Fearne & Rosie founder: from Yorkshire Primary School Teacher and Mum of 3 to winning listings Waitrose, Ocado, Booths, Morrisson's

0:00Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands looking to pour gasoline all over their growth. Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with a toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started. Hello there people and listeners of The Hungry Podcast. I'd say I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Rachel Kettwell onto the podcast. Rachel is the founder of Fern and Rosie. Fern and Rosie are disrupting the jam category with jams that have less sugar.

0:43They have won listings at Waitrose, Ocado, Yorkshire Morrison's Booths, a couple of biggies in the pipeline, which we can't talk about just yet. And he's got some amazing investors. Giles Brook, who's been on this podcast before. We actually had Bread and Jam and we're going to do another one with him soon. So look, super excited to talk a myriad of different things with you today. Appreciate it. Thanks so much. I'm so excited to be here. Yeah, I'm really excited. I listen to the podcast often and I'm a big fan and I'm super excited to be here. So thanks so much for thinking of me. Oh, no, no worries.

1:29As I say, it was always a question of when or if. It's just trying to get the calendar stars to align sometimes. It's always a bit of a rigmarole. Where I want to start, and one of the reasons I was so keen to talk to you,

1:48is you're a mum. Obviously, your kids are called Fern and Rosie, and let's not forget George as well. You're going to have to create a peanut butter brand called George or something like that. do you know what I mean and to keep him happy I always think he might be grateful like I'm never quite sure I always think like by the time they're all teenagers George is probably going to be delighted that he's not involved yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah he might be furious but I want to talk about like how yeah dealing being a female mum founder and being a mum are two really like potentially conflicting things right because i know how much it takes to build a brand and i don't know how much it takes to be a mum but i know how much uh i know how much how much energy it takes to like raise kids like loads of loads of people from money life had that had kids but i want to talk about a linkedin post i read which is sometimes it gets busy and this is what you wrote by the way not just some random fucking linkedin post sometimes it gets busy and it's important to remember why you started i'm growing fern and rosie whilst growing real life fern and rosie dot dot dot and george so today i took a few hours off and went to the school nativity the first one in three years and i was an emotional wreck now it's back to it i've got some very very exciting news coming over the next few weeks i'm going to do my best to hopefully make them proud so how does growing Fern and Rosie the brand get in the way of raising Fern and Rosie your kids and like how how do you navigate that because it's quite tumultuous territory I think yeah um big question I think Pip Brooke who is Giles Brooke's sister she said to me a while ago um it's brilliant that you've got children because having children pulls you out of the business and she's the first person I think that said that to me because I think often people see having children as a conflict and perhaps raise it growing the business perhaps there's a time consideration there but actually what Pip was saying and I think she's right is because I've got children I can't I can't give 20 hours a day to the business and actually what that means in the longer term is that hopefully I won't burn out so I think I have something else in my life you know I think often when people start a business it is their baby and they do throw everything at it and yes I am throwing everything at Fern and Rosie but I also have two or three nights a week where I do do school pick up and I do school pick up I'm with my children I'm putting them to bed and then I'm logging back on in the evening if I need to do anything but I don't do that every night because I do think it's important to work on that work-life balance and I think everybody's circumstance everyone's circumstances are so different as well and for me I was a teacher before I started Fern and Rosie and then having Fern and Rosie I was on maternity leave so I think I took around six or seven months maternity leave with Fern and with Rosie and then went back to teaching part-time so I was two days a week or three days a week and I had George as well and again took some time off for maternity leave and I think the the beginnings of Fern and Rosie like Fern and Rosie started on my phone you know it started with me seeing I thought I was very lucky because I had access to my husband at the time was our first manufacturing partner and so I kind of knew a lot about or not a lot but I had a knowledge of jam and I knew that there was a product there was a problem in that there wasn't a better for you product on the market and a lot of Fern and Rosie kind of started with on my phone and it was things that I could do after I'd put the children to bed so I'd put the children to bed and then I would start on socials and it was me sharing recipes online reaching out to people that I'd followed on my personal socials and just saying I've made this jam I'd really love you to see what you think um would it be okay to send you some and doing and it started really small so I think the flexibility I had um in being able to work around my family is something that I'm incredibly proud of and I think in the beginnings things it was the thing that I focused on like so when you're on maternity leave and when you've got small children I was the mum that was going to parents group and taking questionnaires to the parents there and saying like I've made this jam could you tell me what you think about it and is it is it a good idea would you buy this why would you not buy this um and I did that kind of really small scale market research um that I still kind of apply now as we grow and that I think well if it works in a small group we can model that out in different groups um so I think it started small and it has grown which is wonderful um and for me there's always a balance of how I use my time um so that I make sure that because the number one for me is Fern Rosie and George um and my husband and my friends and family of course but like equally Fern Rosie is my job and it pays for my family you know so I need to do both of those things and I think everybody's circumstances are different for me as well it's the opportunity to make a positive impact and that's the thing that always drives me the most is I was a teacher and I remember vividly standing so this is going to sound silly but I do remember vividly standing in my classroom we had Waitrose and we were about to launch in Ocado and Ocado sent a message an email and said something needed to be done like in the setup process and they've said it needs to be done by 12 and it was eight o 'clock in the morning and my class would have been coming in at half eight so there was just no way that I could do it in that time and that was the time that I thought so if I stay in my classroom and I do a really good job I can probably impact on like hundreds or thousands hopefully of children and families but i believe with fern and rosie that um if i oh sorry i believe with fern and rosie that if i do a good job and i've got the opportunity to impact um across millions of lives which is what i'm trying to do hi there guys super super quick one um i write a weekly newsletter called hungry friday feast it goes live at 8am every friday i'm pouring my soul into this bad boy it's probably my favorite creative end of i've ever done i basically pick apart all the biggest lessons all the biggest learnings from all the wonderful guests and throw it into a feast or a newsletter we've got over a thousand two hundred subscribers come and join the party i'm going to put a link in the show notes it's right at the top and subscribe and if you are already a subscriber please just forward it on to a friend do the amount of favor it would mean the world to me Anyway, back to the old episode, boys and girls.

9:09One of the things you've said, and it reminds me, people talk a lot about work-life balance. Yeah. And I interviewed the other brand who gives a crap, the toilet paper brand. Yeah, huge. I interviewed Simon, the founder of that, the other day. Sorry. And he talked... Do you want to... It's not me. It should get better in a minute. Sorry. That's all right. it adds to the uh adds to the sort of the flavor of the episode don't worry about it um and and he was like to me he says oh actually i don't believe in work-life balance and it does sound a bit david brenti goes i believe in life-work balance right and he was like he was like we were on zoom he goes mate this surf outside i'm not on a fucking zoom call mate i'm not on a zoom call i'm going surfing and it's like and actually i reframed it and it's actually if you can get your brand to work around your life then you're on to win it because as Giles's sister says you you don't burn out so what I'm seeing is it's it's not like Fern and Rosie is something that destroys time with your kids it's something that actually adds to it so like when you're going to the mum's class you're taking the surveys and saying okay well you know you're almost you're blending the two together it's like that time with the other mums is actually your market research so you're you're getting the life work balance so right and i think it's i think it's fascinating i think when you become a a founder it's not it's not a an on off thing it's like it's like an always on on both and i'm trying to i'm trying to get to to how to manage that i think what you're saying about taking you know putting the kids to bed but then maybe doing a bit of work in the in the evening is is is kind of how to how to navigate that and actually get the brand to fit around both um what does jiles's sister do out of interest she is oh how am i gonna describe pip she's a superhero she works for a variety of brands and in marketing um but she definitely works across all aspects of the business um she is a lovely really really lovely person um yeah so we i spend as much time as i can with pip really and she's a great person she she'd be a great person for you to chat to she's got loads of knowledge um and she's just super bright um so she used to and still does support fern and rosie um and helped me kind of put in like a structure for what our marketing plan would look like um and yeah i've learned a lot from her so she used to work at vitacoco as well um and she's worked in lots of different brands i think she worked at i want to say she worked in sainsbury's um but i'm not quite sure if that's a fact but she um yeah she's great so she's so she's in fmcg as well she's not like is yeah yeah she is um she's currently working with a brand called first i don't know if you've seen them they are a gut-loving soda, I believe.

