Even as a young company of only four years, Simple Mills is already taking the clean, natural food market by storm. It is already a top 5 trending food on Insta Cart. Katlin Smith founded the company as she was cleaning up her diet and now helps consumers do the same.
Many companies claim to offer natural or organic ingredients but do not deliver on their promises. Katlin chose to stay true to the mission, purpose, and vision of Simple Mills to create a strong brand and gain consumer trust.
“When I look around store shelves, I see a lot of brands that have deviated from their tenets, especially for cost reasons. As I think about our products, we have very clear and outlined brand tenets that we don’t compromise on. And that sets us apart.”READ FULL TRANSCRIPT
Good morning, Natalie. How are you?
Good. I’m good Brian. Good morning.
So I’m thrilled to have Katlin on. She’s the founder and CEO of a product that sits in my kitchen, and actually Annette, the “A” in AE Marketing Group, was actually baking up their banana muffin just last night.
Did your whole house smell yummy?
It certainly did. And I have to tell the truth that I actually couldn’t wait till this morning to eat one of them so… ’cause I don’t eat before the show, but I did have one last night and it was still warm and delicious.
Oh, that’s nice. Yeah. I love health food actually and so, if you don’t know about Simple Mills, you really should.
Yeah. Well, the other thing that’s great about them is they’re such a young, fast-moving brand, and since I referenced the “A” in AE Marketing group, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the “E” because they’re actually younger than Edmond, they’re just four years old, but already, think about this, their the number one fastest-growing natural baking mix and cracker brand, they’re the number two natural baking mix brand by dollars sold, and they’re the number three natural cracker brand by dollar volume.
And Simple Mills is one of the top five trending foods on Instacart, did you know that?
I didn’t know that.
And fun fact for our audience. So is RXBAR who we had on Episode 51 back in Season 2.
And another favorite Brian product. I eat RXBARs all the time. Well, as I said, we don’t eat before the show, so, let’s stop talking about food and let’s welcome Katlin on the show. Katlin, good morning. Welcome to the Brand Lab Series™.
Good morning. Thank you for having me.
Well, as I was just talking to Natalie about, I’m so excited to have you on, I love when we have entrepreneurs on where I’m actually a user of their product, and I know we’ve got a bunch of it in studio this morning. I’m not sure what my favorite is, it’s always between the pecan cookie and the banana muffin. But I’m thrilled to have you on, so why don’t we start with just talking a little bit about you and your role at Simple Mills.
Yeah, absolutely. So I started Simple Mills about four years ago. I started the brand after cleaning up my diet, taking out a lot of processed food, a lot of the sugar, and it made a huge difference. My joint pain went away, my seasonal allergies went away. I realized I had a ton more energy, and it really shocked me, the effect that food has on our bodies. And as I looked around, I realized that it was affecting everyone around me. And really, this food that we eat, it relates to, not just the traditional heart disease and diabetes, but autoimmune diseases like arthritis, and thyroid problems, and ability to focus, and anxiety, and depression, things that 20 years ago, we never thought about in relation to food.
And so as I realized that, I really wanted to help make a difference and change what we’re eating. And I thought one of the best places to get started was really lifting the standards of what sits in the center aisles of the grocery store. So when you look at those aisles, there’s typically tons of sugar, tons of ingredients you can’t pronounce, and I just didn’t think it had to be that way. So I started Simple Mills with that in mind, and our products, they’re made with really simple whole food ingredients that you can pronounce. So our baking mixes for example have fewer than 10 ingredients per box. Some of them have as few as six, and the number one ingredient’s always something that’s more nutrient-dense, something like almond flour that has more protein, and vitamins, and minerals. And we use a lot less sugar as well.
Well, what I love about the story is that you solved first a personal need but you really were solving a market need. And I think that that’s the best kind of brand of business to have. And as someone who did a whole 30 for four months, it totally transformed the way I kinda looked at food, and more importantly, the way I look at ingredients in food. And you really timed this well also from a market perspective because I think there’s been such a surge in kind of the clean, natural food market today. Now, also as a marketer, I feel like there’s some bad actors in that world where they try to use terms like “natural,” yet, its not when you look at what’s inside it. But when you started a few years back, were there any brands that either you drew inspiration from, or were there some where you were like, maybe it drove some of the competitive spirit in you to say, “You know what? I can do better.”
Yeah. So we started out in the baking mix space, and as I went through those aisles, I realized that even in the natural food stores, it was still a lot of ingredients that I didn’t wanna be eating. So I didn’t see a great solution on the shelves. Instead, I would say where I really drew inspiration was a lot of the influential bloggers in the space. So, people who were talking about a better way of eating, and ways of getting more nutrients in our diets, and not relying so heavily on like that wheat flour or rice flour or what have you. And they played such an influential role in my development of Simple Mills.
