Today’s panelists are Megan Reamer is the co-founder and CEO of Jackson’s Honest, a healthy foods company. Jackson’s Honest makes potato chips, tortilla chips and grain free puffs all cooked in organic coconut oil. Patrick Vlaskovits is an entrepreneur and 2 time New York Times bestselling author. His writing has been featured in the Harvard Business Review and the Wall Street Journal, and he speaks at technology conferences worldwide. And our third panelist is Bret Boyd is the CEO of Knoema, a software platform for data access and discovery. At Knoema, Bret and his team build tools to help public and private-sector organizations make better decisions with data.
During today’s episode, I’m interviewing not one, but three exceptional CEOs. This episode is a bit different than my other podcasts, because we recorded it live in front of a audience of hundreds of executives, so the style and format is slightly different than usual.
Here's the video recording of the live episode if you prefer to see my sky blue eyes while I impart wisdom into your brain like a boss:
The audience Q&A is from 42:40 - 57:00.
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Megan Reamer is the co-founder and CEO of Jackson's Honest, a healthy foods company. Megan and her husband Scott started Jackson's Honest as a way to share their son Jackson's story and the delicious snack foods they made for him. Jackson's Honest makes potato chips, tortilla chips and grain free puffs all cooked in organic coconut oil. Their son's autoimmune disease defined the types of foods he could eat and when they started addressing his disease through diet and nutrition in 2003, specifically a paleo and ketogenic diet, they couldn't find the foods they needed so they made them all from scratch. These delicious products were some of those foods.
My main takeaway from my conversation with Megan was this idea of "Product-Channel Fit."
It’s not something we talk about directly during the interview, but it’s something that is present in the way Megan has gone about marketing and selling her healthy snack food products.
What I mean by Product-Channel Fit is that specific consumers want to purchase or buy from specific venders in specific ways. The environment and the ritual someone goes through to make a purchase has an impact on how the customer feels about said product - and it may be just as important, if not more important, to choose the right CHANNEL for your product as it is to ensure your story and branding and pricing are on point.
For example, there are many food companies in the world. There are fewer, but still many, healthy food companies in the world. There are even fewer healthy SNACK food companies in the world. And those with their products on the shelves of Whole Foods can be counted in the dozens. So there’s less competition once you get onto the shelves of Whole Foods, and that's a big plus, but even more importantly: the type of people who shop at Whole Foods have channel-specific expectation of the products they purchase. The healthly, organic, anti-inflamatory message of Jackson’s Honest snack foods is a perfect match for this group of customers.
In a nutshell, it would be hard to imagine what Jackson’s Honest would look like if Megan hadn’t adroitly positioned her products on the shelves of Whole Foods when they first got started. Now, of course, they have the positioning to expand into a broader range of stores, without losing that consistent, congruent brand and story - and that's exactly what Megan is planning for the future of her company.
And much more.
Subscribe to In The Trenches on iTunes
Did you enjoy today's broadcast of In The Trenches? Please click here to leave an honest rating and review on iTunes. Your review helps me spread the word of this podcast, which allows me to line up amazing guests and continue to produce this podcast ad-free. Thanks so much in advance for your support.