[00:00:05] John Craven: Hey, Mike, can I take a second to clear up a common misconception? Sure, but I think I know what you're gonna say. Nosh Live is not a trade show. Right, and to be clear, we love trade shows.
[00:00:14] Carol Ortenberg: They're high-energy events and often are an instrumental tool for your sales team.
[00:00:17] John Craven: But your business is more than just pitching and interacting with retailers and distributors.
[00:00:21] Carol Ortenberg: Most brands come to Nosh Live in grow my business mode and take the time to learn what's next. You'll get to meet with experts from designers to packaging suppliers to co-packers to ingredients providers and investors. Everyone that a CEO needs to partner with is there.
[00:00:34] John Craven: Yeah, and if you're not in this room, you're passing by a lot of opportunities that other brands will be taking advantage of. Tickets and more information can be found at noshlive.com. And now, Taste Radio Insider.
[00:00:53] Ray Latif: Hey everyone, I'm Ray Latif and you're listening to episode 35 of Taste Radio Insider. I'm with my Bevanite colleagues, John Craven, Mike Schneider and Jon Landis. We're recording from the Taste Radio studio in Watertown, Mass. And in this episode, we discuss whether kumbaya and kombucha are mutually exclusive. Later in the show, we chew the fat, literally, with Suzie Yorke, the founder and CEO of Love Good Fats, a fast-growing brand of keto-friendly snack bars. Just a reminder to our listeners, if you like what you hear on Taste Radio Insider, please share the podcast with friends and colleagues. And of course, we'd love it if you could rate us on iTunes or your listening platform of choice. All right, guys, we're going to flip a coin. You guys want to talk about that Vita Coco urine stunt, or do you want to talk about some controversial comments that GT Dave made in a recent profile in Forbes?
[00:01:43] Carol Ortenberg: Both of course, it's a two headed coin.
[00:01:48] Jon Landis: Coconut water is still a pretty polarizing thing after all these years. So it's pretty, pretty creative campaign that VitaCoco just launched, which is worth checking out if you haven't seen it. Basically giving Vita Coco people that they claim are, I think they call them like the angriest people on the internet or something. And one that made me chuckle was this woman drinks it and she's like, I'd drink this if someone gave it to me for free. Classic, you know?
[00:02:19] Carol Ortenberg: Yeah, it's classic. I mean, the whole idea of I'd rather, you know, drink urine than coconut water was... I couldn't believe they went there and actually, you know, allegedly filled a jar.
[00:02:32] Ray Latif: I mean, where do we send it? Well, it's not allegedly. They said they did. Yeah, I know they said they did. I don't believe it. That's an awful lot. Well, the way it happened was this guy said, I will never drink coconut water. Right. I would rather drink the urine of your social media coordinator. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:02:47] Jon Landis: Which is a weird, weird thing to say.
[00:02:49] Ray Latif: It's kind of a weird thing. Well, this guy's a pretty well-known troll, so. But then they, then Vita Coco responded with a picture of that social media coordinator holding a jar. Hopefully not of real urine. Well, yeah, with the... They say it was? Yes.
[00:03:03] Jon Landis: It would be weird just to say.
[00:03:05] Ray Latif: Yeah. And basically the caption that just said address and the question mark.
[00:03:09] John Craven: So yeah. This all goes a little too far for me. I mean, personally, I get, you know, trying to be edgy and I don't know, when you start associating food and beverage products with things like urine, it's like... Yeah, it's not super appealing to me all of a sudden.
[00:03:25] Carol Ortenberg: I give him credit for that. Yes, it's edgy. Yes, it's over the top, but it definitely accomplished the mission. And, you know, yeah, here we are talking like it's on brand for Vita Coco.
[00:03:35] Jon Landis: We're talking about coconut water.
[00:03:37] Ray Latif: Exactly. Yeah. More specifically, Vita Coco. So, right. Is there anyone else? Oh, burn.
[00:03:44] Jon Landis: No, I mean, I think they've, they've done a really good job of, you know, basically staying the leader in this category that for sure has seen its gold rush of everybody wanting to get into it and it being sort of that cool, trendy ingredient. And then that sort of tapered off and other stuff kind of took its place. That hasn't stopped Vita Coco, right? So props to them for putting something like this out there, too.
