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My intent is to Educate, Celebrate and Elevate the Consumer Relations function in CPG (Consumer Product Goods) companies, especially for Brand Specialist and Analysts roles and responsibilities... !
Welcome to the My Curious Colleague podcast with your host, me, Denise Finniere. We'll be talking all things consumer relations with a focus on consumer product goods organizations and the brand specialist and analyst roles and responsibilities. So if you like CPGs, like I like CPGs, marketing, insights, and caring deeply for your consumers, Well, take a listen. Hello, my curious colleagues. This week, my guest is my colleague, Allison Kane, founder of Haven's Kitchen.
Denise:Hi, Allison. Yeah.
Alison:Hi, Denise.
Denise:Yeah. He's right. Welcome to the podcast.
Alison:Thank you for having me. This is I love this. I love what you're doing. I love the conversations you're having. I really like you a lot.
Alison:So I'm I'm psyched. This is a good way to end the week.
Denise:Oh, my goodness. That's so nice of you to say. And, you know, it's I've had you on my short list of guests. Right? You might have one too.
Denise:My my wish list, I should say Mhmm. For at least 6 months. So this is this really means a lot to me. So thank you for taking time out as a busy founder to chat with me and, our colleagues. Enough about all that.
Denise:Let's get into you. A lot of folks know you in the start up, emerging brand, midsize cos. Some of my listeners may be more in the big co's. So either way, let's level set us on on the store and the CPG and kind of how you got here,
Alison:if you don't mind. Sure. Well, I, my name's Alison. I'm the founder, as you said, of a company called Haven's Kitchen. Haven's Kitchen started off as a recreational cooking school in the Flatiron District of New York in 2012.
Alison:I was at the time getting a master's degree in food systems and sustainability, and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that the most important thing a consumer can do for their personal health, the environment, farm labor practices, sustainability in general is to cook more from home. But not everyone has the time or the skill set or, I guess, the confidence to do that. So my answer to that was, well, I'll teach them. And I'll bring them to the farmers market, and I'll make it so beautiful and so joyful that they'll wanna do it over and over and over again. And it was great.
Alison:We had a thriving business. We ended up doing a lot of activations and events and book launches and corporate events and closing dinners and book parties and weddings, and, I mean, we had an all day cafe. And then in 2018, after hearing sort of over and over from our students that, you know, they like cooking. They But but the sauce is hard. It takes a lot of ingredients.
Alison:Sometimes you need a blender. Sometimes you need to roast things. It's hard to get the balance of acid and salt right. Can you just take some of the things that you're teaching us and put them in some port containers in the front of the store in a little fridge. And so we did.
Alison:We started that in, like, I guess, 2017 around. And then in 2018, I I guess still in 2017. At the end of 20 17, I was visiting my mom, and she is an artist and, you know, paints. And she had these beautiful pouches of paint and these really vibrant colors. And every time I would sit in her studio with her, I would have this, like, very intense sort of sneaking suspicion that maybe I should be a painter.
Alison:And I'm not in any way a creative or a painter, but it was just that these these pouches were so tactile. And they were so pretty, and they were, like, really compelling. And I just wanted to play with them. And I was like, wait, what if we put our sauces in these pouches? I know that they're, from a sustainability perspective, the best type of pack.
Alison:But maybe they'll encourage people to play in the kitchen and to, you know, to feel like maybe I have a secret chef lingering inside of me. I just haven't met her yet. And so we went to the fancy food show with the sauces and pouches, Whole Foods, pick them right up. It took me 9 months to figure out how to make them. But then we launched officially in March of 2018.
Denise:Wow. So these pouches of your mom's spoke to you more or less, so thank you to your mom. Yeah.
Alison:It's all thanks to her. Yeah. I'll play that for her.
Denise:Yeah. Really. Well, I love it all. You know, there's the New York City vibe coming through with the cafe. And I don't wanna tell the rest of your story, but maybe I'll just jump to it.
Denise:I know that at one point, you needed you you follow this inspiration, and you put the product in pouches and got into the CPG space.
