We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alli Ball a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alli, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

I’ve found my calling as a food business consultant and certified coach, and my passion for providing everyone the access to the knowledge and tools they need to give their CPG business a real shot at success. In my previous role of Head of Grocery at Bi-Rite Market in San Francisco, I saw products fail week in and week out. Most often it was super delicious, incredibly tasty products that didn’t survive. There was nothing wrong with the products themselves but something else – something bigger – that caused them to flop. Over the years, I came to realize that the best way I could support producers of good food was to share with them the behind-the-scenes of wholesale, letting them know how to make small changes with their brands in order to find more retail success. So I did just that – I left Bi-Rite, founded Food Biz Wiz®, and coached thousands of brands on how to not only get ON the shelf but have high sales once they got there. Most often, it didn’t have anything to do with changing the product itself but had EVERYTHING to do with changing their strategy.

The grocery & packaged food industry has historically been an incredibly homogenous one. We’re on a mission to make it more diverse by “pulling back the curtain” on wholesale secrets, and helping mission-driven brands succeed on the shelf. Our philosphy here at Food Biz Wiz® is that everyone deserves the knowledge & tools they need to give their business a real shot at success. When we empower entrepreneurs and help their food business succeed, we are able to increase diversity on our shelves, deepen connections to our food sources, and support consumers as they shop more consciously and with integrity.

Through Retail Ready®, my team and I have supported close to 3,000 food brands in their wholesale growth. Thus, we’ve helped generate over 200 Million dollars in revenue for values-driven food and beverage brands. I understand that systemic racism exists in our food systems, and that we need to work together as an industry to actively dismantle outdated systems and educate ourselves on how to create more inclusive, diverse and equitable food businesses. And that is precisely why I founded Food Biz Wiz® and created Retail Ready®–to give ALL founders access to the insider knowledge they need to succeed.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am Alli Ball, the founder & CEO of Food Biz Wiz and the creator of Retail Ready®, an online program offering strategic support, a curated curriculum, and a values-aligned community for producers of packaged products in the food industry. With my background as a former grocery buyer-turned-wholesale consultant, I’ve assisted thousands of emerging brands in understanding what it takes to land on the shelf and achieve high sales once there.

Retail Ready® stands out as the ONLY online course tailored to food and beverage founders, delivering insights directly from a former Grocery Buyer. Drawing from my years of experience in wholesale grocery, I am uniquely positioned to share insider secrets with passionate CPG founders aiming to leave their mark on the industry.

In Retail Ready®, I provide consulting & coaching to our students from the perspective of a wholesale buyer through our student group and live Q&A calls. I help producers grasp what’s required to get their products on retail shelves and maintain their presence there, offering insights into the behind-the-scenes assessments made by Wholesale Buyers when evaluating new products.

Our team collaborates closely with CPG founders to achieve their wholesale objectives, whether for brick-and-mortar or digital retailers, while also providing access to a valuable founder community with professional industry connections.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Being a female Grocery Buyer in a historically white male field is HARD, and there are a lot of barriers to overcome being an outsider, a young buyer, and being undervalued at the table – which continues in the consulting space as well. Now, 10+ years into consulting, I still get pushback from older, more conservative players in the industry.

I’ve also worked hard to dispel the myth of coaching in my field: coaching is a completely unregulated industry, and anyone can call themselves a business or leadership coach. I found, after years of working 1:1 with food founders and with thousands of brands inside her Retail Ready program, that entrepreneurs got stuck in the same places: confidence around selling, self-worth while growing a business, stress and anxiety that keeps them stuck or leads to burn out – the list goes on. My clients didn’t need more skills or tools – they needed leadership development. As such, I did a 200+ hour certification program to become a trained leadership coach in 2020/2021, and now covers both the tactical skills that founders need to know, AND the self-development that is so necessary in entrepreneurship. I believe that your financial growth cannot outpace your personal growth (without coming at a cost to the founder’s health and well-being!) and am on a mission to help founders balance the two.

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

One of the most effective strategies for growing our clientele, as a service provider, has been executing live launches for our program on the tail-end of our biannual workshops. We host 1-2 live, weeklong workshops online every year that are free for our followers & fanbase to attend. Spending the week with us learning from our team’s video trainings, collaborating with our team and other entrepreneurs online in the group, and hearing the theory behind our business really helps “warm-up” our committed audience. At the end of the workshop & masterclass, we always have new clients eager to join us because we’ve demonstrated our VALUE as a team, and they’re ready for more. These workshops obviously take a lot of planning & work to execute, but they always pay off in the end with new clients ready to jump onboard with us.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.alliball.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foodbizwiz/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/foodbizwiz
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aball/