Shelley E. Kohan (00:27)
Hi, everybody, and thanks for joining our weekly podcast. I’m Shelley Kohan and I am excited to welcome Misty Skolnick. Welcome, Misty.

Misty Skolnick (00:37)
Thank you, Shelley

How are you today?

Shelley E. Kohan (00:39)
doing great. I’m excited to have you because you are the co-owner of Uncle Jerry’s Pretzels, which is actually a family-owned business that’s been around for over 40 years, based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And the company makes hand-twisted sourdough pretzels using only five ingredients, water, flour, sourdough, yeast, and salt. I wish just with five ingredients I could make his pretzels as good as yours. So, welcome.

Huh.

Misty Skolnick (01:09)
Thank you very much. Thank you.

Shelley E. Kohan (01:12)
So let’s start by kind of telling, I don’t know if a lot of our listeners are familiar with Uncle Jerry’s pretzels, but maybe talk a little bit about why your dad, who’s Uncle Jerry, founded the company, and also what was the general mission back when you started 40 years ago?

Misty Skolnick (01:28)
Sure, so as you mentioned my dad started the company about 40 years ago He is a Philadelphia native and at the time he was living in Lancaster County with my mom They’re still there today Someone approached my dad with this idea and at the time he was doing some odd jobs like painting houses and driving his dad’s taxi in Philadelphia

And he learned about this handmade bakery, handmade pretzel bakery that was looking to expand its line. And my dad thought there’s not a lot out there in Philadelphia like this. So he took the idea and ran with it. He had a friend draw the label. It’s the same label we use today. And flash forward 40 something years later, ⁓ my dad’s still making deliveries and now we’re distributed nationally. And I think.

Shelley E. Kohan (02:17)
I want that.

Misty Skolnick (02:20)
think the mission has always been very simple. It’s just providing a high quality product to customers.

Shelley E. Kohan (02:29)
That’s amazing. And I’m going to toot your own horn because I know a little fun fact about you, which is, so you started with the company, I think, back in 2008-ish. And you actually are the reason that it has really come into this huge digital landscape. So you’re the one behind the digitization or digitization of Jerry’s Pretzels Online, right?

Misty Skolnick (02:39)
I did. I did.

Yes, you know, my dad’s still the foundation of the business, but when I stepped in in 2008, there wasn’t a website. So ⁓ I built it and just kind of kept growing the business and took on more and more responsibility. started it as just kind of a favor to my dad. It was never my intention to really join, but it’s been great.

Shelley E. Kohan (03:11)
I’m so proud, that’s awesome.

So Misty, we have you on today because there’s a lot going on in the food market in terms of synthetic dyes and removing all kinds of ⁓ ingredients from products that are currently on shelves. Walmart just recently announced that they plan on removing like 30 ingredients by 2027, which is just around the corner. I’m not sure at their scale how they’re going to be able to do that. ⁓ But certainly, you know, what does this mean for the food industry? And can you talk to us a little bit about what it means for a company

like yours.

Misty Skolnick (03:55)
You know, I’ve been watching this with lot of interest. think it’s fascinating to watch these large companies that are really transitioning, whether changing their own ingredients and therefore their supply chain or acquiring more natural brands. ⁓ For companies like ours, you know, we’re small. We’re a small business.

It’s business as usual in a lot of ways, but we are getting a lot more customer interest in our type of product. And you are definitely seeing more and more questions come in where customers are trying to understand what we use, how we use it. And so a lot of what we’re doing today is just kind of focusing on how we do what we do and getting

the education out there about how natural our product truly is.

Shelley E. Kohan (04:48)
That’s amazing. even today, fast forward 40 years, you’re still just using five ingredients.

Misty Skolnick (04:54)
Yeah,

we haven’t changed the recipes. Yes.

Shelley E. Kohan (04:57)
That’s unbelievable. I

know you’re in Whole Foods, which is great. I don’t know if you know Stu Leonard, but we had the CEO, Stu Leonard, on. Yeah, he’s great. was on it. He was talking about the same thing. It’s very impactful about artificial dyes and how the consumers are really driving this change. I’m just wondering, when you look at that consumer behavior, will they actually be happy with the end product once a lot of

Misty Skolnick (05:08)
Yep.

