2025, eTail Boston. Keynote Fireside Chat: Respecting Brand Heritage While Focusing on Innovation and Growth: The Nuts.com Story

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: All right. So nuts.com. Fun company. You've been the CEO since 2023. What attracted you to the company in the first place?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: So nuts.com is a very cool, very fun brand. For me, what attracted me to it, it was really. It was such a unique opportunity. My background is bifurcated, so I actually grew up in finance and spent my early part of my career, the first decade in private equity and then crossed over to food.

And the interesting part about that journey is I didn't cross over to food. Especially coming from an investor world because the margins are great. Yeah. 'cause from anyone in the room that actually works in food, it is hard. You commiserate. Yeah. The margins are lean. But I actually crossed over to food because I joined a company called FreshDirect, where the business was incredibly operationally complex and I wanted to learn to be a great operator.

Yeah. So for me, I want, I went into food for a great training ground. Why? I ultimately went to nuts.com, gosh, a decade or so later. Was I was approached by a founder. I've had three tours of duties with founders. I love helping and partnering with founders to bring in scale their vision and bring it to life.

And when the founder of nests.com reached out to me, it was. I would say post COVID during COVID. I don't know when the official end date was. Yeah. With COVID. I don't know. I, it was definitely still going on. I think we thought we were past it. And the business had seen fantastic success scaling during that time, and he was really looking for a partner to help professionalize the organization and build the systems, people and processes to actually take the company the next level.

What attracted me to the opportunity was. I don't know how many of you may know this, but nuts.com actually has a hundred year heritage and it was founded originally as a store by the grandfather of the family. And so to take an iconic brand that had really a hundred years of history, but still very much felt like it was in early innings of telling its story was such a huge opportunity.

I'm like, this is gonna be fun. So fun. Food is fun. Food is really fun. I'm not super in love with it after all these years, despite the leaner margins. Yeah. So food is fun. And I just saw a great opportunity to partner with a really great founder and scale and bring a brand to its next phase of its journey.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah, and it's fascinating. A company like that, it's seen so many transformations of retail. But when you joined, so it sounded like the goal was to professionalize the brand, but did you have much of a specific mandate? Did Jeff give you ideas of like how he wanted you to take that or what was your mandate?

Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah,

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: it was wild. My mandate was a number. That's it. Triple it. Figure out a way to

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: triple it. Triple the business. Okay. Easy. The

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: job is to triple it. And I think, listen, most leaders, when you go into a company, of course you have a number. Yeah. You're, whether you're family owned, private equity owned, venture backed, there's always a goal that you're trying to accomplish.

But it very much so was a blank canvas of here's what we've done and here's how we've gotten to this place. What does it take to get to that next phase? Yeah, and so that's also a very fun and cool opportunity. I. I'm like a secret closet entrepreneur at heart. I had the privilege of co-founding and building a sister brand while I was at a company called Fresh Erect.

So pure play eCommerce business, predominantly in the Northeast. Though not here. So for my Boston folks, I'm sad that we're not yet. But so I had a privilege of co-founding and building a new business there. So I have this founder bug and appreciation. Yeah, so the idea of entering a brand and having so much leeway.

Of envisioning what the future of it would look like was a very cool opportunity. It could be daunting if that's a scary thing, but most people in positions like this find it exciting.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah, absolutely. Okay, mandate was to triple the business, triple. What was your process of figuring out what levers should we be pulling to get there?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah, so any new leader in a company, and I think many people you've probably heard this. And you've probably done it yourself. You just have to learn and listen. You have to assess what is the market opportunity, how do the customers feel about the business? What do they like? Where are the opportunities?

How do the employees feel? What do they know? And really understand like what you're working with. And so for me it was really. Figure out the vision of what we think the future of this company looks like. Where's our right to win? Where is our right to play? Where do we have natural extension and adjacencies?

Yeah. And then really build that, create that kind of mission, vision, values. Where are we going? Repeat it a thousand times internally, externally. Make sure it's very clear. And then what was interesting, once we had that picture of where we wanted to go, I took an approach that was really. Simplify strength and scale.