[00:04:09] John Craven: Well, I know Thirsty Buddha is going very strong in Canada, and they are huge fans of the podcast. So shout out to that whole team up there who is kicking butt north of us. And hey, Harmless Harvest.
[00:04:24] Ray Latif: Mad love. Yeah, well, I'll be speaking with the co-founder and CEO Vita Coco. That's Mike Kerbin for a future episode of Taste Radio. Super good dude. Perhaps I'll have to bring this up. Perhaps not. We'll see how it goes.
[00:04:38] Carol Ortenberg: I love seeing him at trade shows because he's always got the secret vials ready to go. I love secret vials.
[00:04:44] Ray Latif: Secret vials of what, Mike?
[00:04:46] Carol Ortenberg: Whatever he's working on. It's awesome.
[00:04:48] Jon Landis: He gave us some CBD coconut water.
[00:04:51] Ray Latif: CBD coconut water was the last secret vial. Indeed. Now, we have had the founder of GT's Living Foods on the podcast a couple of different times. That man is GT Dave. He was recently profiled in Forbes magazine. The title of the article is Tempest in a Tea Bottle, Billionaire GT Dave Brewed a Fortune, open parentheses, and Plenty of Bitterness, close parentheses, from Kombucha. A few controversial comments made in that article ruffled a few feathers, to say the least. Just one example. If your claim to fame is that you're in amber bottles or that you're three cool hipsters behind this product and that's it, your days are numbered, in my opinion. We all know who he's talking about. In fact, the founders of HealthAid knew who he was talking about and they, well, they weren't very happy about it. One of the co-founders and the CEO of Healthy Daina Trout wrote on LinkedIn that read in part, when the 800 pound gorilla in our industry takes a pot shot at competitors, I can only assume he feels threatened. That was followed by about 52 other comments, including some responses from GT Dave himself. John Craven, where do you stand on all this? You know, you went to kombucha con about a month ago, seemed all hunky-dory, right? But then this happens, what's going on?
[00:06:14] Jon Landis: Well, I mean, I think these companies have been rather competitive with one another for a while now, especially as you have a variety of brands that are growing fast, have significant capital behind them. And of course you still have GT, you know, the category leader growing as well and, you know, broadening his base. I mean, I think a lot of this is just sort of unfortunate, maybe industry gossip that we're perhaps, you know, just furthering by talking about it here. But, you know, I think that'll blow over and what people read out of that, you know, I'm not really sure that that Forbes article accomplished what GT was setting out to do. I'm assuming that he probably wasn't looking for Forbes to anoint him a billionaire. He seems pretty comfortable and confident in what he has and who he is. So I do think, you know, sort of the positive of all of this is that people will see this, you know, things like here's this billionaire that you don't know. You know, certainly the way they laid it out and describe it, you know, GT sounds like a pretty eccentric, interesting guy, which which he is. And I think it's something that probably will, similar to how we were just talking about coconut water, will, you know, get kombucha on people's minds. And I do think that it. you know, talks about this sort of pure, unique product that, again, I think it will sort of translate and trickle down to other brands in the category. And let's face it, I mean, it is a, you know, sizable category in business at this point. And I don't personally think there's anything wrong with people profiting from that, GT, HealthAid, or anyone else. So that's my two cents.
[00:07:56] Carol Ortenberg: I think GT is a purist and I would say that when Dinah says he feels he must be feeling threatened, that's accurate. Maybe not for the reason that she thinks, which is, you know, we're taking market share, but he's a purist who has a definition for what kombucha is. He gave a million dollars to KBI, Kombucha Brewers International, to protect that definition. The trade group.
[00:08:20] Jon Landis: Right, the trade group. What's interesting in that article and sort of the place that maybe threatens what GT's been trying to do is that, you know, he talks about like newcomers trying to control the narrative. And, you know, the reality is that as time goes on, he has to sort of share the narrative with companies like HealthAid and BrewDoctor and other ones that have scale and have, you know, sophisticated marketing machines. You know, what's interesting is that he's kind of the founder of this category, but he didn't really control the narrative of the category and its inception. It was much later that he started kind of being more outward facing. So the category kind of had its own narrative for a while, and then he kind of grabbed it and ran with it. And now the category is getting bigger and it has to be shared, which I think is it's good. I mean, you can't have a category that just has one person controlling the narrative like any of these that have, you know, vibrant competition and a lot of dollars in them and a lot of consumers consuming them that that narrative is broader than, you know, just the CEO of one company. So I don't know, it's in part of the evolution. And it's something that maybe feels unsettling and that it is kind of outside of his control too.