Alison:Mhmm.
Denise:And eventually, with COVID, needed to to close the doors of, what I understand is, yeah, a very beloved cafe. I mean, I've seen people talk about it and, love all that. So let's dig in a little to, my sweet spot of customer service Mhmm. From your vantage point. So you have the store for several years.
Denise:You're kinda slowly moving over to the sauces in the store and now on shelf. Mhmm. So what were some of the approaches to customer service, Allison? Were you able to kinda leverage and pull from from that, you know, your brick and mortar experience through to your CPG world experience? And then what are some of the things that you needed to leave behind?
Alison:Yeah. I mean, well, we'll start with, you know, the the, stakeholders or the consumers, right, for my brick and mortar business were people getting their coffee on their way to work in the morning, quite busy, uncaffeinated.
Denise:Okay. Okay.
Alison:Another demographic for us were people getting married. Again, another demographic for us were people that were responsible for planning corporate events for the incoming law school, you know, or legal intern team or whatever. Right? Or someone who was responsible for making their boss look good to their clients. So I basically, it was like baptism by fire or whatever the expression is.
Alison:Customer service at a 3 sort of business unit, cooking school, cafe, and, event space in Manhattan is really the best way to get to know, the sort of fundamental rules of what drives people to love you after their experience and what drives people to not love you. And it kind of all comes down to, you know, the same things that we're all looking for just on a human level. I wanna feel seen. I wanna feel heard. I don't wanna feel placated too.
Alison:I don't wanna feel like I'm unimportant to you because I feel, you know, I feel dehumanized in this moment. And it's not that hard. If you just break it down to that to just look someone in the eye, as as unreasonable as you might think that they're being at that moment, and just have a little empathy, right? This person might be being unreasonable because their parents are giving them a hard time about who they're marrying. Or this person might be being a little unreasonable because they've been late for work three times, but they just really want their cup of coffee.
Alison:Right? Like, and when you when you look at everyone that way, you all of a sudden don't see the complaints. You just see these, like, human beings kind of reaching out for a little bit of, like, love. And that's how we operated. You know?
Alison:I mean, I actually got taken off of the barista job because I was just giving away too much free food. Because I tend to overemphasize sometimes. Right? And so you do have to learn where if you are being empathic to one group of people, is that hurting or harming another group of people? Right?
Alison:Because I also have to have empathy for my team and the other people in line or the other etcetera. Right? So those boundaries. But, you know, to fast forward to the CPG line, we very much took all of those brand values and imbued them into the way that we operate through now. We're you know, you and I have talked about as a Gen x, you know, founder, I'm still under the the customers always write banner of living.
Alison:I think that younger generations have been taught more about personal boundaries. And I think that's probably really healthy in a lot of ways. I don't necessarily think that it works great with customer service. And I don't think it's that hard to convert someone who's taken the time to complain about something into your most loyal customer. Because oftentimes, those are the same person.
Alison:So Yep. In terms of what we've had to leave behind, I think very simply, I am not directly engaging with most of my consumers most of the time. I have customers in between. So, you know, I'm not in control of our price point on the shelf at certain places, and I don't know why it was out of stock at a certain retailer. And so I think what I've had to leave behind is feeling like I can solve all of these problems, because they're within my control.
Denise:Okay, you
Alison:know, and now I can't, because they're just not.
Denise:Yeah. Okay. A lot to unpack. Yeah. I'm processing it.
Denise:No. But I think you're spot on, you know, ahead of the curve with with people getting that getting that empathy and, not that this is the reason to be empathetic, but turning that frown into that frown upside down and what that means to somebody and how that can create the word-of-mouth Yeah. And the advocacy. It's Absolutely. So simplistic, and you you got it.
Denise:I had an opportunity to to work on supporting, you know, through consumer care
Alison:Mhmm.
