How to Disrupt Dusty Categories – The Pip & Nut Playbook with Pippa Murray #23

0:09Pippa Murray:Welcome to You, Me and CPG, a podcast brought to you by Haines McGregor, brand and innovation partner to some of the biggest brands in the world. Hosted by Jamie Holton, we sit down with industry leaders and rising stars, putting them in the hot seat. In this series, we delve deep beyond the label and discover the people behind the products. Leading insights, tips and tricks from the top, nothing is off limits. Right, let's get into the pod.

0:40In this episode of You, Me and CPG, we're joined by one of the brightest brand builders in UK, food and drink. Someone who out of nothing has created a category defining, culturally relevant, palm oil free powerhouse. Pippa Murray is the founder of Pippa Nut, The nut butter that proved joy, quality and ethics could all live in the same jar, now stocked in every major retailer, shaping and driving the nation's snacking habits. We go into the detail behind the person, the vision, the resilience and the razor sharp intuition, but also of the brand, the proposition, the innovation and of course the future strategy.

1:17Pippa Nut isn't just in your cupboard, it's on your feed, in your rituals and defining the future of natural indulgence. Pippa Murray, welcome to you, me and CBG.

1:25Pippa Murray:Oh, pleasure to be here. Thank you. What's the one thing in the business that keeps you up at night? It's funny, at the moment, things are flying. So at the moment, things are good. I am very excited by it. But if I am going to wake up at three o 'clock in the morning, which still does happen, it's actually more about not necessarily like bad things going wrong but probably ideas that are like coming up you know it'll be the things from a brand point of view that i'm trying to fine-tune or nudge along you know whether it's um or a product that we're developing that's still not quite there and or just like ideas which probably if you'd asked me five years ago there would have been the usual like supply chain issues cash flow etc not hitting budget all of those things but i actually find now it's more of like they're like that kind of agitation perkling up at 3 a.m so i still still do get the kind of weird wake-up calls you know your brain is really buzzy and busy but it's more about opportunity at this moment which is actually a nice place to be in because it's not always that case and I'm sure in future months years it won't it won't be that so right now yeah it's probably those things yeah and you've hit a level of maturity really haven't you from a kind of how long the business has actually been going now was it 10 10 years this year you know look at the statistics that's a brilliant achievement in itself does it feel like that does it feel like actually we've grown up a little bit we're beyond the kind of throes of of real startup days or does it still feel like that no if it does feel completely different when i started pippin up it was very much i loved the product that's where i came as to i don't think i was hugely strategic if i'm honest i fell in love with nut butter i loved the idea of disrupting a dusty category i felt there was opportunity in this particular range but did i have like an all being all consuming kind of big vision for like the next 10 years of what that could be probably a little bit but it wasn't refined in any way I probably had like a bit of an intuition about what I think we could do next but I don't think I'd like fully formed like written down on paper what the brand really at its heart stood for whereas now I feel like we've got real clarity about our positioning I feel like we've got real clarity of like where we play and where we don't play I got real clarity of like from a creative standpoint how do we show up tonally how do we show up so I feel like the brand is like mature in terms of it's got clarity of thoughts and it's got and of course there are still things that are that we're trying to like box in a bit and kind of make sure we're clear on but I it's just not the same business anymore and I'm not the same person that I was when I started it I don't know if I could imagine quite how it could have evolved into back in that day so I don't it's still a hustle like we're still like every day like how can we make things one percent better every single day how can we push the brand harder faster further than you know that that mindset hasn't really shifted but I think in terms of like actually how the brand feels like it's got like a I from when I look at it which you'll see from a consumer they might not see all these nuances but I feel like I can see the layers of the brand world and I can feel I can feel the clarity in it that I definitely didn't have I'm much better at being able to say no to things no to things whether it's from a product point of view or even just like we're looking at campaigns or creative or whatever it is I I know what feels right for the brand and I'm now better at being able to say like no we know what doesn't fit yeah whereas before I think it would have been a bit more fluid and there's definitely been mistakes along the years around stuff getting out the door that probably shouldn't have or especially creatively or just like not necessarily knowing completely what was right from a product point of view as well what is the positioning so for us we're all about so the brand essence is natural nuttiness and our current kind of positioning is all about well our kind of brand platform at the moment is all about obsession spreads so this idea that you know once you eat our products it really you really can't get enough of them but so you don't need to feel bad about having a lot of them.

