Building a Global Snack Brand Through Retail First With Hassan Alireza of The Daily Crave

Hassan Alireza is the Founder and CEO of The Daily Crave, a California-based snack company that crafts better‑for‑you, non‑GMO, wholesome snacks sold worldwide. He launched the business in May 2012 with Veggie Chips and Sticks, which quickly gained traction in national retail chains. Under his leadership, the brand has expanded its lineup to include award-winning quinoa chips and, more recently, Crunchy Fries To-Go, which are made from high-quality non-GMO potatoes and are both gluten-free and kosher. Hassan’s vision focuses on delivering snacks that are delicious, crunchy, flavorful, and made with clean ingredients that offer nutritional value.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [1:47] Hassan Alireza shares his early skepticism of ecommerce and preference for retail distribution
• [4:22] How the pandemic accelerated The Daily Crave’s Amazon sales and shifted focus to ecommerce
• [6:34] Why snacks are difficult to ship DTC and why relying on Amazon, Vitacost, and Thrive Market was more efficient
• [9:53] The dangers of overspending on DTC, and how avoiding outside investment kept the brand sustainable
• [10:22] Hassan explains why launching in both retail and Amazon simultaneously is the optimal strategy today
• [16:55] The Daily Crave’s relaunch on Amazon with Seller Central and new marketing strategies
• [18:45] Launching innovative products like Crunchy Fries and Utopia Protein Chips to attract and retain new customers

In this episode…

Many brands assume that direct-to-consumer sales is the only way to scale in today’s digital-first marketplace. But can leaning too heavily on DTC actually weaken your growth and profitability? Could retail partnerships and smart channel strategy be the real key to building a sustainable brand?

According to Hassan Alireza, a retail and food distribution veteran, retail has always been the most reliable engine for long-term growth. He highlights that snacks are expensive to ship directly, often eroding margins and forcing smaller brands to burn cash. By leveraging established distributors and platforms like Amazon Vendor Central, he maintains efficiency and avoids costly logistics pitfalls. The result is steady expansion without sacrificing financial health. He emphasizes that scaling should be about playing to your strengths, using ecommerce as a marketing tool, and protecting profitability through balancing channel strategies.

In this episode of Minds of Ecommerce, Raphael Paulin-Daigle interviews Hassan Alireza, Founder and CEO of The Daily Crave, about why retail still wins over DTC. They discuss the challenges of shipping snacks directly to consumers, the importance of leveraging Amazon without losing control of pricing, and how innovative product launches help attract new customers. Hassan also shares insights on relaunching with Amazon Seller Central and other fresh marketing strategies.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle: LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Hassan Alireza on LinkedIn
• The Daily Crave

Quotable Moments:

• “I was a skeptic of ecommerce, I was a skeptic of DTC, now we’re going back.”
• “Moving truckloads was music to my ears, like anytime you’re moving wheels across the country.”
• “Snacks are not, you know, the best thing to ship around the world, just because it’s air.”
• “So I didn’t want that to happen. This is my baby, and I wanted to keep it alive.”
• “Everything we do is obviously non-GMO, gluten-free, and kosher, and that protein chip is new.”

Action Steps:

1. Leverage retail partnerships early: Building a strong retail foundation creates stability and ensures broader market penetration.
2. Use ecommerce as a marketing tool: Online sales introduce your product to new customers and drive awareness for brick-and-mortar growth.
3. Play to your strengths in distribution: Focusing on what your company does best avoids financial pitfalls and ensures long-term sustainability.
4. Innovate with unique product launches: Offering new, distinctive items keeps customers engaged and attracts fresh buyers in competitive markets.
5. Control pricing and the customer experience: Managing channels like Amazon Seller Central helps protect margins and strengthen brand loyalty.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  0:06  

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading ecommerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15-minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy. So you'll get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, we talked about how to build high converting websites and run conversion optimization programs that both hit your performance goals and your brand goals. Now today, on episode number 63 get ready. We've got Hassan Alireza, who is the CEO and founder of The Daily Crave, and we'll talk about how DTC doesn't always need to be your primary channel for growth in order to make it big. I'm your host, Raphael Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is mindset ecommerce. Now this episode is brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine figure brands such as Dr Squatch, Hyperice and Amica grow through customer focused conversion optimization programs. Our programs pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix it the result you get to fight against increasing ad costs, get higher conversions, higher AOV, and, of course, more money. We've been at it for over a decade, and can help you manage your optimization program from A to Z so go to splitbase.com to request a proposal today and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right has thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show.

