growth, which is where we are now.

Stacy: Do you feel like, okay, you did that for Bolthouse and again for others, has it gotten to the point where you follow the playbook, or is it a new challenge and uncertainty each time?

[38:08] Suzanne: I know the playbook now. There’s a playbook of business functions and processes that we implement, and that’s what I’d call the playbook. But the actual brand, the consumer, the innovation, the categories we’re playing in, are so fundamentally different each time. The business problems are different, so you can’t have a single playbook from one to the next, because the consumer is so different.

At Califia, we’re competing against gigantic companies in the dairy set. Quest was different, so the dynamics are different. The lesson for an MBA student, or anyone interested in marketing, is that the most important thing is understanding your consumer first and foremost: their mindset, what needs have to be met, how your product meets those needs differently from everything else on the shelf, what your point of difference is. And really understand the category dynamics, because what’s happening in one category is fundamentally different from another.

Stacy: Obviously, since you started, the world has changed so much. CPG has changed, food has changed. I have a couple of questions around that. One: what are some of the biggest old-school lessons you’re still using? And two: what are some of the biggest new innovations in marketing, social media or whatever, that you find helpful and are really leveraging?

[39:45] Suzanne: When we were at Kellogg, there was no class on social media. It didn’t exist. When I was at Kraft, it didn’t exist. Your communication with the consumer was all what I’d call megaphone communication: paid media, TV advertising. Even then, at Kraft, there was no streaming television. It was all linear TV, meaning you tuned in at a specific day and time to watch something.

Everything I was trained in for building brand equity was traditional media: how to build a media plan and read GRPs, which measure how well you’re reaching your target and the effectiveness of that reach, broad-reaching tactics. The interesting thing today is that it still matters. I’m still working on a media plan that has linear TV in it, because even though it feels old-school, it’s still one of the most effective ways to reach your consumer.

Stacy: I was traveling this weekend, watching something on the iPad on the plane, and there was such a good Califia ad with, I think he’s Irish?

Suzanne: Yes, I love him.

Stacy: I was thinking of you. He’s so cute.

[42:00] Suzanne: He’s great, and he’s been a great partner. That’s a fun ad. So the one thing that’s stayed the same is that traditional media is still part of the media plan, just not the only thing in it. The other thing that’s stayed the same, which I apply from both Kellogg and my first years at Kraft, is understanding the business intrinsics, the foundational business issues.

When people tell me they want to be in brand management, I always say brand management is an extremely analytical job. It’s not making ads or designing packaging. Yes, that’s part of it, but based on data. The most successful brand managers I’ve seen are very quantitative and analytical, because you have to pull the data, analyze it, and not just report on it but draw the insights out to know what to do with the business. That’s what brand management is.

We learned a lot of that at Kellogg, but you don’t really learn it until it’s hands-on, which is why I needed a big foundational CPG company that sees brand managers as the hub of the wheel, the general managers of a brand, understanding all the levers of the business and what to do with them in various situations. It’s like consulting. The biggest misconception is that brand marketing is just marketing, that it’s sexy and you get to do really cool stuff. You do get to do cool stuff, but if you don’t understand the business, you’ll never make it as a brand manager.

Stacy: I experienced some of that in my summer internship in business school. I love hearing about all the different brands. I have a big marketing piece of me, so it’s fun to hear about the brands you’ve worked with. Can you pick one and talk about what made it work, what was central to its success?

[44:50] Suzanne: This is an easy one for me: Quest Nutrition, Quest bars. The interesting thing is, when I took the job at Quest, Dave said, “How are you going to do tastings? You’re dairy-free, and our bars have whey in them.” I said, “I’ll figure it out. I’m here to learn about the consumer. It’s not about me, it’s about the consumer.” I wasn’t the consumer of Quest at the time, though I am the consumer of Califia. But boy, did I fall in love with that brand. The Quest consumer was so clearly defined, crystal clear, and so passionate about the brand that we had people- we called them Questies- whose lives it changed so fundamentally that some of them got Quest tattoos.

Stacy: Oh my gosh.

Suzanne: The love for this brand by the people who use it is so deep, so much a part of who they are, that it made being the marketer the most fun job I’ve ever had. Not only were you helping people- a lot of transformation stories about people who lost a lot of weight, or who were sick or diabetic, whom Quest helped tremendously by letting them eat sweet things they otherwise couldn’t- but we also had a very clear, iron-tight brand positioning that made innovation easy, because we knew exactly what the brand stood for.

The brand stood for making the foods you crave work for you, not against you. That meant turning the nutritionals upside down: where you’re used to carbs and sugars, replacing that with protein and fiber. We had this upside-down pyramid. You could take any carb or sugar junk-food category, and if you could flip the nutritionals and make a great-tasting product, we had a right to play there.

When I got to Quest, we were in Quest bars, the biggest piece of the business, protein bars, and we’d just launched Quest cookies. While I was there, we launched Quest pizza, shakes, peanut butter cups, and chips, the tortilla chips, like a better-for-you Doritos. Every category.

Stacy: They’re everywhere. I see them in the airport.

