Welcome to the Community Call Podcast.
I'm Melissa Travers, Director of Community at BevNET & NOSH, and I'm here with my co-hosts, Jackie Brugliera and Mike Schneider.
If you're enjoying the show, please follow and review us on Apple Podcasts or your listening platform of choice.
Hi guys, great to see you.
I'm gonna start out with a shout out, if that's okay with you.
To Market Basket.
I'm gonna shout out Market Basket.
They should come on Community Call, don't you think?
I think so.
I think you should just get some people from Market Basket, Rando's, that you have battled.
Yeah, from your cart battles.
That's an amazing idea.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I feel like this has a place at Live too.
At BevNET Live?
Yeah, I think if you have a quality battle with somebody, you should just like bow to them and say you should come on my podcast.
That's a fantastic idea.
All right, I'm gonna get-
You can break it all down.
Let's get legal on this immediately.
For the people that are a little clueless.
We were raving about Market Basket on the last episode and you should check out The Real with Mike's story about bringing his father into Market Basket.
Yeah, I mean, Mike, your family loves Market Basket, as do I.
I mean, we really are gonna talk about Market Basket on every single one, right?
All right, well, first of all, thank you, Mike.
Shout out to Market Basket.
Second of all, shout out to Ruth Elnokava of Joy of Foods.
She is the founder there.
She left her law practice to study holistic nutrition, started Joya.
She came out with her Superblends first, which I don't know if you all remember that, but she was at NOSH Live in 2019, right?
Yep, so she joined us there.
And then since then, she's launched Functional Chocolates.
Just in the last few months or so, she just joined our Slack community.
And it's great to have you here, Ruth, for anyone else who wants to join Slack.
Where do people go again?
Melissa, I'm glad you asked.
You go to slack.bevnet.com.
slack.bevnet.com.
Could be easier.
We'd love to see you all there.
But I did want to hear what you guys think about functional ingredients.
She's got things like functional mushrooms, ashwagandha, maca, moringa, that kind of thing.
Where do you get your functionality?
Do you take vitamins?
Do you eat cubes?
Do you drink powders?
Eat chocolate?
What do you do?
All of the above.
I'm not surprised.
I mean, I love nutrition and I love eating healthy and clean.
So that's like priority.
And then I take like a daily vitamin.
But sometimes when I'm feeling spicy, I get, you know, gummy vitamins because those are a little bit more fun.
And outside of that, I also use kelp granules to get iodine and I use that in cooking.
And I love that you're calling out rootless because they're powered by seaweed and they call out in the back that iodine really helps support your thyroid and naturally boost your metabolism and energy.
We've got some rootless here in front of us.
Have you tried this yet?
You know, I have.
And Jackie, I am right there with you on seaweed.
Iodine is a crucial nutrient that so many of us are missing from salt nowadays with the sea salt trend.
These, I thought, they are seaweed-y.
They remind me of fish food.
Yeah.
Those big pelts that you feed like Jack Dempsey's.
They are kind of dry.
But that said, if this is what...
You can see why fish go crazy.
Because this is tasty.
And it tastes really healthy.
It does make me only kind of want to eat one because it does taste like I'm eating nutrients.
Which is certainly a bonus.
You know, Jackie, I was thinking, you should...
Do you give blood?
Like, you should give blood.
Your blood is probably shock full of nutrients.
I'll go do that next week.
Okay, great.
Yeah, I think, somehow, if they were positioned more as a...
Jackie blood.
If you got confused with Jackie blood, you're like suddenly a superhero.
You're wondering why you feel so amazing.
Yeah, I know.
They'll turn into that Barbie that you created of me.
Wait, I noticed that I...
I don't think I saw the Barbie.
Did you dye your hair because of the Barbie so you'd match the Barbie?
I noticed that.
I noticed that.
So Mike made a Barbie of me yesterday and it had bright red hair, so yesterday I had to go get my hair done.
And I got to see it.
So I look just like the Barbie.
You look like the Barbie.
This is more AI.
It's more AI.
I also made AI Ray and Melissa too as Muppets.
I really do think we need live action figures.
Those turned out really good.
Really good.
You've made it if you have a live action figure made out of you.
I was saying that we should give them out at all of our events coming up.
I made Jackie Barbie and Amanda Barbie.
Amanda is our awesome copywriter on the marketing team.
From a cost perspective, is this in our budget?
Can we make Barbies of everybody?
I think it would be well worth it.
We can make AI Barbies of everybody.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Mike, what about you?
Where do you get your...
Do you take vitamins?
What do you do?
