BRAND SECRETS AND STRATEGIES

PODCAST #58

Hello and thank you for joining us today. This is the Brand Secrets and Strategies Podcast #58

Welcome to the Brand Secrets and Strategies podcast where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.

I’m your host Dan Lohman. This weekly show is dedicated to getting your brand on the shelf and keeping it there.

Get ready to learn actionable insights and strategic solutions to grow your brand and save you valuable time and money.

LETS ROLL UP OUR SLEEVES AND GET STARTED!

Dan: Welcome. The theme for today's show is to start with a mission in mind. This show is about you, and it's for you. I love sharing stories from inspirational thought leaders with a mission and a great story to tell. You're about to hear an amazing story about how a brand was built with a mission in mind. What I find unique about this story is the competitive nature of today's guest. He continually pushes himself and his team to be better, to do more, and to want more, never resting on their accomplishments. While some brands would be thrilled at what they've been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, what keeps this thought leader up at night are trying to solve problems beyond tomorrow.

My guest and I both have traditional CPG backgrounds. We talk about what big brands know and how big brands go to market, the strategies they use, the competitive tactics, etc., and despite that great education, we both ended up in the natural channel. This is why this is important. At the heart of what most of us do in this channel, there's a mission. There's a reason for wanting to be more and to do more. I frequently make the comparison to the ripple in the pond. There's a seismic shift happening in the industry, and natural is that ripple in the pond. Natural is growing exponentially.

What's exciting about this is that while there are a lot of things that natural brands, smaller brands, can learn from their larger CPG counterparts, what's exciting is that large brands are beginning to take a lesson from us. They're beginning to change the way that they do things. Think about it: Brands that no longer have artificial flavors, large companies that are getting behind and helping to support natural brands. What's encouraging about this is, like the ripple in the pond, we're making a difference, a lasting difference. We're getting those larger brands to take a more active role, making a large commitment to support the causes, the many causes, that always support natural. For example, the Climate Collaborative, organic, sustainability, and much more. Here's Kyle. Kyle, thank you for coming on today. Can we get started by you telling our audience a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you're at today?

Kyle: Yeah. I'd be happy to. Thanks for having me. I am currently the CEO of Organic India USA. We are a leading herbal tea and dietary supplement company with 100% organic and non-GMO ingredients based in Boulder, Colorado. Company's been around about 16 years in the U.S. and about 20 years overall. My background is actually a little different than a lot of the folks that I deal with here in the natural products industry. I started off my career and spent 17 years, actually, at Procter & Gamble. Straight out of college, went to P&G and worked in market research, a variety of different categories doing all the typical P&G rotation through laundry detergent, and paper towels, and retail, and ended up working in the healthcare business at P&G and was there during a big period of change and worked on a lot of mergers and acquisitions, including P&G's acquisition of New Chapter, which is a dietary supplement brand based in Vermont that sells whole food supplements.

As part of that transaction, I was asked by P&G to go out and lead that business, and so I moved to Vermont with my family in 2012 and took over as the CEO of Organic India and spent three years there. Fell in love with this industry, really loved the dietary supplement aspect, but also the natural products industry more broadly, and got an opportunity in 2015 to join Organic India and jumped at the opportunity. It was a brand that I knew and loved and drank tulsi tea every day well before I worked here. Actually, when I got the call from the recruiter, she said, "Oh, it's this little company you've probably never heard of before," and I asked her what it was, and she said, "Organic India," and I was actually drinking my daily dose of Organic India tulsi tea, even. She said that she was a little shocked to hear that I did that, and jumped at the chance. Next thing I knew, I was on a plane to India meeting the founders and really fell in love with the work that they were doing and decided to leave the P&G nest and head west and come out here to Colorado in 2015.

Dan: Well, thanks for sharing that. What a change, to go from Cincinnati to Vermont and then to Boulder. I'll bet that was kind of a shock on your family.

Kyle: Yes. I was growing up, both my wife and I had grown up in the Midwest, so it's a real shock, but we love it here in Boulder and couldn't be happier.

Dan: This is home. I love it here. When I tell people I live in Colorado, they're just amazed. I've had opportunities to move and live just about everywhere, but I've got to say this is, in my opinion, the best place. Thank you for sharing that. You mention that Organic India is based in Boulder, but yet you had to go to India, and then you were also talking, when we spoke earlier, about a trip to Australia, so how does that work?

Kyle: Yeah, so we are a global company, and a lot of people still don't know the company exists, but Organic India was founded about 20 years ago in northern India in a town called Lucknow. Our founders are not Indian. They had been in India at the same time on a spiritual journey and met in Lucknow and became aware of some of the issues with farmer suicides that were happening in India because of the terrible Western agricultural practices that had come about. That led them to an idea to teach farmers how to grow organically and to get out of this cycle of debt that had been caused by the Green Revolution sweeping through India. Pretty much on a whim, not having any experience starting a business before, they decided they wanted to try to tackle this problem by building a business that could create a marketplace for farmers to grow herbs organically and teach those farmers how to do it, pay for their certifications, and really build a marketplace for them, at first in India.

What they quickly realized, once they got up and running, is that there was demand for these organic products, probably even more so in countries like the U.S. and Australia, and parts of Europe, than there was in India. When the organic movement really kicked off in the U.S. when the organic standards were being developed, back in 2002 they started importing products. They had a friend that happened to have a technology business, of all things, in Boulder and had some extra warehouse space that he let them use, and so they started importing products. That's how they ended up in Boulder, and in 2012, officially Organic India USA was formed as the U.S. distribution arm, and now the product's available in about 15 countries around the world. Most of our business is still in India and the U.S., but we're starting to expand throughout Europe and other parts of Asia as the market for organic healthcare products is really starting to expand.

Dan: Interesting. Could you unpack that a little bit? I think it's fascinating that they went to India, found a problem, and worked to solve it. When you're talking about how terrible the farming practices were, what was it like then, and how did they change it? What did it look like when they were finished?

Kyle: Yeah. It's a great question and a really fascinating story, because the history, if you think about a lot of the farmers that we work with, if you go into the Uttar Pradesh region of India where a lot of the agriculture is, it's kind of the agriculture belt of India, where Lucknow is and where a lot of our farms are, if you saw what these farmers were doing, a lot of them had been, for generations, maybe 10 generations even, had been farming on the same land, and so a lot of these families have between one and two acres of land, and it's all they really have. It's the only asset that they have. It's been in their family, passed down for generations, and all they've ever known is farming.

They farmed using what in India they may call Vedic agricultural traditions, which is similar to organic and gets into some of the more spiritual aspects of when they plant with moon cycles and how they treat the soil, and it was really, in some cases, thousands of years operating as a holistic system. There was no seed store to go to, no fertilizer store to go to. It was, you had what you had on your land, you saved your seeds, you had your cow, maybe, that would provide some compost for you. When the Green Revolution was sweeping across the world almost 60 years ago now, this idea that the only way that we were going to be able to feed the rapidly growing populations in the global south was through industrial agricultural practices.

