Better Nature
Getting into retailers and wholesalers and scaling up fast
Better Nature produce Tempeh, a vegan food product that is similar to tofu but tends to be firmer, chunkier and has been enjoyed by millions of Indonesians for centuries. Chris Kong, the co-founder of Better Nature, thought it was about time that this underappreciated, all-natural food was brought to the UK mass market.
Better Nature knew that launching a completely new product that customers didn’t know how to prepare would create a really high barrier to people buying it. So instead, they used tempeh to create familiar like-for-like products (such as barbecue ribs, kebab strips and mince) as an easy way to introduce customers to something new. And it worked. Better Nature is currently sold in over 200 independent retailers across the UK – and that’s growing almost every day. But what is amazing is how quickly the company grew: they hit their first 50 retailers within a couple of months of launching and were in 100 retailers within 6 months.
There is a lot to take away from this session, and pay special attention to how much Chris talks about how the secret of scaling up is not to get too hung up on scaling up. Your first 100 customers are the most important customers in the entire lifetime of your business, and if you concentrate on treating these people like each was your only customer, they will grow your business for you.
All sessions in this collection:
Scale-up: Fungtn Alcohol Free Beer
Fungtn was a pandemic lock-down start-up business, and the company’s founder Zoey Henderson used that time to take the product from idea to selling thousands of units a month in just one year. In this first episode of our scale-up series, Zoey tells us how she did it.
Scale-up: Better Nature Tempeh
Better Nature Tempeh hit their first 50 retailers within a couple of months of launching and were in 100 retailers within 6 months. In this second of our scaling up series, co-founder Chris King talks about how the company achieved such fast growth in their early years by embracing a testing culture.
Scale-up: Miami Burger
Miami’s founder Tom Bursnall didn’t originally launch Miami Burger to make money. However they soon won an exclusive one year deal with Morrisons supermarket and a listing in Holland & Barrett. In this third in our series of scaling-up interviews, Tom shares Miami Food’s story of how they broke into large retailers.
Key points from this session:
- Producing like-for-like products (such as BBQ ribs and mince that people were familiar with but made from Tempeh) gave consumers an easy entry point to try their product.
- Better Nature used something familiar combined with something new.
- It is crucially important to tap into the flexitarian market when you’re producing a vegan product.
- Even though the company was founded by vegans making a vegan product, their target customer is not vegan.
- Chris’s number one goal when starting was to test the market and get as much customer feedback as possible before getting any manufacturing contracts in place. They went to Just V Show and VegfestUK to get customer feedback – but now think they should have also gone beyond just testing on vegans.
- The mindset of any good entrepreneur should be to try and kill an idea as soon as possible. Before you commit five or ten years of your life, make sure your idea isn’t destined for a dead end.
- Those early days of getting in front of as many potential customers as possible to test the product led to them being approached by their first wholesale buyer.
- You shouldn’t worry about doing things that can’t scale in the early days. Instead concentrate on your first 100 customers as if each was your only customer, because these are the most important customers in your entire company lifetime.
- Your first 100 customers (if you treat them well) will each onboard 15 new customers, who will each onboard 15 more. Your customer is the most important person in your business.
- It’s one thing to get listed by a wholesaler, but another thing to actually drive sales through the wholesaler. Chris and his team literally drove door to door with samples, letting retailers know they could now buy the product through this specific wholesaler.
- Retailers don’t want to receive lots of invoices from different suppliers and have to order direct from every one of the 200 brands they stock. They want to buy everything through wholesalers – so they get just get one invoice a month and one delivery day.
- Retailers often get rebates or discounts on the entire order they place with a wholesaler, so their purchase becomes even cheaper.
- You need to put in the hard graft of turning up at stores that are selling your product to help them to sell more. Handing out samples creates a significant impact on sales at each store: if Chris spent three hours at a store giving out samples, that store would sell their entire week’s stock in a single afternoon.
- Giving stores point of sales material, leaflets and recipes cards helps the product engage better with the customer so they sell more (and then order more!).
- This strategy built momentum very quickly. Creating strong pull-through with their first wholesaler allowed them to then take very impressive sales figures to the next wholesaler.
- 8 wholesalers service over 200 retailers – and it’s far easier to market to these 8 companies than 200 stores.
- Retailers speak to each other and you want them to be a fan of your brand when they do.
- Creating a visual brand and packaging that make customers pick up your product is crucial to getting your product stocked with retailers.
- The most important thing a brand can do is build trust with your customer. You need to create a brand that people aspire to be associated with.
- Part of your brand is building a company mission, then you need to align every part of your business to it. If part of your company or operations runs contrary to your strategy and brand, this causes conflict both internally and with your customers.
- Emails are still one of the best ways to get the attention of buyers, but you need to be clever with the subject line. You also need keep the emails short and punchy.
- Digital marketing is not just about making sales. It’s also about building background brand awareness so that when you are in contact with someone they are already seeing your brand through other activity also.
- Building visibility is hugely important but it doesn’t always have an effect straight away.
- LinkedIn is a really underused platform for brands; it’s one of the best ways to get cut-through to buyers.
- During the pandemic, 70% of Better Nature’s sales were coming directly from the consumer – through their own website or via Amazon.
- Better Nature launched their online store right at the start of the business so that they could have a 1-2-1 dialogue with customers, get feedback and build a community. It also gave them the ability to run quick and easy tests with their early adopters.
- Having their own online store since the start has meant they also never had an objection from stockists that they were launching a sales channel against them – it has just never come up.
- Better Nature have actively developed collaborations with other vegan businesses, such as releasing a co-branded limited edition product with One Planet Pizza using their tempeh as a topping.
- You should use your ethical and vegan connection to reach out and link up with other companies and professionals who can help your brand.
- Chris’s two bits of advice to smaller companies looking to scale up are: 1. Test test test – don’t wait too long to test new ideas. It’s now easier than ever to get customers to try your product. 2. Don’t be too engrossed in scaling. Scale will happen if you build a loyal band of customers who rave about you.
