Full Transcript - Victoria Vaynberg - Wild Business Growth Podcast #330

Full Transcript – Len Kretchman – Wild Business Growth Podcast #322

This is the full transcript for Episode #322 of the Wild Business Growth podcast featuring Len Kretchman – Uncrustables Creator, Bread Kneads Co-Founder. You can listen to the interview and learn more here. Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Len Kretchman 0:00
You’re not calling to sell me jelly. Are you Vince? He goes, No, I’m not. I’m calling to buy your company.

Max Branstetter 0:22
Hey, Jamie! in between the last Wild Business Growth podcast and now we had our daughter, Jamie, and baby girl and mom are doing great. We are over the moon. Our world is rocked in the best ways, and we’ve never been so happy and fulfilled. Jamie got a little upset that I took a couple months off from the podcast and said, Dad, you better get back to wild business growth. I was impressed she was using so many words already. And so here we are. Welcome back to wild business growth. This is your place to hear wild entrepreneurs turning wild ideas into wild growth, and I’m your host. Max Branstetter, founder and Podcast Producer at MaxPodcasting, you can email me at to save time with your high-quality podcast. Today’s guest for Episode 322 is Len Kretchman, the creator of Uncrustables. This is just awesome and delicious. We talk everything from the uncrustable story to the big role that school cafe or school Dining Services played in the launch and success of uncrustables. We talk his stud football career at North Dakota State, and how the deal went down with Smucker’s that really took everything to the next level. It is Len, enjoy the shoe.

Oh, alrighty, we are here with Len Kretschmann, and today we’re going to talk a little uncrustables. Going to talk a little bread needs. That needs is a pun, a bread pun. So I’m already a huge fan of Len to begin with, but Len, thank you so much for joining today. Super excited to talk to you. How you doing today. I’m doing great. Thanks for having me. Max. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, of course, again, again. You. You won my heart from the beginning with with pun, but when we were exchanging emails before, you know, even hopping on here, you mentioned that you sell frozen bread for a living, which I imagine is maybe not something you thought when you were like, three or four years old, how did you end up getting to present day, where that is what you do for a living?

Len Kretchman 2:46
I was lucky enough out of college, I went to work briefly for one of Marvin schwann’s companies, the the old trucks that deliver ice cream and pizzas and all that sort of thing, and and he had a number of companies that lot of people probably weren’t aware of, but one of them was a pizza company in out of Erie, Pennsylvania. And I was hired as a marketing manager for that company a long time ago, and that gave me my first experience in the school food service industry. And I just got bit by the bug, and I’ve been in the food business ever since, and we specifically, even with the start of the uncrustable that was primarily school business, and just really enjoy the industry. The people are really good. They care deeply about our kids and their nutrition. And I just kind of fell in love with the industry and been in that segment for 35 years.

Max Branstetter 3:49
What is it that first struck you about the school service industry that’s a bit different than other industries?

Len Kretchman 3:56
A couple things. One is the biggest restaurant in town.

Max Branstetter 4:01
I never thought about it that way. It

Len Kretchman 4:03
is truly the biggest restaurant. The people in the kitchen all the way up to the professionals that are that administer the programs, serve somewhere between 750 and 1000 kids in 22 minutes. It’s really quite amazing. Logistically, it’s amazing. And we’ve all been there, we just never thought of it as kids. So when you get a product that’s well received in the schools, you don’t sell a case or two, you sell pallets and semi loads. So it’s it’s a volume business, not very high margin because it’s school bid business, but the volume is significant. Now, the personal side of it is, there’s nothing like going into an elementary lunch room and having a 10 year old kid wrap their arms around you and say, you know, hi. How are you? And. And they don’t have filters. So if you’ve got a product that doesn’t meet their expectations, they’re very clear about that. There’s a level of honesty there that’s really quite refreshing.

