UNSTUCK 010: The Quarterly Crit with Nutella, Smug and Cod Almighty

Continuing the spirit of constructive feedback on notable sustainable food launches, the UNSTUCK crit (short for critique) is back. Here we review launch news from the consumer perspective (those who ultimately make or break a successful product launch) and capture valuable marketing lessons to be learnt.

This time around there are three launches that caught our attention, and sent our collective thumbs pointing 👍 and 👎. Sometimes we’ll agree, sometimes we won’t, but we’ll always identify what we believe is working well from our experience leading food brands and designing brands and what we suggest could be done better.

Let’s dive in . . . 

Plant-based Nutella 👍👍
Imitation is a road to nowhere, unless you’re the leader

Regular readers hopefully know by now we fly the flag of differentiation and worship at the church of distinctiveness. These two things are critical to cut through and change consumer behaviour in the cluttered consumer goods world.  So why 👍👍 for a promised plant-based product launch that goes against our mantra of NEVER doing identical? (on a rushed trip round the supermarket you could easily grab it believing it to be the original).

Nutella is a globally recognised mega-brand (one jar sold every 2.5 seconds) showing up with an identical version of itself – but plant-based. Their value is their brand (the iconic jar, the black and red logo – thank goodness they haven’t opted to “go green” – the bread and knife with a smear of Nutella).

This means they play by completely different rules of the game to new market entrants. They trade on familiarity, nostalgia and consistency built up over decades. They don’t need to be different, but everyone who wants to win their consumers, does. And this launch shows us exactly why.

When a mega-brand backed by the might of Ferrero sees upstart brands imitating them they move to crush them with the weight of years of value built in their brand. In doing so, they also grab new distribution opportunities (in this case supermarket free-from aisles and plant-based sections of online shopping sites they couldn’t previously reach).

This last week we saw a European distributor and the alt protein community very excited about this launch. For Ferrero, it’s likely a small launch they won’t invest heavily behind, but it will drive some nice incremental growth and keep the upstarts at bay. As others have pointed out, this is a drop in the ocean of what Ferrero needs to be tackling from a sustainability perspective (there’s a lot more palm oil than milk powder in a jar of Nutella).  

This is why upstarts can’t be identical – they have to be different, and better – to disrupt their potential consumers from reaching for the trusted old jar of Nutella. Imitation is a road to nowhere, unless you’re the leader.

Smug Dairy 👎👎 
Manufacturer thinking that’s dead on arrival

Nobody likes smug when it comes to food as Monty Python pointed out 55 years ago. That’s why the Smug Dairy launch from a company of Kerry’s stature is baffling to us from both a strategic and an executional perspective.

The entire brand proposition hangs on blended as if it was a benefit in and of itself that consumers should care about. It is not. Blended is just a product formulation that, if left hanging naked as is the case here, simply leaves people confused. Even Danone’s discontinued NextMilk and Wondermilk blends, may they rest in peace, learned that lesson.

The choice of launch SKUs is also clearly manufacturing-centric with a blended variant of everything they make, rather than taking a consumer lens and figuring out which occasions and products would relate to the proposition. Tubs of butter play a very different role in people’s lives than the rituals of coffee, which is why even a market leader like Oatly is staying away from bulk occasions while expanding the category.

Then there is the execution that makes us want to reach for 🤦 instead of just 👎. Putting the questionable name aside, the decision to use random color codes for different SKUs fragments the brand from the outset, giving up any hope of building distinctive assets or color equity. It doesn’t help that blue butter, snot green milk, and red cheese do not leverage established category or taste cues either.

Starting the blended discussion with a consumer benefit, building a portfolio around it, and then bringing it to life with care and craft would be much more likely to result in a delicious feeling for everyone involved.  

Cod Almighty 👎👎
Replication will do no better with fish than it did with chicken or beef

The perfect corollary to our earlier Nutella discussion comes in the form of The Vegetarian Butcher’s Cod Almighty launched into UK supermarkets in April. It’s clear that Unilever is trying to apply the Ben & Jerry’s playbook here, keeping the retro counter-culture vibes of the brand and giving each variant a cute sounding name as they scale it globally.

But unlike a pint of Cherry Garcia or Phish Food with their surprising bits of chocolate or marshmallow, there’s no discernible difference below the surface of this particular Almighty. The best The Grocer could come up with in its announcement of the launch was that it is a “battered cod alternative made of structured rice flakes” to “replicate the flakiness of white fish”.

Let us say it once again: mere imitation or replication is not a viable strategy for disruptor brands among which The Vegetarian Butcher surely counts itself. A mainstream consumer is not going to go out of their way to get the same thing they’re already getting from their usual animal protein, as we’ve seen time and time again.

Instead, The Vegetarian Butcher, or The Vegetarian Fishmonger in this case, should be single minded and clear about what is so mighty about their cod. Is it health? Is it nutrition? Is it taste? Is it convenience? We’re not sure, and the great British shopper probably isn’t either.

Finishing on a dose of positivity

This above doesn’t make for hugely happy reading. The only 👍 for a multi-national company launch that isn’t really that significant for them. But it’s not all doom and gloom out there as far as bringing more consumers into sustainable foods goes.

A notable mention for a brand we’ve covered before is the Huera Fest. Keeping with their positioning of successors (not alternatives) Huera Fest puts their unique spin on the summer festival, celebrating food the way it should be celebrated. Meanwhile, Oatly’s super cute single serve format is a smart, consumer-driven move that brings the brand into a whole new set of occasions when consumers access milk on the go. What an opportunity to displace the awful long-life little milk cups that no-one actually likes (if they can successfully open them) whilst reaching more consumers to trial the brand and have a positive experience doing so.

Both relatively small as far as launch news goes, but both a definite 👍👍.