How To React When Mass Media Has The Mic

0:00Why one creamery decided to cut the cheese, what's the big news in the nut category, and how to handle a crisis. Find out more on this week's week's week's week's week's week's week's week.

0:20podcast. Hi, everyone. I'm your host, Carol Ortenberg. On the Nosh podcast, we go inside the business of natural, organic, sustainable, and healthy food. Today, the team discusses why one creamery is turning its focus to snacking and Campbell's divestment of Emerald Foods. Then in our featured interview, we'll hear from Neil Buer, VP of Crisis and Reputation Risk at global PR firm Edelman, to hear how company leaders should react in a time of crisis. Joining us today are reporters Lucas Southerd. Aloha. Aloha, Lucas. And Adrienne DeLuca. Good afternoon, Carol. Afternoon, Adrienne. First off, a big congrats to Masienda.

1:03This past weekend, the Masa Company won a James Beard Award for Best Commercial Media for their Masienda Presents series. You can view all of the videos on YouTube. And if you missed it, definitely check out our recent interview with the Masienda team about why they've invested in long form content. Now, while they were off accepting prestigious awards, what were you guys up to last week? Well, I spent way too long at the beach without any sunscreen. Adrian, that's very, that's not nosh of you. I know. Well, I should have gotten like some natural sunscreen in there or something. But no, I just cooked myself in the sun for like 12 hours and regretted it.

1:45Did you at least have good snacks? Oh, gosh. Yeah. Michelle's granola. You know, that's my go to. I feel like every snack tastes better on the beach. Totally. Really? You guys don't find that there's a there's a sand problem with your beach snacks? I tend to. It almost makes it better. It's like a little seasoning. No. No, I disagree. I just avoid putting the sand in the snack. It's pretty easy to put in the bag. Yeah, but I mean, sand is blowing everywhere. You don't just, like, get sand in your snacks. I don't sit there during a gale force wind. Yeah. My beaches normally don't come with a sandstorm.

2:21Do yours? No, you get sand. Sand gets everywhere. Where are you? Like, in dune? No, but, like, it's on your hands. Like, you can never get sand off of your body until you shower. Sand is a fickle, fickle beast. Lucas, clearly you did not spend any time at the beach last week. What were you up to? I did not. There's no beaches here in the Berkshires. Well, I guess there is, but they're on lakes, and so it's different. But I had a joint birthday party for the boys, so it was me grilling some very non-nosh hot dogs and very standard kids' snacks for 20-some, you know, four - to two-year-olds. Was there some Pirate's Booty there?

3:08I feel like I don't have kids, but I feel like that's a standard for smart food. No, they do love Pirate's Booty. We didn't have any in the house, but we did have some hippies. Pretty nosh. Yeah, that's very nosh snacks. Yeah, but I mean the hot dogs were pretty standard kind of. We'll let you have one. Yeah. Yeah. I actually had a hot dog for Memorial Day too. I think it's like required eating. I mean, a hot dog's just always good. I don't, you know, it's one thing that I will, if there's hot dogs there, I will have at least two of them without even thinking about it. Yeah. I did spend the last week in the Bay Area in Healdsburg.

3:50Of course, probably comes this. Bay Area. Sorry, I had to do that. It's my home where I grew up. All right, I'll let it go this time. Please continue. Not Healdsburg, though. That's too far up in the hippie zone of Sonoma County. Probably comes as no surprise to you guys. I insisted on going to a farmer's market, and besides giving me some serious produce jealousy, I did not know onions could come that big, nor have I ever like coveted an onion that much. It was great to see flatbread company Balani there. I think it's so wonderful how they have kept up their original sales channel of farmer's markets.

4:34They take part in over 30 farmer's markets a week. Even as they've grown their retail presence to include Target, Earth Fair, Whole Foods, and Erewhon, they just really stayed true to their roots. And if you've ever visited them at Expo West, that is exactly what visiting them at a farmer's market's like. Big samples, lots of toppings, super happy, just awesome people at that stand. I think every trade show I've seen them at, that's exactly what they embody. So love to see that that's out in the wild for everyone else too. It really showed me how important your demo reps and sales reps are because it would have been so off-brand to not have that experience.

