Ep. 19 | Jesse Guzman, CEO & Co Founder @ Zucca

Plenty of mid-market food and beverage brands, some doing hundreds of millions in revenue, still run product development out of spreadsheets. A single launch can take 12 to 18 months and move through R&D, brand, operations, and a co-manufacturer, with a lot of places for things to go wrong. Before starting Zucca, Jesse Guzman had more than 100 conversations with people inside that process and heard the same problem over and over: details slip through the cracks. Jesse is co-founder and CEO of Zucca, a Seattle startup building an operating system for CPG product development. Before that he worked in brand strategy at Prophet, in biz ops at NerdWallet, as chief of staff at Rain, and at the venture studio Pioneer Square Labs, where Zucca started. He joins Jeremy Pomp and Chad Brinton to talk about why product development is under so much pressure right now. New federal and state rules on healthy claims, front-of-pack labels and food dyes. GLP-1s changing what people want from their food. Consumers who expect brands to react in weeks, not years. And AI finally making the problem workable. Jesse walks through what really happens when you pull one dye out of a product: the replacement can change the taste, texture and cost, push you outside your current supply chain, and break claims you were printing on pack. Also in this one: why enterprise PLM software never came downmarket; turning a SharePoint folder of ingredient specs into a structured ingredient database; a brand lead who got in front of a national retailer's buyer in a few months instead of over a year; capturing the reasoning behind product decisions so expertise stays when people leave; why Zucca paid an independent evaluator to try to prove its own nutrition label engine wrong; and Chad on what a missed launch did to the revenue and inventory plan at Made In. Chapters 00:00 Intro 01:10 Jesse's path: Prophet, NerdWallet, Rain, Pioneer Square Labs 02:32 What's broken in CPG product development 04:45 Running development in parallel instead of in sequence 07:16 Why now: regulation, GLP-1s, and speed 11:39 From over a year to a few months with a national retailer 13:44 What a missed launch does to the plan 16:48 Why enterprise PLM never reached mid-market brands 21:03 Capturing the "why" before people leave 21:56 Paying someone to prove your product wrong 24:07 The unglamorous middle 28:30 What's next for Zucca Guest: Jesse Guzman, CEO & Co-Founder @ Zucca Hosts: Jeremy Pomp & Chad Brinton, Atomic