⁓ adventure. Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (05:27)
the gorgeous dyes are taken out, knowing that it’s actually better for consumption.

Misty Skolnick (05:33)
This is what

I find most interesting is how well.

Walmart be able to maintain the taste and the visual of a particular product while changing essential parts of its ⁓ ingredients. I’m really curious how they are going to do it because either you launch a new product and a new brand, right, and you can start from scratch. But to reformulate something that people have developed a taste for, it’s remarkable. And I think you’re gonna really see, I think, ⁓ Conagra,

⁓ craft, they’re all kind of taking on this ⁓ project of reformulating existing products. It’s going to be wild.

Shelley E. Kohan (06:20)
I think the other interesting thing about this whole topic is that it’s not regulatory. It is now, but a lot of that process that’s coming down is based on consumers. So it’s really consumers that are pushing forward these regulations,

Misty Skolnick (06:32)
Right, right.

Right.

You know, think I’m looking. Walmart put out a statement that they’re noticing that 62 percent of their customers say they want more food transparency and 54 percent are saying they actually look at food ingredients. That’s huge. That’s very different than what it used to be. So.

You know, we’ll see. It’s not just regulatory environments, I think. ⁓

It’s fair to say that companies really respond to consumer demand in a way that maybe they don’t when there’s regulatory changes, which may or may not affect the bottom line. But when consumers start putting their dollars elsewhere, that’s where you really start seeing shifts. And I’m sure, I mean, you’re familiar with the retail industry in general, right? So it’s not unusual to see this.

Shelley E. Kohan (07:33)
Yeah, I’m wondering, do you have any insights in where you think some of this consumer ⁓ driving these clean label changes, where it’s coming from, and why now?

Misty Skolnick (07:48)
it’s been you know you only need to look at the rise of a company like Whole Foods you know over the past 30 or 40 years they wouldn’t be at the scale they’re at unless they had a customer base to serve right and so I think it’s been a long time trend and I think maybe with social media

you know, it’s getting a lot more traction a lot quicker and a lot of different age groups that maybe you didn’t see before. ⁓ And if you go down to a grocery store, their natural aisle has expanded to several natural aisles. So I think it’s been a long time coming. I don’t think it’s ⁓ immediate. I think it’s been incremental.

Shelley E. Kohan (08:34)
think the other thing, Misty, is this idea that so a lot of natural labeling has come out in foods and packaged foods. But now I feel like the consumer’s actually calling it out. They’re not just reading in the label, but they’re actually doing due diligence and calling companies out.

Misty Skolnick (08:54)
Yeah, I mean, how many times have you gone into a store and people are Googling ingredients? They’re looking at labels and they’re like, what is this? They’re Googling it and then they’re putting it back down. And I think people are just getting more, like you said, more verbal about their displeasure and not being able to know what’s in their food.

Shelley E. Kohan (09:15)
It’s so true. So now when I go to the store, have this, ⁓ I think it’s Yucca app, Y-U-K-A. And I never knew if it’s Yucca or Yucca, but ⁓ I go into stores and I, you know, I scan food and it comes up and if it, you know, I think, my God, this is healthy I’m gonna get it. And it comes up with a poor rating. Like I’m like flipping through trying to figure out why it’s a poor rating. What did I miss? So the labeling can be misleading oftentimes even.

Misty Skolnick (09:22)
Yeah.

Right.

Ray.

the labeling

is fierce. Natural, what does that even mean anymore? And even when you get into certifications.

What is the certification process? It’s interesting. just want to go back to a point you mentioned. I was just reading an article before we jumped on this call about the role that AI is going to play in consumer trends. And I think like you were just talking about with that app, you’re going to see that explode in the next few years because people are going to be able to walk into a store, their phone’s going to be tied into where they are. It’s going to geo locate them. They’re going to know they’re in a grocery store. They’re going to look at their

past purchasing habits, what they’ve Googled, what they’ve looked up, and they’re gonna start providing answers to products. They’re gonna say, you can use this, you can use that, and I just think that’s where the trend is going.