Well, I'm eating rootless.
I mean, I kind of graze on adaptogens because we have them here.
So I'm not like actively buying them right now.
But I really find that when I have mushrooms in my diet, I like that.
So I do try to find ways to get functional mushrooms into my diet that puts the fun and functional.
I would say working at BevNET definitely increased my health, getting all the functional ingredients into my body too.
That's a benefit.
Yeah.
It is a benefit until you're at Expo West and you're sampling them all at once and you get this functional cocktail inside of you and you're hoping you go down one aisle and it's just like, oh my God.
And then you're hoping to eat your way to the cure on the next aisle.
There is a toxic brew of functional ingredients that I feel like everybody winds up consuming at these things.
It's like ashwagandha, L-theanine, magnesium.
It does make you feel crazy.
And then you're always trying to get balanced out.
Like you drink coffee and then you're going to go over to the ashwagandha to like chill.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm sweating just thinking about it.
People think our job is a lot of fun.
And it is.
I mean, obviously we get to do stuff like this, but we also have to do stuff like that.
You know, we're taking one for the team.
Sacrifice our bodies.
I don't know, man.
I shuffled fish in Alaska for a summer.
That is way, that is way, way better than doing that.
For sure.
But I know what you mean.
Well, I am thrilled to introduce this Community Call episode with Soom Tahini.
We are reviewing the skew with them.
They have a couple of chocolate skews that aren't turning quite as well as they think they should.
And we're going to dive into it with Fred Hart, Amy Zitelman and Adam Levit.
Oh, wow.
Superstars.
Please enjoy.
Today we are hosting a community brainstorm with Amy Zitelman of Soom Foods, Fred Hart of Interact, and Adam Levit of Velocity Sales Management to try and figure out a way to boost sales on Soom's chocolate tahini skews.
They are absolutely delicious.
I can attest to that.
So we're going to dig in and try to figure out why they're not moving as quickly as we think that they should be.
So thanks, everyone, so much for joining us here on Community Call.
I'm super excited to dig into this.
Why don't we start off with Amy?
Amy, please give us Soom's backstory.
Please fill us in a little bit on where Soom's been and where you are now.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks so much.
And thank you again, Melissa, for organizing Fred and Adam for your time and efforts in this.
I'm really excited to connect today.
Soom Foods started as an idea back in 2011 when my oldest sister Shelby and my middle sister Jackie and I fell in love with the idea to make tahini, a more popular ingredient in the American market.
So for those of you unfamiliar with tahini, it's a popular ingredient in Mediterranean and Middle Eastern food.
It's made from ground sesame seeds.
I'd like to describe it as thicker than olive oil and thinner than peanut butter and can be used for both in savory and sweet recipes.
And so we've been selling tahini for 10 years now since May of 2013 with an omnichannel sales approach.
We sell to restaurants, fast casual chains, manufacturers and meal kits, along with on Amazon, our website, in grocery stores and on third party e-commerce sites.
And we've been very passionate about introducing tahini to the American market, educating consumers about its versatility, health benefits and all the amazing ways we can incorporate it into our diet.
One of our favorite ways to use tahini and the ways that we've been most inspired by our restaurant partners over the years is in sweet dishes.
Some of the tahini brownies that restaurants have been putting out are phenomenal.
And we also wanted to create a product that was ready to consume because people need to take tahini home and cook with it or mix it or make it into hummus.
And we, inspired by these sweet dishes, decided to create a line of chocolate spreads.
So these are amazing spreads made from just three or in one case, four ingredients.
Tahini, powdered pure cane sugar, and cocoa powder.
We also have some sea salt in our dark chocolate sea salt, and they're delicious.
People that eat them love them.
They've been targeted as a cult condiment within the media before, but our tahini always outsells our chocolate spreads.
In stores, for instance, it outsells it nearly three to one.
We average around five units per week per store on our tahini in the nut butter category in the natural set.
And our chocolate is just under two units per week per store.
And on Amazon, where we sell quite a bit of product, our tahini outsells our chocolate spreads eight to one.
And when I mentioned this to Melissa, she was shocked because like her and other people have eaten our chocolate spreads, they're delicious.
We think they should sell more, but there's a lot left on the table as it relates to its opportunity and ways that we can improve our strategy around it.
So we've been thrilled to be connected to Adam and Fred and excited to kick this off today.
Could you quickly give us a review on the value proposition?
I know that the seeds that you use are so special.
Yeah, so most of our sesame seeds are sourced from the Humera region of Ethiopia.
They're really coveted internationally for its qualities and pressing into tahini.
