When you own the process, you don’t scale fast. You scale correctly. It’s harder upfront, but it keeps you from rebuilding the entire business later.
Stone & Skillet began with a practical observation: Why is a great eggs Benedict sitting on a forgettable English muffin?
Cam Meekins and his brothers realized you couldn’t fix that by using the same mass-production system everyone else used. So they made their own: denser, griddled, and built to hold up to real cooking.
Restaurants picked it up quickly. Diners loved it. And then a Whole Foods forager tried it at a farmers market, and opened the door to retail.
Ten years later, the company is now an eight-figure business sticking to the same principles: protect your product quality, listen to people, and grow the business on your own terms.
Leverage what you have, but listen to signals. Stone & Skillet began squarely in food service, a natural starting point given the family’s restaurant ties. That was the plan… until it wasn’t. A Whole Foods forager tried the muffins at a farmers market and opened a completely different door. One store turned into three, then ten, then the entire region.
Your product is still your loudest marketing channel. Cam is clear: “The number one marketing tool we have is within the four walls of our bakery. The product itself.” No campaign beats a great first bite. Stone & Skillet puts everything into its product, building its own production facility, restaurant and retail channels, and unique LTO flavors.
The people closest to the work often have the answers. Listen to them. Many founders think strategy is top-down. Cam builds the company from the inside out. The best ideas have come from bakers on the line, store reps in the field, and chefs using the muffins in their restaurants. They see problems (and solution!) long before leadership does.
Be agnostic to opportunities and loyal to the data. One retailer merchandised their muffins in a different display and sales jumped 50%. Another one cut their SKUs from three to two, and velocity improved. These weren’t choices Cam made. But they were signals he paid attention to. Let reality reshape your assumptions.
Rough margins today can still lead to a healthy business tomorrow. “Margins are a circumstantial anecdote,” Cam says. “A point in time in the life cycle of the business.” Most early brands sit well below 50% gross margin, and that’s normal. What matters is understanding how to shift the math at scale. Better margins are earned over time, not engineered overnight.
Market insight → Durable CPG growth is coming from slow-build brands. They’re expanding in sequence, matching ops to demand, and giving retailers what they actually want: proof of sell-through, not projections.
Solve the bread riddle with a griddle
The “sequence before scale” checklist
Decide if your next jump is a good move or premature.
1. Prove it small before you prove it big. Pay attention to what happens in your first few stores. If you can’t reliably move product there, adding more doors won’t solve it.
2. Let actual signals guide your next step. A buyer reaching out, a display change that lifts sales, a customer who keeps coming back. These are the things that should shape your roadmap, not the other way around.
3. Make sure your operations can scale without changing the product. If increasing volume means adjusting quality or cutting corners, you’re not ready to scale yet.
4. Watch where your margins are heading, not where they are today. Early margins are rarely pretty. What matters is whether they improve as you grow, even if it’s gradual.