Your Next Move - Creating an Effective Brand Narrative

Episode Date: April 23, 2024

Building the right narrative about your brand can be the difference between success and failure for your business—no matter how strong a product you are offering. This episode offers detailed advice about building a successful brand narrative. It also features wisdom from the founder of Farmer’s Fridge, whose work as a traveling salesman motivated him to create a company to solve the problem of finding healthy food options while on the road.

With the VentureX Business Card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase. And with no preset spending limit, your purchasing power adapts to meet your business needs. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at capitalone.com slash VentureXBusiness. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Sarah Lynch,

and you are listening to Your Next Move, Audio Edition, produced by Inc. and Capital One Business. On today's episode, Ayesha Bowe talks with Luke Saunders, founder and CEO of Farmer's Fridge. The company's mission is to make healthy food as accessible as candy bars. With thousands of vending machines serving salads, wraps, and other healthy snacks, Farmer's Fridge is doing just that. In this interview, he talks about defining his brand's narrative and revolutionizing the idea of the vending machine. But before we get to that interview, Inc. correspondent Britt Morse talked with Karen Bonner, VP of Brand and Acquisitions Marketing at Capital One Business. Karen is an expert on what

companies need to keep in mind when developing their brand narratives, and in this conversation, she explains that the key to a successful brand is authenticity. Companies often devote significant resources to developing their brands. What should they be keeping in mind while doing so? One key thing I've learned throughout my career is that a brand identity and narrative has to be authentic. If it's not rooted in something core and true about the product or the company, I've observed that people just have a really hard time

connecting with it. The other big thing to keep in mind is that the brand has to be differentiated. If it's not a unique story compared to other competitors in the marketplace, it won't break through and it doesn't give customers a reason to choose you. Developing the right brand message

requires understanding your competitors. What are some ways brands can do competitive research? Well, competitive research may sound daunting, but it can be very simple. It doesn't have to be technical or expensive. You just have to experience those brands yourself. I would always start online. Go to the websites of the competitors you're aware of and learn about how they're presenting themselves online, on their site, in social, et cetera.

And if you're in an industry like retail or hospitality where there are physical locations, you can even just go visit them yourself and experience the brand that way. What should companies be looking for when they're doing this research? You should really look for the audience that the brand is attracting

and really understand that customer base. Again, you can do that if you go and actually experience a brand live and in person, or you can even see it through things like customer reviews. I think it's also important to evaluate how they're reaching that audience. What channels are other brands using to get their name out there

and to engage with their audience? And you might even start to learn where the gaps are and where you can enter in as a competitor. Is there a channel where they're not present? Do you observe something that's just not connecting with the intended audience? It's a great way to figure out what's working, what's not, and give yourself an opportunity to get in there

and fill those gaps. What advantages can this type of research deliver? Well, understanding your competitive set and the brand narratives that they are putting out into the marketplace is critical to being unique and differentiated. Once you understand what else is out there, you can find your own unique voice.

But as we said, always staying true to your company values and who you really are. And this is going to allow you to create the strategic brand narrative that helps you compete. Thank you for sharing these insights about brands and competitive research, Karen. Thanks so much for having me, Britt. And now, here is Ayesha Bowe's conversation with Luke Saunders. Enjoy. Hi, I'm Ayesha Bowe, and I'm here with Luke Saunders, founder and CEO of Farmer's Fridge. Welcome to your next move, Luke. Thank you for having me.

So, Luke, you've had quite the journey. While on the road as a traveling salesman, you encountered something that we can all relate to, a lack of healthy and fresh meal options on the road. You saw this need, and you addressed it by creating Farmer's Fridge, which now has healthy and fresh meal options at airports and offices all throughout the country. Can you tell me about your journey from being a traveling salesman to founding Farmer's Fridge? Yeah, it started with just kind of driving around in my Subaru trying to find something healthy to eat. And I was selling into the food

industry across the Midwest and realized, you know, there's really efficient ways to make food, but getting it to people is the hard part. So I backed into the idea for a vending machine as a way to put food in places that restaurants couldn't go, make it available 24 hours a day, and then just kind of got started making that food in a shared kitchen. And now we have over 1,500 locations across the country. The whole idea for Farmer's Fridge is to make fresh, healthy food as accessible as a candy bar. And the way that we do that is by integrating as much of the supply chain as we can. So from sourcing the food to making the food so we cook things fresh every day, we're chopping them up in the kitchen first thing in the morning,