So that has to do with the oil to meat ratio, making it really creamy and easy to use or re-emulsify after it separates in time.
And also a great flavor profile.
They're less bitter than sesame seeds from other countries and have more of that nutty flavor profile that lends itself so beautifully to the versatility of savory and sweet.
So we're very passionate about sourcing, of course, high quality ingredients, working with high quality manufacturing partners.
And then our team here on the ground has been working tirelessly to educate the American market about how to use it and use more of it, hopefully.
And what have you done so far in order to sort of address the chocolate conundrum?
So we early on demoed a lot in grocery stores and at events.
I mean, Soom has been around since 2013.
Our chocolate spread has been in the market since 2015.
So way back in the day, I used to stand in grocery stores and hand out samples either with a pretzel or on a tasting spoon.
We've been at vegan festivals or other types of food events across the metropolitan area.
I guess I should say we're based in Philly, so from DC to New York.
And those have proven successful for us.
We've done digital marketing and advertising for the product.
We've worked with influencers for them to create recipes and share them on their profile and also use that as content for our social media.
So I think we've kind of run the gambit.
Of course, we do trade spend, like putting the product on sale.
I guess our largest point of distribution is our dark chocolate sea salt are sold nationally at Whole Foods.
So a lot of the conversations that Adam and even Fred and I have been having have been revolved around that national distribution at Whole Foods.
But our chocolate or our dark chocolate sea salt spreads are distributed across several hundred if not thousands of stores at this point, either our plain chocolate or that dark chocolate sea salt.
And what's been the response from, you know, for example, the influencers, the folks at your demos, because I've tasted these, they are fantastic.
What's the response that you get?
They think they're delicious.
I mean, same with people.
I would say the biggest response that we get is what do I do with it?
And so our follow up answer to that is I typically say anything that you do with Nutella so you can spread it on toast, add it to a smoothie, bake with it.
And so but people like the way that they taste.
We have people that don't like chocolate that have liked our chocolate tahini spread.
And we have people that don't like tahini that have liked our chocolate spread.
So we're really excited and have always been very inspired by it.
I mean, selfishly, I eat it all the time.
I make it into sandwiches for my kids nearly five days a week because it's one of the only things my two and a half year old will eat.
So chocolate Soom on a good healthy bread.
And they've added a lot of value to my life.
And I think to the lives of people that have been consuming it, I would imagine if I would have prepared our repeat purchase rates are really strong.
You know, we've gotten great media attention about them in the past, but I think just not enough people have tried it yet or have been compelled to pick it up yet.
There's a lot of questions that circulate in the Sooma offices when we talk about chocolate.
Fantastic.
That was great background.
A nut free Nutella analog is something that we certainly need to figure out.
So let's dig right in here.
Fred Hart of Interact, thank you so much for joining us.
A pleasure to be here.
I'm equally a huge fan of both chocolate and this dark chocolate tahini spread that Amy's been building.
So I've been really passionate about digging in and trying to figure out how can we help this product perform better in market.
A little background on myself, I'm a creative director at Interact Brands.
We're a branding and design agency that has a strong focus on the CPG industry.
And we work with a lot of different companies and clients.
And it feels like Amy's sort of at an inflection point where she's moving beyond her core product and trying to find additional growth as she sort of introduces new pieces of innovation.
I'm going to share my screen here for a second and give us a visual prompt to show what these products look like to date.
So these are the tahini skews that Amy was talking about that are performing so well and outperforming the chocolate skews.
Now, first thing that we started to talk through with Amy is that there is most likely a difference in both occasion for this product as well as consumer audience for these products.
The person that is maybe more culinary oriented, foodie, cooking or baking with tahini is probably using it not in always an indulgence format as the dark chocolate tahini.
And as brands grow over time, they start to have different audience segmentations based on different parts of the portfolio or innovation.
And so the first thing that our gut was telling us was we need to design for a different audience when it comes to the dark chocolate tahini than how we design for the core line.
And we have a hunch that in the indulgence space, and mind you, we're at Whole Foods, we're a better for you product, these are consumers that are looking for permissible indulgence.
This is not a Nutella where it's just there's no health benefits whatsoever.
So how do we both take credit for what makes us more permissible than the incumbent product, as well as what do people who want indulgence care about?
Do they know what tahini is?
Is there education there?
What are the things that are most important?
Amy had shared another wonderful slide with us talking about all of the unique product benefits compared to some of the competitive set.
So we're lowest in calories, second highest in protein, lowest in sugar, we're vegan, we're nut free.