[00:09:36] Ray Latif: I think one of the things that GT seemed really concerned about private equity money and strategic money influencing the future of the kombucha category and leading to innovation that is what he called, in quotes, bastardized kombucha. And, you know, he called out some of the new flavors that HealthAid recently came out with, a cherry berry tropical punch. He says they make it basic, they make it mainstream. Now, you know, you can have your own thoughts on that, but it also gets more people to get to the kombucha category. Maybe that's an entry point to his product. So, I mean, I think there's a bunch of different ways you can look at this. I think obviously, you know, some of the comments and the quotes did not put him in a good light, but you know, to everyone's point, you know, this kind of conversation is important.
[00:10:27] Carol Ortenberg: Yeah. And we've seen the way that HealthAid brews their product and it's old school. They make every batch with a two liter mason jar.
[00:10:36] Jon Landis: Seems pretty authentic to me. To me too.
[00:10:38] Ray Latif: Now we just got to go visit GT David, his facility.
[00:10:41] Jon Landis: We've been there, we just can't go inside the facility, which is a little different than some of the other ones. How did Forbes get access to it. There's plenty of photos showing stuff going in a bottle. That's not the part we want to see. I mean, that's like, you know, here's where we put the labels on. Like, cool. Didn't really need to see that. But, um, no, I think, look, this is, you know, to your point before about like the kombucha gone thing. I mean, you know, it's like, he's the cult leader of this category, which is, I think there's again, there's so much that's like, you know, neat and interesting about kombucha. And I feel like, you know, someday in the future, we'll look back on it and be like, wow, that was kind of kind of nuts. But even reading his story, as many times as I've heard it, it's like there's nothing typical about that, you know, his path. to starting his business and even all the way up to the fact that, you know, he's pretty damn wealthy and still owns the whole thing and is the biggest company in this category. Like, there's just nothing to compare that to. So I think a lot of people are, you know, jealous and envious and, you know, kind of want to knock him down.
[00:11:43] Carol Ortenberg: Like Forbes, they, I didn't really like the light that they painted him in, you know, as we've, we've met him, we've talked to him and he's, you know, he's a purist and I think they kind of painted him as more of a villain.
[00:11:53] Jon Landis: Well, and, you know, again, anytime you're putting this label of billionaire on someone, that's largely, I'm assuming, based on, you know, hypotheticals on paper versus, I don't know, maybe he has a room full of gold bars in one of his properties.
[00:12:08] Ray Latif: I didn't talk about that, but... Well, I did talk about his extensive contemporary art collection, which seemed pretty interesting. If you follow him on Instagram, you see some of that contemporary art. I hope that GT and Dinah can have a conversation that, you know, is not in the public. That is a little bit more.
[00:12:24] Jon Landis: I'm sure it'll blow over. They're both moving forward. So I think it's probably at some point, easy to get past the category.
[00:12:32] Ray Latif: Nothing wrong with that. John Craven, you know, what, what was this groundhog day? You're sipping on the same thing you were last week. What is this? You got the Proposition Cocktail mixer in front of you.
[00:12:40] Jon Landis: Once again, this stuff definitely has, has grown on me. I think after we talked about it on the last podcast, I took the bottle and drank it. It was good.
[00:12:50] Carol Ortenberg: I like the turmeric ginger one myself. I mean, I thought that one was good.
[00:12:53] Jon Landis: Look, this is like a full calorie beverage here. But it's not. Well, it is. It's seven servings. No, no, it's not.
[00:12:59] John Craven: No, it's one serving.
[00:13:01] Jon Landis: Oh, you're right. I can't read this little tiny print on here. Yeah, it's 26 calories. What's in this? I don't even know. I've just been drinking it. It had me at 15 milligrams of CBD.
