We help food founders build brands that actually sell.
18 years. Real experience. Real results for food brands.
Meet Lori
Lori Karmel knows what it actually takes to build a food business from the ground up. In 2002 she bought a struggling specialty cake company with $100,000 in sales, no baking experience, and no outside capital. Over the next 18 years she grew it into a national brand, bootstrapped every step of the way, and sold it in 2020.
Along the way she navigated every channel a food brand can touch. Oprah selected her Key Lime Cake as one of her Favorite Things in 2004, sending 10,000 orders in two weeks and crashing the website. Her products were featured in O Magazine three times, on Good Morning America, and on a CNBC prime-time special. She built drop-ship partnerships with Williams Sonoma, Goldbelly, Neiman Marcus, and 1-800-Flowers. She walked away from a Trader Joe's deal that would have destroyed her margins. She learned the hard way what Whole Foods, QVC, and specialty retail actually require.
She made expensive mistakes. She also figured out what works. Now she helps food founders skip the costly trial and error and build brands that can actually scale.
Lori's expertise covers brand strategy, channel selection, margin analysis, packaging, retail readiness, and the kind of operational decisions that determine whether a food business survives growth or breaks under it.
Expertise
Lori has over 20 years of experience and retail connections in the specialty food industry. Her expertise includes brand development, brand strategy, product development, packaging design, business development, public relations, marketing and sourcing products for retail buyers.