12:24So, yeah, she's just working with them at the moment. First. First. F-H-I-R-S-T, I think. Hang on. No, because F first. Sorry, I sound like I'm first. First D. Yes, I think that's what it's supposed to be. I've seen those. Yeah, I've seen those. That looks sick, yeah. It's like the tongue looks like the Rolling Stones a bit and a bit rude healthy yeah that looks i saw that that looks unreal um okay so that that's amazing i suppose where i i want to go to is is understanding and you briefly talked about it going from like a teacher you realize as a teacher you could impact maybe hundreds of thousands thousands of kids um to being a founder you could impact more there's a quote i love by david height David Hyatt who's been on this podcast and he says uh if I can find it the struggle is the struggle but you get to choose the struggle and that struggle is meaning so obviously starting a fat food and drink business is hard but the whole reason it's hard is because it gives you meaning I'd love to know like you're sat in that classroom you've got your 20 to 30 kids in the room what is the thing that happens in rachel's what what alchemy changes in your kind of being that says right i need to go and do this what's the call to adventure like what pulled you to to this i always thought i honestly thought i could do both um in the beginning and i always my initial thought because i was the teacher first and i still am a teacher like i or everything i do in every aspect of the business it's always relating back to the fact I am a teacher um but I remember I always thought I wouldn't let Fern and Rosie impact on my teaching so I was teaching part-time two days a week or three days a week and I was always really clear that I wouldn't let Fern and Rosie the business come into the world of teaching and I wanted teaching was first for me and then there came a point where I realized that actually what was actually happening was that teaching was holding back Fern and Rosie which I hadn't anticipated that happening and I think the Ocado launch was a part of that Dragon's Den as well probably a point where I was like actually I can't grow Fern and Rosie the way that I want to and the way that I think it can um because I'm spending my time teaching and I love teaching but like I said I think with Fern and Rosie there's an opportunity to support children and support schools in a bigger way than I could have done in the classroom so I think when I apply that to Fern and Rosie as a business now um my number one is that I want to I want to be a product that's in schools like I want to work with schools and you know people can tell me there's no money in schools people can tell me schools can't afford it that doesn't mean that's right and that you know there was a big campaign by jamie oliver um around school dinners and there's legislation in place around what children can eat at lunchtime but that legislation doesn't extend to breakfast clubs or after school clubs so those part of the school day are firstly they're unfunded um but secondly there's no guidelines in place for what children should or shouldn't be eating and that means that nationwide um we're seeing breakfast clubs providing our children with with an unhealthy start to a debt to the day and i think as a teacher what i could always see was there's always those vulnerable children and it is always our most vulnerable children that come into school and haven't had a breakfast or haven't had a healthy breakfast and you can see physically the impact that that has on their ability to learn on their ability to form friendships on everything that they're doing and my big vision with Fern and Rosie when I was in schools was that we would build a business that supported schools so I wanted there to be like Fern and Rosie breakfast clubs and they would obviously buy jam which is great but also there would be like educational resources available for them and that is a big part of what I want us to do so we've just closed our second investment round and we are working with twinkle um which is a massive opportunity for us to start to build fern and rosie within the schools network um and i think that that's the right thing for us to do um but we need the support of the retailers as well i think it's everybody working in partnership because actually if we can get the product into schools and children and families are seeing it in schools then they need to be able to go and buy it in the supermarkets so i think it's it's everybody working together to provide those healthier choices like we can say everything we need to say but we know statistics we know there's a problem with jam the jams are with second or third generation of consumers just picking jam up off the shelf and not really questioning what's in it most jams on the market are 60 to 70 percent sugar um we know obesity levels are rising and specifically obesity levels in children are rising um at record levels like last year the nhs reported the largest um rise in childhood obesity since records began and i think like if we've got children leaving school at 11 leaving primary school age 11 already overweight or obese that's really hard for them for like so I think we need to make sure that we're kind of educating and that's where I think Fern and Rosie's responsibility is as well as that we're providing that healthier choice but we're also providing that education piece because I really I personally don't believe in like good foods and bad foods I believe in educating people around um what's in their food where it comes from the impact that it has on their body so that we can all make informed healthier choices but it's a balance um it's not about shaming anybody or saying the teller is the devil you know it's just about providing education so that children learn to understand um the choices that they should have that they should and can make um to lead a healthier lifestyle yeah it's mad how i've never spoken to someone on the podcast about almost specifically targeting mums and their kids because that that is ultimately where where you can have the most change and i think what you're saying is if what if a kid's been eating chocolate bars and uh and whatnot their whole life as soon as they get out to 11 13 they're already in those bad habits so as soon as if you can get to the root of the problem then yeah you're you're solving that from the off and i think this education piece is really interesting and it's it's it's fascinating to to what you've said there it's such a big why and such a big mission that it kind of makes the the the struggle and the hard times worth it but you said I I love teaching but what why what does teaching do for your for you what does it do for your soul favorite thing to do and that's why everything we do is always going back to teaching I don't know we did a fern and rosie did a school visit or a couple of weeks ago where we went to a london school we took pudsey and we went into the school and we did some baking so we've done some recipes with bbc children online bbc children in need and those recipes are on the children in need website um the school section and then also on the fern and rosie section and what we did is we took these recipes into schools and we did baking with the children and pudsy was there as well um and that's that's winning for me like that success for me is was starting to do that and then actually you know if you start to build out the network of schools it's a great way to also help with retail distribution and retail sales because that's where our families are um but I think what teaching does for me is I'm a really big believer in inspiring people to be the best that they can be um so my favorite thing about teaching was making that positive impact um I typically all was um so I was a year six teacher or year four teacher and typically would probably have the more challenging class um because um the thing I was quite good at as a teacher was building relationships and getting the best out of people um and I did that every year with a new class I would build the team to be the best that they could be um and I think there's a lot of teaching that translates to Fernarosean running a business I think um actually the fact that as a teacher you're a jack of all trades and a master of none in that you're doing um a little you know I can do basic maths I can do a little bit of English I can you know speak a bit of French um but I'm not an expert in any of those things and when you translate that to running a business um I'm okay at marketing I'm all right at sales I can do a bit of accounts that's probably not my strength you know it's it's similar and I'm a generalist um so those things are probably translatable but working with children and inspiring people to be the best that they can be is what I'm trying to do there's also a massive a massive amount of empathy in uh teaching I think the best teachers are probably the most empathetic people on on the planet like I remember I had a teacher who was um like who was definitely on my side and and yeah like it was basically sort of like to me is like mate don't go to the crap uni it's like really push yourself to go to the next one and i think it's there's this um there's this quote by uh chris rock which i think it's just it sums up empathy which is you see someone on the side of the road with their car broken down you just drive you just drive past but if you see somebody pushing their own car like that you stop and help and i think it's like that that is what the the best teachers are the ones who really stop and help and push behind people and i think as with with your with your mission you are kind of seeing the kids on the side of the not the kids on the side of the road that sounds fucking morbid but like the kids are stuffing their face with kit kats or nutella it's like how how do you help them and i think it's it's fascinating what you're doing what are the um what are the hard things about being a teacher that most people who who aren't teachers wouldn't understand