[00:13:11] John Craven: It tastes like it's very sweet, but it's not. It's not that much sugar in the product. The one bottle is a full serving, and it's a ready-to-drink, non-alcoholic cocktail. It's not something that you're going to want to drink in guzzle. You definitely want to sip on this product. And, you know, for my wife who's training for a half marathon, you know, she's trying to cut back on the boozing and she loves this stuff. Just pour it over the rocks. It's ready to go. There's nothing to do.
[00:13:41] Carol Ortenberg: Did you notice when Landis talked about running, you reached out to me? I love that. Thanks, Landis.
[00:13:46] Ray Latif: The thing that we talked about last week with this product that still isn't entirely clear is why it has CBD in it.
[00:13:52] Jon Landis: Why shouldn't everything have CBD, right?
[00:13:56] Carol Ortenberg: It's for John Craven.
[00:13:57] Jon Landis: I think, you know, that's a great question that I don't know the answer to.
[00:14:02] Carol Ortenberg: I mean, I think in this case, it might be in lieu of the alcohol and say, hey, you want the impact, the functionality and a ready to drink.
[00:14:10] Ray Latif: But CBD doesn't have the same functionality that alcohol does.
[00:14:14] Carol Ortenberg: But it does have a chill factor to it like alcohol. It also doesn't take you to exactly the same place that a drink of whiskey takes you. But see, raise a naysayer because CBD doesn't do anything. I'm not a naysayer. It does nothing to you.
[00:14:27] Ray Latif: I've felt some effects of CBD. I wonder, and this is, I think, a question that everyone in the beverage industry or fruit industry asks themselves is, okay, CBD is a hot ingredient. Why should it be in my product?
[00:14:37] Carol Ortenberg: Well, we're trying to figure that out right now. These guys are testing it as an alcohol.
[00:14:41] Ray Latif: CBD or not. Alternative. It tastes pretty damn good. It's on my Instagram account. I took a picture of it the other day. I saw that. With a Y. Bev tirade. It's not Peptide. You're going to be following in someone entirely different if you follow Peptide.
[00:14:54] Jon Landis: The angriest guy in beverage.
[00:14:55] Ray Latif: Just follow Bev, not Mike. That's easier.
[00:14:58] Jon Landis: For all your latte picks.
[00:15:01] Ray Latif: All right. I think it's time we get to our interview with Suzie Yorke, who, as I mentioned at the top of the show, is the founder and CEO of Love Good Fats, a brand of high fat, low carb, and low sugar products. Bleeding with the message of fat is back, sugar is out, Love Good Fats launched in Canada in 2017 and quickly became one of the fastest growing snack bar brands in the country. Earlier this year, the brand made its U.S. debut at Whole Foods stores nationwide and is quickly expanding its presence at other retailers. In an interview with Nosh editor Carol Ortenberg, Susie spoke about her decision to launch the brand following a 25-year career as a marketing executive and how Love Good Fats got off to a fast start. She also discussed evolving consumer perception of healthy fats, the importance of staying on brand, and why the two-year-old company has invested in television advertising.
[00:15:56] Good Fats: Hi everyone, Carol Ortenberg, editor of Nosh here. And I'm joined by Suzie Yorke, who is the CEO and founder of Love Good Fats. Susie, thanks so much for being here with us in the studio. Pleasure. Thanks for having me. You just had an exciting couple of days. What are you doing up here in Boston?
[00:16:13] Taste Radio: We decided as a company to come and sponsor and have an exhibit here at the Boston Marathon and introduce our bars to thousands of runners. So we were here for the three days.
[00:16:27] Good Fats: Now, for our audience that didn't get to see you at the Boston Marathon, what's Love Good Fats?
[00:16:32] Taste Radio: Love Good Fats is a new brand of ridiculously delicious bars. They're very low in sugar, one to two grams. They're keto-friendly. They're like no other bar in the market, and we're now in the United States in all of the Whole Foods stores.
[00:16:48] Good Fats: Being at the Boston Marathon must be particularly exciting for you because you are an athlete as well. And that's kind of how this company came about.
[00:16:57] Taste Radio: Yep, it was the first time that I'm watching an event like this and not participating, so it was a little bit hard. But in my 20s, I started doing triathlons, and then I got hooked, and I did my first Ironman, and then another one, and another one, and then I took a nine-year break, and then I turned 40, so it was time to do something again, and then I did seven more. And I've done a couple of Bostons and marathons and bike races all in between there.