Denise:An incubator product. And, you know, we were trying to figure out with the head marketer, I'll call her the founder, what that care should look like. And it's hard. And and it's hard, but that's where I sort of really got interested in this this notion. Like, you have a white space, but yet you have to figure out how you wanna be.
Denise:You have shared
Alison:a If you if you think if you frame it as a marketing channel. You know, I think just simply framing it that way as opposed to I mean, it's like anything else. Right? It The reason why I wanted going back to the cooking school, I wanted to make it beautiful and fun, is because if you position that to a human being, you know, let's take cooking. Right?
Alison:You should cook more because it's good for you and it's good for the planet as opposed to, oh my gosh. Look at this amazing meal you can make. Right? All of a sudden, you have a completely different person in front of you. Similarly, if you position customer service to your team as, just deal with these people, like, they're just, you know, fetching, Or look at this, look at what we have this opportunity to do.
Alison:This person has taken the time out of their day to actually correspond. They want to love us. This is a perfect opportunity for us to convert someone into a lifelong brand advocate forever. It's just that little switch, right? Thinking of it as a marketing opportunity, as opposed to like a drag that you have to deal with, just changes the whole tone of the, you know, the the function.
Denise:Hey. Anytime you wanna work in my space, let me know because that is I love that idea of thinking about consumer care as a marketing channel just like any other one.
Alison:Totally.
Denise:Now I take me back, though, if you will, to those early days when you had the time or the space to you told me you were answering the phone calls. You were the initial sort of founder. You know, you wore many hats. One of them was taking questions and comments slash baby complaints, I dial it, from consumers. And how that went?
Alison:Yeah. I mean, you know, when we first launched, we were in 14 New York City Whole Foods and an online, grocer called FreshDirect. And those were the days where we could post something on Instagram and say, swipe up to buy, and it would take you right to FreshDirect. And then, you know, we were we had, you know, our Instagram and that was pretty much it in terms of, like, social media. Everything else was just word-of-mouth and people who loved the cooking school going and just pulling the stuff off the shelf because they recognized the name or we would, you know we involved a lot of our students and the people who came to the cafe in taste testing before we launched and, like, getting excited about the names and which things do you think we should go to market with.
Alison:And it was very much like a community effort. So we had that really that pull very early on. But, yeah, we were brick and mortar with the name on this thing. So someone would look up Haven's Kitchen, and the first thing that they would see is our telephone number or our Yelp, right? I mean, that was what we were.
Alison:So, you know, the phone would ring, Hi, I can't find it. You guys said you were in Whole Foods in New York, but I'm looking, you know, and I don't see it. And so, you know, we also had this really interesting dynamic where we were in 3 different sets in those initial 14 because we're kind of a category bending product and we didn't have a natural home. So a third of our, you know, stores were homeless, a third were produce, and a third were this fermented, you know, sort of what I call the hippie set. And, you know, so people didn't know where to find it, and they were looking.
Alison:And and so that was again, I looked at that as this is so helpful. This is so helpful because I'm getting to hear directly about their experience now trying to find us in the store. Similarly, on Instagram, we didn't have anyone really doing social at the time. I it was kinda me. Yeah.
Alison:So, you know, I was DM ing everyone, and I was getting a lot of, I love this, I'm not sure what to do with it, which then helped me think of, okay, now we need to give a little bit more recipe, right? Like, now we need to people want to buy this. They understand that it's fun, and it's good, and it's delicious, and they love our brand, but they're not quite sure what to do with it. So we need to lean into that. So it was very important, I think, that we had such an intimate relationship with the people that were first trying it out.
Alison:And then because of what the feedback was from them, we were then able to sort of expand out and then out and then out from there.
Denise:Brilliant. Brilliant. I know this didn't have a happy ending in that someone had originally tapped you on the shoulder and, suggest that maybe you
Alison:Step out.
Denise:Step out Yeah. Quietly from this world.
Alison:You know? What happened? I think it's just, you know, founders in general, you know, we're a weird ilk. You know, I wanted to answer every single person, and I wanted to send every single person a reason for everything, and I wanted to send them free things, and I wanted to give them my firstborn, and I wanted to throw them a party. And Right.