What we call this when the clients come to us with this sort of scenario is an embarrassment of riches.
But you can't try to gain credit for all of those things on the front of packaging in a very small amount of space as consumers are looking to make quick decisions.
So this is where we teamed up with some of our favorite partners in the consumer research space, a group called Designalytics.
Designalytics has jumped on board and offered all of their services for free for this conversation so that we could bring some data points to this conversation.
At Interact, we have this philosophy that we test to learn, not to win.
It's really easy to get focused on like validation and is it going to do better or not.
What we want to know is what can we learn from consumers by exposing them to some of our designs and different iterations of the current packaging to see if they actually lead to future proposed velocity changes.
I'll run through this document very, very quickly.
The goal is not to go through all of it.
What we did was we said, let's put ourselves up against one of the better known permissible indulgent spread brands in the natural set.
In this instance, Justin's and we tested the two.
With Designalytics, they're showing this to a sample size of about 250 real life consumers that give us a benchmark of overall preference, what do you choose, Justin's or Soom?
And as you can see, the blue is overwhelmingly for Justin's as opposed to Soom in this instance.
And we want to change that.
The more helpful piece of this deck though is all of the additional competitive analysis.
So they put in all of these other different brands, Nutella being obviously a very conventional one and then all of these better four year alternatives to help us map across where are we testing from a taste great, high quality, made with real ingredients, brand I trust, good texture components.
Again, there's a lot to go through this and we could spend an entire hour.
That's not the goal.
What we wanted to learn was what are the things that consumers like about our packaging and dislike about our packaging and how do we fare to some of our competition.
This is a good starting place.
This is an area that allows us to talk about what are the distinctive assets of unpackaging because in retail what isn't seen isn't sold.
You have to have something that's very recognizable and unmistakable from other brands.
But the best part was resonance.
So here we got consumers to actually tell us what did they like about the packaging and what did they dislike about the packaging.
And the primary learning that we got was that tahini was the most disliked element of their overall design.
You can see the dislikes actually outweigh the likes for tahini.
And when we dive into some of those pieces of feedback, you can see people saying, I hate tahini or what is tahini?
I'm not familiar with tahini.
I don't know what tahini is.
And so therein lied kind of our hypothesis that we were trying to do too much education and treating it like our core product and instead needed to focus on how to revise the labels to tell those consumers what they really wanted, which is a world of indulgence.
So again, through our wonderful partners at Design Analytics, and they're going to make all of these assets available to you, Amy, to go through after this call, we then went into versus testing where we can create a scenario of forced choice between two options.
So I'll toggle through and let you see, general audience, some of the design iterations that we made.
So I'll actually start with a close in.
So the first thing we did was let's look at what happens if we reduce the language of tahini on the front of our packaging.
So this is the current pack.
On the right was one proposed direction where we just made dark chocolate larger, tahini spread smaller, and put on the front of pack only six grams of sugar per serving.
Pretty straightforward.
Some of the other things that we then started to do based off of that new design look was what if we further mitigate tahini to be tertiary on this pack?
These two options, we wanted to know, is there a difference when you tell a consumer that it's made with creamy tahini or that it's made with sesame?
Does that have an impact?
Then what we tried was, what if we talk about sugar or number of ingredients?
What did consumers care about more?
And again, we're isolating for variables in this design testing platform so that we can properly attribute them to the right design change.
Then we looked at something else.
Can we make design feel more indulgent?
There's actually no communication differences here.
We actually just put this sort of marbled spread like pattern into the background.
Does that feel more intriguing?
We then tried photography on the right hand side of an actual chocolate drip versus illustration.
Nothing else is different.
And then we took what was our favorite, our recommended approach of all the things that we thought might work best and tested against current.
I'll share with you what we learned through this process.
And again, we say we test to learn not to win, but there are some really positive results here.
Oops, this is against Nutella.
Again, we did this head to head just to see how are we comparing.
What I'll share here, though, are some of the results.
What do consumers care more about, sugar or ingredients?
It turned out, overwhelmingly, they cared most about sugar.
So sugar seemed to be the thing that most consumers were cognizant of.
There was a lot of resonance for the four simple ingredients, and you could entertain testing a piece of packaging that has both elements on it.
But when we did head to head, consumers cared about sugar.
When we did same exact communications, in this instance, just four simple ingredients, but it was a difference between a flat label design and something that felt more textural, that evoked that sort of creamy, indulgent element with the pattern background.
What is the rate performed by a margin of 4.6 in committed preference?
