Deal with PepsiCo extends the Perfect Granola’s reach

The Perfect Granola LLC, a mission-driven startup in Victor, has partnered with PepsiCo Inc. on its Food for Good and WomanMade programs. The two initiatives raise awareness for key issues intensified by the pandemic: child hunger and the decline of women-owned small businesses.

It is not the first time the local company has partnered with Pepsi. In 2019, Michele Liddle applied to be part of the inaugural “Stacy’s Rise Project,” a collaborative effort between Frito-Lay North America’s Pepsi division and its Stacy’s Snacks brand, founded by Stacy Madison. The project awarded five women entrepreneurs nationwide with a three-month executive mentorship program and $20,000 to advance their missions.

“They realize that women, in particular in the food industry, and really across all channels, receive so much less funding than our male counterparts. And it’s really hard for us to get our product out into retail and ultimately to a consumer,” said Liddle, who founded the Perfect Granola from her home in December 2015. “They wanted to help women-owned businesses get into retail and give them access to funding and access to the resources and things that we really need to continue to grow and thrive with our business.”

Liddle said she did not want the relationship with Frito-Lay and Pepsi to end when the mentorship was over.

“One of the things that I had asked my mentors for is how we can partner a little bit closer with Pepsi, with our mission and what Pepsi had going on? So I learned about the Food for Good program, which is their anti-hunger initiative,” said Liddle.

Roughly six months after the Stacy’s Rise program ended, Liddle traveled to Texas, where she met the people who ran Pepsi’s Food for Good.

“It seemed like a perfect partnership because they’re feeding kids in food deserts when school’s not in session and supplying food for those in need,” Liddle recalled. “I said hey, that’s my jam, that’s the whole reason why we started this company.”

Liddle for the next 18 months worked on a way in which the Perfect Granola could partner with and become a supplier to Pepsi. Early this year that partnership dream became reality.

“We started shipping orders to them a couple of months ago, and now Pepsi is our customer, where we ship our product we make over at Foodlink — our single-serve, one-ounce pouch of granola — right into their warehouses and then they put it in their food boxes and distribute it around the country,” Liddle said. “It’s really a dream come true because they have huge buying power and they can purchase a lot of our product and then distribute it right to people we want to supply food for.”

That means the hungry children Liddle was hoping to help when she founded the company will benefit from the partnership.

“It gives us more reach because prior to that we were supplying Feeding America, but just in six states, which is still a big undertaking for our tiny little company, but we weren’t able to get things outside of the northeast just because of logistics and shipping costs,” Liddle explained. “But now we’re able to ship pallets and pallets of our product into their warehouse and they’re able to take care of the logistics for us.”

It also diversifies the Perfect Granola’s portfolio in the process.

“It’s an additional selling vertical for us outside of retail and food service,” Liddle said.

And the Perfect Granola makes a little bit off of the sales, she said, though Pepsi gets a discount because of who the end user is.

“When Foodlink is purchasing our stuff it’s done at cost. I don’t want to profit off a food bank. That’s not our deal,” she added. “We actually put the line in (at Foodlink) back in September of 2019 and we put the line in there after winning Grow NY because we became the first and only New York state grown and certified grain that’s part of the Farm to Institution program in New York state. That’s why we put that line in, because we wanted to support the New York state schools with a New York state grown and certified grain that was pre-packaged that they could put into their meals.”

Pepsi’s WomanMade program is an initiative committed to advancing female-founded businesses in the food and beverage industry. Partnering with the company’s socially-conscious brands allows the Perfect Granola to expand its reach and capabilities further. Liddle and her team have a goal to donate more than 15,000 pounds of granola this year, and the partnership will help further that goal.

The Perfect Granola products can be found at Wegmans Foods Markets, Tops Friendly Markets and Walmart Inc., and during the last year the company launched into the Kroger Co. stores.

“We’re just going to continue to grow,” Liddle said. “We do have a couple of new accounts that we’re going to bring on in Q3 and Q4, which are really exciting. Even with the pandemic, we still grew 37 percent last year and we were able to expand our footprint of giving.

“As we grow we’re able to do more,” she added. “We’ve never been a company that takes all the profits and keeps them for ourselves. The more we grow and the more we make, the more we’re able to extend that mission and outreach to people who really need it.”

[email protected] / 585-653-4021 / @Velvet_Spicer