5:44Pippa Murray:But really we're all about kind of, you know, our mission as a brand is to put the nut back into nutrition. So we're really helpful either about seeing how we can get more and more nuts into people's diets in a kind of playful, healthy, natural way. And playfulness is a really big part of like our brand and how we kind of come across. So, yeah, that's our direction of travel. I was in the Haynes McGregor office this morning and I said, of looking forward to having Pip on later. And it caused the most heated debate on what peanut butter or what nut butter was best. It was extraordinary, the passion and the hostility, if I can use that word, around what people thought was the best nut butter.

6:31And 10 years ago, you'd have been taken away if you had that sort of vicious opinion about nut butter. You've talked about dusty categories and disrupting them. What does that actually look like in reality? Is that you sitting down and going, right, what categories do we go after now? What categories can we disrupt? Is there a kind of playbook for that?

6:55Pippa Murray:Yeah, absolutely. There probably is. The nut busted category, I mean, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, was pretty bland in terms of like product offering, brands available, even just the brands themselves weren't particularly like contemporary or you know youthful or particularly kind of yeah I guess speaking to a consumer like me and I think for me like big part of sort of disrupting a category is trying to find like the problem within it so within nut butter category but also quite consistent across the categories that we're playing in at the moment is that every single product had palm oil in it a lot of them are really highly processed there's nothing that really like lent on flavor and taste first I felt from a foodie background myself and that's what I was trying to I think what we were trying to challenge like this either it was challenging that like is these Americanized products don't necessarily need to be the things that you put on your on your kids food in the morning or plate on the morning or something that feels like more worthy and kind of wholesome doesn't have to taste bad and or make you feel like you have to like sacrifice something and that's what was playing out in this particular category but if you look at like the world of snacking I'd say the similar kind of tension arises that you've got like pretty processed stuff on one end of the spectrum and sometimes on the other end of a spectrum healthier bits which either don't taste particularly good or you know perhaps don't necessarily appeal to the lifestyle that you're kind of showing up in so yeah I think that's what we are challenging that perception of like the dullness I guess that you can often find in the category or on the flip side the kind of process aspect yeah is that just looking at the business and from the outside it looks like there's been kind of one misstep, hasn't there, around almond milk?

8:36Pippa Murray:Yes. And was that almost because, I'm just guessing here, but that playbook almost didn't work in alternative milks or plant-based milks because they were already being disrupted? I think, yeah, that was definitely one of the reasons why it didn't work. So we launched the almond milks in our third year of business and there was some external context. So when we eventually launched the almond milks that we had, which I really love the products, the way they looked but when we launched them um pretty much everyone and their dog had entered the category so it was sort but at the same time the category was just tipping over into decline like this specifically almond milks whereas oat milks was booming still and carried on booming but almond milks was sort of losing the heat around the category and then there was a lot of people crowding into the alternative milk space so it already got super crowded for a young brand that had only really been out the door for three years it was too much but then internally if I felt about it from a brand point of view you know a big part of like not but you touched upon it earlier around like people it gets under people's skin it is one of those products that people get really weirdly passionate about I remember like people have it on like their hinge profiles whether a crunchy or smooth peanut butter eater or you know it's it has that like quite literal stickiness around like it's a real can be a bit marmitey but and those that do really love it like get really into it and you eat it with a spoon out the jar which feels like a bit obsessiveness about that hence sometimes our brand platform like i mentioned earlier yeah but almond milks always felt when we launched them i remember almost we always do samplings i mean if we launch a product we go and sample in like whole foods and stuff just to get a feel on the ground um even now we do that the whole team will spend like the first month sampling in store just to get a feel and we get loads of like insights just from listening to people try the product firsthand but i remember when i was sampling our almond milks in whole foods like the first couple of weeks that they launched and the reaction was really tepid it was like people would try them be like nice yeah and and that was it um and that was fine but i think almond milks are a bit like that they are like they're nice but they don't really set your world alight in terms of taste flavor excitement and i think it was that moment almost quite quickly realizing that people not really is a taste-led brand and therefore things that we'd have to launch sounds obvious It has to be almost like that kind of permissible indulgence aspect to it, which was a really big part of our core range when we launched.

