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Design a unique experience to make a deep long-lasting connection with shoppers. Give them ownership through discovering new & creative ways to celebrate your brand through personalized recipes. Empower them to rewrite your brand story in their own voice

The value of having a recipe on your site is that you create understanding and connection with your customers. Once you have understanding and connection with your customers, you will become a better company. You will make better marketing, better trade marketing.

You will manage category managers at the retailer level better because you know your customers better. You will build better products. You'll essentially just have a machine that's much more customer-centric.

So that's super valuable. And then we started realizing that actually very few people, they didn't get that out of their recipe. So we want to do something better.

And it was lucky because we already had built an experience that worked extremely well on an app, that we can then transfer over to web. So basically saying now we can white-label this, put it in front of a lot of people at the brand sites, help them get an understanding and connection with the customers, and inspire people. So it was really that journey of being another need that was actually bigger than just the recipe app.

That was all these food brands trying to connect with their customers.

Let's roll up our sleeves and get started. Welcome. As you know, this show is dedicated to getting your brand under more store shelves and into the hands of more consumers.

And the way I do that is by identifying or looking for creative strategies and solutions to help you level the playing field and give your brand the edge that it deserves. That's why you're going to love today's show. I always talk about how you need to build a thriving community outside of traditional retail.

And you've got to give your customers a reason to join your community, to become part of your loyal tribe. And the best way to do that is to develop a creative strategy to invite them into your community and to celebrate how they use your products. And more importantly, what are some different and even more creative ways that they could use your products that they haven't even thought of yet?

That's what today's show is about. It's about giving a strategic advantage that you can leverage not only with your customers, but you can leverage at retail. That's the best part of this.

In other words, today we're going to discuss a creative way to take all the insights and the strategies that we've been talking about throughout this entire podcast and leverage them to grow your brand using one simple solution. Before we go any further, I want to thank you for listening and for sharing these podcast episodes with your community and with all your friends. I cannot thank you enough for helping me to raise the bar in our industry.

As a quick reminder, there's always one easy to download, quick to digest strategy at the end of every podcast episode. In order for you to have a healthy brand to grow on, you've got to have a healthy solid foundation. And that's why I'd love for you to take the free 30-day prosperity challenge.

It's going to give you the foundation that you need to confidently grow and scale your brand while giving your brand the edge that it deserves. You can learn more about it at the end of the podcast episode. Now let's start the show.

Here's Michael with Plant Jammer. Michael, thank you for coming on today. Dick, could you please start by telling us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you're at today?

Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Dan. Yeah.

So I'm Michael. I'm CEO and founder of something called Plant Jammer. I started this company five years ago.

And basically what we do is we help people cook. So we inspire people with new approaches to recipes, where basically rather than you finding a recipe that just has a pretty picture, we are using AI so that you can personalize that recipe. And then we're putting that on brand pages and retailer pages so that people truly engage as a customer on these websites and you get valuable data as a brand on, what do my customers like and not like?

And you actually get to engage with them so much that they also connect with your brand much more than your average recipe that has a very high bounce rate, which means normally on a recipe people just jump in and out. And we do a little bit of tricks here and there that makes it super personalized and makes people engage.

That's cool. And so let's break this down just so everyone understands. We're not talking about the generic recipe that someone says, puts on their website, which I've been recommending for a long time.

People have recipes and ways to engage people. What you're talking about is something that's unique to that brand. So using that brand as one of the ingredients, what can you do to build a recipe around that?

Which is even really even cooler, even neater, because now you're personalizing that brand based upon the experience of the person who bought it and trying to, I mean, this is something I want to dig into more. But more importantly, you're using that brand along with ingredients that they found in their home right then and there, they don't have to go buy right away to be able to produce something. Can you talk about that because this is really cool technology, the idea that I've got something, I love the brand, but I want to find new uses for it.

So talk a little bit about that.

Absolutely. So what we've learned and I've learned by talking to a lot of brands is that there's so many great food products out there that are versatile, which means they can be used in so many different ways in the home kitchen. And that versatility seldom sort of comes out in a recipe, right?

Because it's a static sort of this is exactly what you can make. You know, you have to also add these other ingredients and you don't get the versatility of the ingredient that way. Now, what we do is to make that very clear, because in those recipes, you can adapt because they hope, by the way, I like what I'm seeing as an end user, like what I'm seeing in this recipe with this particular brand that is a product I want to have or already have.

But make that recipe Mexican and make it vegan. And by the way, take out the cilantro. And what can I use instead of soy sauce?

And that way, you're really showing that, OK, this is not a product for one recipe. It's a food product that is versatile and can be used across. And I can truly empty my fridge, stop food waste, eat healthy, do all these things along with this brand.

And so the analogy that we used last time we spoke, and again, thank you for reaching out to me, is that similar to a wine pairing, when I go to a wine store, it says this is good with red meat or fish or whatever vegetable, et cetera. But now I can go even deeper into what I want to customize based upon what I have at home, which I think is really cool. And that's something I really want to emphasize.

The point being is that instead of having a recipe and I need to race out to the store to pick up a bunch of stuff that I may or may not be able to find, given what stores I shop at or what stores are close by, I can put something together in a pinch with ingredients I already have at home. Why did you decide to build in that flexibility? Because I think that's a game changer.

Yes, so do I, because I was looking for that game changer myself in my own life. So basically, I'm a former McKinsey consultant that I was working 80, 90 hours a week, almost still do, because that's how entrepreneurship is. But back then, I didn't cook and I wanted to learn it.

And basically, it didn't feel to me as an individual, I didn't feel like I was being empowered when I had to now follow a recipe of someone else's and just follow their steps. So I was myself looking for something more empowering. That feeling of I'm in charge as a customer and I'm the one who is creating this is super important if you're going to create a real connection.

