• by Erin Everhart , 10 hours ago

I'm Southern through and through, which means I take my comfort food seriously. Fried chicken. Cornbread. Sweet tea.  A simple mayo and tomato. And of course, mac and cheese.

When I was a kid, homemade mac and cheese wasn’t always an option, so I found my way to the boxed variety. You know the one: blue box, orange cheese, one flavor. It was my go-to when I was on my own for dinner when my culinary skills consisted of boiling water and not burning the house down.

My palate's grown up since then, and I’m pretty good in the kitchen, so most of the time, I make my own mac and cheese, but every once in a while, the old craving creeps back in. I need a specific nostalgia that only a powdered cheese packet can trigger. And when it does, what's in my cabinet these days isn't the mac and cheese of yore. It's Twist My Parm. It's Shella Good. It's Here Comes Truffle.

When Goodles decided it was time to disrupt this Southern staple, they didn’t just update the box. They leaned in, hard. They called out the category for coasting on nostalgia instead of earning it. They realized they can’t out-spend the competition, so they wanted to out-weird, out-good and out-community them, turning these little acts of good into cultural moments.

How do you convince consumers that a decades-old category needs disruption? How do you build a brand that wins over a four-year-old and her mom in the same bite? And what does it actually take to out-good instead of outspend? 

We chatted with Executive Creative Director, Dan Chodrow, to find out.

Listen to the full episode here.