Shelley E. Kohan (10:37)
Yeah, the other part of that is the agentic commerce, which is coming forth. And that is going to be really interesting where we have these agents in the AI apps like Claude or ChatGPP or Gemini that are, you’re going in there and saying, I want a really tasty pretzel and I want it to be fresh and good. And I only want five ingredients and poof, Uncle Jerry’s comes up. ⁓

Misty Skolnick (10:46)
Yeah.

Right, right. know

a lot of websites, and this is veering off topic, but you know, a lot of websites now have to restructure their back end so that they’re showing up on these LLMs. So you see a lot of responsiveness to it. Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (11:10)
That’s right.

So I’m curious to know, like you developed this whole website, like what’s your background? Where did you go to school? What did you learn in school? ⁓

Misty Skolnick (11:20)
Sure. ⁓

Well, I started off in international affairs. So I have a master’s in US foreign policy from George Washington University. I started working in community development, which is what I was doing when I joined my dad’s team. And when I

Shelley E. Kohan (11:32)
Please.

Misty Skolnick (11:40)
first kind of started the website and started growing the business, I was working in a men’s homeless shelter for men that had come into contact with the criminal justice system. So that was my background. U.S. foreign policy slash community development and now pretzels.

Shelley E. Kohan (11:51)
That’s it.

I

love that. But you built this website, now you have to become an AI expert because that’s going to be the next frontier for you. So how are you gearing up for that?

Misty Skolnick (12:08)
Well, to

be fair, I did go back to school. ⁓ I’m a couple of months away from graduating from an MBA program at NYU, so it’s very exciting. And I think just being in a classroom and listening to my peers about how they’re handling things across industries has been invaluable.

Shelley E. Kohan (12:29)
That’s amazing. And so one of the things that’s happening in our retail industry is this idea of upskilling. And it’s exactly from what you said, because I mean, quite honestly, when I went to school, we didn’t have any of these things in school. So I think it’s great that you did go back to school. Disappointed you didn’t go to Fashion Institute of Technology, because I teach there. But.

Misty Skolnick (12:35)
Yes.

I I saw FIT.

Shelley E. Kohan (12:52)
I’ll let that slide. But yeah, no, I think it’s great. And I think it does give us the opportunity as retailers and brands to be better at the industry, to really kind of do better work for the industry. I’m always about, what can we do differently to kind of raise up our industry? So I think it’s great. ⁓

Misty Skolnick (12:53)
Yeah.

Right. And I think it’s

a lot about looking at the industry internally, but also looking at other industries to understand similar or equivalent problems and how they’re approaching them or solving them. Retail is obviously very specific, but then there’s lessons to be learned across the board.

Shelley E. Kohan (13:34)
Yeah, I think from a retailer’s perspective, there’s two things that I’ll build on from what you said. One is in the past, you know, we’ll say, you know, 10 years ago, retailers in general, we weren’t real great at looking at other industries and then making those connections to then further our own industry. I think now we’ve gotten so much better at that. And I think the other thing in terms of the retail industry is that we’ve gotten much better at

Misty Skolnick (13:47)
Right.

Yeah.

Shelley E. Kohan (14:04)
using technology at a quicker rate and adopting technology faster than we’ve adopted it in the past.

Misty Skolnick (14:13)
I mean,

the amount of data at your fingertips and the way you can collect data, you know, from a retailer’s perspective, the way you can collect SKU data and you can get really point of service information. It’s amazing. And you can collect millions of data points in a second. It’s just amazing.

Shelley E. Kohan (14:35)
So I’m wondering, so this is kind of like an interesting question, but I’m wondering, so we’ve had this idea of transparency in supply chain. And so from a fashion retailer, you want to go back to the raw materials, you want to see what’s manufactured, you want to see where the items are shipped from. Do you think that that same level of transparency and the desire to have transparency will at some point come to the food industry?

Misty Skolnick (15:03)
think you’re seeing a little bit of that in the buy local trends. ⁓ But I think the fashion industry in particular has gotten a lot of attention. mean, Nike had that big… ⁓

kind of spotlight on it, what was that, like 20 or 30 years ago with the, where they were producing their clothing. ⁓ You haven’t really seen that in the food industry, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And I think it’s interesting you talk about the supply chain because a lot of people have been so focused on tariffs.