Because at the end of the day, I think an old saying goes that people forget what you say, but they will never forget how you make them feel. And that's really how you make them feel that's important here, because a recipe that's just giving to you from the Mount of Sinai will feel a little bit authoritative and you'll have to follow it. And suddenly you have a relationship between the brand and the customer that's very much sort of a one directional, I know better.

Whereas with this approach where you actually are jamming on the recipe and you're using it and you're adapting it to your personal needs, it's a conversation. And suddenly you're building that sort of relationship where you make the hero of the story, the customer, and they're going to appreciate you for it.

Which is the best part about this. And again, it's all about building community. The, from my standpoint, the experiential piece, etc.

Let me back up a little bit. My wife is amazing at being very creative and doing a lot of this on her own, finding different ways to use different products, etc. It's amazing what she's able to do.

The point being is that the same thing that we would, that we really fell, the same thing that we fell in love with, we're not going to get bored with. We have so many different options now. And now that you've come up with a way to creatively do this and automate it for me is even neater.

And then to go one step further, when it comes to food, most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about what they're eating. And so if you're focused on healthy eating, that's good. But okay, so then you pair it with something that's not healthy, that kind of takes away from that mindset.

It really, it pulls you away from that goal, from that, it pulls you away from what you're trying to accomplish. But if you have the ability to put together a bunch of healthy ingredients together to come up with a meal, that's the win-win. And more importantly, the fact that you're able to build an experience or a memory around how that came together.

Because to your point, instead of just saying, I'm a nice guy with a cool brand, neat slogan, et cetera, now here's how I use it. And that's something that people are going to brag about. So when it comes to building community around your brand outside of traditional retail, this is something I spend a lot of time focusing on.

And a lot of brands struggle with how do you do that? How do you make that work? And so what you're doing is you're automating it to the degree that now someone, the consumer has the ability to personalize that experience.

Can you talk a little bit about what was the impetus for this idea? Why did you come up with it? It's very creative.

Thank you. So it actually started off with me building along with a team of chefs and data scientists. We decided to build first a recipe app by itself to solve this problem for ourselves.

And we kind of wanted to build that product. And it went really well. And we have an app called Plant Jammer that has a little bit more than a million downloads, a little bit more than 150,000 active users on the database.

So it's going well and we have a great experience there. But then what happened was I started talking to food brands. So in the beginning, it was like the big guys, we're working with companies like Dr. Erdger and Barilla and McCormick and these kind, and also retailers like your LDS of this world.

And we started talking to them and we realized, wow, there's something shocking going on because they are all posting beautiful recipes on their sites. But they're not really having any engagement on those recipes. They're spending between $1,000 and $3,000 per recipe on organizational resources internally, but they're not getting much bang for the buck because basically what they get is, what we saw was they're getting very high bounce rate, which basically means people who go in, see the recipe, don't click on anything and go out again, which means you have not engaged with that visitor.

And then very low time spent on page, which means less than two minutes on average once you get to click something. Which again means that you have not engaged at all and build an actual connection. We've just had some people coming in from Google, searching around and finding your site, but then going away again.

And you lost an amazing opportunity to connect with a customer. So we really saw that problem and started asking why, many, many times why, at least five times to understand why would people have recipes on their sites? What's the benefit?

What's the real sort of core reason that this is important? And the conclusion we got to after asking why a lot of times was the value of having a recipe on your site is that you create understanding and connection with your customers. Once you have understanding and connection with your customers, you will become a better company.

You will make better marketing, better trade marketing. You will manage category managers at the retailer level better because you know your customers better. You will build better products.

You will essentially just have a machine that's much more customer centric. So that's super valuable, right? And then we started realizing that actually very few people, they didn't get that out of their recipe.

So we want to do something better. And it was lucky because we already had built an experience that worked extremely well on an app that we can then transfer over to web. So basically saying now we can white label this, put it in front of a lot of people at the brand sites, help them get an understanding and connection with the customers.

And inspire people. So it was really that journey of being another need that was actually bigger than just a recipe app. There was all these food brands trying to connect with their customers.

And then we started talking to much smaller brands and engaged with them. And now we have about 40 different food brands, about six different retailers who are using our recipes, engaging this way and adding another few per week these days. So that way, it's an exciting thing because we've gone from building a B2C, offering us with customers directly, learning a lot from that.

And then now we build it with partners. So we have all these food brands that have common visions as us building a world that's more sustainable, more healthy. And then we're doing it with them, helping them come along the way.

So that was the journey.

That is exciting. And again, thank you for creating this. This is really cool.

I'm anxious to try it. So let's talk about some of the different things you said, because I think this is really interesting. One of the things that I talk a lot about how big brands rely heavily on focus groups.

And focus groups are people that are pulled together usually randomly to give an opinion about a product. And sometimes they don't give you the right answer to what you're trying to do. And the point being is that you've got a group of people that may or not be entrenched in what that product does or that community.

So if I am a plant-based consumer and I put together a group of people that aren't dedicated plant-based consumers, then I miss the mark in terms of understanding the resources and understanding their opinions and their views. So this allows me to personalize on that level. Then to be able to take those insights and leverage them at retail, that's how you gain a significant competitive advantage.

And so instead of again to go up to a retailer and say, hey, I'm a nice guy, got a great product, please put this on the shelf. Now you can come up, now you can share with the retailer a lot of use cases. This is how someone uses it.

This is how someone uses it. These are testimonials from live customers that are using the product. These are some of the other products that customers are buying when they buy my product.

And those insights are priceless. So how do you leverage that? Or how do you help the brands that you work with leverage that?

Because at the end of the day, that's far more important to the retailer than any of the fees that the retailer is going to charge. So how do you help brands or are you able to help brands understand the value of what you're putting together?