You mentioned the aisles of a grocery store, that’s exactly what I wanted to ask you about. In thinking of a market shift, there’s also been a shopping shift where your CPG brand struggled with shelf space, and now we’re in an Amazon era. Talk about how Simple Mills has grown quickly through both retail and e-commerce channels.
Yeah. So these days you really have to play in both areas. We actually started out on Amazon before we started in retail stores just because it’s a little bit easier to get started on Amazon. There’s not a review process to get your products on the proverbial shelf. And so we started there but what really has propelled our growth has been the retail business because that just brings in such great brand awareness. So if you think about a retail store like Whole Foods or Target, they have a set of consumers who are walking through the door, and checking out the shelves on a daily basis. And so, it’s much easier for somebody to discover a new brand that’s sitting on the shelf there, than it is to discover a new brand on Amazon because even if it’s a perfect, or near perfect keyword match, it doesn’t mean that it’s gonna show up on that first page, or second page, or even get their sixth page of results. That takes a lot of SEO, and making sure that you’re generating sales on the site to get into the groove with Amazon. Now, it’s something that we do really heavily prioritize and we have a huge online and Amazon business today, but it takes a long time to build that up.
And there was a time though where your muffin went through the roof on Amazon, right?
Yeah. [chuckle] We actually, within three months of starting in stores, became the best selling muffin mixes on Amazon. It happened overnight. I will tell you, we went through a six-month period before we started in retail stores, we would sell like one box every month or something. But it goes back to that whole, it’s like on the 50th page of results so who’s finding it, and well, it turns out that a blogger Danielle Walker, against all grain, she wrote about us on just her facebook page. It wasn’t even a blog post and within an hour sold us out of all of our Amazon stock and it kinda gets back to that point when you have a product that’s selling on Amazon, Amazon prioritizes it and so it rises in the search results and after that, we had awesome sales on the items.
Well, I’m gonna come back to Danielle, no relation to me, because we have the book “In The Kitchen” as well. I know we were joking before we recorded about my daughter and the future baker that she wants to be, so I wanna talk about influencers in a minute but, since we have a handful of your products in front of us, I wanted to talk about something that relates to product development. So back in season two, we had Bob Moesta on episode 45. He talked a ton about how companies often misperceive why people buy, and how people purchase, and he said one of the hardest challenges as someone who had created 3,000 products is that engineers and marketers often speak in different languages. So I’m curious, as you’re growing fast, when and how do you decide which products to create? And I’m sure you have a pipeline that you’re thinking about in the future as well but what is the product development process like?
I think the most important thing when you’re developing a new product is making sure that there’s a market need. And so what we really look for, as a brand, is places where there’s a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of sugar, a lot of processed ingredients, and not a lot of real food. And fortunately, for us, that makes the center of the grocery store ripe for the taking in their multiple categories there where we see a need. And then once we’ve identified a concept or a need, we’ll test that with consumers so we’ll actually do quant testing to determine, “Okay, what do you think of this concept? Would you be likely to buy?” And score the product, and so that way we can actually compare even against previous product concepts and see how it is doing relative to our other items that are on the market.
So did you create any products that you either absolutely loved right away or kind of hated at first?
Honestly, I love all our products. I think that they solve a very real need. I will say I did have a love-hate relationship with a number of the products in the form of developing them.
Natalie: Right.
Yeah, it wasn’t always easy.
Yeah, I can imagine because this product you basically engineered yourself. You went into the labs and created all the recipes yourself?
Yeah, so to date, I’ve probably done about 80% of our product development. We have partnered with some outside individuals when there’s problems that I can’t solve, or can’t figure out how to solve, but a lot of the bench work has been done in the kitchen of yours truly.
Yeah, I was gonna say Natalie, “lab” I think is being a little…
Fancy?
A little fancy. For someone who started the business out of a closet, she started out of her kitchen, and I know we’ll talk about that later too but I wanna come back to the influencer marketing. It’s so interesting because I have that book in my kitchen that you referenced that Danielle wrote. I know she’s one of many really influential bloggers in your space. Talk about how you harness the power of influencer marketing on the brand because I think it has potential big upside, it also sometimes depending upon the influencer and the category, can have some risks. So I’m just curious what your journey has been like in influencer marketing because so many brands come to us and are like “We need an influencer strategy. We need it now.” And it’s like, “Well, wait a minute. Let’s take a step back.” So I’d love to hear what your journey has been like with influencer marketing.
Yeah. So if you think about the way people are purchasing products now, it’s very different than it was 20 years ago. So 20 years ago, you might just go to the store, go to the department store, pick something out, check out in the store, and leave. Today, you’re much more likely to use the advice of influencers, or even the people around you, to determine what you purchase. And the reason for that is, people are realizing they have a choice and they want the best, call it a home speaker, the best cellphone, the best toaster oven, and they’re doing research to find out what’s the greatest item out there, and then they’re going out and purchasing that. And so, the kind of first thing that you need if you’re gonna do influencer marketing is an awesome product. Because if you don’t have a great product, you’re right, it’s risky. Because you don’t want somebody saying something negative about your product, it’s worse.
