Q&A with Brodo Broth Company

We sat down with the Brodo team — chef and founder Marco Canora and CEO Andrew Garner — at Marco’s East Village, Manhattan restaurant, Hearth, in late 2024 to learn more about their business. We discussed how Brodo started, where it’s going, and how WooCommerce has helped them along the way. The following video is the result and below is the transcript, which has been edited for length, clarity, and to fit the format. 

Marco 

Brodo is a broth company. I started selling hot cups of broth out of the back door of this restaurant back in 2014. It was really the product of a few things. One, I was kind of on my own health journey after cooking in the city for 20 years, hitting my early 40s, and being a new father. I wasn’t exactly the cover boy of health and I was feeling pretty ill. 

I needed to change some things. And so one of the things I did early on was swap out my coffee habit, which was an extraordinary amount of coffee in this business. I was drinking quarts a day. Instead, I started drinking the restaurant broth, which is what I’m drinking now, still to this day. 

Swapping out the coffee habit for a broth habit really started to have a lot of wonderful effects on my wellbeing, so much so that after six or so months I decided to try to sell it out of the back door of the restaurant as a product. And that was basically the founding of Brodo.

Marco 

Brodo has grown pretty dramatically over the last ten years. We opened in 2014 and we’re sitting here now in 2024. It has been an incredible roller coaster ride of all different kinds of growth. At first, we were really keen on the shops, and had this idea of the broth shop as the next Starbucks. 

We really wanted to lean into the hot beverage thing, where you buzz all these flavors into the broth and it starts to feel very “coffee shop.” So our initial phase of growth was really in retail here in Manhattan. We grew to five shops: Upper East Side, Upper West Side, West Village, East Village, and near Astor Place. That was our model early on. 

But because it’s a hot beverage, two months a year — July and August — proved to be difficult for sales. And then Covid happened, and then brick and mortar proved to be very, very difficult.

So slowly but surely we started getting out of the shops and we now just have the one window, the original window in the East Village. So the first half of the decade it was about the shops, and then it was about figuring out manufacturing — and we finally got into this shelf stable product. That’s really what accelerated Brodo.com, which is now very much the core of our business. 

And to be honest, having one window serves us almost as well as having five shops in terms of being in front of customers, learning their likes and dislikes. Having that face-to-face interaction is incredibly valuable for an online business — I just wouldn’t recommend having five of them. 

And obviously having Brodo.com and being able to ship broth nationally, the market just got way bigger. I could reach more people than I’ve ever reached. And shops are hard. Opening a door and locking a door every day is very difficult. But the model that we’ve built with the help of Andrew Garner, it’s been incredible. 

Marco 

Bringing this product to market was no small thing. There are so many moving parts. And what’s funny about this is that running a restaurant, there’s a million balls in the air. Restaurants are a very complicated business. So when I landed on this concept, I thought it was going to be so easy. All I need to do is find a huge pot and then I just have to make big vats of this, and then put it into a container and move it around.

Obviously that was a product of me knowing nothing about commercializing broth at the time. But one of the things I learned is that most commercialized broth isn’t made the way I make it in the kitchen. And when I learned that, it was really a moment of like, wow, well that’s the opportunity. Because most broth is made with meat paste and water. That lends itself to manufacturing in this country because of its super quick turns and high yields.

But I knew we could do it differently. That if I could bring this thing that I grew up on and this thing that I cook with, and make it well and figure out a way to get it into a package, then the world is my oyster. 

So when I told our first manufacturing partner that I want to cook it for 12 hours and I want to fill the pot with bones and I’m only going to get a 50% yield, they were like, “get out.”

It took a very long time to get to where we are today. We’ve been through a lot of manufacturing partners and we finally found a great one. And we’re literally making this broth the way I make it in my basement. 

There have been so many learnings along the way: packaging, boxing, production, cooling it down, getting it into the bag, and I had no idea. But ten years later we finally got there.

