Founder Feature: Dina DiCenso of RIND
Dina DiCenso, co-founder of RIND, a Brooklyn-based vegan cheese company, explains how they developed proprietary fermentation cultures to create aged Camembert-blue and blue cheeses, as well as a vegetable-based deli line called Veggie Underground. She details the strategic decision to bootstrapping the business with a four-person team, allowing them to compete against heavily funded private equity-backed rivals by focusing on product merit and direct consumer education through demos. DiCenso discusses their distribution strategy, which places RIND in high-end retail like Whole Foods and Erewhon, while targeting food service scalability for Veggie Underground, noting their recent appearance at the White House and success at the Shelfie awards.