Community beats influencers: How Grind Coffee became the UK's most popular coffee brand

0:02Frankie:I'm Eric Fulweiler and this is Scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today. Hey everyone and welcome to another edition of Scratch. I am Viren Somani, typically I'm the executive producer, but today I'm hosting the episode. It's a really, really special episode with Stacey Fitzgerald, who's the brand director, and Frankie Cook, the brand marketing lead over at grind coffee so if you're based in london or you've been to london you will definitely know what grind coffee is they're pretty much everywhere they've become somewhat of a cult brand in the coffee space but also in the wider fmcg space as they've grown not only into grocery and retail but also like d2c as well so they've been on the list for a long time you'll hear me you'll hear me tell them this as well that we've been wanting to get them on the list on the show for such a long time just because of the incredible brand that they've built not only aesthetically and using you know design as a differentiator but actually that they're expanding outside of their category as well you know they're no longer just a coffee brand they're doing all sorts of stuff they have recently done a an amazing collaboration with surreal the surreal brand launching a tiramisu surreal who i mean who doesn't want that first thing in the morning so i think they this conversation has been really really insightful because we actually dive into you know really how they're utilizing cultural moments and using cultural moments to guide them in terms of the collaborations that they do and really tapping into new communities of i guess cult communities and things like the san rio universe and clueless and peanuts brands like that which already have existing customer bases and bringing them into the grind ecosystem so they really get into that they share their playbook around how they're doing that and how they're choosing which collabs to do and which ones not to do we also start talking about the community playbook and how you know a brand of their size and skill typically would lean on an influencer playbook but actually this has changed and they are really doubling down on their community and this is working for them so they're going to talk about you know how they're doing that or every new launch that they do if you're in london they're doing like their instant coffee launch soon so definitely check that out and then the final piece of the puzzle is really focusing on like their retail playbook how did they get into grocery and you know it's some of the stuff that they say is kind of counterintuitive but super interesting stacy talks about you know not everything needs to be an Instagram flashy moment, but actually you just need to do some of the things which are the fundamentals of the category in grocery and making sure that you're doing them well and you'll see an uptick in your performance.

2:54Frankie:So actually for such a creative brand, they have a lot of performance thinking behind that, which is really, really insightful. So a great conversation. I think you'll enjoy it. So without further ado, join me for this conversation with Stacey and Frankie. All right, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Scratch. I am joined here today by Frankie Cook, who is a brand marketing lead over at Grind and Stacey Fitzgerald. I'm going to take that again. Stacey Fitzgerald, brand director over at Grind. Both of you, welcome to the show. Grind is a brand which I'm very, very excited to have on this show.

3:35Frankie:we've had you guys on the editorial wishlist for I don't even know how long honestly but you guys stock our coffee all of our coffee in our office and we still go out and walk to your little coffee van on the corner of um Hoxton Square well not even Hoxton Square but Scruton Street where we're based uh pretty much every day to get coffee from so we love it thank you for your business Yeah, we are well and truly grind fans. But yeah, welcome to the show. Really, really excited to have this conversation. You know, one of the most exciting brands, not just coffee brands, but one of the most exciting brands definitely in London, if not the UK.

4:14Frankie:So this is a great conversation to have. um we always start this with icebreaker so i'm hoping you both have prepared separate answers to this icebreaker and we'll get a two-for-one deal on this so i'll ask you both what is one challenger or rival brand that you're passionate about right now carb urine no self nominations

4:40Stacey:um i'll go first so i am obsessed with guia the the non-alcoholic aperitif um And I'll admit, I had to Google how to pronounce them because I think I've been saying Gia, but it is Gia apparently. But they're constantly in our mood board. It's just amazing visuals, really, really upscale. I mean, they make you want to drink their aperitif instead of any, you know, alcoholic alternative. The photography is on point. They even refer to their merch as objects, which is like you called an object instead of merch. Suddenly it's very desirable, very covetable. um so yeah absolutely love them that's a great one actually I've not heard of them and we had

