Charles Coristine: CEO of LesserEvil
Episode 860
On today’s episode, we welcome Charles Coristine, CEO of LesserEvil — one of the fastest-growing better-for-you snack brands in the country.
Charles' entrepreneurial journey didn't begin in the food industry. In fact, he left a successful career on Wall Street and took a chance on a struggling popcorn company that was worth less than $1 million at the time. With no food industry experience but a strong belief that consumers deserved snacks made with better ingredients, he set out to transform LesserEvil into something much bigger.
In this episode, Charles shares the lessons he learned from betting on himself, building a challenger brand in a crowded category, and scaling LesserEvil from a small popcorn company into a national snack brand. We also discuss product innovation, the creation of fan favorites like Moonions and Cheezmos, what it takes to stay true to your mission as you grow, and how he approached the company's acquisition by Hershey.
Charles' story is a powerful reminder that some of the biggest opportunities come from seeing potential where others see problems.
Listen and learn!
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https://www.lesserevil.com
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Transcript
Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be. I want to be. You just want to make sure you will get knocked down, but just make sure you don’t get knocked out, knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control, control, control. Hi everyone, and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go, let’s go. Hi, everyone, and welcome back to the Kara Goldin show. What would make someone leave a successful career on Wall Street, put nearly all of their savings on the line, and buy a struggling snack company they knew almost nothing about? Today’s guest is Charles Corestine, CEO of LesserEvil, and back in 2001 Charles took a leap that most people would have called irrational, with no food experience, he other than the fact that he enjoyed it. He acquired a small popcorn company worth less than a million dollars and set out to build something very different, his vision wasn’t just to create healthier snacks or continue making healthier snacks, it was to prove that consumers shouldn’t have to choose between ingredients that they think they trust and products they actually enjoy eating. So, fast forward to today, LesserEvil has become one of the fastest growing brands in the snack aisle, cult favorite organic popcorn to newer innovations like Munyans and Cheese Mose. The company has transformed into a multi-category powerhouse built on great clean ingredients with lots of innovation, and in 2025 the company was acquired by Hershey, and Charles is still the CEO involved in leading LesserEvil into many people’s homes and mouths. So, so excited to have you here, Charles, Charles Corstein. Welcome to the Kara Goldin show.
Charles Coristine 2:19
Thanks, Kara. I’m excited to be here.
Kara Goldin 2:22
So, Charles, for those who aren’t familiar with the brand LesserEvil, what is the brand, and what made you believe it was worth betting your entire future on?
Charles Coristine 2:34
Obviously, it’s a food brand, it’s a vertically integrated snack food brand. I like to think it’s a little more than that. I like to think it’s a lifestyle brand. The other question was, what made me decide to do that? So that’s a, that’s a tough question. So I was, I was a finance guy working in New York City. I’m originally, originally from Toronto. I moved to the States when I was, was pretty young to work for an American Bank, and I got transferred to New York, and I, I traded government bonds for close to 20 years, and I think that it’s largely a young man’s game trading bonds in New York City, and I was starting to fatigue. I sometimes say I felt like life was blurring a little bit around the edges, and I think I needed, you know, I needed to find something else to do, so I, I’m a big believer in synchronicity. I kind of just opened myself up to trying to find something else, and a friend of a friend was, was selling less or evil, and for some reason the name intrigued me. I was really into food at the time, because I had been going through a lot of stress, I had really focused in on my diet, and I was meditating, so I was looking for something a little more mindful in my life, and I was like, this could be interesting, I had no idea how hard it was going to be, but for something, for some reason, it resonated, and I took a deeper look at the food space, and I decided to jump,
Kara Goldin 4:03
so it was not just about walking into the space and taking it from there. I mean, you had to build it, and really not just the brand, but also the team. How much more difficult was that than you ever imagined?
Charles Coristine 4:20
Yeah, so when you buy an emerging brand that was not vertically integrated, that was kind of, that had, you know, stagnated a little bit, they just hadn’t found their hero skew, you know, it had been, or the brand had been around for, you know, six years, I think, when I, when I first jumped in, so you know, I got into it. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to make it work unless I made some drastic changes, and it was either I was going to jump all in and bet it all on it, or I should have walked away. And I told this story that when I left Wall Street, I kind of had told. People that I was, you know, I was going to become an entrepreneur, and that I was making the leap, and my ego kind of got the better of me, and there was no way that I was going to, you know, not go all in at that time, because it was just, it was a matter of personal pride at that point. So I just, I decided I was going to basically invest in manufacturing, because that was the only way that I could turn around the margin structure of the business, and you know, and basically innovate. It
Kara Goldin 5:27
sounds like the manufacturing part was one of the first decisions that you made, but was there a first hire that you knew you needed, almost as a mentor to some extent to help you get going?