Hassan Alizera  1:42  

Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure to have been invited to your show

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  1:46  

Yeah, and as I was telling you earlier, I'm super excited for you to be here, because I didn't even know that when we initially reached out to you, but I've been a big fan of your chips for a long time, and I only connected the dots a little later, so it's always fun to be interviewing the founder of a brand that I buy myself. But you also have a very, very interesting viewpoint on DTC, because you're a retail veteran, you've grown the brand internationally. And initially you were a skeptic. You were skeptic of ecommerce, you were skeptic of DTC. Now we're going back a little bit right, but let's just start. I want to focus on the today and how you guys are able to thrive in retail without really, you know, over indexing on DTC, but maybe just for context in you know, 30 seconds, can you tell us a bit about your initial views on ecommerce, and you know that what happened between that time and today,

Hassan Alizera  2:50  

Thank you for having me on your wonderful podcast. It's such a pleasure to be here. So initially, being an older guy and being that I've been in the business since like 1984 in the food business, as a distributor, as a broker, and so on and so on. Moving truckloads was music to my ears. Like anytime you're moving, as they call it, wheels across the country and around the world, you were doing something right. And when I heard about ecommerce. I was not purchasing anything online. I wasn't doing anything like that through someone's website or any third party, and I just didn't know how successful it could be. So I build the business based on what I knew best, and that was, go to the retailers, go to the distributors and try to get them to take our delicious products on, because they were not only better for you, but they actually tasted good. They were in a very distinctive packaging, and it worked, and it worked very well for the past 13 years. Meanwhile, in 2019 I'm like, you know, I hear a lot of good things about ecommerce, and I would be a fool as a CEO not to at least entertain what it could be or where we can go with it. And as we set up our Amazon store, you know what hit in 2020 and it just covid like, blew up, the sales blew up, and it did it on its own. I didn't have to do anything. There were so many people at home doing absolutely nothing, watching TV, Netflix, whatever. And the best thing that goes with that is snacking. And it keeps your kids happy. It keeps your adults happy. It's just comfort food all the way around, so it worked really well. And I'm like, Oh my God, I've been missing out on this for so many years. And what a timing to have just done our store online, and we decided to actually pay a lot more attention to it. Meanwhile, our business is through brick and mortar. Is literally going through the roof. The biggest problem was getting products to the stores, distributors, trucks are overloaded. Everybody's overloaded. You know, just things change in a lot of ways for the worse, in a lot of ways for the better, where people were really paying attention to the company. So we decided to pay more attention and without having to spend a heck of a lot of money, we had a beautiful kick start because of the last few years, but now we are literally going back to figuring out, okay, what is going to be the best way to continue this momentum going forward and and actually making ecommerce a much bigger piece of our business, percentage wise. Anyway,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  5:46  

um, I, you know, I love it that this is episode number 63 and we've had many episodes where we talk about, you know, you build your online presence, you build that online moat, and use that as a way to convince retailers to take on your product. But I don't think, I think this is the first time we're actually having the opposite situation. I'm kind of curious, right? You, when you guys went on Amazon, you've made that conscious, conscious decision that you did not want to be selling directly to your customers, but that you wanted to sell not through your website, but through Amazon, and I'm guessing other retailers. Why was that decision made? And do you still stand by that decision, or do you think it should be different?