Absolutely. So first of all, at the transparent level, what we do is on a monthly basis, we come back with a dashboard and we show of all the people who got into your site and who engage with these recipes, what have they done? So which are the recipes that they picked?

Among the recipes they picked because the thing is our technology does just to tell you the story of the technologies, I can tell you what data we come back with. So basically the customer goes in, they say, okay, I have these three ingredients that I want to cook with. You know, I have broccoli and carrot and soy sauce.

Then you be told, okay, what can I make with that? And then you find a bunch of different recipes and you take one of those. And the recipe is with your brand right there.

So it's your brand and it's those three products. Those three ingredients you're searched with. Now you pick that one, but you now have these options on top where you can talk to the recipe.

So you can basically take out ingredients. You can say, make it vegan, make it Mexican. And all these substitutions are data points for you.

So suddenly you're learning a lot about what are the actual needs out there. So at the end of the month, you get a dashboard out from our site where you see, what are the ingredients people have in their homes that tend to cook with yours? What are the kind of dishes or recipes that they tend to make?

On what occasions are they relevant? Are they making this for lunch, for breakfast, for dinner? Is it pastas or stir fries?

And then also at the recipe level, which are the other ingredients that they were proposed, but they took out. So we know sort of, okay, and they took something else in. So suddenly you really get a mapping of what are the ingredients that people tend to take out and take in relative to my brand.

So that gives you very granular sort of data on the needs of customers who are coming into your site. And that is something coming with on a monthly basis. Now, what's beautiful on top of this is the sample of people you get in with this, because you do in a focus group, we all know how difficult and expensive it is to get people into a focus group.

And we also know how biased the sample is. The kind of people who go to a focus group is also a certain crowd of people, which means you're going to have a very hard time mapping that with your own crowd. The beauty of the Internet is that you can actually for much lower investment from their side and your side, get this information.

So you can either just have the people who normally come in your site, who are probably a good sample of your normal customers, or you can start doing very targeted marketing on a certain type of customer you'd like to have in. We help you with that on either Google Ads or Facebook Ads, even TikTok these days, where you're getting people in, and you get them to engage, and you know what kind of group you're getting in. And that way you get very dedicated focus groups, you could say on a daily basis based on this.

And again, getting the monthly data back on, okay, that focus group you put in, this is how they act. Which brings you the data back to when you start having a conversation with the category manager at the retailer level, you will know your customer better than he will know his category, which is what gives you an edge once you have a discussion about how to position your product.

Love it, absolutely love it. And so one of the things I was thinking about what you're saying that there's an oatmeal that I remember hearing about a couple years ago, where the company was so focused on selling their oatmeal because they knew their customer better than everyone else, right? Wrong.

They found out that new parents were using it as a baby food. They had not even thought of that. And yet, as a baby food, they were selling more of their oatmeal to the young parents than they were selling the oatmeal to older people as an oatmeal.

The point, and by the way, the other thing is, because that category is so commoditized and so hyper competitive, now switching or pivoting into the baby category gave them a whole new opportunity to reposition the brand. So they're getting to understand who your customer is and actually asking them or getting to know them, like I always say, like a good friend, and be able to understand how do they use your product. That by itself, if you did nothing else, that is critically important.

And most brands overlook that. To your point, focus groups tend to overlook that unique consumer. And I can show you tons and tons and tons of products that the focus group said that this was a huge winner.

The focus group said that this would be a great success, but the product failed as a result. Because consumers are kind of fickle. They want what they want, when they want it, how they want it.

And there's really no way to identify what a consumer wants unless you ask them. And so your ability to reach in to that database and understand what your consumers are wanting and how they're using your product, actually using your product is priceless. And if you can do that for pennies on the dollar compared to a focus group, like you said, that is a huge win.

One of the things that I preach to Michael is that I tell brands that they need to become an expert in their brand, in their product, in their competitor's product, and in their market. It's the sole focus of the Free Turnkey Sales Story Strategies course is teaching brands how to leverage those insights. And what you just said is that you can become an expert in understanding what your consumer wants.

And when you understand what matters to your customer, the market basket, the sum total of everything a customer buys when they check out, that's gold. And you're telling me that you can effectively understand not only what's in the market basket, and this is really cool, you can also understand what's in their pantry. In other words, what products do they have available to them automatically?

And if you have those insights in addition, that's amazing. So talk a little bit more about that. What are some of your success stories?

Yeah, actually, I really love the oatmeal story, because this anecdotal evidence is something that works. We have a very equivalent story, actually, I would love to tell. But before that, I think what's really interesting here is exactly what you said at the end here, is the fact that normally you think your brand, there's always a person sitting between you and the customer, which is the retailer.

They're the ones who have the direct engagement at the physical level on a day-to-day basis. They're the ones who are trying to educate you about your category sometimes. And sometimes they know a lot because they see a lot of data.

So this is a way for you to have an edge. And the edge is really exactly that, that you can go beyond. You can go all the way into the kitchens of people and see how they actually act.

Not just what they put in the shopping basket, but what do they do with it thereafter. And a good example of that that we are working with, we're working with a cyclical grain company called grain here in the Nordics. So what they do is they take mash from beer production and then they make flour out of it.

So they dry it up and they make a flour. And it has a lot of good properties, particularly health properties, but also very good properties for baking in general. So it's a really, really cool product that increases sustainability because you have this mash that normally become a feed for animals, and suddenly it becomes food, which is high value and generally is a more efficient way of using resources.

So fantastic product. I love what they do. And because they do something that's about sustainability, that's from microbrewery, beer production, they had a very clear perspective that our customers are the people we engage with on Reddit, which are hipster bakers who make sourdough bread.

