While cynics might query Karls’ priorities (Mid-Day Squares is after all, a food company), in a world where most  of us spend every waking moment on a cellphone, what emerging  CPG brands have to secure, first and foremost, he points out, is our attention. 

And if you can’t win that, it doesn’t matter how good your product is, observes Karls, who says that in the early days at least, you are marketing yourself just as much as your products, an insight that launched a podcast and a flurry of Instagram videos​​ tracking the trials and tribulations of running a startup. (Tellingly, the firm’s first outside hire was a videographer.)

“​We’re telling that organic story of the good, the bad, the ugly of entrepreneurship… think Shark Tank meets the Kardashians,​” says Karls, who co-founded a clothing brand while still at college and describes himself on his LinkedIn profile as the brand’s “rainmaker​” and “resident Social-Personality.”​

The videos – featuring co-founders Jake Karls, his sister Lezlie Karls Saltarelli, and her husband Nick Saltarelli – range from a few seconds of footage from a trade show, to a lengthier introspective on the impact of losing key team members, to a three-minute, highly-produced MTV-style dance track ‘Chocolate Gone Crazy’​​ inspired by a cease and desist letter (let’s just say Hershey was not happy with earlier iterations of the brand’s packaging).

“When you create an emotional connection, people want to be part of it,” ​said Karls, who was speaking to FoodNavigator-USA at the Natural Products Expo West show earlier this month. “They want to know more. So you try and bring them into the ecosystem and they fall in love with the humans, not just the three of us, but our entire team​ [which is now 60-people strong].”