HELPING FOOD FOUNDERS SCALE WITHOUT THE COSTLY MISTAKES.
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.
WHAT I DO.
Lori works with food operators who are already selling and ready to grow. She helps them get clear on their brand positioning, fix their margins, choose the right channels, and build the operational foundation that makes scaling possible without breaking what is working.
About Karmel and Company
FREE DOWNLOAD FOOD BUSINESS STARTER BLUEPRINT
FREE DOWNLOAD FOOD BUSINESS STARTER BLUEPRINT
FREE DOWNLOAD FOOD BUSINESS STARTER BLUEPRINT
Build a product that actually sells before you waste time or money.
Six essential questions every food founder should answer before spending another dollar. Takes 30 minutes. Could save you years of costly mistakes. Free. No credit card.
Most food businesses fail not because the product is bad, but because the founder never stopped to ask the right questions at the start.
This blueprint is six of those questions.
Work through it honestly and you will know whether you have a viable business worth investing in further, or whether you need to fix something first.
What's inside:
Where are you taking this? Defining your vision and your market position before you build anything else.
What makes you the only choice? How to find and communicate one sharp point of difference.
Who are you actually selling to? Defining a real target customer, not a broad category.
Do the numbers work? A simple viability table that tells you whether your margins support your channel.
Has anyone actually paid for this? The validation steps that separate a good idea from a real business.
One marketing truth worth knowing now. What actually works for small food brands in 2026.
After downloading, go to File, Make a copy to save it to your own Google Drive and fill it in.
Free. No credit card. No strings.
FOOD BRAND OPERATOR PLAYBOOK
FREE DOWNLOAD FOOD BUSINESS STARTER BLUEPRINT
FREE DOWNLOAD FOOD BUSINESS STARTER BLUEPRINT
Our Team
FREE DOWNLOAD FOOD BUSINESS STARTER BLUEPRINT
Our Team
Our team consists of experienced professionals who are dedicated to delivering the best results for our clients. We work closely with our clients to understand their needs and provide customized solutions.