Los Angeles gets a promising new media startup.
Plus The RealReal's new SF store, an Expo West dispatch, and TBPN wants an Emmy.
UPDATE: A member of Zach Bryan’s team emailed me to clarify that Zach didn’t buy 430 Hudson Street as reported yesterday — a member of his team did. The commercial space on the ground floor will not be “open to the public.”
Good afternoon, everyone.
I have a California-sized West Coast edition of Feed Me for you today that I just finished up editing while eating a cinnamon bun from Wayfarer Bakery in La Jolla. I will have to take care of the sugar granules in my keyboard.
Today’s letter includes: An interview with the newly-launched L.A. Material, Cami Fateh reports from Expo West parties, TBPN is going for an Emmy, and a rumored addition to The Sunset Tower’s all-day menu.
Beef tallow, EBITDA, and the dream of a $500 million exit at Expo West.
Political Parties is a party column by Cami Fateh. It offers readers a glimpse into the unspoken cultural trends of party culture, in rooms that they didn’t even know existed.
Every spring, more than sixty thousand people descend on Anaheim, California, for Natural Products Expo West, the largest natural products trade show in the world. “Expo West” or just “Expo,” is a festival for anyone who works in or around food, snacks, vitamins, supplements, even beauty, and for those who invest in these industries or consult for them.
At Expo, you might meet partners at McKinsey, the lead R&D Chef at Sweetgreen, someone who has the real job title of “Brand Forager” at Erewhon, the co-founders of soda brand Poppi, a buyer for Happier Grocery, or one of five Assistant Vitamin Managers at Sprouts Farmers Market. And there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of founders of CPG brands, ranging from the founder of a Korean tampon product with sub-600 Instagram followers to the CEO of the viral cottage cheese brand Good Culture (which just landed a $500 million acquisition), who I met hanging outside the expo floor. Some attendees describe it as “the Coachella of the food industry,” but with all the fandom going on, at times it felt more Comic-Con.
On the first day, I stepped into the Anaheim Convention Center with a goal of walking by all 3,000+ booths, which are carnival-like installations that lure in visitors with testers and freebies. I ate grain-free pizza pockets at the Caulipower booth, hit the “Protein Drop Challenge” at one of the three Chomps beef stick booths, and stopped off at the Oatly conveyor belt to sip on their new launch: popcorn-flavored oat milk.
“We were ushered into a single-file line like pledges entering a frat party, — a heavy-handed bartender greeted us with shots of vodka mixed with one brand’s tomato sauce and another brand’s hot sauce.” 🍅
I snacked dutifully, accepting samples of nootropic chocolate, jalapeño beef sticks, low-glycemic sour candies, teriyaki ice cream, a product called “Proda” (you guessed it: protein soda), four different varieties of candy dates, and a date-sweetened soda. I walked the expo floor until my feet hurt – 16,000 steps without setting foot outdoors feels wrong – until 6 p.m. hit, which meant it was time to party.
I walked into my first after-hours party (a 700-person event hosted by Snaxshot) with my new friend Olivia, the founder of a months-old red wine spritzer brand. We had just met while waiting in line outside, when she offered me a can of her product, Maison Maxine, as another guy was showing off an unidentifiable sauce bottle. “Oh my god, I know that one from Erewhon!!” one girl exclaimed. Another guy was introduced to me as Kim Kardashian’s co-founder, which made sense when I saw the can of energy drink Update in his hand. He explained that he’d been building the company for three years before Kim came to the rescue, and he was at Expo debuting their relaunch.
We were ushered into a single-file line like pledges entering a frat party, and were each handed a goodie bag and an empty tote (which I later learned is for trick-or-treating the samples), and pulled into a strobe-lit room filled with blaring techno music. A heavy-handed bartender greeted us with shots of vodka mixed with one brand’s tomato sauce and another brand’s hot sauce.
Cue: Willy Wonka’s ‘Pure Imagination’.