Alison:You know, and I think at some point, you know, it is important that I see some of it. I think it becomes challenging if I see all of it. And there wasn't that much at that time. We again, we weren't in that many stores, but we knew as we were going to the region, right, like, we were gonna be in these places that had never heard of the cooking school. And then, of course, when we went national with Whole Foods, that was exactly when we closed the school.
Alison:I mean, it was literally the same 2 week period, which is kind of zany. There were bigger fish than I needed to fry. And we had a team at that point that was focused on not only, you know, customer service, but retention marketing and building up our email list. And and so it needed to kind
Denise:of be someone's job. Right. And it and I did say, like, it didn't end well, but I I'm sort of mistaken. It just naturally evolved to where it should evolve. As a founder, there's you're getting bigger.
Denise:There's other things, that you need to be involved with. You have a gang now that can help you. And currently, you have, like, 1 or 2 people who are still on that team focused in,
Alison:like, the care? I mean, it's, you know, we because, again, we're not direct to consumer. We don't have, like, like a CX infrastructure, like some of my friends do. But we do have, you know, we use a platform called Gorgias. We were talking about that, I think, the other day.
Alison:So our info at Haven's Kitchen, our Facebook, There's a chat function on the website that you and I talked about. That all feeds into a platform that we get alerts from in on our team. So we are able to respond to them quickly. And then that's separate from we have an SMS and email that's totally a different person. And then the same person who responds to the gorgeous inquiries is also in our DMs on TikTok and Instagram, YouTube, etcetera, making sure to respond and engage with every single person who, you know, messages us.
Denise:Same voice and everything. Mhmm. And I know that we could, you know, I could what I typically might do is I go through every one of the channels that I'm familiar with and see, you know, what you're doing, etcetera. What I'd rather do, though, with someone, like a midsize company like yourself is let's talk about them more. When you and I were talking about it, you positioned it as more proactive.
Denise:Mhmm. So, like, the channels that typically like, usually, it's a toll free number. I know you don't you have a QR code instead and emails and live chat. But let's talk about the more interesting creative things that you're doing proactively and what your philosophy is there. Like, your your email newsletter, so gorgeous, so gorgeous.
Denise:The SMS text program that you were talking about. Yeah. And anything else around more of that, you know, those channels. Yeah.
Alison:Yeah. Please. So the way that I think of it is like any other relationship. Right? If you have a really good friend and they say something offensive, or they don't invite you to something, or they just mess up, but you have a depth of a relationship there, and you have trust built between you.
Alison:You are more likely to see it as like a one off, whoops, I'm sorry. Than let's say someone who is trying to sell you something or someone who you don't have an intimate connection to. Right? That's why, to me, you know, this entire thing is about trust Entirely. Right?
Alison:It's about I trust that you're making a product that is safe for me to eat. I trust that you aren't just trying to get my money without giving me something in return. I trust that you're actually trying to improve my life. I trust that you're going to respond to me when I ask you a question. Without that, you've entered into a commodity situation where there's no brand building that can happen.
Alison:And, you know, I I'm not involved in that type of business. So I think what you and I were talking about was, of course, there's going to be out of stocks. There's going to be this was left, and it didn't stay refrigerated. I can't find you. This recipe isn't working for me.
Denise:Okay.
Alison:And if we haven't built a trusting relationship already proactively with that consumer, then they're not going to give us a second chance. They'll write us off. Right? But if we have, then we're in a great position, like I said before, to really make them feel heard and seen and appreciated and be a partner with them in their kitchen forever. And so it goes back to, well, then how do you build that trust?
Alison:If you don't have a d to c relationship, how do you build trust with the consumer? And for us, it's about making their lives better and providing content that makes them feel more confident in the kitchen. Right? So going back to the question you had about emails and SMS, we're never hawking product in either of those channels. We've decided that we're going to be a source of, you know what?