23:34uh i think i teachers work incredibly hard and i think that's um another wonderful thing i think in the food industry we're so busy and we are so busy and everything is so fast-paced but I'm telling you schools are just as busy and schools are just as fast-paced so I think it's kind of that understanding that actually a school environment is a very intense um place to be because the the level of work versus the level of resource um isn't adequately balanced I think it would be really interesting I always think I used to say to my husband it would be really interesting to just film like the first 20 minutes of a school day because if you think about how many people you come into contact with in that 20 minutes a bit like we were talking before about the lunch show and how that's quite intense if you think in your classroom you've got probably 30 to 35 children actually in your one classroom so that's that's 35 people then each of those is bringing in a parent those parents are coming in so that's 60 people each of those people have had something has happened that morning they've not been able to find their shoes somebody's granddad is poorly you know there's something happening in this person's home there's a drug problem here there's all those things happening and you are one person that's trying to support all those things and actually the way that you talk to the SEN child that's you know or the child that's got English as their additional language or the child sorry SEN special educational needs um so children that might access the curriculum in different ways and the way that you have to structure your conversation and the way that you talk to people the expectations that you have the way that you have to be kind um it varies and I just think that would be a really interesting capture and actually I spoke to so you know I mentioned there was a school visit the other day I wasn't at the school visit I was in Yorkshire so the school visit happened in a London school and something happened and a member of team Fern and Rosie wasn't able to be there so instead of there being three there was going to be two members which is fine but I had to ring the school and say just so you know this is what's happened so there's going to be two people so the head teacher was on the phone and the head teacher was on the phone and it just kind of reminded me of what's happening in schools because she was on the phone I could hear there was a child in the background having a meltdown and she was saying I'm dealing with this child they're very upset I'm trying to talk to them so she was also she wasn't telling me to go away she was talking to me as well as dealing with the child and then I was saying just so you know there's two members of staff not three members of staff so then she then went on to the intercom and was saying to her staff there's two members of staff not three members of staff so that's going out to 20 people and she was doing all those things whilst staying calm and looking after the child and I was like actually that is the thing that teachers are doing you maybe forget when you come out you just forget how busy they are and actually how competent they are how clever they are and how skilled they are at being able to spin a thousand plates and also smile um so i think they're busy delighted to announce the extension of our partnership with the wonderful billy and paul from mckenzie jones but even more exciting they have just launched a brand new brand as part of mckenzie jones called mkj ignite mkj ignite is a recruitment firm which specializes full shebang focus entirely on challenge brand space they work with some incredible brands lucky saint good race purdy and fig hunt and gather and real superfoods they can support with your hiring needs across all levels top to bottom junior entry-level jobs all the way through and up to md and ceo level so if you're looking for a field sales stomper a sales wizard an 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codes well look very very simple mate gs1 will help you drive revenue upsell and cross sell your amazing products boost your bottom line boost your bottom line yes please where do i sign enhance customer engagement look delight your customers with dynamic content that captivates and keeps them coming back for more more more please sir can have some more yes you can comply with regulations look you want to be building your brand you don't want to be knee deep wading through a deep river of legislation agrovation these barcodes allow you to stay ahead of the curve look don't allow this beautiful boat of boundless opportunity to sail away into the malting sunset be on that boat join GS1's UK's free pilot program today yes it's completely free there will be a link in the show thank you so much teachers are such unsung heroes in every in every like I think that's why I love exploring things I've never explored before but it's actually the teacher is just a good teacher a bad teacher can have such bad consequences on a on a kid like I remember there was one kid at our school and our um I went to a proper toffo school right so but like yeah yeah yeah yeah the fucking house master mate yeah but he he was um this this kid was just like lambasted by this this professor not professor this guy who's just a bit of a dick to be honest and his his trajectory of life i mean the home life wasn't great either but like the school just compounded the issues and the guy's like completely off the rails now and it's like the teacher as i zoom out the teacher has such an important role in the kid's life and i think what you've said there about being at 8 30 in the morning you're there parents from the granddad could be poorly the car may be broken down the special needs kid like may have specific issues and you've got the way you communicate with that person is different that is literally being a founder that is the parallels to being a founder are so are so transferable um it's just fascinating to see that because ultimately like a founder whether it's a classroom or an office in the morning you have to show be on be on the best regard or but show face and and empathize with what people are saying um and then also i think there's a there's a great parallel in managing relationships with different retailers like having the that empathy what we talked about earlier of the way you'd speak to a tesco versus a sainsbury's versus a co-op versus your local indie yes they're all customers and they're selling your product but that's a wildly different conversation per customer i think that's a really interesting that's really interesting yeah yeah i hadn't thought of it like that the what what so one of the things i've talked about i talked about this with um harry on the podcast from uh the savorists he's a really good mate of mine and we were talking about yeah yeah he's a g i've got a lot of time for him and he's got he's got really good podcast as well but he um sorry having some water but um I sound like a little kid in class sorry I'm having some water yeah I'm just just on my phone miss on having a little coca-cola under the uh and a snickers bar um but the uh what was I saying so he he we're talking about the educational system and I personally believe I don't think our current or the way I was educated at least 10 10 15 years ago is is sets kids up to to start their own business one and doesn't it may have changed but when I was at school I sound like some old fucker but I'm not but like back in my day but um yeah back in the olden days in 2007 the uh the uh like doing dt in art was perceived as lesser than doing biology and economics and actually to be a founder art and deep design and technology and all those classes are the are the right right classes so i suppose my issue with the um with the the educational system is is to be a founder it's like your learning is try fail learn try fail learn try fail learn it's like you see this with the rebrand you take it to market then you you learn then you rebrand and then you try to improve the product whereas with with the way where we're we're marked at school is like right we want you to absorb as much information as you can yeah and And then just chunder it all out in an hour.

33:26And I remember just like researchers, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And then away you go and we'll mark you and then off you go onto the world. I'd love to know is what's your opinion on this? Like, do you think schools set kids up to be founders? Or what do you think is broken with the school system in that regard? I think it would be amazing if there could be a change in the curriculum. um i think it's being is there's an organization called soul which is self-organized learning environments um and they did a piece of work which was saying our educational our education system bill eight jam people haven't touched it for years um but if you look at the educational system it's built on it came out of the industrial revolution and the the the educational framework that is in place at the moment is trying to produce hundreds of people that can do the same thing because they need to go and work in the factories and that they need a certain level of skill because the curriculum is set up on those foundations and the curriculum hasn't caught up with the fact that actually now what we need is hundreds of people to go and do different jobs and that is the shift that that needs to happen um we're not all the same we all think differently um and we need to celebrate the strengths of everybody you know everyone's got different strengths as you were saying that art and the dt side are just as valuable as your science subjects um i think again the resilience um so i always think that my role as a teacher wasn't to teach the answer it was to teach children to love learning and be inspired by learning and lifelong learners and i don't teach the answers i just teach them to be resilient to try their best and to learn as much as they can and I think often that resilience is kind of underrated um sorry sorry oh go on sorry just that's really got me going that uh so sorry it has how so year six is what 12 years old 10 and 11 yes yeah how how do you teach an 11 10 year old resilience often year six is a really interesting year because if you are a relatively everybody's different but if you are a relatively bright human you can get through primary school okay I don't want to say it's easy but you can probably get through primary school year six is the time that actually the work becomes starts to become more challenging and you move into that more um high school approach to learning and actually if you're typically quite bright child what can happen is in year six you haven't developed that resilience those strategies where you've tried and you failed and you've tried and you failed and you've tried and you failed so suddenly when it becomes hard and you haven't got that base um and actually that can be a real challenge for children so actually you know there's all those quotes isn't there like i've learned so much from my mistakes i'm going to keep making some more but it is that failure and that ability to fail and keep trying and that will ultimately lead to success whatever success looks like for you um I'm dyslexic and I always think a strength of that was that I didn't find school particularly easy you know my spelling is appalling my auditory processing is pretty poor um so i think i have those opportunities to fail um safely actually in primary school and fail fail fail a lot so that now i'm perhaps less scared of failing and i have got that resilience and i can keep trying and i think you can see that um we see that a lot in different learners that those super bright children perhaps because the curriculum isn't very flexible they perhaps perhaps haven't had those opportunities to be pushed um and that's not fair really so we need to set that up for everybody so that the brighter children as well are getting pushed as the as the children that need more support are getting more support