Drinks and snacks snaked up three floors of the Airbnb, including creatine cocktails (Arrival), coconut sugar in dime bags (glonuts), and a pistachio butter fountain from Pistakio. Everywhere the eye could see was a grinning stranger handing you a new snack or drink - DOU chili oil on popcorn with chopsticks, a Ya’Albi olive oil dirty martini, Sobo dumplings off a sputtering skillet. There were shirtless men in bow ties. I watched three women compete over which of their products had more protein (35 grams vs. 10 grams vs. 5 grams) and a grocery store owner typing his number into a sauce founder’s phone.
I felt like a college kid on the first day of Spring Break, but instead of warm beer, I was drinking a Cowboy Colostrum cocktail. And for many people, this trip was a business expense! Brands and buyers were closing deals.
Let’s zoom out for a second: Why is the Sprouts buyer treated like a celebrity by these founders? It’s because wholesale – not DTC – is the most viable sales channel for these young CPG businesses. About a decade ago, there was a moment when you could launch a really good CPG company with DTC and Facebook ads as your main channel. That moment is over, primarily because customer acquisition costs are higher online, but we can save the iOS 14.5 conversation for next time we see each other at a party. So the right grocery store buyer is a kingmaker to these young brands. That first million dollar purchase order can change the future of your business.
Back to the party.
Andrea Hernandez, who writes the CPG newsletter Snaxshot, hosts her “anti-expo” party every year. It’s a chance for the “newest of the new” startups (some of which haven’t even launched or hit retailers, or are debuting at the party itself) to meet the same vendors, influencers, VCs, and restaurateurs that they would at Expo. Crucially, there’s very little overhead to showing up at parties and handing out samples – whereas booths at Expo run anywhere from around $5,000 to $140,000, and can exceed up to 20% of a company’s annual revenue.
Parties like Andrea’s are where the young, cool, and hungry people are: like my new friend Olivia, or Nikita Mansouri, the founder of La Saum, a 4-month-old olive brine brand, who chose not to pay for Expo, but was behind the bar serving up dirty martinis herself, or Jack Davis and Jacob Tubis, the founders of Byte’m Brownie Bites, who committed themselves to attending over 300 CPG-community events in the past year. According to Tubis, they’ve met the bulk of their industry contacts through Andrea herself or at parties like this one, including their Amazon agency and their bank, Rho.
I woke up on the second day of Expo feeling both stuffed and starving, and awash with a hangover. My Uber driver asked me if I was going to Disneyland, to which I responded, “No, but close enough.”
I was thrilled by the flavors of my first snack of the day – a plate of sizzling beef tallow fries – until I learned that it was the tallow appetizer before a tallow smorgasbord that would overwhelm even RFK Jr. I proceeded to count tallow-fried tortilla chips, two tallow-fried potato chip brands, beef tallow tater tots, tallow protein bars, tallow lip-balm, and 14-ounce jars of straight-up Wagyu beef tallow.
No trend on the floor - not even the many varieties of tallow-fried chips, tots, bars, and lip-balm - could eclipse the word “protein,” which hung in the very air of the halls on glowing neon signs, in multiple beef-stick startups, debut products from trad-brands, like Nature Valley, which debuted “Protein Plus Milk,” as well as from millennial CPG brands, like Banza.
According to Good Culture’s co-founder and CEO, Jesse Merrill, the protein trend isn’t going anywhere. He was fresh out of leading a panel called “After the Hype: How Real Trends Mature - Lessons from Protein” when I caught him lingering on the quad (college campus vibes) with a guy whose shirt read “EBITDA.” Surprisingly, he believes that manufactured protein foods will be on their way out as consumers develop discernment for foods should actually contain protein (hint: probably not clear sparkling drinks). He compares the hype around synthetic protein to the engineered plant-based meat fad, which burned out fast. Remember Beyond Meat? They’re now dropping the “Meat” from their name and, ironically, expanding into protein beverages and bars.
I asked the “EBITDA” guy about his outfit inspo, to which he responded: “If you’re asking, we already have a problem. It’s something that a lot more brands here should be thinking about.”
Later, at “America’s Next Top Snack,” a Shark-Tank-inspired event hosted by Air at Bubba Gump Shrimp (this sounds like a mad lib), I met a grocery-store owner who compared $17 tallow chips to “overpriced pork juice,” and a fractional CFO for CPG brands who predicted that the tallow “microtrend” will burn out quickly – possibly wishful thinking, as she herself doesn’t eat meat. On the floor at Bubba Gump, I listened to chatter about fiber “replacing” protein (albeit, from two guys who “work in fermentation”) and about the “return of gluten” – a preposition closely tied to the hype around “ancient grains” – surrounding Ollin, a cake mix startup that proudly contains both ancient grains and gluten.