10:59Pippa Murray:So if I look at our nut bus cups now or our cereal bars, they're really taste-lead and they're designed to kind of hopefully make people feel like, oh, yeah, I really like that. Almost provoke a response to their so delicious sort. And we're not on that real health edge. We are more in the kind of permissible indulgence side of things from a health point of view. So it was a slight nuance. and that's the clarity that you've built right like the seeing what permissible indulgence really is yeah is that is that what you mean when yeah like we're not a functional brand and we and um yeah it's like a gradient isn't it from health to kind of yeah complete indulgence and we are further away from that complete pure play health and it's yeah that was for me a clear thing i learned from that piece of innovation and other things around how fast you get something to market never take that process too quick.

11:49So you talked about, or I talked about actually beginning a cultural relevance point and you guys have created that you've created a sense of cultural resonance. Has that ever been an ambition? Is it you guys ever sat down and go, right, how do we create a culturally relevant, a culturally attuned brand? Or has that come more organic?

12:09Pippa Murray:It was pretty organic. I think it often helps when you start something from a consumer point of view so I very much was the consumer so you are sort of as a consumer of the category culturally within that space so you kind of understand I think the things that are driving you as an individual but also the problem that you're seeing at the time so it always came really organically and you know for me my background was in not in food and drink but I was the reason I started it was because I was really into running so I was always quite into like the running culture anyway and nut butter is a great thing to kind of have when you're eating when you're doing lots of training and things like that so again where we try to tap into tribes if you like you know micro little communities within a bigger kind of culture movement like the wellness movement they just fell really organically because they were things that i was observing at the time when we were sort of first out the door and and so we still try and make sure we are like tapping into like the most relevant we call them tribes that pip and nuts are like the running tribes or like the cycling tribes those sorts of things because we know that those are always from the brand story feel really relevant to us but also relevant to kind of the wider movement that is happening and in fitness yeah and the brand choices b corp tony's open chain yeah obviously the palm oil free part of the the business you could argue that they are not just ethical they're almost political in terms of those choices again is that a kind of conscious ideological type thing or is that actually well we know they're the right thing to do and we know our consumers really value that and that's why we're doing them from the brand's origins not having palm oil in the products has been from day one and will obviously be consistent so i guess there's always been like a walking the talk right from the early days in terms of whether it was more around a bigger picture political piece um individually for me as a founder also running the business i do believe that the system that we operate in has to change i don't think that the way that capitalism has served us in the last 50 100 years is going to be the way that serves us in the next 100 years if we want to still have a planet that we can live on in a relatively harmonious way so i believe that business has a big part to play in solving some of the biggest issues on the planet um not the only thing but it is an important part of it so personally um yes i believe that business needs to have a role and therefore b corp i think is a really great movement and that we can be part of as pip and now so yeah b corp is about validating the work that you do internally and demonstrating that you are you know being as progressive as you can be from a social and ethics point of view and an environmental point of view but it's also about demonstrating at scale to the wider business community that you can be both highly profitable grow fast and do the right thing and so I like that it pushes Pippa Nut to be the best kind of business that it can be and I find that highly motivating as an individual but then I also like the fact that you're part of a bigger movement here and I think that's also what drives a lot of my team maybe not so much on the macro side of things perhaps it's more sits for them as like feeling good about the work Pippa Nut does but I think for me, they're both interlinked.

15:22Have you had pressure, and you must feel this from a commercial perspective, when difficult decisions have to be made around investment, where those things are not the most profitable things to do, particularly the quality of the ingredients and things like that. I know that's been such an important part of the business, but how do you balance, I guess, commercial needs and those values?

