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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 Fenary. 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
Chris Drury:listen.
Denise Venneri:Welcome, my curious colleagues. In this episode, my guest is my colleague, Chris Drury, director of customer care at Blanc Fine Foods. Chris and I share an interest, and to quote Chris, leveraging data to build continuous improvement in product design. And we'll be specifically chatting about how this has evolved via a scorecard that Chris developed. And I think what the fun part of this is that even if you're one of my colleagues maybe with, a smaller group of analysts or maybe you're just the analysts, and perhaps you don't even have any, you know, highfangled reporting tools, this can be done in Excel.
Denise Venneri:So listen up, everybody. Let me first introduce Chris a little bit further. He joined Blunt Fine Foods back in 2013 and has been relentless in growing and elevating consumer, customer care and the consumer's voice into the company. Chris joined Blunt Fine Foods in 2013 and has been relentless in growing and elevating customer care and the consumer's voice into the company. He has 20 years experience in a variety of roles in marketing business process improvement and customer service.
Denise Venneri:He's also very active in our industry group, which is called SOCAP, which stands for the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals. He is currently a member of the board of directors at the national level. I believe this is his 2nd year and was active at chapter level on that board leadership. He's a graduate of Providence College, and I only mentioned that because a few people have noticed that, yes, Chris is the 3rd guest from the big east that I've had on. And it's really just purely coincidental.
Denise Venneri:With that, let's get into it. Hi, Chris. So happy you're here on the podcast today.
Chris Drury:Hi, Denise. I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Denise Venneri:My pleasure. You know, what's, well, there's a lot of things that's interesting about you, but what's interesting to me, the most probably is that your model for care is, you know, a bit different from the ones I've been familiar with in my, in my experience in CPG. And it's one like a couple of my colleagues support as well. So you support both the CPG or I'll call that the retail side plus the food service side of Blonde. So kinda let's start there, level set everybody, on BlondeFind Food Products, where they can be found, and, just kinda who they are.
Denise Venneri:Please.
Chris Drury:Sure. So I I guess the easiest starting point is that Blount Fine Foods manufactures about 80% of the refrigerated soup in America. It's not a household name. It's a name that's behind most other brands. Some of those brands, for instance, are all the Panera soups that you can buy outside of the cafes.
Chris Drury:Legal Seafoods here in the northeast and along the east coast is very popular. And then very, very large numbers in the private label sector. So most grocery chains, private label soups that you'd find would be produced by Wow. We can find the products, in Target, Walmart, Costco, Sam's Club, BJ's, and then grocery stores. Now, the food service side, we work with a lot of national chains as well as regional, right down to the mom and pops that are sourcing through folks like Cisco and Reinhardt and Gordon as distribution.
Chris Drury:So we really do have 2 distinct pieces to our business.
Denise Venneri:Okay. And where do you spend most of your time? On the food service care or the retail care?
Chris Drury:Mostly the retail. Because for instance, Panera is the largest brand, in terms of distribution for us, and the 800 number that is on every single container comes into my team.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. Alright. So let's talk about this I call it the traffic light scorecard. Is that what you call it? What do you call this thing?
Chris Drury:A stop stoplight.
Denise Venneri:A stoplight.
Chris Drury:A stoplight report. Yep.
Denise Venneri:Stoplight scorecard of yours. And let's kinda start at the beginning. What at a high level, what was the the initial intent of the scorecard, and then in what situations are you using it? Is it, you know, just everyday monitoring of products on a, on a timely you know, on a monthly basis, quarterly? Or can you also use it to assess new products or a reformulated product that's out there?
Denise Venneri:So the, the intent and situations.
Chris Drury:Sure. So it initially started focused primarily on just one brand, and the reason for it was that although, you know, your complaints when something big happens, the normal reaction is to look at root cause analysis, identify what created the issue to begin with, and put in place corrective action. So that's just normal quality type of procedures that many of us in CPG would do should we have something that just bubbles up as a major problem in the product. But what's more subtle and what really drove this is we wanted to be able to take all the consumer contact points that we have through the contact center and look at those things that don't just jump out at you as a major problem. So for instance, for us, chicken noodle soup, was one of the ones that glared at us because we were seeing a lot of feedback points around the distribution of the salads in that product.