Okay, so as I think about my multi-year plan, it was like we need to simplify, strengthen, and scale. The business had been wildly successful with a very long tail product catalog.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Okay? So

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: building an e-commerce business with long tail, that's a great way to play, especially in. What I'm gonna call the old world, sorry, of Google search.

Yeah. Because you could search for it online, you're gonna get directed. You win that game, you get the customer. So we had a very long tail catalog, but in the modern age of how the consumer shops, and you think about Amazon as a search engine and how people leverage Google or even Walmart marketplace being the long tail player.

Is a much more competitive environment with gorillas out there. So to really, to compete and continue to win at that game didn't feel like the right strategy. Yeah.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: So how many, are you still in the process of simplifying? Like how many products or skews do you think you've cut so far?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah, so we've actually cut like 25% of the catalog in the last year.

Okay. Wow. Yeah. And it's so interesting 'cause when I say simplify, so for us it was. Simplify the clarity of the vision, simplify the value prop, make it very clear to the external customer who we are and what we stand for and what makes us better and different. Which meant simplifying the catalog, simplifying the messaging, so simplifying how we work, and then it was really for strengthen.

Make sure our tech stack is modernized, make sure our operations are ready to take the scale and lean into automation and other capabilities. And strengthen the leadership team. Really overhauling the talent in the organization. I'm very much so a people first leader. And I believe in hiring people that are better and stronger and smarter than me in every area.

So building that team so that you can facilitate scale. Yeah, so we've done a lot to simplify the business, which was scary. At first people, the merchants were like, eh,

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: yeah. Nobody wants their percent catalog taken away so much revenue. Yeah. And going back to that, you also talked about simplifying the messaging.

Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah. So how did you do that? What's your message today about what makes nuts.com different?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah, so it's so interesting because I even, I use this example all the time. They say, I think you have to repeat things seven times for it to even be heard.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: I feel like even more than seven times, honestly, think way more than

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: that.

And I count it now at our all hands. If I say something month to month for our teams, I'm like, this is the eighth. Yeah. But so for us, really from a messaging standpoint, the brand nuts.com, when I came in and I had joined as president, so I've been with the company actually about four years.

So I joined at first as president and then took over as CE O2 years ago. It was what I would classify as an, if brand. Yeah, which is there was pride behind that where our customers get us and they love us, and I'm like, cool. But it was too hard for our customers to figure out.

So like the customers that figured it out were obsessed. Our NPS is through the roof. They love this brand. You would, I would meet people on the street or in other settings, and if they were like, oh, I love nuts.com, it's so great, and here's all the reasons why, or they just didn't know it. Yeah. So the opportunity for us was to really lean into.

What makes us different? What makes us better? And so we are doing kind of simple messaging hierarchy, where it really started with our nuts are bigger and better. Easy to remember. Our nuts are bigger and better. Because when you think about e-commerce, particularly for food, one of the hurdles is how do customers trust it?

How do they understand what's different? When you think about everything as a consumer, we're all consumers. We all buy food. Or most of us, even if you're not the primary grocery shopper in your home, you buy food. And it's like, why do you choose that brand? Why do you choose that product? And for us, truly, we have a hundred years of history and deep vendor relationships.

We, our extended family members go on vacation with the people that own kind of the Elman company or where we're sourcing the organic dried mango from. So the sourcing history and deep roots is actually a major competitive advantage of ours, in addition to the fact that we are doing the manufacturing vertically ourselves in our manufacturing facility.

So for us, it was just like, start with the simplicity. Our nuts are bigger and they're better because. That's hard to tell online.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah. Switching gears a bit, one thing I wanna talk about, so you recently launched a line in retail. Yeah. And interestingly, it is not under the nuts.com name. It's not, it's called Pop and Soul.

Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: So tell me how that came to be. Why did you decide to launch this new brand under this new name?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah, so Pop and Soul is very special for us. That's our new little baby brand that we just launched at the end, really in Q2. Yeah, I like the term baby brands. It is our VP brand. And so for us, pop and Soul gives us the opportunity one, and it is what is retail on shelf?

So we're in Target, we're in Fresh Market, ShopRite entering Walmart soon. But so Pop and Soul gives us the opportunity to really have a line of products. Pop for us stands for bold innovative flavors. So it gives us the space to be modern. The colors are very bright, it's a much edgier brand, and soul actually pays heritage to our history.

So Poppy Soul was actually the original founder of the family. So for us it was a play on words where we're like the pop, the edge, the freshness, the bold, but then soul is really. Paying honor to the heritage of our Yeah. Our family, which is Poppy Soul, the first generation founder of what was Newark, not Newark Nut Company, and is now nuts.com.

So for us it was a natural extension of innovation, be edgier, bring the pop of flavor, but pay honor

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah. For our history. So what have you learned so far about launching in, you've dabbled in retail before, but like launching in a bigger scale at retail?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah, it's. It's launching a whole new brand.

And I think what's interesting for us is because we are such a sizable player in the space and a dominant player in our categories, online retailers are very happy to let us in. They're like, great, bring that customer, bring that demographic, send them into our stores. But the reality is Pop and Soul is a new brand.

Yeah. It's a new brand launch playbook. And so I think the it for, I think one of the hardest things is. Managing the expectations of, because it's not the same brand. There's not that immediate natural extension. Customers are looking on the shelf and while the product stands out and it's bold and it's still about trial, right?

It's still convincing the customer to try a new brand when there's other players on the shelf that have been there a long time. So for us, I think. I was nervous about that because I knew the brands wanted us for that reason, but I was like, all right the expectations are gonna be very high.

Yeah. So how do we make sure we keep pace? Because a new brand launch takes time to build for anybody in the room that has either been a part of something at the early stage or launch a brand, it just takes time. It takes money, it takes grit and rigor, and ultimately you have to get trial. We know our products are phenomenal, but we have to get the customer to try 'em.

What are you

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: investing in right now to get the customer to try it and to build brand awareness?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah, so we've done kind of the traditional playbook, whether it's, the promotional on shelf especially because our first launch partner, our big launch partner was Target. So when we launched with Target, we're like, they have.

They have customers in store, it's about standing out. So it's a lot of that trade spend, promotional, get people to try it. And then we're amplifying it more with influencers and PR and making sure we're rounding it out to create the brand awareness and cross-selling to our existing customer base and building the brand through our existing channels.

Because we spend already a lot of money. We have a strong playbook for how we market the core business. And so now we're just working on how do we. Cross pollinate those together. Yeah. But I actually think there's an opportunity to be even more kind of grassroots with things like this, especially 'cause you're pushing trials, so you gotta get gritty and get out there and be like, how do you have those small pack sizes and make sure everyone's just getting a chance to taste it.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: I should have brought them for you today. Yeah. But I think too, launching a new brand it's an excuse maybe to try things you wouldn't normally Yeah, because it's. We have this new brand, we have to be scrappy and gritty. So I think that's a really interesting challenge. So like how are you thinking about balancing the two brands?

Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Are there plans to launch another brand? Like how, what's your hope for where both nuts.com and Pop and Soul grow in the next few years?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Yeah. For us, pop and Soul is an opportunity, as I said, to be bolder, be edgier, target a different demographic, really a younger consumer. And so for us, I think. As we bring, we're leveraging pop and soul to really see what wins, how far we can extend it, and bring back some of those learnings to modernize the core brand, really.

So for us, like we do plan on them coming together and we're starting to bring pop and soul like, 'cause at first we launched it purely. In physical retail, and now we're starting to bring it more into the e-commerce experience. So we will bring the brands together much more and we'll probably do some fun things.

We call it pop's market which again, paying honor to our heritage, the poppy soul, but. Creating space for the brands to come together, but pop and soul needs to stand for something and live on its own because it is a cleaner labor label. It is a better for you. Like we have guidelines behind what that brand means.