15:44Pippa Murray:Yeah, I mean, I probably am. I will err on probably not being as commercial as I probably should be. I think if I was a traditional CEO, I did the baniers. Don't know why I did that. I still do that. You are a CEO. but I think not potentially but I think maybe traditionally probably some of the decisions that I make might not necessarily be on the surface you know the most sensible in here and now but I think you've got to see stuff like you do with brand building you see sustainability as interlinked with your brand and that some things from a brand pay off short term some things pay off long term so you have to make sure that you're seeing sustainability in the same way that in order to see long-term benefits you're going to need to invest in long-term initiatives which might not immediately pay back in the case of things like tony's open chain that absolutely made no commercial sense if you look it hit our margin quite significantly because not only did we make that switch we moved our already ethical supply into tony's open chain which was was more expensive and we also did it at like the peak of the cocoa industry crisis which was happening last year but it's still happening now so it really hit our margin but it strengthens the product proposition in my point of view because you know tony's chocolate only they are like the kings of chocolate like they are great they signal that to consumers both uh taste and ethics and we felt that having their tony's open chain stamp on our pack was would would add value to our brand because we're all about the nuts and the nut butter so if they're about the chocolate felt like a really good way of being able to communicate that but also they are very good at communicating there and and doing the work around sustainability so again we felt like strengthened that proposition and i just loved what they were doing i loved that it is we're helping them also through our supply chain you know eradicate exploitation in the cocoa industry in Ghana and Cote d 'Ivoire so it doesn't always make sense if you look just at the PNL but you've got to believe in the long term And you've got to believe that it will benefit you longer term, both as a brand, but also in the context of the wider society.

17:53Yeah, I love that. Particularly those two brands. It feels like the word pioneering is chucked around a lot, but it just feels like it's a new type of doing business.

18:02Pippa Murray:Yeah, I love it because it's about collaboration. It's not about holding your USPs tight to you and using sustainability as a competitive advantage. it is i think they i could wax lyrical about what i think that tony's open chain does for um actually demonstrating that if we're going to solve some of these big issues we're going to have to work together as brands like for instance in our um peanut supply chain we're working with mars unilever lorenz in snack some of the really big players to invest in sustainable agriculture initiatives and we're sharing our knowledge across as a group working with um argentinian growers on the ground to explore what practices we can you know put on the ground to help improve all sorts of different things from soil health to carbon etc so you know in theory like you shouldn't really work together because your competitors and although they're massive we've got brands that are probably competing against each other but it's the right thing to do and that's what sustainability is about are there people within the business that balance that view and sort of say no pip look at the p &l we can't afford this right now we shouldn't do that like do you have that tension yeah yeah within the business i guess that's a good thing yeah yeah i mean my team hold that tension but the board really are there i think too and actually the board are brilliant they are are on board with like the fact that our brand our purpose is all about helping people love food that loves them and the planet so it is about making sure we deliver on that but they do hold it in tension like we moved to glass four years ago and again that was another example of it's quite a big capex investment and cost because glass was heavier than plastic and also um uh more expensive so and and there was lots of debates as to whether that was the right thing to do or whether we should do it this particular moment in time and i think sometimes it might not always be like a conversation about should we do it sometimes it's more about when should we do it and just acknowledging that maybe you can't do all these things at once and the other thing is just making sure you're really clear on like the materiality of the things that you're doing so you'd be quite busy full with sustainability but I think making sure you're really clear about what is most important to you as a brand and what's most important to your consumer and other stakeholders and mapping that and then being clear around okay the top quartile stuff that's where we really invest so for us nut sourcing is a really really big focus of our sustainability work because that's where we can make the biggest impact as a brand um and a couple of other things that we're working on as well it's very clear it feels like you got very yeah we know where we start and stuff and and where we probably could do more but are choicefully being more moderate on areas so i think that again signals that you're not just saying like we're just gonna throw it all out and just go after everything you can't it's that's not realistic the the point around you know nut butter isn't exactly high frequency yeah i'm sure you've driven frequency in the category how have you done that how do you make it feel you know daily habitual yeah i mean the nut butter category it's been really interesting we've obviously got our nut butter portfolio and then more recently we've launched into snacking and the the speed at which you can recruit people into your brand through snacking is just unreal in comparison to nut butter so it's taken quite a long time to get to the point where we're now the number two brand in the UK but we think we can get to number one by the end of the year if not the beginning whole earth is in front they're in front by 0.5 just recently bought by KP snacks exactly just sponsoring England cricket team I noticed this week yes so they yeah they've been yeah I won't talk about them but uh we think we can get there you can get them so how do you drive frequency I mean it happens slowly over time in that category it is a slower moving category so you do you can't expect the same level of hockey stick growth in nut butter or at least not sometimes in the earlier days although now we find it there has been like a tipping point in the last three years where i think our physical availability have been so it's so high now and that we've managed to tip enough people into the round that almost like our rate of sale is starting to like naturally build and i think the combination of like yeah the physical mental availability has sort of hit that point now where it's rolled over the side of the hill if you know the rock's kind of been pushing it for a while up now it's going down the other side to drive frequency i think there's a bit on product our product is eaten comparatively versatile compressed set at more moments throughout the day in different occasions partly because by literally the nature of not having palm oil it's more like it's a bit more runny it's like not as thick and spread so people have it more frequently in in smoothies or they'll put it on their like granola they'll drizzle it on it's actually used more because of the fact that the texture is different from that other set so that's one way we think yeah that's good yeah um we use a lot we've got a really big social following we do a lot from a recipe content point of view um and a lot of the you know we've got about nearly 300 000 followers across all of our different platforms and particularly instagram is all built through UGC.