From where I stood, the crowd wasn’t concerned about dietary restrictions in the slightest. Out of all the early-stage startups presenting at Expo, the names that garnered the most hype were dairy products: Smearcase, a high-protein cottage cheese ice cream, won first place in the Albertsons Innovation Launchpad competition – a prize that most of the early-stage founders I met were vying for. Other hot names being passed around the early-stage crowd included Cotto (cottage cheese), Chara (fro-yo), Sour Milk (yogurt), and Bezi (labneh). The Bezi team ultimately took home America’s Next Top Snack.
I dipped into the Carbone pizza party, only to discover that it was literally just people eating pizza, and made a quick turnaround for my final stop of the night – a corporate hotel to meet a family friend, a manager at Unilever, at the Morgan Stanley/McKinsey Margarita Mixer (another mad lib), in the hopes of meeting someone interesting. Two partners at McKinsey looked at me blankly when I name-dropped “America’s Next Top Snack,” admitting that they attend the conference yearly yet never interact with early-stage brands. Their itinerary looks more big-dairy than small-cottage-cheese-ice-cream, they didn’t even know there were parties involved, and they told me, earnestly, that they’re jealous of me for getting to hang with early-stage founders.
While waiting at the gate for the LAX-EWR flight, I tried to synthesize my takeaways from Expo, and found it difficult to separate the different stories I’d heard all week: protein mania, the fiber takeover that everyone seemed to be talking about, and the cottage-industry of Partifuls that get food startups off the ground. Some trends I am sure people will be betting on: dates, fermented products (even olive brine developed just for dirty martinis!), and, unfortunately, tallow.
I walked past a guy eating Partake cookies, two guys in Carbone hoodies, and a woman carrying a bag that read “the CPG retail Logistics Experts,” and then struck up conversation with another woman who was waiting to board my flight. Turned out she worked at a gluten-free product subscription service. She stressed, emphatically, how it felt like “everyone is fiber-maxxing” this year.
It struck me that the early-stage founders, ignored by McKinsey, were here chasing the same dream - that rare $500 million exit achieved by Good Culture. Jesse did it, and so can I. Each buyer might be the one to slip a tiny disposable bamboo sample spoon between their lips, get floored by flavor, and cut a check for that million dollar purchase order. And if not them, then the next buyer, the next booth, or the next bountiful Expo, next year.
This concludes Political Parties, a column by Cami Fateh.
As summer rapidly approaches, and we continue to discuss the job market in various Feed Me forums, I decided it would be a good day to roundup some West Coast summer internship and job opportunities for my younger readers (or their parents). Reminder that college students get free Feed Me subscriptions with a university email address by filling out this form.
Creative Strategy and Copy Intern, Rare Beauty: You’ll assist the Director of Creative Strategy with identifying industry trends and opportunities that will help shape global campaign messaging and product copy. ($22/hour, Los Angeles)
Food Reporter Intern, The SF Standard: You’ll write and report news and feature stories about food, dining, and drinking trends from San Francisco and the Bay Area for readers here and around the globe. ($25/hour, San Francisco)
Part-Time Barista, Madhappy: You’ll prepare coffee, tea, and specialty beverages with precision and consistency, prioritizing quality to deliver an exceptional customer experience in Madhappy’s new Malibu flagship store. ($17.27/hour plus tips, Malibu)
Software Engineer Systems Research Intern at OpenAI: A systems research internship is for people who love the real-world intersection of systems-engineering and research: You’ll investigate a hard systems problem, build something meaningful, and measure it carefully. ($67/hour, San Francisco)
Executive Assistant to Founder Family Office: Seeking a low-ego, highly intuitive, tech-savvy Senior Executive Assistant to support a dynamic CEO/Founder. This is a business-focused role requiring strong judgment, anticipation, and the ability to pivot quickly. ( $175,000–$210,000/ year, Woodside, CA)
Brand Partnerships Intern at The h.wood Group (Delilah, The Nice Guy): You’ll assist the Brand Partnerships Director who manages and develops brand partnerships for The h. wood Group. You will be expected to learn the ins-and-outs of the department while gaining valuable insight to further your interest in your chosen career field. ($20/hour, West Hollywood)
Posting and browsing on the Feed Me Job Board is free.