[00:17:25] Good Fats: And from talking to you, you know, I've learned that you were always cognizant of your health and what you were eating and that kind of guided you in starting Love Good Fats.
[00:17:34] Taste Radio: Yeah, for sure. I, as many, many millions of other North Americans, listen to the food guidelines and all of the information and the food products on the shelves, which said, eat low fat. stuck to a low-fat diet for 20 years trying to lose the last 15-20 pounds and trying to kind of feel a little bit better and I avoided butter and all good saturated fats and all fats and I hit my mid-40s and then I was not feeling great, I was on two prescription meds and I was just kind of struggling along as a single mom and traveling I read Nina Teichold's book, Big Fat Surprise, and it was at the Expo West. And that day I started eating fats and just cut out carbs and sugar and never looked back.
[00:18:21] Good Fats: And while you're a recent entrepreneur, you've spent years in this industry as we were chatting about, where did you kind of develop these skills? What companies and what did you learn along the way from working there?
[00:18:35] Taste Radio: Yeah, it's a very exciting journey. I turned 50 and decided to launch this brand. It was certainly a scary fork in the road for me because I had been 25 years of having a paycheck. So I'm a little bit different than many of the colleagues I'm meeting now that are serial entrepreneurs that seem to have all this experience of starting a company. For me, it was all new first time. However, the background that I have working at large multinationals from I started my career at Procter & Gamble and went to Frito-Lay and Heinz and then spend a chunk of time as a VP of marketing and weight loss, and particularly with Weight Watchers. I think the combination of all that experience, figuring out how to work on teams and high performance teams, figuring out how to reposition brands, launch brands, relaunch brands, optimize the ROI of marketing mix, and really dig deep into understanding consumer insights to understand how to better meet consumer needs. all kind of laid the foundation to my first venture as an entrepreneur at age 50.
[00:19:39] Good Fats: I like how you say first venture, like there are plenty more to come after this. And Love Good Fats has seen a really rapid rise. You went from zero stores to how many stores in under two years?
[00:19:51] Taste Radio: Yeah, the results of the launch of the Brad Avery been beyond anything as a board or myself had ever, ever imagined. They're unprecedented in Canada. We think we're smashing all records in terms of rapid growth. We sold our first case in September 2017 to UNFI and Whole Foods. We were in 10 stores and then about 100 by, 150 by Christmas 2017. And then 2018 just grew very quickly to the summer at about 1,600 stores and now we're going to be at about 2,500. 500 stores and we're, we think we're everywhere in Canada. Pretty much every store we're in we're outselling every other bar and yet still this weekend we met a bunch of Canadians that didn't know our bars so we know there's still a lot of upside but the revenue growth and the turns of our bars in Canada are absolutely unprecedented.
[00:20:49] Good Fats: What do you think starting in a market like Canada that's a little smaller than the American market and potentially a little less crowded in the bar space than the American market has allowed you to do as you move over here to the US?
[00:21:03] Taste Radio: Yeah, for sure for us as being in Canada and initially it was just me up to April 2018, being in Canada has allowed me to start a company with not a lot of funds initially and get some learnings. It's really, really hard to secure angel investment in Canada. Pretty much everyone told me there's no money here and bars, you know, you need a lot of money. So I don't know if I'd recommend to other, you know, other startups to venture, it's hard. It's really hard to start in Canada, but what it's provided us is now we have an incredible proof of concept. We have turns in every single channel in Canada and in the same banners that now are in the U.S. You know, Canada doesn't have a lot of brands that have gone from Canada to the U.S. in food successfully. I can probably think of three others right now. There's one or two small incubators, one with Dragon's Den, Arlene Dickinson. It's a tough place to start and when, you know, initially I had some resistance when I was looking to get support from U.S. funds, where they would say, well, we don't know if, you know, Canadian results, we don't know if that will translate to U.S. results. So there was one barrier after another. And now we're in a different place because we're, the turns at the retailers are so phenomenal and they have access to that. So we've overcome all of that, but it certainly was not a, there was more kind of barriers than anything else when we were starting in Canada.
[00:22:39] Good Fats: But at the same time, you did manage to convince investors to give you capital. I think the last time we spoke, you had raised about $10 million. Yep. And so how did you go about convincing them to take a risk on a first-time entrepreneur, a rising trend, frankly, keto, and a Canadian company at that?
