CJ Bruce is the Founder and CEO of The Missing Ingredient, a marketing agency dedicated to helping food and beverage brands grow through performance marketing, brand building, influencer partnerships, and AI-driven strategies. Under his leadership, The Missing Ingredient has helped brands 5x their sales over five years, and CJ himself is recognized for building marketing systems that drive measurable results and long-term impact. With a background in film, political science, and hands-on culinary experience, CJ brings a unique, creative perspective to food and beverage marketing.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [01:29] CJ Bruce shares the inspiration that led him to launch The Missing Ingredient
- [03:13] The secrets behind growing content beyond friends and family
- [04:13] Why speed and authenticity outperform perfection in content creation
- [07:39] What makes marketing food and beverage brands uniquely challenging
- [11:55] Tips for using data to guide strategy and fuel continuous brand growth
- [18:03] Transforming marketing workflows and creativity with cutting-edge AI integration
In this episode…
Great food brands rarely scale on taste alone. Behind the scenes, growth often comes down to understanding what the data is quietly revealing about customers, channels, and timing. So how do successful brands turn marketing data into real-world momentum?
According to CJ Bruce, a marketing strategist focused on scaling food and beverage brands, the answer starts with grounding every decision in data. He explains that effective campaigns begin with deep audits of existing marketing data, competitor activity, and consumer trends before testing ideas in the market and iterating based on real results. That process often uncovers surprising insights, like micro-influencers outperforming massive creators or simple user-generated content beating expensive productions. The lesson is clear: data doesn’t just guide marketing decisions, it constantly reshapes them.
In this episode of The Missing Ingredient, CJ Bruce is interviewed by Chad Franzen of Rise25 to discuss scaling food brands through data-driven marketing. He explains how marketing audits and competitor analysis shape strategy, why micro-influencers often outperform larger creators, and how storytelling and performance marketing work together to drive growth. CJ also talks about using AI to streamline marketing workflows and unlock new creative opportunities.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Quotable Moments:
- “You got to figure out what works and doesn’t work and see the data that comes back and use that to inform what you continue to do next.”
- “So everything we do is grounded in data.”
- “You can’t just run performance, and you can’t just run brand marketing.”
- “So it’s both streamlining existing processes and also opening up new marketing opportunities that previously were unaccessible.”
- “I think it’s a huge technological evolution that’s happening and happening very quickly.”
Action Steps:
- Conduct a comprehensive marketing audit before launching campaigns: Reviewing website, ads, social media, and email data reveals strengths, gaps, and opportunities.
- Analyze competitor strategies and market trends: Understanding what competitors are doing helps brands position themselves more effectively.
- Test marketing ideas quickly and iterate based on real performance data: Continuous experimentation reveals what truly resonates with audiences.
- Prioritize micro-influencers with strong engagement over large creators: Smaller creators often deliver more authentic connections and higher conversion potential.
- Balance storytelling with performance marketing strategies: Combining brand awareness with conversion-focused tactics ensures sustainable, long-term growth.
Sponsor for this episode…
This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. They partner with purpose-driven brands to drive growth through smart, results-focused marketing — without the “set it and forget it” approach.
From brand awareness and paid media to content, influencer partnerships, and loyalty programs, they act as true strategic partners invested in your long-term success.
To learn more about how they help food and beverage brands grow with impact, visit themissingingredient.com today.
Powered by Rise25 Podcast Production Company
Full Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
Intro: 00:01
Welcome to The Missing Ingredient podcast with CJ Bruce, where food and beverage founders, operators and experts share the real strategies behind building successful brands. Let’s jump into today’s show.
CJ Bruce: 00:15
Hey CJ Bruce, and welcome to the show. This is the podcast for founders and leaders of high impact food and beverage brands who are serious about scaling. Each episode, I sit down with the people who power the fab industry brand operators, agencies, vendors and retailers to unpack what actually works for brands in the 5 to $100 million range. This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. We partner with purpose driven brands to drive growth through smart, results focused marketing, from brand awareness and performance marketing to content influencer partnerships and AI driven workflows.