Suzanne: The shakes are still there, and there’s more candy now, other kinds of bars, cupcakes. It made not just the marketing easy but the innovation, too: if there was a category where you could flip the nutritionals and have a craveable food with better macros, we had a right to win. It’s not often you can take a brand from the active nutrition aisle, where we had our strength, and launch in frozen pizza and find success. Or salty snacks, a totally different aisle. The strategy was so on point that it made my job easy and fun.

Stacy: That makes a lot of sense. If you love Quest and you’re suddenly going down the pizza aisle, you think, “Pizza? I can have pizza again.” And then people were making their own recipes.

[49:49] Suzanne: On social, yes. We didn’t get back to your other question: what’s different now, which is social media. Quest is where I got my huge lesson in social media, because we had a group of ambassadors for the brand. At first, it was a panel of about 2,500 people we called Questies, posting on behalf of the brand, not getting paid anything. We doubled that number over the time I was there. We’d do events for them and send them product, but we didn’t actually pay them money.

Stacy: They didn’t get paid, but they were recognized as part of this community.

Suzanne: Quest was one of the first brands to do that, because the Quest Squad, as they were called, was built before social media and the companies behind it got really sophisticated with algorithms and paid social. In the early days, it was much easier to build up a following. Now not everybody sees your content, so it’s harder to build organically. We had this base of 2,500 people before all the algorithm stuff made it harder. At Quest, I really learned how to use social as a brand and create that ambassador energy out in the world, which is much more organic and less traditional. We didn’t learn about that at Kellogg, and now it’s a big part of Califia. So that’s a big thing that’s changed.

Stacy: Are there any CPG trends you’re excited about right now, either within Califia or out there, that you saw at Expo?

[51:08] Suzanne: At Expo, the big things you see are protein everywhere, in all forms. Clear protein is big right now. A lot of that is driven by the GLP-1 drugs, where people are consuming way less food and need nutrient-dense options in easy formats to make up for the calories they’re missing. That’s a very big trend, and I think it’ll stick, because these drugs are here to stay.

They’ve had a massive impact on the food industry as a whole. If people are taking calories out of their diet and eating a lot less, that has a ripple effect on the entire industry, with dollars coming out of it. That’s what we’re all facing, which is why nutritional shakes are up: people trying to get nutrient-dense solutions quickly.

The other big trend I saw was fiber. There’s fiber in a lot of things now, and people are calling it out more because of the benefits. And there are interesting dynamics with the clean-food movement, fewer ingredients. Then you layer in the sentiment on social media versus what’s coming out of MAHA in terms of food rules, regulation, and the FDA. There’s this big triangulation of very different perspectives coming from all angles and coming to a head.

I find it interesting because anyone with a phone can post anything on TikTok and say anything, and it gets this groundswell even if it’s not based in science or fact. It becomes pseudo-fact in the TikTok world. I see it myself: my kids will say, “Aren’t these bad for you?” and I’ll ask, “Based on what?” There’s a lot of noise, which I find very interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how it all falls out.

Stacy: One last question for you: best Califia product?

[53:30] Suzanne: The easy answer is Califia Simple, our organic almond milk. It’s made with three ingredients: almonds, water, and salt. That’s the number one item, and it’s in my fridge every day. I like to take that with one of our organic creamers, the lavender creamer. I do a splash of lavender inside the organic milk, froth it, and put that in my coffee every single morning. It’s awesome.

Stacy: That sounds great. I love your career, your fun job, and the way you’ve navigated it. You’re a textbook example of how to navigate the network, because you’ve really leveraged it, but not in a calculated, slimy way. You’re just great with people; you forge great connections, you hold on to them, and you build from there. I love hearing that.

Suzanne: My advice to anybody going into the business school process is to just be yourself and build the relationships you’d naturally build. I didn’t set out to network, necessarily. I was myself, I met people I connected with, and later in life those connections bear new connections.

Stacy: Yes, indeed. Bring on the advice.

[55:33] Suzanne: The advice my dad gave me early on is the advice I give to everyone who wants to go back to business school: do not narrow yourself too quickly. Keep your options open. A lot of people go back to business school to restart or pivot their career, but my biggest piece of advice is that you want optionality.

The reason I went to Kraft was to give myself the broadest training possible, so that if I wanted to work at a big company later, I could, or take my skills to a small company. The reason I went into brand management is that you learn all those skills, quantitative and creative, so if I wanted to specialize in advertising later, I could, or move into finance, or do research.

The biggest mistake I see young people make is narrowing themselves too quickly. You start a career in social media because you think it’s cool and it’s what you like to do, but then you’re limited in how much you can grow, because it’s one piece of the puzzle, one vector, and those skills don’t always translate to everything else you’re capable of doing.

Stacy: I think that’s the beauty of the MBA degree: it’s so flexible. Everything’s a business. Even if you’re a doctor running your practice, or a lawyer in a firm, or a school, or a nonprofit, it’s all business. That degree is the foundation, and it gives you so much flexibility. You’ve had a career that twisted a bit but stayed somewhat linear. Some people are all over the place, but they pull on that foundation.

Suzanne: The optionality is key.

Stacy: Okay. Well, thank you, Shu. Thank you for spending time with me. It’s good to see you, and I’ll see you soon. Thanks for sharing your story.

Suzanne: Thank you so much, Stace.