At Category King Webinar, Industry Leaders Discussed Routes to Growth
With an industry all-star lineup, Naturally Chicago's "Becoming a Category King" webinar on Monday, October 1 provided a roadmap – and role models -- for emerging brands that want to soar to the top in sales for their product category.
Differentiation — what makes your brand or product stand out from the competition — is the key to sustainable growth and success. The webinar discussion will unpack how companies can shift their thinking from making better products to forging entirely new market categories.
The webinar was inspired by a podcast produced by S2G Ventures, a Naturally Chicago partner that invests in better-for-people-and-the-planet companies. The episode featured a conversation between host Chuck Templeton, Managing Partner of S2G Ventures, and Jason Wellcome and Mike Bruno of Play Bigger, a firm that consults with companies on category design.
Bruno joined our webinar panel along with:
John Foraker, Once Upon a Farm Co-Founder/CEO and former CEO of Annie's Homegrown
Rashid Ali, Chomps Co-Founder/Co-CEO and Naturally Chicago Board member
Emily Groden, Evergreen Waffles Founder/CEO and Winner of the 2024 Naturally Chicago Pitch Slam for Established Brands
Sean Riley, Dude Wipes Chief Executive Dude/President
Kat Cole, AG1 CEO
Jim Slama, Naturally Chicago Managing Director, moderated the panel.
Bruno opened the discussion with an explanation of category design, accompanied by a slide deck. He emphasized the importance of creating new markets rather than trying to improve existing ones.
Bruno highlighted the success of brands such as Athletic Brewing Company and Kind Bars, which disrupted their respective categories.
“Every product and service that you've ever loved exists because some human person who is real and not from on high had a unique insight about an unsolved problem,” he said. “And then not only did they create a product and a company to solve that, but they designed an entire category and market around that problem.”
He continued, “When they do that, they drive demand where it didn't exist, urgency for change, pricing power and long-term value. And here's the thing, companies that design the categories are in the best position to win those categories.”
He also complimented his fellow panelists, saying, “There are some folks who have this sort of natural innate talent for developing categories. I think this panel is a great cross-section of those types of folks.”
The other panelists followed with explanations of their brands and how they have achieved success.
John Foraker, Once Upon a Farm
Foraker became a legend in the natural products industry by expanding well-established product categories. As CEO of Annie’s Homegrown, he provided alternatives to the “blue box” brand of macaroni and cheese mixes, as well as soups, dressings and condiments. In 2017, he joined Once Upon a Farm founders, including Cassandra Curtis, in building a fresh product niche in the baby food sector.
During the webinar, he discussed the need for incrementality, meaning adding new, innovative products as alternatives to established brands.
If you're solving a need that has been yet unmet, like a lot of founders do, like Cassandra did when she was like, ‘Hey, I would really love it if somebody sold fresh baby food, but there's none in the grocery store, and I'm making it myself.’
At that time, depending on what research you looked at, 40 or 50 percent of the consumers that could be buying baby food were not buying it at grocery stores, because they're making it themselves. When you develop a product like that, you inherently are very likely to bring a lot of new consumers into a category.
So our brand is highly incremental, in some places up to 70 percent incremental to the category when we show up. And when you do that, and can prove that in data, it becomes undeniable for retailers and all your partners.
And so I always encourage people, when they're thinking about innovation, really focus on incrementality. It's it is really, really the silver bullet. If you can get that right, you can really, really unlock lots of growth for you and your retailers.
Rashid Ali, Chomps
Chomps is based in Chicago and Ali is a member of the Naturally Chicago Board of Directors. He said that he and co-founder Pete Maldonado had no entrepreneurial experience when they launched Chomps’ pasture-raised meat sticks 13 years ago.
“I'm proud to say that Chomps is now the fastest growing brand in all of food, based on the last 52-week reset, and it's just crazy to see the growth we've experienced in the last couple years... We were able to take this brand off the ground and with a premium line of meat sticks, and you can now find us in most all natural conventional mass channels.”
He said a lot of Chomps’ success is predicated on “checking all the boxes for what somebody wants as far as a better-for-you snacking option: high protein, low sugar, tasty, convenient, highest-quality ingredients.”
He also discussed the game-changing break that the brand received when the Trader Joe’s supermarket chain – which predominantly features house brands – not only brought Chomps in but started featuring their meat sticks at the checkout lines.
If you think about our go-to-market strategy, we also were very focused and disciplined, with four years of e-commerce only. We were fortunate to get Trader Joe's in 2016. We then leaned into and were the best Trader Joe's partner for two years before we decided to take a step into further retail. And then we focused on natural and then conventional mid-size and we were very, very focused on how we grew.
I think it's a testament to how we built the business, and it enabled us to make sure that we didn't have to overinvest in marketing or trade. We wanted consumers to already understand the value proposition that Chomps offered, and we didn't want to have to overinvest to do that.
Kat Cole, AG1
After a successful first career building the success of major national restaurant and foodservice chains such as Cinnabon, Cole in 2021 took a leadership role at the company then known as Athletic Greens. The company, producer of a daily just-add-water powdered health drink packed with nutrients to help alleviate bloating, support sustained energy and whole-body health, quadrupled its sales to $600 million in the three years since Cole joined the company.
