Fila Manila To Scale Online Offerings Via New A.I. Focused Grant

Filipino food brand Fila Manila is working to scale its growing ecommerce business via a slate of A.I. applications across all areas of the business after receiving a $25,000 grant from tech company Lenovo’s Evolve Small program.

The non-dilutive capital comes with an additional $10,000 worth of customized A.I. technology from Lenovo, the maker of laptop line ThinkPad, and was locked in on the heels of the business’ $250,000 “Shark Tank” investment from Daniel Lubetzky in 2024. That cash has not only given the business a boost, but the origins of both have set founder and CEO Jake Deleon on a path to fine tuning the company’s growth strategy.

Prior to “Shark Tank,” Fila Manila’s ecommerce platform accounted for only about 10% of the business’ sales, Deleon told Nosh. After the episode aired, DTC sales grew to about half of Fila Manila’s business.

“When we aired on ‘Shark Tank,’ we sold thousands and thousands of our Shark Tank boxes, which is great: that’s revenue, that’s trial,” he said. “But a more symbolic takeaway from that is that we were the first experience with Filipino food that thousands of families had – we are almost defining what the category is.”

“Shark Tank” To TikTok

While the recent grant funding will support the company’s continued online push, those efforts will also be supplemented by another key area of investment: telling the brand’s story. Deleon intends to lean into TikTok with micro videos as well as affiliate marketing on the platform, explaining it was also accepted into TikTok’s food and beverage incubator program where it has learned that building the brand through affiliate networks is more powerful for both storytelling and consumer conversion.

“A few months ago, a lot of the thinking was that [you should] generate great content on TikTok and then people will buy it from your TikTok shop based on the quality of content and how viral you go,” said Deleon. “But now I’m learning from a lot of experts – people that are so well versed in this and had so much success – [that the] a lot of the push for growth and a lot of the push for prioritization of resources is around this idea of building an affiliate army.”

Fila Manila remains one of only a few Filipino CPG brands in the U.S. and claims to currently hold 95% of the category’s market share with a lineup of sauces and spreads including Banana Ketchup, Coconut & Ube Spread and Kare Kare and Adobe sauces and marinades. The brand is sold in about 1,400 stores nationwide and recently rolled out to Walmart and Kroger stores in addition to expanding its door count with Target.

“Retail helps you scale; you can’t get the amount of volume that you get with pushing products through online,” Deleon said. “Most people shop at stores for categories like spreads and cooking sauces. More people go to the grocery store and buy within a basket, rather than buying one pouch of sauce online, or one bottle of banana ketchup online.”

A.I. Innovation

But Deleon believes he can grow the overall business with a targeted innovation approach around online-exclusive products. These items will serve as a means to continue growing total average order value online. Fila Manila already promotes multipacks, value packs, gift sets and volume discounts rather than one-off product purchases, which he said has been key to making the DTC platform a “profit generator.”

“Working in retail these days is very expensive for many brands,” Deleon said. “In most cases, brands don’t even make a profit; maybe [they] break even, but with online, you control the pricing, you control the distribution methods and how it’s fulfilled. It’s easier for a business to eke out a profit online – maybe not at scale at first – but at least in the critical stages of an early business it’s really important.”

Keeping cash burn low has been key to Fila Manila’s success. Deleon remains the company’s only full-time employee and uses a network of fractional help, agencies and now A.I. to fulfill all of the business’ necessary functions. He said the use of A.I. has been essential in keeping the business running with a lean team by inexpensively filling gaps across all aspects of the business “from operations to R&D to even finance.”

A.I.’s first major impact on Fila Manila will come via innovation on a new snack concept that will launch as the company’s first online-exclusive offering. The product was ideated, designed and prototyped completely through A.I., Deleon said. He came into the project with “a blank drawing board,” while asking the tech what product type, flavor and positioning would be best for an online exclusive product, resulting in a “narrow funnel” of products to consider.

“Traditionally, we would do focus groups, qualitative research, quantitative research, to then nail down a concept. But these days we just plug it into ChatGPT or A.I., and that can help us finetune a lot of data, filter a lot of consumer inputs, and help us narrow it down to a couple of winning concepts and products.”

He said in the past it would have taken weeks, “and a couple thousand dollars,” for a designer to mock up packaging and do the necessary briefing and development work. With the use of A.I. that entire process only took about 24 hours. Deleon noted he was shocked by how dialed in the platform is when it comes to recommending formulations, down to stating “try this percentage of this ingredient.”

After a handful of viable options were narrowed down, then the team used “the human element,” to finetune the concept further. Deleon believes the new snack item will be a higher-volume offering compared to its core line of spreads and sauces, with the potential to become Fila Manila’s hero platform.

While Fila Manila may be pushing deep into tech while keeping its team lean, Deleon emphasized how much the brand values the importance of human-to-human collaboration. He highlighted that he has been fortunate to continue learning from others, including through the Lenovo program, which has allowed him to connect directly with other recipients across a variety of industries.

“It’s always just a game of learning from folks who are smarter than you,” Deleon said. “I don’t think it matters what the particular product you’re selling online is compared to the strategy and the customer funnel. Those things are pretty broad and can be agnostic to your product – whether you’re selling banana ketchup or you’re selling a sexual wellness device.”