37:43it's yeah it's it's interesting it's a bit like what we were saying about the earlier you get into these problems or potential problems the easier they are to fix further along the lines it's like if you can get into the schools and solve the what they have at before school at breakfast with less sugar the the more sound they are for later life if you can get a 10 year old to understand resilience the more sound they are for later to later life also i thought i found really interesting is how you're saying the current system is set up uh or or is spawned from the industrial revolution which was like an input output process like you doing hours in the ford factory you create this amount of output and actually now if you think about it every probably everyone even my diary pretty much every creative organization's diary is still built on that process it's built like the school diary it's like you have your meetings you block your meetings out then you have your lunch break it's still built like the school system and actually i think the great irony is the the creative organizations need to have like i'm writing a thing about this now about like a three to four hour lunch break but all the creative ideas come when you do nothing then yeah all the creative ideas come like you know when you do like a get together um like as a team like every quarter and you know you come away you're absolutely buzzing like you've got loads of fresh ideas everyone's like that my thing is like why do that every quarter when you could do that once a week yeah so you say you get five five ideas five ideas a quarter suddenly if you're getting five ideas a week then i don't know what the math is on that but it's way more idea is way more ideas and it's it's fascinating i'd never thought of that before it's like yeah we have we we just creative organizations even though they're creative they have their days mapped out to fit an industrial revolutionary world if that makes sense yeah it does it does it's exciting to see like i wish we could see where we are in 200 years time and how much we've you know grown and developed and that would be really interesting but the sole organization as well um which was founded by a man called skater mitra and who is a very inspiring human and he did a piece of research um around learning i don't know how interesting this is but i find it quite interesting yeah so he did a piece he did a piece of he did a piece of research where he um he put he took a computer to a slum an indian slum he put a he he's from india and he put a computer in a slum in india where children hadn't seen the computer before and they hadn't seen they didn't speak english i don't think book and he put the computer in there and he left it there for a week and then he came back and he said can you use the computer and the children said no we can't use the computer and he and they said and he said okay cool so what does the computer do and they said we don't know how it works but we know if we press this button that this happens and we know if we type this in then that happens and we and so actually they did understand how to work the computer they taught themselves how to do it and that's kind of a reflection of the fact that children are really clever and if we lift the lid on learning they can go on to explore and learn in lots of different ways we've just got to provide like the same as what you just said about providing those opportunities for creativity we've got to provide the skill set the resilience the lifelong love of learning but then children have got the ability to go and learn for themselves boe me our beloved sponsor are helping build the fastest growing challenger food and drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale boe me are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger boe me are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic ollie's ollie's been on this podcast twice actually they saw a 29 percent uplift in sales when using boemy to check major malt listings availability insane 29 percent uplift by downloading an app insane lucky saying my boy aaron duff is coming to podcast in a couple of weeks he uses it to manage a team of 30 people and they've lucky to have unlocked 500 draft listings by using boemy look you've got to get involved with this stuff it's absolutely insane and it will categorically change your life it's just the sickest platform i use it all the time at ireland hi guys super super quick one so so excited look for years i've been badgering on about hungary the podcast you're probably bored to death thanks for putting up with me but hungary is also an agency and we look after one amazing brand called ireland's chocolate we've had a great time over the year we've won listings at load of wholesalers we've won milk and more we've got our first grocery listing coming very soon which is very very sick but what i'm thrilled to announce is Hungary's merging with HC Consulting.

42:45My boy Harry Clark and his wonderful team, he's an absolute G. They do brand strategy, new business, business and account management. But why I really love working with Harry and why we've got on so well over the last couple of months is Harry was actually the founder of the boozy, isolated brand Pops. He's been in the trenches. He's grafted his face off. He's had the sleepless nights. He's had the turmoil. He's had the triumph. He knows what it is to be a founder. He is a founder. and he's got a proven track record in grocery and out of home holy moly dips the gut stuff savile drinks remio gelato so if your brand and you're you're stuck you're looking for like new business help you're looking to scale drop us a message we'd love to chat thank you so much back to the old episode there's actually so many parallels from little kids at school to being a formidable founder it's like what you said there about the computer it's like yeah just just fucking like you're just if you just keep trying you'll figure it out i think what someone said to me is called like stoic um rory southern who's been on the podcast he called it stoic stoicistic uh tinkering which is a really wanky way of saying it but it's like you you you start your brand and you know i saw the original fern rosy packaging it's not what it is now that's like the kid going to the computer you press enough buttons you oh you've got it right in front of you voila this will be on youtube as well so people please watch on youtube um but you know you it's like the kid going to the computer and into it's like well we're going to press a few buttons we're going to see how we're going to make this work it's tinkering and i also think when you're a kid you're so curious like you know i was with lou yeah i think you met lou actually at um at lunch she's amazing yeah so she was my mentor really good mate of mine the one i was talking about the train station yes can't get to the train station early but like um but you know so so her we were having a coffee the other day with our little kid grace and it's like a costa not costa coffee like a prepped coffee lid you're looking at this three-year-old looking at a lid thinking oh my god this is the most i've got a lighter in my hand but like this is the most interesting thing yeah yeah sorry i'm like a little three-year-old um this is the most interesting thing in the world and i think i what one of my peeves with school is it for most people it can bludgeoned the curiosity out out of kids like like i remember thinking this is just like double that we had to start double maths on a friday afternoon i was like fucking hell like please don't do this to me yeah what what how do you think we keep curiosity alive in the school system to help kids become more curious i think i think there's a lot to be said for a good teacher and i think that um although the school system is strained and it is um there are so many wonderful talented enthusiastic beautiful teachers out there in the world but they it's finding them and making sure that we look after them so that they continue to do a good job with all of our children but i think um it's the job of a teacher to inspire children to be the best that they can be in spite of the curriculum not because of the curriculum so I think you can if you are creative um you can teach in a way that you want to teach and you can still link that to the curriculum and that's the skill of a teacher is making sure that you know if the curriculum is saying we've got to learn what five times ten is we can learn that in a really creative way or we can learn it in a boring way um and I think that creativity of those teachers and making sure that they've got the support to teach in the way that we want them to um is what's important yeah it reminds me of what what you've again more parallels like we should maybe i should just do like it's just mad how in the most not obscure places but just random places you find loads of interesting lessons but it's almost like it's it's not the educational system it's the people it's the teacher and it's um julia metcalf from preramonji says people don't people think they work for a brand they don't they don't actually work for a brand they work for people and and it's like the vehicle the brand and the vehicle is just a vehicle to express that kind of emotion like and i think that's such an interesting way of looking at it it's like i went to work for the people and the people's what brings it all together and it's the same with the teacher It's like, how can you show those blinkers?

47:15And I'll take the kind of the rigid blinkers off. Let's talk about the genesis of Fern and Rosie. And so you're on mat leave, if I'm right in saying, on your blurs, getting the jams. What was the first steps to tell the world that they needed a lower sugar jam? Like what was the first six, seven, eight months like?