And it's very sort of high level sort of gastronomy that people are excited about. And we need to talk a lot more about how to do sourdough bread with a lot of fibers in. And great, we made a bunch of dish types that could do that.

We also added some other ones just sort of a little bit secretly just to see, you know, if the hypothesis was right. And then we got a really shocking learning because actually, by far the most popular thing that people were making were what we call dinner muffins, which is like the most simple dish you can make with flour. Basically, you're making a batter for pancake, but you're putting into muffin shapes and putting it into the oven for 15, 20 minutes, and you got these muffins.

And that was by far the most popular thing. It's super simple to make. There's like no big sophistication.

And it was very clear that it was mothers of several children doing this for breakfasts, by the way. So it was a very, very different audience than what they thought. It was much more about convenience.

And they could actually retarget all their general marketing. They could go and they used to be only selling in retailer called Irma here in Denmark. That was very high level, both on pricing and on perspective and only present in Copenhagen basically in one big city.

And now with this data, could bring it to all the big retailers that go outside of the big cities. They could address a very different segment, very different market based. And now they're present in Denmark.

This is a lot, but I'm not sure it is in the US, but they're present in 900 different individual stores now. When we started, it was present at 30. Because they could address a market that was much bigger.

It wasn't just the urban hipster doing sourdough bread, but as a much bigger group. And that was just based on the fact that we did a little experiment, just put in a few other kinds of dishes in there. Didn't tell them about it before we came back with the data after a month, and just showed them, actually, your customers are very different than you think, opening up a completely new pocket.

That is really cool. I love that story. And you're talking about Category Manager at a retailer and how they understand their customer.

And I would almost... They do and they don't. The challenge is there's no retailer who can understand every single customer and every single product and every single item and every single category they sell.

There's just no way. Most retail stores have about 30,000 items in it. And this is your opportunity to differentiate yourself.

And the point being here is that if you can provide insights that they can't get on their own, in other words, same as you found out about this company, great story, by the way, then you're able to help that retail buyer understand who is their ideal shopper and be able to target market or be able to support them. But really getting down to the level where you can personalize what you're trying to do. And that's what customers want.

If you think about it, when you buy something on Amazon or something like that, it always recommends pairings. People bought this, bought this, or we recommend other products. Companies don't do that, generic as a rule.

But yet, if you're taking a product that would normally become a waste, a food waste product, and then converting it into giving it a new use, that's really cool. And I'm very familiar with what you're talking about, about recycling the grains, because there's a lot of other great benefits, the probiotics, prebiotics, et cetera, et cetera. But more importantly, giving that brand a lot more depth and a lot more bandwidth to be able to explore what kind of customers are buying that product.

So thank you for sharing that because that's exactly what I think brands should be doing is having a way to not only interact with and engage their customers, but more importantly, understand what matters most to their customers. And again, it's these insights that are just, they're priceless. They can not only help make you, help you be more creative in terms of new innovation, they can help you, like you said, and thank you for saying that, they can help you develop a story that resonates with future retailers.

You can build a community around your brand so that you can leverage that and have your customers drive sales or drive distribution. I mean, there's nothing better than having a customer come up to a retailer and say, hey, where's my whatever? And then that product magically appears on the shelf.

So there are a lot of great strategies I can think of that someone can leverage with your technology. Let's talk a little bit about how it works. So I come to a site, a brand site, and I click on the product.

How does that interact? What do I do? I click on the recipe tab and it opens up?

Or how does that work?

Yeah, so we learned a few things during building our app ourselves first, because we learned a lot from just being close to customers on a daily basis. Because I think many people who build services for others don't get this kind of learning at a granular level where you really understand, what do people think when they get to a site? And one thing we learned is that there's an extremely strong, what you in psychology call heuristic related to the sentence, empty your fridge.

So the moment that you hear empty your fridge or cook with what you got, there's a degree of curiosity that spikes in us. Because we're like, okay, we all have carrots in the bottom of the fridge and a bit of bad conscience about it, right? Half of food waste in the world, in the Western world is basically happening in the home.

So there's a lot of that sort of heuristic of I need to probably use what I got. And that heuristic is the first thing that we use. So the moment that you get into the site and you either have picked the product or you're just going on the front of the site or you're on a recipe, we have that line saying, okay, here's a button for emptying your fridge.

And we know that basically average bounce rates on a recipe site is around 40 to 50%. So 40 to 50% of people, they go in and never click anything. But that one goes down to 15 to 20% once we have this on the page, because they actually click that thing, because they're curious, what will that do?

So that's the first really important premise. We now got a first action that got you away from bounce rates, which is going to help you on SEO, it's going to help you on learning. Then on the next page, we did a lot of user experience about what do people expect to come here?

And the first thing that comes up is not your brand. The first thing that comes up is the ingredients that are extremely likely to be in someone's fridge. It's about 15 ingredients always that are extremely likely to be in someone's fridge.

They can also search, but we make sure that we actually have little icons where you see, okay, here's a carrot, here's a broccoli. And you very playfully just click a few ingredients and then you get a prominent search button. And you click search, and you see those beautiful pictures of recipes that could be inspiring right there.

And at this point, I will also show you right away, by the way, all of the ingredients you search with are in these recipes. You click it and that's the moment that your product starts occurring. So you see what is in the recipe and you see which products of yours are valuable in this recipe as well.

That's the moment that your product actually shows up for the first time. And that's also the moment where people can personalize and adapt the recipe to their personal needs on top. And that's the journey you're going through.

At the end of this journey, just as you're getting the recipe, you can get it sent to your mail, which gets you to collect the mail from someone that you can use later on for your newsletter. But also a little net promoter score survey where you're asking the person a little bit about your brand and learning a little bit about how they think around brand sustainability. And that gives you an additional piece of data on the monthly dashboard describing the customers who were here, who were they, how were they thinking.