then we assemble everything. And then we have over 150 trucks that drive refrigerated across the country every single day to get that food to the vending machines where you show up and buy them. Wow, that's incredible. Every day. When you were in the beginning stages of founding Farmer's Fridge, were you thinking about branding? I definitely was. I knew that as a consumer-facing company, we had to have a really good brand, something that people would understand and connect to. But I had no brand experience, so I had no idea where to start. I think I remember cooking recipes in my kitchen, trying to make the first menu and listening to podcasts about branding. But that's really where it started was knowing that it was important for

a consumer brand, but not fully understanding what that meant and kind of learning over time how to do it. When did you start to focus on the brand message for the company? And how did you go about doing it? So I think the intuitive part was a brand for me was the promise you make to a customer. And how do you get that to come to life in all the touch points that you have with them. The part I didn't really understand is that how does it come to life? So like, you know, visual design, I don't have any design background, I don't have copywriting experience. So I was trying to figure out how do you bring all that together? And actually one of my close friends was a brand and design expert and she was helping me think it through and gave me a lot

of advice and actually came up with the name for Farmer's Fridge. Can you tell us what is the promise Farmer's Fridge is making to the consumer? Yeah, so the promise of Farmer's Fridge is that we're going to make fresh, healthy food as accessible as a candy bar. But what that really means is I want it to be delicious, convenient, affordable, and safe. So those are kind of the big four pillars. And then I want it to be ubiquitous. So you shouldn't even have to think about Farmer's Fridge and eating healthy on the go. I love that, the clarity. Delicious, affordable, convenient, and safe. Very easy for someone to remember. Can you tell me, how many iterations did you go through before you arrived upon that particular brand message?

Well, at the beginning, the name wasn't even the same. So we started as Romaine Empire. It was a friend's idea and it was kind of a cute name. So I needed to incorporate and get going. And I just said, that's it. We're going to keep moving. And then over time, I was giving people my business card and talking about the name for the business. And they were very confused about what exactly we did. So a friend of mine who had experience in brand design

helped me think through why that wasn't working and came up with the name for Farmer's Fridge. And then from there, it was how do you bring all the other elements to life? And so I was able to connect with people in design and copywriting, and they helped me kind of bring that all forward. But then it actually took us a couple of years. We were having feedback from consumers. They still didn't really understand the brand promise. So we'd go up and we'd ask them, you know, what do you think of this? And it was a machine covered in reclaimed wood and plants and all these signs. And they weren't understanding or connecting with the things we

wanted them to, which was the basic message that this is fresh, delicious food in a vending machine. And they were getting distracted by all the other elements. So we actually did a whole brand redesign. And we kind of constantly do this. Every few years, we're looking at, does this still resonate? Is this still the way we want to position this? Does the food line up with the brand? But it's a continuous exercise. It's not something you do once and then just kind of move on. And what was really interesting is we worked with a design studio that did restaurants. Because one of the things that we really wanted people to understand is this isn't a vending machine the way that you think about a vending machine. This is really restaurant quality food. It just happens to be in a vending machine. This is really restaurant quality food. It just happens to be in a vending

machine. So we found a very famous restaurant designer in New York City, and we basically begged them to do the work. The first thing they told us is, you know, we're super expensive, you can't afford this. And they were right. So it took us about six months to actually get them interested in the project. And the way that we did it was we showed them, you know, here's a fridge in a convenience store. Here's a fridge in a convenience store. Here's a fridge in a shopping mall. Here's a fridge in a hospital. How do you bring this all together and make it cohesive and make it fit into other people's space while still having your own brand identity that you can bring to life? But I think actually having that couple of years to really understand, it's like trying on a pair of clothes.

You know, does it really fit and work right? And so you don't have to get it perfect out of the gate. You can kind of iterate over time and make it better. Could you tell me how you gather feedback on the alignment of the brand message? Yeah. So I think I did this at the very beginning by measuring people's reactions as I handed them my business card. So I had my logo on there, the name of my company, and a little line about, we're going to recreate vending. And I'd hand it to people and they'd say, you know, they kind of look confused. So they're just, you could see it in their face, their reaction.