47:50So, sorry, just thinking. What did the beginning look like? The beginning looked like I knew how much sugar there was in jar. And to me, because my background wasn't in the food industry, I didn't realize, to me, it was a really simple, obvious solution. Like, let's put more fruit in there. How about we don't use citric acid? maybe we don't need concentrate um all those things i just say well how about this um so i made our jams um which are 70 through we are the you know all natural ingredients is what we sing so we're always the closest ingredients to sauce so we use fruit we use sugar beets and the reason we use sugar beets is because um it's got a more it's got a more ethical supply chain than cane sugar actually if you look at the work that Tony's have done and in the cocoa supply chain is actually similar with cane sugar so by using sugar beet we can ensure that the sugar that we're using is fairly traded it's farmed to EU standards you know we are a B Corp business so we can put supplier agreements in place to make sure that the the food that we're sourcing the ingredients that we're sourcing is farmed to the way that we would expect it to be and we then use fresh lemon juice and so again we don't use concentrate we don't use citric acid because those things can trigger allergens why would we use them we don't need to use them and then we use fruit pectin so those are the only ingredients we've got four ingredients um so to me it was just simplifying the products that are out there like if you actually look at the jam category um it is quite a messy category i think the peanut butter category i take a lot of learning from because if you look at the peanut butter category and you look at the innovation that's happened there perhaps the past five to ten years the category it even if you look at it at fixture like it's a really beautiful category there's lots of beautiful brands all breaking up the fixture shouting about what makes them special shouting about why they're doing good in the world and actually if you look at the jam category um it is heavily dominated by the market leader or known brand there isn't there are some brands coming through and that's brilliant um but we need more brands to kind of break that up and become the voice of the category so that we are the educators yeah now for some reason i've got some weird like i'm getting really like really needing some fucking jam on toast i haven't had it i don't think i've had it yeah i haven't had jam on toast in like yeah like you need generally like 20 years probably okay so superberry this you need to try it superberry is the best one um so straw actually you know strawberry we have strawberry in the uk brits buy more strawberry than any other jam so for a long time strawberry was our best selling line but actually um recently superberry is doing really really well they were neck and neck and i think superberry is winning a little bit at the moment um what um we know that's yeah i love that and it's i always think it's there's two ways to build the brand there's there's you either find a category that's growing yeah and try and find a usp in that category which is kind of hard really and truly like finding another functional drink or a healthy snack is hard or you look for a category actually that no one's playing in you know amelia's done this with bold bean co like bold beans was beans were shite like i was doing an amazing amazing job you're doing it in jam i think it's fascinating so how big is is the jam category or category I don't want to speak like that, category Did you know?

51:28Yeah, yeah, yeah Hashtag fun facts Fun facts, jam is the hero in total spreads, it's bigger than peanut butter and it's bigger than honey and it's growing faster than any other category, growing within the spreads category, it's the fastest growing segment and within there healthy jams are the fastest growing sub subcategory within there so actually we're in a we are in a growth category and it's about 150 million i believe in the uk the total global market is 9 billion for jam um so yeah and how did you know all this did you know all this going into this or did you is this something you've learned from giles because there'll be a lot of founders listening to this and i always think there's a gap between i think there's this gestation period where where the founder is you know going to the mum's classes with this product and this like new idea and there there's this like almost again this delicious kid-like wanderlust and curiosity you know i've got this thing and then it goes it gets a bit like a kid gets older and becomes learns more a bit like going from year one to year five do you know what i mean are you like mate we're the biggest category fucking player in the world

52:44what's the what's the ebit ebit dar mate what's the ebit dar

52:51but honestly but even like ebit dar i remember i always giggle about the fact like the first time i met lovely giles i sat down with him and he said rachel well he's like i'm gonna bought your pnl and i said what is a pnl um and i think that was that was the the level of my knowledge at that point and then he just said it's a document that um shows like what money you have in the business and I was like oh no I don't have one of them um but I think that probably shows like my very baseline knowledge when I started um the business and no I didn't know anything about what I did know was I was watching wonderful brands um like Pippinut like Mani Life doing amazing jobs in peanut butter but also brands like kiddielicious animal caramel ella's kitchen and bear actually so i could see brands that were innovating in different categories and i could see that there wasn't innovation in jam so i did know that um i didn't and the further i kind of went along in my journey the more i googled a lot and got that initial knowledge about like how big the total category was um how big the global category was um which retailers are growing ahead of the category which which retailers can we help support in that um it it's always learning and i'm still definitely not an expert yeah no it's it's uh yeah and also i think there's a lot of jargon that i mean i don't still don't really i still had still blags my head the word incremental all like still i'm like well i'm like mate what's i have to like go through it loads of times there's so much industry fucking speak isn't there but um so so giles brooke is a hard man to get hold of he is swamped with messages linkedin messages um uh yeah bless him what was the specific thing you how did you get his attention one how did you get the meeting two and three, taught me what that first meeting felt like for you.

55:00Sorry for a triple threat. Yeah, I know. I feel like I'm testing you today.

55:11I'm trying to think. So Giles, I do feel like I can't just feel so lucky that I get to spend time with Giles and learn from him because I think he is exceptionally talented. He's also really kind. And I think that is, I feel so lucky that I've had the ability to spend time with him and learn from him and continue to do that. And I think, you know, when you meet those people and I think when I met Giles, very, very, when I met Giles, I still remember like very, very quickly thinking I've never met anybody quite like you like he's so clever and fast-paced and inspiring and I think that that love of learning so as a teacher I always want to learn and I always want to be the best that I can be like that is I've got the love of lifelong learning and I think when I met Giles I thought oh my gosh I can learn so much from you and that is still my favorite thing about spending time with him is that I always learn more and more and more um which is it helps me be a better founder but it helps me build the business faster um because we've got Giles in our team and I'm so grateful for that um I met him initially um ages ago actually so I met him really randomly I sent him a message and said oh hi um my name is rachel we've just i've made this jam and um i really didn't know what i was doing and um i asked him for some help and he said yeah i've always got time to help um and i met with him and he helped us um and i think in the beginning what my i think in the beginning my relationship with giles was that he was my mentor i always say kind of my forced mentor because I was like would you like to be my mentor can I ask you some questions and he was like yes I'm always here you know if you've got any questions let me know um and then little did he know that I would be asking him questions every single day multiple times a day so I think in the end he was like okay um and then he invested and he now works in the business I call him my business partner I don't I always struggle with the right title for him business partner um business partner implies that he just works with me and he doesn't he works across you know he supports our business across the business um so he's just a wonderful person that helps to grow our team um yeah you know he's he's formidable and i'm interviewing him again in in a two weeks yeah we're gonna i want to come on to that because i want to i want to yeah get your get your help in in the prep for the prep for this interview or podcast or chat I should say he's lovely yeah he's sound I did the thing with him at Bread and Jam which was epic I knew I missed it I wasn't there but I did listen to it yeah he's great I quite like how he's just unapologetically has his opinions I think there's two people are scared to have opinions and he's not one of those people so I get that but there'll be I know for a fact literally so many people who have messaged Jansson can't get hold of him just because he's so fucking busy right what was what did you literally say in the in the email specifically or the cold message if you can remember like why did he take a punt on on you and and do you know what I mean I'm trying to get to you're gonna have to ask Giles I've got no idea I'm just incredibly lucky I guess um I can't remember what I said initially other than hi my name's Rachel I'm a teacher and we I've just made this jam and actually maybe i'm trying to think what i said initially i can't remember i cannot remember but it would have been that it would have been hi my name's rachel i've just made a jam i'm a teacher i don't really know what i'm doing just so you know we're about to launch in waitrose oh my gosh um so i think that would have been the initial conversation um just asking for help oh my god i am so so so excited it feels like hungry is finally swimming in the big leagues I can't believe this It's absolutely mental But delighted to announce that Big Fish Yes Big Fish are part of the podcast Perry's been on the podcast three times Listeners absolutely love it Some of my most downloaded and cherished episodes of all time But Big Fish are behind literally so many brands In your cupboard, in your weekly shop Charlie Bigham, Year Valley, Tyrells Clippity, Goo, Rana I mean make the list longer than the River Nile but they also share risk and invest in brands that they really believe are a force for good brands that they believe are going to be the next big thing like how the snack that gives back but even more exciting news big fish want to speak to the next wave of small challenger food and drink badgers that are destined for big things the raconteurs, the movers, shakers, buccaneering visionaries so look if you want to speak to big fish and just have a chat get your brand in front of them then drop me a message my mate louis from local beer amazing beer was in their office aka la fish bowl uh last week chatting to perry freddie and the big fish crew so drop me a message if you would like to speak to them if you could boil it down like you boil the strawberries down um if you could boil down his his learnings or giles's learnings that have really transformed the way you think about brand building into maybe one two that would really help our listeners who may not be able to work with Giles on a day-to-day basis like what would you say they are oh uh give me a minute that's pressure what does he do I mean like I can kind of I think what he said to me which well like whilst whilst you um like reflect on what his were when i interviewed him albeit for 45 minutes and jam and jam lol i said this to jason i was like we're the jam jason yeah yeah yeah yeah i just thought that um it was was being being the hero of your category was his big thing for me and and and actually it kind of goes back to the category players it's like do you want to be trying Is it easier to find a USP in a crowded category, which is kind of probably what most people think?

