Hess Street Foods swapped hours of scrolling competitor feeds for KeepTabz CPG competitive intelligence. See how a weekly email now steers pricing and ads.
.png)
“I hope that every CPG business looks at this and understands that this is something that’s gonna help you grow.”
Maria Flores, Founder and CEO, Hess Street Foods
Maria Flores runs Hess Street Foods a chorizo seasoning company out of San Antonio, and for most of its life she was also its competitive intelligence department. Between bookkeeping, production and recipe development, she found time to scroll the Instagram and TikTok accounts of brands like Fishwife and Fly By Jing, trying to work out what they were promoting and where. Today a weekly email does that job, and a printed KeepTabz report runs her marketing meetings. This is what CPG competitive intelligence looks like at an emerging food brand, and why Maria thinks any consumer brand, or any agency that serves one, should be doing it.
Hess Street Foods makes Abuela’s chorizo seasoning in three versions: Original, Verde and Spanish. The recipe comes from Maria’s grandmother, a chorizo maker from Saltillo, Mexico, who handwrote it and passed it down. The company takes its name from the San Antonio street where her grandparents settled after arriving from Mexico in 1955. Maria launched the business in 2023, won first place out of more than 500 entries in H-E-B’s 2024 Quest for Texas Best, and now sells at H-E-B, Central Marketand Pullman Market, with Amazon added recently. The seasoning is plant-based, gluten-free and preservative-free: mix it with ground meat, heat, and dinner is done in under ten minutes. In a category where shelf space and attention both go to whoever is louder that week, knowing what other emerging food brands are doing is part of the job.
Before KeepTabz, competitor research at Hess Street Foods meant opening the social apps and looking. Maria and her team would pull up the accounts of competitors and brands they admired, check their promos, their ads and the kind of content they posted on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, and try to draw conclusions.
“It would take a lot of time,” she said. “We were not consistent. We would have very little time to really dive into all the little details of every single strategy.”
That is the honest state of competitive intelligence at most emerging CPG brands: the founder is the researcher, and the research happens when there is a gap in the day. Maria was also running operations, production, bookkeeping and new recipes. Competitor tracking lost the fight for her calendar most weeks, and when she first came across KeepTabz she nearly passed on it for a different reason: she assumed it was built for software companies.
“When I first saw KeepTabz, I thought KeepTabz was just for SaaS businesses,” Maria said. “To my surprise, it’s exactly what I was doing, but in a faster way, smarter way, more info.”
The same twelve signals KeepTabz watches for a software company map cleanly onto a food brand. The Facebook and Instagram ad libraries show the actual creative competitors are paying to run. Website change tracking catches a new promo or bundle the day it goes up. Newsletter tracking captures the discount that only goes out to a brand’s email list. Facebook organic, Reddit and Google Reviews carry far more weight for a consumer brand than a B2B review site ever will.
What sold Maria was not the coverage list. It was how the information arrived. “The way the data was presented to us not just saved us money, but it was so clear to see what direction we need to move.”
The first concrete example came from promotions. “KeepTabz presented us all the different promos that Fishwife and Fly By Jing were running on their websites. And we understood that we were lacking that piece.” From there the picture filled in: what competitor ads looked like, where they ran, how to split budget between Meta and Google, and what kind of content and collaborations were working.
Maria’s routine is built around two things: the weekly email and the printed report.
The weekly email, in her words: “Fishwife is now in Costco, and then Somos is running a back-to-school campaign, and Siete is getting ready for Hispanic [Heritage] Month. I’m like, red flag, I haven’t done this.”
Maria has not put a number on the hours saved, and we are not going to invent one. What she can point to is a set of decisions that would not have happened otherwise:
For a founder who is also the head of operations, the value is that the research happens without her. The decisions still take her judgment. The digging no longer takes her weekends. Agencies that run marketing for CPG clients will recognize the shape of this: it is the competitive briefing every client wishes you were already sending them.
“If KeepTabz were to disappear tomorrow, I would have to find time to keep doing what I’m doing now because it has helped the business so much. Maybe it would have to be Saturdays, but it would be a loss definitely.”
The restaurant and food service push is the current priority, and Maria is using the collaboration intel from KeepTabz to decide who to approach first. The next layer is benchmarking. “It’s a great tool to situate yourself in the industry and understand if you’re behind, if you’re ahead, if you’re right where you should be at.” For a brand two years into retail, knowing which of those three it is, week to week, is most of the game.
See what your competitors are running this week. Start a free 14-day KeepTabz trial, or book a demo if you manage competitive research for CPG clients.
.png)