And what Design Analytics will tell you is that margin of plus or minus four indicates with a 90% confidence rate of an increased confidence rate of 4.6.
What we did here, though, is we tested what was our hypothesis at the time of what would matter most.
I can already tell you our hypothesis was a little wrong.
We should have put in the number of grams of sugar here.
But we tested this full batch of work all at the same time.
And you can see a net margin of 7.1, which is a huge lift.
And again, this is current on the left.
So the things that we've done is we made dark chocolate spread really large.
We talked about the four simple ingredients.
We swapped out illustration for photography.
And we added an indulgent background into the packaging.
Now, what we aren't doing is adding any emphasis around what is tahini and that education.
We think that can happen on the side of PAC, on the back of PAC, on our website, on the Amazon page where you're driving a lot of traffic, but that ultimately when it comes to a consumer making a quick instance and we're packaging the selling itself, this is a far better communication strategy that speaks to this unique audience that is different than the core tahini buyer that is looking for permissible indulgence.
So I know that was a lot of talking, but Amy, if you have any questions, I'd be more than happy to sort of like share some of these things.
And if not, I'm more than happy to hand the baton over to Adam to talk through his portion.
How many people were surveyed in this and are the same people surveyed for each versus?
Great question.
There are distinctive groups each time and the sample size is about 250.
So it's statistically significant, not quite totally qualitative, but we love this testing platform for the quanta, for the excuse me, it's qualitative, not quantitative.
We love it for the qualitative information that we get because what's great about this and you'll see this in all of the reports, you get consumers then following up.
Why did they pick one direction over the other?
And those verbatims are extremely helpful because you can start to read between the lines of why did they like the one with sugar versus why did they like the one with four simple ingredients and what are those different statements?
And then my last question maybe unless something else comes up is when we built out our product line with our rebranding, which we did in 2021, we worked really hard to get it consistent, assuming that they would be next to each other on the shelves.
Now, tahini and chocolate spread are merchandise together in the natural set.
We're in the nut butter section.
We're learning now, although we haven't hit conventional, we just hit our first conventional store with tahini without our chocolate spread.
How important is it for it to be uniform across the line if we're able to get more skews together?
Such a smart question.
So in the early stages of building a brand, what you're trying to do is build up brand recognition.
So consistency of your core assets and elements is critical.
As we look at your core portfolio today, what we haven't done is actually mitigated the size of Soom.
Soom is still number one in the communication hierarchy.
Your logo is still evident there.
We're still picking up some of your similar typefaces.
So there's continuity.
But at the end of the day, what we're designing for is not ourselves, but for our audience.
And it's clear that these shifts actually help your audience understand the product a lot quicker and with less of a hurdle.
So for us, when you start to get really complicated for us, you have your bars, obviously, or your bytes.
You have different product things and different categories.
You want to make sure that there's enough flexibility in the brand system, but overall consistency in those key assets, aka brand color if you have one, or brand logo, or sometimes even product structure.
Got it.
Do you have any other questions for me, Fred?
No, I don't.
I'm excited to just share more of this with you.
The Design Analytics team is happy to talk to you, and then you're working with your branding agency to continue to make pushes, because it's such a good product.
It deserves to be performing better.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
This is amazing.
I can't wait to dig into that data.
Fred, thanks so much for that.
That was incredibly thorough and fascinating.
So thanks so much for that run through.
Adam, why don't we move over to you.
Before we dig in to the sales side, could you give us an introduction on yourself and what you spend time doing in CPG?
Gladly.
My name is Adam Levit.
I am currently the CEO of Velocity Sales Management.
We are an outsourced sales agency specializing in natural and organic products.
In my prior life, I spent 17 years at Keen Celestial.
Many of them as their chief sales officer worked across 39 different brands, across many, many different classes of trade and product types.
So I've seen problems like what Amy is experiencing dozens of times, and none of them are the same, but they all have some similarities.
So first, I want to thank BevNET and Melissa and Amy for allowing me to be part of this process.
I really enjoyed Amy learning about your story and the company and the things that are working and equally the things that are not.
The challenges are sometimes the fun part.
I'll try not to be too repetitive of what you've said and what Fred said, but the themes are similar.
For me, it all starts with the product, and I have my very empty jar of dark chocolate sea salt.
The product is amazing.
I think in our first meeting, I referred to it as frack in a jar.
It's hard to believe that anybody would not enjoy the product.
So it's clear to me that anybody and everybody would enjoy this product, and there really is not a problem with the product itself.
And there's a lot of stuff out there where the product is the problem.
You don't have that problem.
That's the first piece of really good news.
