She Built A ‘Nation’ Of Millions In CPG’s Toughest Category

She shares why velocity is her North Star metric, how she thinks about omnichannel as a flywheel rather than separate businesses, how she evaluates when syndicated data is worth the cost, and why she chose to self-warehouse to maintain margin and operational control. 

Ashley also unpacks her approach to pricing across channels, portfolio expansion beyond a single hero SKU, and constant creative testing in one of grocery’s most competitive categories. 

Show notes:

0:20: Ashley Nickelsen, Founder & CEO, B.T.R. Nation – Ashley talks about her deep ties to New York City and a life largely spent on the road for work. She also shares her path into CPG from a master’s in higher education and then into the supplement world, and how she applied lessons from her experience to B.T.R.  Ashley also discusses evolution as a spokesperson and her belief that brands need a consistent “face,” explains B.T.R.’s origin story and how losing both parents to rare cancers before age 30 shaped her mission and her decision to avoid natural flavors. She describes how trust and community grew “organically” through direct customer engagement and helps generate retail discovery and online reorders across channels. She then details how B.T.R. approaches growth with constant iteration while keeping affordability and velocity in mind, and shares practical learnings on Meta advertising and how to pair digital attribution with retail data stories to win new accounts.

Brands in this episode: B.T.R. Nation, Spindrift, Mid-Day Squares, Graza, Simple Mills, Siete, Perfect Bar, Lily’s, Unreal, Heinz, Crumbl