Max Branstetter 5:17
Well, speaking of refreshing, let’s get to something uncrusting, if you will. You’re you’re never going to know what I’m going to ask. No, but uncrustable is obviously, seemingly something that more and more over time, gets more and more popular. And, you know, there’s all the I remember, like the product went viral again in recent years, when there was all these stories about how many uncrustables NFL players consume? We have a bit of a teaser, because we’ll get to some of your football career in a little bit. But you were in the early, early days of, you know, what is now known as encrustables. Can you share where this idea first came about? It

Len Kretchman 5:55
was actually my wife Emily’s idea. Here’s the thing about it Max. It’s kind of like we’re not reinventing the wheel or creating the atom bomb or anything of that, we’re making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but nobody had figured out how to commercialize it, and mothers have been cutting the crust off of their kids sandwiches for 100 years. And my wife’s idea was, you know, you should figure out how to commercialize this. And it’s not that’s kind of the challenge when it comes to manufacturing. It’s like, yeah, you can slap together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in your kitchen. Try to do 1000 of them. That’s what we figured out. Is novel because the crust was gone and the kids don’t eat the crust. Anyhow, it solved a problem. Served a purpose, solved a problem with our customer base, because the school managers and the cooks, you can imagine the mess that peanut butter and jelly makes in a school kitchen, and when they discovered that they could buy a finished product that was all enclosed didn’t make a mess, individually wrapped handheld. It truly solved a problem for the operators. And of course, then the kids loved it, and once it got into the school systems, there was no going back the people who run the financial side of the business and make me new decisions and that sort of thing. Once they bought the uncrustable, if they went back to their staff and said, You’re going to go back to making your own, they’d revolt. So once we got in, we were in. So that was kind of the fun part of

Max Branstetter 7:32
it. Yeah, there’s, there’s no better proof that a it’s a great product than when your audience is going crazy for you. And in this case, the customer base was the kid? Well, you know the final customer, I guess we’ll call it, consumers of it. We’re the kids, and you’re right. Kids are are passionate when something they like is out there. What were some of the early insights that made this possible from a production standpoint, besides cutting off the cross,

Len Kretchman 7:58
here’s always been our philosophy, and that is, there’s two kinds of companies, there’s manufacturer driven and there’s sales driven. And we’ve always been a sales driven company, and because of that, it forces manufacturing to solve problems. When I first started this, we lived in Minnesota, and I took prototypes to Minneapolis public and St Paul Public Schools in the same day, and they both ordered, well, we didn’t even know how to make it yet. Well, guess what? That forces the company into production, and that’s how it kind of started. And then I mean rudimentary, the way that it started. And we had a conveyor belt and one pump that did jelly and we did peanut butter. We had to have the right amount on there, and we figured that out, but it was all done by hand until the business evolved, and we began to automate the process. That’s kind of how it started. It’s you take an order and then you go back to the operation side and say, Oh, guess what? I just took a 500 case order, and they look at you like, what? That’s when the fun begins. So that was kind of the beginning of the uncrustable and how it happened. And thankfully, we were able to figure out how to make it more efficiently than a bowl of peanut butter and a wooden spoon.

Max Branstetter 9:30
There’s only so far that can go. But what a brilliant product. And then who? I mean, like so many of us, like, I grew up on PB and J I was thinking that I haven’t, I haven’t had it in way too long, so this is going to make me like, have one right after this, seemingly, but it’s like, such a brilliant thing. And then, like you said about reinventing the wheel, like, there’s so many products or foods even that are just like mainstays in society. And like, for some reason, like, nobody’s thought to to reinvent that. Like, what do you. Think was it for your your wife, that like led to this moment of the AHA, Eureka moment that so many entrepreneurs strive

Len Kretchman 10:08
for. She’s really good at identifying opportunities that after they become reality, seem obvious, but when, when she thought of this, it was kind of like she and I sat down, and she goes, I think this is what you should do. And it was that you kind of look at each other and go, the first question is, why hasn’t someone done this? And the answer to that is, who cares? We’re going to that’s the incentive behind it’s like, nobody’s figured this out. It’s like, no, but it’s not impossible to figure out. We will figure this out. And that’s kind of how, that’s how that was the beginning, and that’s how it evolved. And everything that we’ve ever done is started in our kitchen and prototypes and testing things and and that sort of thing. It’s we don’t have a big R D lab, and we just go, what is it that people want? And if you ask your customers, they will tell you, with this one, nobody was really asking for it until they saw it, and then they were kind of doing the smack yourself on the forehead. Yeah, that’s a good idea, and let’s buy this. Well, that’s kind of how it started.