So that's the full-on journey. Now you have a recipe as an end user that you're excited about. You're hopefully going to share.

You have a net promoter score of your brand, and you have a little bit of qualitative sentences about how they felt around this. And that's the full-on journey.

No, that's cool. And thank you for going through that, through that whole story. I mean, that's in the back of my mind.

I'm thinking about how customers use this. If you're renting space at a retail store, one of the comments I made just a moment ago, when you think about how retailers really work, retailers generically don't make anything. They sell other people's stuff.

What they sell is the real estate that your product takes up on a shelf. And what they want in turn is they want more customers in their store, a reasonable profit in their category, and they want a competitive advantage and advantage in their market. If you can help a retailer get that, then savvy retailers will give you incremental opportunities not available to everyone else.

So what you just said was that if I am able to build an email list, then I am future-proofing my brand. First of all, because I am not relying just on being on a retailer shelf. I am also enhancing my ability to remain on that retailer shelf because now I've got insights that no one else has.

So that's really, really cool. And then as far as capturing the research, again, that is priceless. People don't understand how much research costs.

If you were to go buy market data information or buy sales data, that's horribly expensive. And you try to get that in some channels, like the natural channel here, that data is not very good in terms of, it doesn't capture the entire channel. And you're missing a lot of the key trends.

And it's just a function of how to put together, etc. And the point being is that now we're talking to our targeted consumers and we're focused, we're getting insights, real insights about what they buy. Better yet, now we're only getting data from customers that know, like and trust our brand, our ideal customer.

And when you overlay that with a customer that shops at the retail store, again, you're able to help that retailer better understand who their customer base is. They're not going to get that information anywhere, whether from a focus group or a panel study or anything else. So live, real time data, that's really cool.

So one of the things you've mentioned a couple of times, Michael, is food waste. This is great because there's a guilt people have around throwing food away. I know I hate it.

And so your ability to help me waste less food is a really great thing. And by the way, I'm a big proponent of eliminating food waste or trying to get it down to the point where it's not such a big issue. Grocery stores throw in an astonishing amount of food, unfortunately, but consumers do too.

And so if you can help a consumer eliminate a lot of that waste, fix that thing where they've got all that guilt and yet help them come up with new uses for products, that's the one win. And what I'm getting at here is that when customers go to the store and they want to get healthy, they buy products that sound like they would be good because they are healthy, and they don't necessarily know how to use those products. And now you're breathing new life into that use case, you're also connecting that consumer into the produce section and other sections in the store where you have perishables, which again, drives more loyalty and more awareness to the rest of the store.

Can you talk about that piece? What stories or what case studies, etc. would you have that you'd be able to share around how you've been able to make a difference in this area?

It's a super interesting area. The one where you don't just see your brand as something isolated, that you're just trying to sell your product, but you're putting it into the ecosystem basically of other brands around you. And one thing that we found really interesting here is when you start thinking of different, even different distribution channels than normally.

So we particularly work with, we still work with a company called Vasa that makes crispy bread based out in Sweden, but they're also present globally. And they have a very classical brand approach of saying, we're going to go through retail the way we normally do. But then what we learned by doing a few experiments on their site on recipes and also doing it on a site for a particular veggie box player that was delivering a box of vegetables to people's homes.

And they were doing it at quite a large scale, meaning 15,000 households per week. So they're sending that out. And we realized very quickly that actually there were a lot of people over there that were actually making crispy bread lunch and breakfasts with the vegetables that were coming out there.

So suddenly we found a match, right? Suddenly we're saying, okay, if Vasa, you actually put the crispy bread into the vegetable boxes for delivery right there, you actually are serving a customer that is anyway going in for crispy bread, and you're probably the biggest brand in this space, you can be present. And the veggie box player wins as well, because they're suddenly serving a need that I didn't even know there was out there.

And suddenly Vasa could go much more direct to consumer. They didn't have to go through a retailer. They actually went through a veggie box player, delivering recipes and ingredients on a weekly basis through another channel, where they suddenly had a super passionate audience, because it's a different kind of audience than your average retail store audience, that could give them even more data about this kind of particular target group that they could use back into their retail arm again.

And suddenly they could actually go in and say, because we learned this by delivering to 15,000 homes directly with vegetables, we know that actually a lot of people want to have avocado next to the crispy bread. So we actually had a few retailers who started putting avocado and crispy bread close to each other with a little scanner on the store of what can you make these things together for breakfasts. So suddenly you start getting these sort of links that start becoming another physical experience as well on top.

And it's creating value to all parts of the chain, whether it's the food brand, the veggie box player who suddenly found a way to serve the customer they were surprised and delighted about, and the retailer who suddenly gets... I think they would never have thought of before putting crispy bread in the vegetable section, but suddenly it started making sense as a campaign. So that's a good example where you can think and you can start educating your retailer, and you also can start thinking different about your supply chains, your distribution channels, sorry, so that you start thinking not just the classical ones, but think about two or three alternative ones.

We've had quite good success with exactly this, the food banks of this world, the CSAs of this world, this whole space where you're getting, you know, delivered a bunch of ingredients to your home, and you need to start cooking with it. It's actually a space where people need inspiration. And once you give them that inspiration, you start learning how to connect with brands, and you can get the right brands into those places where you have a very, very dedicated audience, where you can learn a lot from and think a little bit different and future-proof yourself, because you're suddenly getting an alternative distribution channel which gives you robustness in your sales going forward.

That is really cool. I'm impressed on how the different, all the different ways you've thought about how to use that. So if I'm a brand, one of the challenges that you have is that the retailer tells you where your brand is going to be, because generically, they know, but they don't understand your customer.