Chris Drury:The salads being the pasta noodle, the carrots, the celery, the chicken. We would have cups of soup that were mostly broth, and then you wind up on the other end of the spectrum with a lot of cups of soup that had a ton of stuff in it and less broth. So unless you're tracking that and and aggregating all of those that seem like one off complaints, you would never really pick up that there is a bigger problem. So we have that stoplight report set up in a way that we're taking all of those data points from consumers. We bounce them against how many cups do we ship.
Chris Drury:So to normalize complaint rate. Yep. We normalize and we end up with a complaint rate.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Chris Drury:And we use thresholds, to turn a little bubble that's next to the number green, yellow, or red. So anything with a rate under 1 becomes green.
Denise Venneri:Anything with a red Anything with a what? A rate of 1? To 1 Mhmm.
Chris Drury:Is green. Mhmm. Any rate between 15 Mhmm. Is yellow. And then anything 5 or above is red.
Chris Drury:So it makes it very easy when you're looking at large sets of data across different complaint codes. Your eyes gravitate to the red. Yeah. And if you see a lot of that over time, you know it's been a problem that's been persisting. So, and when I say over time, we have it set up by complaint codes so that we're able to see where, what's specific.
Chris Drury:Is it the viscosity of the product? Is it the solids of the product? Could it be some flavor profile? In other words, it's too salty or it's too sweet. So we let the data now drive where we focus our continuous improvement, because it's not like we we have a a recall situation or a situation where we had a major misstep in manufacturing that prompted, you know, a high call volume around a specific batch of soup.
Chris Drury:These are all onesie twosie feedbacks that come over time.
Denise Venneri:Right.
Chris Drury:So that really is what started it, was to to make those little changes to big products because they have a much larger positive impact for consumers and the experience they're they're getting with the soup when they interact with it at the dinner table.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. And that's that continuous improvement, goal that I know is a big mantra for you. So that was the intent, and the situations are every day, and, could you use it for new product tracking too?
Chris Drury:Yeah. So we we use it in a monthly meeting. Mhmm. We have a team specific to looking at the CX data that we do have by brands. It's a continuous improvement team.
Chris Drury:We get together monthly and we review these, and we're always looking for where's the red. Yeah. You know, and focus is this red just a single month? Was it a one off or maybe there was a problem with 1 batch? Or is this red persisting over time?
Chris Drury:So we're now at the point where we start looking at the the the yellows with the higher rates because we've driven a lot of the red out of the products. Yeah. Right? So now it's that's just a continuous improvement process where, you know, you you let the data drive you towards the most problematic pieces in the process and the formulation. So we do use it in that sense of constant monitoring on a monthly basis.
Denise Venneri:Got
Chris Drury:it. We definitely use it for new product launches. Mhmm. It takes time to build the data, so we have to be really careful that if we see a red blip, we can't necessarily react right away because you may not have enough distribution behind it.
Denise Venneri:Right.
Chris Drury:You know, you could have the volume could be so low on it that it doesn't take many complaints to to turn that red. So we have to be sensitive to that. But once we make a change, we put a line in the sand and we look at pre reformulation or change against post change. So we actually have a line in that stoplight report at the given month where the change was implemented in our manufacturing process so that we can look at, are these reds going away? Are the complaint rates in those areas where we were focusing starting to drive down and turn yellow to green.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm. Mhmm. You know, I I we had spoken before, and I remember trying to visualize it, and I was, like, sketching it out of my copy book. And, then you were kind enough to send me sort of a mock up of it. And I think if anyone's gotten this far in the podcast, let's let them know that if they DM me, that we'd be happy to send them a PDF of a mock
Chris Drury:up version
Denise Venneri:for themselves. But, until then, let's let's kinda break it down for the colleagues listening right now. But, you know, because you talked about all you know, looking at all the reds, and so, really, like, help me visualize it here, audio. What are all the data points that are on it? Is it just the rates?
Denise Venneri:Is it time periods in the columns? What's in the rows?
Chris Drury:So think of just a tabular form, and across the top, we have every month. So it's monthly.
Denise Venneri:Okay.
Chris Drury:And we look at, just tracking that over time. And the rows, the very top row is the number of cups shipped for the month.
Denise Venneri:Okay.
