We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cheryl Chin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Cheryl thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.
There are two pillars that corporate America is built on but that is entirely wrong:
1) Greed is necessary to drive higher profit in a corporation than paying it forward. To drive higher profit, you just have to be more creative in designing a model that benefits everyone and not just your own company. Once you design a system that can do so, you’ll find that every outlet of good is yet another great value proposition for others and therefore drives far more sales.
2) The breakdown of our global food supply system exposed the fragility of a global distribution model and our dependency on it. It is evident more than ever before that we would be much wiser to depend on our local food producers than the ones so far away that they can be held hostage by any one of the middle man at any time, exactly as the scenario that is playing out right now.
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
Tàstès is a hyper local grocer that leases shelf space to vendors at “affordable” monthly rates, eliminating the pay-to-play model. Consumers buy direct and therefore save on access to small-batch, freshly harvested food. Tàstès plans to feature goods from hundreds of local vendors, including White Mountain Foods; Dos Lunas; Wagyu4u, Cunningham’s Eggs, Austin’s beloved Quality Seafood, and many more. Digital kiosks littered throughout the store, cell phone scanning and checkout technology, along with food producer direct tastings and events, allow shoppers to intimately and efficiently discover local gems, who makes them, and the empowering stories behind the products. Shoppers can even choose what products they want to see on Tàstès’ shelves by participating in a quarterly voting system. Tàstès is the next generation grocery store.
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
We are in the business of serving communities around the world and it begins with building the trust of of the food producers in each community. They are who we serve and they in turn give back and serve the community. The first step is building the trust in us starting with our promise to the community. Serving them in ways they’ve longed to be served is a starting point. Beginning with our food brands who are made up of startups and intermediate companies starved for resources, we’ve built a revenue model that directs an additional 40% or more of their margin back into their pockets that traditionally would otherwise go into the grocer’s bank account. In addition, we’ve dedicated a whole department to developing resources for our vendors to tap into. From vetted mentors and consultants to suppliers and partnerships, from bootcamps to highly advanced marketing and data technology, all of which is financially unavailable to self funded startups, is made available free of charge to our brands. We mean what we promise and that’s the reputation we have built in the community.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
Tàstès began with a 6 person, 8 week think tank aimed at building a business of the future. Some members of the think tank along with friends and family invested $350K seed capital to develop a proof of concept along with operations for the first year. Once we had our POC, we then turned to a more aggressive fundraising strategy to now fund our fundraising efforts! By this time, we had gained enough traction in the market to leverage the list of vendors and potential shoppers amassed. As a community driven business, it made perfect sense to open the investment opportunity to these contacts as well as to the general public via Wefunder, a crowdfunding platform. This bought us a few months of runway and a professional, licensed Investment Banker to come onboard with Tàstès’ $25M Series A raise at $143M valuation. Funds will be spent on the acquisition of 4 existing neighborhood grocers plus the buildout of a new store in the heart of Austin’s trendy and highly sought after South Congress (SOCO). The datapoints of both types of locations in addition to the launch of our first store will help build a strong foundation for our Series B raise of $100M to begin immediately after launch of store #1 in 2023. Series B is allocated to the acquisition and conversion of an additional 16 regional stores and the development of our nationwide blueprint. The next two raises thereafter take us nationwide and beyond.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.TastesMarket.com
- Instagram: tastesmarket
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tastesmarket
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/71729302/admin/
Image Credits
Variant