Max Branstetter 11:19
What was the first moment that you’re like, I think we’re onto something here.

Len Kretchman 11:23
When you go for two for two, if the sales calls with school districts that serve 30,000 kids a day, you can on the drive home, you go, you know, we might have a tiger by the tail here that drive home from Minneapolis. We lived in Northwest Minnesota, about 180 miles from the Twin Cities, and you come home, and you go, they both ordered, and there was no hesitation. It’s like, that doesn’t happen. You know, it takes you 10 tries to get one. From a sales standpoint, that was probably the easiest part of the job, that the challenging was figuring out how to make it, yeah,

Max Branstetter 12:01
oh, you just cut the crust off. I’m just kidding. Well,

Len Kretchman 12:05
it’s, actually, it’s, it’s a little more, God, hate to use the word technical Max.

Max Branstetter 12:10
It’s, yeah, you could use it technically. I’ll give it to you. The bread.

Len Kretchman 12:15
The bread itself, in North Dakota, they, they grow what’s called spring wheat, and it’s high. It’s higher in protein than a lot of wheats that are growing, and it makes it stronger, because when you cut the crust off, you cut it and you crimp it, you can’t have the bread rip. So the bread that we were purchasing normally was perfectly suited for this application. The The other thing that we did is we discovered, almost immediately is that when you make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, put peanut butter and jelly and then the top on it, right? Well, you can’t do that with the uncrustable You gotta encase the jelly and the peanut butter, or the jelly, will leak and weep through the bread. And it’s gross. It looks terrible. So it wasn’t very far into it. We said, Okay, we gotta have 16 grams of peanut butter on the bottom, we got to have the 12 grams of jelly, or whatever it turned out to be, and another 16 grams on top, so the jelly is encased, and then you put the top on and you cut it and crimp it. There’s a little bit of method to the madness, not a lot. When you cut it, you couldn’t catch any of the crust, because if you did, the sandwich would pop open. So you had those are two things, the accuracy of cutting and crimping it, along with the jelly, had to be encased, and you had to have a good, strong bread that wouldn’t tear apart when you did that process. None of that took very long to figure out. You make it, you freeze it. The grape jelly is leaking through. It looks terrible. It’s like, no kid’s gonna eat this. It’s like, so we got to put it inside the peanut butter. So that’s what we did.

Max Branstetter 13:51
I’ve never been made more hungry by technical terms. That description got my mouth watering. I don’t know why. So that actually ties to the patent, which I struggle saying the word patent, patent, patent, I don’t know. So it’s like paint and Manning, but yeah, at what point along the way did you guys decide, like, we should really get a pain a patent for this thing? We

Len Kretchman 14:20
weren’t very far into it. Okay, I’m not an attorney, so take this with a grain of salt. Yeah, yeah, of course, I’m going to be close Max. But after you introduce a product to the marketplace, at least back in the day, you had one year to apply for a patent. You didn’t have to have it, but you had to apply. You had to apply. Otherwise, it’s public domain. So before that year expired, it probably wasn’t six months we said, well, we got to do something to get a little protection here. And so that’s what we did. We applied for patent. And you know, later. On people said, oh, who can patent a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? This is absurd. And we looked at it and kind of laughed and just said, you know, if you can’t engineer your way around what our patent was, then you’re lazy. You’re lazy. You’re not very smart. But what it does do, is it? It makes big companies pause, because they have big legal departments, and they tell their people they’re risk averse, right? They don’t want to litigate. So they go, no, let’s not do that. And that’s why companies like Smuckers buy little guys like me, because it’s just easier. So that that was kind of our thought process with the patent. It’s a deterrent, and it’s not that expensive, or at least it wasn’t. I haven’t gotten a patent quite I’ve had a few, but I haven’t gotten one in probably 10 years, so I don’t know what they cost nowadays. So that was, that was why we did it was like, yeah, it’s patented, well, and

Max Branstetter 16:03
that reveals my next trick. My next question is, Smuckers. Which huge, huge name I mentioned. I’m from Ohio, so even, even huger name, how did Smuckers first, I guess, figurative, maybe literally, but figuratively, come knocking at your doorstep, inquiring about your

Len Kretchman 16:23
company. That’s kind of a neat story. The person in the plant that answered the phone did a lot of small companies. You don’t just answer the phone. You’re doing all kinds of stuff, right? But this particular person was the first one to get to the phone and told me that this person from Smuckers called, well, I thought they were trying to sell me jelly,

Max Branstetter 16:44
right? Yeah, I would do.

