The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 15 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Caldbeck: Future CPG brands won't reach multi-billion-dollar scale
“There will be more of them, but they will get to a smaller level. So what I mean is it lasts 10 or 15 years, the brands that won, Chobani, et cetera, you can build multi-billion dollar businesses. I'm skeptical if that's true in CPG going forward.”
Caldbeck: Quantitative VC will emerge in CPG, but is impossible in tech
“In CPG specifically, there will be quantitative VC firms... We think that that is possible in some industries in the private markets. We don't think it's possible in tech.”
Caldbeck: DTC customer acquisition costs often jump tenfold within two years
“We see a lot of DTC companies raise money, you know, with a CAC, let's call it 10 dollars, 30 dollars, and then over the course of the subsequent two years, it raises literally sometimes by an order of magnitude, and that is just killing their profitability.”
Caldbeck: Direct-to-consumer is best used as a product iteration channel
“So when we say it doesn't work, I think it is an incredible channel for iterating on a product. I think it drives innovation. I can find my consumer base and I can test a new product. Next month I can test a different product. That's very different than the of…”
Caldbeck: Physical grocery stores will endure for at least 20 years
“I think grocery stores are here for the very, very long term. Very long term meaning next 20 years at least.”
Caldbeck: Traditional retail data providers cover under 5% of CPG brands
“You've got a couple retail level sales providers that on average track 20, 30,000 Products or companies rather each. There's about a million and a half out there. A million and a half, and they cover less than five percent of them.”
Caldbeck: Web data covers 30-50x more CPG brands than legacy sources
“Covers 30 to 50 times as many companies as your existing data source does.”
Caldbeck: Failed physical retail expansion can kill early CPG companies
“So if you think of like the CPG products, they're selling through a third party, the retailer. Now they have to make a much bigger bet. They can't usually just start in five safe ways. So they have to start in 200. Now when you start in 200, flipping that and …”
Caldbeck: Grocery operates on thin 2-3% net margins, limiting tech disruption
“Grocery today, two, three percent net margin business. That's hard to strip out a lot of costs from that.”
Caldbeck: Consumer receipt apps fail to capture long-tail CPG data
“The challenge has been many of them tap out at five, ten million consumers, at least here in the U.S. The problem with that level is that then that's such a small portion of the pot of the overall population that you're not capturing the long tail of companies…”
Caldbeck: Offline retailers are eliminating or lowering product slotting fees
“Many of the offline retailers are eliminating or lowering slotting fees.”
Caldbeck: Large CPG companies spend only 2% of sales on R&D
“So today, large CPG spends about two percent of sales on R&D.”
Caldbeck: Consumer sector winners grow in highly similar, predictable ways
“When you look at the winners and consumer, the previous winners looked really similar. That might have been a different, might have been a different magnitude, but they grew in really, really similar ways.”
Caldbeck: Credit card data shows merchant total sales, not SKU-level purchases
“The problem with credit card data is it can tell you what the retailer is selling, not what was bought at the retailer. So I can see what Nordstrom.com sales were last month. I can't see what pairs of jeans were bought there.”