Marco 

The team has changed dramatically over time. You can imagine when you have five shops and you have to open that door and you have two shifts — it’s very labor intensive. And the beauty of where we are today with the help of software is that our team is very small. It’s myself and Andrew, our CEO, and we have a few key partners that help us with Brodo.com. And then WooCommerce is a great partner and we have some digital ad partners. 

So I’m super grateful for where we are today and who knows what’s next. I think there’s a lot of growth to be realized on Brodo.com right now, and there’s a small part of me that hopes there will be a day that the shops can kind of come back or maybe we can nest within existing shops now that we have a product that’s shelf stable and much easier to use. 

I’m just super excited and happy to be getting a traditionally made product like this that’s truly helpful into people’s homes, because ultimately the core value of this company is the same as this restaurant: to spread truly nourishing foods to people.

Marco 

People have been reaching out to us since the beginning. One of the nicest things about the shops was being face to face with customers and hearing stories like “this helped my joint pain” and “this helped my acne” and “oh, it helped my IBS.” 

My working theory is that this product helps heal your gut. And if you have a healthy gut, then you have a healthy immune system. And if you have a healthy immune system, your body can fight anything, right?

I believe our guts are compromised because of our bad diets, and then our immune system is shut off. And when your immune system is shut off, then all kinds of bad things can happen to you, whether it’s acne flareups or stomach flareups or joint flareups or whatever it may be. So it’s like, fix your gut and then the immune system gets turned on and the immune system has the power to fix everything.

Marco

We have our info@ email address, and we get so many inquiries through that. And the good news is that eight out of ten of them are really wonderful stories thanking us for bringing such a great product to market. And it really invigorates the team — it’s lovely to get these notes every day. And obviously we get a lot of questions. We used to get way more questions when we were frozen. Now that we’re shelf stable, that has kind of leveled off a bit. But online serves us really well because we could really home in on our story. 

When you have five shops and you have a big staff, you’re always worried about the message that they’re going to put out into the world. That message is super important. 

Having an online presence allows you to tell very specific and precise stories in a way that I love. I don’t worry whether we’re saying the right thing anymore. And that’s pretty powerful because with a new product that messaging is critical.

Marco

One of the milestones that was exciting is we’ve sold a million hot cups of broth. Obviously through this ten-year path, there’s been a lot of fundraising and pitching and all that stuff.  

People would say, “What do you mean you’re selling broth like coffee? What do you mean a hot beverage? Do you have proof of concept?” And we could say we’ve sold one million hot cups of broth. And every day these shops would open and hundreds of people would come in and it wasn’t always pretty and it wasn’t always perfect, but they would walk out with a hot cup of broth and we would introduce this concept.

And then a lot of the other milestones were around packaging and finding good co-manufacturing partners. Anybody who’s in this world understands that co-manufacturing is a pretty big deal. It’s challenging to establish those very trusting relationships and get everybody on the same page. It was a very windy road, but we finally got there. So having a good manufacturing partner was a great milestone. 

Getting this shelf stable and getting this to a single serving, that was also a huge milestone for us and it really unlocked our Brodo.com business in a wonderful way.

Andrew 

Brodo started using WooCommerce in 2016, when we quietly launched our delivery service out of our shop in the West Village. Today we’re processing over 10,000 online orders per month. Relative to last year, that’s about five times what we were doing. So WooCommerce has given us a pretty seamless ability to scale up from a standing start.

WooCommerce has been a terrific choice for us. It’s tremendously flexible, so we can pretty much do whatever we want with it and it’s really just limited by our imagination. 

— Andrew Garner, CEO, Brodo Broth Company

It obviously integrates very well with WordPress and what we’ve been doing with our blog. So one of the things that we talk about a lot is how we take that shop experience and try to have that same level of engagement with our customers. 