Like, I don't really know what this is all about. And so you have to take those cues from your consumers, from people that you're telling about your product and your story. If they're not really clicking on what it is that you're selling, and very quickly, then you are going to have a really hard time going to market. So there's thousands of people walking past that machine every day. If they don't understand just from looking at it what it is I'm trying to sell them, then I'm going to miss half of the revenue opportunity or more that I could have gotten. And so at the very beginning, I actually worked out of the food court that we were in. My desk was one of the tables right there. And I'd walk up to people and ask them all kinds of questions about their experience

and what they thought of the food and why were they coming back every day or what made them stop and try something to begin with. And I used that as the data to refine the early brand on my own for a couple of years. And then once we had enough traction and enough money and enough locations, we were able to take it to the next level by working with that design firm. But the idea at that point, we actually were very fortunate. We had a board member who had an insights background. She had actually worked at Nielsen and said, you know, you guys really need to do research. And for a company that's only a year and a half old, that idea is not often brought up in the boardroom.

But Consumer Insights is a really powerful tool for figuring out, is the message you're putting out there the message that consumers are receiving? So we were able to work with a friend of ours that had actually had a background in engineering and became a freelance researcher and went around and talked to people and put it together in a very scientific way and basically said two things. One, people have a lot of very positive feelings about your brand, but they're all over the place. And so whatever you're communicating is not clear and it's not resonating the way that you want it to. So we spent a lot of time on the look and the feel and the copy and the messaging.

And then the other thing that she told us that was really interesting is people loved Farmer's Fridge. So we would get like a 9 out of 10. They thought it was really convenient and affordable, which is great. Those are two of the big brand promises. But they didn't like the food very much. And so actually the next hire that we made was a culinary director to help us revamp the menu. But it's a continuous effort of talking to your customers, hearing what they're telling you, and refining it so that you guys are more in sync. Did it hurt when you found out that people didn't really like the food that much? You know, to be honest, it wasn't at all. It was like, oh, great, this is an

easy problem to solve because I had been in charge of the menu up to that point. I don't have a culinary background. I'm not a chef. So it made a lot of sense, candidly. It was like, oh yeah, this is actually easy. I can go hire some culinary talent and do this the right way. I just didn't have the money for that when I started. How did you recognize that the feeling that you wanted the consumer to experience was more restaurant than vending. That was actually the easiest part. We had restaurant-quality food and all these people saying, you know, I'm not sure I want to try food out of a vending machine,

especially fresh salads. How do I know I can trust them? How do I know they're going to taste good? And so the idea from the beginning was to create that restaurant feel. That's why we actually put stanchions, like the things that you would normally see at a line forming in a fast casual restaurant. We put plants everywhere and made it like the vending machine had space around it. So you'd really feel like you were walking into a restaurant. So we knew that from the very beginning.

But the idea of actually refining that and making it really work and doing it in a way that's scalable to 1500 locations because I couldn't climb up on top of the machine and water the plants. So that was all something that we knew as intuitive based on the quality of the food that we were selling and the feedback that we were getting from customers. But it's a continuous refinement effort of finding that balance between scalability, resonance, and what you can actually bring to life for the consumer.

Luke, you've even included the brand pillars on the website. Can you tell me why you thought it was important to do that? Well, I think your brand, as I said, is something that has to resonate. It's really the promise that you're making to consumers. You want them to understand what that promise is so they can hold you accountable and tell you like, hey, I don't think that was meeting your brand promise. And we do the same thing internally. So kind of telling everybody what your values are, telling them what you're solving for allows you to be held more accountable to what that brand is. A brand narrative is about more than your customers. How do you integrate

the brand narrative into the other aspects of your business? A really great brand, in my opinion, is one that is consistent internally and externally. So you don't have to be one thing with your employees and a different thing to your customers. The more it's all the same and it comes from those values that you have that support the problem that you're solving, the easier it is to have a really amazing brand. So we start with that internally with recruiting. Are we bringing in people that are really passionate about solving this problem of making fresh, healthy food as accessible as a candy bar? So like a disproportionate amount

of people here love to cook, love to go to restaurants. We even have a chopped that we do internally where people sign up and they compete to make the best dish and they judge. And we do that once a year just to really get everybody excited about culinary stuff within the company. But then it's also from when you recruit somebody to how you operate every day. So we care about making food delicious, convenient, affordable, safe, and ubiquitous. Everyone here understands that. They know that that's what they're operating against. That's how we hold them accountable for their different functions.