But for me, diving into the problem really starts with data, and you're lacking some of the data that I would love to have to dig in.
I know you're working on those contracts now, and when that data is available, I'm happy to dig back in with you and Daniel and take it to the next step.
But I took the data you did have, and we crunched it the best we can to come up with some more questions and some more areas to research to dive deeper into the problem.
So there's two pieces.
There's distribution and velocity.
No pun on the name of my company.
But your velocities are very stable, right?
We're not seeing big dips and swings in the velocity.
And even on promotion, we're not seeing the lifts we see on promotion that we see on your regular tahini.
That tells me that the consumer does see this as an indulgent product, and they're going to buy it irrespective of price.
They're not waiting for it to go on sale.
I'm entertaining.
I'm putting this on ice cream.
I'm having a party this weekend.
And price isn't an issue.
And in today's economy, price is an issue for many, many manufacturers and many consumers.
So that's good news.
And that may say we need to change the promotional strategy and go more ADLP than high-low.
The velocities are about a quarter of what they are for your tahini.
Now, your assumption, your belief is that it's not selling well on us.
And I think what we need to get to, and it would be hard to get to with the data you have, is what is the right expectation?
Should it be a quarter of tahini?
Should it be half of tahini?
Should it be twice tahini?
And to get to whatever that expectation is, how does it have to be positioned?
Which Fred's given some absolutely incredible ideas.
Fred's given ideas on how it should be positioned, but then there's also the where.
For that use case, does it belong along with nut butters and tahinis?
As I look at the package and as we've talked about, you've got it drizzling over ice cream.
You've also got a little brownie there and a strawberry.
Well, if you're baking, you don't necessarily go to the nut butter set, right?
So if we're encouraging people to bake, would this be better served down the baking aisle or near the baking set?
If we're using it as an ice cream topping, well, there's a set in every store with chocolate syrup and strawberry syrup and rainbow sprinkles.
Would we be better served as the healthy option?
Because there's probably not a lot of healthy options alongside the ice cream.
So I think there's a little bit of an identity crisis.
And as you sort that, sometimes trying to be something to everybody, you wind up being not anything to anybody, right?
And that is often a problem.
I look at the regions, right?
Not every product, not every category performs the same in all parts of the country.
And I think when you average off all the pieces of the country, that average may not be what you're looking for, but the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic, where you're sitting, and I don't know if that's a coincidence with the consumers in the Northeast or you're located in the Northeast, but you index much, much higher in the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic.
And our friends down in the Southwest and in Texas, not as big a fan.
They might be going out for way more barbecue and a lot less chocolate tahini spread.
They may not know down in parts of Texas what tahini is.
So I think figuring out in your best regions how to make it work and then expanding.
I know that's really tough with retailers today.
Whole Foods is now a global retailer, and they take things more globally than they do regionally.
So some work to be done there.
I looked at the velocities over time, and there doesn't seem to be any seasonality.
It's pretty flat month over month.
So kind of the questions that I'm left with after looking at the data we had is what is the right volume for this item?
What is the expectation relative to tahini?
And I think it's looking at items like Justin's Chocolate Nut Butter and some of the other chocolate spreads within that category.
Where are they as a percentage of the hero SKUs?
And every brand I've ever worked on, there's a couple of hero SKUs.
I use the ice cream analogy.
Vanilla and chocolate are 80% of the sales.
And strawberry is going to be a distant third.
And that's okay.
But we really need to figure out what is the right level.
I think we need to talk to some consumers.
Both the consumers that have bought it, how are they using it?
Where would they expect to find it?
And the same for some of the consumers that haven't bought it.
We can help you do research studies and design research studies or go back to some old school, do some demos, do them yourself or have your team do it so we don't get Mabel at the table and not get really good feedback.
But if you're there, you'll certainly be able to talk to consumers and understand what they're thinking.
Let's see, going through all my notes here, making sure, you know, I had a lot of comments around the label and I think Fred has really dug into that extremely well, so I'm not even going to touch it there.
One of the other things that struck me in our earlier conversation, you mentioned it's a small part of your business, so it gets less attention.
Well, is it a small part of your business because it gets less attention or is it a small part of it, right?
So maybe it's not getting the love from marketing and it's overshadowed by its big brother in your regular tahini and, you know, you've created a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And, you know, with any organization, sometimes that's okay, right?
You can only have three top three priorities.
And there's only so many hours in a day.
There's only so much human capital.
There's almost so much financial capital.
And I think that going back to my earlier point, what could this be?
And then is that big enough to warrant the resources it's going to take to get there, right?
