Taking Your Brand Global: Rachel Carrasco of Baken Shares Marketing Insights at GrowthCon 2024

At GrowthCon 2024, Rachel Carrasco shared how it has always been her plan to make premium snack food Baken into a global brand.

For Rachel Carrasco, it was always part of her plan to take her premium snack brand Baken to the global stage. Speaking at The Business Manual’s GrowthCon 2024, Carrasco provided valuable insights on what it takes to create a global brand for the attendees of the entrepreneurial summit. GrowthCon is the premier conference for entrepreneurs and is on its second year this 2024.

Rachel Carrasco spoke at the session, Entrepreneurial Growth: Building Essential Skills for Success, with speakers from Peddlr, Avocadoria, Parlon, and DMark. Together, they provided attendees of the conference with knowledge and tools to achieve growth in their respective businesses. Carrasco’s focus was on marketing and branding, bringing her experience working with international brands in luxury and in fast-moving consumer goods, and as a marketing consultant with her company Rache.

International Experience, Global Vision

Baken is a premium all-bacon snack and confectionery brand that began as Rachel Carrasco’s passion project. She recalls, “As a kid, I used to candy my own bacon. And I would eat it with brown sugar, and rice.” When this lifelong passion for bacon met the inspiration she found from an all-bacon deli in Cape Town, Baken was born. 

After a long career working for the lifestyle and luxury industries, Carrasco created Baken, and, in many ways, the brand itself is a combination of lifestyle product and luxury experience.

“I have always been in the luxury and lifestyle industry,” Carrasco says. “I live in Singapore. I’ve been there for the last 12 years. And there I have been working with a lot of MNCs [multi-national corporations]. And it’s been a very, very diverse experience.”

Baken, like Carrasco, is Filipino but with a global vision.

“Yes, we’re distributed here in the Philippines,” she says. “But my vision, of course, having been living overseas, was to always make it a global brand.”

Baken is well on its way to conquering the world. Today, the brand is already sold online in Singapore and Australia, and this 2024 is the year the company began preparations for global distribution. The brand will enter Vietnam and Dubai markets in the first quarter of 2025.

Building a Global Brand

To build the Baken brand, Carrasco shares that she looked at the market and found that her product had something unique to offer.

She shares, “What I wanted to do was ready-to-eat crispy, that’s the keyword, crispy, bacon in a bag. And everything that was in the market were jerky, meat sticks, bacon-flavored potato chips.”

Yet it wasn’t all smooth sailing. Building a global brand also came with unique challenges. “Of course, of all the meat that I had to pick, it had to be pork. And it’s super highly regulated in the world,” Carrasco explains.

With Baken’s operations in the Philippines, Carrasco had to ensure that Baken products would pass international standards both locally and abroad.

“Currently, our direction is to build the perfect plug-and-play brand model here,” she continues. “Then once we perfect that, we will replicate that overseas. So that’s where we are in our business right now.”

Inspiration for Entrepreneurs

Rachel Carrasco and Baken are proof that Filipino startup companies can make it in the world. At the end of the GrowthCon 2024 session, Carrasco’s parting words are advice for young entrepreneurs and startup companies who may also want to create a global brand. She says:

“You have to stop beating yourself with yourself. It’s important because you are your biggest critic. It doesn’t matter what other people are thinking or saying. At the end of the day, if you are criticizing your own work, that’s going to make it difficult for you to move forward as an entrepreneur. You have to get out of your own way first.”