So if you're a driver, we want to make sure that you're getting to your fridge. And if someone's talking to you, you can explain that whole process of where the food came from and how we're keeping it cold the whole way to a fridge. And even the little details that we build up across the company. So if you go to our production facility, we have like the old fridges hung up everywhere and a bunch of old branding and things that are just really fun. But we also have only one room that has windows and that's the public space for all of our employees. And it's just the little things that you do like that, that bring the brand to life for people. How does communicating your brand narrative fit into your marketing strategy? I think for a startup, the brand really starts with the founding team and the leadership team

and making sure that you all understand what problem you're trying to solve and what are the key things that support solving that problem for your consumers. And then the marketing team just brings that to life through design and copywriting and the channels that you communicate on and who you partner with. And so they're really the sort of the clothing that we wear as a brand. But like what kind of clothing and what is the function of that, that starts really with leadership. And then our operating team understands, okay, our job is to make this food as affordable as possible, so we have to be really efficient. In the same way, the marketing team says,

okay, we need to make sure it's approachable, so that means we can't take it too seriously. We can't make things that are inside jokes or ingredients that nobody's ever heard of before. And so they understand that as they bring it to life too, but it's the same exercise for every function in the company. And I think sometimes people focus too much on the marketing department and the marketing aspect, and then you don't have that resonance across the whole company. So you put out a product that might be

really great, but its brand doesn't line up at all with its functional characteristics. And so the marketing team is really at the center of helping me think about how we bring that to life for consumers and tell those stories in ways that make it resonate. But at the end of the day, if you don't have that from the top down, it's not going to work the right way. Let's talk about food safety. Foodborne illness is a real concern when you're dealing with fresh food. I understand that this is a top priority for you. Can you tell us more about how you and Farmer's Fridge handle

food safety? Yeah, so food safety for us is obviously a central pillar. If you're asking somebody to eat your products, you should care a lot about this from day one, and we have, and actually designed the business around food safety. So by making everything in one place, we have a lot of control over the things that are coming into our manufacturing environment. We can clean everything and prep it in a cold room, and then we can ensure that it's getting onto a refrigerated truck and going directly to the point of sale and keeping it cold the entire time. We even built technology into the fridges to allow us to lock things out. So if you remember, there was romaine lettuce a few times that's been recalled nationally. And we were able to say to our team, okay, do we have this in our

supply chain? They actually said we did not. And they had washed it. And so they're like, we're really well covered here from a food safety standpoint. But then from a consumer standpoint, if you're trying to sell them that product, it looks like you're not paying attention. So we actually were able to remotely lock it out. So if you walked up to a fridge the day that that romaine recall happened, you couldn't buy a salad with romaine. And by the next day, we were making salads with the substitute green leaf lettuce and getting that out into the market so that we didn't miss a beat in terms of product availability for people, which also goes back to that idea that if you're going to be convenient, you've got to be there every day for your customers. So you do all of this great work behind the scenes to ensure food safety. Why don't you talk about it more?

Well, I think for a food company, food safety is table stakes. So to talk about, you know, our food is safe is kind of like assumed by the customer is one reason. But the other reason is it's something that, you know, in a brand environment, you don't necessarily say, hey, I'm cool. And then people think it's cool. You want to make sure that you just do the things and keep people safe. And so if we keep doing the things that we're doing and over time people understand them better and better and see what happens in the rest of the world, you know, we get credit for that, but we don't have to stand up and say, oh, this is something that we do every day. And the other thing I think

that's worth pointing out is it's a day-to-day improvement process. So yes, you can have a PhD on your team, but we have over 50 people on our team and all they think about is food safety, whether that's cleaning our facility, swabbing our facility to make sure it was cleaned properly, watching the team as they're making the food to make sure there's no deviation

in how we're preparing it and handling our critical control points properly. So it's much more than just like one person. It's that continuous process and exercise. And to some extent, you want to make sure that you're not putting too much pressure on your team either. Every day, it's like, okay, this is like a brand promise we're making, but just make sure you guys do it well and not necessarily something I need to be talking about all the time externally. Let's talk about the numbers. You closed the Series C at $30 million, led by notable investors. Can you walk us through how you set yourself up for success at each round?

Yeah, so the beginning part, I just want to make it clear, is I didn't know how to raise money when I started Farmer's Fridge. In fact, the first time I needed to raise money, somebody gave me a book and told me, you know, read this and make a pitch deck. And so, again, it's like you can start small. You don't need to raise $30 million on your first day. Most people don't. And so what I look back on now is really how do you sequence this efficiently and make sure that you're raising the right amount of money from the right people at the right stage of your company. So at the beginning, it's really proof of concept. Can this thing even work at all? Then you have proof of product market fit. So does the thing that you created actually solve the problem

for enough people for you to be able to make money? Then you have the proof of your economics. Can you make money off of that idea? And then it's proof that you can scale it up. And then you have to actually scale the business. So those are the stages that you're thinking that you should be thinking about raising again. So what I recommend every entrepreneur to do is actually start at the end. So this is what the end looks like. And these are what the milestones will look like in each of those phases and how much money will I need to get through each of those phases. And of course, at the beginning, it's a total guess. But take whatever you think it is and double it. And that's a good start.