5:21Frankie:like a so we last week in London we did we host these CMO roundtables monthly in London, New York, Boston pretty much around the world and last week's one in London one of the it was one of the first conversations where every single person pretty much mentioned a non-alcoholic brand there was one person who mentioned an alcoholic brand is their favorite challenger brand but we are starting to see this huge like dichotomy between like no alcohol and then really high alcohol so buzz balls was mentioned if you guys are familiar with them yeah like super high very different yeah super different but actually like the way that category is going is insane and actually we're seeing a huge amount of challenger brands in that non-alcoholic space yeah definitely one that we'll check out um it's an interesting one have you have you tried it and you actually like the taste of it or is it more the brand that's attractive to you yeah yeah i think definitely

6:14Stacey:at first it was just the brand but um i actually uh there's this great little non-alcoholic bottle shop in covent garden called club soda and so they've got like every every kind of non-alcoholic brand that that exists out there and um yeah try them and they're they're just amazing but yeah just in terms of brand inspo going going into that shop is amazing because all of the brands that are kind of in this new emerging space are just like killing it and having to kind of go over the top of the branding to you know get those customers in that maybe you know aren't keen on a non-alcoholic uh you know drink or aperitif so it's um a lot of really nice

6:50Frankie:marketing happening in that space yeah oh definitely check that out i didn't even know about club soda as an actual shop yeah so i'll definitely check that out that's cool and frankie

6:59Stacey:what about you um so i think mine has to be bold bean um so they're a brand that basically have kind of premiumized the tinned bean category um i'm big into my cooking and i must confess i've bought them first on offer at sainsbury's and then love them and now i can't stop buying them but yeah I think that the kind of what's definitely drawn me to them is a lot of their activations and what they've been doing kind of in real life so they had a pop-up post Glastonbury at Paddington and like Victoria Station where they were handing out like a package for essentially beans on toast when you get home post Glastonbury and just like the fact that that was so targeted um I just thought that's genius like that's exactly what people are going to want on their way home um so yeah and things that's kind of a great example of what they've been doing also like they've just launched a new book uh QuickBook and they're doing like a book tour for that in like local independent bookshops which I think is a really nice way to kind of like tie in with community and yeah so they would be the one for me I love that I love that Bald Bean's actually

8:18Frankie:been nominated a fair few times so we're doing this like challenge brand index um for which we're launching at web summit in november um and it's like the top 50 challenger brands in the world and bold bean has been nominated a crazy amount of times actually and i love that i love that glastonbury sort of not even really a partnership with glastonbury but partnering around the event that's really cool yeah they couldn't actually say glastonbury like they couldn't reference

8:44Stacey:Glastonbury because they didn't have the rights to so it's like worthy farm but clever so good

8:50Frankie:that is so good I really love that like because you're seeing that across not even just CPG like I don't know if you guys are familiar with the credit card brand Yonder um I've heard of it yeah so they did something similar with the Wimbledon queue like two years ago I think so they they decided to sponsor unofficially the Wimbledon queue where people queue up from like 4am it was just amazing it's just like those types of activations are things that you know we I think only challenger brands think about because they don't have the money to sponsor the actual event so how do you how do you get into culture and that's a really interesting point um okay cool can you give us an overview of what grind does then for those people who don't know and like you know a lot of our audience base is in the US so they may not have heard of grind or

9:36Stacey:had the pleasure of tasting grind yet so yeah yeah so grind is a coffee company that is based in london um we are available throughout the uk we're on a mission to bring better coffee to more people in more places um and for us that means um you know coffee that is sustainably sourced from ethical farms um thoughtfully packaged um you know brings craft coffee to every format regardless of of how you like to consume your coffee. So whether that's coming into one of our cafes in London or Manchester, or now Dubai, because they're in the Dubai are for it. If you're coming into one of our cafes and getting a flat white, or if you're, you know, in your grocery store, and you're looking to buy home compostable coffee pods, or perhaps one of our ready to drink iced coffees.

10:22Stacey:I promise that wasn't product place when I actually do drink these at home. Or if you're looking to drink instant coffee, which actually we just launched today, which is a massive, massive deal for us. And in addition to our coffee products, we have accessories, coffee machines, and we love to do kind of cultural collabs and have done quite a few of them in the last few years. So that is grind. And we're very pink. So if you're in America, you wouldn't know this about us, but our brand color is pale pink. And it's quite a standout color in the coffee aisle when you're in a grocery store compared to all the other brands.