One of the ways we do that is through our blogs and some of our publications, which help people not only use the product, but help them incorporate it into their daily lives. Having the ability to go back and forth between WooCommerce and WordPress from both a transaction perspective as well as a content perspective is pretty powerful.

Andrew

We did try Shopify for a little while, because one of the agencies we were working with was using it. Then we came back over to WordPress and have not left since. WooCommerce has always been great for us.

I think Shopify is a great product for some businesses. Obviously there’s an ecosystem of add-ins and plugins. And I think it’s very easy to get carried away with all of these bits and pieces. What’s been great about WooCommerce is it feels very integrated for us, but also extremely customizable. It really feels like the best of both worlds. 

With Shopify you can easily plug all these things in and run your business. But half the time they’re not that complicated and you’re paying a margin on every single one of those transactions. 

If you do the work to understand what each element of WooCommerce is doing, you really have maximum control and are much closer to your business and much closer to your customer. In that way, WooCommerce has become a real competitive differentiator for us, and we’re very grateful to be on the platform.

— Andrew Garner, CEO, Brodo Broth Company

Andrew

WooCommerce is really at the heart of everything that we’re doing on Brodo.com. We pair it with AutomateWoo, which flows directly into our fulfillment centers. I think most people think of AutomateWoo mostly as an email system, but actually it’s powerful software that lets you impact almost any aspect of the individual customer experience. 

You can customize your site, fulfillment, the marketing materials customers receive in the box, and perks and benefits by creating segments using any transaction-level or subscription-level detail. You can segment by age of customer, where they live, what they’ve purchased before, etc. And then you can use that to customize what’s going into their shipment, what messages you send to them, that kind of stuff. 

Andrew 

About a third to a half of our business is subscriptions. So they’re important, but I actually don’t really think of it as subscriptions — I think of it as repeat customers. A lot of businesses use a siloed subscription service, and I think that’s a real mistake because we’re in it for the long haul with the customer. 

Sometimes they want to just buy the product to try it, and then they want to upgrade to a subscription. Or they may start with a subscription and decide they want to ease back and control their own destiny, and they’re willing to pay a premium to order on an ad hoc basis. 

WooCommerce allows us to pretty fluidly go back and forth from ad hoc ecommerce to Woo Subscriptions and vice versa. That’s pretty differentiated with WooCommerce and it’s a big part of how we approach the customer. We’re not trying to railroad them into a subscription — we’re not really in that business.

Andrew 

Definitely the quality of the product is first and foremost — the fact that when we worked with Marco to develop this new line, one of the non-starters was obviously we were going to make it exactly the way we were before, but we just wanted to get it into this different form factor. 

So that’s obviously been critical and we had a lot of explaining to do to help people understand the transition from the shops into the new package. But we also had built up a lot of reputation and brand trust through that little window. And so when we were able to launch this, I think we were able to capitalize on a lot of that goodwill and word of mouth. So that’s certainly been a real boost to the business as we launched the new product line.

Andrew

We had to learn how to communicate to people in the absence of that one-to-one interaction at the window. So part of how we’ve done that is creating educational materials. When you get your box, you also receive a piece called How to Brodo that tells you how to open the box, where to store it, how to open up the pouch, and how to consume it as a beverage. 

And then of course, there’s an infinite amount of recipes leveraging Marco’s knowledge that we can provide to the customer. So education is a huge part of what we do in fulfillment. And being able to do that through ecommerce is actually really powerful because it gives you that back and forth between transactions. When people are trying out the product, we can really support them and have them come back and ask us questions. 

The other thing around fulfillment is just being able to do a lot of customization. So we sell a variety pack, and we try to make it as easy as possible for people to find their favorite flavors and then build a box around them. We’ve built a portal in WooCommerce that allows subscribers to put their subscription on hold, skip an order, or change the subscription. 

Giving the consumer the flexibility to basically control their own experience is a big part of what makes fulfillment work. It’s easy to build a standardized process in fulfillment, but It’s a lot harder to build personal customization. 