Alison:I just got all this basil, and I know it turns brown sometimes. So how do I store it so that I get more out of it? Thanks, Haven's Kitchen. Right? Or I wanna make a good chicken in 20 minutes, but I don't wanna go through 18 pages of SEO.
Alison:And I don't want to get a subscription to this whatever. And, like, I just want a nice recipe that I can just follow. Okay, thanks, Haven's Kitchen, right? Like, those types of things. That's how I think you build a real relationship with people that isn't transactional.
Alison:That makes them feel like you're a real partner for them. And there's a lot of sort of false authenticity, I think, in the world of marketing. I think the way that you have real authenticity is very simple. You just you make people's lives better more often than not.
Denise:I absolutely love that. If you don't mind, I do like to get into the details here. Can you just practically, you know, can you share who is let's let's talk about the SMS program first. Who is the vendor you use? How many a week?
Alison:Good question.
Denise:What kind of reaction do do you so I signed up Mhmm. And I and I've gotten 1 or 2. Yeah. Like what? I do.
Denise:Okay. I do. I feel like, oh, I who someone just texted me. You know, you don't have to have a. I have a friend.
Denise:Thank you, Haven's Kitchen. I like the way you do it. So so, yeah, break it down for me on the on the SMS text.
Alison:Gosh. I gotta ask Maddie. We're just waiting for the vendors. Yeah. We I I know that we we were very thoughtful about launching SMS in particular, and we should spend a minute on that one because it is a very, very intimate channel.
Alison:Right? Someone who's giving you their phone number is at a whole different level of connection to someone who, like, fills in an email form. Right? People do not like getting spammed by companies. They don't like I personally hate when I get like all caps, like 50% off, like, from some random number that I don't know.
Alison:So we were very, very conscientious about this has to be additive. This has to be delightful. This has to be easy and fun for someone. A one little like, here's a little grilling tip. Here's a little, you know, knife sharpening tip.
Alison:Like, here's a tomato tip. Don't put them in the fridge. Right? Like, and then something that's a little bit charming, so that someone actually, again, has this, like, internal visceral feeling that's like, oh, as opposed to, like, delete. And, you know, that is Maddie on our team, very much like, that is her jam.
Alison:She loves SMS so much. She loves doing little polls. She responds to people. Someday, she's like, I just ended up writing a 120 responses to DMs because, you know, they were asking, or they wanted a follow-up, or, you know, it is time. I think it is worthwhile time.
Alison:And again, she sees it as a really great way to do research on top of building trust, right? What are they asking about? Which ones do most people respond to? Like, all of that is just this really fun sort of social listening. So Maddie does SMS.
Alison:Yes. We definitely have a platform. We can all get it. I don't remember the name.
Denise:Okay.
Alison:Email, we use Klaviyo.
Denise:Okay.
Alison:I, you know, again, we were, you know, because we don't sell directly to consumers on our website, We don't have that sort of limited time, super fun product that you can only get on our D2C site. Like, what is the thing that we're offering people that makes their lives better that we would ever have them come to our website for? And for us, it's very much 500 cooking recipes that are totally filterable by what proteins you have, if you're gluten free, one pot meal. That was very important to us as an investment. And then being able to send emails to different groups of people.
Alison:Like, we're very segmented, so the people who came from the cooking school are in one flow. The people who come from social nature are in another flow because people come to the brand from different places and are expecting different things from us. So, you know, that's a very important channel to us. We have something like a 62% open rate on our emails, which is like 40 points higher than industry average. Because, again, we've built the trust that if I open this, it's not gonna be like flash sale, refer a friend, blah blah.
Alison:It's gonna be, oh, that's helpful. You know, maybe I will cook grilled peaches this week. You know? So those those channels are very much about retention and loyalty. And, you know, I guess, again, that's that's the trust building.
