Nick Beste — CEO and "chief instigator" of Man Cave Craft Eats — has overseen the specialty meat company's evolution from a Minneapolis Farmers Market booth he started while at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Business to more than 5,000 retailers across the country, including Kroger, Safeway, Food Lion and Target. Costco locations in the Twin Cities this summer are offering Man Cave's Riesling, Kale & Smoked Gouda Sausage, which Beste hopes will lead to bigger things with the wholesale club. Beste, 30, credits the growth to a brand relaunch, with storybook-style packaging in fluorescent colors, and dozens of new products, from mac-and-cheese-stuffed hot dogs to juicy jalapeño and queso fresco turkey burgers to sirloin-brisket-short-rib beef burgers. Craft still rules, with each 500-pound "micro" batch taste-tested before departure. Man Cave's 19-member team, meanwhile, is preparing to move from Golden Valley to northeast Minneapolis.
Q: How has Man Cave gone from 200 stores in 2013 to 5,000 this year?
A: It sounds silly to say, but that part wasn't that hard. We had good distribution before the relaunch, but the relaunch is really what helped propel us. They see the packaging and they go, "Yep, let's meet." Then they eat the product and they go, "Yep, we'll do it." After they eat it, it's kind of game over. For us the biggest challenge of growing fast is all the other things that come with it.
A lot of it has to do with what we're offering. There's a big gap in the market for a modern craft meat brand. It's considerably higher quality than anything else out there. Considerably more in tune with today's consumer and what they're looking for. It kind of resonates and speaks to them. If you look at this on the shelf compared to Hillshire Farms, it's quite a bit different.
Q: What led to Man Cave's new Bite Back program?
A: To know there are people who are starving while we're eating macaroni-and-cheese-stuffed hot dogs isn't real cool. So we do a one-for-one. For every package we sell, we give a meal to a hungry child. We just wrote our first check for $42,000 to Kids Against Hunger. That's 420,000 meals in the last three months. We anticipate being able to donate millions of meals this year alone and only growing from there.
Q: You're a millennial running a company of mostly millennials — to what degree are you marketing to millennials?
A: We are millennials. We're creating a product that we think is great in design, that we think is cool, so we're kind of creating for ourselves. A lot of people ask about focus groups or what do you do for market research. We have a lot more of that Apple mentality of if we like it and we think it's great, it's probably what other people will think is cool, too.
