Food Chained

4:05 – Market based on taste
When Matt first started Good Crisp, they marketed their chips as “better-for-you Pringles,” but he realized that they would get more leverage if they marketed based on taste instead of health.

“We used to talk a lot about being the better-for-you Pringle or the better-for-you chip. And now, particularly as we move more into conventional, we just talk about being a better Pringle. Our product beats Pringles in blind taste testing, we're a better product, better quality ingredients, better taste. So it's beyond that as well. I mean, to your point, it used to be that you would have to sacrifice, it doesn't taste as good, but it's healthier for me or whatever. We want to be at the forefront of a new generation of snacking, which is there should be no compromise. There should be, as you say, no drop-off. We should be able to actually say this tastes better. It's better quality. It's better for me. Why wouldn't I buy this product? And so that's a really important focus for us. And particularly if I may, I don't want to niche down too much and be, ‘Well, we’re the keto of Pringles,” or something like that. Not that there's anything wrong with that's, it’s just different. But I really want to be both broad and mainstream. And how do I have everyday Americans just feeling better about their snacks is really what we focus on.”

5:48 – The decision to go national
Good Crisp started out as a California brand, but when Matt got the opportunity to go national he decided to take it.

“Originally I was like, ‘Oh, we're just going to focus on California.’ And California is bigger than the Australian economy. There's more people, let’s just do this. And we started to do that. And then a couple of weeks later, Wegmans calls and says, ‘Matt, we want to put your product into all of our stores.’ So we had to make this decision. Are we going to turn down these opportunities and just grow here? Or are we gonna actually make a serious go of this? And so I decided just given that we had a good head start, there wasn't a lot of competition, I was worried that people would come out behind me that would see what I was doing and try and get a copy of that. And I thought, look, let's just go everywhere and do this quickly. And so we made a conscious choice to do that and to go national really quickly. There was some good and bad things about that. We definitely stretched ourselves really thin in some places. But it really helped to accelerate the brand. So we were opening DCS and filling those up really, really quickly. And the first couple of years was just a blur of getting distribution out.”

8:23 – Sell your brand
Packaging can make your product stand out. Your packaging tells potential customers what to expect from your product and brand.

“When we launched, we had different packaging to now, and we changed probably two years ago and that really helped accelerate our business as well. And so that was a real learning for us as well that, yes, it's obvious what we are, but that can be read other ways. So our packaging was actually, I was really obsessed, going back to your earlier points around, how do we show that we're a better Pringle, that we're healthier, that we're all these things? And so our packaging was really focused on the healthy side, and I missed out on the fun and taste side of things. And so once I got here and started to chat to consumers more, we realized that, yes, people were noticing us. Yes, they knew what we were. But it didn't mean that they picked us up because, ‘Oh, that's either a private label or that looks healthy or probably doesn't taste good. I'll just stick with what I've got.’ So we reinvented our packaging fairly drastically to stand out more, to look more appetizing, and to focus on the taste and fun side. And that's really then helped accelerate our sales as well.”

9:58 – Determine your audience
For marketing purposes, you have to define a target audience. This doesn’t mean your product isn’t for other people, but you have to know where to spend your resources.

“We are a snack company for kids that adults like. The reason being, when we looked at the data as well, canister chips are mainly consumed by 5- to 10-year-olds. They’re the largest consumers, and then kids tend to grow up, move on to Doritos, and then move out of it. And then adults don't go back to it too often. So it became lower-hanging fruit for us to attack those millennial parents that were currently buying these kinds of snacks that weren't satisfied and would switch over. So that's definitely a key, as I say, low-hanging fruit, but we really do see ourselves as a broad stream. So we do talk more about helping everyday Americans, we think there is a place to extend and build the category and build back users and more of those adults back into the category. And that's something we do focus on, but that's a secondary part of what we do. But that's more from a marketing answer, from a use case, definitely adults do like our product as well.”

11:36 – Don’t get too niche
Niches can be a great way to develop your audience, but don’t get hemmed in by them. Niches are for marketing purposes, they aren’t meant to define your company.

“You can really paint yourself into niches and say, ‘Well we're only just for 18- to 20-year-old gen Zs or whatever,’ when actually, to your point, everyone drinks soda and likes bubbles. Everyone gets benefits from that. I think the challenge is, particularly in the early days, we don't have the cash and the resources to focus on all of those from a marketing perspective. So niching down does help, but we just have to be careful that we're reminding ourselves, this is a niche for marketing purposes. It's not a niche for our company and our brand, that we actually are relevant to all of these people as well. And so not too one way or another when it comes to broader positioning.”

19:36 – Find your product market fit
The world doesn’t need any more companies, so you have to determine another reason for your company’s existence.

“I think the biggest on a macro level challenge that brands and companies go through is really finding, and I don't like borrowing this term from the tech world, but product market fit, essentially. What’s the reason for you being there? The world doesn't need another snack company. There's enough snacks out there that have found a niche that works the same with what you guys are doing there with Perfy. So finding what are we actually doing, how I'm bringing value to this? Yeah, sure, I could make a great cookie recipe at home that everyone says tastes really good, but what actually is different? What's beneficial? Why are people going to buy this? Is this actually going to work? How can I know what am I positioning? What's my competition? Spending huge amounts of time around the customer and obsessing about them and the ‘why’ they would pick it up I think just really makes everything else so much easier in what you're doing.”

21:40 – Test when you’re still small
Testing and making changes to your product is easier to do when you’re on a smaller scale. Once you grow, it becomes more difficult and costly to try anything new.

“We grew quickly, and there's probably places we shouldn't have gone into early on that came back to bite us. It's a bit more where we didn't support it, and so our turns and our numbers weren't good. And they raised questions about, ‘Why aren't you selling in this one retailer?’ Forget about the 20 that we’re doing amazing in, investors and people only want to focus on the one chain that we're not doing well in. So I think making sure I'm being strategic about that, about care for that growth, and it ties into the first part as well, because you need to spend time picking off handfuls of stores or DTC or however you do it, but test your market, get your terms right. Learn how to do it. Make your mistakes on 500, 600 stores, and then scale up, don't make a mistake on a thousand stores and have to do that. We to some degree learned that a little bit with our packaging as well. You don't want me to make that change if we had done it earlier, it probably would have been better. So you can't get everything right, obviously. And there's that balance between ‘Perfect is the enemy of done,’ but making sure that you're getting it out there, but just learning that on a smaller scale and then scale up, I think is important and helps you be less costly.”

25:10 – Optimize your product
When you’re going with a retailer, there are lots of things to consider, such as how your product will look on the shelves and where in the store it should be placed.

“I think we've also learned now with going to a retailer, we need to have a minimum of three skews and a certain amount of facings and things like that. A couple of stores we just got one flavor in or something, and so we were lost on shelves, no one would ever see us, we were placed in a bad set in the store. So it was sort of doomed to fail from the start. So I learnt now that yeah, making sure we've got enough facings that we can be seen, that we have a support program, that we have good trade in there, our snacks are very impulse-driven so moving where we can away from EDLC and instead having good, strong trade promotions and catalogs and support is important as well to make sure that people see us and pick us up and try us. Because we know when they try us they’ll keep coming back and buying us, but if they never see us or never pick us up, now we can't get those terms.”