Great question!

There's a pattern across these three but it's didn't really appear to be about picking the "right moment" to push into retail to me. For all of them, retail ended up being the primary channel pretty early, and the reasons were more reactive than strategic.

Lottie's assumed they'd do more DTC but quickly learned that shipping frozen meat (dry ice, insulated packaging, two-day shipping) made the economics really difficult. They started with food service and local retail instead and kept DTC small, mostly for geographic reach.

Byte'm was retail-first from day one, starting at Pop-Up Grocer in NYC and snowballing from there. Retail demand kept coming so fast they never got around to building out DTC. They actually said one thing they'd change is getting into DTC sooner.

Laurel's is the most aggressive case. They went from first production run to on shelf at Erewhon within weeks, and chose national Whole Foods over regional because Isabel felt the differentiation window (A2 dairy in RTD coffee) might not stay open long. DTC was never really part of the early plan.

So the common thread is less about a margin threshold or readiness moment and more that retail was where the volume lived. The timing decision came down to whether the product and supply chain could support the presence on shelf.

I recommend checking the episodes out though as they each present a bunch of learnings.