RodeoCPG Sells R&D To JPG Resources, Seeks To Scale Sales
JPG Resources announced its acquisition of RodeoCPG’s Brooklyn-based R&D team last week. The deal allows the Battle Creek, Michigan-based food and beverage consulting firm to better serve emerging and culinary-focused brands in the Big Apple, while Rodeo pivots focus toward becoming a targeted, tech-forward sales management platform.
The move impacts five Rodeo employees including four R&D specialists and one marketing-focused team member, said Jeff Grogg, managing director of JPG Resources. The team will continue to operate from its Brooklyn studio. Rodeo’s R&D team leader, Robin Puskas, carries over 20 years of experience in scaling culinary products while additional members bring expertise from work at large organizations including Grupo Bimbo and PepsiCo as well as from their time under the Rodeo banner.
Rodeo is now aiming to scale its sales efforts and execute its top priority – helping emerging brands succeed on shelf. Zachary DeAngelo, RodeoCPG founder and CEO, said the organization’s R&D component, which was its only on-site, in-person team, always felt separate from the rest of the business, and that finding a new home for the team was integral to repositioning the company around an expertise in tech-enabled sales management.
“That’s not going to be an easy thing – we have represented a bunch of things to people over the years,” DeAngelo said. “Our single point of focus [looking forward] is that we want to disrupt the broker distributor model that has existed for so long and that has not necessarily served brands in the way that I think that it should.”
Rodeo aims to leverage technology to create that change. According to DeAngelo, the two suppliers have had exploratory discussions about working together for nearly a decade. When he eventually pitched Grogg on a potential sale, an agreement was quickly reached. In addition to it being “good timing and a good fit,” the acquisition also gave JPG a “new home and new anchor.”
“It’s a team that fits well with us and has a broad range of experience across categories,” said Grogg. “It is similar to the rest of the JPG team, but with a little bit more of a culinary bent and focus on emerging brands than our current portfolio. We have those [aspects] but the skew within this team is a bit different.”
JPG’s expanded presence in major urban centers like New York and Chicago, both of which it considers its home market, also provides it an opportunity to “double-down” on its work with emerging brands, Grogg added.
In spring 2019, JPG teamed up with WeWork’s industry-focused Food Lab in Manhattan to help launch a global food training program. However, when the food labs were shuttered during the pandemic, alongside WeWork’s own collapse, JPG left the partnership, and has since been looking for a new way to rebuild its R&D presence in New York City. Grogg also highlighted the team’s involvement with Naturally New York, of which he is a member of the board of directors, and said its connections with that community gives it an advantage in attracting future clients.
The transition will be seamless for existing clients and bring additional services and broader support, like JPG’s own Snackwerks manufacturing and distribution facility, from the larger organization, according to Grogg. JPG and Rodeo believe an emerging brand can come to either entity, and while they operate separately, clients will be able to get everything they need to run their business from “getting it designed and made to getting it sold.”
“We’ve reached a certain size, a certain breadth, that we don’t want to be doing a lot more things,” said Grogg. “We want to be finding the right partners to enable the rest of brands, we’re never going to launch a sales team, we’re never going to launch a finance team, [but] we need to have those as our good partners. Our mission at this point is to be, hopefully, the best in the things that we do –operations, supply chain and innovation – and then we want to have the best partners around us at the right scale.”