We act as a true strategic partner invested in your long term success. To learn more about how we help food, food and beverage brands grow, visit themissingingredient.com. Today I have Chad here at Rise25 who’s done thousands of interviews with successful entrepreneurs and CEOs, and we flipped the script and he will be interviewing me. Chad, welcome to the show.
Chad Franzen: 01:11
Hey, thanks so much, CJ. Great to talk to you. Great to be here. Hey, this is one of your first episodes, so I’m kind of looking forward to finding out a little bit more about you and your background and The Missing Ingredient. So tell me if you could, as we get started here, tell me a little bit about your background prior to founding The Missing Ingredient, missing ingredient, and then what inspired you to start it?
CJ Bruce’s Background and Journey Into Marketing
CJ Bruce: 01:29
Yeah, so I started well, I studied film and political science in school, and then I moved to LA to get into film. And during that time, I started making my own content in addition to working on some film and TV projects. And I was putting it on the internet and it was, you know, the question at the time, it was YouTube and other channels, and it was, after all, my friends and family watched the videos. How do we get other people to see it? And that’s really what got me into marketing.
And so I started figuring out video marketing and how that worked. And then I started an agency in LA, and that kind of evolved into a video adtech company and another agency, and we were essentially a viral video marketing agency for large brands and other larger agencies that would use this as a vendor. So that got me into marketing and content in the early days. And then after doing that for a while, I hit a point where, you know, I felt like the work we were doing, while it was initially exciting and cool to be working with these large brands, I didn’t feel like I was really impacting their business that much. I also didn’t feel like their businesses were that impactful, or I was that excited about the actual net product that they were producing.
And so that’s what led me to start The Missing Ingredient. So went out on my own after the previous agencies and wanted to, you know, kind of bring that big brand playbook to businesses and organizations that I believed in. And I felt like we could have a real impact on their day to day business.
Early Lessons in Content Creation and Growth
Chad Franzen: 02:55
As you were, as you were starting out kind of producing your own content, Trying to get past. You know, having friends and family watch. Was there one thing you learned without giving away any secrets to being successful in, in, you know, causing other people to watch your stuff?
CJ Bruce: 03:12
I think there were I mean there were a number of things I think that the, you know, some of the examples would be collaborations, right. Collaborating with other people who already have an audience or who are interested in promoting what you’re promoting. At the time, there was also a lot of video SEO components. So it was how do you make it? So it’s as visible in search specifically for YouTube.
And you know, YouTube is the number two search engine also in by Google. And they’re all kind of blended results. So that was a way to get visibility. And then the, you know consistency consistently posting and trying things. And I think that was maybe a really big one was not being too precious about, you know, what you’re producing and what you’re putting out.
And really you got to get out there. You got to go through the motions. You got to figure out what works and doesn’t work and see the data that comes back and use that to inform what you continue to do next.
Overcoming Perfectionism in Content Creation
Chad Franzen: 04:01
Was that difficult for you to. I feel like a lot of content creators would be really kind of kind of uptight about about what they put out there. Was that something that was hard for you to accept or did you just go with it?
CJ Bruce: 04:12
No, it took.
CJ Bruce: 04:13
It took some time to make that mental shift. And I definitely had friends who were resisting that shift at the time as we were all, you know, film and TV and writing things and trying to get on, you know, large movies and that sort of thing, which is a very different process and what it means to, you know, produce and iterate online. But I think for me, after and some of the first stuff I did was, you know, was not that right? It was like we spent a ton of time producing and editing and, you know, coming up with the perfect kind of language and all of that. Pretty quickly, though, you saw, you know, as people started to come out and post and just that’s what was working.
And at that time, at least it was a very new format, right? Like YouTube specifically, people were vlogging or creating these shows. And what what makes sense? What’s going to work in this format? How are people going to consume it?
