GT Marketing and Comms

Grown in Totnes Case Study

Totnes Case Study

Marketing and Communications

Our marketing job was made easier by choosing to sell our products all in a close geographic area. We knew the local shops and owners, we knew who to talk to and who else to team up with. However it never failed to amaze us how many people had never heard of us; proof that it really does pay to use multiple media avenues for marketing yourselves and to not make assumptions that your message is reaching all of whom it needs to reach. But our role wasn't just to sell, we also worked to broadcast the seeds of a more resilient local diet and help people to make educated and informed choices about the food that they ate. We wanted people to be inspired to make a political act every time they bought food and to create enticing dishes that showcase the local diet on a plate.

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Link to Checklist

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 Sections

8.1 Our Marketing Strategy

8.1.1 Brand Positioning
8.1.2 Our Logo and strapline
8.1.3 Our Communication Channels

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8.2 How Would Our Products be Used?

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8.3 Telling Our Story on Our packaging

8.3.2 Trading Standards Regulations
8.3.3 Optional Information
8.3.4 Packaging Design

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8.4 Printed Materials Used to Tell Our Story

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8.5 Our Online Presence

8.5.1 Our Website
8.5.2 Our Social Media Presence

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8.6 Not Included In This Case Study

8.6 See Checklist 8 Section 8.6

8.7 Not Included In This Case Study

8.7 See Checklist 8 Section 8.7

8.8 Not Included In This Case Study

8.8 See Checklist 8 Section 8.8

8.9 Education and Awareness Raising

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8.1 Our Marketing Strategy

We enrolled the skills of an intern, Marcelle, to help us explore the breadth of our vision and values and form these into the framework of our marketing strategy.

Marcelle encouraged us to explore the marketing communication channel options open to us (see 8.1.3 of the checklist) and how we might use them.

We then spent some time looking at the communication ideas the team had come up with and rating them. In undertaking this process we took into account the following factors:

How effective the communication tool was likely to be for our purpose
The cost
Whether it would reach our target audience in sufficient numbers
Whether it was a short, or long-term tool

From this we prioritised the three most popular ideas.

We then explored who a typical GinT customer was likely to be and their journey to finding our products. To this end Marcelle created 35 year old Stephanie, a middle class woman with an interest in food and supporting local businesses. Stephanie took a keen interest in how to be healthy, and read about food and recipes via websites, books and videos.

Stephanie’s journey helped us to understand what we really wanted people to do, and how they might have a wider perspective about the project. We discovered that selling wasn’t our main goal; bringing people into a closer relationship with their food was. We explored the actions that we wanted the customer to engage in, in order to achieve this goal.

Once we understood the customer journey, we were able to consider the appropriate marketing tools to use at each of the different phases. (Knowledge, interest, consideration, purchase, retention.) We felt that our typical customer was likely to be dark green and an early adopter of innovation and alternative lifestyles. Our products were less likely to appeal to people who did not already have an understanding of local food and health issues in relation to food, mainly because we hadn’t managed to achieve a price that competed with mainstream equivalents.

It is important to say that we didn’t use the outline marketing strategy that Marcelle produced to the letter, but it did provide a good framework and basic understanding around which to build our communications and marketing.

8.1.1 Brand Positioning

How to describe GinT in a sentence:

An enterprise dedicated to providing nutritious, locally produced, staple foods for our community; to expand local food resilience and encourage a healthy relationship with our food.

What GinT offered:
- to make staple crops, that can be dried and stored (principally grains and pulses), a part of the local food offering
- to highlight the important role of this food group in providing a nutritious and affordable source of protein, particularly during the vulnerable hungry gap in the UK

Our USP
- reduced food miles
- a fair price paid to local farmers
- full traceability ensured customers know what has happened to their food to reach them
- customers know the individuals who have grown our products
- improved local food security
- added value circulating in the local economy
Our target audience:
- Environmental and health conscious, educated members of the population with a care for food that is plant-based, local, organic and traceable. Although this audience wasn’t the height of where our ambitions lay, as to a large extend this they were converts, we recognised that we needed to get early adopters on board before we could reach the more mainstream population, and we also needed to get our systems as efficient as possible in order to have our prices be as affordable as possible.

8.1.2 Our Logo and strapline

The values behind Grown in Totnes were wide reaching and complex. It was important for us to find a succinct way to put our ethos and vision across so that people could quickly and easily grasp what we were about. The Grown in Totnes strapline became “expanding the range of local food and filling the gap with grains and pulses.”