Charles Coristine 5:40
Oh, I didn’t hire a mentor. I hired a guy I went to business school with that kind of was the opposite of me, you know. I kind of fly by the seat of your pants, you know. I’m probably a little bit more into like innovation and sales and stuff like that, whereas I found my partner, which his name is Andrew Strive. He was much more pragmatic, he used the other half of his brain, he was, you know, you know, very good at, you know, spreadsheets and business models and all that kind of stuff. So he was a very good hire for me, because we kind of, we hemmed and nagged at, you know, particularly well for the first couple years, as we made a lot of mistakes.
Kara Goldin 6:20
You had the finance experience, was he what kind of experience?
Charles Coristine 6:24
He was a finance guy too, but I was kind of more of a trader, which means you know that I’m kind of making, you know, you know, seat of the pants decisions based on what I think the market’s going to do, and he was more of kind of like a quant guy that programmed stuff, so it’s funny you can have two different guys in the in finance, two different skill sets,
Kara Goldin 6:46
so interesting. So the brand had, they actually shut down, or was it sort of kind of operating by the time you ended up acquiring?
Charles Coristine 6:55
No, it was so it was still operating, and you know, it was one guy and a bookkeeper, they were kind of keeping it afloat, yeah, but unless you, you know, you know how it is, unless you’re willing to invest in the business, retailers don’t really take well to brands that just kind of float around, you know, because they recruit, they, you know, they require people to, you know, to invest in brands, that’s how retailers make money, so it was, it was slowly getting discontinued when I, when I, when I got involved.
Kara Goldin 7:25
You didn’t have food experience, food industry experience. Do you think that that was a disadvantage or an advantage?
Charles Coristine 7:35
I think initially probably it was a disadvantage, you know. I, I remember going to food shows and writing up deals with different retailers and having no idea what I was doing and getting taken advantage of in a big way, you know, I’m putting together together promotional calendars that were probably ridiculous, you know, I was pretty trusting and I think at the beginning I probably got taken advantage of a lot, but maybe my naivete had me look at them, look at the space in a different way. I learned pretty quickly, because the money drifted out of my account pretty quickly, and I also, another thing I did is, like, you know, I thought that any kind of distribution was good distribution, and I, and I put my products in places potentially where they weren’t set up to thrive, and I lost a lot of slotting dollars at the beginning. I remember making a, you know, a $250,000 investment in slotting that I lost within six months, and it was like, wow, that was, that was fast.
Kara Goldin 8:38
So, when you took this brand over. How many SKUs? I guess you kind of did relaunch. How many SKUs did you go ahead and launch with? Then did you do any SKU rationalization, or what was kind of the thinking?
Charles Coristine 8:52
Yeah, so they had, they had a couple popcorns, there were kettle corns, and they had a line of potato sticks, like a French fried potato stick. I realized pretty quickly that I was, as I was losing distribution and potentially losing some of my distributors, like Unifi and Kahe, that unless I came up with a product, a new product line, really quickly, that I was going to lose potentially the biggest asset that I had. You know, the previous guys had done a really good job, they had gotten a lot of distribution, and I, unbeknownst to me, because I didn’t really know much about food, was the asset that they had was that they had warehouse slots in every Unifying Kehe warehouse across the United States, you know, and I, at that time, I’m like, at first I’m like, well, this is probably a bad investment, but I realized pretty quickly, you know, after I went to go visit Una Unify in Rhode Island, that if I could keep all those slots, that I had a huge leg up. So I quickly launched a line of black bean pop chips called Chia Chris, and it was wasn’t a home run. By any means, but it was, it was a solid single, maybe a shallow double, meaning that I picked up some distribution, and I was able to, like, swap out, you know, some of the products that weren’t doing so well with something that had a little wind at its back. I also was able to get a couple of Whole Foods regions to bite on, and, you know, and I got Wegmans, was an early adapter, because I went to school in upstate New York, so I, there was the first time I, you know, I saw a little, I saw a little success, but that was a, that was a copay product, so we, the margins on it still weren’t great, so we were, we were still bleeding a lot of cash at, you know, at that time,
Kara Goldin 10:41
so at what point did you go ahead and invest then in in manufacturing, and for those who may, might not know what we mean by that, can you share the details?