I use this line a lot at Hayne and the marketing people didn't like it.
But yummy is not a selling strategy.
It can be a really good, yummy, delicious product.
And this is, and I am now a fan and a consumer.
You will see sales go up at Whole Foods, Fort Lauderdale.
I can promise you that.
But if the juice isn't worth the squeeze, then as an organization, you've got to make those tough decisions.
What's going to get you to the promised land?
I think this has got legs.
I think with some love and attention and some repositioning, it can be a very strong skew, but it's going to take some work and it's going to take some redesign and it's going to take some research and even capital behind it.
In your experience, what could be a strategy for getting secondary placement?
Like, I don't know whether it...
Would you suggest that we take it away from nut butter completely to test it in those secondary markets like you're suggesting, either chocolate spreads or baking aisle, or can we, based on our relationships and maybe in our best markets, like the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, test them in secondary locations in those regions specifically?
That's a fantastic question, and I'm going to steal from Fred.
It's test and learn.
Off-shelf displays are hard.
And when they don't work, they're really, really expensive.
So I like to win big and fail small.
If it's not going to work, you want to do that at, you know, Dave's Market and not at Publix.
So I would love to see you build a display unit, give, you know, a smaller 5, 10, 15 store chain, a really strong deal on it.
So they make good margin, not so that they lower the price, because then it's not a fair test.
You want to test at or near your regular retail, let the retailer make a ton of margin and put a shipper in the ice cream aisle, put a shipper on an end cap or put a shipper, you know, above an ice cream freezer bunker and do testing like that and then crack the code.
And then once you crack the code, it's copy and paste, right?
That's when you get your brokers involved and say we've cracked the code, here's the one pager on what works, this over and over and over again.
Yeah, the ice cream comes to mind, also strawberries come to mind.
I'm thinking about where it could be merchandise as it relates to its use cases.
So that's really great to think about.
I know you're aware too, but we are currently purchasing data and additional.
If you could share for those on the call that are not familiar, what would you purchase if you had our limited resources?
You can just assume what our resources are.
What would be the most compelling data set to purchase as it relates to this SKU?
As it relates to this SKU, you want to understand the competitive items.
So if you can afford to buy the entire nut butter category, that's going to give you Justin's Chocolate and Barney Butter Chocolate and some of the other chocolate indulgent spreads.
And then the key metric that I would look for is sales per point, dollar sales per point.
That eliminates the noise of distribution, whether Justin's is in more stores, and they certainly are, versus your Esquiu.
It's a measure of how fast it's moving.
And then you can use that data to spin out, well, if I was in 5,000 stores or 10,000 stores, here's what this is worth.
Here's what it's going to cost me to get there.
And then you can decide, is the juice worth the squeeze, or is it too big a distraction from your core business?
You know, you mentioned strawberries.
It would be amazing to have this sitting over the strawberry bin at Whole Foods or Sprouts, but it's all at the same time, that's your sales team, your broker network, going to different buyers in the store.
That's a heavy lift.
And if you're not adding more resources, you're taking those resources away from Core to Hain.
And, you know, my training is you can't take your eyes off your hero's skews.
You can only do that on a limited basis because you can't neglect the Core.
Never, ever, ever, Cardinal, rule the guy I worked for for a decade at Hain.
Those key skews and key pieces of the business that got you where you are, they can't slow at the expense of something that you're not sure about.
And we're sure it's good, but are we sure it's going to deliver what you need for your company?
I think the jury's still out there.
It can do it if you have enough money, but not every project on the list can get funded.
I can speak to that, absolutely.
That's really helpful.
Yeah, Amy, if you don't mind, we have a question from the audience from Isabel Rubin.
Isabel wants to know, Adam, this is a question for you.
Are there particular retailers or channels where you do think this product would be a good fit?
I absolutely do.
And I think Amy's started with the number one, Whole Foods.
Their consumer is less price sensitive.
Sprouts has a much smaller grocery set, so you're not lost among the 35,000 items at a Kroger or a Safeway.
Then when you talk about the grocery channel, if it doesn't work at Wegmans, it's not working anywhere else.
I've never seen anybody fail at Wegmans and say, yeah, but it's working for me at X.
They are the best test case in my mind.
They execute well.
It's 105, 104 stores, so it's not like that thing at 2,000 Kroger's.
You can play and test and learn there and hopefully win big, but if you're wrong, it's a small fail.
Thank you so much.
And I do have a final question for each of you, Adam and Fred.