And I think what people don’t understand is how the supply chain is so deep that even when you do want to buy local, your supplier’s suppliers are not local. ⁓ So I think as people become aware of that, yeah, you’re probably going to see a raised level of concern.

Shelley E. Kohan (15:54)
Do you think that in the food industry, and maybe we can focus on packaged snacks, assuming that you know that category of business quite well, but I won’t tell Uncle Jerry on you, I promise.

Misty Skolnick (16:03)
Hopefully.

Yeah, yeah. ⁓

Shelley E. Kohan (16:11)
But when you look at like even packaged snacks, right, do you think at some point that we will be able in the future to look at a label and understand where precisely all those ingredients came from? Or is it just in food and is that too difficult to trace and measure?

Misty Skolnick (16:32)
think it would be, back to our conversation about technology, I think it would be entering the supply chain points for every ingredient, right? But I don’t know that companies will allow that access. I think unless there’s a huge shift in consumer demand and again, demanding that level of transparency, I don’t think…

manufacturers will give that up willingly.

Shelley E. Kohan (17:03)
It’s so interesting. remember clear as day, it must be, I don’t know, 15 years ago, might be more than 15 years ago. I remember clear as day when I first got to know Everlane, which is a retail, you know Everlane, right, okay, great. When I got to know Everlane, and I’m teaching retailing at the professor level, and I’m like, I went to Everlane and it actually showed what their cost of goods were. And I’m like, oh my God, I’ve never seen a company

Misty Skolnick (17:16)
yeah. Yep.

No.

Shelley E. Kohan (17:33)
actually say, here is my cost of goods for this item. And I was blown away, but actually I’m thinking that makes a lot of sense because the consumers kind of have a better understanding of what that price is and where it’s coming from and all of those things. So do you think in the food industry, do you think transparency is going to become a differentiator in the packaged snack category?

Misty Skolnick (18:02)
⁓ If I understand Everlane, their price points are higher on their items, right? So you’re already dealing with a consumer who’s okay with higher price points and therefore might understand mark, you know, might be willing to be forgiving of markups, right? I think it’s going to depend on the product. You know, the food industry has notoriously low margins.

Shelley E. Kohan (18:07)
Yes.

Misty Skolnick (18:32)
that’s just part of the industry. I don’t know. I think there’s gonna be a lot of transparency in ingredients as much as possible in sourcing, but costing might be tricky. ⁓ I don’t know. I have to think about that. don’t see, I don’t really see.

Shelley E. Kohan (18:50)
It’s interesting, right? Yeah.

Misty Skolnick (18:56)
I mean, you would know, you said you, I mean, you’re at FIT teaching retailing, so maybe across industries it’s different. I mean, I’m sure with cars you might see that. ⁓ But food, it’s hard to imagine. I mean, how many people really want to know that…

that potato chip they’re eating costs 0.0001 cent to actually make. And they’re paying $9 for it. Like, I don’t know. That might not be company information that’s good to be out there.

Shelley E. Kohan (19:17)
Ha ha ha ha.

It

will be interesting. do think they’re very interested in ingredients and the simplifying ingredients and trying to get rid of ingredients that don’t belong in there. I think the other big question for me when I think about all the changes in the food industry and removing of the ingredients and the color dyes and all that is the consumer says they want all this, but are they really ready for this when they actually see products that have the dyes that are removed? Are they ready for it, do you think?

Misty Skolnick (19:57)
We’ll see. We’ll see what the pushback is. ⁓ It’s hard to imagine that if you’ve grown up on a product for 30 years and all of a sudden the color’s duller and not as fun that you’re going to be okay with that. You’ve become used to it. I don’t know. It’s really… No, no, that’s all.

Shelley E. Kohan (20:15)
And you talk about, yeah, go ahead, sorry.

I was just going to say, you mentioned earlier, the whole formulations and rescaling it and getting it back out to market, the taste may change. know Walmart claims there’s no taste changes. I’m wondering, is that really the case? I don’t know.