23:10Pippa Murray:Like a lot of people were tagging and telling us how they were doing it. I think that has helped. And then I think the final one has been probably not the most exciting, but kind of key in CPG is the formats. We've got these like kilo tubs that we launched. So they're literally a kilo of nut butter that when we launched them, I genuinely was like, nobody's going to buy a whole kilogram of pippin nut. Like that is a lot of peanut butter. now people eat our peanut butter kilos just as frequently, if not more frequently. They get through it faster than they do our jars because I think once you get into people's habits and their cupboards, particularly when you've got a slightly larger pack like that, people are a bit more liberal with it.

23:52Pippa Murray:They'll almost use it in more occasions because it's there and it's available. So there is about making sure you have the right formats and so long as your product tastes really good and people enjoy it, then they'll almost find ways to eat it. So I think that's kind of thing. I think it's so interesting that because I think your Byron chart point there around mental and physical availability is exactly right. Going after the light fires, going after penetration ultimately is what's got you the growth, isn't it? But because of the slow frequency, being able to drive that through habitual use and bigger packs and stuff like that is kind of double pronged, very powerful, compelling proposition.

24:32yeah people talk a lot about kind of fields of marketing but uh you're also tapping so well into the you know we mentioned it before but the cultural strategy of standing for something being quite ideological driven it means something to me if i have a pip and nut versus something else versus something else so it's a yeah you're a brilliant case study of utilizing lots of different very powerful kind of marketing strategies to do so well yeah and i think