5:15And I don't know what they do to make sure that it's very consistent, but I've gone to a lot of Bay Area farmers markets and it's always the same vibe, no matter where you go to their stand. Kudos to them. They're doing something right on the hiring end. Of course, I also checked out some of the plant-based options I saw on store shelves. You know, Prime Roots Pate, Current Foods Tuna. Adrienne, you'll be excited. There were a ton of aged and artisanal vegan cheeses. Frankly, I didn't even know there were that many options in the category. It's getting me so excited. The fact that this is like coming into the world now, like the fact that those options exist.

5:57No, only in the California world. That's the thing. That's like a little beacon of hope that like the rest of the world will have this soon. We can all dream. I've been dreaming for years, so I'm going to hold on to that. all you vegans can dream, I should say. As a little girl, Adrienne was like, one day I hope to spread word of vegan craft cheese. There'll be a wall of vegan cheese just for me. For your eye blew out those birthday candles. I just wish they had vegan cheese nationwide. Well, on the opposite end of the California cheese spectrum, you talked to Sonoma Creamery last week and they're making some major changes to their portfolio.

6:37What's the scoop? They are making some major but long time coming changes to their portfolio. So since their CEO, John Crean, acquired the company back in early 2010s, the plan has almost always been to just focus on snacking. They spent a few years revamping the fresh cheese business, getting packaging updated, kind of cleaning up the skew count. But then they started playing around with these cheese-based snacks and realized that seemed like a better way forward. You know, they own all the manufacturing in their snack end, but all the fresh cheeses that they owned were co-packed. So they sold off that fresh cheese section of the business to Atlanticor, which has a ton of fresh cheese.

7:23And they manpower to really grow that set better than Sonoma's, you know, group did at this time. So you're telling me Sonoma cut the cheese. They entirely cut the cheese. Whoa. Cut all the cheese. I was waiting for that one to come out. Glad you guys appreciate my pun, though. I think a lot of people think of cheese-based snacks as kind of being a small segment of the market. But there's been a lot of news recently. Lucas, I think you covered the sale of moon cheese. We had Parmcris selling to Hain. and then Wisps entering a bunch of new categories in distribution, a lot of movement in the space.

8:04And one thing that particularly stood out to me is that this is a category that when Keto and CrossFit was really hot, was positioned as being for that consumer base. And it's interesting to me how they've managed to really stick around and reposition the brand just as high protein snacking, low carb snacking and withstand sort of the decline of the keto movement so well. You know, it's funny you brought that up because when I was talking to Sonoma and John last week, he had mentioned that Brandon experimented with their first plant-based product ever because, you know, cheese has been their lifeblood for 90 something years.

8:45And they actually launched a veggie crisp type product, which contains no cheese, no dairy or anything. And they are keeping it as a seasonal item. But he mentioned, he's like, we're never going to tie ourselves to keto, to plant-based, because we saw kind of how that went with these cheese snacks. So consumers were looking for plant-based options. It did really well seasonally in club stores, and that's where they're keeping it. But in terms of portfolio growth, they are looking to just broader snacks generally. Not tying themselves to one trend or consumer base. Lucas, you also covered some snack news recently.

9:21I did. I did. So last week, the Campbell Soup Company, spoiler, they don't just make soups anymore, sold their Emerald Nuts brand to a nut and trail mix co-manufacturer named Flagstone Foods, who are going to, it's going to be the Flagstone's first kind of branded product that they're going to distribute themselves. And so Emerald was launched in 2004 and was acquired by Campbell in 2018 as part of like a big$4 billion acquisition of the Snyder's Lance Incorporated business by Campbell. And Emerald was kind of folded into a kind of new segment, a new category called the Campbell Snacks Division, which included a number of brands, pretzels and goldfish and whatnot, and kind of became a big part of the company's priorities.

10:22They've done pretty well. They have announced on pretty much the last three or four quarterly earnings how well their snacking division has done. CEO Mark Klaus said that the performance in snacks marks a significant step in our journey as we continue to emerge as a truly differentiated and best-in-class snacks portfolio. And I was just in the third quarter earnings earlier this year. So it really seems like they're putting a lot of resources behind this snacks portfolio, which makes it interesting to me that they would feel the need to sell emerald nuts. I think one thing that's important to keep in mind is that a lot of these big strategics are trying to achieve supply chain efficiencies.