1:01:58Or actually, if you take one step back and think, OK, which category is crying for innovation and how can we be the hero of that category? That really changed my way of thinking about this wonderful industry. I was like, oh, shit, that's what that's what it is. It's it's not, you know, Bold Bean did it with with beans. Mojo did it with those shots. they became the hero of the category that's what I really took from him and I thought it kind of that's really changed my way of thinking but yeah well I'd love to know what yours have been

1:02:36um he honestly I always think our business wouldn't be what it is today and we're still tiny but we wouldn't be where we are um if it hadn't been for the support of Giles for the support of wait waitress actually backing us when we were really really tiny i think they are um a really special retailer to work with because they do support i mean you know all all the retailers are wonderful and they're all very different um but i think what waitress have done really well is um almost looked at fern and rosie as an incubator brand without an incubator does that make sense like they've supported us when we were super super tiny and backed us every step of the way and I think we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that we wouldn't be there if it wasn't for them um Giles I have quickly written some things down but I wish I'll probably be able to come up with some better ones that I'll whiz over to you so he said that it goes back to that teaching one actually about I've learned so much from my mistakes I'm going to make a few more but Giles has said to me you need to learn from your you know you need to make the mistakes to learn to get better and actually that's been quite painful um because you have to make the mistakes and you have to fail and wouldn't you rather not um but to have his support when I have failed and I have messed up and something's gone wrong one of the most wonderful things about him probably is that he takes the good news and the bad news with a smile so if I ring him and I say guess what we've got this distribution isn't that amazing he's going to be happy if I ring him and I say I have messed up this is going to cost us this amount of money and I'm really sorry he'll still smile and say Rach it's going to be okay and these are the things that we're going to do and I think to have him there in that capacity is invaluable and I'm just so grateful and lucky so i think that and they're kind of taking the good news and the bad news with the same smile is brilliant um he says every category needs a challenger brand and i think that is true and i think the kind of going back to you know the spread report's going to come out this year and i think one of the things that they're looking at is kind of that trade into their own label because of the cost of living crisis.

1:05:06But actually what the brands do is the brands speak for the category. So we do need the brands as part of the fixture because they provide that educational education piece. They, Fern and Rosie was the most written about jam brand of the year in 2022. And that's good for Fern and Rosie, but it's also good for jam. So it's good to have a brand out there talking about jam. You know, you just said, when did you last have jam? oh yeah i don't know i'm pining for a bit of jam on i'm gonna send you some but yeah yeah how many years ago was it i like like 20 years or when we were nana sort of yeah yeah exactly so we need to bring these shoppers back in and remind them how tasty jam is and when i send it you i bet you really like it and i hope that you continue to buy it um and i've got two more things that jiles said so and one more thing that he said is no matter what anybody tells me there's only two or three things I need to do in a day and when you become overwhelmed with all the jobs that you've got to do and there's so much noise around building a business and all the different things that could be distractions if you remember there's actually two or three things I need to do today that's all I actually need to do that's great so sorry so sorry sorry on that so so like no matter what you do each day just pick the two or big two or three big things and everything else can get okay okay get that yeah yeah yeah everything else can wait um and then the last thing i think is probably something i'm still learning on which is being concise so like in our email kind of respondents like those five reasons to say yes that's it you don't need to talk anymore five bullet points um why do they need to take fern and rosie forward and i think that is something that we can all probably learn from you know buyers get hundreds of emails a day how can we make sure we stand out in their inbox and really clearly deliver our message of why are we important what i want to go back to is you said you know he'll he'll take it with a smile good bad or ugly uh and he said that to me actually he goes i don't mind bad news as long as you just you're honest with me i just give me the bad news what's been the time when you called him you were like proper shitting yourself before you called him like what's been the biggest fuck up and you're like i can't i can't tell giles this but then you obviously hit uh it's probably too soon to say what it actually was but we did have an error don't do this to me i know i did have an error that we fixed but i think what was great about that error was something had happened within the business which meant that a payment was approved for something that was much bigger than I would have approved and it wasn't the right choice for us as a business.

1:07:58The learning from that was that I put in like payment levels. So somebody in our team might have, if anything costs up to a thousand pounds. So somebody within our team might have a 50 pound, they're allowed to spend 50 pound on whatever they want to spend 50 pound on, that's okay. Somebody within our team might have a thousand pound, I can spend up to a thousand pound as long because it's within this criteria and that's okay and then once it reaches three thousand pound it has to come to me and so anything that costs around three thousand pound has to come to me and we have to decide together as a team if we think that's the right thing to do and then perhaps there's an upper payment level of around five thousand pound where I might be like actually anything that's more than five thousand pound I'm going to check with Giles because I don't want to commit to that without checking it's okay and it's not checking it's okay but it's talking it through and making sure it's the right decision for the brand.

1:08:49So I think having everything written down as well is a real learning that I've had because you know what it's like. It's all so fast paced. If it's not written down, it's really difficult for people to remember, well, what was actually said here because this order has been placed and it's this big. I can't see any comms saying that we've ordered that, but it's all done verbally. So I think we need to make sure everything's written down and I'm a real stickler for doing that now. Yeah, he's, so what had happened so that you'd approved a payment that was too big or something like that? I didn't approve it, but something got ordered that was too big.

1:09:31Yeah. Right, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's, and then what was his, what was, it seems, again, linking this back to the teacher thing, it seems like he's quite an empathetic teacher to you. You know how you said like, Like it doesn't, it's not about the curriculum. It's about the teacher. Does the teacher vibe and connect with you? He seems like he really connects with you. I think he's a teacher in another life, definitely. And he is a teacher to me, 100%. He's, like I said, he started off as my mentor and now he's not officially a mentor. He still is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm interviewing him in a couple of weeks.

1:10:09What's one question you think I should ask him?