Misty Skolnick (20:32)
Yes.

I

You know, I’m not, I don’t know how each synthetic dye or artificial flavor contributes to the overall taste profile of an ingredient, how incremental it is, how marginal it is. ⁓ So it’s kind of hard to say. I think it also depends a lot on what the substitutes are.

Are they able to get a close enough? And then if they’re pulling from more natural sources, how is that going to affect prices? Are you going to see a 30 to 40 % increase in pricing? Are they going to have to change labeling? Like all this is coming. Yeah. And it’s interesting. I just want to.

Shelley E. Kohan (20:59)
Definitely.

Misty Skolnick (21:16)
One thing I’ve been reading a lot about with the Walmart is a lot of the ingredients that they have said they’re going to not use anymore, they’ve already not been using them. So I think it’s, yeah, and there’s already a lot of things that they list that they’ve pulled out from their products ages ago. So I’m not really sure, slightly maybe, tad bit misleading.

Shelley E. Kohan (21:28)
interesting.

Well, it’s interesting because when they said 2027, I’m like looking at the calendar thinking, does that say 2027? Like, is that possible? Like, that’s just right around the corner. So maybe that’s why, because maybe they’ve taken a lot out of it.

All right, so let’s get back to Uncle Jerry’s. I just want to finish up here. So you started with a very simple product. Now you have expanded your assortment. So when you go to these expansions, you now have chocolate covered pretzels, which are delicious and yummy. How are you making those decisions? And how are you specifically leading back to this conversation about ingredients? How are you choosing and picking these ingredients as you expand your assortment?

Misty Skolnick (21:56)
Yeah.

My dad is still making deliveries, so he has a really good ear for what’s out there on the shelves. ⁓ And he’ll kind of see like, ⁓ I’m doing this. So I’m more on like the market research side. And I’m like at the computer doing some research. He’s seeing it. And so then lots of times we just sit down and chat a little bit. ⁓

Ingredients is always really important, not just in terms of pricing, but how different will our product be? I know that we’re talking about launching a new product now, and one of the concerns is what will the taste be like? What will the texture be like? ⁓ When we add this ingredient,

Will the same stores and customers be purchasing us? Some stores have very strict rules and regulations about what they allow on their shelves. So there’s always that consideration. And then there’s just the fun taste testing part.

Shelley E. Kohan (23:25)
Do you ever need taste testers? Because I can volunteer to be a taste tester.

Misty Skolnick (23:29)
I’ll remember that.

Shelley E. Kohan (23:33)
No, there’s a lot of thought that goes into ⁓ when you expand your assortment and ingredients that go into it and, you know, is it going to meet with the target market and all of that. But any closing thoughts that you have in general about what’s happening in the food industry to packaged snacks or Uncle Jerry’s?

Misty Skolnick (23:39)
Yeah.

I’m just really proud of my dad to have built a business that has endured all these trends and changes without major shifts. I think what he’s done is amazing and I feel really lucky to be working with him. It will be really interesting to see what happens with the food industry. know

there’s a political shift as well that’s informing the changes. So I don’t know if, you know, in a few years, if the political environment will change, if then we’ll kind of have the pendulum swing back. So it’s interesting, but when you see big companies responding to things, you know something’s happening.

Shelley E. Kohan (24:33)
It’s so true and I would hate to see us go through all this reformulation to get foods more clean and healthier. I’d hate to see that all get undone. So I’m hoping that once we go there we don’t come back in terms of cleaner foods.

Misty Skolnick (24:52)
Yeah,

it’s interesting you say that because you talk about a company like Everlane and their competitors that have had quite a bit of success, but you’ve also seen a dramatic rise in fast fashion. So you’ve seen these parallel movements. I don’t think the food industry is going to be that far off.

Shelley E. Kohan (25:13)
I agree. Well, thank you so much for coming on Retail Unwrapped It’s great having you. We’d love to have you back sometime. And good luck in the company. And ⁓ I’m so proud of you. When do you graduate?

Misty Skolnick (25:17)
Yeah.

Thank you.

December.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Shelley E. Kohan (25:30)
That’s great.