As much as we know today that that's definitely not true, at the time there was a lot of energy in that space, and India was a huge market for these big ag companies to come in and sell fertilizer, and to sell seed, and to sell pesticides. They took advantage of that situation and went into a lot of these regions and started teaching people the monocropping, big farm, highly toxic farming techniques that are used throughout the U.S.

Like a lot of new things, I think the first couple of years the farmers were having pretty good results, but what they quickly realized, which is now proven in a lot of the science around organic agriculture, is, the yields were good, but in extreme conditions, either drought or heavy rain years, organic tends to outperform conventional agriculture, and so some of these farmers, if a drought hit, the land wasn't as resilient without their traditional techniques, and they may have a total crop failure and lose everything.

Unfortunately for these farmers, in the past if they had lost a crop, then maybe they couldn't eat, and they would work with their neighbors and help each other out, but suddenly they had all these input materials that they had to pay for, and so they had no income coming in, but they still owned money for pesticides, and fertilizers, and all these input materials that they had bought off the farm that they had never had to worry about before. Instead of creating this food for all, which is how the Green Revolution was pitched, it really was creating a cycle of debt for these farmers. They had a crop failure, they owed the money, and as a result, they couldn't pay it back, and it led to an epidemic of farmer suicides, and for the last 20 years, an average of 41 farmers a day have committed suicide.

Dan: Wow.

Kyle: It's just an astonishingly scary situation, and while it's getting better, it's still a problem now, but 20 years ago really at the peak of this happening, the founders saw this, and it's a devastating thing to be living there and to be in these communities and see these farmers that have nothing else ending up taking their lives because they can't afford to pay the bills for some pesticide or something that they had bought.

At the same time, the founders had coincidentally met a Western-trained physician named Dr. Narendra Singh who was operating a clinic in this town called Azamgarh and treating a lot of patients and using some of these herbal medicines like tulsi, and ashwagandha, and a lot of the products that we still sell today, and he was growing frustrated that a lot of his products that he was trying to treat patients with were being contaminated with pesticides. He felt like in some cases maybe he was doing more harm than good, and really bringing those two ideas together of, "How do we get clean crops for Dr. Singh, and how do we get these farmers out of this cycle of debt," the idea for an organic farming mission was born.

Pretty quickly, able to get a few farmers to try it out, and it was a big conversion. The farmers weren't exactly open to listening yet again to some people from outside of their country coming in and trying to tell them what to do after they had been burned, but thankfully we were able to convince a couple of farmers. Once they saw the benefits of going organic, both for their individual health, but also for the yields and for the quality of the herbs and the payment that they were receiving for the herbs, those five farmers that we started with were able to convince their five friends and so on, and today we work with about 2,500 small family farmers that otherwise would have been marginalized out of the system in India.

Dan: Thank you for sharing all that. They went from five farmers to 2,500 farmers. I love the story, because it is counterintuitive, and if you've been listening to the podcast, I talk to a lot of industry experts who are sharing a lot of these insights about how the old way of doing things really was the best way. I guess I really want to go back, dig in a little bit further, and celebrate, but yet talk to you about how that works. How did they get five farmers to sign on to a way of doing something that probably seemed very foreign to them?

Kyle: Yeah. It was foreign in a lot of ways because of the foreigners that were coming in and telling them that, but I think what some of the farmers realized, that a lot of the practices that we were advocating for in organic were practices that they had been using before they were trained on these new industrial techniques. Before industrialized farming became a thing in India, most farmers used what they had on their land, and the farm was an ecosystem of what you had available, and so you used food waste, and you used cow manure as compost, and you saved seeds, and so a lot of the things that we were advocating for their forefathers had also done, and in some cases, their parents and their grandparents had farmed that way, because it was all that they knew.

That helped, but what also helped, I think, was, they were realizing, some of the more progressive farmers that picked up early on, they were realizing that they didn't have much time left using these industrial practices, because if they had a crop failure and they were getting no money at all, maybe the risk of trying something new with higher projected yields and also higher income, because, one, lower input costs, and two, higher commodity prices because of the organic premium, why not try it out? In fairness, when they called the first farmer meeting, I know that Bharat Mitra, one of our founders, tells a story about there were times during that meeting where he thought he might even be beheaded.

Some of these guys were saying, "Don't come into our village and tell us what to do," but they had a couple of the elders in town lean in and say, "Okay. We're going to give this a chance." Those first five were really able to convince the rest of the village and get their neighbors and their friends bought in so that that grew in the future, because what we found, and still to this day, it's a lot easier when a farmer teaches another farmer. The train-the-trainer model works so much better than us coming in and trying to educate, and so we'd benefit a lot by going into villages and building the expertise in a couple places and then having kind of lead farmers for the village that can really take over and push the expansion.

Dan: I love that. The train-the-trainer model, that's what we use in natural. We're such a nice, well-knit, tight community where we work together, so thank you for sharing that. I want to talk about that again in a minute, but I've got another question for you. Regarding the farmers' adopting these new practices, how did that go over with the pressure that was being applied by the tradition, by the crops, by the seed sellers and fertilizer sellers, etc.? How did they get beyond that?

Kyle: I think at first, probably with the first five farmers it was less, it was seen as less of a threat, I think, by the folks that were selling those things, because there's hundreds of farmers and a few branched off, but we did run into some issues in the early years where the farmers that we had brought on were learning organic. It takes three years to convert the land, so we were buying a lot of herbs and basically composting them, because we couldn't sell them as organic, and teaching them the techniques and spending time there. What we found in a couple instances was that these salesmen would come into the village and say, "Oh, I've got this organic pesticide you can use."

It wasn't an organic pesticide, but these farmers, they weren't well-educated. They didn't speak great English, and so they can be tricked into some things, and we saw people taking advantage, and we had a couple instances early on where the farmers had been tricked into buying pesticides, and we grew the crops. They thought everything would be organic, and we took them through testing before we did anything with them, like we always do, and we find all this pesticide residue. We dig in and try to find out what happened and see someone was tricked, but the amazing thing about these farmers is that they pretty quickly built a self-policing mechanism to make sure that didn't happen.

The next time that sales guy showed up and tried to trick one of their neighbors, you can imagine what kind of feedback they got, because in a village like that, if one farmer makes a mistake, the others are all affected, and so you're not only responsible for what you're doing on your land, but if the crops are being merged together and it contaminates a batch, you can affect your neighbor, and so it became a really strong community building where they stood together, and that allowed them to stand against the pressure from the outside interests who were trying to make a buck. Pretty quickly, when they saw that we were guaranteeing them minimums and that organic goods were selling for 10 to 20% premium depending on the crop, they pretty quickly got the idea that this was for them. It was financially better. They were healthier. They weren't spraying all these pesticides and getting sick, and they were enjoying their work more. They were healthier. Their community was healthier. It was a pretty easy sell at that point, once they saw the benefits after a couple years.