So the core doesn't have the same guidelines for that yet. So we have to protect what it is, but bring them closer together and help the customer understand why they're distinct.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: So one thing I wanna talk about, nuts.com, it's a name that, like you said earlier, is built for. A different era of Google search.

Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: And this is also something I'm thinking a lot about. I met someone from lambs.com while I was here, furniture.com. Love it. Okay one of the big hot topics now is a lot of people are using generative AI engines to find information instead of Google search. So for a company like nuts.com that was built for Google search, how big of a concern is that for you? How much does it keep you up at night?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: To me it of course keeps me up at night and it's interesting. I went to another conference with like CEOs a few months back and the entire, I feel bad, I won't use the name, but like the poor people that put together this conference because all the CEOs wanted to talk about was AI and tariffs.

Yeah. It didn't matter what the agenda was, everybody just wanted to talk about AI and tariffs. And so for me. Of course it keeps me up at night, but I choose to instead look at everything as like an opportunity of how do we get ahead of it. And so when I think about the evolution, it's think about yourselves again.

We're all consumers. We're just good humans trying to do a thing, right? So I used to say all the time, if I were to go back five years, 10 years, talk to my husband, talk to my friends, just Google it. Just Google it. I apologize for Google or anyone who's in the room. I don't say that as much anymore. Yeah.

And certainly my children. My son's nine. My daughter's five. They don't say that. They're like open chat GPT. Yeah, that's wild. And so the way, when you think about the future of what websites will be like and how personalized data and how people search, like it's all just getting disrupted and it's happening very fast.

So for us, you have to be where the customers are, whether that's. In kind of the open AI kind of search engine and like how they're working or in physical retail, like you have to be where the consumers are and move with the times. And so for us, like we are actually completely evolving our tech stack, we're moving to Shopify.

It was a big scary decision for a long time, e-commerce brand that had a lot of customization and everything else, right? But the reality is that Shopify's investing billions of dollars to stay ahead of these things. I can't personally keep up with that. My budget is not gonna, I'm not gonna be able to run with those stallions.

Yeah. So like you need to actually move your technology and partner with players that can help you stay ahead because it's just happening and changing very fast. So ai, whether it's how you're leveraging it for a tax tech stack, your product recommendations, and then also your team efficiency, I'm still amazed.

And actually we had this debate in our leadership team meeting earlier this week that. One of my executives said it feels like we're cheating. It feels like I'm cheating if I use this. I'm like, who is afraid of a cheat code? Let's go faster. Let's be competitive. Let's do what we need to do to get a great product in a good way, right?

Leverage it for good, not cutting corners on quality or things like that. But if you can leverage. AI to help you do more value added work for your consumers and help your teams do more fulfilling work because they're not in the grind of manual grunt work. Rock on let's do that. It's just every, it lifts all boats together.

Yeah. I'm I actually have it as a part of many people's goals, not just not just our tech team or our products team on how can they leverage ai. What is something they can bring to their function, something they can test just because if it's in their goals, I think, I'm sure you guys have heard this many times at this conference already, but if you measure it, people will focus on it.

So if you put it in people's goals, they will be thinking about it always. So I just think we have to be on top of it, be humble, be learning, be talking to, there's so many startups I'm sure a lot here for this conference as well. So you have to be willing to roll with it 'cause it's changing fast.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: And then my last question are you at the stage yet where you are, there's this talk of GEO now versus SEO and optimizing for GEO. Are you at the stage yet where you're starting to optimize like the content on your website for that? Do you feel like you have enough information to do that?

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: I would love to be further than we are.

Yeah. And I'm probably not the first or the only CEO in that bucket. So I think we're evolving, but we're not, we need to move faster.

Moderator: Anna Hensel, Executive Editor, Modern Retail: Yeah. I challenge for everyone. Pj, thank you so much. This has been great. Thank you. Thank you for having us.

PJ Oleksak, CEO, Nuts.com: Thank you.