1:10:15I want to say something witty I don't know if I've got anything what should you ask him um ask him how he is because ask him how he is because as you've said he gets 2 ,000 messages a day probably he has however many businesses that he works with he's also got his lovely wife and he's got his children and he's a busy busy human so I think sometimes we forget that Giles is a person you know he's really busy and he also doesn't need to help anybody like he's got enough going on in his world that he certainly doesn't need to take on any more work um but he does and i believe that he does that because he wants to help people um i think that's what is special about him is that he's trying to make positive impacts and i think that is what what's driving him hi there guys thank you so much for listening as always means the absolute world to me before we jump into this episode i need a really big big big big favor i have pitched us some massive guests humongous guests and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough please please please just hit the subscribe button on apple or spotify or follow ultimately it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations equals hopefully better insights for you which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well so please hit that subscribe button and yeah enjoy this episode another guy i want to talk about is a guy called oliver lloyd oh yeah yeah he's he's he's another uh investor of yours right so i'm interviewing i'm interviewing him in two weeks as well um but he yeah he's he seems super lovely he has he built this great british chefs thing well not say he built great british chefs I'm like my obsession other than podcasts well my obsession is chefs food the whole I just I just love that so I'm really excited to talk to him um he and he actually asked a question during the Giles Brook interview but um he asked I heard didn't he ask what categories are exciting and Giles said jam obviously yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you're all sort of jamming together there So what did he, how did you meet him?

1:12:37And what's he taught you about being a founder? Ollie is absolutely wonderful. We are, he's one of our Fern and Rosie investors. And I tell you, we are the luckiest people in the world. Like the investors that have joined Fern and Rosie are all exceptional humans. like we're really lucky because and I think that's probably a reflection it's probably a reflection on the brand that we're trying to build is that we're trying to build we are trying to build a brand that makes positive impacts in the world that is what we're trying to do so probably anybody that's investing in Fern and Rosie also has that belief that they want to back a business that makes a positive impact and investors as well are our retail partnerships they are our customers that buy our products they are our team members all those people are invested in the business and we're all working together to try and build a business that hopefully makes a positive impact and ollie joined our team uh may time i think um and he he's so clever have you spent much time with ollie yeah he's really clever so i met he came up to me at the end of the talk and was like i was he was i've never heard of the podcast i was like oh you know we do this I do chefs and he's like oh mate I know a lot of chefs I was thinking yeah I was thinking oh that's amazing and then he linkedin'd me and I saw he was great British chefs I was like fuck that's sick um I've looked at that yeah looked up he's such a foodie he's such a foodie he's got a podcast he's got a podcast as well he's got I know I said I said can I come on one day and he said yes so i'll be like kyle um but he ollie ollie joined us i think around may june i'm not sure exactly but he um he's really clever like one of my favorite things about ollie again i really love learning so i think ollie provides he's really i think he's really strong in marketing so a lot of the work that he's done before are for big huge businesses so actually he's got he told me a story about Milka where they were photographing the chocolate you know the piece of chocolate that goes on the Milka wrapper and he was like I think there were about 80 people in the room deciding how to move this piece of chocolate so I think he's come from like a really he's come from all these massive enormous businesses and he's got all that wealth of knowledge and then he's able to apply that to our small tiny startup so we're really lucky so like you talked about PAC and like yes this was our initial packaging and this is the current packaging that we have at the moment but there is a next step and we need to do some work to make that sing a little bit louder on shelf and ollie's been um a big part of that journey that we're on at the moment and that hopefully um because there is a lot of work and i think with the branding like this was our initial packaging that i did i am not a designer um but if you look at it it's got fern and rosie it's got the house on the hill which is where we live in the middle of yorkshire um and this launched in waitrose which is what cracks me up but also one of my favorite things about it is um you know because i'm a teacher and i don't know anything about the world of food i think it's banging when it launched into waitrose the barcode on it um was fern and rosie's birthday because I had not heard about proper barcodes.

1:16:16I hope that was a hashtag GS1 barcode. Hashtag fixed it. But initially, the barcode that launched into Waitrose was Fern and Rosie's birthday. And then maybe it was a year later, Andrew Allen, I was checking the packaging and I was moving to the new branding and he was like, so I'm assuming you're using GS1. And I said, what's GS1? And he was like, Rachel. So we now use GS1. yes thank you and i met the team and they're lovely um but ollie's helping us with the packaging so the next stage of fern and rosie which will be in the world soon i hope um what so what do you think you're getting wrong what do you think you're getting wrong with the current packaging well i think sorry i know i went off on a little bit of a tangent there but what i was saying is the initial branding was this and then we changed to this but we turned to this branding around in about four weeks we did it really quickly because we knew that we wanted to fix what we had and also we had um we had dragon's den coming and we wanted to try and get the packaging out in in time for that to go out so we turned this around really quickly to get it onto the shelf if you look at it you can see um that's three different flavors and you're not too far away but actually it's quite difficult to tell that they're three different because i don't quite think we've got the colors right um I also think there's too much messaging on pack at the moment so I think you it's almost like we had so much to say that we just shouted it all and stuck it all on the packaging and actually we need to simplify what's on pack to really be singing our key core messages um so we need to do that and also we started as a product for children and we are a product for children but actually when we did some consumer research we found that 30 percent of fern and rosie shoppers do not have children um so what we need to do is appeal to make sure that the packaging is appealing to contemporary adults and families and so that it kind of maintains that truth about our business is that we are a product families but everybody's a family um so it could be your you know you're fresh out of uni or you're fresh out of school um you're buying jam for the first time and or it could be that you're in your 50s 60s your children are up and grown or you didn't have children but you're still a contemporary adult that cares about your health cares about taste and so i think it's moving the packaging along a little bit that way so that we i think brands innocence an obvious example um of a brand that's done it really well in that it appeals to families but you you know i buy innocent smoothies for my children um but you can buy innocent if you don't have children you know i think that's the yeah yeah that's what we need to kind of move towards what was the um what was the questions you're asking on the consumer survey because i'm not like anti-consumer research at all i i i think sometimes consumer research loves consumer research get ready this is favorite thing okay yeah this is this is i like i like uh testing my sort of things that i could be wrong about because my thinking with consumer research is there's a david ogilvy quote which is people don't tell you what they think they don't act what they say or something like that and don't do what they feel like this there's something like that basically what were you doing with that and like what did that teach you i think there is an element of truth in what you're saying in that what because i always say with our fern and rosie customers particularly so the fern and rosie customers that follow fern and rosie on instagram because that's where we are the biggest at the moment is they are the i call them our super fans so they are like the loveliest most engaged fern rosy consumers that there are they're also really lovely people which again always really makes me giggle because I think it's probably a reflection of the brand that we're trying to build but let's say we've sent out an order to a customer we've messed up they've got the wrong jam or the jam's broken something's happened and we get these emails from our customers and they are the kindest people like they come and they're like I'm really sorry to bother you and I I don't I know you've got a lot to do but I just need to tell you that there's a mistake and I'm always like it's our mistake and we'll fix it and i think the consumers that we have the fern and rosie shoppers that we have are always so kind overly lovely like you've said probably when we ask them a question they are likely to say it's great even if actually there's lots of things we can still do to improve um what did we ask them so we asked fern and rosie shoppers and then we also worked with wider like we were we sent it to we didn't send it to agencies but what i mean is like we might know somebody that works in an agency and we've sent it to them and said can you can you ask your team so we kind of got like a random sample as well as a core shopper sample we asked them why do you buy fern and rosie the number one reason was taste we asked them we gave them our messaging hierarchy and we asked them to sequence what they felt was the most important so we maybe gave them five or six things like um the fact that we're b corp the fact that we're female founded the fact that we're a small business all those things and the three things that they came back with as a priority were the fact it's got less sugar the fact it's got more fruit and the fact it's all natural all natural ingredients so those were the three things that they were saying were the most important to them and then actually when you look at our packaging it doesn't necessarily show those three things so i think that's another step as well as if we know that's why people are buying the product we need to make sure that that messaging is really clear i did um some shopper research um i stood at fixture in waitrose and somebody picked up a competitor brand it was saint dalfour um and i said oh can i just ask i just want to know why you've picked that up and the girl said I think it's because it's the healthiest one and I said okay can we just have a look at the pack and then I turned the pack round and the Saint Dalfour jam is 51 grams of fruit um and I said so they've got 51 grams of fruit in their jar and then I turned Fern and Rosie round and I said ours is 71 grams of fruit per jar but as I turned the jar round I realized you actually can't see it because the phone is so small and it's kind of hidden behind a splodge and actually that's not clear.