8.1.3 Our Communication Channels

In this video we discuss the various methods of communication that we used as part of our marketing strategy and give examples:

All resources referred to in this video can be found within our Resources page , including a helpful checklist of useful items to take to promotional events.

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8.2 How Would Our Products be Used and Eaten?

The range of products that we were able to offer our customers was not only dictated by the type of crop, but also the processing machinery that we had available to us. A key limiting factor to the range of products that we were able to offer turned out to be our inability to dehull grains. This ruled out barley, oats, spelt, einkorn etc; i.e. many of the high value crops.

Spelt

Einkorn

Although we had a dehuller, we weren't able to use it effectively in the processing unit. See GinT Case Study Chapter 3-3.2.2 - Dehuller

We researched into the oat-buying habits of customers before we launched Grown in Totnes and spoke to the local shops to get an idea of the consumption of different oat products: oat flour, oatmeal, oat groats, porridge oats and jumbo oats. We did little research into the consumption of the other crops that we grew in subsequent years, but as active members of the small community of Totnes, who bought regularly from the local shops and had good relationships with the shop owners, we felt that we knew enough, as a team, about the availability of product range in the town.

People loved our pea flour but unfortunately we didn’t have enough of this to sell commercially. The first year was a trial, we had just 200-300 hundred kilos, sadly the harvest failed in subsequent years because contractors were not available to undertake the harvest at the opportune time.

In the latter years we reduced our range just to wheat, albeit revolutionary populations of wheat! An interesting aspect to our ‘typical customer’ was the high percentage of people who were gluten intolerant. This had its own challenges; clearly wheat contains gluten*, but there was a strong story to tell about the difference between our stoneground flour* and mass produced nutritionally supplemented roller milled flour*; between strong gluten flours used in most modern bread (including many sourdoughs*) and low gluten flours; between the high gluten content of flours imported from countries such as the US, Canada and Uzbekistan and the low gluten flours suitable for growing in the UK; the difference between slow fermented sourdough breads for our digestive system and quick rise, mass-produced (Chorley-wood processed*) yeasted breads used by nearly all commercial bakeries.

We discovered that raising awareness around these topics is a slow process, and most effective when told in person, either one-to-one or in talks and practical workshops, such as bread-making. More information on these topics can be found in depth in Andrew Whiteley’s book Bread Matters.

With the more unusual ingredients like pea flour we developed a series of recipes on postcards. We had a strong affinity with the work of Hodmedods and loved their marketing; this is where the idea for recipe cards came from.

We also did a number of in-store tastings, in particular with oat groats to demonstrate how to use this useful, local alternative to rice.

We gave out pancakes in-store for pancake day, and cream teas, in the Summer, made with our wheat flour.

We found generally that our products sold best if they were next to the mainstream equivalent on the shop shelf. If our products were placed together in a separate section this wouldn’t attract the browser, only those who knew to look out for our products.

Wheat+Flour+on+Shelves+at+Happy+Apple+on+angle.jpg

A key issue around product placement arose for us when we realised that our naked oat products (other than whole oats (groats)) were going rancid too fast. The only way we could sell them was frozen, but shops didn’t have enough shelf space for them in the freezer and customers wouldn’t expect to find oats there. In the end we just sold them to wholesale customers and directly from the processing unit to customers who knew us - we could then explain the storage needs to them.

Oats are higher in oil than most other grains and naked oats are higher in oil again - the fat naturally degrades over time into its constituent fatty acids by the action of a lipase enzyme; it is these free fatty acids that make it rancid. All oats that you buy in shops have been steamed in order to deactivate the enzyme. We found that just two weeks after milling, our oats started to taste rancid (bitter in the back of the mouth). We had to do a product recall and remove all but the whole oat groats from shop shelves.

* Denotes items featured in the Glossary

8.3 Telling our story on our product packaging

8.3.2 Trading Standards Regulations

This video shows how we told our story on our packaging and how in this we did not meet Trading Standards requirements.

All resources referred to in this video can be found within our Resources page

8.3.3 Optional Information

Barcodes

We used Buy A Barcode. You simply download the unique barcodes once you have ordered one for each individual product. When you start to supply your products to a retailer, you will need to give them the barcode number, as well as the product name, description, price etc. They will input this information into their inventory system.

8.3.4 Packaging Design

8.3.4.1 Choosing Our Packaging

We chose our packaging to reflect our ethos practically and visually; compostable brown paper packaging for our flour bags and sacks.