But provided that you have a great product, it’s such an awesome vehicle for helping people understand the benefits of your product and how it relates to other products in the space. And really too, why consumers are so interested in this is they’re craving this authenticity, this realism from the brands that they work with, especially in the food space where 20 years ago, there were all of these commercials about “Eat this food. Eat this mac and cheese.” And then people are kind of coming back from it and saying, “Well, that product actually wasn’t that great. It actually made me sick. I’m not healthy now.” And so they’re not trusting the commercials on TV and are instead looking to trusted sources like influencers.
Well, that’s where sometimes marketers like myself can get a bad rap, because I walk through the Whole Foods or the Mariano’s over in the West Loop and I look at certain products and I’m like, “I can’t believe they put natural on the label,” because then you look at the ingredients and it’s just not natural. And I think that’s always that slippery slope from a brand perception point of view.
Yeah, it absolutely is. You can’t fool consumers today, they know.
So, AE Marketing Group looks at brand as a bigger function than just traditional advertising. How do you make sure to maintain a strong brand across your organization?
Yeah. So, you’re exactly right. It’s spans everything from the traditional advertising, to the influencer marketing we just talked about, to the way that your organization operates, and the people inside your organization. And so, one of the most important things to us, when we’re hiring, is fit with our mission. And so, we actively screen and look for people who believe that food really influences how you feel and what you’re able to do on a daily basis. And it doesn’t mean that we all have the same perspectives on food and believe exactly the same things, we’re united under this fundamental belief that what we eat, and the decisions that we eat, around our food are really important. And so, how that manifests is we have a lot of our consumers sitting inside our organization. And so, when we’re talking about developing a new product or figuring out how we’re going to develop a Facebook post or a video, we have our consumers sitting in our four walls and they can say, “Oh, I don’t like that.” Or, “That doesn’t resonate with me.” Or, “I would hate that product.”
Well, kind of building on that a little bit, although you’re growing gang busters in your space, it is still a very competitive space. CPG historically has been dominated by legacy big brands, then you have lot of challenger brands coming in. So, as you continue to grow and compete in a space that does have a lot of mixed messages frankly, how do you continue to break through that clutter but then also stay true to that kind of mission that you just talked about?
Yeah. I think it’s exactly what you just said, which is staying true to your mission, and your purpose, and your vision. I think that’s really what differentiates us. Because when I look around at the shelves, I can see a lot of products that have at some point deviated from their original tenets, especially for cost reasons. And so, as we think about our products, we have very clear and outlined brand tenets that we don’t compromise. And I think that sets us apart in terms of the quality of our products, in terms of the nutrition. It’s something that’s unique to us.
Well, something that I always say, and this is after a decade in the ad agency business before I started my company, is that customer experience always will trump your advertising. At the end of the day it really matters more about the customer experience than anything else. So, talk a little bit about, and I know you alluded to it a little bit earlier, but talk a little bit about the importance of customer experience in the Simple Mills brand.
Yeah. It’s incredibly important because if your consumers are having bad experiences with your products, they’re going to be posting and talking about it and it’s gonna be the exact opposite of the positive influencer marketing you’re looking for. It really comes back to quality for us and tracking the feedback from our consumers, really listening to them, accepting it from a number of different channels. So whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, the phone in our office, or email, these things are all answered by our team members that sit inside our office. It’s not answered by somebody at an off-site location and that enables us to really understand here what our consumer’s positive or negative feedback is. And weave that back around and say like, “Oh, we’re having an issue with quality here.” For example, when we first launched our Sea Salt Crackers, we were getting a lot of feedback, “These are too salty,” and so we pulled back on the salt. We don’t get these complaints anymore. But you have to listen.
I think this is awesome. I find that one of my pet peeves is health foods, well, foods that market themselves as health foods, but they’re just as bad for you as junk food. So I’m so excited about your product. What is next for you guys? What’s on the horizon for Simple Mills?
Yeah. We’re pretty secretive about our innovation pipeline but I will tell you that, in general, it will be places where you see a lot of carbs, a lot of sugar, not a lot of whole food ingredients and, so, we’re always thinking about what’s next. So, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled.
Excellent, okay, thank you.
So, she left us a mystery. She left us wanting more. Just like how I want the banana muffins that are right in front of me. So, Katlin, thank you so much for being on the Brand Lab Series™ today. Congrats on everything with the growth of the brand. It’s a fabulous product. If you don’t know it you should definitely check it out. Amazon, Whole Foods, Target etcetera and if you could, we’d love to have you back on to talk about your journey as an entrepreneur, as a founder and what that’s like as well. So, Katlin, thanks for being on the Brand Lab Series™ today.
Thank you so much for having me.
Tags: B2C, Brand and Marketing, Customer Experience, Entrepreneurship
Enjoyed this episode? View all of our episodes now.
