At the crossroads of social media, fruits and vegetables, retailers and dietitians lies the passion for increasing consumer produce consumption — specifically, organic produce.
That was the focus of the “How social media is driving fresh produce consumption” education session at The Packer’s 2023 Global Organic Produce Expo. The expo kicked off with a series of education panels as well as lunch and learn discussions, all of which seemed to lead back to the topic of how to leverage social media as a tool to drive organic produce sales and increase brand awareness.
The panel was stacked with rockstar talent. Leah Halverson, founder and CEO of Ten Acre Marketing, led the discussion. Panelists included Liz Della Croce, blogger and social media influencer for The Lemon Bowl; Amy Petersen, digital marketing manager and a previous retailer dietitian for Coborn’s; Auna Lundberg, marketing manager for Stemilt Growers; Kevin Miller, chief marketing officer, and Patrice Sadd-Molnar, director of communications, both for The Fresh Market.
Influencer marketing has allowed brands like Stemilt to drive through the noise that is social media. Stemilt’s year-long marketing campaign, Crisp Collaborators, includes partnerships with 13 social media influencers who create content across the U.S.
“We try to partner with those that we believe share our same values and provide a good message with our products,” Lundberg said regarding Crisp Collaborators. The campaign focuses on, “nano-influencers, and they’re all really engaged in their community. Their content is a story that people want to interact with,” Lundberg said.
Engagement
The trick for most brands is active engagement from users. Engagement, which was mentioned several times throughout the panel, is a major part of measuring a campaign’s success.
“It’s all about the engagement rate, very important conversion rates. We benchmark against industry standards. And so there’s a lot of numbers involved when you look at it and you feel like the brand is bringing joy, anticipation and trust,” Miller said.
“It’s not so much, ‘how many followers do you have?’ It’s how much engagement they get per post. I think that’s a metric that is sometimes forgotten with market efficiency ... ‘what’s their engagement?’ Because then you know that you’ve hit the right market,” Halverson said.
“One thing that a lot of people don’t see from a supplier standpoint is ... general brand awareness for commodities is extremely difficult. So you have to lean into all areas of the supply chain,” Lundberg said.
One area that has seen success for Coborn’s is the company’s “Kids Cook at Home” virtual cooking class, in partnership with Produce for a Better Health, and its “Produce for Parents Movement.” Pre-pandemic, the cooking classes took place in store with a max capacity of about 15 children. Once COVID hit and in-person teaching was no longer an option, “I really wanted to keep engaging our youngest shoppers,” Petersen said. Switching from the in-person to digital format allowed Petersen to expand the audience from 15 children to 178, increasing engagement substantially.
Another social media success story stems from Della Croce’s work with Sunset Produce. Her recipe for grilled vegetable pasta was posted on The Lemon Bowl blog and on Pinterest, YouTube, Facebook, etc. The real kicker — the recipe did not go viral until about nine months later.
The trick is to “pay attention to trends, and we repurpose content. We don’t just put it out once and forget about it. Every apple season, pumpkin season, asparagus season, whatever it might be — we are thinking about what we can do to make that content that was paid for months or years ago continue to gain momentum,” Della Croce said.
Partnerships
Partnerships were another major talking point during the session. When considering a partnership with another brand or an influencer, “you just never know what other offerings [they] might be able to provide you outside of your initial idea ... if you build those relationships and have those discussions, you can find out what opportunities they might have,” Della Croce said.
“Social media is very forgiving. If you fail, you try again,” Lundberg said.
Ensuring the influencer or brand partnership sticks to their genuine self and produces content their audience has grown to expect is important.
“I want it to seem normal that they will be partnering with The Fresh Market. So it’s really important to me when I write these [marketing] briefs ... that we’re taking into consideration what the key messaging is ... but the rest really is up to them,” Sadd-Molnar said.
“For us, it’s always about being on strategy ... and we’ve seen some amazing things,” Miller added.
Building trust with the influencer or brand of choice was another sticking point in this panel discussion.
“The best thing we did was allow the creative freedom and allow their personalities to shine through,” Lundberg said.
Stemilt recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary of “Half Mile Closer to the Moon” cherries. The company told influencers, “celebrate with us in your way. It was so cool to see. We had people making recipes, people taking them out on a family outings, we saw somebody [who I didn’t even know did stop-motion] making stop-motion videos,” Lundberg said.
“Social media is very fleeting and fast,” Della Croce said. “I worked with a large retailer, and we had a 12-month calendar. It was just so rigid that they really missed out on a lot of opportunities because everything had to be approved.”
Strategy
Social media is constantly shifting. Retailers, marketers, fruit and vegetable growers, shippers and wholesalers are constantly calculating success strategies.
“Back in the day used to do three- to five-year plans, marketing plans; right now that’s unheard of. Why would you even think about that? You know, we don’t know what’s gonna happen in five years,” Halverson said.
When considering the audience, platform and message, content strategy is very different. For Coborn’s, the strategy focuses on keeping the message local.
“Im coming from a retailer perspective ... We know Liz [Della Croce] has a great number of followers. She’s reaching people all over, however, for us — we want to keep it local,” Petersen said. “We use Facebook because we know that the majority of our followers on Facebook are ... local. As you get into Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok, they’re not necessarily your direct shoppers.”