[00:22:57] Taste Radio: Yeah. Again, I don't think there's a lot of Canadian brands that have raised this much money in such a short period of time. It is more difficult in Canada. It really just started with the first $10,000 with the first advisor who said, you know, we'll support you. And then there was another one. So then, OK, I had, you know, $20,000. I needed about $400,000 to $500,000 of angel to complement the money that I had put in to really start turn the machines on. So it was 10,000 at a time by just exposing my little PowerPoint deck and my idea. I had some prototypes. They were kind of not really holding together, but they were enough to have a line of sight to say, you know, we have the three P's. We have a positioning, which is the game changer. We have a product and we have the right price value. And between that and my background, it pretty much was 10 to 20, 30,000 at a time. We got the first round. And when we closed the first round, we turned the machines on. We had a lot of issues with the first round of machines and production, but I'll get back to that. And then once we kind of had bars in market after a few challenges, the bars really started selling. Within six weeks, the largest Whole Foods store in Canada, downtown Toronto, told me The store manager congratulated me and told me we were the fastest selling bar and two bars in the store. So by then I had enough information and we're starting to hear every single store was selling. So potential investors would just go in a store and ask the store how we were selling and every single store back in the first couple months were saying, wow, you know, they are flying off the shelf. So it really then just snowballed. You know, when you have velocities, things can happen. And then it just snowballed from there and launched two more flavors and then two more and we needed to make more and more production and it just kind of it wind up being a fairly easy series of angel raisins after that.
[00:25:00] Good Fats: Ketogenic is very popular now. We walked Expo West, there's keto this, fat is back, it's super popular. But two years ago, you were still pretty cutting edge. How hard was it to convince investors and the general public to trust fat and to eat fat again?
[00:25:18] Taste Radio: Oh, it certainly was a journey. I wrote the first PowerPoint, I guess now, with a few pages on it and no brand name other than fat something. I had a whole bunch of different versions and I didn't have product. And it was hard. I did four rounds of concept testing with US consumers and Canadian consumers. And we had at that point, that summer of 2016, 22% of consumers had issues with the word fat when we kind of went through likes and dislikes. It was very polarizing, but I just knew, you know, having read Nina's book and then Walking Expo, fat was back, you could see it at the Expo even then, but there was no brand that had kind of taken it upon themselves to be the beacon brand and carry the voice of it's okay to eat fat, it's actually healthier to eat fat and the reality is sugar was the culprit. It was a harder kind of sell, but some folks, like me, kind of realized that that's where the trend is going to be going.
[00:26:21] Good Fats: With a lot of brands that are encouraging a shift in diet, there's sometimes the pitfall of telling consumers that they're doing it wrong, right? You want to make them make a change, so you have to explain why what they're doing now is wrong. But you guys have a fairly positive message. How do you straddle that line between, hey, here's what's wrong with your diet, and also not making people feel bad about the way they've been eating?
[00:26:47] Taste Radio: As a marketer, all my career, I've shied away from the negative consumer insights as the angle for the marketing campaigns. And that's, you know, that's just a choice. There's lots of phenomenal campaigns that have used kind of the tension off like problem solution. That's never kind of worked for me on the brands that I've been on. So certainly when I was starting to launch my brand. You know, there was a lot of feedback initially from folks around and, you know, we can kind of have like, oh, you know, we've been duped and that more kind of negative angle. But from a consumer insight, I think where I wanted to net out is the insight that yes, indeed, the science was not right. Sugar was the culprit. Fat is great and now back. And I think that all kind of came together in a really good way. And the consumers we're talking to are really well educated. You know, we just, we spent three days talking to over 38,000 consumers at the Boston Expo. Clearly that audience is a little bit older, above average fit, but every single person that came to our booth nodded when we said one gram of sugar and nodded and smiled when they saw Fattah's back on our poster. So it's working out really well.
[00:28:09] Good Fats: Now, like you said, that's a very educated consumer. To scale this to be a really household name, you have to talk to every consumer. So having worked for large global brands, where I'm sure you've had to do that, how do you then take this message and translate it to those next phases of consumers who aren't, you know, marathon runners or reading about their nutrition and diet? They kind of just, you know, know what they see a little bit.