And that's sort of what I recommend, is just kind of go to the end and then work your way backwards at those phases. Does the mantra, always be raising, resonate with you? I have to say no. I really get frustrated by the idea that an entrepreneur or founder should spend so much of their time on fundraising. At the end of the day, your business is about execution and about customers and your team. And if you spend 50% of your time raising money, you're not spending enough time building your company and getting that right. So I think there's probably too much emphasis on fundraising and not enough emphasis on just the internal stuff you have to do to be in a position where fundraising is easy. That said, this business was not something that required no

capital up front. So I got started with my credit cards, liquidating my savings account, and actually transferring my wife's paycheck over to make payroll at the very beginning. She was super supportive. But then over time, we were able to raise a little bit of money, get out of the shared kitchen, prove the concept in a real way. But to scale it up, we had to raise a lot of money. So I'm not saying you shouldn't raise money. I just don't think you should always be raising money. And I think it needs to be much more driven by what does the business need and how does this money help me solve that problem for consumers versus the money being the thing that's validating you on a day-to-day basis. Can you share a little bit more about the funding milestones that you've hit

and how you set yourself up for success at each stage of the race? So for our funding milestones, we actually shared this with the whole company over time. So it really starts with proof of concept. And at the beginning, the idea was, you know, nobody's going to buy lunch out of a vending machine. Who's going to pay $8 for a salad from a vending machine? And my best friend told me this before I was starting. And as I was telling him, like, this is the idea that I have.

And so my goal was as quickly as possible, I want to prove if it's possible to do this. I basically got the business off the ground for like $50,000. Then the next thing that people said was not possible was, well, this will never scale. Like the economics won't work. You have one good location, you know, to make this a real business, you're going to have to have thousands of locations. So we spent the next two years getting to about 20 locations and kind of scraping together money here and there to get to that proof of concept.

We were able to show that the economics worked for one route. So you have proof of concept, then you have proof of economics, and then what I call is like proof of scale. So the next obstacle is everybody said, there's no way this will work. You're going to try to scale it up. Everything's going to break. You'll fail. So we had to raise money to get through that milestone. And then once you've proven that, you can kind of prove this is how we grow. So we've proven that it can scale. Now we're just raising money to grow into that scale. It's kind of the last phase. To what extent has having a clearly defined brand helped you raise money? I think it's helped a lot because we actually look at who our investors are going to be and how that ties back to the mission that we're trying to accomplish and the brand that we have. So early on, one of the things I would do is I would take

potential investors through our production environment. And one of the things I'd be looking for is people that were trying to cut corners on our product or asking, why are we investing so much in things like food safety? We could save a little bit more money. And so those are good tells that these are not going to be people that are aligned with what it is that you're trying to build towards. Another really good example is this business was never meant to be like a small company with 10 vending machines. We want to be solving a problem for how we eat. So the idea at the beginning was, I'm going to change the way the world eats. That's what we wrote on our website. That's what we're still trying to do.

So we wanted people that had that level of ambition. And so if somebody was scared by that, that was good. We said, don't worry about it. This isn't the right investment for you. But just be really clear about who you are. It's just like any relationship in your life. Be real. And then the people will self-select about who should be on that cap table, who's going to support you, who's going to share that vision. And that's benefited us a lot because it's allowed us

to maintain our mission, maintain our brand. And when things happen that haven't been great, like when COVID shut us down, we lost 85% of our revenue in a day. And I called a couple of our board members and said, hey, you know, this is, I think, just a short-term challenge. At the end of the day, people are still going to need fresh, healthy food. They're just going to be in a different place. And the ones who really understood our business and were aligned to that mission, were like, yep, no problem. I get it. Like, go do your thing. You'll figure this out in a couple months. And so just every step of the way, that's a critical thing. And it's hard when you don't have multiple term sheets. But I would recommend, like like take an offer for less money, get the right people involved in the business that you're trying to build. You clearly

have a strong brand narrative for this company. How does that impact your overall success and profitability? I think it's been really essential because we don't actually spend a lot of money on marketing. The marketing that we do is the fridge itself. So you either see the fridge and want to try our food or you don't. And so that point where you're looking at it and you're hungry and we have food available, we have to communicate to you in a split second that this is something that you should try. And all of our growth has been organic growth through the placement of those fridges. And that moment where people are hungry, there's no other options, and they're willing to trust our food and a vending machine.

