🎙️ Shelf Help Podcast: Amy Collins - From Grandma's Kitchen to a National Rollout

On this episode, we’re joined by Amy Collins, the Co-Founder and CEO of RoRo’s Baking Company, a Dallas-based brand bringing her grandmother’s beloved cinnamon rolls and dinner rolls to freezers across the country. What started as a family recipe baked by hand in a shared kitchen has grown into a nationally distributed brand carried in Whole Foods, H-E-B, Harris Teeter, and more.

Amy shares her journey from ICU nurse to food entrepreneur, how she scaled from self-manufacturing to partnering with a copacker, and what she’s learned about preserving authenticity while building a frozen brand at scale.

We get into the decision behind frozen vs. refrigerated vs. ready-to-eat and some of the learning lessons that Amy has gathered during the journey thus far.

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Episode Highlights:

🥣 The family legacy behind RoRo’s Baking Company
🍞 Pre-baked & frozen vs. refrigerated vs. ready-to-eat formats
📦 Packaging & brand identity lessons learned the hard way
🏭 From shared kitchen to building a commercial facility
⚙️ Transitioning from self-manufacturing to a copacker
🧊 Competing and winning in the frozen category
🛒 The role of demos in driving retail velocity
💻 DTC and national shipping via Goldbelly
🎯 Managing expectations and staying scrappy
🌟 Trends and brands Amy’s keeping an eye on

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Table of Contents:

00:00 - Intro & RoRo’s Overview
00:41 - Origin Story
03:53 - Pre-baked & Frozen vs. Refrigerated vs. Ready-to-Eat
05:24 - Brand Identity & Packaging Design
09:12 - Kickstarter & Building Out a Commercial Space
12:32 - Commercial Kitchen vs. Copacker
18:38 - Searching for & Choosing a Copacker
22:56 - The Frozen Category
26:36 - Demos
27:48 - DTC & Goldbelly
31:16 - Learning Lessons & Expectations
32:41 - Trade Shows
34:18 - Trends & Brands Amy’s Watching

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Links:

RoRo’s Baking Company - https://rorosbakingcompany.com
Follow Amy Collins on LinkedIn -   / amy-collins-4a200216  
Follow me on LinkedIn -   / adam-martin-steinberg  

For help with CPG production design - packaging and label design, product renders, POS assets, retail media assets, quick-turn sales and marketing assets and all the other work that bogs down creative teams - check out https://www.kitprint.co/