Dan: Thanks for sharing that. That's exactly why I wanted to ask that question, because you hear stories about farmers that quote-unquote "don't do it right" in this country, meaning they do it organically, and their neighbors are using other methods, the big ag model where they're using pesticides and herbicides, and they're chastised by their community, and a lot of pressure's put on them. The idea that they were able to self-police and then manage that system on their own is inspiring. Where I'm going with that is that small brands, small, organic farmers that need to do a better job at standing up and getting together to communicate the value of that, and where I'm going with this, Kyle, is that the value of the product that you put in your box needs to be celebrated in terms of it being organic, and clean, and easy to understand ingredients. I think as an industry, we need to do a much better job of highlighting why those products are better, why clean label, why organic is better and different, and not give in to the noise and the rhetoric that you hear from the naysayers. Your thoughts?

Kyle: Yeah. I think that's exactly right, and I think when we started, especially on the tea side of the business, when we started selling tulsi tea, no one knew what tulsi was. Holy basil is another name for tulsi, is a now widely commonly used adaptogen in the natural products industry, but at the time, no one knew what it was, but the benefit we had was, not a lot of people were selling organic herbal teas anyway, and so being organic for that niche was a helpful starting point for us. We got to ride the wave of the strong organic growth, but it's always amazing to me how few people think about that when they're thinking of a product like tea or like coffee where you're basically creating a hot water extract in your cup.

If that's full of pesticides, once people realize that, it's hard to convince someone, once they realize that, that they're ever going to go back and buy any kind of tea, or any kind of coffee, or anything like that, that's not organic, because why would you? People are viewing that with things like milk, and you see some of those categories emerging more. You've heard of the dirty dozen and some of these categorizations where people will say, "Okay. These are the most pesticide crops. I'm going to avoid conventional there. I'm going to seek organic," but something like tea is not an obvious thought for people until they have that idea. Once they do, it's hard to go back.

We try to focus on the positives of organic, not the negatives of conventional, and we're seeing more and more, as the research comes out, that the nutrient value of organic is often better, especially in antioxidant profile. Obviously, the land impact is way more positive on organic farms than on conventional farms, and so we try to celebrate those positive differences and educate the population, so even though organic is growing, it's still a very limited part of the marketplace in those categories, and so we view a big part of our job as just educating people on organic in general, not just tea. We believe people should be ... We don't sell bananas, we don't sell milk, but we want people buying organic bananas and organic milk, because we know it's better for the planet, and it's better for the people ingesting it.

Dan: Absolutely. Thank you for sharing that, and it's one of the things that I think really needs to be celebrated in this industry. One of the things that I think brands need to do a better job is communicating exactly what you just shared with us beyond the four corners of the package. This is exactly why I wanted to have you on the podcast. The fact that you've got a great story, and your background, and I'm not going to tease you about working for P&G. We'll get to that in a minute but the fact that you're able to share so many great insights, what a great story to be able to tell. One of the things I want this podcast to do is to help educate current and future consumers not only about what Organic India stands for, but what other organic products are about and why it matters. Where I wanted to go with that, Kyle, is that I believe that if you are what you eat, then what you eat matters, and what I mean by that, kind of like what you were saying, that if you eat something that is tainted by something unnatural, pesticides or whatever, that eventually seeps into your system.

One of the stories that on a recent podcast I had with Jon Sebastiani, Sonoma Brands, he was talking about his background in the wine business. He was talking about how the different vintages, the romance around how they were able to sell, and share, and embellish the attributes of the wine, why those grapes are better than a different set of grapes, and why this model's worth 2,000 dollars versus something else. My point is this. I think, as an industry, we need to do a better job at celebrating food and communicating the value of that to the consumer, because no one would go out of their way to eat pesticides. Everyone knows that they're bad for you, but if you thought about the residual effect that you're going to get because that crop soaks up the pesticide or because that leaf is tainted with the pesticide, I think they'd think differently. Your thoughts?

Kyle: Yeah. I think we had a pretty eye-opening experience a couple of years ago. We have a great relationship with the Rodale Institute. If you're not familiar with Rodale, it's definitely worth looking into. They have the longest-running side-by-side organic versus conventional farm systems trial in the world, and for I think about 30 years now, they've been running a side-by-side experiment in their farm and in Pennsylvania. They've got all this great research, and so we look at them.

We talk about educating, and what we found in that process is, there's a lot of data emerging around the planetary benefits of organic, but there wasn't a lot of data around the individual benefits, and from a business standpoint, like it or not, I'm a passionate environmentalist myself, but I realize that most of the population doesn't make buying decisions the same way that I do, where they're thinking about the broader impact. It's, not to sound selfish, but a lot of consumers are looking at it as, "What's in it for me," and every reason to do this. They're spending their hard-earned money on products, they need to make sure they're getting a benefit. I think, as an industry, organic has struggled a little bit because it seems to be this nichey thing where it's like, "Oh, those are the tree-huggers that are worried about saving the planet, and they're telling me about pesticide runoff in the Gulf of Mexico."

All of those are real problems, if you ask someone like me, but to the average consumer, that's a few steps removed. What we've been advocating for, and I think what organizations like The Organic Center and some other universities have started doing is researching the nutrient value of organic. Organic Valley has found some data showing the nutrient quality of milk, the omega profile is a healthier profile in organic versus non-organic. Organic Center, which is a non-profit, does a lot of work, has published, I think, 17 different meta-analyses, and I think in 14 of those, they showed higher nutrient quantity, a quality of antioxidants, vitamin Cs, omegas, key things that the body needs, in organic.

If we can get enough science around that that can show organic is healthier and more nutrient-dense than conventional, I think we've got a much better selling story for the average person than we do saying, "Hey, save the planet with organic," which is a great sentiment, and it's true. It's just not as compelling to the individual that has to maybe pay 10% premium at shelf. I think that's where we need to start to pivot and, as an industry, start to get data that shows not only is organic better for the planet, which I think it could be broadly agreed, but that it's also better with people consuming it. I think that's where the real tipping point will hit.

Dan: I appreciate your sharing that. I've been actually talking to a lot of people, as you know, in this podcast. Neil Blomquist, Ahmed Rahim, Gary Hirshberg, and Katherine DiMatteo, who I interviewed just a couple days ago, and they all go back to the Rodale Institute, and they all talk about the important work they've done. Let me go one step further. I agree with you completely. I believe that as an industry, we need to do better, and I think that the science makes a lot of sense, but to your point, a lot of people don't understand that. How about this? The work that I do for some of the clients that I have, I actually go down to that level where I study and pay attention to those nutrient levels and develop a compelling story. What I've found is that those products that have those attributes, those compelling stories around why that's unique, why it's better, why it's cleaner, that's where the sales are growing across every category and every channel.

Just to kind of back up a little bit, I talk about this a lot, and I'll include it in the show notes. I wrote a feature article for the 2016 Category Management Handbook where I was looking at the effect of organic across all categories, and so dairy sales at the time were up 1.5%. Organic represented 9.8% of that pie, a multi, multi, multibillion-dollar, with a B, pie. Organic sales were up 12%. If you remove organic from total dairy sales, dairy was only up .5%. Point being that organic is responsible for every, for sustainable growth across every category. This is true, literally, about every category.

When you start looking at gluten-free, plant-based, and some of the other things that people are focusing on, especially in this channel, that's where the real growth is coming from, and so like Gary and I were talking about, people need to vote with their dollars, and so by teaching people the value of these products and then by developing a solid story that you take to retail to help the retailer understand that your real growth comes from these products, that's how I think we're going to conquer that, and that's how I think we're going to change things. To your point, back to the hippie movement, I don't think a lot of people really resonate with that, especially people nowadays, because like you said, we're kind of in a throw-away society.