So it was it was a shift. But I think for me personally, at least once I saw results and saw that people started to engage with those and then pivoting to the business side, once it was, businesses were actually paying to get support, and that was then driving results for their businesses. I think that’s where things started to click to me, and it just made total sense to go all in on that direction.
Why Focus on Food and Beverage Brands
Chad Franzen: 05:19
Okay. Very nice. So The Missing Ingredient, why what made you focus specifically on food and beverage brands?
CJ Bruce: 05:27
So I’m personally very passionate about food and beverage. I’ve done a number of I mean, I worked in a restaurant for many years when I was younger, and then I, I cook a lot. So I’ve actually had a plant based chef certification. I’ve done some catering things, some private dinner things back in the day. And so just inherently very passionate and excited about the space.
And then the other piece, there are a few pieces. So that’s one piece. Another piece is, you know, we think about I mentioned the impact with the work. And I think the, you know, that impact comes from the work that we do on a marketing side that impacts helps to grow businesses. But I also think that food and beverage in itself is one of the most impactful businesses that there is because it hits on so many different levels.
So there’s bringing people together around food, there’s supply chain with food. There’s the actual, you know, health benefits or not with food. So all of those things combined, excuse me, make us so that there’s a lot of different areas of people and the planet and the lived experience that food touches. Another piece is food is fun, food and beverage. It’s fun to work in from a marketing perspective, right?
There are a lot of other industries that may have bigger budgets and whatever it is, but they’re not as enticing for me personally, right? Like working in financial services, not a knock on financial services, but it’s not as fun creatively and inspiring for the team. And then, you know, you also get to to taste and eat the food and engage on that level so everybody can kind of participate in what the end product is, which I think is also a really nice aspect of food and beverage. And the last thing I’d say is we, you know, really decided to double down on it in from a business decision. Right.
It was what’s what’s a strategic approach for us to help differentiate as a small team and focusing in on the space. We’d already, you know, about half the work we had done at that time was already in food and beverage. And so it just made sense to differentiate ourselves in the market and again, really focus in on that industry.
What Makes Food and Beverage Marketing Unique
Chad Franzen: 07:31
What what would you say maybe differentiates food and beverage from others, from other industries when it comes to marketing?
CJ Bruce: 07:39
There are a lot of things. I think so I think part of it is, you know, people can eat it. So there’s there’s that which is different than any other industry, right? You can actually consume the product. And and with that comes a lot of different, you know, cultural Tool components your your history as well, right?
Like family. Like there’s a lot of emotional pieces tied up with food which can be, you know, can be good and bad. You tap into it in a good way. It can really resonate with people. People can also have negative emotions associated with certain aspects of food.
So I think that differentiates the regulatory, you know, is very specific. Certain claims that you can make right around, especially health claims of like what the function is of this food, if it’s not curing some kind of disease or whatever it might, or giving you energy and focus. Right. All these different health claims that are specific to food and then the the way that people engage with food, whether that’s, you know, buying something that’s like ready made to eat, buying an ingredient that they cook with, going and eating something out at a restaurant. There are a lot of different ways that you can engage with food and beverage.
And then I think there’s also the element of, you know, where you buy and what the actual kind of customer journey is with food and beverage. So people are ordering things, you know, direct to consumer from a brand’s website. People are going to retail stores, grocery stores to buy product on shelf. And then there’s, you know, a whole retail world of, you know, the natural specialty versus like, wholesale grocers, right? Like all club, like there’s all these different categories in there.
And then, you know, sites like Amazon and other other marketplaces. So there’s, you know, there’s that aspect of how the product is actually sold and gets into the hands of people that is unique, I think, to Food and Trends is another piece very much evolving on an ongoing basis. So it’s always new, right? Whether that’s, you know, talking about your macros or specific diet trends or, you know, or recently like GOP ones. Right.
It’s changing how people eat, changing people’s appetites. And so that affects food. Yeah. There’s a lot of things that make it, I think really a unique space and dynamic and exciting.
