Business Reflections Podcast Episode #18 - Corporate Charitable Giving with Lola Snacks
Episode Transcript
Meredith Matics: Welcome to Business Reflections with your host Meredith Matics, and we are here to reflect on the business topics that are affecting you today and how you can better run your business. Today, I have Mary Molina, Founder and CEO of Lola Snacks. Hi Mary.
Mary Molina: Hi.
Meredith Matics: Can you tell me a little bit more about what inspired you to starting Lola Snacks?
Mary Molina: Sure, I started Lola Snacks because I had a need to feed my family. We were receiving food assistance from the state and when I would have to go to food banks and food pantries to help supplement. There weren't a lot of healthy snacks there.
I have a daughter with some severe food allergies. I needed for her to be able to take a snack to school that was one healthy, two that she would be able to eat because of her food allergies, but also something that would satiate my husband's appetite. So I started making these little energy bars and I called it Lola because my daughter Lola could eat it.
As my kids would go to school, they would trade food, which you're not, you're not supposed to do, but they would start trading food because when she would open it out of the packaging, the kids were like, wow, that smells so good. I think a lot of the foods that we eat it's based on our sense of smell.
So they would trade or they would, or I, I'm not sure that my daughter Lola would necessarily trade because of her allergies, but she would take half of it and give it to her friend. Then their friends started calling me saying, you know, Hey, where did you get this bar? And I would say, well, you know, I'm making it for her.
They would say, well, we're having a birthday party and we know there's some kids that are gluten-free or they're nut-free, or they're dairy-free, could you make some of these for all the kids to have? And I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. I started noticing that more and more people were calling me for a gluten-free snack.
Originally when I made it, I didn't make it out to be gluten-free. I just made it so my daughter, Lola, could eat it. That's kind of like my aha moment. If I sell enough of these, maybe this could help put food on our table also. So it started to turn into a business, and as I started delivering it to cafes around the area more and more people started calling me.
And so that's when I was like, well, I, you know, the demand is starting to become too great for me. You know, what do I need to, what's the next step that I need to do. Over the course of doing that we had become good friends with some of the food bank and food pantry organizers. As we started to grow, we started to donate bars back to the food bank and the food pantry. We were so thankful for them helping to feed us, we wanted to be able to help feed others.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. That's a really unique aspect of your business is that you have the charitable giving worked into your business model, which I think is really great, especially in today's day and age. With COVID we've seen unemployment and people losing their jobs. I feel like giving back is so critical. We're really excited to discuss this charitable aspect because it is so unique to you guys. Tell me a little bit about how you've actually included this in your mission.
Mary Molina: Yes. Because food banks made a difference in my family's lives. When I say make a difference, my children didn't go to bed hungry. My children didn't worry about where their next meal was coming from because I was able to keep food in my cabinets and food insecurity is huge.
I live in a bedroom community right outside of New York City. We have so many great organizations and I think that sometimes people fail to remember or even understand that there are families where they open up the refrigerator and there's nothing there.
It's scary when a child opens their cabinet and there's not something for them to eat.
There's these wonderful programs called backpack programs where they will supply children on the weekends with a bag of food. It's for them to be able to take home to be able to eat. That's where we really first started to get involved because one in, I think, five children in America go to bed hungry.
I have five kids, so the thought of a child going to bed hungry you know, we're always hungry throughout the day. We're busy and our stomach's growling, but we can quickly open a drawer, open a cabinet and grab something. But when a child has to go to bed hungry because there's no food in the house that's scary for them and they don't know where their next meal is gonna come from. So we started volunteering to help pack those bags in the beginning, because we didn't have the resources to donate. Once we started having resources to be able to donate we thought it was better to give product rather than a dollar amount because we wanted to make sure that kids were going home with healthy items.
A lot of the products that are donated to larger food banks - I don't want to say that they're not the healthiest because it's food and when you're hungry, any food helps your body. But we wanted to make sure that we gave them something that was whole grain use, natural sugar , filled with nuts, seeds, dried fruit , so that they wouldn't be hungry or when they ate, they would feel fuller for longer. It's also what helped my family feel good and feel better when we were in need of food assistance.
Meredith Matics: I remember reading a study that they were saying in the study and I don't have the exact source from it, but it was something about how nuts really could help the world hunger issue if they were able to distribute nuts like peanuts in particular, at a larger rate because of the amount of protein that's in them. And also how they make you feel fuller and they digest slower. Nuts could be the cure of hunger to some people.
Mary Molina: Yes. Nuts are amazing because they're packed with so many different nutrients.
If you look at world hunger programs usually those life-saving packets include squeeze pouches of peanut butter or a dried milk that they could mix with water. Healthy food that is packed with really good nutrients is super essential, especially to kids whose brains are growing. Speaking with different doctors and nurses within the school districts , we were made aware that children who go hungry, their brains don't develop quite as rapidly as children who aren't hungry. There's this huge correlation to food and your brain's health.