I like the idea that brands are now communicating beyond the four corners of their package, and that you need to have a compelling selling story on their website. They need to be able to communicate their message to their friends, to their family. The selling never ends. It goes well beyond the purchase. My point being is this, that the story that you're able to share with your loyal, evangelistic consumers is what's really going to set you apart, so that, again, is one of the other reasons why I wanted to talk to you. What thoughts do you have around that, and when we spoke a little bit earlier, you were sharing some of the things that Organic India is doing to try to communicate that. Can you share some thoughts, some ideas around that?

Kyle: Yeah. I think it's one of our biggest challenges and one of the things that we try to spend a lot of time on. When I started here three years ago, I noticed we had a lot of education around the products. We have a platform on our website called Herbal University that's open to the public. Anybody can go on and learn about these herbs, and it's a great tool, but we weren't educating people more broadly on the story and the benefits of organic, and our B Corp status using business as a force for good. It felt like we were maybe missing a big part of why our consumer was attracted to us. There's dozens and dozens of turmeric brands out there.

What makes us different isn't that our turmeric is necessarily any better than anybody else's, though we believe it is. It's that it's grown organically, and we're supporting a small family farmer, and we're using our proceeds to benefit our people and the planet as part of our B Corp status. We shifted gears about three years ago and began focusing a lot more on the company story. We rebuilt our website and started telling stories from the eyes of our farmers. It's not as heavy of a product focus as it used to be. It's a lot more about the company and why we exist, and we often say if we stopped selling herbal products tomorrow, Organic India wouldn't go away. As long as there's a way that we can support a small family farmer, maybe it's selling cotton, or maybe it's desilting ponds in India and getting fresh water for people. We think there's opportunities to deliver our mission that go beyond the product, and so we should celebrate that. We are in the process of revising packaging, because obviously we want that package to tell that story, but doing it in the other touchpoints that we have with consumers, being a part of events and engaging with consumers directly.

I always joke with my team that I'm the worst salesperson, because when I go out and do presentations at industry events, or I was just at a health conference this past weekend in California, and at the end I was like, "Oh, and by the way, we sell products," because I spent an hour talking about the company, and the mission, and why we're in business, and how we work with the farmers, and you always get that question at the end that's like, "Well, where, what products do you sell, and where can I buy them?" It's like, "Oh. Right. I'm the CEO of this company. I should be mentioning that," but I think it's an important learning for us, is that you can do both.

It doesn't have to be this heavy product-focused thing, and not only do the consumers appreciate that, especially the millennia consumers that are shopping based on values, not value, retailers are starting to appreciate it. There is a category management story. I mean, to take all the altruistic parts and shove them aside, if you want, and look at it, what's growing? Big CPG brands are not what's growing, and they're not the ones driving category sales. It's organic. It's non-GMO. It's plant-based.

It's all of the things that are being innovated by these small, up-and-coming brands that appear to be too risky for the big guys, and now the retailers are saying, "Whoa, well, if I want to grow, if I want to grow in the tea category, I'd better shift my set to organic. If I want to grow in supplements, I better shift my focus to plant-based, food-based supplements, not these chemical isolate vitamins that are made in a pharmaceutical factory someplace." Not because they necessarily believe, but it's because that's what the consumer is demanding, and they need to be able to keep up, or otherwise, they're going to lose a shopper.

Dan: Exactly. Okay, so a quick question, and full disclosure. Do I need to edit that part out so that your mentors and your trainers back from your P&G days don't hear that? Because they'd be shocked that you're not in there, selling the brand, and you're not the best salesperson, because that's what P&G's known for.

Kyle: I think it's the new world. I think the big companies are realizing that. I mean, you'll never hear me say a bad thing about P&G. I learned a ton in my P&G years, and I respect so many of the leaders that have come through there, a lot of which aren't even there anymore, people that I worked with. They're off leading these big companies, but if you see what Unilever, and you see what General Mills, and you see what a lot of these big CPG companies are doing is, they're using our industry as their R&D platforms. They've either convinced themselves that they can't do it, or they think it's more efficient to do it this way.

They're finding, instead of building a brand from scratch, they're finding they can go spend a couple hundred million dollars and buy an established brand with established revenues with a mission that they couldn't create from scratch, and then their hope is to hopefully keep it true to that mission. In some cases they have, and in other cases they haven't. I have a perspective on that, but I won't share out of respect for some of the brands, but when you see it, and you see some of these big brands that are now, or some of these natural chain of brands that are now owned by big, multinational companies that are doing well, and one of the things we always talk to about at New Chapter was, maybe we can kind of infect the big company from the inside.

It's hard to change a company from the outside, but maybe if you get in there and you show them that even if you don't care at all about this mission, even if you just want to come in and say it's all about driving sales, and margin growth, and, "I've got to report my quarterly results," there's a universe where that exists, but even if you just believe that, look at the results. Look at the results of the B Corp, like the average growth of a B Corp company versus the S&P 500. Look at any index and look at mission-driven brands, and probably any dataset you can find, you're going to see disproportionate growth among mission-driven brands, among B Corps, among organic, a lot of the things that we are. It's not because we're better marketers. It's not because we're smarter. I mean, most of the people in these places probably don't have the marketing skill, or the category management skill, or the sales skill that the big CPG companies have. It's because they have a great idea, and they believe so passionately in it that they live it. They live it as their lifestyle.

That's a hard thing to replicate when you're creating a brand in a big company, and I think the big companies are, say what you want about them, but they're not stupid, and they're realizing that if they want to grow in the future, they've got to get into this game. It's just a different world than how a lot of those brands were developed over the last 50 years.

Dan: Absolutely, and I'm glad you said that, that we are not as good as the big brands in terms of the way that they apply the strategies. We talked a lot about this offline. I'm classically trained in category management by Unilever and Kimberly-Clark, back when category management was foreign. P&G was our opponent, and even though Kyle and I were talking about how we were not at each other's throat, but the level of competition was extremely high. The way that we went to market against each other was extremely competitive. The competitive arena was extremely high. It wasn't about, "Well, I'm a nicer guy. I've got a better product." It wasn't relationship-based. It was all focused on the numbers. It was driven by facts and insights, we called it fact-based selling, that included fact-based research, and by proven strategies.

My point is this. There is a lot that natural brands can learn from their larger, more sophisticated CPG counterparts, but same as we've shared in this story, going back to more of an organic footprint, a more genuine, altruistic footprint for your brand, is what's driving sales across every category and across every touchpoint. My point is this. There's an opportunity for natural brands to learn from their larger counterparts and, as you said, there's definitely an opportunity for big brands to learn from their natural brand counterparts. The brands that are doing it well, the big brands that are leaving those small brands alone and adopting some of those strategies and changing to better meet the times by removing artificial flavors and improving their transparency and so on, granted, it's slow, but we're seeing some progress. I don't think they should necessarily be vilified, certainly, as they were before, but to your point, I think that there's a lot of things that natural brands can teach big brands.