Len Kretchman 16:45
They discovered the product in the marketplace. It was one of the executive vice president on the commercial side of their business. His name was Vince Byrd. And let me tell you, the Smucker people, up and down, are just really, really good people, that part of it made it even better, their guy in charge of the commercial site, which is retail. Okay, I say commercial, that means the retail grocery stores. He was calling and I thought they were trying to sell me jelly. So I said, you know, just ask them to send samples in, and we’ll for sure look at it, because we weren’t buying smokers jelly. We were buying a grape jelly out of somewhere else. After the third call, I pulled over. I was on the road, and I pulled over and I called, and I got a hold of this gentleman, Vince Byrd, and I said, Vince, what do you do for smokers? And he says, I’m the Executive Vice President commercial sales. And I laughed. And I go, you’re not calling to sell me jelly, are you Vince? He goes, No, I’m not. I’m calling to buy your company. And that’s kind of how it started. Oh, wow. Those conversations and meetings started and and this was a really small deal for a company the size of the Smuckers, but I dealt directly with Richard and mostly Tim Smucker, who were co CEOs at that time, I was

Max Branstetter 18:04
going to say that that name sounds like it might be important for the family behind us,

Len Kretchman 18:08
yeah, and they were just, they were great about it, so we struck a deal, and that was that,

Max Branstetter 18:16
did it ever cross your mind before they called about maybe we could sell this one day?

Len Kretchman 18:21
No, I mean it, it’s kind of a far reaching idea. But the reality is, you are so headlong into it, and you are so busy and you’re trying to manage the plant side of things, the manufacturing side and the sales side of it, there’s not enough flowers in the day to say, I wonder if someone would want to buy this. And that’s why it works so well, is because they found us, and it was their idea to buy the company, and otherwise, didn’t really think about it. It’s

Max Branstetter 18:53
a perfect fit. And thankfully, they called So, how does that work? I mean, a lot of people are kind of split a lot of entrepreneurs about selling their business like they think it would be a wonderful thing to do one day, and it might be great for, you know, their family and their life and kind of the personal side of things. But also it’s, you know, it’s like you’re, you’re passing on something that you’re so tied to. How did that transition go for you over the years?

Len Kretchman 19:19
I don’t marry my ideas. I’m a capitalist. I I’m in business to make money. And if something that we’ve created is someone sees value in it, it’s for sale. Everything, everything’s for sale. In my opinion. You know, a lot of people say this is my baby, and it’s like, no, it’s not max you’re gonna have a baby. You’re not gonna compare it to your business,

Max Branstetter 19:48
right? If, if so, Dana’s gonna kick me out,

Len Kretchman 19:52
right? So I look at it, my viewpoint was, I was, oh gosh, where I was probably 28 when I started in 32 When we sold it. And it’s not the end, it’s the beginning, because at that age, I mean, at least in my situation, I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have any means. But you sell a business like, Okay, now you have the means to go do something new. Now, in hindsight, you say, well, they turned it into a billion dollar brand. They just celebrated that in this last year, in 2024 they said the uncrestable is a billion dollar brand. And people said, Geez, Leng on. But it’s like, I couldn’t have turned it into a billion dollars. No chance, but could have I turned it into more than when I sold it. Sure do I have regrets, not for a second, because it gave me resources to continue my professional career. So people that go, I’m gonna I’m married to my business and this and that. And it’s I’m not that way I look at it. And I go, You know what? Young crestible is not the last great idea, you know? And if you put that limitation on yourself. It’s like, well, that’s too bad if you only had one good idea in your whole life, then yeah, you shouldn’t sell it. But you look at it and go, yeah, now I’ve got a few bucks in my pocket, and it allows me to go and do other things. That’s how I look at it.

