Stop Romanticizing the Ramen Years

Call them Brand A and Brand B.

Both launched in the natural foods space.
Both built passionate followings.
Both eventually achieved transformational valuations.

The similarities end there.

Brand A was an innovation engine. They engineered products that consumers did not know they wanted until they tasted them. They deployed aggressively into product development and marketing and reached $100 million in sales in three years.

Three years.

The velocity was unparalleled.

They understood that speed to inflection creates its own momentum. Shelf space begets velocity. Velocity begets more shelf space. That begets negotiating leverage. That begets margin improvement.

They compressed what takes most brands two decades into a fraction of one.

Brand B took the opposite path.

They cleaned up conventional categories, offering familiar products with cleaner labels. A me-too but better approach. They bootstrapped for years, grinding through the doldrums while the natural channel slowly matured around them.

They took fifteen years to reach the same $100 million threshold Brand A hit in three.

When influencers eventually discovered them and started evangelizing clean labels, the brand caught a wave they had not engineered. The exit came after nearly twenty years.

Both models worked.

By 2014 both companies had achieved similar valuations.

The naysayers will tell you Brand B validates patience. They will point to Brand A’s stumble seven years in, a brand messaging misstep that broke consumer trust and forced them to rebuild value, as a cautionary tale against moving too fast.

But this reading misses the point entirely.

Brand B got lucky.

I do not say this to diminish what they built. I say it because luck is not a strategy and most founders do not have twenty years to wait for the market to discover them.

The clean label movement that lifted Brand B was not something they created. It was something that happened to them.

They were positioned correctly when the wave arrived. That positioning was intentional. The wave was not.

Had consumer preferences shifted differently, had the influencer economy not emerged when it did, had a dozen other variables broken the other way, Brand B might still be grinding toward that first hundred million or might have quietly folded years ago.

Brand A engineered their outcome.

They studied what consumers responded to, built products against those insights, capitalized the business to move fast and achieved in three years what Brand B took fifteen to reach.

Yes, they stumbled at year seven.

But here is the critical distinction. Their stumble had nothing to do with speed or capital deployment. It was a self inflicted wound on brand integrity, a promise made and broken that eroded the trust they had built.

That is a leadership failure, not a model failure.

This brings us to the trap that catches most CPG founders today.

You need capital to achieve market traction but investors want to see traction before they write a check.

Show me the margin, they say.
Come back when you are at three million in sales.
We want to see forty percent gross margin first.

Meanwhile you are stuck in the doldrums.

Premium products require premium ingredients and at early scale you have zero supplier leverage. Breaking through forty percent gross margin before you have earned negotiating power is rare.

So founders linger.

They stretch runway by not paying themselves.
They burn through savings.
They sacrifice years that could be spent on business growth just trying to survive.

The psychology is predictable.

Nobody wants to give up twenty to forty percent equity at an early valuation. It feels like selling the future for pennies.

But reframe it.

You are not losing ownership.
You are buying speed.

Speed to the inflection point where the business sustains itself. Speed past the danger zone where most brands die.

Brand A understood this. Brand B survived despite not understanding it.

Which bet would you rather make?

This is not an argument for raising capital before you have anything to show. The sequence matters.

Your first job is reaching a marketable concept as quickly as possible for the least amount of cash.

Build a defensible MVP.
Prove consumers actually want what you are offering.

For products where it fits, direct to consumer can be a clean path to early validation. DTC lets you test, iterate and build real data without the catastrophic cash burn of retail listing fees.

But DTC is a validation tool, not a religion.

Refrigerated, regulated or capital intensive categories may require different proving grounds. The point is not the channel. The point is generating evidence of pull that exists beyond your own hustle.

Fail fast. Sell imperfectly. Learn whether people want this thing before you optimize it to death.

If they do, iterate and improve. Fix what is broken quickly.

Here is the signal that changes everything.

When you see validated repeat purchase and early velocity that you did not personally manufacture, when customers return without prompting and new ones arrive through word of mouth rather than your own outreach, you have pull.

That is when capital deployment shifts from gambling to acceleration. That is when speed beats ownership preservation.

Once you have core business metrics mapped, the capital conversation changes entirely.

You have models.
You have proof.

Data is science and investors respond to science.

When you do raise, know who you are talking to.

Angels who believe in your story, your journey and your mission are the right first investors. The best angels are founders themselves, people who built and sold businesses and now want to deploy what they learned.

They will bet on you, not just your spreadsheet.

Institutional capital is a numbers game. VCs and PE run portfolio math. That is not wrong. It is just a different tool for a different stage.

Here is what separated these two trajectories.

Brand A landed on a novel need-state. They solved a problem consumers were actively seeking to solve. That pull was strong and immediate.

Capital deployed against that kind of demand generates velocity because the market is already leaning in.

Brand B offered a cleaner version of products consumers were already buying. A better option, not a new solution.

The pull on clean label is real but weaker.

Millennial moms eventually wanted cleaner options for their families, but that shift took fifteen years to mature.

Brand B was positioned correctly when it arrived. They did not create the demand. They waited for it.

This is the hierarchy every founder needs to understand.

Need-state innovation pulls harder than clean label differentiation, which pulls harder than me-too.

Capital amplifies wherever you sit on that spectrum, but it amplifies a novel need-state dramatically faster because the consumer is already searching for you.

If your product solves a problem people know they have, raise and move fast. The market will reward velocity.

If you are cleaning up a category, you can still win, but you are betting on consumer preferences shifting toward you. That is a longer game and a riskier bet.

It worked for Brand B because the planets aligned. The clean label movement matured. Influencers emerged as a distribution channel. Millennial parents became the dominant purchasing demographic at the right moment.

That path cannot be intentionally replicated.

The capital environment, retail dynamics and attention economy have all shifted. I would not advise any founder to bet on that alignment happening twice.

This is where it all connects.

Whether you are riding a novel need-state or waiting for consumer preferences to shift, the endgame is the same. All roads lead to retail.

But the goal is making retailers need your brand, not begging them for shelf space.

I call this selling money.

When you walk into a buyer meeting with velocity data, proven demand and a product that moves, you are not asking for a favor. You are offering them margin.

The same applies to investors.

When you have achieved this inflection point, raising capital is not a chore. It is a pleasure. You get to choose who you want on your team.

Brand A got there in three years. Brand B took twenty.

Raise earlier than you think.

The equity you give up buys speed to inflection, and the ramen years, however romantic, make for terrible strategy.

Mark Haas is the founder and CEO of RegulateCPG, an AI-powered compliance infrastructure platform designed to democratize regulatory expertise for food and beverage companies. With 35 years of experience navigating food safety regulation, manufacturing operations and multi-jurisdiction compliance, Mark has formulated over 200 brands representing more than $2 billion in market value. His work spans conventional, plant-based and emerging protein technologies across FDA, USDA, CFIA and EU regulatory frameworks, with deep expertise in using sophisticated amino acid analysis and PDCAAS methodology to create litigation-proof label claims for alternative protein companies.

For more insights on using regulatory compliance as competitive advantage, visit regulatecpg.com or connect with Mark on LinkedIn.

Legal Disclaimer:
This article reflects general business strategy and industry experience and is not intended as legal, financial, or investment advice. Every company’s circumstances are different. Founders should consult qualified legal, financial, and regulatory professionals before making capital, ownership, or commercialization decisions.