25:00Pippa Murray:sustainability message which in our case is a number of things but predominantly you probably hear us most speaking about palm oil takes just a really long time to think actually like get into people's psyches and i'd say that still a lot of pip nut consumers don't realize that some brands contain palm oils and others don't so i think just banging the drum consistently over the last 10 years about the same topics over and over and over again through whatever marketing bits of the mix to use is also kind of unfortunately you can't build a brand overnight like it takes time for consumers and even now like obviously there'll be loads of people that just buy it because it's there and i want to buy it and that's fine you are listening to you me and cpg by haynes mcgregor if you're enjoying the conversation please remember to subscribe and if you have any questions for our guests get in touch with us let's get back to the pod talk us about this launch the new kind of chocolate spread effectively in a kind of world of i guess comfort and cost sensitivity you've gone after that category with a an amazing product but a very high price point talk to us about that we in our previous conversation you sort of said it's a it's a bit of a test and learn really to see what happens talk to us about it yeah i think uh on paper you probably you definitely probably wouldn't do it or at least you can do like the we've done all that price sensitivity analysis etc and we were like testing it before we launched and you know there's these like cliffs that you know when you go over certain emotional thresholds on price like ever volume drops off and we're probably on the volume drop off so in lots of ways you're like probably shouldn't have done it but there are lots of rules or examples across the industry where you can see that people will pay more for if the value is in it if they see enough you know value proposition in in the product then then they will so like you know tony's trocolonia at speaking about them again they're almost double the price of say dairy milk in our category we're almost double the price of some parts uh pence per gram that is so i think there are lots of rules where you can make some assumptions you can ask a consumer one thing that will you pay this for that much and the rational side of your brain will say no absolutely not what is really hard to kind of understand or kind of tap into is like that slightly irrational side of things or that desirability and really trying to like understand whether someone would out of like more instinct rather than like conscious decision making if that makes sense so yeah can you get the value proposition right but also i think until you get something on the shelf it's quite difficult to almost test that i'm sure there are ways of testing it but we can't afford to do those for modeling I think but really I think until it gets on stuff do you get to really understand like what's that kind of desirability that actually means people will be willing to spend a bit more for it but the proposition of the product is and we have been careful about formats and price points and things like that so at least that we're trying to kind of make certain formats more accessible from a kind of entry-level jar versus like larger formats but I think yeah I think it is a case of sometimes you can overthink innovation and although we put a lot of thought into it sometimes you just have to get it into the market and see and have a bit of patience with it not expect it to necessarily become like again an overnight success but in a lower slower moving category know that shifts in consumer behavior like we've seen in peanut butter take a bloody long time and actually if you kind of focus your efforts on a few retailers and making sure you're really clear about who your target audience is make sure the proposition and the quality of the proposition is brilliant if you're asking people to pay more then over time you can hopefully see that change and that build so i think that's the way with i'm thinking about it trying not to put too much pressure on this innovation to suddenly be like the overnight success and recognizing that like in that butter i mean when i launched nut butter you know less than 25 percent of the category was a product that didn't contain palmer I like the rest of the category all the products were filled with palm oil now nearly 60 percent of the category our products bought that don't contain palm oil that makes sense so that has happened over the last 10 years and you just thought that that wouldn't have been possible yeah what's the retailer reaction been when you've introduced the new launch yeah I mean we were quite conscious about working with retailers that we've got really long-standing relationships with but also a consumer base that we think will be most receptive to it so it's launched into Sainsbury's nicado initially and i think they're they i mean they they want this category to evolve like from a consumer point of view i think it doesn't take a a genius to know that it needs to be better and i think we've worked with those particular retailers because we feel like they'll give us a bit more time so they've been receptive but i think they're also a bit skeptical as well because they're commercial you know the challenge often with these things is that you've got buyers who are here for a year and then they move off and they need to see performance immediately so you do need to work on like above buyer level as well to make sure that they understand what the opportunity is and to try and paint a bit of a vision for like a three-year view of like what do we think this could be yeah so that at least if they are just looking at the immediate performance i'm not saying it's doing badly but if they look at immediately they don't just measure you by this ridiculous yardstick that you can't hit in a 12-week window how does your 2025 consumer or the 2025 consumer want what your 2015 consumer didn't what are the differences you know in many ways it's it's quite similar I think the thing that has shifted probably is that our consumers just got older so when I started the business the consumer that we targeted was a consumer a bit like me no-brainer so mid-20s or kind of early 20s to mid-20s single household living with friends and And now naturally our consumer is getting older.

30:57Pippa Murray:They're having kids. They're wanting to figure out what their kids are going to eat. And it has been a natural evolution about who we've targeted. So now we do target kind of that family audience a bit more, like that young family audience, as well as also still the kind of 20-somethings. So I think their needs have evolved because their lifestyle has shifted. In terms of like the trends that they are playing into, i mean i are probably a bit biased but obviously but more and more i think people are being receptive to kind of things around gut health and um you know getting more plants into your diet you know the 30 plant points is something that's more on people's radars and looking at their health in a more slightly more less like five of day and bit binary like that i think they see it more holistically so it's definitely i think worked in our favor that actually the kind of education and shifts in our perceptions about either health or nutrition as has actually evolved to mean that nuts for instance are a really great source of fiber and are encouraged to be eaten as amongst all the other plants that you'd have legumes and fruit and veg and stuff so their needs have shifted because their lifestyle stage has shifted but also i think the education has evolved a bit but with that it's kind of still supporting things that we're working on i guess thinking of health and the future of it and the future of the category.

32:23GLP ones are kind of in the news, skinny jabs or skinny pills as the media is talking to them. What do you think about that? And are you worried about that? Are you thinking that's going to start to impact your business, your numbers? What are your thoughts?

