Specialty Food Magazine

JAN-FEB 2013

Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.

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PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENT: WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM BOAT STREET PICKLES Food and beverage marketing expert Tammy Katz of Katz Marketing Solutions in Columbus, Ohio, evaluates some of Boat Street Pickles' strategies and discusses ways other companies can strengthen their own brands. Build and Maintain Superiority: Boat Street Pickles was inspired by and translated an exceptional French product to a superior, unique line of artisanal pickled products. The business was tireless in developing the optimal formulations, product specifications, quality and consistency to ensure that consumers have a great brand experience, every time. What You Should Do: Ensure that you have a truly superior product experience for the consumer. Make sure your products' taste, flavor, mouthfeel, aroma and visual appeal are consistently better than your competitors'. Confirm this with actual consumers on an ongoing basis. Do not rely entirely on biased internal evaluation. Maintain a Focused Line: Boat Street Pickles specializes in a very narrow assortment of exceptional, profitable products, rather than an overly broad, complex line of products. Building strong demand on a narrower line yields higher volume per SKU, per facing and per store—a more profitable business model. What You Should Do: Keep building demand and consumer preference for your core business with continued product improvements and marketing support. Monitor velocity (sales per point of distribution) on each core item to measure consumer pull—not just total sales, which may be increasing solely due to distribution gains. Ensure new products are sufficiently different and more profitable than your base business, so you are not merely cannibalizing current sales or reducing the profitability of your line. Get Packaging Right the First Time: After a few common startup misses, Boat Street Pickles now has a packaging graphics system that reinforces the brand's intended French-country and artisanal personality. What You Should Do: Always work with an experienced food and beverage packaging design firm, not a graphic design generalist, to ensure that you get it right the first time and avoid unnecessary redesigns, reprints or recalls. Food packaging is not merely a design; it is often your primary communication to the consumer and has many retail and regulatory requirements. Work with your design team to clarify your communication priorities, considering the relative importance of key elements such as the brand name, product description, flavor, product features, romance copy and regulatory requirements. Food and beverage brand marketing expert, Tammy Katz, CEO of Katz Marketing Solutions, has led numerous Fortune 500 and specialty food brands from concept through global expansion. She has launched more than 100 new products with cumulative sales of $2 billion. Katz serves on the board of directors of several food companies and is adjunct instructor of brand management at the Fisher College of Business MBA Program at The Ohio State University. Oregon and Washington. Soon, Murray's Cheese will become the company's East Coast distributor. In her first year as a supplier, Erickson sold 350 jars of Boat Street Pickles products; in 2012, sales reached 25,000. The staff though, remains small; in addition to her father and mother, Erickson hires only occasionally for odd jobs. With growth comes new challenges. "The faster you grow, the more you have to spend on making products," says the restaurateur, who now co-owns a new Seattle restaurant, The Whale Wins, which opened in 2012, and is in the process of opening a food truck catering company called Narwhal this year. "I find myself asking, Are we really going to spend $25,000 on pickled figs?" There is the added challenge of ingredient availability. "If you start a business like this, you don't expect it to be easy or a straight line. You're going to bump into hurdles that will make you change your mind. When you have people praise your product, you think, I'll make this product and sell it," she explains. "You don't think about weather and all the issues farmers have. In restaurants if you can't get carrots, you buy turnips. You can't do that if you're making pickled plums and there's a bad plum season." But even with the challenges, Erickson remains as enamored of pickling as she was nearly 20 years ago when she tasted that first pickled plum in France. Her passion for a high-quality product is what drives her future business strategy. "Part of what I love about pickling is how it changes the texture of things. One of my favorite things is pickled watermelon flesh. It almost turns into jelly—it's so unlike a regular watermelon," she says. While she is hoping to find a way to add pickled watermelon to her line, and she would love to bring back pickled onions, beyond experimenting with a few new options, Erickson is content growing slowly. "We're not going to try to have 20 items," she concedes. "We want to stay small and grown sustainably." |SFM| Deborah Moss is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Sports Illustrated and Shape. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2013 115

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