Charles Coristine 10:51
Yeah, I want to say it, I’ve been pretty quick. I bought the business in November of 2011 I want to say that I made the decision to buy some popcorn slash puff equipment, you know, probably within a year, so maybe the end of 2012 and then we had to, like, install it in this, you know, in our first factory was like a 5000 square foot, you know, looked like a like a welding shop that we converted into a factory, it was, it was pretty unimpressive, but for me it was pretty exciting.
Kara Goldin 11:23
That’s awesome. And do you still have those factories today?
Charles Coristine 11:28
No, we’ve, we’ve since moved. We’ve moved into, we now have two factories, soon to have three. There’s still.. you mean, there our footprint is pretty, because popcorn and extrusion aren’t like these huge lines, we can fit like eight production lines into like a 25 30,000 square foot facility, so our facilities are pretty small, you know. We have two, let’s say 30,000 square foot facilities, and we open up, you know, maybe a 60,000 square foot facility downstairs, so they’re pretty small footprint
Kara Goldin 12:00
when you think about the brand LesserEvil, what do you think the consumer thinks? What are like the top things about the brand? It’s it, and what I mean by this, when you’re launching a brand and scaling brand, the consumer has to be able to define it, or almost tell their friends this is what this brand is, and so, for hint, the company that I launched and scaled was it’s an unsweetened flavored water, and so there was a definition behind it, and then we came out with different flavors along the way, but it was something that the consumer, they might have a favorite skew, but they go try another one, because they trusted the brand. What would you say about LesserEvil?
Charles Coristine 12:45
Well, I think at the beginning it was like the, it was the guru or the Buddha guy on the front, and it was pretty good tasting popcorn. I think we became known, you know, for organic, our commitment to organics and to non-seed oils and biodegradable packaging. I mean, I wanted the brand to be about affordable wellness that has soul, and I think that that’s.. I don’t know whether all consumers feel that, but I think there are some consumers believe that that makes any sense.
Kara Goldin 13:15
Yeah, I think that is very relevant. So, as you’ve talked to consumers over the year, and I’m sure done all kinds of focus groups or surveys. Consumer behavior is sometimes surprising, right? Especially when you think, like, oh, I’ve got to launch innovation because Whole Foods told me, or Wegmans told me, like, what do you got that’s new? But then you look at the consumer, what have you learned about the consumer that maybe is counter to what new founders think about?
Charles Coristine 13:47
I think it’s about taste and value. I mean, and I think it’s about great packaging too, because I thought, like, if you put this amazing product together, that the consumer would find it eventually, but I’ve seen, as we’ve iterated on our packaging that great packaging is, you know, is a multiplier, and if you, if you’re going to spend money, and one of the best investments I spent money on was doing a rebrand in 2018 and when I did the rebrand, our velocities definitely went up, you know, 20 30% so it’s definitely worth spending some money on.
Kara Goldin 14:25
That’s so interesting. What do you think? What it was about the rebrand that made such a significant difference, you know. It’s interesting while you’re thinking about that. I’ll tell you, when we did a rebrand, we were forced to do a rebrand for Hint early on, because New York City had a bottle tax that you had to put on the bottle, and they were going to pull us off the shelf, and we’re running around trying to get the bottles off the shelf, and then we’re like, maybe we should just change the labels, and no one could do a clear label, which was our original label, was fruit. On it, and so we were like, let’s just do a white label, and it, it literally, like, in some locations, 10x the brand. I mean, it was like people could finally see the brand coming off the shelf, and it was kind of like, what were we thinking? I mean, and nobody caught it beforehand, but is there anything in particular in your rebrand that really caused
Charles Coristine 15:25
it? You know, Les Revo at the time was, it was kind of like the master brand, and was tucked up into the corner, and I had all these other kind of like sub brands, so I had, you know, Buddha Bowl and Green Elephant, and all these different things, and nothing was unified, and people didn’t recognize that sometimes, you know, that this was part of the same brand, or whatever. So I dropped, I dropped the name LesserEvil as the mat, you know, really front and center, and the brand became all about LesserEvil. And then I tightened the lines, you know, the Buddha, the laughing Buddha, which was on the package. I tightened it around, and I made him a guru, and I wanted to keep the same spiritual message, but the guru became something more symbolic of what I thought was important, which was that, you know, wellness starts within, and you are your own guru, and no matter what anyone else says, did your intuitive intuition is the most important part of wellness, you know, and that’s something that I really believed in, because I had, you know, I started my meditation practice, and I, you know, I found that happiness and calmness, and it was all found inside, and the more I looked externally for that, the less happy I was, and that if I just simplified my life to a certain degree, that you know everything else kind of fit into place.
