The natural CPG industry has spent years talking about ingredients. The next conversation is about processing.
When a new standard like Non-Ultraprocessed Foods (non-UPF) Verification shows up, the instinct is to chase the certification, reformulate, and wait for shoppers to notice.
But Ashlie Winson-Jones doesn’t think it usually plays out that way. As a founding member of Social Nature, the leading shopper activation platform for natural CPG brands, she’s had a front-row seat to which certifications actually sticks.
Her take? Certifications don’t move shoppers on their own. Retailers do. Non-UPF won’t mean a thing to most consumers and brands until it has retailer backing.
The Non-GMO Project launched a new certification this year called Non-UPF Verification.
But what does this mean for shoppers? Do shoppers actually understand it? No. I don’t think the industry fully does either.
The categories under the most scrutiny are anything in center shelf: packaged goods and how processed they are inside the package. I think what will happen is shoppers will just see processed food is bad, this meets a standard, check, and move on because we’re all so busy.
That’s the real misconception. Social Nature represents the largest community of natural shoppers, and when they don’t want to buy something, price is usually six or seven out of ten. So they don’t mind spending more, but they have to understand why they’re spending more, and it still has to taste good.
The challenge with non-UPF is the processed foods, like sugar, emulsifiers, seed oils, often make food taste good. So it’s just gonna be a really interesting challenge, and I don’t think brands will care until their retailer cares. The requirements are wildly specific and different depending on the category. Brands can get a free audit through the site, which is probably the best start.
But certifications don't matter until there's a partnership with a major retailer.
In 2018, Expo West was flooded with non-GMO certifications. It was orange everywhere. That was the year Whole Foods put a stake in the sand: get organic or non-GMO certified, or don’t get shelf space. The entire industry flipped overnight. It was destabilizing, and arguably anti-startup. The big boys can afford to do this, but a startup can’t.
But at the end of the day, these certifications often don’t mean anything until they partner with a major retailer. That’s really how consumers catch on because certifying bodies like the Plant Based Foods Association and non-UPF don’t have the resources to build mass awareness on their own.
Retailers can get you on shelf, but now what?
When Social Nature started, there were almost no levers for shopper marketing. Just us or in-store demos. COVID forced a wave of contactless sampling options and the methods got very sophisticated. But after 11 years, the problem hasn’t changed: once you get on shelf, now what? You have a few months to prove yourself.
Brands come to us for targeted trial at specific stores, without having to run demos all day every day. We take a brand’s exact store list, cross-reference it against where our members shop, and invite them to try the product at those specific locations. Members buy it, upload the receipt, and we reimburse them through a rebate tool. That helps force sales at the exact stores you need to hit velocity targets.
Distribution points and a cool product is the secret formula.
So Molly Suds is a laundry product, and as soon as they came to our doorstep, I was like, this is gonna kill it. Molly Suds is $21 at retail, so it isn’t cheap. I figured the campaign would take six months, but we ran through all the redemptions in three weeks, it went so incredibly well.
It was a 50% off discount and 97% of those who purchased were new to the brand, but willing to put $11 of their own money in to try the product. The brand also had great distribution in Walmart, Target, Home Depot, which matters just as much as the offer itself. Without that distribution, we wouldn’t have had the funnel to support the demand.
Giving shoppers more choice will increase redemption rates.
Our offers run more aggressive than something like Ibotta, because most of our brands are challenger brands, not enterprise. Once a brand gets big enough, they’re not defending shelf space the same way.
The best offer type depends on the category. Buy-one-get-one (BOGO) works well for beverage and frozen because they’re products people stock up on. For something like an açaí bowl, I’d give one free and retarget with a BOGO later; nobody’s buying two smoothie bowls at once.
Usually, 30% off on a brand with no name recognition doesn’t move the needle. Shoppers have to put in too much of their own money for an unknown product, they won’t try it.
Brands often get too attached to tying offers to one SKU but widening the offer to apply to all your products gives shoppers more choice and almost always increases redemption.
The more product reviews that are syndicated, the better.
SEO used to be everything; now it’s AEO. Your product needs to be searchable across every channel, and reviews are the easiest way there. We partner with Bazaarvoice and syndicate reviews directly to Walmart.com and Target.com, which makes products more visible to tools like ChatGPT.
One of our clients, Daiya, is being picked up by ChatGPT when people ask about plant-based butter alternatives Partly because of syndicated reviews and partly because they’re already a known name. I think everyone’s trying to figure it out, but let’s just say the more product reviews you have that are syndicated, the better.
Buyers are exposed to hundreds of brands, just make it easy for them.
Beyond velocity and reviews, we let brands ask shoppers 10 custom post-trial questions. My favorite use of this is to help de-risk a retailer’s investment in the brand.
Going back to Molly Suds, their narrative is about how they compare to conventional, which will always be cheaper and has tons of brand awareness.
So post-trial, we ask shoppers: is this as good as Tide? Would you buy it over the leading brand? We can also show whether they’re Walmart or Target shoppers, and whether they plan to buy again. This data de-risks the brand and gives retailers a forecast beyond just initial velocity.
There’s tons of swaps you can make for scale that you might as well do early.
Brands consistently underestimate how much margin they need before they can really go to market. Then pressures like non-UPF only add to that.
I always tell founders: get real advice early about the swaps you’ll eventually need to make. A lot of founders are too idealistic about their product, which erodes margin until it’s impossible to scale or fundraise.
Aim for 50%+ margins, get good operational advice, and make the trade-off between perfection and scale early. I’ve seen brands wait until year five or six, then have to pull products off shelves entirely to reformulate, repackage, and basically start over. If founders got that tough-love advice from the get-go, they’d save themselves years and a lot of money.
One of the biggest mistakes a brand makes is thinking they know what their shopper cares about.
Working with a lot of owner-operators and founders, I find that one of the biggest mistakes a brand makes is thinking they know what their shopper cares about.
I knew a founder who was completely fixated on the fact that his product used Italian wheat. He was proud of it, convinced shoppers would care because European standards are stricter than North America’s, and that Italian wheat was easier for the body to process. When we actually sampled shoppers, all they cared about was the 23 grams of protein… and this was even before the whole protein craze. He spent years marketing in a direction that didn’t resonate with his actual audience.
I see this constantly. A supplement brand says “gum-free” and shoppers think, what’s gum, and why would it be in here? When you’re close to your mission, you don’t realize how much of an expert you’ve become, or how little the average shopper is tracking what you mean.