Meredith Matics: Yes, totally. Were you able to build this charitable giving part of your business from the very beginning or did you have to get to a certain growth point to be able to? I know you mentioned that it changed with you being able to pack lunches to them being able to give product, but was that part of your mission from the beginning?
Mary Molina: It pretty much was part of our mission because again the food banks and pantries were so essential to us just as a family having food. So once I realized that I can make this a business, Lola Snacks, a business I knew that I wanted to be able to give back. It was definitely a part from the beginning and it's kind of changed over the years. We're refining it more to make sure that we're getting food to people who need it the most.
Meredith Matics: How do you navigate and balance the need to have a profit and grow and the need to give back?
Mary Molina: That is a tricky balance in business.
Obviously you go into business to make money. When I went into business, I went in because I needed to make money to put food on the table so that I wouldn't always have to be reliant on social services or food banks. I think that depending on what your business model dictates what you're able to give, because if you're giving too much and then you're not in business in a year, you're not really helping over the long run.
Each business has to determine what they're able to do and how much they're able to do it. And again, as your business grows and scale changes you may be able to do more later.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. I think that's something that a lot of different businesses do have to face and have to be challenged with if they want to have a mission driven purpose, but how do you balance that with your ability to make money? People always go how do nonprofits stay in business? Because they don't make any money and it's not exactly true. They still are out to make a small profit just a cash profit.
Mary Molina: Correct. They still have to support payroll. They still have to support, you know, office expenses, capital expenditure. So it's a very fine balance. And if you are not able to donate on a cash basis or a product basis, time and energy is also amazing. I know several accounting firms here in Westchester County.
They donate their time. People on their staff go in, they help balance the books of other nonprofits. They do pro bono work. There's many different ways that you can include it. So if it can't be on a cash or product basis it could be services or time served because we volunteer with some meal prep organizations, and we donate our time to deliver meals during midnight runs. Those things wouldn't be possible without volunteers.
Volunteering can be just as good as, you know, donating product or cash or services.
Meredith Matics: How did you build? I mean, I know you've built these partnerships out of what they are, what it sounds like for ones that gave back to you initially, have you been able to expand those partnerships as your business has grown to new, different charitable ways? Or have you stuck mainly with the food banks that you spoke of?
Mary Molina: As we go into new areas of distribution we look to work with the food banks and food pantries in those areas just to make it easy. It is difficult with logistics costs. If I have to ship something across several States, it becomes cost prohibitive, but if I'm in a distribution center and I can donate from that distribution center then it's a win-win for all of us.
Meredith Matics: That makes sense. You don't want to give away all your profits to ship it all the way to California, since you're in New York with nothing out there to benefit it.
Mary Molina: Exactly. We've really liked to work within the communities that we're serving or that we're in stores in because it shows you how genuine we are.
Meredith Matics: Right. How do you communicate your giving back to your customers or do you communicate that?
Mary Molina: I really don't because I never wanted people to buy my product because of my give back. I wanted people to buy my product because it tasted good.
It tastes good and it's good for you. It's like a little bonus, Hey, by the way, a small portion of this has gone to a food bank or an anti-hunger program.
Meredith Matics: Quite the opposite of like Tom Shoes that want to make their whole marketing plan on the fact that they buy one, give one back.
Mary Molina: Exactly. I would love to have a platform or a model like that. I think Tom's is amazing. There are so many different companies out there doing it. Warby Parker is another organization that has huge impacts on people with sight issues. I would love to be able to do that.
Unfortunately our margins are so small that it's a little bit prohibitive, but again I went into business to help feed my family and as we grow our contribution, grows to anti-hunger programs.
I think there's a line between non-profits and then businesses that are for profit. If you're selling goods you have to be respectful of those people who want to buy them because usually people are buying them based on what their need is, not just their want. If you restrict your business to that type of model buy this so that I can do this. You're kind of restricting a lot of consumers.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. How has it been for you personally growing from such like a humble place to such a bigger place in your business?
Mary Molina: The struggles are different now. I'm not as worried about being able to put food on my table, obviously. But now the worry is am I protecting the people in my manufacturing facility the right way against COVID.
How can we support our community during this time? Not just people who are hungry? Am I running my business effectively? For my investors and shareholders, I'm am I doing the right thing by them? Your decisions change as you grow.
How can I include sustainability? Should I become organic? Is that what consumers want? There's so many different things that you start to worry about as you grow and having really good counsel around you and people that you can ask questions from is super helpful, so that you're making an informed decision versus a reactionary decision.