Denise:Love that. I haven't, like I guess I knew no. I hadn't put it together how the email is just like I've throw my email every like, I don't know how many times I've written in my email this week to things, you know, or to reports or get this analysis or something on LinkedIn that looks interesting, a webinar. You're right. But my phone number, you know, when I have to offer that, I'm sort of like, oh, you know, I really think
Alison:Only if I really right. I mean, it's like someone picking you up at a bar. Exactly. I was gonna
Denise:say that. Right. Exactly. So that's Clavio. And I'm assuming the platform so it gives you open rates.
Denise:It gives you probably performance of this one pitted against that one, which recipes are getting clicked on.
Alison:Which, yeah, which, subject line, you know, you can AB test on subject lines. Yeah. You know, we we don't really look through, you know, there's some emails, like, again, we're not looking at driving a percentage of revenue because we we expect it to be 0. And we're not even always looking at click through because we're not there's no call to action to buy. We're just like, hey.
Alison:Here's information from us that we hope is useful for you. So we're really focused on open rate. There are some, right, like if we when we launched our YouTube channel, you know, and we want people to start going there, there is a click through, and we're measuring how many people are going to YouTube from email. Or if we have a new retailer, right, and we'll say like, go there. But for the most part, we're really just trying to, you know, I don't think that there is a condiment company, at least that I can think of, that is also a cooking resource for home cooks.
Alison:And the fundamental business, right, relies on 3 basic pillars, right? We're making a better for you product. We're making something that has a lot of flavor that like gives you just a lot of like, fun in the kitchen without a lot of work. And we're trying to help you with like the big hurdle of inspiration and confidence. And if we can do those three things, right, the product is the product, but then our messaging and all of these different channels is where we sort of solve for the confidence.
Denise:Yeah. Wowza. So speaking of the product. Because I know we wanna I wanna wrap up so you can get back to running this this empire. Do you have any updates on anything new or exciting coming up?
Denise:Or would you rather kinda wait on that?
Alison:I mean, it's you know, in in my world, it's, like, coming around the corner. I think anyone listening to this is like, that's in a long time. But we have been working on, you know, one of our one of our biggest learnings. Right? When when we get customer service complaints, the complaint that we hear 9 times out of 10 is, I can't find you in a store near me.
Alison:Like, I'd love to buy your product. I'm really into your brand. Like, where are you sold, and why can't I get you? Why can't I get you online? Why can't I get you on Amazon?
Alison:And the answer to all of that is because it's a fresh product, and it doesn't really make sense online or on Amazon. And it's there's no home in the store, so distribution is slow and steady, but we're not gonna have massive distribution anytime soon. So, you know, what we wanted to do was we wanted to make a product that had those brand pillars, Right? Better for you, great flavor, super creative and, like, inspiring with, you know, that sustainability piece additionally and make a shelf stable product that had a home in the store. So we are launching something at the beginning of 2024.
Alison:I don't know the exact rollout yet, but it will be available on Amazon at the end of February, March, and it will be in probably, you know, I hope close to, you know, 4,000 retail doors by mid year. So that's the new thing.
Denise:Yeah. Definitely a new thing.
Alison:Y'all know where to find it.
Denise:Yeah.
Alison:Y'all know what to do with it. Like, all of those things that we've learned from all of our listening. You know? Yeah. We've tried to answer while holding to the integrity of the brand.
Denise:Yeah. Very cool. Very thank you for sharing that. Appreciate that. And and thank you so much for taking time out of your Friday evening to chat with me on, the podcast.
Denise:I really appreciate it and really loved having you.
Alison:Thank well, thank you for having me, Denise. And I think it's cool. I think, you know, customer experience and customer service, it's almost like, I think you and I were talking a little bit. It's not necessarily the sexiest part that everyone gets all jazzed up about, but it is a part that if you do not pay attention to, it will bite you in the
Denise:ass. So
Alison:that's that's right. All I gotta say. And so it's really cool that you're focused on it. So thanks for having me.
Narrator:If you've learned even a kernel of an idea or was inspired by this episode, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Be sure to share out the hashtag CPGCX because CPGCX really and truly rocks. You have been listening to the My Curious Colleague podcast with Denise Venneer . Thank you for your time.