During the webinar, she discussed selling direct and getting customers to buy from their website.
Our business is quite unique, being at this scale with one product and one channel [their website]. We only recently, like just a few weeks ago, put up a very limited offering on Amazon. So it's truly been just drinkag1.com and the reason for that is, quite simply, it is a complex and high-quality product.
People drink it mostly every day, and they do that for years because of the benefits they feel and see. We're a 14-year-old company. A lot of people think we're like a recent hot DTC [direct to consumer] Covid success.
Never had a headquarters, never had a storefront, never been on a retail shelf... But a few things happened over the years that are a part of the secret to success, that build on a foundation of a truly high-quality and complex product. It is very difficult to blend 75 mostly whole-food sourced ingredients with no sugars, no juices and no sweeteners, and get it to taste good enough for people to drink it every day. It is a full-blown multivitamin.
So we’re disrupting the supplement category with this phytonutrient blend, creating this powdered supplement to help supplement our diets and modern life... Our guts are a mess, and so we need support. If we could all eat kimchi every meal and perfectly balance evolving phytonutrients, we might not need the supplementary support that we do...
Gut health without nutrients is suboptimal. Put them together where they start to work together synergistically, make it tasty enough to drink every day, and you get the daily replenishment that our cells need, the daily gut health support that we need, and then the benefits compound, energy, digestion and over time, immunity mostly driven by gut health and nutrients.
DTC allowed us to have a direct relationship with the customer and learn and message something that was a bit new and complex. Then constant innovation and elevating of quality kept us at the forefront of what has become an incredibly competitive and crowded category.
Sean Riley, Dude Wipes
Riley is a big personality and he addresses his product – bathroom wipes targeted to men – with a humorous take on marketing.
I come from like an Animal House-style apartment in Chicago where me and my buddies were drinking too many beers, eating too many burritos. [This resulted in “big, nasty” bathroom sessions "and toilet paper was not getting the job done.”]
We just started trying to disrupt the toilet paper aisle, one butt at a time.
It was going to be a little crude and loud and talk to you and have fun with you and stuff like that. The Dude Wipes brand always, we just felt we had to keep it authentic and real. We were the first brand in wipes, any kind of wipes, to ever bother talking to men.
I would say any other brand really in the store that it was going to be like, a little, you know, crude and, like, loud and talk to you and have fun with you and stuff like that. So the Dude Wipes brand always, we just felt we had to, keep it authentic and real. And that didn't really break through right away.
I think our first lightning strike moment was in 2014. We had only been business a year and a half or so, and we put a Dude Wipes logo on the back of a UFC fighter's trunks, so right on his butt. To my knowledge, it was the first time that anybody had put a product on a butt. It felt like kind of cool like, ‘Hey, this, this should be something.’... And then the internet exploded. When it hit, Dude Wipes was the number three trend worldwide on Twitter for the night. This logo was on someone's butt. What is this thing? They're looking it up.
We were relatively unknown, doing a couple 100 grand in sales, and all of a sudden we're having this national media, blowup exposure moment. And so that was a good lesson early on. We’ve got to put ourselves out there in different and unique ways, and there's exponential upside to that, and how can it fit the brand, and how can we be not just designing the category differently from a product perspective, but also marketing differently.
Emily Groden, Evergreen
In Groden’s words, Evergreen makes frozen waffles in decadent dessert flavors that have one full serving of fruits and veggies in them. A lawyer with a Harvard degree, Groden decided to become a food entrepreneur after creating tasty and healthy waffles at home for her young children.
During the webinar, Groden discussed how her business as grown significantly as the result of a rebranding, launched early this year, that centered on colorful upgraded packaging.
Our rebrand has been a total game changer for us. We launched our rebrand in January 2024, just shy of being on shelf for four years. The week our new packaging hit shelves, we saw a 62 percent jump in same-store sales. Nothing else had changed. We weren't on promo, nothing. So it was just the packaging.
I think we saw the spike for a couple reasons. One, I think a major mistake I made in designing our original packaging. As a first-time founder, I was trying to fit into the category... I guess I wanted to look like we belonged. I was an industry outsider, and so I wanted to feel like we fit in and make people think that we belong there.
So I chose a white background. But the problem is that there are a lot of brands in our set with a white background, and we just blended in and got lost. So this is the same SKU now, but as you can see, totally different. Flipped it on its head, super bright. And you know, all the statistics about shopper experiences say that you've got like two seconds to catch a consumer's attention, and being in the frozen aisle, we're also behind a frosted freezer door, so we have to work extra hard to get that attention. So our packaging now is so bright that it is impossible to miss.
Merchandising is one of those things that can make a massive, massive difference in terms of velocities... The whole idea of Evergreen is that we are this vibrant, warm, homemade product. We don't want to feel like a tradeoff. We want to be fun. We are delicious, contrary to a lot of the dry, stale stereotypes of frozen waffles. And our new packaging just aligns so much better with that concept. It is bright, it is fun, it is playful; even the font on our logo is round and bubbles. It almost feels like a hug. So everything has come together to represent Evergreen so much better.
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