What You Need To Create a Viral Marketing Campaign

0:00We really wanted it to be something that people would want to experience and capture and then put on TikTok. and then other people would see it and be like, wait, I need to be there too. Hey, it's your host, Shuang Esther Shan, and you're listening to Shopify Masters, your companion for launching and growing your business. When was the last time you got excited about a can of beans? Yeah, that's what most of us would feel, but not for Kat Kavner. She is the co-founder and CEO of Hay Day Canning. The Hay Day Canning team is redefining the industry and bringing excitement back to the canned foods aisle by delivering flavor-packed and nutritious products.

0:42Kat's been able to capture the market with eye-catching branding, viral in-person pop-ups, and key retail partnerships with Whole Foods, Sprouts, and more. Kat's here to share her strategy behind it all. Thank you so much for being here, Kat. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here. I am so excited because I feel like, first of all, Hay Day is doing such cool things and we never have ever had a canned food merchant on the show. So I gotta ask, what made you even want to enter into the canned food business? I know it is certainly not like the sexiest business of them all.

1:24So I'm not surprised that I'm the first one. But yeah, our origin story kind of begins in the COVID era. It was spring of 2020. And if you can go back in time to that period, maybe you were buying a lot of canned food. Seemingly, everyone was loading up on canned food for the end times. Yeah, we were all stocking up our pantries. Yes, just like anything shelf stable. We were just scooping off the shelves like there was no tomorrow. And all of these articles were coming out about how canned food sales had just gone through the roof, unsurprisingly. And my co-founder, Jamie, and I just kind of had this aha moment where we're like, wow, this is so interesting.

2:01Canned food is this like massive industry that you really only ever pay attention to when there's a pandemic or some other global crisis. Like it's just not something that's top of mind because the food that fills those shelves is pretty boring. A lot of cheap commodity stuff. There's nothing particularly innovative or exciting or flavorful. And it just really got us thinking that there seemed to be an opportunity to take all of the good stuff about canned food, how convenient it is being shelf stable and create food, you know, kind of for today's consumer that knows great food and, you know, really values great flavor and premium quality and doesn't always have the time to cook completely from scratch and could really benefit from the convenience of just grabbing a can out of their pantry.

2:48So we just, yeah, kind of got very intrigued by this idea of reinventing this like very massive heritage category within the grocery store. So timing was certainly on your side. You noticed that this market demand was on the rise for canned foods, but you also have worked extensively within food and consumer packaged goods. So talk to us about what other exercises were you doing to actually figure out how you were going to develop this brand? Yeah, for sure. So I would say like the first thing that we did was really do a deep dive into canned food to understand it. Like I had never really spent that much time thinking about canned foods.

3:32So before we even got to the point of like thinking about developing the brand and designing everything and coming up with the flavors, we first wanted to validate that there was a real opportunity there. So we very much started by just going out and looking at all of the products that were on shelf and kind of putting together this giant spreadsheet of every single canned food product and kind of mapping what was out there and doing a lot of research on the big canned food companies. And we had this hypothesis that the canned food category as a whole was very much ready to be reimagined, but we wanted to validate that and really have some good insights and data to back that up.

4:09So we spent a good chunk of time just like really digging into the category. And we saw very clearly what we kind of expected to be true, that there was this big hole in the category and that there was no startup brand that was really pushing the limits to try to reimagine what canned food could be. And so once we felt like that hypothesis was really backed up in the data that we were seeing, we went about designing and developing the brand. But the first step was very much just like, we think there's an opportunity here. Let's go see if that plays out in the data that we can find online. Yeah.

4:45And you mentioned your partner, Jamie, and yourself actually have met through work previously, and you both have this industry experience. Talk to us a little bit about that and also how the different corporate experience have actually shaped you and helped you in developing Hay Day as well. Yeah, for sure. Just some quick background on the two of us. So we've both spent, for me, about a decade, for Jamie, a little bit more than that, in the natural food CPG world. And my background has been more on the marketing and innovation strategy side of the industry. And Jamie is trained as a food scientist, but has spent most of her career on the manufacturing side.