32:40Pippa Murray:Yeah, I have to say it's probably not showing up in our strategy conversations as much as it could be it's so new still I think I read that this could be wrong so don't quote me on it like five six percent of the population are on some sort of Zen pick or something like that so it's still very early doors although you can see it in the states taking off faster I don't know whether or not it will I'm sure it will hit our business in some way but it'd be really difficult to understand exactly what the scale of impact could be i think it'll be very difficult through i think the data that we have access to but i do wonder if it will more impact the slightly bigger brands who are selling more unhealthy things potentially maybe those because naturally some i don't know i'm probably going to make some assumptions but if you're a healthier led brand yeah we the consumers that we typically are slightly more health or sustainability conscious maybe they wouldn't necessarily choose to be on a zempick but i don't know maybe they would i i to be honest i'm slightly talking off the cuff here so i'm i think really it's the next year or two will be and how government legislation will yeah exactly i think that's right i actually think i actually think from a pippin up perspective it could benefit because i think i was reading that zen pick or the and the like is probably gonna suggest you eat less traditional three meals a day and actually move into the more little and often yes and you're actually seeing that from gen z as a as a trend are eating the less kind of traditional meals and moving more into snacking and little and often anyway so yeah you could kind of see it as a few different ways and then you You need good calories with nutrition for the few calories that you are able to get into your body because you'll still need a certain amount of vitamins and minerals.

34:36Pippa Murray:I'm sure vitamin companies will fly through the roof. But yeah, you're right. I think little enough it might be. No, it's interesting. I mean, there is concern about it within the industry. Yeah, there is. Yeah. But yeah, we'll see how that plays out. every week we have a section in the podcast called that will never work where we ask our guests to bring in a product that has been successful but defies conventional thinking and you can hear the safe cautious senior innovation manager muttering that will never work we've had a key cutting business employing convicted criminals to cut the keys meal replacement drinks cbd snacks super premium can cocktails pitt what have you got for us yeah i I mean, it's our most recent bit of innovation that has probably gone through that that will never work kind of test.

35:24Pippa Murray:So, yeah, our chocolate hazelnut spread in many ways when we were doing the many rounds of gate processes would often get caught up against that that will never work. Partially because that category chocolate spreads, it's dominated by one key player. You know, they have 60 % of the category. So it's pretty hard to topple someone that has such high visibility in store and sort of household penetration. But the product is crap in comparison. Yeah, but arguably lots of people like the taste of it because it has loads of sugar in it. So it's like if you're giving it to your kids, they're not going to like they'll enjoy it.

35:58Pippa Murray:Right. So that's always been a barrier. And it's also a really like set product. So like people are used to the texture of it because it has lots of palm oil in it. So it gives you, you know, probably the user experience will be better. And it's about half the price pence per gram than what we're offering. So you're not only asking people to spend more, you're asking them to use it in a slightly different way because it's not, the texture is different. And from a taste point of view, whilst I believe our product does stack up against it, it might not be as sweet as maybe your kids will. So maybe they'll reject it.

36:30Pippa Murray:So in lots of ways, you know, will it work? But I guess for me, I have to believe it does because, A, I think it is quite a family product. You know, it's the sort of thing that goes on the kitchen table and, you know, you have the whole family really. And I do think particularly parents are more and more wanting to make sure their kids eat the right food. And I think there's lots of people who probably don't even shop that category because there's just nothing available for them that they really feel is something they'd want to give their kids in the first place. So I'm hoping that if it's going to recruit a whole new load of people into that category that has stuff walked past that aisle because it's not been for them.

37:08Pippa Murray:So that's the opportunity. So if you ask like a chocolate spread consumer right now, like maybe they wouldn't want this product because maybe they're not completely our consumer. Or maybe they will, but we can convince them to spend a bit more. So it might work. So it might work. We will see. Thinking about innovation, are you constantly thinking about what might come next? Are you looking at line extensions for the core portfolio that you have? Are you looking at new categories all the time? Open the hood or lift up the hood, what it's like in the Pippin' Nut office around this sort of stuff.