WooCommerce has allowed us to do that — personalization at scale.

— Andrew Garner, CEO, Brodo Broth Company

Marco 

Look, there’s no magic bullet. But if I had to say what the secret ingredient is, I would say that our differentiation is how we make it, right? So many food and beverage products in this country are backed into manufacturing processes. So it’s like if you want to make a salty snack, there’s certain things you do because that’s the way the manufacturing has been built. And if you want to make a tomato sauce, there’s certain ways that it has to be done. And broth, too. 

But going into something without knowing anything is sometimes the best thing you can do. So I was a chef, I grew up in a home where there was a lot of cooking and making broth. There’s only one way to make broth — literally there’s only one way. And then when I learned that nobody understood or knew that way, I was like, there’s our little nugget. 

It’s hugely important to me that this continues to be made the way my grandmother makes broth, which is you fill a pot with bones and vegetables and water and then you cook it for a really long time. So when you talk about milestones, one of the milestones is something we haven’t done, which is changing the way we make it.

And then of course it’s always about people. Our team is small, but it’s very mighty. And they’re really good people that buy into the culture and buy into this idea of making people feel better through quality food. And I think the core of what we’re doing and making people feel better is a great driver. 

We’re not obsessing about scale, we’re not obsessing about profit margin. It’s important, don’t get me wrong, but this notion of the why — it’s like none of us are doing this because we think it’s going to line our pockets. And I think that that’s rare and I think that that’s awesome and I’m very proud to be a part of that and our team is, too. 

Andrew

I think the secret ingredient to Brodo’s success is really that we have no secrets. If you open up Marco’s cookbook, the recipe for Hearth Broth is right there. So if you want to go and make it yourself, go ahead. It’s a lot of work and you have to get great ingredients, but there is no secret. We’re transparent in terms of what we do. We’re transparent about what we’re good at and what we’re not so good at. 

And, I have a wonderful relationship with Marco in that regard, and I think it’s good for the business, and it has certainly been incredibly satisfying for me to work with him. So yeah, I think the secret ingredient of Brodo is that Marco has no secrets. Well, he probably has a few, but not when it comes to making broth.

What advice would you have for another merchant who’s thinking of starting an online business?

Marco

The greatest part I think, and this is a tip for any online business — any business anywhere, is if you make something that customers love, then you’re golden. And that’s all you really need to do. 

Figure out a product, produce it, and make sure that your customers love it. And then you can kind of scale it to the moon. 

— Marco Canora, Chef and Founder, Brodo Broth Company

And we’ve seen great growth. WooCommerce has been amazing for us, and it’s just like, who knows what the limit is?

Andrew 

My advice is that you really need to start small. I think we had a real luxury of starting with this window here, and not every business has that opportunity. So we were able to leverage Marco’s years of experience, years of perfecting the product, but really I think you need to find your own equivalent of that. 

You’re certainly not going to get it right the first time. We didn’t — in fact, it took us almost ten years to get it right. So I think you’ve got to get as much feedback as possible, try to be objective, not fall in love with your first concept, and really be open to finding something that works for your customer.

That means being a good listener, but also having guardrails on what’s really important to you. We had some very specific principles about how we were going to make this product. And if we hadn’t had those, we probably would’ve taken some shortcuts early on. 

So I think it’s that combination of listening to people, but also recognizing what your values are and what you’re trying to achieve. Managing that tension and figuring out a way to survive long enough to resolve it is a big part of being an entrepreneur.

What’s next for Brodo?

Andrew

What’s next is hopefully more and more people will start enjoying the benefits of drinking broth. We want people drinking broth and having broth in their kitchens and feeling like it’s absolutely essential. 

Broth is the original comfort food. There’s always a new thing in wellness, but broth has been around for thousands of years. We say it’s the hottest trend in nutrition for the last 2,000 years. So I just hope that more people can learn that and I think we’ll all be better off if that’s the case.