Retail products were sold in either 1kg or 1.5kg brown (manilla) paper bags, though the actual weighed amounts in the 1kg bags were only 750g for the flaked oats and flaked wheat as their volume was considerably greater than flour. We bought the bags via the printing company we used, though an alternative is Charlotte Packaging. We chose brown paper tape for its compostability. For our wholesale bags we used 25Kg 3 ply plain kraft sacks. We didn’t print these, but simply wrote the batch number and details of the content on them. See Packaging Costs for details of our costs and sources.

GIT FLour on the shelves at the shops at dartington (1).jpg

8.3.4.2 Choosing Our Look

Our font and colours remained the same throughout our promotional materials, just 2 colours in addition to black and white in order to create consistency and make our brand recognisable:

Hex Colours:

Dark grey #404041, RGB R64, G64, B65
Green: #8cc63E, R140, G198, B62

Fonts:

Bebas (for headings)
Black Jack (for Grown in Totnes)
Bree Serif - for the body of the text

Our logo was dark green and, though we loved the look of the green against the brown paper, it meant that our bags were hard to read, although the black print worked well.

8.3.4.3 Using Our Packaging to Tell Our Story

We wanted our products to have full transparent traceability and so individualised our packaging to highlight the farmer who grew the crop and his location. We also wanted people to know what they were eating and the variety of crop.

We had a lot to say and we struggled to fit it all in the space available, particularly on the smaller bags. We wanted our packaging to give product-specific information, which meant we could only have very short print runs to allow for the annual change of crops. As a result our bags were expensive to produce. In order to minimise this we designed versatility into them, and entered the ‘milled on’ date by hand on each bag. Batch numbers were also entered by hand.

Unfortunately, our very honest and frank way of labelling, that ensured full traceability, didn’t fit in with the standardisation of Trading Standards’ food labelling guidance.

In retrospect, we now realise that the different names of products on our packaging was not enough to differentiate them when seen all together on the same shop shelf. Colour changes would have been better, however colours on brown were difficult. We didn’t want to use stickers because this would be time consuming to put on every bag, and finding labels with a nice finish, not too glossy, compostable, using ecologically-sound glues proved difficult. White bags would have been easier, but we didn’t like the look for our colour scheme, though in hindsight it may have been better to design our colour scheme around the white bags.

8.3.4.4 Printing Our Packaging

We chose to use a lithograph printing company, as they printed with vegetable inks, but lithography requires a custom-made printing plate to be made for each type of bag and was an expensive option as we weren't doing large print runs. It was also difficult to gauge the numbers of bags needed accurately for each product.

8.4 Printed Materials to Communicate Our Story

We had shelf edges in a few of the shops that we supplied, which brought the customer’s attention to our products and set them apart from similar products.

The main wholefood store in town was keen to promote our products and made a GinT display behind the cash desks. We supplied them with A4 posters and recipe cards.

We had a banner printed with our logo and strapline, which we used when we were selling at food festivals and similar events. We did a lot of research into the materials used for making banners. The majority are made from a thick plastic material such as PVC. To avoid plastic we opted for a canvas banner that was made using waste sail material. We were really pleased with the result, thanks to Sails and Canvas

We produced a DL sized leaflet (one third of A4) to display at events and in shops, this succinctly explained the ethos and vision of GinT and invited customers to support us.

8.5 Our Online Presence

8.5.1 Our Website

Emily, our marketing and communications officer, worked on the project for 2 days a week. She created a Wordpress website for us, linked to the Transition Town Totnes website. You can see the website here. Note that it hasn’t been updated since GinT closed down in November 2018.

Our ‘What We’re About’ section set out the perceived problem with our local food system and explained the need for projects like GinT,

and the ethos and vision for the project, using infographics.

From here you can link to information about our farmers, our contact details and a gallery of photos

The Our Products’ section listed our stockists and range of products in a drop down menu

Our Trade section was targeted towards our wholesale customers and provided details for them to contact us

Our Recipe section lists all of our recipes and gives the option of looking at recipes that relate to the different crops via a drop down menu

Anna Thomson, local food blogger of Nourishing Families, volunteered to take product photographs for us including a "lifestyle" shot of her oat risotto recipe which we used on one of our recipe cards.

The final section is our News section, an archive of all of the articles that we wrote over the course of the project. It is a good way to see the evolution of the enterprise from the beginning.

