If you are trying to grow your food brand in the retail or foodservice channel, it may help to listen to someone who has successfully navigated the waters and ended up very, very rich. Which is particularly relevant if you plan to one day sell your brand.
How I Built This highlights several famous epic retail food brand growth stories. I just finished listening to the Tat’s Bake Shop story. Go to the website for the sweet, cleaned-up version of the story. But go to the podcast to hear how founder Kathleen King built two successful brands.
Started Baking Farm-Stand Cookies at Age 8. Never Stopped.
This is a captivating, yet pragmatic story of how Kathleen inherited a hand-me-down job from her older sisters – baking cookies to sell at their family farm stand – and grew that into the Kathleen’s Bake Shop brand. Then she lost that brand in a bad business deal, and 20 years after starting, Kathleen’s Bake Shop started from scratch to launch Tate’s Bake Shop.
Any of this sound familiar to your retail food brand growth story?
The second time around Kathleen was smarter with hard work, and the right people in place sold her controlling stake for $100 million. Then a few years later, the brand was sold to Mondelez for half a billion dollars.
Check out the full podcast and check back here for other retail food brand growth podcasts I think may help you see the big picture.
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail, while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Brant Baumann
Brant brings 20 years of experience to NewPoint as a chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
At the core of his skill set is an ability to hold an outside, investigative perspective on a business in a way that effectively uncovers and isolates that business’ true unique selling proposition—one upon which can be built a marketable brand that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Over his tenure, he’s applied these services to a broad and diverse range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain—from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the more ancillary enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.