CPG Exec Sarah Bird Heads to Quinn

Longtime CPG executive Sarah Bird has joined Quinn Snacks as CMO.

The role will allow Bird, who previously served as the CEO at powdered bone broth brand Grace’s Goodness and tea brand Bhakti Chai, to focus on one part of the business, she said, and less on fundraising. Quinn, she noted, is also further along in its development and has a slate of experienced investors including The Hershey Company, the family office for the Lissette family (the owners of Utz Snacks), Echo Capital and New Road Capital.

“[Grace’s is] still an emerging brand and I was a bit of a Swiss Army Knife wearing a lot of different hats,” Bird said. “The piece that I bring now…is just that breadth of thinking about a business holistically and really working cross functionally. [I] became focused on profitability, and supply chain challenges in a way that [I didn’t] when I had my marketing hat on.”

Bird, who has also had c-suite roles at Three Twins Ice Cream, Ecologic Brands and Annie’s, joins Quinn less than a year after founder and former CEO Kristy Lewis moved to chief visionary officer. Mike Keown was brought on as CEO, and in February the company hired Mark Osborne, who Bird previously worked with at Annie’s, as VP of operations.

At Grace’s Goodness (formerly Beyond Broth), Bird was charged with rebranding and restaging the company, but at Quinn her remit will be to make small changes in messaging, tone and focus, she said. Quinn began as a popcorn brand but has since expanded to include a line of pretzels, which now accounts for the bulk of the company’s revenue. The company plans to invest further into its snack offerings, Bird said, and will add 13,000 points of distribution in the back half of the year.

“There’s great DNA with this brand and my challenge is going to be ‘what are the key messages that we really hunker down on’…Let’s set some guardrails and operate within those and just tighten things up,” she added. “The brand is at this incredible place where it can grow.”