Back up into our conversation a little bit, here you are teaching five farmers how to do something that eventually was taken up to 2,500 farmers, and you were able to show the results. Using that same model, how would you recommend natural brands help big brands clean up their act, improve the way they go to market, focus more on the consumer, not trying to manipulate the consumer by marketing, and some of the strategies that they use, price, etc.? What recommendations would you have for natural brands around that?

Kyle: Yeah. I think that's a great question. I think the single biggest factor is that it's got to be authentic. When we talk to our team here, I say all the time we're either 100% authentic, or we're 0% authentic. You can't be 35% authentic. It's just, it's not a concept that works. I think what happened for a lot of years, the big companies were able to get away with a little bit of greenwashing. The natural movement, where "natural" used to mean something, and now you see "natural" used in ways that those of us deep in the industry would consider far from natural. I think the generation that's emerging now, the millennials, anybody under 30, really, is a lot more aware, and their BS detectors are amazing.

Those big companies, where maybe for years you'd get by and say, "Oh, yeah, we made progress here and put some greenwashing spin on," whatever, their GHG tracking, or whatever they were doing, they can't get away with that anymore. The first thing is to actually, if you want to do it, if you want to move the needle, whether it's for altruistic reasons, or whether it's just because you think it's better for the bottom line and you're losing to a competitor, you've got to really believe it. You can't greenwash it. You can't put a coat of paint on it and pretend that the underlying stuff isn't there. The brands that are doing that well are actually starting to not only buy the small upstart brands that are really mission-driven, they're starting to affect their own operations. It's got to start there, but then it's got to translate into some kind of action that's actually meaningful.

The benefit that these big companies have is that they're big, and so if we say we've got a checklist of 100 things that we want to do to improve the health of the planet and reduce our footprint, and maybe we're doing 90 of those things already, us going from 90 to 95% is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to a P&G, or a Unilever, or one of these big companies going 20 to 30% or even from 20 to 21%, in a lot of cases, just because they're so big. To me, it's be authentic and set some stretching but reasonable goals, and then go deliver on it and move the progress.

As much as it's easy for the average person in our industry to vilify the big companies, and in some cases well deserved, I don't focus a lot of energy there because I think, for me, getting those companies, even if they're not doing a lot great now, if they start to move in the right direction, there's a monumental shift that would come. If a P&G or Unilever went out tomorrow and mandated, "All flexible packaging that we buy as a company has to be compostable by the year 2020," what would happen? Probably by the year 2019, every package supplier in the world would have innovated a compostable packaging. We're trying to do that ourselves, and it's hard to get a vendor to even pick up the phone and answer our call, because we don't have the buying power.

I sometimes think the big companies, maybe, because, well, it's hard, when you're steering a big ship, it's hard to move the needle, but for those big companies, if they put a stake in the ground, I think the cage-free eggs, which, I think, if you want to dig into eggs, cage-free is not necessarily a good thing, but when that mandate went in, I think Unilever was one of the first companies to put a stake in the ground there. They overdelivered that commitment by like three years because they're buying eggs for Hellmann's, and Ben & Jerry's, and all these brands. Everybody selling eggs wanted to be able to sell them then, and if you don't, you don't have a market for it.

Ask them to push further. Demand it with your dollars if you're a consumer, but also these big companies, I think if they start to realize why we're growing, if they say, "Okay, we're only going to buy pasture-raised eggs," guess what? In three years, the entire market, there wouldn't be a CAFO chicken farm in the country, because the entire market would, pasture-raised, just because their purchasing power is so huge.

That's the kind of change that I think they probably underestimate what an impact it could have. If I was them, I'd try something like that, because if the consumer followed, if you do something like that on a huge brand selling in multiple countries, that are hundreds of millions, if not billion-dollar brands, not only did the true planetary impact you have a lot bigger than what I can do with a 20-million-dollar business, but they also may win over some consumers in the progress, in the process, and it would be a great thing, both for their business and for the planet.

Dan: Absolutely. Couldn't agree with you more. In fact, actually, the packaging aspect, that's the thing I was going to talk to you about next, so thanks for bringing that up. I guess the theme of this is really, greenwashing equals Green Revolution. The similarities, the point being that trying to teach people that there's a better way doing it, and the better way doing it is really going back to our roots to understand how things were done before. More altruistic, more authentic ways of producing products.

I've had a lot of people on the podcast, Tim Joseph, Maple Hill Creamery, who says that his cows are healthier, and live longer, and produce more than most of the conventional farms around him. I've talked to people that talk about how their crops are healthier. I was talking to Caryl Levine with Lotus Foods, and she was talking about how they're able to get more crop yield out of a drought-stricken area by farming in a way that creates less waste, in terms of water, and less methane, and they get a higher crop yield, and a better product as a result. Point being is that, like you said, we have the ability to change, and we have the ability to affect other companies.

Again, this is why I wanted to have you on. I first met you at a Naturally Boulder event where we were discussing some of this. Thank you for sharing that about the packaging. One of the things that I wanted to celebrate, as a highlight to what makes natural natural, and why this is different, is that when you're talking about packaging, the big brands are talking about, "how do I get more sales?" Here you are, consumed, as you said, using, quoting your own words, keeping you up late at night because you can't get that last tenth of a mile in your packaging because the capabilities, the technologies aren't there. To your point, if you could get a big brand, like a Unilever, a Frito, a P&G, or whoever, to embrace this, then it would happen overnight.

Can you share a little bit more about that? What I'm getting at is, you were talking about how you've completely changed the way your packaging is, and yet you've got one piece of the package, that small but very important part of the package that is not as sustainable as it needs to be.

Kyle: Yeah, that’s something that I think is an interesting case study. If you look at our tea, a tea box is a cardboard box with 18 teabags inside, and those teabags have a paper tag, and the teabag itself, and a string, and overwrapped to keep the teabag fresh, the part you open to actually pull the teabag out. We've moved our boxes to post-recycled content, and plant-based things, and we've got compostable teabags, unbleached teabags and strings, and we've got compostable paper tags, and we've done all this.

The one area that is still a struggle for us is the overwraps, the envelopes that the teabags go in, because we need a moisture barrier to protect the product not only for the flavor, which is obviously important in tea, but we also sell a lot of our teas as dietary supplements, and so they have benefits that they have to provide, and so we need to make sure the product does what it says it does 30 months after the point of manufacture to make those shelf claims. We spent a lot of time getting stability testing done to say, "Okay, this product, it's as good 30 months after we package it as it is when we package it." A lot of the compostable materials for envelopes are designed, by definition, to break down. That's what compostable materials do.

While we would love that from a footprint standpoint, we can't have someone buy a product 18 months after we manufacture it open it up and have all the envelopes inside having degraded, because then that would allow bugs in, or moisture, and it would damage the product. We'd have this struggle, and until about 15 months ago, when we joined a compostable packaging consortium that was set up by OSC Squared, which is a great group out of the Bay Area that does a lot of work in this area, were we really able to move the needle.

