Creations Foods
Fractional CMO for a high-volume food manufacturer. We stepped into a full executive role for 15 months, leading all sales and marketing across white label, private label, and branded product lines. Reported directly to the CEO.
Not a project. An executive role.
Creations Foods is a high-volume food manufacturer with multiple business lines. They needed more than a consultant. They needed someone to own the entire sales and marketing function. The company was losing six figures monthly when we stepped in.
We took the fractional CMO seat, reporting directly to the CEO. That meant full accountability: budget, strategy, projections, team management, broker relationships, agency oversight. The whole operation. We managed brands including Toatzy, HighKey, and Moon Cheese, and led the evaluation and integration of brand acquisitions. Moon Cheese we'd built and named a decade earlier. It had been headed for wind-down; as the people who built it, we helped it find a home at Creations instead. Now it was back under our watch.
This wasn't a pitch deck that lived in a drawer. It was 15 months in the trenches, turning around a struggling operation and making decisions that mattered.
Stealth health
One thing we established early: stop leading with "healthy." Yes, the cookies are plant-based. But shouting that from the front of pack might actually hurt sales. Health claims rarely convince anyone to pay more than 5-10% extra. Worse, they can marginalize a product in the mind of the average shopper looking for an indulgent treat.
Our approach: keep the health info available for those who seek it out, but don't make it the headline. Lead with indulgence. Let the product speak for itself. The health-conscious shoppers will find what they're looking for on the back of pack. Everyone else gets a cookie that just looks delicious.
Simple shift, big impact on how the brand showed up in market.
From co-packer to brand owner
Creations made excellent product for other companies' brands. The bigger prize was building brand value of their own. For a stretch we ran their innovation team, and that's where we pushed.
We concepted and developed Aw Yeah! Snacks, a cookie brand built on bold, indulgent flavor instead of health claims, and carried it to the edge of launch. We set the Moon Cheese Space Spice line in motion and designed its lead Pizza bag, the template the rest of the flavors followed. That was a strategic call as much as a creative one: we chose it with R&D because it added new life to the brand with almost no new manufacturing cost. And we mapped HighKey off the cooling keto label toward protein, where the category was heading. These launched the year after we handed off.
Owning a brand also means protecting it. When product ideas came up that would have put the name on something it didn't stand for, we pushed back, set the conditions any extension had to meet, and held the line until they were met. Saying no to a direct request is rarely the comfortable move. For a brand built on a real promise, it's the right one.
Since then Creations has kept building. Aw Yeah! is running Costco roadshows, and in 2026 the company merged with REAL Cookies into a vertically integrated better-for-you platform. That growth is theirs to claim. What we're proud of is the direction we helped set.