So this helps validate your reason to help that, to get that product merchandise correctly where customers can find it. You can have the best product in the world, but if customers can't find it, then they can't buy it, then you don't have a brand. So one.

Two, being able to pair different items and have the data to support that, that's great. So if I'm a brand and I go to a retailer and I'm trying to get a side stack or an incremental display or something like that, usually it's very expensive. One.

And then two, if you do get it, it's not permanent. There are a lot of other constraints around it. But the point is that being able to validate that, not being able to validate today without your tool, makes it very difficult to convince a retailer why this matters.

So now if I have your tool and I'm able to show a retailer, how is the example bread and avocado, if you put those two items together, here's what the lift is, that's a win-win because the retailers are looking for creative ways to differentiate themselves in the market, right? Talked about that. The other thing is you're providing insights that the retailer can't get anywhere else.

This is a huge win. The other thing that I wanted to touch on here is trade marketing. If I go to promote my product by itself, it's expensive and most brands can't afford to do that.

However, if I can promote my product with another product and we can go in on that promotion together and we can leverage our resources, both brands, as a pairing, then we can reduce the overall cost. And yet the benefit of co-promoting is I get to talk to, I get to invite their customers to buy my product and vice versa. And I also am able to create a new use case for it, a new way to get customers excited about my product.

And from a brand perspective, this is a great way to build sales. Because when you promote your product, you get a huge lift, you increase in sales. If I promote it with an increment, with a different product, then I can get an even bigger lift.

And I've done a lot of research around avocados and people don't understand, would probably be surprised, I should say, by how incremental their volume is when they're paired with other products. I know for a fact that that's a huge win. So if you have the ability to leverage the strength of another brand or another product, then that's going to dramatically propel your brand, your growth, et cetera.

That is really, really cool. I love that. So do you have other?

I'm sorry, you're going to say something. Do you have other?

Yeah, thanks. I just want to play on that because I completely agree. I think co-branding is exactly where you campaign two brands together.

FIt's an extremely powerful tool, but it's also a tool that can be very difficult to master because it can seem extremely unauthentic or pushed if it's not something that really fits a user need. If you're trying to push really hard for avocado and chickpeas to go together, but actually that's not what people do out there and they don't get the association, it's not going to work for you. It's going to seem unauthentic and it's going to seem like you're just pushing sales and you're actually going to detrack brand value by doing so.

So the easiest way to change behavior is to first understand behavior and ride the wave of existing behavior. And that's exactly what we try to do here. First learn the data, first learn what is your brand being consumed with, what are the products, what are the ingredients you're being consumed with, and then you can ride on that existing behavior and just put your brand into that space in natural ways where people are anyway doing the behavior, just making it easier.

d then you scale up that behavior. So that's sort of the core rule here is that you cannot invent consumption, but you can actually identify patterns and then ride the wave of those existing patterns. So it's really important to start with the data rather than start with a great idea that I think everyone should eat avocado with crisp bread.

That's to come from people actually doing so.

Well, and great, thank you for sharing that because yeah, a lot of people, first of all, they probably would not have thought about that had they not seen that use case. So again, it gets back to understanding what matters to your customer and leveraging the way they want to see the product with that retail, et cetera. In addition to that, it gives me a whole bunch of new insights about what my customer is like.

If my customers are eating a lot of avocados, well, what does that mean about that customer? There are a lot of insights that you can get out of that. And actually, one of the points I actually meant to touch on before is tools on a website.

One of the greatest SEO drivers for a way to get people to come to your website is to have a free tool. And I think a lot of people undervalue that. I've got a free trade promotion ROI calculator on my website.

I mention that because to your point a minute ago, now if I can understand the different components, the different levers that you need to pull when you're working with trade promotion, that will teach you how to become more efficient. Becoming more efficient makes your brand more valuable to retailers, to investors, et cetera. But more importantly, it helps give you more bandwidth to grow and scale your brand, et cetera.

But now pair that with another brand, that's a huge win. And so if I can leverage those insights, then not only am I going to get more bandwidth to support my brand, my future growth, but again, I'm going to be able to help my retailer at a much higher level. So back to the SEO piece, the point is that people like to play with tools.

And they like to play with, if I do this or add broccoli versus carrots or whatever, what would it look like? And that's that curiosity factor. You talked about it a little bit.

That's really key to helping develop a relationship with a brand. Because it's not just, hey, I'm a nice guy, here's a cool brand, got a great slogan. But more importantly, here are some of the other things, the value add that I'm giving to my consumer.

And now I'm helping my consumer understand about other products, other food groups, other ingredients, etc. Can you talk a little bit about that? That piece of it, that interaction.

What type of engagement, you mentioned a little bit of it, what type of engagement do you see when you have a variety of choices like that on the website? And then the SEO part, how does that drive customers to my website? How do I build that awareness?

Yeah, and this is a super important topic because we all are learning that, as you mentioned just before, the value of owned sort of traffic versus rendered traffic. So you getting people on your website on a regular basis, you collecting emails so you can regularly engage is infinitely more valuable than having to put another Facebook ad or another Instagram ad or Google ad out there again and again and again and again and just rent that sort of learning. So having not just a one-off, but like something that returns is super important.

So what we're learning in our journey is the first and most important part of SEO. This game is changing by the minute, right? Because Google is changing the algorithms.

SEO used to be all about having the right words on your site. And then backlinks, those are the two things you need to do. But increasingly Google is trying, because people are trying to hack that as much as they can.

They're also trying to move the goalposts. And increasingly what they're excited about is engagement, interaction. So the most expensive thing on Google is if you have users coming in and jumping out right away.

Because then they're like, okay, you apparently are not creating a lot of value for people. So we're not going to send as many people your way. So if you can get bounce rates down and interaction up, spend time on page, you're going to get Google search engine up and running.