We know that the technology has progressed a lot in the last two years. There just wasn't a demand for it, so the big packaging companies, the people that are creating the materials for gusseted packaging for envelopes, for any kind of flexible paper, there was no market for it. Like I said, if a big company would have done that, they probably could have gotten the innovation done in six months. We brought some of our purchasing power together in a consortium and worked with some companies that were like-minded, and now Alter Eco on the chocolate side, Numi, a competitor of ours on the tea side, have both launched compostable, flexible packaging on their lines. We're starting to see that it may be possible for us, in the next 12 to 18 months to be able to get there.

There's still some limitations. We still have some stability work to do. There's some limitations based on the markets you source from, but the amount of progress we were able to make as a unified industry, versus as individual companies, is great, but we'd also like to see some of the big companies pushing for innovation there, because if they did it and there's suddenly 100 million dollars of purchasing power, guess what? A lot of laminate suppliers would be lining up to figure out how to do that way.

I think one of the things that makes a company like Organic India or other mission-driven companies so great is that instead of patting ourselves on the back for the cardboard innovation, the way that we've done everything else, we're beating ourselves up for not getting that last bit right. I think that kind of hunger to try to always make it better is part of what drives this industry, and part of what I love about this industry is that we're not going to pat ourselves on the back for getting 90% of the way there. We're going to try to get 100% of the way there, even if it kills us along the way.

Dan: Absolutely. I'm so glad you said that. We focus on making sure that our lips and our feet are moving in the same direction at the same speed, instead of just paying lip service. I appreciate you saying that. I love OSC2, and I've interviewed several people within the organization, and I feature them on the podcast, and what a great organization. In fact, I've actually been focusing on a lot about this packaging, the whole idea behind it, to try to really raise the bar. You'll get a kick out of this. Last week, I spoke at the Category Management Association's national conference, and also, FMI, Food Marketing Institute, has reached out to me.

We're talking about some of the largest mainstream groups that are focused on helping their brands, they're reaching out to me to help them understand what makes natural natural. With your work, and your help, and hopefully, this podcast, because I think there's some great insights in there, and thank you for sharing, hopefully, we can make that change. Because to your point, if we could get them on board, that would change overnight.

I was talking to Kathy DiMatteo. One of the examples that I used, do you remember the pop tops that used to be on all the soda cans, and you'd find those all over the parks, and just they're like a little ring with a little top on it? Anyhow, they were everywhere, and the Park Service complained, and people rose up, and because there was enough consumer pressure, that technology was changed, almost overnight, it seemed, and as a result, we don't have that specific kind of litter anymore.

I heard on the news yesterday that there's a big push to eliminate straws at McDonald's and other places, and so, again, we can vote with our dollars. We can make a change, and, going back to what I was saying earlier, consumers want to feel good about their purchase. If you can help a consumer feel good about your product because you're doing these things, you're taking those steps, helping the consumer understand what it is, why it's important, and why it's beneficial, why they should feel good about it, I think that should be celebrated in terms of your value proposition and why they should choose your product over the next guy.

Another key point, like you said, the fact that you're working with your competitor on this is great, because that's what makes natural natural. We're a community. We work together. It's not, we're not out for each other, and I think that that's one thing that really sets us apart. On that note, can you please talk about certified B Corp, what is it, why is it important, so that you can help educate the audience as to why they should be focused on and rewarding companies like you to go the extra distance?

Kyle: Yeah, we are strong advocates for the B Corp movement, and especially for brands getting certified as B Corps, because I was first introduced, back at New Chapter, it was after the acquisition of P&G, and one of the things we talked a lot about is, how do you codify this mission of a brand that's been around for 20 years, very mission-driven, that's now a part of this larger ecosystem at P&G, and how do you make sure that when the next generation of leaders come in, they really understand why that brand existed? Through that, met some folks involved with B Lab, which is the non-profit that does the verification on B Corp certification, and we said, "This is a really interesting way to kind of lock it in," and so we took New Chapter through B Corp certification. I started to familiarize myself with the community, met a lot of great people. When I came to Organic India, I knew I wanted to do B Corp certification. What it really allows us to do is to have a third-party assessment in a very, very robust way. I think the last certification we did was over 250 different questions that cover everything from how you source your products, to how you govern your business, to how you treat your employees, to how you impact the community, and you get points based on the way that you do those things. If you're organic, certification give us some points. Fair trade gives us some points. The benefits that we have for employees, the donations you make in your communities.

All of those things added together is what makes businesses become less degenerative and more regenerative, and we, obviously, want to be a regenerative business in everything that we do, putting in more than we take out. It's really a way to measure that. What I loved about it was, we knew, based on the work that we were doing, it was pretty likely that we were going to get certified, and we went through the certification, and you have to get 80, a score of 80 to get in. We got 103, so we were easily in, but yeah, but instead of saying, "Wow, 103," and patting ourselves on the back, we said, "How do we end up best for the world?"

Dan: Good for you.

Kyle: We set a challenge to get in the top 10% of all B Corps. We recertified, and actually, we'll find out in June, I think middle of June, they announce Best for the World, but we were able to improve our score to 120.

Dan: Oh, wow.

Kyle: The way we did that was, in the B Corp community, one of the core tenets is transparency. You publish your results, you go to bcorporation.net, you can search for any company that's taken the assessment, that they've taken the assessment, and they become a certified B Corp. They have to publish their score. You have to ... Good and bad. All the good stuff's up there. All the bad stuff's in there. You can see that score, but you also have access to tools of where you're not doing as well as your peers, and that gives you ideas.

I always use the example with our team here, we're celebrating all the great work we're doing with farmers in India, and how we're improving the land, and the soil, and we're paying them all. It's wonderful work, and then we kind of forget about what happens when we pack the product, and we put it on a container, and we ship it across the ocean, and we put it on a train, and then we put it on trucks, and we forget about that other part of our footprint, and so we started analyzing it for the first time. We had never done a lifecycle assessment, and we started to see that having a now 46,000-square-foot warehouse and office complex in Boulder is putting a pretty big dent from a environmental standpoint, and so then we started investigating solar. We're in the process of negotiating a solar installation to deliver 120% of our energy looking at, meaning packaging options, looking at employee benefits. It's a way to trigger, are we really walking the talk on these things, and benchmark ourselves against the best companies in the world, and find ways that we can improve every year. We use it as a call to action not only to pat ourselves on the back for doing well, which is an important thing to celebrate, but also to look at ways that we can do better, and we get a team internally that's focused on improving our score every two years when we recertify.

Dan: Congratulations. That's inspiring. Then one of the things I really wanted you to share, and thank you for doing that, is, a lot of people don't know what they don't know, and the point being is that how do you know to improve ... We were talking about P&G versus Unilever and Kimberly-Clark, the level of competition is really high, because we had a scorecard that we were able to keep, and we're not talking dollars and so on necessarily, but my point is this. If natural brands have a scorecard, a target to shoot for, a benchmark, and someone's able to identify opportunities that maybe they hadn't thought about, and they can improve on those capabilities, I think that's what's great about B Corp. The fact that they have the tools, and you can rank yourself, and what I really love is how competitive you are. Again, back to you not being the best salesperson. That's funny. I mean, coming from P&G, the company that's known for sales excellence.