Kara Goldin 16:50
I love that so much. So, you launched products like Moon Yins and Chismos, which are really awesome. So, like, what’s the innovation process like for you all today? Now that you’re a national brand, and I guess to some extent you’re also sitting inside of a larger company. Did Moon that came out before you were acquired?
Charles Coristine 17:12
That came out, our commitment to that came out before. So I kind of had to come to Jesus on that. Like, I used to be create products that I loved myself, you know, like super bites and paleopuffs, and all these different things, and they were somewhat aimed at the natural food shopper, you know, that like the same things that I liked, you know, obviously it was sales focused, but it also felt like I wanted to create the most good for the most amount of people, and that if I was creating kind of these niche products that I was not going to, you know, kind of reach deep into America, and so I made a decision, like, okay, you know, is black beans something that everybody wants to eat, and no, I mean, it was quite obvious to me that if you look at Spins data, you know, or Sukana, or Nielsen, or whatever, that texture is important, so how you know why not go after some of these like bigger SKUs that are potentially yes, made with or with corn, which is probably not as high value of an ingredient, but it’s it’s something that more people want to eat, so I decided I was like, okay, these are the.. this is why don’t I take what I’m doing in popcorn and move it to something into a category that’s even even bigger than popcorn, which is the puff category, and I had the extrusion, you know, the extruders that I had already purchased, because that’s what I had been making paleo puffs on, and you know, I think it was a pretty good move.
Kara Goldin 18:43
You guys did such a great job. My son was home and ended up taking the entire both bags at one point, so he was quite happy about the product. So really great. So you came from Wall Street. So, what lessons from your Wall Street career have actually been super useful in building a consumer brand, and what lessons from Wall Street turned out to be completely wrong.
Charles Coristine 19:09
Well, let’s start with the one that I think worked well to my benefit, was it was I was very used to being wrong more than I was right when I was on Wall Street, and typically you know it’s against human nature to, you know, when you’re wrong to admit you’re wrong really quickly and change direction, but in the natural food, what in what I chose to do was, I, when I first launched, started launching products, I failed, and I failed on a lot of products, I think entrepreneurs hold, you know, they, they think they have this great product, and they hold on to it too long, and they bleed too much cash, you know, investing in something that velocities tell them that they shouldn’t be, you know, investing in. So, if you study the data really closely, you know, it can reveal a lot, you know, in a particularly short period of time, so. I just kept launching new things and discontinuing things until I found something that really worked, and then when I found the thing that really worked, that’s when I started putting the pedal to the metal.
Kara Goldin 20:11
What was the thing that really worked? It
Charles Coristine 20:13
was the Buddha bowl popcorn, the skew that I made with coconut oil and Himalayan salt.
Kara Goldin 20:19
I love it.
Charles Coristine 20:20
You wouldn’t have thought you would have thought that organic coconut oil, extra virgin coconut oil at the time, would be somewhat niche, so like completely unexpected that it was gonna like when I first launched it, I was like, well, this is, this is a bit of a winger, and it turned out that, like, a the pot, the coconut oil, when you cook with it, it obviously gets, you know, it has a very strong taste, but when it goes on popcorn, it actually tastes really buttery, and popcorn, for whatever reason, hides the hides the coconutty taste to it, and I, so I was very surprised at how well it did, you know, right, right out of the gates,
Kara Goldin 20:58
so in 2025 Hershey acquired LesserEvil. How did you know was the right time and the right partner to work with?