1:23:02And it was only when I did that that I was like, we're really missing the key messaging here. It's not landing on front of pack and the shoppers can't see it. And I think there was some research that said 60 % of purchase decisions are made at shelf. So no matter what we do in the world of marketing, in the world of brand building, all the stuff that we do, a massive 60 % of our sales just come from people standing at the fixture and they're buying it. So, you know, you were saying about packaging is your biggest marketing tool, like is the packaging. We're working so hard to build Fern and Rosie and I believe it's such an important product.

1:23:39Am I telling people why? No, I don't think I am at the moment. so i think we need to simplify and shout that messaging a little bit more it's so it's so hard i interviewed you know union coffee union roasted hand roasted gossip so they're they've been super interesting founder interviewed jeremy the other day he basically brought coffee to the fucking uk like in the 90s huge huge um yeah just a little thing uh and uh and he he was saying that they've got you know the whole supply chain they've got complete traceability on that um but he was like i get back to your point like 60 of people make their decision on the shelf we've got so many great things to talk about which one do we put first do you know what i mean and what that's the hardest hardest thing to get right is like which out of all these messages we're low sugar we're good for kids we're healthier we're tasty which one do we lead with and it's it's it's absolutely fascinating what's the when i interview ollie what's some things i should ask him do you think ask him what do you think about fern and rosie branding you should ask him that um ask him what do you think about fern and rosie branding no um ask him who are the three most exciting challenger brands at the moment and i don't mean fern and rosie i just mean who else because he think he's really exciting.

1:25:03I think he'll say Bold Bean because it is. And what else should you ask him? When was the last time you ate bugs? He loves bugs, doesn't he? He loves bugs, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. So what I want to understand is what did you say to Waitrose to get that listing before, you know, before Giles comes on board. Yeah, you're so small because, say, I know for a fact with smaller businesses, they're like, are you going to be able to fulfill supply chain? Are you going to be able to make enough? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What did you say to waitress to win that listing?

1:25:54with the time that we won the waitress listing i was so new to the business um what did i say to waitrose i said i said i have made this jam it's got 40 less sugar than standard i haven't put any junk in there there's nothing like it on the market you should stock it in waitrose because the the also because the target market the demographic was growing so at the time i knew that there was and there still is like there's this rapidly expanding consumer demographic of people that care about their health so as i said before health is the fastest growing subsection of jam jam is the it is the hero in total spreads we need to invest here because that's where the category growth is going to come from so actually growing fern and rosie great growing the category great growing waitrose great and i'm you know i'm tiny i'm not gonna you know even if i do everything that i want to do i will still be a tiny tiny part of team waitrose or team any retailer that we're working with obviously i'll always be tiny but i can do my little bits trying to help and I think that's kind of been at the heart of everything that I've done with Waitrose but with all the retailers and in everything that we like my children need partnership like everything that we do is trying to help people like that is what we're trying to do I'm not selling something that's terrible I'm telling you that this is a better for your product and it will help and these are all the reasons why you should say yes because it will help you um and I think but I think it's understanding that everybody's busy you know I was saying before schools are busy my sister yeah schools are busy my sister's a nurse nurses are busy um people that work in food are busy and I think it's kind of having that patience and that understanding and that respect for their time like they get hundreds of emails a day when I met with a buyer a few weeks ago um a really lovely buyer and that we will be working with well we are working with and we'll be working with more soon um but when i met with them they were saying you know we get hundreds of emails a day and sometimes it just takes that one little thing to push it over the line because they're so busy they don't have time and that's not because they don't care they do care it's just everybody's workload is intense and so i guess it's how can you kindly keep pushing and keep knocking on the door in a polite and respectful way and showing that you're going to help um and not showing that you're going to help and that you're trying to make a difference and ultimately we are all a team and we're all working together to try and do the right thing um and that's almost it's almost it's almost the way you you said kindly and you know politely and nicely it's almost the way you're selling into a retailer is a lot like the way you teach kids to do but like you know what i mean there's a lot of parallels like ultimately empathy um And, you know, do it politely.

1:29:04And I think there's a lot in that in terms of, I think this whole narrative of, you know, fucking persist, persist, persist, rock up at the doorstep. I think that can sometimes work if it's done in a very delicate way. But ultimately, I think putting most of your energy into like a really empathetic, kind, patient, persistence way is a way to do it. You go on. no i was just gonna say improving that concept as well like being aware i think having evidence points so i think when i it's tiny but like when i first met with waitrose we were tiny and i remember in the initial conversation saying so this is my you know this is this is fern and rosie and this is why i think it's important and this is why i think it will work and i'd set myself a challenge when I first started Fern and Rosie where I said I'm gonna try and get into 10 farm shops like that's my challenge I'm gonna see if I can get into 10 farm shops and I got into 30 within the first month I know that's really small but that is a small scale proof of concept so it's showing that you know what I know it's still that's still 30 stores it's still really little but I've shown you that I've got 30 stores in a month and they're all telling me this is working so it's going to work with you and this is why and I think having those proof of concepts independents are wonderful because you can test and learn on such a small scale you know you can put packaging in and go oh that didn't work no one's buying it you can switch it you can you can do that really small before you roll out nationwide in an enormous retailer and then you've got a huge problem because actually you didn't realize you can't read how many grams of fruit are on there you know the indies the indies are so i love the indies so much and also all the wild creative uh activation stuff you can trial it the indies before you try it huge we've got this thing with islands at the minute that we want to do this wolfy wonka uh so we've just gone into we've we've gone into uh when this goes live it'll be live but into bailey and sage which is a sick super high-end kind of deli, independent deli.

1:31:20It's like in between a slightly more premium than a Whole Foods and a Planet. But we've got this thing of like a golden ticket. So our founder is called Wolfie Wonka, a bit like the Wolfie Wonka golden ticket. And we'd have like the winner gets Christmas on Ireland. So the winner gets a Marcus Waring hamper, the second place prize as admission style voucher the third place prize is a shitload of um uh uh like samples we're using that little competition as a way to drive rate of sale we've there's no way you'd be able to do that in a big molt off the off the cuff but if we can then go to a molt and say well this is works there's a way to do it and i think that's why i love the indies in terms of just all and also like you know it's it's much easier back to empathy of building relationship with an indie retailer.

1:32:15An indie retailer is like, you know, the person, the Chris Rock of the person going to help you push the car because the indie retailer is a founder as well. Like it's a slightly different relationship versus a buyer. They understand what it's like to build something from the off. Final question. What's one piece of wisdom you're going to impart onto Fern and Rosie, your kids, when they eventually embark out on the world? oh um that life is so short and time is so precious um so you at the end of the day you've got to be spending your time doing things that make you happy and make you smile because that's the point absolutely love that absolutely love that um rachel absolute pleasure i will see you in Manchester on the 16th.

1:33:02Can't wait. I'm very excited. Hi, Cowan. Thank you so, so much for listening to the podcast. I really, really do appreciate it. If you liked that episode, only if you liked it, please do give it five stars. Subscribe. Tell all your friends, families, foes, next door but one, cat, dog, whatever. Please tell everyone about this podcast. It means the world to me. And I really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of Challenger Food and Drink brands. Please do hit me up on LinkedIn. in search Dan Pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much