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

Nicole, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Once I realized there was a need in the sorbet category, I found a partner who brought culinary skills to the partnership to complement my finance and business organizational skills. From there we made some small batches of sorbet and brought them to a local farmers market to get a read from real consumers. It was an immediate hit! From there we rented space out in a commercial kitchen and took over the red-eye shift at a local creamery to ramp up production. We then began to sell into small local specialty stores, delivering on dry ice out of our car, and opened up 3 more farmers markets. The sorbet continued to sell with rave reviews and we finally attracted the attention of a local specialty food distributor who had the ability to take over delivery to our current stores and help bring on more distribution. To prepare for this jump in sales we had to find a co-packer (3rd party manufacturer) to make our product. In this process we learned that we could no longer pack sorbet in glass mason jars but had to switch to standard ice cream pint containers that would fit the commercial machines. This also required new case packaging and palletizing schematics, and converting our homemade recipes to commercialized “formulas” – all foreign concepts to us! But we caught on quickly and began knocking on every grocery store door trying to get as many sales as possible. While that part seemed challenging at the time, the real challenge came once we were on the shelves – now we had to get off the shelves! Learning how to properly market with a 360 approach to consumers: in-store promotions, shopper marketing, local media/PR, and advertising are the primary tools brands use to build awareness and we consumed ourselves with trying to learn all about them. How to budget for each type, how to execute each efficiently, and how to measure ROI. All these new learnings while still trying to sell into new stores every day and manage current sales with sufficient production, inventory management and supplier management. And it was still just the two of us co-founders working, we didn’t have the funds to hire anyone else. We thought it could’t get any more challenging or that we couldn’t work any harder – but we had no idea just how incredible and crazy this journey would be…

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I was born and raised in Alaska, living so remote I always had big aspirations of moving to the “lower 48” and making something of myself. I moved to NYC to attend University with dreams to be a high powered Wall Street banker. When I arrived I knew it was where I belonged. I thrive in high energy environments and have always been an overachiever, so even when my first job in investment banking proved to not be all I dreamed of, I still didn’t slow down. I began to realize I wanted to start a business. After many harebrained ideas, I finally found my calling with what I loved most – food, and especially dessert. I had always been a Ben&Jerry’s lover and began making fruit sorbets with chunks of cookies folded swirls of chocolate folded in. When I realized I couldn’t find anything like this at the grocery stores I knew I had my business idea! I brought in my co-founding partner and together we launched Gourmet Sorbet (later branded as “SorBabes” after the nickname we were given in the early years). Today SorBabes offers a plant based frozen dessert like no other, with layers of flavor and texture – going beyond the standard sorbet we offer rich nut-butter flavors as creamy as ice cream along side our fruit flavors that take the fruit-bar eating experience to new heights. We transitioned from pints to novelty bars in 2021 and now offer flavor dipped crisp bars crafted with a soft frozen dessert center enrobed in a creamy flavorful shell with crisps. All products are 100% vegan, gluten free and all natural.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

So many times over the past 10 years since we founded SorBabes that we have had to pivot! I’ll share the most recent story, going from pints to novelty bars. We began selling our sorbet in pint cups. As the years progressed we continued to refine our recipes, at some point we fell victim to the “low sugar” craze and decided to adjust our recipes to include stevia and erythritol to cut back on real sugar. We made this decision fairly quickly and didn’t take the proper time to adjust for the effects of this change on the product. Sugar is a wonderful stabilizer, it has a low freezing point so it helps ice cream stay soft even when it is very cold. Without any dairy fat (which is another great stabilizer) sorbets need sugar to stay scoopable, this is why so many commercial sorbets out there are in the 30+g sugar per serving! We had always kept our sugars in the 10-18g range but consumers were demanding no, or close-to-no, sugar. The result of our experiment was a crumbly texture and icy hard texture that didn’t present the same off the production line as developed more on the retail shelf and in the storage warehouses. This so happened to be a change we made when we went from 1,000 stores to 3,500 stores – BIG mistake. We saw our velocities suffer as current consumers wanted the original sorbet they loved back and new consumers were put off by the not-so-creamy texture. At the same time we launched our new dipped sorbet bars in a few retailers as test, these were a huge it. When the year was over we saw our velocities suffering with the pints but soar with the new dipped bars. We had to make the tough decision to discontinue 90% of our distribution and let go of the pints. Once a consumer is unhappy with a product, they rarely give it another chance. Our only hope of rebound was to build up the novelty bars into a business the size of the pints. We are excited to say that two years in we are doing just that -sales are super strong and new retailers are coming on every year. Now that was a serious pivot, but it may have just saved our business!

We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.

We have been through more co-packing manufacturers than I care to count. Each one has taught us a lot about the business and our product in general. We began making the sorbet ourselves in the back of an ice cream store using recipes that worked in our home kitchen. From there we found a small commercial manufacturer, the big adjustment there was translating our recipes to “formulas” with weights, adjusting packaging to fit the commercial machines, finding larger scale warehousing and logistics, finished goods inventory management, raw goods/supplies sourcing and management, managing COGS and shrink, and contracting with ingredient suppliers to ensure consistent pricing and availability of ingredients and supplies throughout the year. We quickly grew out of each manufacturer and into the next size up which is why we have gone though so many. One of the hardest, and most important, challenges in CPG is finding a good manufacturer for your product. These manufacturers don’t advertise so it’s a lot more than just a Google search. The best way we have found is talking to other brands in your industry, getting real life recommendations. A 3rd party manufacturer can make or break your business, no joke.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.sorbabes.com
• Instagram: @sorbabes
• Facebook: @sorbabes
• Twitter: @sorbabes
• Youtube: SorBabes
• Yelp: SorBabes (gourmet sorbet)
• Other: TikTok @SorBabes

Image Credits
Suzanne Koshco Photography