Kyle: It's great that we, I think it's such a healthy kind of competition too because we all joke about the B Corps get together, they have a Champions Retreat every year, there's a lot of events, and we all get together and go, "Oh, we're going to take you down. We're going to outdo your community.” It's like we're competing to see who's going to do more to benefit, versus competing to see who's going to sell more. It's just a positive mechanism, I think, to get people focused on raising the boats, or raising the sea level for all the ships, and also doing that for the planet and our people in the process.

Dan: That's what I love about natural. Such a fun community, and it's so inspiring to work in this industry. That's why I'm so focused on helping small brands like Organic India get their product on more retailer shelves, into the hands of more shoppers, because at the end of the day, that's what drives a lot of this. The strategies that we've talked about that the big brands have, leveraging those strategies to help small brands stay small, stay mission-driven, stay focused, but yet help them compete head-to-head, toe-to-toe with the big guys, to give them an equal seat at the table.

Thank you for sharing that, and again, I love how competitive you are. That's funny. Some of the stories that you've shared, I can imagine you in a room going, like a cage match, okay, "My team, we're going to do better than you guys. Anyhow, and so let's talk about this a little bit more. You were talking about how you have EV chargers, and you have ... I don't remember all the different things I heard you talk about that night at the Naturally Boulder event, but you reward people for riding their bikes to work, and can you go on about some of the different things that you do?

Kyle: Yeah. It was eye-opening for us, because like most mission-driven companies, you assume every decision you make is ideally supporting that mission, and there's just some things you never think about. Through the benchmarking process, when we looked at what other companies were doing, we realized there were cool little practices that we could institute that don't cost a lot, if maybe no money at all, that reward people for doing right, and so we started rewarding people with extra vacation days if they would ride their bike to work, or if they would choose an alternative form of transportation. We got a grant from the clean air district to install EV chargers. We have a couple employees that have electric cars. It’s kind of like free gas for people investing in that.

We're investing in, we've got a proposal to put solar on the building that's right now being negotiated with the landlord on how we can get that installed, because we don't own the building, and yet we're looking at investing significant financial resources to power our building, on a building that we don't even own, because it means something to us. We changed a lot of our policies on paid leave and time off. We had an organization where we didn't even have a policy in place when I started, because it had never occurred to anybody. Right? No one had young kids. We didn't have any pregnant parents in the office, and now we got a bunch of young people here, and it's like, "Oh, at some point, someone's probably going to get married, and someone's probably going to have a kid. What's our policy on that? Well, if we're going to create it from scratch, let's make the best policy possible."

When I talk to young entrepreneurs, like through Naturally Boulder, that are creating a company, what I always tell them is, "One of the hardest things you'll ever do in your life is start a business. Most businesses fail. They don't make it past a couple years. If you can do that successfully, it's only incrementally harder to start it the right way. It's a lot harder to become a B Corp if you've been in business for 15 years with a profit motive than it is if you start with the mission in mind and you build those things in from scratch."

Even though we've been in business for a while, any time we get a chance to create something, we always look at it through the lens of, "How can we create it to be the best that it can be? What can we do to encourage people?" I'm not going to ... I can't force someone to ride their bike to work, but I can encourage them to do it if I give them the right incentive. I can reward my employees for their hard work and dedication through better benefits programs, but if I built a system where I've only got X dollars to spend, and then if I try to retrofit that 10 years later, it's going to be hard, financially, to make that work. Build those things in up front when you're developing new programs and build them in a way that it benefits your community, that it benefits your employees, that it benefits that planet more broadly, and you'll find it's only incrementally harder to do it if you do it from the beginning, and I think that's a very helpful mindset to work with in this industry.

Dan: I absolutely love that. Again, back to the greenwashing equals Green Revolution. It's counterintuitive to a lot of companies to think that, "Well, if I don't put a time clock in the breakroom, I'm not going to get the most out of my people, and I need to stand over them and micromanage them," whereas you're smart enough to stand back and say, "You know what? If I reward people for doing their job and reward them for going the extra mile, not only do I keep people longer, people are going to go out of their way. They will walk through walls to be successful, to help me as a business be successful, and make you a superstar."

I used to have the mindset that whenever I worked for someone, or when I work for a client, whoever, my mission, my single focus is to make them be a superstar, make them stand out, help them differentiate themselves and be the best ... I always believe that the responsibility of a mentor or a boss was to help educate, and bring me up, and mature me. The point being is this. You've adopted that model, that methodology, by simply treating people like people and then going the extra distance and giving them an incentive to do more, to be more. Again, that's what makes natural natural, and that's why I wanted to have you on this podcast, so thank you so much. Any other thoughts?

Kyle: Yeah, just, on that point about when two years ago, 2016, there was a ballot initiative, and Colorado's one of five states that have raised the minimum wage, and they only wanted to raise it to 12 dollars by 2020, which is still remarkably low. We were a part of a Raise the Wage group, both here in Colorado, and also Fair Pay Today, a national group that was a lot of brands in our industry, brands like Dr. Bronner's, and ourselves, and Badger were involved in.

We saw some research in that, and I think the data even supports the hypothesis that you just laid out, which is, while it may cost more in terms of one line on your P&L, which is the salary line, these companies that pay their employees well have much lower turnover. They weren't spending as much on training and hiring because they have longer-tenured employees. They had more dedicated employees. They had more productive employees. While we start everybody at 15 dollars an hour, which at the time was twice the minimum wage in Colorado, it was worth it, because a lot of the companies that we saw that were paying eight or nine dollars an hour, which you can do under the law in Colorado, were having those employees stay for six months and then move on to something else.

We wish we could afford to pay even more, because we want to invest in our local communities, and we know that's better for the local economy, but what we've also seen in our data is, it's better for us, and the broader data speaks to that same thing, and so I think it's not just a feel-good part of the story. From a bottom line standpoint, if you find that sweet spot where you pay people well, you're spending more on one line, but you're spending a lot less on the other lines, because the employees stick with you, and they're more productive, and they're more engaged, and all of those things pay for themselves very quickly.

Dan: Absolutely. Couldn't agree with you more. Thank you for sharing that. Let's go one step further: If you're paying someone well, they don't have the stress. They're not trying to figure out how to manipulate every minute, "Oh, it's two minutes to 4:00. I can close up my desk." Instead, they're going out of their way. They don't have the health issues because they're so stressed, or overworked, or overburdened, and I really want to touch on this one. I'm glad you brought this up. Same theme we've been talking about this entire time. Most companies spend all of their effort reacquiring the same customer, and what I mean by that is, instead of focusing on loyal, building true loyalty, loyalty comes from within. It's something that you command, not something that you demand.

Point being is this. By having a model within your business where you have loyal, dedicated employees that want to be there, that aspire to be there, not only is your turnover lower, not only is it better for the community, because now your employees can give back more to the community, because they can spend more, they can ... They're better citizens within that community, but more importantly, you've developed an ecosystem that says that you're an ideal employer to work for. If I'm getting out of college and I know a little bit about your company, I'm going to go out of my way to try to get on your radar, versus another company that is more focused on, "Will you punch the time clock twice a day. Breaks are exactly 15 minutes." I mean, that minutia that people go through.