5:25So basically doing everything across R &D, commercialization, operations, everything involved with developing a product and getting it ready to scale. And so the two of us met at a startup called Sweet Earth Natural Foods about a little bit more than 10 years ago now. And I was doing marketing. She was doing operations. We were a very small, scrappy team that was growing super quickly, bringing new products to life in like six months or less. And so we very much were like in the trenches of startup life together. So got to know each other very well and got to understand each other's skill sets very well at that time.

6:03And then the two of us kind of went on our own paths. I went and worked at Clif Bar for a couple of years in brand management. Jamie stayed with Sweet Earth longer than I did, and Sweet Earth went on to be acquired by Nestle. And so she ended up kind of transitioning everything from our very small plant in California to Nestle plants across the country, some of like the biggest food manufacturing facilities in the world. So she's kind of seen that whole gamut from like really, really tiny, kind of homemade almost to really, really massive. So yeah, so the two of us just have kind of two sides of the same coin covered.

6:38Like my background is more in kind of coming up with innovation concepts and doing more of the creative and strategy work behind what we should launch. And then her experience is like, okay, that's the idea. How do we bring that into reality? So she and I have always wanted to do something together, both just loving working with one another and knowing that we have such complementary skill sets. It just felt like a perfect partnership when the right idea came to us. So digging deeper, what were some of the exercises you did to develop the brand for Hay Day? Yeah, for sure. So the first sort of phase of work that we did, I would call like the brand strategy.

7:17So we started first by just really thinking about like, what are the products that we want to develop and what role are they going to play in people's lives? Like what job are they going to do for people? What problem are we solving for people? And so we did a lot of kind of exercises getting really crystal clear around how we answered questions like that. And then we started thinking more about the brand personality and the values of the brand, sort of like who we wanted this like brand persona kind of to be. We did a lot of thinking around the brand's mission and vision and like what is like the big picture thing that we're trying to accomplish here.

7:52So there's a lot of just like big picture noodling and dreaming and thinking and kind of like massaging all of these different exercises until we got to a place where it felt like a really tight, cohesive vision. And, you know, something that felt like it had a lot of clarity around like, this is what we're setting out to do. And this is who we are. And this is how we're going to do it. And these are the values that we're going to carry through everything that we do. and from that kind of emerged this consistent brand vibe of you know this new brand that was going to be very joyful and vibrant and fun and kind of like vintagey and retro in a way but very forward-looking and so we kind of had this foundation of knowing like who we are and what we stood for and what we wanted to convey that we were then able to take to our design partner and actually brief them on creating our brand identity, our logo and colors and fonts, and then eventually the packaging.

8:49So that upfront work really helped them understand what we were trying to do and what we wanted to create. And truly bringing canned foods into its new heyday again. And I also love how you and the team really leverage storytelling to build that connection with the community. Talk to us a little bit about sharing stories and how it's important for the brand. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we want Haiti to feel like your friend that happens to be really good at cooking, that like loves to invite you over for dinner and is kind of cooking alongside you in the kitchen. So we wanted the brand to feel very personable and relaxed and not like this cold corporate vibe that you might get from some other canned foods, It's like very contrary to what you think of when you think of canned food, which I feel like is very faceless, industrialized, kind of like cold commodity.

9:44We really wanted hated to feel warm and personable. And yeah, just like a friend that knows a lot about food and you trust when it comes to food and cooking, but they're not like super like hoity-toity about it and is just like down for a good time. So that like general brand persona seeps through in the way that we approach storytelling through our social platforms and on the website. And so we have, you know, for example, on the website on our About Us page, we tell a story of one of the first times we tried canning up one of our recipes at home and we made like an accidental bean bomb because we didn't know what we were doing.

10:18We recently shared a TikTok of we had gotten some complaints about our e-com packaging not being durable enough so that the cans were bursting and people were receiving boxes that had like burst open beans. And so we did like a durability test with a new box where I was like up on my roof and like throwing it off of the roof of my house to see if the new box was strong enough to withstand all of the, you know, pitfalls of shipping. So we try to just be like kind of playful and open and honest and give our community a peek behind the scenes at everything that goes into creating the brand and running a startup.