How Culinary Experience Shapes Marketing Perspective
Chad Franzen: 09:56
Yeah, I would imagine so. We’ll definitely get into how you use data to inform your strategy for clients. But tell me, how does your does tell me if or how your certification your you know, your your familiarity with plant based cooking and your certification affects how you approach marketing in terms of food and beverage.
CJ Bruce: 10:16
So I think having, you know, having that gone through them, that was really just, you know, kind of a personal I wanted to learn how to be a better cook and cook in different ways that I had maybe grown up with. But understanding that and then also, you know, working in restaurants and being on the ground, I just have a very tactile, direct sense of what it means to to cook products, to come up with new recipes and ingredients. I think that it gives me a different perspective than maybe other people who could be in digital marketing, and they know that they’re like, oh, food seems interesting. You’re not as connected to, you know what? Like a founder’s mindset would be in coming up with a recipe or trying to commercialize something that they, you know, came up and cooked at home.
And I think another aspect is I get just excited about playing with the food that we know of our clients. Right. So it’s like I will just naturally take an ingredient, try to make something with it, give feedback or actually like share, like, hey, this is what I discovered in using this. And when we think about the consumer that we’re going after, right. It’s not they’re not always the kind of, you know, super in the weeds foodie like I might be.
But having that consumer mindset where it’s like, yeah, I know people who are looking to buy new foods, right? And explore foods and how they might explore foods. I’ve done a lot of that myself. I go to the grocery store all the time. So I am the kind of, you know, super consumer in that way, which I think helps in understanding where people’s mindset might be and how different segments of food consumers might engage with the brand.
Using Data to Inform Marketing Strategy
Chad Franzen: 11:48
Okay. Sounds good. So how do then, do you use data also to inform strategy for clients?
CJ Bruce: 11:55
Yes. So everything we do is grounded in data. And so we do, you know, upfront research. We’ll yeah. Generally most clients we’re starting with an audit.
So we’ll go through kind of all of the data that they have. Right. Whether that’s their their website, their e-commerce, the marketplaces they sell on, the assets that they have, the ad campaigns they’ve run, the email campaigns they’ve run, what they’re posting on social. So just a deep understanding of what are the data points in all of these different areas of what’s currently being done or has been done before, and then paired with additional research on our own? So looking at competitors, right, what are what are competitors doing on social.
What are competitors reviews online. Right. What kind of products do they have? How are they pricing themselves. What does all that look like.
So the kind of competitor research and then broader market research we’re pulling in from different data sources to see how we’re different, say, generational segments engaging with this type of product. What are those trends that I was talking about earlier? Where does the brand or product intersect with those trends? So a lot of upfront research that will do to get grounded. And, you know, what’s the current state and what are the current threats and opportunities.
And then once we get going. So from that we put together a plan and then we start to execute that plan. And then everything is iterated on based on the data. So as soon as we can we get things in market and we start to gather real data back. That tells us, you know, are we on the right track or not?
And then based on that we iterate on the strategy. So it’s a continuous improvement is a core value for us. And we do that internally with our own team and processes and also with clients. And the majority of that process is rooted in data.
Surprising Insights from Marketing Data
Chad Franzen: 13:35
Is there a data point or insight that has ever surprised you?
CJ Bruce: 13:40
All the time. Yeah, I think all the time it happens. Like some examples would be, you know, working with really big influencers. You look at an influencer, they have a million followers. This is going to be amazing.
We get them to post about our brand and there’s no results, right? You know, or you get very little results compared to maybe the investment. And that’s part of that is because some of it’s you don’t know until you try, right. You got to test things and see what the actual results come back with. The other piece is and this is something that we’ve learned over time.
And so we don’t really do that anymore. Right? We focus more on the micro influencers because we’re looking at things like engagement rate, like how was their average views per video if they’re posting videos. Right. And even a little more nuanced is what type of audience are people curating, right.