Chris Drury:So that's simply taken right out of the invoicing history, the number of cups. And for me, it's not, for instance, at a club store if we have a package that's 4 10 ounce cups.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Chris Drury:For me, it's 4 cups. It's not a single cell unit. It's down because every one of those 10 ounce cups, even though it's in one cell package at a club store, every 10 ounce cup is gonna deliver a unique experience to the consumer even though they bought it as a 4 pack. So it's really important. It sounds like it's it's intuitive and it's a it's you know, people will pick up on it.
Chris Drury:But I know, typically, we're looking at our sales volume in what we ship and what we were shipping our club packs. I break it down deeper into how many units are actually in the club packs. That's an important subtlety with your shipment data. Under shipments, we have the overall complaint rate for the product. That's taken into consideration everything.
Chris Drury:It's all complaints against the shipment amount.
Denise Venneri:And that's, like, the And then That's the row.
Chris Drury:That's that's a row right below the shipment row. Yep. And then then we look at our high level complaint categories. For us, it's viscosity, salads, taste, those sorts of things, and that's just the next row. So I I and then later, we have the top ten specific codes.
Chris Drury:So this is all tabular. They're all rows beneath each other, but it starts at the high level with the overall. It goes to the next level in our hierarchy looking at, more categorizing of complaints, and then we look at the top 10 specific complaint codes below
Denise Venneri:that. They're
Chris Drury:all rows, and the columns are all months.
Denise Venneri:So is that the full are you tracking this for, the beginning of the calendar year? Are you on a calendar basis, your fiscal year?
Chris Drury:We no. We're on a a fiscal year that starts October 1st.
Denise Venneri:Okay. So you're just in the start of this next year here. Okay.
Chris Drury:We just, yeah, we just had New Year's Eve not too long ago.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. Fun. Fun. So you're tracking it for, like, that fiscal year or the the past Correct. You can you could probably change the number of months too.
Chris Drury:Yeah. You can. And we summarize in quarters also so you can look at it in quarterly slices. And we also look at, year over year. So we look at this year against prior year.
Denise Venneri:I'm crushing on the scorecard. I really am. I really am, and I hope people can feel it. And, you know, like, take a look at it. Not necessarily that they have to adopt it, but take a look at it and then compare it to what they're using and see where they could maybe borrow and benchmark.
Chris Drury:You know, we I think one of the real important pieces behind this is to really understand that that you have to have a cross functional improvement team looking at that data. It can't just be customer care. So the the team members bring value to those conversations. So Yeah. That team that's using that stoplight report, we have it one of our, chefs is on that team.
Chris Drury:We have head of QC on that team.
Denise Venneri:Mhmm.
Chris Drury:We have the head of our food safety quality assurance as part of the team. Mhmm. We have a sales analyst, and we have a product manager on the team. So and and then myself, of course.
Denise Venneri:So Yeah. Okay. So this team of cross functional folks, are they looking at it, so they're on the distribution list. Are they looking at it at the same time, like, in a Zoom meeting these days, or do they look at it sort of on their own and then
Chris Drury:No. We we look at it together. I do send out, of course, an agenda and some, if I pick up on anything that I really wanna, you know, make notable, that goes out with the agenda. So we kind of focus on that. That meeting really is to look also at if we had a reformulation, are we still seeing the improvements from that?
Chris Drury:So it's it's got pieces to that meeting. It's looking at what's been done and and how is that going. And then it's also looking at what is the next thing. You know, we we look to try and pick out what is that next thing that we can focus on as a team, and then we use, and leverage everybody in that group. Because sometimes, you know, it's it's just a chef making subtle changes to a recipe to change flow the flavor profile.
Chris Drury:Sometimes it's ops and QC folks making a change in the processing of it. You know, and then monitoring the process. Thing. So that's why it's really important to make sure it's a cross functional team. It's not just customer care.
Chris Drury:It's not just marketing. It's not just product management. You need operations. You need quality. And in our case, because we're food, we need our chefs as part of that conversation.
Denise Venneri:I'm in full support of that cross functional team. And, I talk a little bit, if I can, just talk a little bit about, the cross functional team that we kicked off when I was at Campbell Soup, with the episode from yesterday that I recorded with Chris Graziano. So if you tune in to Chris Graziano episode 2022 was he 22? Yeah. We talk a little bit of how we approached it.