10:59Frankie:i think we did we definitely took a leaf from your playbook when we designed the rival logo with the like bright pink we didn't go for the pale but the bright pink definitely stands out in the sort of consulting landscape i don't think that many other players have that so yeah i really like that um and i know we're going to get into obviously the collabs and things like that some personal favorites i think when i did the prep call with you guys way back when was obviously the the peanuts collab so i can't wait to actually talk about that one um but talk to me a bit about then you know grinders has been established now in london i feel like a lot of people know who grind are and what you guys stand for but how have you built that brand image of grind and like what it means as a brand uh to the consumer but also just within that coffee space because that's it's an incredibly difficult uh space to be in and to be competitive within especially in a city like london so talk to me a bit about how you've built that brand yeah well frankie i think could take

12:03Stacey:this one because she's been with grind how long frankie uh six and a half years so yeah yeah um yeah i guess in terms of like how we've built the image of grind i suppose it's very much evolved um well in the last six years it's really evolved I think for me that kind of uh I guess thinking more around I've lost my career of thought now you want me to take this one yeah maybe you start and then I'll chat more to the left Yeah. So so Grime was first started by our CEO, David. He actually took over his dad's old mobile phone shop, which was at the old street roundabout in Shortage, turned it into a coffee shop.

12:55Stacey:And originally we started as a kind of coffee shop by day, cocktail bar at night. And I think a lot of coffee shops now that wouldn't necessarily be as weird because we kind of love this idea of the third space. right and the places where community can come together but it was it was pretty unusual at the time so um yeah espresso martinis at night flat white by day um and then slowly grew into you know a bigger hospitality group with multiple sites but i think it always kind of had this kind of cool culture um you know there's a recording studio in shortage grind that was above um where they served a coffee so it always felt like it was sort of this mashup of of coffee meets London, East London culture, right?

13:34Stacey:And so as it started to evolve into more of like a, you know, an FMCG brand and creating products that you could either, you know, order via DTC or get into a grocery store, that kind of always stuck with us, right? The big sort of aha moment for the brand, I think in terms of our evolution of becoming who we are today, you know, which was during COVID. I mean, I think, you know, like many hospitality brands, restaurants, coffee shops, overnight, the business was, you know, felt like the business was over, right? People could no longer come in and order a coffee and, you know, everyone was staying home.

14:09Stacey:So it was, it could have been a really devastating moment for us. But, you know, we had already gone to market with home-combustible coffee pods and it turned out to be, you know, as much as it was horrible, obviously a horrible tragedy for so many people, it was also a fortuitous moment for some brands that happened to, you know, be in the right space at the right time and grind with our home compostable pods was there. And suddenly people were ordering like massive, a massive pods to the point where I think, you know, Frankie, I think was there when it was all happening, but our roastery basically like overnight was like, what is happening?

14:44Stacey:Oh my God. Um, so very quickly the whole business had to, had to jump in, um, and, and figure out how, how do we meet this demand? How do we meet this need? I came into the brand almost three years ago. And just in those three years, I've seen us go from, you know, restaurant brand, or I should say coffee shop and restaurant brand to a D2C brand. And then in the last three years, now that we've gone into grocery, we've gone into B2B, we're served in every solo house around the world. We're on all British Airways short haul flights. So the brand has had to evolve from just being like, again, cool place in East London to get a coffee or an espresso martini.

15:24Stacey:It's a being grind for many different places and for many different types of people. And I think throughout that, what's sort of helped us keep the brand and keep it feel authentic is, you know, sticking to, you know, what ultimately is our brand personality, our tone of voice, the people that we partner with, the cultural moments that we lean into. One good example would be just today, Alan Carr, who we love at Grind. I'm going to shout this out in the hopes he sees this podcast. Alan Carr, we posted on our CinemaSign on Shoreditch Grind this weekend that celebrity traders, we said Linda walked so that Alan Carr could run because he is like the worst trader of all time on the current season of Celebrity Traders.