Like we’ve worked with, again, large influencers in the past where it’s more about free content, right, or free recipes. And so their audience isn’t really tuned to buying from the type of content that they make, right, compared to a different creator that maybe that is already integrated. And so their audience is more primed to buy, so it’s more likely to be something that could convert and drive sales. So that’s one example. But other examples around, you know, different Demographics that engage across social.
So like we’ve seen, you know, clients where we’ve been really heavily focused on, say, millennial and Gen Z audiences. But we have some campaigns where we opened up broader and see that, you know, a boomer audience really engages much more with certain content than we ever expected. So it’s kind of a new identified audience that came out in running the campaign. And then another, another surprising again at the time. Now it’s kind of become more of a best practice was just comparison, especially on social with, you know, very highly produced branded content compared to more UGC user generated content or influencer content on social or we’ve consistently seen within social media, at least it’s different for other channels that that more native feeling UGC content tends to perform better.
So it’s it’s lower cost to produce, right? It’s less of a slick experience, but it feels more native to the environment and that tends to drive better results on that channel. So again, at the beginning it was the assumption was, well, if we spend more money and produce something that’s more polished, it’s going to get better results. But that was not the case.
Balancing Storytelling and Performance Marketing
Chad Franzen: 16:04
So your your background I’m guessing, is probably rooted in creative storytelling. If you trace it all the way back to the beginning and now you’ve, you know, you’re doing all this thing with all this stuff, with performance marketing, how do you kind of balance those two things?
CJ Bruce: 16:20
I think they really go hand in hand. I think it’s it’s you can’t just run performance and you can’t just run brand marketing. You really do need both. And we’ve seen this so so yeah, the way that we think about it you need both. So the performance is that’s what’s getting you the sales.
That’s what’s getting people to convert. However, you can only you need to still get the awareness and educate people about the product that you’re selling before they’re ready to convert. And so how do you you do that with storytelling and telling that story in different ways across different channels and different formats with different voices. And so we think about them together and, and really in the customer journey. Right.
So you got to start with something that’s again more emotional telling the story, introducing the brand to people, getting them interested enough to go and start to look at the brand themselves, whether that’s on a brand’s website or in online marketplaces or at retail. And then once they start to engage, you can kind of move more into the performance marketing side but have them work together. So if you, for example, if you just run performance, you kind of cap out, right? There’s only so many people that are in market for your product at a given time. And if you don’t also have the more top of funnel brand marketing, you’re not going to be introducing and bringing new people into the fold consistently.
So doing both over time and then also thinking about the audience that you’re reaching and speaking to and those, you know, those stories that you’re telling. So different audience segments are going to respond to different types of creative. And that can affect both what people respond to from a brand standpoint and from a performance standpoint. So they really yeah, they really do go together.
Leveraging AI in Marketing Workflows
Chad Franzen: 17:59
How do you incorporate AI into your marketing strategies?
CJ Bruce: 18:03
We do a lot with AI, so it’s been a heavy, heavy investment for us over the last few years. So I’d say before, you know, GPT obviously changed everything prior to that, the ad platform so Meta and Google were already heavily using AI to optimize the campaigns. So we had already shifted our approach to how do we feed the machine within the ad platforms to get better results. So it’s already kind of a mental shift going from previously where it was, you know, we make the perfect ad and we target the perfect audience. Now it’s where how do we kind of creatively feed it with different things to drive performance.
And then beyond that, now it’s there are a lot of ways where we can give you two specific examples. One is streamlining existing marketing workflows. So internally, we’ve been doing this and we’re starting to do this as a service for clients where you have a marketing workflow, where someone on your team follows these steps to execute certain aspects of the work. And there are ways now that you can leverage AI in that to make that more efficient. So it could save, you know, 60 to 70% of that person’s time.
So an example could be social social listening and community management. Right. People are talking about your brand online. They’re tagging your brand. They’re commenting, they’re sending DMs at a certain level of volume that can be overwhelming.
And how do you keep track and how do you stay on top of all of these messages? And so incorporating AI in this one example where you can have first a filter, right. Does this require a response or not. Right. At what level of urgency would this message require response.