10:54Definitely. Those stories and videos sound so fun and it makes me and other consumers actually want to follow a canned food company. But yeah, I think a lot of listeners are probably wondering, how do you actually convince someone to go outside of their routine, outside of their habits to actually spend their money on Hay Day? So I think it really comes down to, like I was saying earlier, like what problem are we solving for people? And the way that we like to think about that is that for a lot of people who know great food, they know great flavor, they like to cook from scratch, they just don't always have the time or the energy to do that.

11:33So you get home from a long day at work, you want to get a homemade meal on the table, but you're just like, oh, I don't feel like going out to the store and like putting in all the effort of chopping and prepping. And so Hay Day comes into the equation by having all of the flavor already developed inside of that can. So you pop open a can of beans, you just like pair it with some rice or some noodles or some sauteed vegetables, and you have this like really delicious flavor coming straight out of the can. You barely have to lift a finger, but it still feels homemade. So if we think about that as like, you know, sort of the solution that we're trying to sell to people to that problem, it really comes down to telling people, this isn't just a regular can of beans, this is basically like a meal in a can, like we have a little slogan on the back that says, tonight's dinner plan, open this can.

12:17And so we're really trying to convey like you pop open that can, all you need to spend is an additional like if you want to like five minutes, you can spend more than that. But you can make a very, very simple, easy meal within minutes of opening up that can. So to answer your question, like across every touch point that we have, we try to be really clear about flavor first and foremost. So, for example, like our harissa lemon chickpeas, the harissa lemon takes up way more real estate on the can than the word chickpeas itself. Like we're really trying to lead with that flavor to convey to people that it's, yeah, so much more than just chickpeas inside the can.

12:54And that harissa lemon sauce is really the value that we're adding versus just picking up any other can of beans. And on our socials too, like we try to do a lot of recipe content of people just opening up the can and very quickly whipping up a really delicious looking meal. So we try to just lead with that over and over again, that it's the ease of use and really delicious flavor that isn't at all a sacrifice. Like I think a lot of people think of canned food as like a last resort that maybe you only buy when there's a pandemic happening, but we're really trying to elevate it. It's not something that you have to reach for as like a doomsday alternative, but it's something that you can reach for when you want to whip up a great meal just without putting in a lot of effort or work.

13:35I love the fact that you brought up the flavors and how Hay Day is truly a meal in a can. And I think that really goes back to how well Jamie and yourself have developed the recipes and really iterated on the different flavors. Can you share some tips for going through that product development and recipe testing process? Like I mentioned, Jamie is a food scientist, so she does have that like angle to how she thinks about food. But besides that, she and I are just both like very passionate home cooks that love cooking at home. And we started coming up with our six flavors from a very sort of like non-strategic standpoint of just like, what do we like to cook at home?

14:16What do we like to cook with beans? And we just came with a big list of recipe ideas and we hit the kitchen and started experimenting to see what would work and what didn't. And we started pretty scrappy at first. We had like an instant pot and some glass mason jars. And we were just like making these recipes and putting them into an instant pot as a very, very rough way to prototype this product concept. And some things clearly were working. Some things were like definitely not working. And it allowed us to sort of narrow in on, okay, we think these flavors have a shot. And as we continued down the path, we sort of leveled up the sophistication in how we were developing and testing recipes.

14:55But it very much just started from us being home cooks and just like whipping up the kind of food we would like to eat and then trying to figure out if it would work in the context of actually canning it up. Thank you for all your advice. And I'm very excited to chat about the most recent exciting pop up you had. I'm going to take a quick pause to thank our listeners for tuning into the show. Our team wants to keep creating episodes you love. So let us know your thoughts on the show by leaving us a review. You can also comment directly on today's episode with your feedback. Don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you're listening now.

15:37And thank you so much. One of the things that we are so excited about is your pop-up and it has created such magical and wonderful marketing moments. Tell us about this setup and how this activation really drew in so many new people to Hay Day. Yeah, I'll start by just sharing the whole story of the pop-up for people that maybe aren't familiar with it. So I have to shout out my brother because he was actually the one that came up with the original idea. So my brother lives in New York and is a comedy producer out there. And we were brainstorming. This was probably like six to nine months ago. just like, what are some fun kind of wacky marketing ideas that we could try out?