16:10Stacey:and posted that. Of course, our hope is like, oh, maybe Alan Carr will somehow see it. And then he posted it on his Instagram today. And so just like constantly looking for like cultural moments that we love, that we think our customers will love and leaning into them has kind of been a guiding light, a North Star across the brand building experience at Grind. And we obviously now that we've got a bigger team, you know, a bit more budget here and there, as much as a challenger your brand can have a budget and more space to play. And it's just allowed us to have more and more fun. And instead of diluting the brand, it's just made it feel more authentic.

16:46Frankie:I mean, talk about earned media attention, like with that one post, I'm sure that's gonna like hit everything.

16:53Stacey:Yeah, exactly. 1.5 million followers. Thank you so much, Chatty Man. We love you.

16:59Frankie:No, that's great. And I mean, like all of this, I know we're jumping around a bit here because actually I was gonna ask a lot about the community and how you've built that really strong community. But we will get into that. I'll pause at where we're at for a second because I think all of those little tactics but also bigger strategies that you've just kind of outlined there, they all have built up to you being awarded, obviously, the SME brand of the year at the Grocery Awards not too long ago. So congratulations for that. But what does that mean for a brand like Grind? What does that mean for you guys?

17:32Frankie:and like how I would love to dive into a bit as well, like how you've taken grind into grocery, because I think this is one of the big steps. I think a lot of marketers within CPG brands, especially when they are sort of growing in that challenger space, like get cracking grocery seems to be one key fundamental pillar, which everyone needs to do, but not everyone does it well.

17:54Stacey:Marketing can feel lonely at the top unless you're in the right room. That's what Rivalamp is a global community built for senior marketers and brand leaders inside our private whatsapp group you'll find unfiltered conversations sharp insights and bold ideas you won't see on linkedin straight from some of the brightest minds in marketing it's exclusive it's application only and it's designed for challenger marketers who want to push boundaries together apply now at we are rival.com and join the marketers rewriting the rules yeah um i mean i think that first of all the sme brand of the year was was mega um actually the photo that they posted on the grocer's website of of me david and our our b2b director annie um was probably the worst photo of me of all time of us like getting the award because that's how happy i was i just had like the biggest the cheesiest grin but yeah it was it was a huge deal for us we were so excited i don't think we expected it it was the first time we had um you know, submitted ourselves for consideration in the category.

19:00Stacey:And it was our first year in most of most of the grocers that we're currently stocked in. So we thought it was, you know, everyone says, it's amazing just to be nominated, but we actually did feel that way. And we're sitting at this table. So yeah, it's a huge deal. And you know, you can't, I can't think of a better audience for us to get that award in front of than all of the biggest executives and buyers in in the grocery arena right it just it felt like it was um you know gave us a huge stamp of approval in terms of us being a brand that deserved to be there and is destined to do great things and you know that's what of course we want to believe on our side but to feel that other people believe that is was absolutely amazing um and yeah but in terms of retail marketing i'll let frankie speak to that because she has had to figure that out and it's been hard hasn't it frankie it has to be honest but it's been a lot of like test and learn and I think what has been really important to us as we've kind of been experimenting in what works what doesn't is just looking at what others are doing going into stores doing walkthroughs with our gross like our um execs or account execs and yeah seeing what's out there but also collaborating with other brands so we did a shipper with oatly um in waitrose a couple of months back and that was incredibly successful and so kind of looking at those maybe bigger brands that are kind of what they're doing and like and also sharing budget with them because it's it's so expensive and to do these um different activities so yeah that was really successful and kind of like leaning into them having experience in that space and obviously using their brand to build awareness of ours um was really great so i think yeah it's been a lot of learning as we go trying different things out um and kind of editing so we did a big sampling activity like last year um around grocery and then this year we've kind of like um improved that so looking at um how we can kind of give out coupons for people to go and redeem in stores um and making that sample in more targeted to specific locations um so yeah I think it's been a journey.

