#124: Loren Brill, CEO & Founder of Sweet Loren's, the Clean Food Company With Delicious Non-GMO, Gluten-Free, Vegan Cookie Dough Available in 10,000+ Stores Nationwide

Jun 29, 2020

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Loren Brill is an entrepreneur with a mission to make clean food delicious and more accessible. After overcoming cancer after college, she cut out most dairy, artificial and highly processed ingredients. When she couldn’t find anything to satisfy her sweet tooth with, she made up her own recipes. Sweet Loren’s was born. Loren is the CEO & Founder of Sweet Loren's, a clean food CPG company transforming what is means to be convenient, insanely tasty, and more sustainable. Their first product line is a first-of-its-kind place & bake and edible cookie dough. Sweet Loren’s ranked #114 in the 2019 Inc. 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. and Loren was picked as part of the 2019 Inc. Female Founders 100, building America’s most innovative and ambitious businesses.

She is a graduate of the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Southern California and a certified Hatha Yoga instructor. She completed the master class in cooking at The New School and studied at The Natural Gourmet Institute. She loves good food, health & wellness, female entrepreneurship, and turning negatives into positives.

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Some of the Topics Covered by Loren Brill in this Episode

What is Sweet Loren's and what makes their product unique
How Sweet Loren's got started
How surviving cancer at 22 re-framed Loren's life
Seeing food as fuel and what clean eating means to Loren
How Loren began testing her cookie dough and got her big break with Whole Foods before she even had a packaged product
The challenges of her first year of business
How Loren recommends to test market
How Loren gathered data and refined her product as she got her company off the ground
How Loren grew from having her product carried in a few New York Whole Foods to over 10,000 supermarkets across the country
How taking a course helped Loren formulate her business plan
How Loren got her first big meeting with the head buyer at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods and the push that gave to her business
Figuring out how to not be afraid of opportunities and to just show up and do her best
The whirlwind between that first meeting and getting her product onto the shelves
The challenges of finding a factory to work with, scaling up her recipe, distribution, and sampling
What growth looked like during the first few years of building her business
Winning the Next Big Small Brand Contest
The importance of branding and packaging in food
Getting on the Today Show and getting voted Top Entrepreneur in Marie Claire
How networking led to meeting her mentor Hamdi Ulukaya, founder of Chobani
How getting launched nationally by Publix and Kroger supermarkets made Sweet Loren's into a multi-million dollar business overnight
How Loren knew she was ready to bring on a full team
The food service side of Sweet Loren's and diversifying the business
What the e-commerce side of the business looks like for Sweet Loren's as a perishable product
How COVID-19 has affected her business and the baking boom during this time
Why they have stuck to cookie dough for five years and why they are now evaluating the market demands for potential new products
Loren's advice about identifying and focusing on your strengths as you grow a business
What Loren would have done differently if she could go back in time and her biggest advice for entrepreneurs
How Loren avoids burnout
Loren's book recommendations and what she learned from them
How Loren manages her time day to day

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