[00:28:33] Taste Radio: Well, we've already done that in Canada, given that, you know, we're at the turns and velocities and overall gross sales size that are trumping, in terms of run rate, trumping pretty much every other brand out there. So we're reaching, we now know that we're talking to the consumer who shops at the natural health food stores, the grocery chain and the whole range of the grocery chain and on Walmart, the mass and in Club in Canada. So I think we've now kind of seen that we can go from the premium health food store to mass in six months in Canada. And that was a bit of a scary move that many brands and natural would hesitate doing, but we took that big bold leap and have had phenomenal success. And I think for us it comes down to a simple message. we're one to two grams of sugar. And that transcends, you know, right now it transcends from kids to anyone who's 70, 80 years old. Everyone is trying to reduce sugar. So that's for us what's allowed the transition to allow the brand to really meet many consumer needs.
[00:29:46] Good Fats: How does that branding and messaging vary from channel to channel? How do you think about that strategically? And how did you go about developing that, especially when you're a very small team, right? And you don't have the bandwidth for tons of market research and employees who are maybe focusing on each channel.
[00:30:04] Taste Radio: That's a very good question. So as a marketer, our job is to come up with the brand positioning and then fiercely protect it so that we don't have any of our agency partners or team members or our retailers go too much off strategy. And that's always a challenge when you're a team of one or a team of three and you're rolling out across channels, including e-com and including retail and across channels. So for us, it's been pretty classic, have a compelling consumer insight around fat is not the culprit and sugar was, and a tagline that kind of brings that together, the benefit around ridiculously delicious, and then our reasons to believe being all, we're keto friendly and we have only clean ingredients and We list out the 10 things we don't have in our bars. So we stick very close to that. In mass, it's really just your packaging, maybe a small POS if you do demos, if you have a chance to do that, or you do some couponing. In other channels, like in natural, we actually now have keto centers and there's education, we're starting to do webinars. So you have a chance to educate the consumer more and connect with them on social. It really does come down to the basics of your brand. Your brand has to live in your packaging and your simple positioning. You know, we're all about a ridiculously delicious one to two gram of sugar bar that happens to be keto loaded with Good Fats because it's called Love Good Fats. that's allowing us to scale without too much complexity.
[00:31:38] Good Fats: Have you noticed is there a difference between keto or ketogenic and fats with consumer both in awareness or how much the mainstream is adopting those terms or even negative perceptions?
[00:31:51] Taste Radio: Yes, certainly, for sure. When we launched it was September 2017 in Canada and keto and ketogenic didn't even exist other than... the low level of awareness of moms who had epileptic kids and some cancer survivors were familiar, but other than that no one really knew keto. And then by May 2018 it appears that half the population knew keto and now we're hearing some big numbers in terms of awareness. So there's, you know, we kind of launched with everyone knowing about fats and pretty much 7 out of 10 nodding. Oh, Good Fats. We were called Susie's Good Fats back then. Oh, Good Fats. Tell me more. And then we would say one to two grams of sugar and then the sale is made. Then the ketogenic trend really started amplifying by the end of 2018, it's the most Google termed, it's the number one diet, the success stories of the diet is incredible. And then once in a while you have someone who peppers an article about, you know, oh it's not good or there's this and that. So there's been some noise that have even kind of brought more conversation around keto. So we're in the Good Fats space, we're in the low-carb, high-fat space, which is an even bigger pie. I'm more of a low-carb than a keto type of diet. We're playing in that space and there's more and more consumer acceptance that healthy fats are really good.
[00:33:22] Good Fats: And there is a difference between fats and Good Fats.
[00:33:24] Taste Radio: Yeah, there's certainly a big difference. It's all about eating Good Fats and we certainly don't want to have all of North America loading up on the bad fats, the trans fats or way too many PUFAs. But it's about if you eat Good Fats like myself, You can make major changes to your health. I'm off my two prescription meds despite trying every other diet in the world for 20 years and in the last 10 trying to get off my medication, it's only when I moved to low-carb that I was able to move away from it.
[00:33:59] Good Fats: It is very appealing though, right, as your brand scales to try to work in attributes that appeal to more consumers. So, okay, we'll add some extra protein in this one or we'll do this. And you did this year launch a plant-based So that is trying to appeal to a different segment. How do you figure out, you know, where you're going to flex and listen to consumer feedback and say, okay, yeah, we need to go this direction and where you're going to say, you know what, that's just, that's too far off brand or that's not who we are. And that's a segment we're just not going to make happy.