11:15And Campbell's owns Goldfish, Late July, Cape Cod, Kettle, Pretzel Crisp, and Snyder's. If they can own the manufacturing, the sales, the marketing distribution, all in those salty snack channels, that makes it a real powerhouse. And Emerald kind of stood out on its own. it maybe had a different buyer on a lot of stores it was in a different category it's hard when you have to figure out manufacturing for just one product type I would agree I mean nuts does kind of stand out a little bit from your goldfish or Snyder's or you know even Cape Cod or Kettle the more kind of like chips in a bowl snacks in a bowl whereas nuts are kind of a should that be the new grocery aisle title instead of like chips it should just say snacks in a bowl snacks in a bowl that's i mean that's how i think of it it would give things like barnana and kale chips like a very clear spot to go uh so i think you're onto something there's category barriers yeah lucas's grocery store yeah here we go but it's also kind of like a i've got people coming over snack.

12:28Nuts? Yeah. I feel like my mom always served little bulls nuts or like fancy almonds. Yeah, but that's your mom's generation. I was going to say, today's day and age. If you did that, I'd probably be walking out. You got to put out those hippies, you know, or some pirate's booty. A charcuterie board. Exactly. Exactly. Some spirulina-laced vegan cheese for the Adrians of the world. Come creeping into your house for that. Little mouse. I also think it's a category that Flagstone might have an advantage in. In an article with Twin Cities Business, the Flagstone CEO said that 70 % of snack nuts on shelves are private label products.

13:09So Flagstone bills itself as one of the largest manufacturers and distributors of private label snack nuts and trail mixes. If it can have the branded product as well, it can just corner that entire category. And it really knows how to fight back against private label brands, though. I'm not sure if it's going to then be trying to steal share from its own products. We'll see how that goes. I wasn't able to talk to Flagstone at the time, although I am trying to get a hold of them to follow up on it because I do feel like there is an element to this sale that was more like Flagstone wanted to get into being more than a private label manufacturer and wanted to have their own branded product that they could put their muscle behind.

13:53And like you said, Carol, they know the nuts business real well. They've been nuts for nuts. They've been nuts for nuts for a long time or as my headline was, let's go nuts. Lucas, we'll have to see how that unfolds for Flagstone. Flagstone, if you're listening, give us a call, drop us a line. We want to hear what's going on with your strategy for 2023. Meanwhile, amazingly, other nut news this week, Orchard Valley Harvest dropped their new ad campaign. I have to admit, it's kind of wonderfully weird. I'd say for a nut brand, but really for any snack brand. it it kind of reminds me actually of um the i think they're still doing it but the skittles uh commercials that are just really off color really kind of dark at times but like there's a there's a there's a heavy heavy dose of like wink wink like nudge nudge like we're all in on the joke and um just just play along and enjoy it that i'm in love with them i think they're great There's like three, there's three ads, I think.

15:05And they all kind of take place. Yeah. With like a, a talking icon. Yeah. Who like jumps off the, jumps off the package and just talks to people. And it's, it's, you kind of have to see it to believe it, but they're, they're, they're great. It feels like sort of a weird fever dream that you might hallucinate. There's one where the mascot convinces a guy whose jaw is wired shut to like take pliers and break his jaw free so that he can eat nuts. How long are these ads? This is like a full storyline. They pack a lot into a minute-long ad. They're 20 seconds long. They're like a normal ad spot. It's pretty impressive, actually.

15:49Well, we'll link to these ads in the show notes. But speaking of gaining attention, this sounds like it was for the right reasons, but sometimes you gain some attention for the wrong reasons. And Adrienne, that ties into our featured interview today. Tell us a little bit about who we're going to hear from and what they're chatting with you about. That is exactly right, Carol. So I sat down with Neil Boer, who handles crisis and reputation risk at PR firm Edelman. He works with a slew of large CPG players and has handled a pretty broad swath of crises across his career. for the purpose of this chat.

16:25We're not going to talk about recalls, but rather external crises and how you handle them. Things like a health scare related to an ingredient that may affect your company over the past few years. We've seen heavy metals and sweeteners making some headlines, as well as plenty of DEI-related challenges that companies have faced and made major headlines for. Neil and I walk through what to do when you find your company tied to one of these headlines and what that path forward should look like. We also talk about how you handle these situations when an influencer or even someone within your company is involved and just how the playbook for handling a crisis on this scale has evolved, especially since COVID times and the pandemic when some of these issues and things have been really heightened on social media.