Meredith Matics: Yeah. When you compare your business to others, have you found that it's common for other businesses to have charitable giving within their business as well? Or are you finding that this is a new territory? What made me think of it was that you're saying talk to those around you, but where those people around you also encouraging you to share basically your profits by being able to give back or were they like, no, you need to take it all for you and just grow your business.
Mary Molina: When I originally started my business, I went and sat with a group of retired entrepreneurs and an organization called Score.org. They wanted to know my why. And my why is because I need to feed my family. I need to feed them something good. I need to have a job, to be able to put money into my family.
And they said, okay, but why do you also have this charitable giving? And I said, because without them, I don't think that I would be here. So we started to define what the charitable giving could be. I'm very thankful to Score.org for asking me the questions up front.
Like, why do you want to do this? How do you want to do this? Is it economical for you to do this? Now if I had gone out to businesses in the area and said this they probably would have been like, you're crazy. You can't do that. You're too small. There's no way that it would work, but if you look at a lot of the small businesses I'm in the food industry.
So I would look at restaurants. There are so many restaurants in my area that donate food, either leftover food from catering to places like the Dorothy Day House or they donate time to help food bank events or they do charitable giving someone will come and say, Hey, I'm trying to host a benefit.
Could you supply us with X amount of appetizers? And they say yes. They probably would have told me no, but if I would have said, well, what about your charitable giving? All of them would have said, Oh yeah, well, I do this here. And I do that there. But again, it's within their own margins that they're able.
I think that they pick and choose certain times when they're able to do charitable giving. I just have made it a little bit of a bigger picture within my company so that as I grow, I can start to give back more, whereas they may not look at it as a larger picture.
Meredith Matics: Right. You've locked it into your commitment of your purpose.
Mary Molina: Yes.
Meredith Matics: And not just that, oh yeah, that would be fine.
Mary Molina: Exactly. Exactly. It's a little bit more conscious versus the unconscious giving that you see a lot of small businesses do.
Meredith Matics: As we close up I want to ask you two questions that I ask everybody who comes to the podcast. And the first one is what is one piece of advice you have received that you would like to share with another small business owner?
Mary Molina: The best advice that I received from a small business owner was network yourself.
Meredith Matics: And what have you found for networking works best for you?
Mary Molina: Believe it or not when I'm out volunteering is when I network my best because I'm putting my money where my mouth is and I meet other entrepreneurs or business people in the community that are deciding to help out.
The other networking that I do is when I go and speak on college campuses or elsewhere, and I get to speak with other entrepreneurs. I personally don't belong to a BNI group which is a business networking group. But I know that if you're in a service related field, BNI groups are great places just to meet other entrepreneurs that have a different specialty than you, but you're in the same circle. Then also networking within your alumni of your college, or if you've gone through an entrepreneurship program like I have with Goldman Sachs 10,000 small businesses, and also I'm an alumni of the Tory Burch Foundation.
Whenever they host events, I make sure that I'm there and I'm present that means I'm not on my phone. I'm actually present looking to engage with others. The other thing that I want to share with you is tell other entrepreneurs about your challenges.
Say I have this challenge or I have this opportunity and I'm not sure what I should do about it and take their, their guidance or how they would solve the problem. Because a lot of times, you will find that what you were thinking, they have a completely different view on it and then you really get to look at the problem or the challenge or the opportunity and a whole 360 degree view.
Meredith Matics: Yeah, talking to businesses is always super important. It's kind of why I started the podcast was I wanted to be able to talk to other business owners because we all have our own unique challenges and talents and things to share.
Thanks for reiterating my point and Mary, where can our listeners find you on social media?
Mary Molina: So you can find me at Lola Snacks on Instagram, at Lola Snacks on Facebook, at Lola probiotic on Twitter. We've just recently started Snapchat. And I haven't figured out all the aspects of that yet. But I have a meeting tomorrow with Snapchat where I'm going to ask a lot of questions and then I'm also on LinkedIn, under Lola Snacks.
Meredith Matics: Perfect. Well, Mary, thank you so much for coming on and I can't wait to share this with all of our listeners and to learn more about giving back as business.
Mary Molina: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I've loved sharing my story and if it inspires one person to either volunteer or to give back in services or products or monetarily. It's gonna make a huge difference in that organization's structure.
Business Reflections Closing: Please note that these are thoughts and opinions alone. For tax advice, please see your CPA or tax advisor, tax professional for business advice and legal entities. Please see your local business, lawyer, or attorney for advice. And if you'd like to reach out to us for any topics or questions about. Any subject, any episode you can reach us podcast@maticsbilling.com. That's podcast@maticsbilling.com.
For show notes, visit Maticsbilling.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, we want to hear from you. Please hit subscribe. Leave a review and share this episode with your friends, family, and on your social media pages. See you next time!