And then even drafting responses. So we still we keep humans in the loop in all of these processes. So a human is defining the framework a human is reviewing what the response might be or the filter might be. But AI helps to prioritize and streamline and draft a lot of those aspects. So that’s one big thing, is streamlining those workflows.
And then one other one I’d share is it’s reducing the cost for a lot of things. And it’s you know, this is rapidly changing. But things like creative production. Right. Not all AI creative isn’t quite there.
It’s not quite perfect, but incorporating it into creative workflows allows brands to produce more creative. And if you’re you’re using it in a smart way, that’s not just, you know, I go to Gemini and I tell it to make an image and I post it on social. That’s not the recommendation, but taking that, getting pieces of it, then modifying that with an actual design team to then post, you can produce a lot more, right? Or you can produce more varied assets than you could previously. And another example is with with coding where, you know, we back in the day with those large brain campaigns, we had clients that would do they’d spend a quarter million, half $1 million to produce some sort of custom, you know, landing page or microsite web app that was just for, say, a product launch, right?
That would make no sense for a smaller brand to do. They would never invest in that. However, with these tools, as they’re getting deployed now, you think about that cost coming down by 90%. And now all of a sudden it opens up new opportunities. It’s like, well, that never made sense before.
But if I’m spending 25 grand instead of 250 grand, maybe that is something that we could do. And it does make sense. So it’s both streamlining existing processes and also opening up new marketing opportunities that previously were unaccessible.
Perspective on AI and Industry Evolution
Chad Franzen: 21:40
Were you you know, I follow a lot of agency owners on LinkedIn, and I’d say three years ago, you know, AI is the worst. Don’t don’t bother with it now. You never you really never see that anymore. Did it? Do you?
Have you always had an open mind toward it, or did you have the same kind of evolution?
CJ Bruce: 21:55
I’ve always had an open mind. Yeah. I think for me I equate it to, again, where my career started, like when I first started and I was in online video, there were similar things. I was like, oh, mobile video and digital video and it’s going to ruin film and TV and there’s all this junk, right? And it’s there’s a lot of similarities.
AI is going to hit way more aspects of the economy than, you know, than the video kind of revolution evolution did. But looking back, there’s a lot of parallels where really it just democratized access. Now, anybody can create content, and then you have the explosion of YouTube and social media. Now anybody can distribute content, right? All those gatekeepers go away.
There’s a ton of garbage, but new things can pop up and new things can break through. And so I think the for me, it’s it’s a huge technological evolution that’s happening and happening very quickly. And so we’ve, we’ve been, you know, and me specifically on the forefront and leading that and figuring out how do we use these tools and leverage these tools, because I really think it’s going to, you know, I think it’s going to fundamentally change the work we do and, you know, work in general. I mean, it’s happening now. So in the next, you know, call it three years, I think things are going to look very different.
Building Remote Culture and Team Engagement
Chad Franzen: 23:06
Do you does is The Missing Ingredient. Is that a remote a remote workplace.
CJ Bruce: 23:12
It is. Yeah. So we’ve been fully remote since we started ten years ago.
Chad Franzen: 23:16
How do you kind of build and maintain a company culture in kind of a remote atmosphere?
CJ Bruce: 23:22
It can be challenging at times. We’ve we’ve definitely. So that was part of for me in starting the agency. That was a key piece for me was I wanted to have that flexibility of, you know, when I work and where I work, be able to work when traveling. So it was it was really important to me from the beginning that, like, we need to have this as a component.
And then the question was, well, how do you how do you do it? So it’s evolved a lot over the years. But today we have, you know, we have a weekly all hands meeting with the team. So everybody’s on that call. We do a weekly question of the week.
So it’s kind of an icebreaker type question. So everybody on that call we get you know we hear a little bit of your wins from the previous week, a highlight from your weekend. And then this question of the week that gives some space every week. You know, it’s not it’s usually short answers, but let’s everybody get to know each other better, builds the bonds of the team, and really helps to, again, get people to engage on the human level. That’s sometimes difficult when you have a remote team.