37:40Pippa Murray:Yeah. I mean, brand and product, which is kind of one and the same thing, is my heart spot. I love it. It's my bit that I enjoy the most. So naturally, innovation product gets talked about a lot. and it's a really big part of our overall strategy is sort of build is our innovation pipeline we think there's lots of potential within the categories that we're in and definitely we're thinking about like where else could we play I mean at the heart of our brand we're called Pippa Nuts so it's kind of an obvious thing to say but like Nuts will always be part of like everything that we look at so we're always kind of doing like cursory scans like I was in the states last week um and sort of browsing some of the stores in LA I feel like just this you know inspiration things that like maybe I've not seen before or ways of like positioning something that I thought was interesting so I'm always sort of like clocking it sometimes you just chuck them into the big bucket of ideas or fire it at my head of product just to say like this is cool like but no you're not going to necessarily do anything with and I think definitely over the years I've got better at like just having the ideas and sitting with them and not necessarily having to be like right we're going for it but yeah I it is a constant like we'll constantly be like looking uh whether it's through social media or going to stores or going to restaurants or just spotting things i mean it's hard not to especially when it's quite a kind of passion point of mine like the food side of things so yeah it is it's ever present really yeah yeah the point around just quickly around whole earth being bought by kp snacks you guys must have been approached by people looking at the business wanting to acquire is that in your thought process at the moment is that in the i'm not saying is there an exit strategy but greater investment bigger ambitions what do you what are you thinking about there's definitely bigger ambitions and like i think you know how we can scale this business to you know that 100 million plus mark 100 is like the sort of kind of trajectory that we're focused on as a brand and you know we have investors we don't plan on raising any further funds we actually are profitable and we can carry on that journey and if we choose to raise money then it's because we really see like a massive growth um opportunity that we absolutely can't do on our own although i'm quite keen to see how we can i think you know do what we need to do those big numbers even for our own pnl i think it creates really good brand building because you don't just spend money for the sake of it and it makes you much better at focusing um so actually i think there's a real like constraint that not raising too much money to is actually a really good thing and you develop focus on making a highly profitable business so that you can invest money back into the business to then grow it as fast so it does make you better at building a really healthy P &L exit at some point probably but when I don't know but we have investors so naturally you they'll want to return at some point but that's that's how I'm looking at it I think there is a bit around when you focus too much on sort of that I'm not particularly money driven myself I'd rather build a brilliant brand and sort of build a brand that I feel like it's going to actually stick around in the next 50 years or whatever so yeah I kind of find it takes the joy out of it if I think about that all the time because you're kind of again sometimes those things we were saying earlier you you want to invest in long-term stuff and you want to invest in sort of the brand in the right way and not just pump up the numbers make it look good for someone else looking at it it's almost living in the future a little bit yeah just like stay in the present and do the right thing here right now for the brand and for the team and and you get way more enjoyment out of it if however one day that exit happened and you were given some money to invest and we asked this question for all of our guests and you had to you know put it behind you don't have to mention businesses but you had to put it behind a trend or a or a movement or something like that what what would you look to do i do find i find it intriguing all of the space of like all the vitamins which is quite different from pippinah so maybe that's why it intrigues me because it's so different but i do find like you know personally um i guess and that's often where i come at it it's like maybe that's why it's intriguing me because it's it's on my mind at the moment it's like how you can support people through you know supplements and things like that you know to kind of complement their lifestyle and the tailoring that you can have with that in some ways i'm quite jealous because you can really do that with a with a um supplement brand or you know and I feel like that probably would be where I place some of my money I do think to some extent you know we are living in a busier you know more hectic society so that demand is only going to increase I think so that's probably maybe with the commercial hat on my head yeah and and I kind of also think again maybe it's because it's very different from the audience that we necessarily target but like again an older audience like I feel like it's such an overlooked part of like the consumer segments is how we support our like aging population so i think those would be things i'd be curious to kind of if i had cash to kind of be a bit more experimental with i think that maybe would be the things that i'd be curious about unfortunately that's all we have time for but thank you so much for coming on amazing story and just an amazing business it feels like you hit such a brilliant point of growth and clarity as a combination which we have huge businesses CMOs on here we have founders but you don't often get someone who feels like they've hit such a sweet spot and that's down to you and it's down to the business that you've created so you must be incredibly proud of that but thank you very much for coming on Pleasure We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of You, Me and CPG Follow us and subscribe on your preferred platform for future insights and episodes where we go beyond the label of leading minds in the industry.

43:52Pippa Murray:If you are enjoying the conversations, find them valuable or know someone who will, share the episode and leave us a review. To learn more about Haynes McGregor, then visit our website at haynesmcgregor.co.uk. Tune in for next time.