“Great Problems” Facing New Catalina Crunch President Warady

While it’s fairly common for startup food brands to face challenges in their first few years, there aren’t too many that are thought of as nice-to-haves.

Still, Joel Warady believes that things could be a lot worse as he moves into the president’s role at keto-friendly snack brand Catalina Crunch. With the New York-based brand growing “faster than anticipated,” the former general manager of gluten-free and allergen friendly brand Enjoy Life Foods has joined Catalina Crunch as the company looks to streamline product innovation, marketing efforts and retail growth.

Warady left his role at Enjoy Life, which was acquired by Mondelez in 2015, in November after 18 years with the brand, serving as first as chief sales and marketing officer and a board member before becoming general manager in 2017. He had served as a strategic advisor for Catalina Crunch since last year.

Catalina Crunch founder and CEO Krishna Kaliannan was first introduced to Warady through a mutual friend when the brand, which has received funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Blue Collective, and Prehype, was still in product development. At the time, though the cereal was low sugar, it wasn’t directly focused on the keto diet, Warady said. Warady saw an opportunity for Catalina Crunch to truly stand out as consumer research demonstrated the rising importance of, and consumer interest in, keto-friendly products. After further discussion, Warady signed on as an advisor and Kaliannan decided to hone the brand’s keto messaging.

“When I started to look at the product line and the innovation pipeline, I just saw a real opportunity to be a leader in the category of lower sugar cereals and snacks,” Warady said.

As president, one of Warady’s main focuses will be the brand’s innovation pipeline. This year, the company changed its name to Catalina Snacks — the brand name remains as Catalina Crunch — in order to support a wider product portfolio. It also expanded beyond cereal with the launch of two new keto-friendly product lines — freeze-dried smoothie cups and sandwich cookies — and has plans to expand into additional new categories in 2021. The smoothie cups, available in three flavors, contain four grams of sugar and are sweetened with allulose and stevia, and are made with freeze-dried fruit, brazil nuts and spinach. The brand uses freeze-dried fruit to “lock in the flavor, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants,” while also reducing the brand’s carbon footprint by 80% by making the product lighter and shelf-stable, according to the brand.

“I’m just bringing some structure into the business so that when we innovate product, we know how many SKUs we’re going to innovate with, we know the launch date six months in advance,” Warady said. “As opposed to any entrepreneurial company, where things happen really reactionary, we’re going to bring some more process into the business.”

The brand sees “tremendous opportunity” in several other sweet and savory snack categories as well, Warady said, but he says it won’t be launching any “me too” products. Last summer, the brand launched keto-friendly Cheddar Cheese Bites, but discontinued them, with Warady noting that “there’s a lot of cheese bites out there, and we didn’t need another one.”

Originally a direct-to-consumer brand, Catalina Crunch has made major moves in retail this year, alongside its growth online. In January, the brand launched its cereal line into brick and mortar stores with Whole Foods nationally; it’s now in 5,000 retail doors nationwide, including Safeway, Albertsons, Wegmans, Hy-Vee and Shaw’s. Warady said it’s important for the brand to establish a retail presence as its goal is for consumers to “find our products where they find all their other products,” because while there’s a “set number” of people who buy food products online, the majority of consumers continue to buy these products in retail.

The brand’s latest launch, a fruit-flavored cereal, rolled out at the end of August as a direct request from retailers, Warady said, as the brand now looks to both consumers as well as retailers and distributors to determine the “need and desire” in the market.

Warady said that the direct-to-consumer success of the cereal line has given the brand permission to expand through the store quickly. Having established brand equity online, it’s been able to cross-sell its products in retail, even though they aren’t in the same aisle of the store.

Warady said he sees similarities to Enjoy Life, which also had a dedicated consumer following and was able to launch products in categories ranging from breakfast to baking to salty snacks.

“I was fortunate at Enjoy Life, because I was involved since the inception, that we were able to build the brand to become a $100 million brand at retail,” Warady said. “I think we can do the exact same thing with Catalina.”

From his experience focusing on special diets at Enjoy Life, Warady said he’s learned how to establish a wide consumer base with a portfolio of products that may, at first glance, seem to only have a narrow audience. For Catalina Crunch, he believes the product appeals beyond the keto community, to paleo dieters and vegans looking for plant-based products.

“You build your base of consumers…around your narrow target,” Warady said. “But if you make the product taste great, and you make sure that the product is readily available, your base will grow significantly broader.”

To grow its brand awareness, and ultimately its consumer base, Warady will increase targeted digital marketing, and is also expanding the brand’s marketing team for both the online and brick-and-mortar retail channels. Last month, the brand added Katrina Quanstrom-Winkel, formerly of Simple Mills, as senior marketing manager.

Warady said the combination of his marketing experience and Kaliannan’s engineering background and detail-focused product development will ultimately be what helps propel the brand’s growth.

“I’m a marketer, and a lot of food companies just have marketing people running it,” Warady said. “And that’s great, we can make a big difference. But if you’ve got science and taste behind it, that’s what makes for a really successful business.”