8.5.2 Our Social Media Presence

We set up several social media channels to help us tell our story and achieve our ultimate goal of helping people to connect with where their food comes from, and to build customer awareness and loyalty. The channels we used were Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Each platform has a slightly different emphasis and so played a slightly different role. Facebook was particularly good for supporting events as it allows you to set up temporary event pages, linking to details of the what, where and when and helping you to get your events in front of your Facebook followers.

8.5.2.1 Instagram

This was the perfect place to create and share beautiful images and videos which helped to tell our story - from following the growth of the wheat in the same field over a period of weeks, to photographs of the farmers we were working with, short videos of us processing grains and at events, and the obligatory pictures of delicious food made with our products. The ability to "tag" others in your photos using their handle (e.g.@xxxxx) really helped to catch the attention of wider audiences, to demonstrate our connections with other respected food businesses and to spark conversations. Combining Instagram with supporting apps such as Re-post allowed us to re-share any great photos relating to our products that others had shared - this is particularly helpful when you have a small budget and not much time to generate content. The stories feature on Instagram - ephemeral photos and videos which are only available for a day - is a good way to share more rough and ready imagery which feels immediate, fresh and less mediated - such as behind the scenes goings on. More attention was given to the main feed's collective look and feel - trying to achieve a level of consistency which spoke to who we were.

8.5.2.2 Twitter

allowed us to try and engage in wider conversations, such Devon Food Hour, which you could include yourself in by using the right hashtag, or to engage in conversations happening simultaneous to the Oxford Real Farming Conference. It was also a great place for us to share links to articles that related to our desire to make a change in the food system, and to re-share interesting links and case studies from other millers and bakers.

8.5.2.3 E-commerce platforms

Instagram and Facebook also allow you to connect with several e-commerce platforms, so if you are selling your products online it is worth considering how you highlight your products through these platforms and link people directly to your online shop. However the platforms are for much deeper engagement than just simply selling. Helping people to understand the story of your product helps them understand that what you say on the label is more than just words and, when they see your products in shops, they will be more likely to pick them up if your social media has inspired them.

8.9 Education and Awareness Raising

We collaborated with educational organisations to spread learning on building resilience in food networks and creating food sovereignty. We were keen to give students the opportunity to have practical experience of running a small scale processing venture.

In the planning stages of GinT we teamed up with a Masters student at Exeter University and undertook surveys with local farmers to better understand the historical context of growing cereals and pulses in Devon (See 2.4 - What to Grow - GinT Case study).

We worked with students from our local Schumacher College on an annual basis; some of the horticultural students would volunteer for us in the processing unit for half a day a week. Another course got involved in our Split Pea Party where we celebrated the harvest with students and members of the community. The students organised activities that enabled the peas to be separated from wheat, through sieving, with drumming to keep spirits high.

The two crops had been grown together as a fodder crop by the farmer in Dartington.

We wanted to experiment with the peas and see whether they would make tasty pea flour. The following year the same course ran a hackathon and designed and made some grain drying spikes for us.
See GinT Case study Chapter 5 - 5.1.2 - Drying Options.

Totnes receives a lot of visitors who come to learn about the Transition movement and how Totnes has led the way with so many innovative initiatives.

Transition Tours, arranged through Future Bound, give visitors the opportunity to learn about and visit many of these initiatives. Food projects, including GinT, make up a large part of the content of these tours, as they demonstrate the dense web that the various businesses are part of, and the support that comes from these relationships.

We worked with the local REconomy project and launched GinT at their event, the Local Economic Forum. This had the dual outcome of raising money for us to buy processing equipment and, equally as important, creating community buy-in and loyalty for the project. You can here more about the event in this video:

Volunteers were a crucial element to Grown in Totnes. A key role of the project was to raise people’s knowledge and understanding of local small-scale crop processing and to give them the direct, floury experience! A rare opportunity in today’s highly mechanised and mass-scale food production. We wanted to create an experience that would have a lasting impression and create a story of hope and empowerment. We took time to talk to people who came to the unit, so that they could witness what we were about and we could encourage them to get involved.
(For more information on volunteering see GinT Case Study Chapter 6 - 6.6 - People - Staff, Interns and Volunteers)

We represented our work at a variety of conferences, where we shared and learned from others in the small-scale crop community. We weren’t the experts, and there was a lot to learn! There is a tremendous amount of expertise within the community, everyone has approached the challenge from a different angle and together we combine to create knowledge that is rich and diverse, if sometimes differing in view!

See Resources page for potential links.