And then we do some other remote team building things like a book club, and we do a remote holiday party. And we have, you know, channels on Slack that are just kind of for sharing, you know, fun stuff or things people are doing with their kids or their hobbies. So all those elements, I think, have really helped to, to build and engage the remote culture.
Client Success Story: Sumo Citrus Growth
Chad Franzen: 24:35
Sounds good as we kind of wrap things up here. Do you happen to have a maybe a success story of a client that The Missing Ingredient has helped scale?
CJ Bruce: 24:44
Yeah, I think the one that.
CJ Bruce: 24:46
Comes to mind is Sumo Citrus, and so Sumo Citrus is a citrus fruit. It’s a decapod variety. And they we’ve been working with them for going on six years now. And we’ve really helped to build their entire marketing system. And so they have they have an internal team.
And then it’s us on the the media and the digital marketing side, partnering with the creative agency called both and and the PR agency called Allison PR and really it’s the three agencies together that have been, you know, pushing and growing this brand over the last roughly five years. And in that time, the, you know, everything scaled up. Basically, I think the last stat I saw was they five x their their sales over five years. It’s like that sales at retail and they’re you know they’re growing operation has has grown. So more fruit being produced by just distribution has grown significantly.
So in major retailers across the country. And for us we’ve evolved and grown with them in terms of the services that we deliver. So it really is a project where we’re, you know, we’re firing on all cylinders. We’re we’re growing the email list, which we started from scratch. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of people on the email list.
Right. We’ve run their paid media every year, which again started very social focused. And now it’s expanded to out of home and connected TV advertising across multiple channels. And the influencer play is another one. They had kind of a core at the beginning, you know, some just organic influencers that were posting.
And we developed this really robust influencer program with them over those, you know, 5 or 6 years and seeing tremendous growth, both in the sales I mentioned and then also their overall brand awareness in the US.
Continuous Learning and Industry Trends
Chad Franzen: 26:30
Do you find yourself, even with all your experience learning new things, with all, all of your campaigns that you’re currently even running.
CJ Bruce: 26:39
All the time? Yeah, I think it’s part of what keeps it interesting and keeps it fun. There’s always, always something new. And we talk about AI as something new. In the last few years, the retail media starts running ads on retailer websites or through Instacart, and that was, you know, didn’t exist when we started.
And now it’s a huge part of of what we do. So there’s always something new that’s coming up and, you know, you’re always and there’s new the new trends on the food side. Right. And we’re different ways of producing food, different ways that people are consuming food. The kind of international inspiration component to from just the food perspective.
So constantly learning new things and learning new things from our clients and our partners that we work with. So it’s yeah, it continues to be engaging and, you know, continue to grow and learn.
Looking Ahead to Future Podcast Episodes
Chad Franzen: 27:29
Sure. Yeah. And speaking of learning new things, I’m sure anybody who turns tunes into this podcast will learn something new. What do you most looking forward to about hosting it?
CJ Bruce: 27:39
I’m really excited to have these conversations. I think a lot of what we, you know, I have these have been having conversations like this over the years offline. And I think having a space where I can formally talk to all of these creative and driven people in the food and beverage ecosystem, and to be able to share that knowledge more, more widely and see how people respond to that. I’m I’m going to learn through this process. I was just thinking about getting things set up and thinking about questions for people.
And it’s like, you know, there’s a lot of these questions that I haven’t really asked people before. We’ve been working together for years, you know, so being able to get to know people a little bit more in this, this format, I’m really excited for that part too.
Closing Remarks
Chad Franzen: 28:24
Okay. Sounds awesome. We’ll look forward to future episodes. Hey, it’s been great to talk to you today, CJ. Thanks so much for having me.
CJ Bruce: 28:30
Thanks, Chad. Appreciate you being on.
Chad Franzen: 28:32
So long, everybody.
Outro: 28:34
Thanks for listening to The Missing Ingredient podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.