Hassan Alizera  6:34  

So that's a wonderful question, because it has been brought up throughout my history and with the daily creative brand that, why aren't you doing that? Because so many other companies that, let's say, our CO packer, or other companies that were doing and they were selling a lot of lot of products direct to consumer, and when I asked them, I go, so how much are you making? They're like, well, we're not making we're actually losing on every case that goes out, because he has to go to a three PL and the third hand and a fourth hand before he goes out. Shipping is very expensive. Snacks are not, you know, the best thing to ship around the world, just because it's a lot of air, it's not enough weight for the, you know, volume of bucks that you have. And so I kept asking the question from the people that were doing it, and they were like, so happy that, you know, they're they're selling so much, but literally, with every case that they sold, they were losing money. And the only way they were able to sustain it for a period of time was outside investment that they also felt this is the way to go. We can sell directly to the customer, and we don't have to worry about Amazon, Vita, cost, Thrive Market, or anybody else that is selling online and doing all the hard work for us, not having outside investors and having limited funds. I felt that if I did that in a major way, I would not be in business few years from now. So we decided that, okay, we're not the best at it, we're not the most efficient at it, we're not the most cost efficient at it. So why not utilize massive companies that are already doing it, that are doing it cheaply. You know, through like vendor central at Amazon, which they picked up the product, they sold the product, they did everything except advertising and marketing. So it was the cheapest way, literally the most efficient way for us not to lose money. We didn't make a lot of money on Amazon, but we certainly didn't lose any money on selling on Amazon via cost and Thrive Market. So that's the main reason we did it, is that we didn't have the bandwidth, we didn't have the financial, finances that you need in order to make it happen. And then we realized that you can almost be as successful and so many of those companies CEOs that are friends of mine, they're no longer in the business. They literally spend themselves into the ground while investment dried up, and they were like, we're done. We have nothing else to spend. So I didn't want that to happen. This is my baby, and I wanted to keep it alive and keep it thriving, although slower and more, you know, methodical, than others, where they want to just shoot up and use that as a platform for the retailers. We went to the retailers first build a base of business, and then said, Okay, now we can expand into ecommerce and do a better job every day, which we're doing now. We're actually relaunching everything on Amazon in the next 30 days or so. So we're very excited about expanding that business now that we have the bandwidth.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  9:53  

I'm also curious about two things. Let's go through them one by one, one. One. If you were to start a new brand today, do you still think going directly to the retailers first? Would that still be your first route? Would you go to the retailers and Amazon at the same time? Would you even maybe just start with, you know, Amazon and the Vita costs and all of those Thrive markets that you've mentioned.

Hassan Alizera  10:21  

What would you do? I think at the same time would be the most optimal way of doing it, because why hold back a segment of the market that has nothing to do as far as physically, it has nothing to do with the rest of the market, and it does not prohibit retailers from purchasing our product just because we are on Amazon, and it's not going to prohibit Amazon or ecommerce from US selling brick and mortar. Now, when it comes to retail prices and selling prices, there is going to be some massaging so you're not alienating any of your regular retailers versus the online retailers, but because you're selling cases rather than individual units, I think you're pretty safe, even if you're a little bit lower in cost per unit versus brick and mortar, which has a lot more expenses, you know, catering to the customers in person. So I feel I would do it at the same time. If I had more money, I certainly would be paying a lot more attention to the ecommerce today than I ever did before, just because that is a form of advertisement, advertisement marketing, and it gets our product into people's hands before it gets into their local stores. So it would be a great way to actually launch the product with it, right?

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  11:47  

I love a couple of things that you said, right? One of the things is that you've really played your strengths. You've been in the retail and distribution space for a long time, and therefore it was a lot more natural. And you recognize that you know, you just didn't know about ecommerce and going ecommerce just first or, you know, 200% all in one go would likely be a big money pit. And I think that is the thing I think a lot of brands underestimate, because, you know, we think the internet, it's so easy, it's but the reality is, ecommerce, especially in the food and beverage space, right? Like, there's a lot of complexities as well that you know, like you said, we've seen a lot of those brands disappear in the past couple of years because the model didn't make sense for them more it ended up costing them more than going retail. Do you think there's a future? What are your thoughts? Like, you know, as someone who leverages Amazon and other marketplaces quite heavily. Do you think there is a place eventually for you to sell on your own website, to ship to the customers directly?

Hassan Alizera  12:51  

I think with the shipping cost today, which continues to rise, at best, you'll break even in our category. Now, if I had an eyeliner or a makeup or something very small that can be combined with other things, and the shipping cost relatively goes down versus a big box of snacks. Although all of our snack boxes are eight packs, so they're not like 12 or 24 or anything like that, it just does not make financial sense. It will definitely bring about the brand to the consumer quicker, because now you don't have to wait for listing your product on any platform you already there with your website. So what we've done at this point is we do have a shop button on our website that is connected to Amazon, and we're kind of mitigating the cost that way. Now, at one point, if Amazon becomes pricey enough that it doesn't make sense to just put all of our eggs into their basket, or other platforms basket, then certainly we don't want to miss it out on the potential for the consumer to purchase our products other than brick and mortar.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  14:15  

What are your thoughts when you guys launched on Amazon? I'd love to know what were the expectations versus the reality in terms of who buys right? Who is the buyer at the end of the day? Is it someone who would already know about the product because they've seen it in a grocery store and they've bought it before, like myself? Or would you know? Did you find that ultimately, they're completely new customers? What was the expectation, what is the reality? And how do those two channels, at the end of the day play together today?

