Many consumers are blissfully unaware of the work that it takes to get a product on the shelves of their favorite local market.
Colleen Sundlie, founder of Date Lady, sure does.
The brand’s Original Date Syrup, Chocolate Spread, and Sweet Chili Sauce made their debut at upscale grocery chain Erewhon in September, while an exclusive 11-ounce bottle of Chocolate Syrup hit Sprouts Farmers Market shelves earlier this month.
Selling products at Erewhon and Sprouts is part of a new era of rapid expansion for Date Lady.
This Springfield, Missouri-based company with 25 full-time and 40 total employees believes these new commerce avenues have the potential to add another $1 million in sales by the end of next year.
There is also a positive benefit to its infrastructure.
“It means opening up distribution warehouses in several different locations where we didn’t have that yet,” Sundlie tells Fast Company. “It means being able to knock on several more brick-and-mortar stores and say, ‘Hey, look, we’re already here in this distribution warehouse in this region.’”
This strategy has already worked, even without a dedicated salesperson.
“We’ve already gotten some stores based on that as well,” she says. “This is a huge feat for a consumer packaged good to get into different distribution regions. You’ve got to get that one big chain in order to make that happen.”
The accidental entrepreneur
The road to this brick-and-mortar win wasn’t always linear or smooth. In fact, Sundlie never even intended to start Date Lady.
When she was living in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, in 2005 for her husband’s job, she stumbled upon pure date syrup at a local market. The seed was planted to bring this magical serum back to the United States.
Sundlie and her husband, Ryan, founded the company in 2012 with $120,000 in seed money and an additional loan from the Small Business Administration (SBA). They started peddling their wares at local farmers’ markets.
It wasn’t long until Date Lady began a partnership with United Natural Foods, with its products being sold at Whole Foods Market.
This distribution process was too expensive at first, in part because of a lack of venture capital funds.
“The amount of money that these brick-and-mortar stores wanted us to put into it was just more than we could handle for what we were getting in return,” Sundlie says. “And so we actually ended up breaking up with [food distributor] UNFI, which meant taking ourselves out of Whole Foods.”
The retail ‘game-changer’
Amazon became the more financially prudent tool to get their product in the hands of consumers, which is perhaps ironic given that the e-commerce giant would go on to buy Whole Foods in 2017.
These days, Date Lady is back on the shelves of Whole Foods located in the Rocky Mountain region.
Date Lady shipped directly from its own warehouse, going the fulfilled-by-merchant route on Amazon. This and partnerships with Vitacost fueled early sales.
“I am not ashamed as a small business to sing the praises of Amazon, because it was just a total game-changer for us,” Sundlie says. “We could be put in front of thousands of households for mere pennies per sponsored ad, where it would cost us literally thousands of dollars to get into an ad for a few brick and mortar stores.”
“Amazon comes with its own set of challenges and frustrations for sure,” she adds, “but it’s just a huge blessing to our company.”
Date Lady has also been sold at Target and Walmart. It was surprising to Sundlie that the products did better at Walmart than Target, leading her to pull them from the latter.
These days, 52.4% of the brand’s sales are eCommerce, 29.3% are ingredient manufacturer sales, and the remaining 17.3% are brick and mortar.
Date Lady has come a long way from its early farmers’ market beginnings. In 2021, its annual revenue was more than $2 million. That grew to around $6.8 million over the next four years.
This year, the company has set a $10 million goal, and with a record-breaking September earning almost $1 million in one month alone, it is on track to reach it.
‘Hot’ dates
When asked what she credits the growth of her company to, Sundlie pointed back to the fruit that makes it all possible.
“I really think a lot of it is just that dates are hot right now, and that they aren’t just a trend that will go away either,” she says. “I’ve always said people in the United States really haven’t known what to do with dates.”
She recalled painful, early demos where people thought dates were prunes and said they did not like them.
She added: “I don’t think we can completely take credit for it ourselves as much as we would’ve liked to, but what we can take credit for is really keeping up well with it. We were here and we were ready for it.”
Beyond the Sprouts and Erewhon retail additions, Date Lady is also expanding into a bigger facility, which is expected to provide an eightfold to tenfold increase in production.
Additionally, the brand is rolling out chocolate chips and a new baked product that has yet to be announced. The age-old saying “when it rains it pours” certainly applies here.
“It always costs more than you think”
For many years, Date Lady’s hero products were date syrup and date sugar. These products came with homework as consumers had to learn how to use them as sugar substitutes.
Because of the company’s slow and steady growth, it realized that products that utilize date syrup and date sugar as ingredients, such as its chocolate syrup, are the way forward.
Even before the Erewhon and Sprouts launches, the demand for the chocolate syrup grew by 111% this year.
Speaking of education, Sundlie has learned many lessons over her 15 years in business and was happy to share two of them. She admits the first one might sound unoriginal but still believes it rings true.
“It always costs more than you think,” she says. “It really is still so surprising. I mean, we overestimate everything now. It’s amazing how much things cost to do business when you’re a consumer packaged goods [company].”
The second lesson? It’s okay to grow slowly, especially if you don’t want to sell right away.
“We’ve been profitable for a really long time,” Sundlie says. “Now it is more exciting to have the fast, rapid growth because we feel like we already have a secure foundation.”