So if we were thinking that the chocolate skews may be well repositioned and perhaps even land in a different set in a store, what are the considerations around breaking up that brand block?
So if we have one skew or two skews of the Soom Tahini with the nut butters and then perhaps two skews of chocolate somewhere else, what are the pluses and minuses there?
Fred, why don't we start with you?
Well, again, as a young brand, what you're trying to do is create strong recognition.
So you're not able to brand block as much when you're not all in the same place.
The benefit, though, is the consumer can find you in different aisles if there are strong enough visual cues and codes for them to be able to connect.
Soom is already also in the snacking set with their tahini bites.
So it's sort of, you know, it's going to be a part of their DNA, that they'll be in different aisles of the store with different occasions and different consumers over time.
I think it's just about reinstilling.
Soom needs to come number one in that overall hierarchy.
And yeah, re-examining, perhaps, is there a consistent color strategy that works across all of them or not?
Years ago, we redesigned Enjoy Life Foods after it was purchased by Mondolese, and we established turquoise as their key color that was in nine aisles all across the store.
You couldn't miss it.
It became very quickly identifiable for them.
That's an extreme case.
I don't see any issues with Soom today, but it's always good to keep a pulse check on, particularly, Amy, if you continue to offer up more product innovation down the road.
And one last question, actually, for you, and I'll ask this of you, Adam, as well.
We have a dark chocolate skew and a chocolate skew.
What do we think about having two products that are so similar?
I've had them both.
My perspective is the sea salt is a more interesting and compelling product.
And yeah, it's hard to say, but you need a little skew rationalization between the two already to just focus, I think.
I think Adam is much more of an expert on this topic than I.
Thank you.
Adam, please take it away.
What do you think about the splitting up the product and brand blocking as well as skew rationalization?
So, splitting it up brings the human resource challenge more than the financial resource challenge.
And where I've seen companies, smaller companies struggle is fighting too many fights and not fighting any of them well.
If you're in snacks and nut butter and ice cream, for argument's sake, that's three different buyers, three different category managers at Cahee and UNFI, it essentially triples the work.
And if you take the same sales team and you triple their workload, they cannot be as successful unless they were sitting around before doing nothing, and I'm pretty sure that's not the case.
So I think that's a big consideration on how many fronts do you want to fight on and is each front properly resourced.
The salt or no salt question, if you're staying in nut butter and that's the long-term decision, then I'm all for a skewer rat and one skewer, and for me, it's the salt.
It eats better for me.
But if you're going over to another section and you skewer rationalize, now you've got one skewer sitting out there by itself as a little bit of a lone wolf, and it might behoove it to have the no salt version to give it at least a little bit of a brand block in whether that's the ice cream set or the produce department.
So I think there's certain questions you need to answer first, and that's going to kind of cascade down the road to some of the other decisions.
Thank you so much, Adam.
All right, Amy, I'm going to turn it right back over to you.
What do you think?
Any last questions?
Where do we go from here?
I was going to ask you that.
Where do we go from here?
I think this was really helpful.
I mean, one of the biggest challenges has been my bias throughout this journey.
You know, we developed the chocolate flavor originally.
We just launched the dark chocolate sea salt two years ago in 2021.
My kids like the plain chocolate.
Adults like the dark chocolate sea salt.
I think that Q split is really top of mind for me.
I think a lot about what if we were just marketing one of them these days, and it was the same one in also Whole Foods and the myriad of independents that we've been in with the chocolate spread for, you know, six years or whatever it's been.
So I'm really compelled to think about that.
But my biggest takeaway is, and I love tahini, and I believe so wholeheartedly in tahini as a category, but I've got to kind of, I think, recognize where the masses are with tahini and realize that maybe this can have legs for itself without highlighting tahini.
It also reinforces to me an initial goal of ours, which was that we wanted Soom to be tahini.
Like when somebody told their, you know, wife or husband when they're going to the grocery store, like, hey, make sure you grab Soom, you know, not make sure you grab a tahini.
And so hopefully we can build the brand strength that when people see Soom, they think tahini and then it trickles into the entire experience of a dark chocolate sea salt spread or the like.
So I just want to say thank you again so much to both of you for your time, your questions, Melissa, I guess all three of you.
This has been a tremendous experience and you are so generous with your resources and your networks and it really means so, so much to me.
So thank you so much.
Thank you all so much.
This was such a pleasure.
Amy Zitelman, Fred Hart, Adam Levit, thank you so much for putting it all out there and all of the support and generosity and great ideas.
This was such a pleasure and I appreciate all of your time and effort so much.
So thanks so much for joining us today.
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