17:19Adrienne, I'm excited to hear more about that. Let's get to it. Hello, everyone. I'm joined by Neil Boer, VP of Crisis and Reputation Risk at public relations consultancy firm Edelman, where he works specifically with food and beverage clients. Thank you, Neil, for joining us today. I'm happy to join you. Nice to be here, Adrienne. I know we're both pretty excited to discuss this topic. What I want to dive into is how do you approach a crisis situation when the expectations are a little less clear cut? So over the past year within the industry, we've seen numerous diversity, equity, inclusion, or DEI related debates, some health focused research reports coming out and a slew of other macro challenges related to the food industry making major headlines.

18:04When mass media outlets are involved, is that reason enough for a company to say something? No, it's a great topic. And I think especially with understanding where your consumers are, right? Most consumers are not going to do deep dives into research. They're not going to get into peer-reviewed science, and they're not going to kind of weigh a whole body of facts. What you're often looking at is perceptions, right? You are looking at tweets that come through from experts, whether they be aligned with the company or whether they be in opposition to it and any headlines that come up where, right, when you're working in spaces with food companies, right?

18:38And especially as you talk about like heavy metals, as you get into just really vulnerable populations, right? Children, that the scrutiny is just so high, and that the barrier for concern is just so low. So as you get into that, you're like guiding light of what you're trying to do within any crisis would be trying to keep your brand in a position to be heard. Like it is a weird passive way to look at it. But it often dictates a lot of what the tactics will be of whether or not you need to be out front with a statement, whether you need to be engaging on social media, whether or not you need to set up interviews with some of your research team to kind of get your perspective out there.

19:14A lot of that is dictated by basically how can you keep your voice both through the crisis and more importantly, on the other end of it, and so that you can still get back to business as usual and continue to operate successfully. I'm glad you brought up social media because, you know, especially with cases like this, where like we said, you might not be the only company impacted by that headline. What value does something like an Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn statement hold? And are there certain parameters a company should follow in putting those out? The maxim often is it's the tall blade of grass that gets cut.

19:46And that is something everyone has to debate about when it's an industry-wide issue versus when it's just a company-specific issue of what is the value of being out there and kind of owning the issue publicly. The risks that go along with that are pretty significant, right? It is not just simply a PR calculation, it's often is going to put you on the radar of regulators. There are congressional staffs, there are regulator staffs who do a lot of just what we would basically call monitoring and desk side research, right? You're looking to see who's spoken on issues, who has a perspective that you can go source from and that you can hold them to to ask follow-up questions.

20:22And so that like thought process of being like, we're going to go out, we're going to say something on social can manifest a few months down the road when you get an official inquiry from either a senator's office, some sort of committee, a regulator to be like, we heard you said X, we'd be curious to know what research is behind that and how do you support it. And so it's often one in which you want to pursue with a full perspective of being like, this could, what is the longest timeframe on this, not just what helps us in the near term with our customer service. That said, Twitter, Instagram statements enormously helpful in regards to being able to take off the burden from your customer service channels.

20:59Often when things pop up like this, what you have is your intake channels just become so overwhelmed, right? Where if they're used to dealing with 100 to 200 questions per day and mostly, right, like returns, questions about ingredients, right? Things that they're kind of accustomed to answering and they have a script for. These sources and instances fit very poorly in that system, right? That system is basically designed to be very broad and then to escalate the ones that need more attention. When you're in a crisis, everything gets escalated then where like there are no easy questions. And so your review staff and your executives who have to weigh in with the messaging are just frankly overwhelmed with having to answer that.

21:41That's where Twitter and Instagram can be really helpful is that if you find yourself answering the same five to 10 questions, put a statement out. It takes the burden off and lets you at least answer the easy ones. And then it lets you get back into that normal rhythm of escalating the really tough ones instead. Sometimes initial crisis-related statements have become kind of this boilerplate type copy and are a lot of the times drafted out of pure necessity of just getting something out there. How do you weigh putting out that timely response versus, you know, one that's a bit more substantive or has a bit more quality behind it?