Really, thank you for sharing that, because this is exactly what brands need to be doing, in my opinion. This is some of the stuff that we need to do as an industry, as a culture, to change the way that people think about putting products on a shelf, and that kind of goes back to what we started this conversation with. If people don't buy your products, nothing happens, so you've got to have a strategy to be able to put a product on a retailer's shelf and give them a reasonable profit, and then have a consumer come back into that retailer again, and again, and again.

Thank you for doing this Kyle, you've covered the important pieces. The fact that you've got a loyal, dedicated workforce that's able to help you stretch to become better, and better, and better, and then, at the same time, you've got a strategy to help consumers feel better about their purchase. Then you can leverage that at retail and, as we talked earlier, you've also got a strategy to help the retailers understand why all this matters. Any thoughts around that?

Kyle: Yeah. I think you've got to be able to build a model that works for everybody in the value chain. There's parts of that that we control, and there's parts of that that we don't control, so a core part of our business model is, on our supply chain, we want to make sure that we're benefiting everybody from the seed to the shelf. What we can control is, we can pay the farmers well. We can ensure the minimums. We can ensure that we expand the land. We can do all of those things. What we can't control as much is what happens after we sell the product.

To make our model work, if we sell a product that retailers can't make money off of, we won't last very long. While our motive may not be to have the highest margin possible or to make the most money possible, if a part of our supply chain, from the retail standpoint, demands something different, we've got to find a way to make that work, and I think that is the challenge that bridges the two worlds together. My experience in CPG, the work you're talking about in category management, it's not easy, but it's also not impossible to find ways that you can still create value and not strip everything from the base of the supply chain and not, in our case, pull money out of the farmers' pockets so that retailers can make a bunch of money or the consumers can get the lowest price.

We've designed a model to say seven dollars for a box of tea, or six dollars for a box of tea is not necessarily inexpensive. There's plenty of three dollars, three-dollar teas out there, but we justify the premium because of what we do. We may eliminate some consumers in the process for either financial reasons or just because they don't believe in what we're doing, but the consumers that appreciate what we're doing, and respect what we're doing, and want to advance what we're doing, are a lot more loyal.

Then we've got the story to the retailer and say, "Okay, it may be a niche. We're not going to sell as much tea as Lipton does, where people are buying cases for 12 dollars and brewing huge batches of iced tea or something, but we can be the growth engine for the category. We can be the dollar premium. We can trade consumers up as they become more advanced tea drinkers and trade people up from a three-dollar box to a six-dollar box of tea, which is good for category growth. We can also give a point of differentiation for a different type of consumer that may not be shopping that aisle right now, because they view all tea as the same."

If we create that retail story that can justify a six-dollar product that allows the farmers more, and the distributor takes their margin, and the retailer takes their margin, and they're happy to support the brand, we're still happy, because we're making enough money that we can pay our farmers a fair trade wage, and we can pay our employees a fair wage, and we can advance our mission. That only works, though, if the full model works from end to end. If I try to sell my tea for four dollars, it breaks. Either the retailers aren't going to be happy because their margin's not there, and therefore the brand will collapse, or we're going to be pulling money from our farmers or employees, and then we're not living up to our mission. It's got to work both ways, and working with people like you that understand that category management mindset.

I think for small brands that are just getting started, it's easy to jump in, and you get that first thread of a big order from somebody, and you get excited, and you're like, "Oh, my gosh, Target wanted this, or Kroger wants this," and those are great retailers, but if you don't have the infrastructure to support that, and you don't have the promotions and planning, you don't have the understanding of how their business model works, you could go chase something that just sets you up to fail in the future. I think having that mindset, going in of, "How does every party in the supply chain win," you're going to be a lot more successful as a brand in the natural channel, or in any channel, for that matter.

Dan: Agreed. There are creative ways to solve problems. I've helped a lot of brands on the cheap, where I give them a strategy, something I'll do ... There's this thing called Google, and you can do a lot of research on it, and without having to spend billions of dollars on the research. I mean, yeah, I was spoiled when I worked for Kimberly-Clark and Unilever, the amount of data that I had, and I was able to work miracles. In fact, I loved pushing P&G around, a little plug, but the point is that this is still possible, even on the cheap, by learning creative strategies. That's why I do what I do. That's why I love what I do, and this is why I love talking to people like you in the natural channel.

On that note, tell us about Organic India. What do you want the listeners to take away? What are the brands? What do you sell? How do they get in touch with you? At the end, of course, I'm going to put a link to Organic India on the show notes, and on this podcast webpage, and I can put OSC2 there, anything else that you think is valuable, but please share with us.

Kyle: Yeah. Organic India is really focused, now, on our branded business. We used to sell a lot of ingredients, but right now, we sell everything under the Organic India brand. Most people know us as the tulsi tea company. We've been selling tulsi tea for about 15 years. Tulsi is also holy basil and adaptogenic. It's calming, soothing, relaxing herbal tea, and we have about 25 different varieties of tulsi tea that are available, and we also sell herbal supplements in capsule and powder form, so we sell a lot of traditional Ayurvedic herbs, a lot of adaptogenic herbs, things like turmeric, and things like cinnamon, and ashwagandha, and tulsi, a lot of the things that are really emerging as plant-based solutions for stress, or for gut health, or for joint flexibility and mobility.

We play in both the dietary supplement and the tea space. Everything is branded under Organic India, and regardless of the product that you buy, what you're really getting when you buy from Organic India is being part of our mission to create a more regenerative future for the earth, and to invest in farmers, in small communities throughout India, to advance organic, regenerative practices, and pay them a fair living wage. That's really why we're in business, at the end of the day.

Dan: I think it's great what you guys are doing. I'm impressed, and again, so thrilled that you made time for us today. Thanks for your time, and thanks for coming on the show, and I look forward to our next conversation.

Kyle: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Dan: Thank you. I want to thank Kyle for coming on today, for his thought leadership, and all he does in the industry. More importantly, I want to thank Kyle for setting the bar exceptionally high. I love his competitive spirit, but more importantly, I really appreciate the fact that he's doing everything in his power to rise the tide and help more brands. I'll put a link to Organic India and to the Climate Collaborative in the show notes and on this podcast webpage. You can get to them by going to brandsecretsandstrategies.com/session58. Today's freebie is my, "What Is Category Management and Why Is It Important?"

Kyle and I spent a lot of time talking about the advanced strategies that the big brands use. Using these strategies would be like pouring rocket fuel on a small brand's growth. Every brand needs to understand these techniques, these strategies, and be able to use them. This is my focus, and this is the focus of the podcast and all the content I produce. You can learn more about these strategies and how to implement them in my free course, Turnkey Sales Story Strategies. You can get that on the webpage as well, or by going to turnkeysalesstorystrategies.com/growsales. As always, thank you for listening. If you like the podcast, share it with a friend, leave a review on iTunes, and subscribe. I look forward to seeing you in the next show.

Organic India https://www.organicindia.com/us/

Climate Collaborative http://www.climatecollaborative.com

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Until next time, this is Dan Lohman with Brand Secrets and Strategies where the focus is on empowering brands and raising the bar.