[00:34:33] Taste Radio: Yeah, that's a great, great question. We have already mapped out our three years and we've mapped out the type of product and segments we are going to play and not going to play in. So I'll update you in three months in terms of where we're playing. But I can tell you where the brand is not playing and then you can fill in the blanks where we are playing. But where we're not playing is we're not a 20 gram protein bar. And that's a big segment, we're not a sugar alcohol bar, we're not a sugar bar and sugar is dates or agave or all of those, we're not playing in any of those segments. And those are big bar segments and we've put a big X, like our brand is never going to go there. We're opening up a segment that happens to be high-fat and low-sugar and there's a few other low-sugar bars and just as we said very few high-fat and we're very true to ridiculously delicious. Like, could we find other ways than a truffle-like core to be delicious? Absolutely. Are we expanding? We've expanded in shakes in Canada, so we have the first ever fat shakes. It's more like a milkshake, and if you make it with heavy cream instead of just cream, like, you need a spoon for it. So we've mapped out the segments for the next three years, and it's pretty easy to kind of figure out where we're going to play and not play. It comes back to our brand positioning. But you have to be humble to the consumer. Your brand is really meeting consumer needs. If you meet consumer needs and you really understand and are there to serve the consumer a product, a brand that meets her known or unknown needs, then the retailer needs will be served because you'll have the velocities to have the retailer needs met and then your company needs can be met. So it really kind of starts with what is the brand proposition and what is the unmet need that you're serving the consumer better than anybody else.
[00:36:33] Good Fats: Now to reach that consumer, I'll admit I had my TV on and what pops up, but there's a Love Good Fats commercial. I'll be honest, there's not a lot of brands I interview that I see have a TV commercial for their food product, especially at this stage of growth, right? Maybe like a very large brand, but not a sort of one still in startup phase. Why television commercials? Because you're very savvy on social media. You have tens of thousands of followers, but yet you still went back and did TV.
[00:37:06] Taste Radio: Oh yes, I've definitely had a lot of questions, especially from, call it a younger generation of either marketers or entrepreneurs or even investors. It's a bold move to have dipped our toe into TV, but it was a very conscious choice. Right now we're in the US, we're listed in, I think, 1,900 stores that we're rolling in. We're just in Whole Foods right now and we'll be in and about 1,900 stores in a couple months, and then we're presenting to tens of thousands of other potential stores as we speak. So the TV was really just to, in a very controlled market, so we selected three cities, to test whether if we have that marketing driver in addition to some digital and social spend and some in-store demos, it's really playing the levers of the marketing mix. I'm in a great position that I wrote the ad, I've been working with our creative director who's just been freelance. We don't have expensive ad agencies, expensive copywriters, expensive production. It was literally done on a less than a less of a shoestring. And that's a really, really compelling 15-second ad. I've also spent 10 years of my life in TV and media. I'm very, very familiar with how to buy, and we can talk offline of media rates and whatnot, but the competitiveness of what you can get with reaching the 35 to 49-year-old on TV and the CPM, actually trumps most of the digital buys. So I kind of lived this and had examples day in day out when I was marketing to the mass in the U.S. to Walmart, etc. So it made sense to test in 20% of our stores. We now have the learnings, you know, we're growing three times the rate in those stores. So now we simply have to wait to get to, you know, three, four, five, 10,000 stores and turn it back on nationally. And it's going to be pretty amazing.
[00:39:18] Good Fats: Well, it's been really exciting to hear about that progress today. And thank you so much for taking some time to connect with us.
[00:39:25] Taste Radio: Well, thank you very much, Carol. It's been great and it's a pleasure and a privilege to have a chance to talk about our story a little bit. Thanks so much.
[00:39:36] Ray Latif: That brings us to the end of episode 35 of Taste Radio Insider. Thank you so much for listening, and thanks to our guest, Suzie Yorke. Please subscribe to Taste Radio Insider on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, SoundCloud, and Google Play. As always, for questions, comments, ideas for future podcasts, please send us an email to askattasteradio.com. On behalf of the entire Taste Radio team, thank you for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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