16:21And he had this idea of doing a bean swap where you bring in a can of whatever beans you have at home and we swap you one for one for a can of Hay Day. And I thought that was such a fun idea. And it was sort of like in the back of my brain, we didn't really make any plans to do anything about that. And then fast forward six-ish months and we were like, gosh, we really want to just put most of our eggs in one basket. Like we don't have a huge marketing budget, but the money that we do have, we really want to like focus it on one thing and kind of like take a risk on doing something that we think is really creative and fun and has the potential to cut through the noise and really like help us grow some brand awareness for Hay Day.

17:02And with that in mind, we're like, okay, so what could we do? And I kept coming back to that idea of the bean swap. And so I called up my brother and I was like, okay, I kind of want to do this, but like, what would it look like? Like, what is the bean swap? And so then we started thinking more about how could we make that an experience? And it naturally felt like it had to be a physical in-person activation. So we started thinking about where we would do that. And New York really felt like if you're going to do a pop-up, it's the most bang for your buck to do something in New York. So we started looking into space and we just like kind of slowly started piecing all of this together.

17:33And so me and Alexandra, who's our marketing manager at Hay Day, and my brother Reed, the three of us kind of became this little like brainstorming pod. where we like very quickly just pieced together this vision of opening up a pop-up. And the concept grew from just this idea of like the one for one bean swap to like, okay, why don't we create a pop-up that is like all about beans? Like everything that we sell in the store is beans. We have Hay Day beans and then we'll also have bean merch. We'll make like bean hats and bean tote bags and bean socks. And we just started getting a little crazy with it.

18:05We're like, let's see if we can find a signed picture of beans from Even Stevens and we can sell that. Like anything like remotely that has to do with beans we'll put into our little bean pop-up store. But everything will be for sale only for beans. So the beans that we sell, our Haiti beans will be one for one. The bean hat maybe will be like 10 cans of beans. So that was the concept. So we decided we were going to do that and like hustled to make it happen. From us deciding to do that to opening up the store was probably like six weeks. So it was a pretty quick activation to pull together. and yeah it ended up going pretty viral on TikTok and we ended up with a line on the block for most of the days and it was amazing and really crazy and honestly kind of stressful because it went just like so much more viral than we were expecting that we sold out of all of the beans that we had shipped out for the store on day two and we still had two days to go so we had to overnight more beans out to the store so it was like it was mayhem but it was very very fun.

19:05We have to highlight the fact that you said you wanted to put all your eggs in one basket you've literally used a whole quarter's marketing budget on this one event. Was it a little scary for you to commit to this and just take such a big risk? Yeah, for sure. And I should clarify, it wasn't like our whole budget, but it was a good chunk of our Q4 marketing budget. And yeah, it was totally. I mean, the week before I was like, I hope people come to our bean store. Like Like, you just don't know. But I wanted to lean into that discomfort and just as a team start to grow that muscle of being comfortable taking risks and doing something that we have deep conviction in as being really fun and interesting and a good way to grow the brand.

19:51And, you know, I think we got honestly quite lucky on this one. Like, our first big marketing moment to come out of the gate with a viral TikTok success is pretty darn good. And we won't always do that. Like we'll do other things in the future and maybe they'll totally flop and it won't feel like it was worth it. But I think it's really important that we just get comfortable with that risk and comfortable in the discomfort of doing something and not knowing if it's going to pan out. Yeah. And it's also redefining for your category in a way. I feel like fashion brands, maybe beauty brands, they really toy with the idea of pop-ups and activations.

20:30and you're planning on other events and you've done other events like bean parties with supper clubs and bean portraits in collaboration with other artists. What is your advice for founders who are trying to think of events, think of partnerships? What should they think about in their checklist when they're conceptualizing an event or a partnership? Yeah, so I think it really depends on what your objectives are for a given event. Like for us, for the pop-up, the objective very much was to cut through the noise on TikTok. And so we really wanted to create an experience that we felt had a high probability that people would capture and create UGC if they went.