Charles Coristine 21:08
Okay, so the right time was was when you know kind of like I kind of like being in control, and we were getting to a size where some of the retailers were starting to dictate terms to us a little bit, well, not dictate terms, but it felt like if we lost some distribution, or that, that I couldn’t. I always wanted to grow here. Hopefully, this is helpful. I always wanted to be profitable, you know. You know, and I wanted to grow at 40 50% a year, and because we’re vertically integrated, I couldn’t grow much faster than that. You know, that’s that was kind of like how fast I could. And then there came a time where some some retailers pushed our growth so hard that I felt that if I lost distribution that I couldn’t keep that growth rate up anymore, so the minute you feel like you know what, if you know things could, you could get up, the apple cart could get flipped over. I realized I’m like, okay, well, if if I’m providing value to my shareholders, it’s probably time now for them to take some risk off the table, and obviously I was a very large shareholder for her company, so I think people kind of agreed with me on that.
Kara Goldin 22:27
Yeah, it’s so interesting. And then Hershey, why Hershey?
Charles Coristine 22:31
Well, I wanted someone with experience in the snack space. I was very friendly with the guy who ran M and A at Hershey. I liked the fact that Milton Hershey had a school that 25% of the proceeds of the company go to fund the school, so it had a nice feel to it, and ultimately they said that they weren’t going to change things, that they believed in what we were doing, and they wanted to continue to fuel our growth as is, you know, obviously we’re going to, we’re going to expand into a bunch more categories, which is really exciting. So I’m excited about our growth plans. They obviously give us, you know, a much bigger sales force in, you know, and they look at the business a little bit differently. It’s, it’s been, it’s been good so far,
Kara Goldin 23:20
interesting, and probably a bit educational too, because that’s all new for you too, right? How they, how they work.
Charles Coristine 23:27
Oh, the integration part of it has been, has been a lot of, you know, has been, has been some work, you know. I hear I was like thinking, oh, things are gonna, you know, things are gonna relax a little bit. I’ve got some more help, or whatever, but you know, we’ve got to get ourselves up to Hershey standards, and look at, look, you know, and look at the world similarly to the how they do, but maintain, you know, our kind of like our renegade upstart innovation kind of, so we’re trying to be big and small at the same time, which is, you know, a type, you know, a type rope to walk across,
Kara Goldin 24:00
that’s amazing, so I mean it seems like such a great fit for LesserEvil, so and such a great acquisition for Hershey too. So, what’s something about building a, I guess, 200 million plus consumer brand that people consistently underestimate? I mean, I think this speaks to there’s different stages along the way. You grew this brand from a million to that, and I, as I’ve been interviewed about it’s all hard, right? There’s different stages along the way where it’s just
Charles Coristine 24:34
no stages, those stages are easy. I thought I could build the brand in five years. It, I think, it took two and a half times, three times longer than I’d actually thought it was going to take. Just because you make money doesn’t mean you free cash flow, and operate operational leverage is like massively important, you know. So, you gotta like, you’ve got to utilize your lines and cover your fixed costs. Once you start doing that, and it takes a while to do that’s that’s when you start to feel some ease, and that probably took me 10 years to do. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t understand that. I think partnerships are much more important. I think a lot of entrepreneurs want to go, you know, all over the place, they want to, they would, they think that ACD is like super, super important. I don’t think it’s as important. I think you want to build partnerships slowly over time and be very loyal to those partners, and I think that that helped me out in a big way. You don’t need a lot of people, I think if you get three, four, or five people, all with a great attitude, or willing to hustle, you can do a lot of stuff with a very small team, and I think that when people have transferable skill sets and everybody can kind of work, work with everybody else, and kind of in different departments and stuff like that, that bode very well for us. We, we kept our costs super, super low, and that you know, and I think the brand message was felt so, so you know, so closely by the team members that we all could talk interchangeably about the brand.
Kara Goldin 26:13
I love that. Well, thank you so much, Charles. This is amazing, and such a great conversation. Congratulations to you and your team on all you built and the acquisition as well. Very excited to see where less LesserEvil goes, and for everyone who has not tried LesserEvil, get at least one bag, many many bags of LesserEvil, and follow the brand, we’ll have all the info in the show notes, and thank you again, Charles. And until next time on The Kara Goldin Show, thanks again for listening to The Kara Goldin Show. If you would please give us a review, and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit, and of course, feel free to subscribe, so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too. So feel free to DM me, and if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Thanks for listening. And goodbye for now.