It's actually more important than the words you put in and even the backlinks sometimes. So that's the core and most important part of this. And what we see is with this empty your fridge heuristic that we talked about, you can get your bounce rates from your 4050s to the 50s to 20s.

So that's tremendously improving your SEO. Then there's the time on page, of course, which is the added benefit where we're getting from a little bit less than two minutes to a little bit more than four minutes. So it's almost a doubling for the people who stay of time spent on page.

And again, that's the thing that Google looks at and you actually will impact your SEO further. So those are some of the impact for the SEO business that sort of we're not focusing very much on search word optimization. We're focused on interaction optimization, real people being really excited.

And what's the added benefit of that is you're going to get people who sign up to the newsletter, which means you're going to get traffic coming in. That's actually owned. So that's going to come in and in the end when you do the right newsletter strategy around it.

Then on top of that, you're going to create something exciting for people because there is a free tool here that you just learned about on your site. And it's white label. So they feel like it's yours and it is yours.

So for that reason, they're going to be coming back because that's the place they know this tool for. They're going to show to a few friends. They're going to have a pretty high share rate.

When we do this word of mouth exercises, we really learn that this is something people talk about. And most importantly, they're going to come back. And that again is basically traffic that keeps them coming in rather than this rendered traffic.

So that's the core thing. The engagement, which is lower bound trade and more time spent on page. And then on top of that, the share rate and the retention rate, which means basically they come back again and again.

Those are the factors we run with by having a tool that has something special.

And when you talk about promotions and marketing and stuff, a lot of brands spend a ton of money saying, hey, I got a great brand. You need to buy my product because I've got a great brand, et cetera, talking at us. But now we're talking to that customer, to that specific customer, one.

And then two, can you imagine the amount of money you're spending to promote your product through traditional ways? Whereas now you can spend nothing, not literally nothing, but pretty much nothing to have Google promote your brand or have other social sites or other customers promote your brand. Word of mouth is the key.

And the reason that matters is that if I tell you that I like a certain product, chances are you're going to go out and buy it because you trust me. And I gave you my honest recommendation, my authentic recommendation. And yet that's hard to come by.

And another thing is most brands struggle to capture that. That's lightning in a bottle. And if you can capture that and then leverage that through what you're talking about, engagement, et cetera, that's again, that's prices.

Hate to keep using that word, but it really is so valuable. And people don't know how to leverage it. They don't know how to use it.

That's really cool. And then to your point, higher share rates. All the things that you would want.

Imagine putting a product out there, and you built it and now customers come to you. And that's really what we're talking about. And more importantly, how do you personalize your brand around that?

Build a platform or community around that and then leverage those insights as you decide about, as you develop new innovation, whether it be for traditional retail or not, or even for your own site, your thoughts.

Yeah, I think there's one thing people miss a lot when they think of online traffic, particularly in relation to when you're going to convert people from something online to something physical. And it's a general law in business that you see in many places and in nature as well, which is called the power law. And the power law is that basically 80% of your revenues are coming from 20% of your customers.

And that power law is even stronger in online, where basically 80% of your revenues are coming from 2% of your visitors. That means if you just try to please the average by creating experiences that are purely based on beautiful pictures or things that just resonate with everyone, you're not going to address the 2% who are the most important ones. You need to create something that truly delights the people who are engaged and gives them a chance to go really deep.

So a way to go really deep is if you have video content, roles, and keeps on describing new aspects of your brand all the time. People can go deeper and they can go binge watch stuff about your brand. That's one way to do it.

Another thing is obviously the experience that we're creating, but there's many other strategies around this. It's just an important general mental model to remember that there's the power law in business, and in particular, actually in food, where you're going from online to physical. And it's that you have to think of the 2% most important ones, because those are the ones who are actually creating your business.

And getting them to engage is core. And getting them to write qualitative comments back to you about how they think, getting them to sign up to a newsletter so you can engage with, that's the most important aspect you can do of all businesses rather than pleasing the 50%.

Good point. I love that. And most brands are trying to hit the ball out of the park, so to speak.

And they're trying to make something that appeals to everyone. And they're so focused on that, that they lose sight of that core consumer, that core customer that loves their brand, the core customer that comes back again and again and again. That's how you grow a brand.

That's how you convert an occasional customer into loyal evangelist. And to your point earlier, it's that loyal evangelist that's going to defend your brand, that's going to support your brand, that's going to share your brand, that's going to help you build that word of mouth that no lie can trust. And at the end of the day, that is the most important asset you have.

And if you can get that, bring them into your franchise and send them an email, so you capture email lists and all that other stuff, that's the holy grail. I mean, that is such a huge, huge win. And this is how you future proof your brand.

If all the retailers went away, and I've been saying that for a long time, never knew a pandemic was coming, but yet the brands that have a community, a thriving community outside of retail, are the brands that survived, they're brands that did well, they're brands that are able to reposition, innovate, etc. And then as stores begin to open up again, those brands are ready to take advantage of their key learnings and the insights that they've gained. And now they're able to help their retail partners even more.

And from my success, if you're able to help a retailer achieve the things they want, remember more traffic in the store, reasonable profit in the category, and a competitive advantage in the market, then Savvy Retails will give you incremental opportunities not available to other brands. So that's another huge win. This is cool.

I love it. What things have we not talked about that you want to make sure that we cover?

I'm loving the conversation, just enjoying the minutes here. But I think one thing that now you mentioned, the Corona quarantine and what's been going on there, I think one thing that people have also missed there is because we've gone more online in our shopping behavior, we've gone even more into habits. Because what do you do when you shop online?

