The Good Food CFO podcast · The Good Food CFO

BABOYOT with Shelley Elkovich of For Bitter For Worse: Patience, Pivots, and Path to Profitability

·57 min·3 clips

A whale-watching trip in the Salish Sea led Shelley to stop drinking and build For Bitter For Worse.

Sarah Delavan opens with a personal announcement. She says the podcast will pause at the end of season 16, that the pause is indefinite for now, and that she hopes the show will return. She also shares that her father became ill in October and passed on November 14, which led her to leave Los Angeles and move to Pennsylvania to be with her family. Chelsea Deer is on with her as usual. The conversation then shifts to a founder, who walks through how the brand expected to begin in specialty retail with a local and regional focus before expanding outward. That plan did not hold. The company launched on March 20, 2020, about six weeks before lockdown, after early traction from a holiday market and a wholesale pipeline that already looked promising. The pandemic forced a sharp change in direction. With direct-to-consumer suddenly the most workable lane, the team built a Shopify site from scratch and leaned into DTC so they could keep moving product and learn from real customers. That work was expensive. The brand was shipping heavy glass bottles, so each direct sale carried real cost, but the upside was a much clearer read on how people were buying and responding. The learning mattered. The discussion also notes that guerrilla PR helped the brand get noticed and that Faire became a way to keep reaching small specialty retailers wherever they would stock the product. Regional recovery stayed uneven, with West Coast and Maryland distribution not coming back until December 2022. The episode keeps circling back to that tension. The launch plan was not the operating reality, and the difference between those two versions of the business shaped the choices that followed. Customer feedback mattered. So did shipping cost, channel timing, and the willingness to keep changing course without pretending the original plan still fit. The tone stays grounded. Instead of treating pivots as mythology, the episode treats them as work, and it connects patience directly to profitability. The result is a practical founder conversation. It gives food and beverage operators a clear look at how DTC, specialty retail, and regional expansion can move in very different directions, and why the numbers behind those moves matter just as much as the story.

As heard by us

A grounded look at a bottled drink launch that hit lockdown and had to find a new route fast.

This Good Food CFO conversation follows the hard edge of launching a niche bottled drink brand when the plan meets reality. Shelly lays out the gap between the early retail strategy and what happened after the March 20, 2020 launch, six weeks before lockdown forced a fast shift…

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Why you'd press play

You want a real look at a beverage brand that planned a specialty-retail launch, then had to pivot fast into DTC when the pandemic hit.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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