21:18Stacey:We definitely had to look at our packaging was probably like the biggest thing that we had to do before going in because we very quickly realized that we had designed to be, we designed our packaging, most of our packaging to be a D2C brand. And when you're a D2C brand, you've got all of the kind of accoutrements around your product on your website or on your Instagram, right? And suddenly we had to do all the storytelling on the product itself, less we had millions of pounds to spend on, you know, aisle fins and chippers and all of that. So logo had to be bigger. Pink had to stand out. We had to put actual product USBs on the front of the product versus just leaning into like cool aesthetics and like the text being interesting.

21:59Stacey:We suddenly were presented with, you know, whole new packaging challenges that we had to do. So our bean and ground, we did a totally new packaging for that. Also, when people were taking the products out of the SRPs and out of the boxes, our compostable packaging was getting wrinkled, right? And then it didn't look good on the shelf. So there are all these things that you don't necessarily think about. You're just like, oh, I can take my D2C product, put it on the shelf. It doesn't necessarily translate. So we slowly have been looking to like, you know, have a consistent kind of brand language across all of our grocery products.

22:33Stacey:but that takes a lot of time and money.

22:37Frankie:Yeah, it always takes time and money and that's always the way, isn't it? But I'm going to ask two questions here which are follow-up questions and feel free if you don't want to answer these, that's fine but I'm really just genuinely curious. Was there anything that you tried that actually worked really well where you thought we're launching this but I don't think this is going to work so well when it came to the retail marketing thing but actually it turned out to be a huge success

23:08what did we think was gonna work well i mean to be honest like i and i this is

23:15Stacey:it might be let me shoot myself in the foot but i think i struggle to understand the impact of um simple things like shippers right like like everyone everyone talks about shippers and you'll get like a crazy uptake on your product, you know, plus 35 % sales, all of that. I think I really struggle to believe because, because I guess being a creative marketer or brand marketer, you think you have to do something that's like a big stunt. It's got to be funny and culturally relevant. But then you're, you're hearing that. No, no, no. If you just put the product in a shipper and put it in a different aisle, that will improve sales.

23:50Stacey:Right. And it's like, for me, I'm like, Oh, but that's not sexy, but, but it's actually like, there's, there's some just like pretty just solid tactics that work in grocery that you have to lean into and um i think that for me was the biggest wake-up call so not everything has to be um this big flashy instagrammable moment sometimes it's just about having your products um in front of more eyeballs and and it being as simple as that so that was probably a bit of a wake-up call for me

24:19Frankie:that's a i think that's a really interesting one because i think we so again we're discussing this actually last week and we're talking about what what things marketers find like really impressive and really sexy when brands do it but actually the consumers are like I don't know I don't know what you're talking about I just think I buy it because it's on offer or whatever it is 100 % and like marketers on LinkedIn are like this is the best thing I've ever seen like people must be thinking this is like the best thing since sliced bread it's so real we have a we have a creative

24:52Stacey:agency that helps us with some of like our out of home ads and is sort of like a right hand to us when we're producing various adverts and their um their tagline that they put on their merch that they hand out that we absolutely love is no one cares so good and their their motto is sort of like you just start with the idea that no one cares about your brand like no one knows anything about your brand they don't care about your brand and like it's brilliant it's like it is really important especially when you go on linkedin because it's just you're convinced that that

25:19Frankie:is the world and it's such a yeah it's so true we actually have like a version of this rival hoodie which is a t-shirt which is just like it literally says another branded piece of swag and that's it and i'm having real trouble getting that signed off but maybe after this episode like i'll have

25:38Stacey:yeah there you go success i should have worn my no one cares hat there you go

25:43Frankie:um and then second question kind of related to that is like frankie you mentioned that the vouchers and like thinking about those tactics and things like that and obviously those work right like we know those work if you get like a some money off your coffee like i only ever buy coffee pots when they're on offer in tesco and then i'll just like stockpile them um but how do you do that and balance it against the brand like knowing that grind at least for me when i look at it on the coffee shelf it gets all the converses it feels like a premium brand it doesn't feel like the same as to be honest even like nespresso it doesn't feel that in the same category it feels like a category above so how do you balance that uh you know internally and externally like in terms of the vouchers that you're going to offer i think with that with the like the activation