Ronnie moved from Chicago to Seattle in 2008 and couldn't find the food he grew up on: square cut tavern-style pizza with sweet sauce, hot dogs with sport peppers, Italian beef with giardiniera. So he started making it himself. The pizza sauce came first, then his own dough, then a self-blended cheese shredded from cheese he imported from Wisconsin. Giardiniera took the longest, over a decade of batches, until friends and family convinced him it was good enough to sell. He started building the business in 2022, and by 2024 Ronnie's Giardiniera was out in the world.

Before Hypernatural, Ronnie hadn't used AI for anything. Video was already part of how he marketed the business, just entirely handheld, shot on his phone.

Ronnie was already doing a lot right: he kept his feed full and stayed tied to whatever felt relevant that week. Separately, he had an influencer he pays to post recipe videos on his behalf, every other week. That worked, but it meant he wasn't always the one deciding what got made or when, and it left the rest of his feed as one continuous stream of handheld clips.

This past summer sharpened the picture further. A run of partnerships (a collab with Pagliacci Pizza, a Crate & Barrel tie-in around Hulu's The Bear, a Today Show appearance) kept sales elevated for months. It showed him just how much staying visible and relevant actually moved the business. The lesson wasn't that he needed the partnerships themselves, it was that he needed a way to create that same kind of relevance and attention on his own, without waiting for the next big partnership to land.

What changed things was a video Hypernatural made for him, using his own product, before he'd fully committed. "They went out on a limb and tried to make a video with our product and just showed me how the tool worked," he says. "That connection, their ambition to go out and track me down and show me what they did, proved to me that they were absolutely somebody who I should continue to talk to."

From there his workflow became: build a base concept, generate, go back in and tweak specific words or shots until it's right. No full rebuilds. It took some time to find that rhythm. His early videos took a while to land. As he's gotten more comfortable, and with Hypernatural's newer workflow giving him more flexibility and an easier way to edit, what used to take him a while now takes minutes.

When a raccoon meme called Jimothy started trending, he saw the opening: a simple raccoon, tagged with the trend, holding a jar of Ronnie's, saying it's "freaking delicious." Thirty minutes, start to finish.

Jimothy is proof it's not about how polished something looks, it's whether the idea lands. Ronnie already has a good instinct for what's relevant, interesting, or trending. What he didn't have was a fast, easy way to turn that instinct into something posted. Now he does, and he can do it himself.

It also let him mix in more polished, produced shots, so the feed doesn't read as one continuous run of the same kind of clip.

It's pushed him to rethink his whole approach. His early instinct was to treat this like old-school TV commercials, a polished ten-second spot and hope people watch. He's moving away from that now, toward content that either makes people laugh or actually answers a question in the first few seconds, instead of just being a novelty someone watches and forgets.

Ronnie's day-to-day organic posts, mostly photos, typically pull a small number of interactions. The Jimothy video showed a real bump over that baseline, more likes, more comments than he usually sees. It's not a huge number on its own, but it's the clearest side-by-side he has of a video outperforming what he'd normally post himself.

Before this, most of his video content came through the same influencer who handles his recipe videos, posted from her own account, where videos regularly do well, sometimes 150 to 400+ views. That's a real channel for him and one he plans to keep. What Hypernatural adds is a second lane: he no longer has to wait on that relationship to get a video out. He can test an idea himself, same day, and see how it performs against his own baseline.

It also gave him a repeatable idea, actually two. He's tying Ronnie's into whatever's trending that week (world leaders, viral memes, whatever's in the feed) and getting a giardiniera angle out the door fast. And he's started using it for seasonal promos too, the Fourth of July, Father's Day, the kind of calendar moments that used to mean either scrambling for a photo or skipping it entirely. Now it's a format he can turn to instead of letting the moment pass.

Right now, Ronnie's proven the workflow works for him, and he wants to keep getting better at it. The goal is speed: being able to spot a trending moment or an upcoming holiday and get something funny and relevant out the door quickly, on his own schedule, without waiting on anyone.

He's already sketching the next one: world leaders uniting over a jar of giardiniera. It's part of a bigger push to build out Ronnie's organic social from the ground up, rather than depending on partnerships he can't control or predict.

His advice to other food founders weighing whether this is worth it isn't hedged. "I don't think skepticism should last more than half a day," he says. "Just go look at it, play with it, throw a ten second clip up to your followers and see what feedback you get."