22:17And are there times when one's more appropriate than the other? Having sat in these rooms, the part that you quickly realize is just how incomplete your knowledge is at the beginning of any incident, where you're getting so many questions that are basically along the lines of what happened and what are you doing about it? You don't really know the answer to either. You have a little bit of a picture of what happened. You don't know exactly why it happened or who's responsible or even the scope of it, much less to say anything about what those plans are going to be. And so what pops out then is just these very generic, very vanilla blase statements that are like, we are aware of this incident and working to address it.

22:57And it doesn't say much, right? It gives consumers really nothing to work on. It gives regulators nothing to say other than we should keep a very close eye on this. Your legal team is probably the only one who's comfortable with that statement of like, at that point, you're not conceding any facts and you're not taking any positions. You are simply stating the very obvious in arguable point of something has happened. And, and you are aware of that. As you get into that, there's multiple ways to do it. You can get it caught into a trap where you are putting out statement after statement after statement in that you continue to extend the media cycle to where all of a sudden you are like basically inviting the whole world into your decision-making process of saying, we made X decision and in two weeks we'll be doing Y.

23:45And there are certain situations where that's really great. It buys you time, it buys you space. And if you don't have results yet, often showing process is a way to signal that you are taking it seriously. The statements need to reflect that. If they're written in such a bland way that people won't necessarily get that point, it sounds more like you're just kind of spinning your wheels and people are like, we want answers. And so there needs to be about an amount of expectation setting that goes into that. The other pressure that you face is that at some point, if you're answering the same questions over and over again, it's a signal that your statements are too bland.

24:17And it triggers the discussion of basically weighing like, what's the complete picture of risk? You're obviously taking a hit on the PR front where people are frustrated because they don't feel like any of your information is accessible or that they have a clear picture of what's going on. That can be weighed against in special situations, right? Legal risk. If you're like, we have to maintain this posture just because that's what the fact pattern looks like. Switching to, I guess, a more specific and timely case, you know, in recent weeks, Bud Light has made some headlines and received criticism for the way they responded in the wake of consumer-led boycotts due to their partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney.

24:56From your perspective, how was that situation handled and what could have happened differently? they're on such a long timeline right as we talk about companies who have to keep putting out statements at milestones they made the choice right to essentially say like we're going to say something at this milestone and then we're going to let our earnings talk for the rest of it but otherwise it's not really going to be a public relations campaign it's going to like let a positive ad campaign do the talking instead around it it's a challenge right it is one in which what it brings me back to is the world economic forum puts out the list of like it's 10 major risks for each year and polarization and like societal cohesion is on that list, rightfully so.

25:36And what it signals is that for marketing departments, risk sensing is its own skill, that it's one thing to kind of know generally that social cohesion, polarization, and election, whatever we want to call that group of risk are kind of out there. It's another to then take all the actions in order to like incorporate that risk and let it actually guide your decision making on stuff. And so there's a difference, right, between risk sensing in risk aversion or even a culture of fear. There are so many different angles for any campaign that you can look at and see something where, especially on social, somebody's going to nitpick at it.

26:10And it's good to be aware of that plan and have a clear risk or a clear perception of what the risk is actually around it. Then you accompany it too with some sort of plan to mitigate it, whether that means you change some of the messaging on the upfront, you promote it on certain platforms instead of, right, LinkedIn has a very different atmosphere than Twitter does and very different receptions. And so sometimes you put a campaign on one instead of the other. It's things like that that build in this organizational sense of where's our reputation currently and what do we need to do to protect it?

26:43And so where Bud Light has landed, I think, with some of these organizational processes, there's more oversight, there's more involvement from senior executives. There's a lesson there for a lot of companies saying you don't necessarily have to go through what they have gone through in order to incorporate some of those lessons to your own approval processes, to your own timelines for putting things out, to make sure they're properly vetted, just to do your own reckoning with what the world looks like now. And that is just always going to be a very splintered consumer set who's just going through a lot on the political front.

27:15And that's going to, at some point, kind of wash up on the shores of every company. And being prepared to navigate that is the best way to mitigate the reputational damage on the back end of it. Moving away from the Bud Light instance, any large company will probably have a bad egg at some point in their history. And obviously the circumstance dictates a lot of that response. But when that reputation has been tarnished a bit from an internal actor, is there a different way to handle that crisis? How do you approach criticisms of a specific person just because they're associated with your company?