Roles this week include Sales at Instacart, Head of Content at a new music venue in The Meatpacking District, and Social Media at Sandberg Goldberg Bernthal Family Foundation.
Catching up with L.A. Material.
Last week, a new Los Angeles-based media company called L.A. Material launched with the aim to “make Los Angeles legible.” The founding team brings together experience from the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, Crooked Media, and the writer’s room of Eastbound & Down. Of course, they’ll have a daily newsletter. But they’re also launching podcasts, events, and something I thought was fun: discounts to local businesses.
Today, I interviewed Matt Hamilton, Senior Reporter for L.A. Material (who spent 11 years at The L.A. Times prior) about what we can expect from the publication, how they chose to build on beehiiv, and why they chose to bring on two people with strong comedy backgrounds.
Emily Sundberg: This a big team for a newsletter startup. How is it funded? Are all of these people salaried?
Matt Hamilton: Well, we are more than a newsletter startup – we are a growing local newsroom, and the daily newsletter is one great entry point and product. As to our funding: There’s no predominant investor but more than a dozen private individuals, family offices, friends, and family. The common thread is they (1) love L.A. and (2) want to see a news organization that builds community with a dash of mischief, verve, and intelligence. And it is worth noting, investors have no editorial control.
As to staffing: We have some people on staff but we also work with freelancers and consultants, and the goal is to keep the team nimble and adaptable as the business grows.
ES: Why did you choose beehiiv as your email service? How will this affect your distribution and audience acquisition strategy?
MH: We’ve been really grateful to partner with Beehiiv’s Media Collective, which has tools and resources for small newsrooms like ours and offers crucial operational support. As we’ve jammed toward launch this week, Beehiiv has been a solid and flexible partner.
ES: Who are peers across the media industry that you respect / have learned from?
MH: Our team’s inspo, in no particular order: The Cut and the wider NY Mag universe. Puck. The Baltimore Banner. The Manchester Mill. Voice of San Diego. ProPublica. 404 Media. Page Six Hollywood newsletter. Feed Me (natch). Alt weeklies in their heyday, like The Village Voice, L.A Weekly.
ES: How will you cover L.A. which in many ways is a REGION not just a city?
MH: You are right – Los Angeles County is a region with 10 million people in 88 (!) cities – so we have to be selective, rigorous, and relentless, all at once.
L.A. Material, which launches tomorrow, will have a daily newsletter, a weekly podcast, and about two longer-form articles, or scoops, per week, plus events. In all formats, we think about: How can we bring an insider perspective or expert context and make that accessible? What will people want to talk about over dinner or text their friends? What reveals something about who wields power or influence here and how they do so?
We also have a member-only forum on Discord, where members discuss local news and share celebrity sightings, restaurant reviews, and a growing catalog of the best vanity plates around town.
ES: Are you hiring/are you taking pitches?
MH: Yes, there is a pitch guide for freelancers and contributors! Send queries to pitches@lamaterial.com.
ES: For you, Matt, why did you decide to work at L.A. Material?
MH: I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to help build a local news organization from the ground up with the co-founders who I’ve long admired. I’ve worked in large, legacy media my whole career, including 11 years at the L.A. Times, where I was an investigative reporter. I was itching for a change, especially after the last few years of buyouts and layoffs. At L.A. Material, I will keep doing the reporting I love – both longer and quick-turn investigations – while also helping to start something small and sustainable, that punches up and relies on an organic connection to our readers and subscribers.
ES: Bonus: I noticed that Hayes Davenport (Creative Director and Co-Founder) and Pablo Goldstein (Creative Producer) have backgrounds in comedy. What if anything does that bring to the publication?
MH: Comedy is all about a relationship to the audience – listening, building trust, entertaining, and challenging the audience. That’s at the core of what we are doing, making Hayes, one of our co-founders, and Pablo, our creative producer, crucial to the enterprise. I think those comedy chops also speak to the culture of what our co-founders are trying to build, both as a workplace and as a product: curious, open-minded, and serious, but with a necessary dose of levity.