Denise Venneri:I think the say it's the same intent, which is to let's get all the people who's got a stake in this product and the consumer together and go through this data that's so important, at the same time because, that's just the best way to do it. So there. Period. So you had mentioned about the ranges. I think what's important is, like, sort of behind the scorecard and what and what drives the, the stoplight colors are these ranges that I think you had said, like, hey.
Denise Venneri:If it you didn't say hey. But you said if the rate is 1, it's green, and 1 to 5, yellow, and so on. And so how did you can you just take us back to this? And it's kinda granular, but I think it's important. How did you determine those ranges in in the first place?
Denise Venneri:And can you take us through this? Because I think that's what really informs the beauty of the scorecard.
Chris Drury:Sure. So, it does draw upon statistical process control some degree in the sense that, you know, you're looking at what is your distribution of those complaints under a curve.
Denise Venneri:Right.
Chris Drury:And the idea is that, you know, the green think of the green as gonna be the extreme to one side and the reds the extreme to the other side. Mhmm. So roughly the bulk of your product will be yellow or bulk of your issues will show up as yellow. So if you think of just a normal distribution curve, we we looked at, you know, if we're setting thresholds, where where do all these fall? And we we want the bulk of those 80% to be yellow because they're not always going to be bad, and let's be real about it.
Chris Drury:Consumers have personal preferences, and that that will come through in the data. So, and they'll influence the data to some degree. So admittedly, it's, even though that sounds all scientific, there's some art to it. It's not going to be perfect, but you have to, you know, go into it knowing that the idea is to to just try and take that big rough cut at it. And then, you know, if you're seeing those reds show up, use some common sense.
Chris Drury:Does the red make sense? Does the yellow make sense? Does the green make sense? So we kind of played with the rates initially. We started this a couple of years ago with one specific product line.
Chris Drury:So we played with those rates. We looked at normal distribution, or I should say, I looked at the normal distribution to make sure that the rates we were using were giving us something that actually seemed to make sense.
Denise Venneri:Okay. Perfect. Thank you for taking us through that. Appreciate it. Let let's talk about, like, your live example of a topic that, you were looking at with the scorecard.
Denise Venneri:How was the scorecard used? You know, what may have been some of the wins there? What challenges came up, if any?
Chris Drury:Sure. So I think one of the great examples that we use even internally is we had chicken noodle soup. And I guess I should also note here, we're bubbling everything up. So we have chicken noodle soup in 7 for this brand in 7 different packages. Right?
Chris Drury:Sure. When I talk about the stoplight report, we are actually rolling up the skews to a flavor level. So when we looked at chicken noodle, we were getting a lot of complaints where people said, I don't have enough chicken. It's all noodles. It's it's, all broth.
Chris Drury:We just had a lot of variability coming across in a lot of different ways. We had a lot of red. So for us, we actually went back and completely reformulated the product. We went from a wide flat noodle to a curly noodle. We changed the chicken that was being used.
Chris Drury:So it brought a little more flavor to the product because we work hard on clean label and trying to, you know, sodium is something that people that are health conscious, we don't want sodium, but we also want food that tastes good and a lot of times sodium brings that. So we we try and balance that and that we went to one extreme and making it too bland at the same time. So we brought a little flavor back. So when you start looking at the reformulation, we overhaul that chicken noodle product altogether because there were just a lot of issues all the way around with it. But we really knew that intuitively until we put it into the stoplight report.
Chris Drury:And then that stoplight report was showing us exactly which specific codes were problematic. So ironically, changing simply from a flat noodle to a more curly noodle actually drastically improved the ability of us when we make this to distribute the noodles evenly throughout the batch. We make these in 3 to 4000 pound batches.
Denise Venneri:Yeah. Probably fill up the noodles or actually, I don't know the process. We don't have to get into that. Yeah.
Chris Drury:It just it just suspending them in the liquid a lot better than the flat noodles would stick together and stack up and kinda sink to the bottom.
Denise Venneri:Got it. So it ended up, with a better better user experience, better consumer experience. And thank you so much for taking time out of your Sunday to chat with me on the podcast. Really appreciate it.
Chris Drury:Oh, you're very welcome. Thanks for having me, Denise.
Denise Venneri: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.
Doug Venneri:You have been listening to the My Curious Colleague podcast with Denise Vineri. Thank you for your time.