You basically go by your recently bought bucket. And there's all these algorithms that are just like Amazon's, where basically it's trying to show you things you bought in the past, particularly in groceries. And that means suddenly it can be really hard for a brand, a new brand in particular, to get in to that space.

Because basically you have hysteresis where you're locked to your habits, much stronger than it was when you went physical. So we create a lot of habits and we're accentuating a lot of habits as we're going more online. And that also means that that accentuates the value of your owned assets.

So you are actually building a relationship directly with customers, so you can nudge them a little bit, because it's really hard to do that online and retail. And that's only going to accentuate as we've gotten more used to buying online rather than offline. So it's never been more important for you to build your brand.

It's never been more important for you to build your connection with your brand because of these new trends. And for that reason, you need to do anything you can really to build that connection, because without that connection, you really are left to people's habits, which means the big brands that are already big are going to win and you're going to have a very hard time coming in. So never underestimate the value of your owned assets.

And as I know with myself, we're a five-year-old startup, so we're also quite new. We're about 20 people now. And I know how busy life is when you're starting something up, when you're building a new brand.

And for that reason, it's easy to de-prioritize certain things and just say, okay, what is core? What is focus? So for that reason, we also just try to make that easier.

If you had to build a whole recipe portfolio on your website and take the great pictures and the great videos, while you're also doing all the key account management of retailers and trying to build a product, you're going to break yourself down. So we try to make it really easy. So that's also why we have all the recipes.

We're just adapting the logic. So we have a product hierarchy below ingredients so that right away you can have thousands of recipes for your brand. And we make it in a way that's something called a widget technology that means it's basically one line of code of HTML you put on your page and it works.

And I'm not a programmer, but I can put it on a page. It's really that easy. So that's super core here, that you need to invest in your own assets and we need to make it easy.

And your comment about habits, to your point, a lot of retailers are going back to the larger brands because the larger brands are safe for them. And yet during this lockdown, we've all had to change the way we think. And customers like the ability to grow and to learn.

And if you can show them a new way to create a meal, to cook something, to not waste things, to come up with something that they're excited about, that's another huge win. And that's an opportunity for you to introduce your brand to a new consumer. I love the fact that you're talking about how one line of code in your website, which if you had talked to me four or five years ago, I would have scratched my head, but that's really cool.

So everything is on the back end, it's on your site. The one line of code simply brings it in. And what we're getting at here is that as a brand, I don't need to rebuild everything on my own.

What you're doing is you're saying, I plugged this simple thing into the backside of my website, so a consumer doesn't even see that. And up pops the window or the widget, the thing that we're talking about, the recipe builder. And it's customized to my brand, et cetera.

I use a lot of tools like that on my website. They're actually easy to use. And point being is that that gives me, it's about building that experience, that personalization and giving it customer a reason to come back again and again and again.

And that's where we started this conversation. So thank you for sharing that. And thank you again for reaching out to me.

This is really cool technology. I'm excited about it. Do you have anything else you want to share?

I think the only thing I want to share is, I'm a fan the other way around as well. I think what you do is important. And this is important that it can be difficult to be a new brand in food in particular, and to sort of go through the sound wall and think hard about how can you do that is important.

And having people who can guide you along the way with great free content like this podcast is a pleasure. So I've been very inspired. Paul, I've been following.

And please continue the good work.

Thanks. I appreciate it. That means a lot.

I really appreciate it. My frustration, when you look at my work, where I play, actually, this is what we talked about before I hit the record button. What we do as an industry is we teach people how to raise money, then we teach them how to raise money, then we teach them how to raise money, and then we teach them to hand the keys to their brand to someone else.

And what's the definition of insanity? Expecting a different outcome by doing the same thing. And the challenge is the strategies that are taught today are the same cookie cutter strategies that everyone else uses.

And if I can help you differentiate the way you use the product, again, thank you, I'm honored. That's the point of differentiation. The reason I was thrilled about having you on today is because this is very disruptive.

This gives you an opportunity to not only develop that personalization, that one-on-one relationship with your end customer, but then more importantly, it gives you an opportunity to learn about them and then leverage those insights with someone else. There are other retailers, your own product, your own site, etc. So you're on the store, thanks.

So thank you so much for coming on today. Tell us a little bit about how we get a hold of you and where can we go to learn more about Plant Jammer?

Yeah, thanks. Yeah, so you can go to plantjammer.com. So the name is Plant Jammer, so plant, because we started off working only in plants.

We now also have offerings beyond, but we still believe that a plant-based diet is a good thing. You don't need to eat it every day, but for that reason, plant. And then Jammer, because we like the mindset of the kitchen, should be much like a jazz band doing a jam session.

So that's why it's plantjammer.com. You're also more than welcome to just reach out to me, michael, at plantjammer.com, or find me on LinkedIn. And I'd be happy to tell you more about the technology and show.

We're a team of 20 people, and basically it's data scientists and it's chefs. And it's those two categories working together. Normally, you don't see chefs and data scientists working together.

They're very different creatures. But we taught them a way to actually put stuff into boxes and make things great together. And if you reach out, you need to talk to a data scientist or a chef.

I'll connect you with them. And if not, I'll be happy to talk to Rick.

Fantastic. So I'll be certain to put a link to you and to Plantjammer in the podcast and the show notes and on the podcast web page. Thank you so much for coming on today and sharing your wisdom and your insights.

This has been a great conversation.

It's amazing. Thank you so much, then.

I want to thank Michael for coming on the podcast today, for sharing his wisdom and his insights, and more importantly, for reaching out to me and sharing his cool tool with us. This is exactly what I've been telling BRANDs to do. Find a creative strategy to drive customers to your website.

Develop a community outside of traditional retail. And then leverage that community to help you grow sales wherever your customers shop. You can learn more about Plant Jammer by going to the link on the podcast web page.