Have a story you want me to look into this week? Reply to this email or text the anonymous Feed Me Tip Line: (646) 494-3916
Leon Black sold his Beverly Hills mansion (which he bought from Tom Cruise in 2016) for $47 million. A spokesperson told The Real Deal that his two adult children were living there while working in Los Angeles, “but both have returned to New York and so the house was no longer of need.”
On Sunday night while staying at The Sunset Tower, I might’ve successfully convinced Jeff Klein to add an all-day BLT to the hotel’s room service menu. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. 🥪
We’re getting our first review of Noma Los Angeles tomorrow. Tom Sietsema, a former Washington Post food critic, is launching his new newsletter (built on beehiiv) on Thursday. Per Axios, “In addition to the newsletter, which will publish around three times per month, Sietsema will offer premium subscribers the chance to meet in person over meals.”
If I were in SF tomorrow night, I’d go to this event that Bay Area Current is hosting. This Machine Kills podcast and Bay Area Current reporters are attempting to decode the tech right-wing vibe shift and its effects on the Bay Area. There will be drinks provided, and you’re going to need them.
OpenAI now has over 1 million sq. ft. of office space in the Bay Area.
From the Feed Me Tip Line: Lucky’s in Montecito threw a party for their 25th anniversary last week. Attendees included Kevin Costner, Christopher Lloyd, and Michael J. Fox, who linked with Carol Burnett at her special table. “Larry David initially denying a photographer before returning a half hour later, asking for a solo shot- classic. Heidi Montag pulled guests into the wine cellar, playing her unreleased album front to back (20 songs. Long. Kim Petras-y). Montag’s husband, Spencer Pratt, snapped photos of her all night (pictured) and loudly chatted about his ambitions to run for mayor of Los Angeles before they left for Chinese food.” While we’re on the topic: How is the Lucky’s in New York City doing?
The RealReal reopened their SF store, three years after closing. There is a coffee shop inside.
And Chanel is planning on moving into the Union Square building they bought in SF soon. There hasn’t been an official opening date, but the company appears to be hiring for boutique roles.
Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett is opening a new music venue called Pacific Electric in Los Angeles this weekend. The 750-person venue is nestled between Chinatown and Mission Junction and its first show will be from L.A. rock band Dawes. I’m excited about the secret Indian food window by BADMAASH and the Long Island Iced Teas. This project comes a month after Kristen Stewart revealed she’d bought a movie theater in Highland Park and five years after Quentin Tarantino bought Los Feliz’s Vista Theatre. Earlier this year, Peter Kafka spoke to Janice Min about the “Detroit vibe” that Hollywood is facing. I respect the local artists who are choosing to reinvest in the city’s cultural institutions.
TBPN has launched a full-blown campaign to win an Emmy. “We’re a niche emerging media company buying FYC billboards across L.A.,” Jordi Hays, co-host of TBPN told me this morning. “If we don’t win, we’re f*cked.”
Urbanlime, an L.A.-based real estate and development firm, is positioning the soon-to-open Aire Ancient Baths as a reason to invest in DTLA. A deck for the 120,000 sq. ft. campus in LA’s art district focuses on the massive bathhouse (set to open later this year), which already has secured a lease with the building. You have to inquire about the price, but there’s an opportunity here to build a mega-wellness campus.
From the Feed Me Tip Line: “Over 150 private flights have been chartered for VIPs attending Hadrian’s big announcement on Friday. The L.A.-based company founded by Chris Power is an AI-powered manufacturer focused on aerospace and defense. It’s backed by A16Z, Founders Fund, Lux Capital and 1789 and most recently valued at $1.6B.” The event is in Alabama, so my 254 AL subscribers should keep an eye out for a brash Australian aerospace founder.
I think this might be the best political parties to date. I’m always trying to get my friend on the California restaurant board to take me to expo west as her plus one and this helped ease the blow of us not going because of scheduling.
the LA Material team is so impressive and I can’t wait to see what they do with their resources. it’s telling he didn’t name any LA media as inspo, except LA weekly “in their heyday” !