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  2. #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

#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

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.

Connect with Loren Brill

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

Links from the Episode