21:11So, you know, we kind of thought about that through every angle of the store. Like we visually wanted to make it really colorful and like you just walk in and you're like, oh my God, I just like need to take my phone out and start recording. And we had one of the walls and the pop-up was a wall that just said like beads, beads, beads, beads, like over and over again. And a lot of people came in and wanted to like have their picture taken against that wall. And so we, for lack of a better word, kind of like created some TikTok bait throughout that store because we really wanted it to be something that people would want to experience and capture and then like put on TikTok and then other people would see it and be like, wait, I need to be there too.

21:49So that was definitely a big part of how we came up with the design and the creative and the execution for that pop-up. But for other events, we've done, you know, smaller things like we've sponsored supper clubs and we've just found through Instagram and TikTok some like really cool people in New York and San Francisco that host these, you know, kind of like small ticketed supper clubs. And then we sponsor them by providing some beans and work together on creating the menu. And that is less about trying to like have a big breakout moment on TikTok and more just about like organically growing community and reaching people that we think are the kind of people that are going to be interested in the Hay Day brand.

22:28Like people that are going to buy a ticket to a supper club. We're like, those are our people. Like those are people that love food, love community and connecting over a dinner table with other people. And so if we can get in front of them in this really cool way to have them try the product for the first time, it feels like just a great way to bring more people into our Hay Day community. But I think for any marketing activation really being crystal clear and what you're setting out to achieve is the first step. And then everything kind of flows from there. Have those goals. And also you're truly really connecting with the different customers on a deeper level when it's in person.

23:07And speaking of more in-person interactions for being such a young company, you're actually in a lot of retailers like Whole Foods, Sprouts, and so on. So talk to us about the process of pitching those retailers. Most of the bigger retailers have what are called category review cycles. So for any, let's say at Whole Foods, there are, you know, for us, we're in the bean category, there's the baking mix category, the ice cream category, like for all of those different sections of the store, there is a set calendar when the buyers who make the decisions of what goes on the shelf and what maybe gets kicked off the shelf, review everything and decide if they're going to bring something new in.

23:53And during that period when they're reviewing, you have the opportunity as a brand to submit your information for their review. So you fill out a spreadsheet with your items and all of the details and you put together, they have like a set template where you put together all of your information in a PowerPoint, showing them the packaging, telling them like what the main points of differentiation are, basically telling them like, what's the product? Why should I care? How much is it going to cost? You know, kind of just like all the basic information. So for all of the big retailers, that's a pretty like set standardized process.

24:24So I don't necessarily have any like specific tips or tricks to how to navigate that process other than to just be like super duper clear in all of those points. Like that's basically what they're going to want to know. Like, what is the product? Why is it different? Why do I need it? So you just have to be very clear in understanding everything else that they have in the store, everything else in the competitive landscape for your given brand, and be able to very clearly argue those points of why your product is different and better and bring something new to that category that they don't currently have.

25:00And if you can make those points in a really clear and compelling way, you have a good shot of getting on shelf. But I think it all just starts with really digging in and doing your research in the category and being able to speak to why you deserve that very precious limited shelf space that they have available. Totally. And I think getting your products into the store is just the first step. Maintaining those relationships over the years, growing them and actually expanding from a select few stores to nationwide, etc. That also takes time to build those relationships. Yeah, what's your advice on maintaining those retail relationships?

25:42Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right. Getting in the store is one thing, and then staying in the store is a whole other thing. So it's definitely like, you know, it's a feat to get in store, but it's a lot harder to stay. And the way that you stay is to make sure that the product actually sells off the shelf once it gets on. Yeah, so it really becomes all about the key metric in CPG is velocity, which is just how many units in a given store in a given week for each item are you selling. So it really becomes all about that. So doing everything that you can to support that from building awareness for the brand so that you're driving people into store to go find it, to doing in-store sampling and demos so that you can catch shoppers and actually give them a taste of your product and convince them in that moment to buy, to running couponing programs.

26:31Like there's a whole huge gamut of things that you can do. But I think one piece of advice, and maybe this is obvious, but yeah, getting in the door is it's certainly hard to do, but it's not the hardest part. The hardest part is making sure that that product flies off the shelf. So having a good plan in place and making sure that you have adequate funds to support the product once you get it into one of those big retailers is really important because you definitely will need money to support with marketing and other initiatives like that designed to make sure that people are going into store and actually buying the product.