Hassan Alizera  14:48  

So I believe about 35% of our current customers on the E platforms are new customers, brand new, like they may have gone to. Our competitors side, or another brand side, and then came upon our products, and they go, Hey, this looks pretty good. The price is reasonable. The there's good reviews. For the most part, our reviews are around 4.4 4.5 stars, which we haven't been able to control. Some of the complaints from the customers that, hey, I got the product and it was stale, or it was It wasn't fresh, because when you're in Amazon vendor Central, you cannot even respond to customer so it's been very difficult to mitigate some of those negative comments. If you really take care of those customers that did have an issue, which we would gladly do, it'll be more like 4.7 4.8 stars, but about 35% we estimate our new customers, brand new that just came across and said, the heck with it. I want to try the sriracha lentil chips, or Himalayan pink salt quinoa chips and so on and so on. 65% are the ones that either cannot find our product and have had it at one point or another and cannot find it in their local retailer due to moving to a new location, or, you know, their store closing, or whatever that happened, those are the repeat customers that come back and they love the product so much that they're willing to purchase eight units at a time. I mean, that's like a dream for someone like me. So,

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  16:27  

yeah, can I ask, like, the when it comes to, you know, those new customers, right? Like, ultimately, both in retail, although you've been in retail for a long time, so you've had time to carve your space, but you know, even, like launching on Amazon. Sure you have some repeat customers, but this is a crowded space, right? Ultimately, how do you make your space in those marketplaces? How do you differentiate yourself and own your own competitive advantages?

Hassan Alizera  16:55  

So that's part of our relaunch with Amazon currently, which is our biggest online customer. We went from vendor central to Seller Central to basically take control of our retail price, to take control of customer requests, customer questions, customer complaints. That's one way we're mitigating that. On top of it, we were coming out with a brand new marketing strategy, which I think it's definitely befitting of this program, that we want to reach out to those customers over and over again that are repeat customers, but yet to the new customers as well, and give them incentive with subscriptions, with multiple ways that we can save them Money, even though we may not make money, we won't lose money, we we're going to make sure of that, but we feel that's a marketing tool in general. So the next time they are in brick and mortar and they see a different flavor, a different product than they have bought before, they'll continue to buy that's one way, and the other way is totally unique products. So for example, the recent launches have been new crunchy fries, sea salt and Taco delicious, which is like off the chain, amazing, but much better for you than a fast food french fry, or even a frozen fry, where it's ready to eat you can take it anywhere you want. Or the new Utopia Protein Chips, which are made with Diallo peas and are just cleanest ingredients you can get. Everything we do is obviously non GMO, gluten free and kosher, and that protein chip, the new utopia, is going to attract new customers by itself, because we're also going to tag along with some of the other Protein Chips and advertise where people go to a certain brand for Protein Chips, and we're going to advertise to grab some of those customers to try our products. And because we believe in the taste and the crunch and the flavors and the cleanliness of the ingredients, we feel we can keep those new customers that give us a try by going to other people's shop and stores. So that's we think that's the best way, is give the consumer another option that they've never seen before, that never had before, and go from there.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  19:17  

I love it. We've been talking to Alireza of The Daily Crave now has, if people want to learn more about you, the brand, they want to taste the ships, where should they go? What should they do?

Hassan Alizera  19:29  

I think the best way would be through our website, which I actually get to see every correspondence that comes through. And there's a place that they can email us directly, and we will be happy to introduce our company, answer any questions and hopefully get them to become fans like yourself.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  19:51  

Thank you so much for being here. It was an absolute pleasure having you here and also seeing opposing views compared to what we. Usually here on this podcast and seeing a different angle, it was very rich and interesting. Thank you so much for all the value here, and have an amazing rest of your week.

Hassan Alizera  20:11  

Thank you so much sent to you, and thank you for being a fan. Thank you.

Raphael Paulin-Daigle  20:19  

All right, well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. And well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes Store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an ecommerce tour that does over a million dollars in revenue, and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages. Well, I've got some good news, because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com to learn more, or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions or comments, tweet me at @RPaulindaigle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you and again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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