Max Branstetter 21:17
Oh, that’s I got chills from that philosophy. Thanks for sharing that. Yeah, I’m totally with you now that there’s some hindsight behind you know, the the creation of it and then the the selling of it. What would you say was, like, if you were to say was, like, the top key for like, why uncrustables became a hit and a success? What do you think that is two things? Oh, you broke the one key rule. No, I’m just messing with you. It’s okay. What’s the one key rule? No, I’m just kidding, because I asked you about one thing, not two. But I’m kidding little too The more the merrier. I

Len Kretchman 21:52
think great products have to solve a solution. They have to be a solution to a problem. Okay, there’s got to be you got to identify a problem, and then you got to solve it. And then the marketplace is unforgiving, and if you can win over the marketplace the minds of people that you create a product that’s so good that people just have to have it, those are pretty key. You solve a problem, and you create a product that people want and need, and those, to me, are the two key components of any new product launch. You can’t push stuff uphill. You might think you have a good idea, but if the marketplace rejects it, you should bail and Max I kid with my kids. I said, Look, people that think, yeah, every time you come up with something, you hit a home run. It’s like, that’s not it at all. But if you hit three out of 10, you’re going to Cooperstown. That’s how I look at it. So if I have 10 ideas, and three of them are good, you’re doing pretty darn well.

Max Branstetter 23:00
Well, you were doing pretty darn well in this interview up until this point, but now we’re going to switch it up and wrap things up with some rapid fire Q and A. So no promises. So you ready for it? Well,

Len Kretchman 23:11
I don’t know when you hear my answers say I was ready or not,

Max Branstetter 23:17
the final listeners to this episode will be able to tell, because it might. I might have just edited out five minutes, so we’ll see. But all right, let’s, let’s get wild, and gonna sprinkle some of your football career into this one. So so stay tuned for that. So speaking of in doing research, I I saw that you were not only a college football wide receiver, but you were a Hall of Fame North Dakota State Hall of Fame, college receiver. You got multiple championships wide receiver. As a former wide receiver myself, I guess once a receiver, always receiver, so I’ll say current as well. But definitely, you know, inspiring to see all that you achieved. And playing for a big program like that, which is now seemingly producing more and more NFL players is awesome. What’s your favorite memory from playing wide receiver in college, there at nd state, or NDSU, however you prefer?

Len Kretchman 24:10
I couldn’t name one, but here’s one that that stuck with me when we were freshmen and we come in. It’s interesting, when you play college football, you come in and everyone that came to NDSU or any college organization, they were, for the most part, the star of their high school team. And you come in there at the age of 18, and you’re sitting in a room with 22 and 23 year old man, and you’re just a boy, and it’s just, you look at that, and you go, how am I ever going to compete with these guys? But if you stick with it, and it evolves, and you learn the system, and you get better at it, all of a sudden, you’re the man in the room. But it’s daunting to begin with. Yes, but one of my great memories is my first head coach, Don Morton, had all the freshmen, incoming freshmen, in a room, and he says, look around this room. He says, These are the guys that are going to be in your wedding. And there couldn’t have been a more true statement. And you formed such a bond with those guys. And I think part of it is the nature of football. It’s a violent sport, and when you’re in it, you’re in it, and sometimes it leaks out after practice and and there’s just a mindset, and when you go out of the locker room onto the field on Saturday, you’re a unit. You know, you’ve you might fight and go back and forth with the defense during the week and and spring football, of course, but when you walk out of that locker room on Saturday onto that field, you are 48 guys all trying to do the same thing. And that is special,

Max Branstetter 26:03
well, and I gotta tell you, that was like Al Pacino in any given Sunday. That was amazing, taking me back. Yeah, I’m still so tight with many of the guys I played with. And, yeah, it’s, it’s a brotherhood. It’s a, you know, you feel like family. It’s after you lose in the state playoffs, in my situation, you feel like you can only talk to guys on the team for a little bit, like it’s, it’s, it’s a real deal. It’s

Len Kretchman 26:30
such a tiny percentage of people that played the sport. Yeah, there’s a kinship, you know, and we talked about it before we started this program, and we got a kinship, because we both played that sport, and it’s the greatest sport ever invented.

Max Branstetter 26:43
I agree, and I have to turn that on you. You asked me this before, so I have to get your thoughts. What’s your all time favorite route to run as a wide receiver,

Len Kretchman 26:53
we used to run a play called The crack and go, and I was the inside receiver. I was a slot receiver. We used to run a route that if I came down to crack on the linebacker on a run play, if the free safety bit, then you turn up field and you just blow by them. And that was a favorite of mine. So it was, we were, we were by far a running team, and we didn’t throw the ball very often, but when we did, we were pretty effective. So that was, that was one of my favorites, that in the five yard out down the goal line. Oh yeah.

Max Branstetter 27:33
Oh so, so hard to cover, all right, and then who? Who’s your favorite NFL wide receiver of all time?

Len Kretchman 27:39
Boy, that’s a really good question. But since I was a Minnesota boy, we lived in the Twin Cities for two years, and I was a ninth and 10th grader in the Twin Cities, I missed one home game. I would go to the Met Stadium, the old met stadium. I lean against the same post, and guys would go by and they’re offering tickets. I got into the game for $5 every time Ahmad Rashad was just amazing. I don’t think he was ever the fastest guy on the field, but he had such exceptional body control that he could make some of the most amazing catches. And then you go Chris Carter came after that. May have been a decade or whatever, the Vikings players that I was most familiar with. And then Randy Moss, of course, you know, so, so the Vikings were the they were my team when I was growing up, and as an adult,

Max Branstetter 28:30
yeah, there’s so many good players, all right. And then last one, you’ve been in the bread business for a long time. You know, bread like the back of your head or the back of a loaf. I don’t even know where I’m going with that. What is your favorite personal type of bread to eat? If you could have one type of bread for the rest of your life? We currently

Len Kretchman 28:49
at bread needs. We do a grilled bread product in a few different varieties. And here’s my thing, after the uncrestable max being around peanut butter, I literally didn’t eat peanut butter for 20 years because I was in that plant. And you go home and you smell of peanut butter, and it’s a great smell, but try to smell it every day.

Max Branstetter 29:11
Yeah, too much of a good thing, right?

Len Kretchman 29:14
Well, since then, we’ve branched out. We make products that our customers make in the grilled cheese sandwich. And the grilled cheese is just another great America it might be number two to peanut butter and jelly, but we do a really good product that makes an exceptionally good grilled cheese. We do a great garlic bread. We’re doing a new product that’s a Cinnamon, cinnamon sugar based bread. And I’m eating potatoes. Not that I don’t like really good kind of extravagant breads, but, you know, give me a good grilled cheese sandwich and I’m happy all day long.

Max Branstetter 29:50
I am salivating once again, Len, thank you so much. This has been awesome and just super inspiring. Fun. Blast talking everything from PB and J. And uncrossables to to football with you. So I know people, if they want to learn more about your company now, they can do so at bread needs LLC, com. Again, that’s needs with the K the needing, like, is there any where else people can connect with you online? Or you want to just kind of keep that anonymous,

Len Kretchman 30:17
our main email address is orders that bread needs, and that’s K, N, E, A, D, S, my daughters will love that plug, because it’ll hope, hopefully lead to a couple sales leads for them and and more fun.

Max Branstetter 30:33
Perfect, perfect. Yeah, yeah, all for it. And then last thing, final thoughts, it could be a quote, a football quote, football, whatever you want, just kind of a few words, words of wisdom to send us home

Len Kretchman 30:44
here. It’s a good one I get from my dad, trust Jesus.

Max Branstetter 30:51
Len Lynn. Len Lynn, thank you so much for coming on wild business growth, and thank you wild listeners for tuning into another episode. Just an Editor’s Note, if you’ll call it that email address to reach Len and CO and fam is at so needs as in K, N, E, A, D, S, and that’s dot net, not.com thank you so much for tuning in to hear more episodes of the Wild Business Growth podcast. Make sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms and subscribe on YouTube for the video versions. YouTube is @MaxBranstetter, and for all things podcast production, MaxPodcasting, learn more about me. You can do so at MaxPodcasting.com There you’ll find the way to sign up for the Podcasting to the Max newsletter and all my socials and everything there. It is good to be back. Thank you so much for being with us. Until next time, Let your business Run Wild…Bring on the Bongos!!