So it's been really essential to have a brand that communicates that message quickly and efficiently and then to follow through on that brand promise, which is that the food's actually going to taste great and be a good value for your money, so you want to come back. So our repeat rates are three times what we see

with a traditional fast casual restaurant in terms of just the number of visits people are making in a year. And we feel like that's all about delivering on that brand promise. So one element of that is obviously the name of the company or the color of the jar, but it really comes down to did the food you ate deliver on making something that was delicious and safe and affordable? And that's what we're trying to do every day. We've talked about the evolution from the name to the updates in the brand narrative and the promise that you're making to your consumers. Did you start off not wanting to spend a lot of money in marketing, or did you notice that

as these things improved, the brand narrative, the messaging, the name, that you were spending less in marketing? This is a classic example where the decision was made for you as an entrepreneur. So I didn't have any money to spend on marketing. And I had no marketing background. I didn't know how to buy media or do any of these things. So at the end of the day, I said, the fridge is going to be the marketing. That's all I can afford.

I got to make this fridge look great. And I got to make it tell a story from the minute you look at it that I care a lot about the food, that the food is going to taste great, and that you should trust me to just try it one time. Over time, what we did start doing is really trying to reduce that barrier to that first meal purchase. So we were offering it for free, you know, just try it and the food can speak for itself and help you and then you'll tell the story to other people. But the decision was made for us. We didn't have any

money to spend. I had enough money for a vending machine and some time in the shared kitchen and the food to fill the fridge, but that was it. We've talked about the fridge. We've talked about the brand narrative. Can you tell me how this approach shows up in the packaging of the actual food? That's actually a really good example of the brand coming to life. So when I was getting started, I had this vision of putting the salad in a normal salad package, like square box, flat. And I actually was having a really hard time making that look nice and standing up in a vending machine and being something that I would look at and want to buy. And it was that same idea that you just, you're taking feedback from the market. I was showing people they're not really

getting it. They don't think it looks that good. So I knew there was a problem. And actually my brother-in-law had sent me a link to some mason jar salads on Pinterest at the time. And I told him, Josh, I love you, but I don't think this is a good idea because I've already got to get people comfortable with the idea of buying food from a vending machine. Now they're going to have to try to figure out if they can eat it out of a jar. It just won't work. It's too many barriers. And I just got so frustrated trying to fit it into a box that I went and bought a bunch of mason jars at the hardware store and started filling them up.

And they looked so good. I actually sent pictures around to like my mom and a couple of friends like, oh my God, that looks amazing. And it kind of, all of a sudden the brand made sense. It was like, you have these nice mason jars and this farm stand idea. And now the only hurdle is trying to get people

to actually try the product. But it was that iterative, like listening to everybody, not being so stuck in what I wanted to say or how I wanted to do it, but like how do other people want to receive this message and what's going to make that clear to them. We're going to take a quick break and be right back. Here's a little tip for growing your business.

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Just imagine where the VentureX business card from Capital One can take your business. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash VentureXBusiness. Farmer's Fridge is one of your first forays into entrepreneurship. What do you love the most about running the company? What I've loved the most is seeing the vision for Farmers Fridge come to life over the last 10 years. And specifically with the team, we now have over 500 people that care just as much about Farmers Fridge as I do, making that possible every day. So this idea that you can have a crazy idea, you can get started, you're doing everything on your own with brute force, but really building a team and having them help you execute and bringing that promise to more

people, that's for sure the most fulfilling part. What's the hardest part of running your company? The hardest part is definitely that there's still so much skepticism about food and eventing machine or the business in general. So I'll still talk to an investor, say, who's like, well, how do you know you have product market fit? And I'm asking myself, you know, we sold over 10 million meals last year. I'm not really sure when you'll believe that this is working, but it's those kinds of things that are very difficult and challenging. And then you look back at all the progress that you've made and you kind of get over it. Is there anything you wish you would have known when you started this path? I don't think so. I think if I knew everything I know now, I'm not sure I would have started. It always takes longer than you think.

There's a lot more twists and turns coming your way. And so I'm happy that I was kind of blissfully ignorant of how much work was ahead of me. Is there one milestone that sticks out to you that you said, wow blissfully ignorant of how much work was ahead of me. Is there one milestone that sticks out to you that you said, wow, this is actually going to work? Yeah, I very vividly remember being in the food court in downtown Chicago, and I was still the person there greeting everyone at the fridge. And I noticed this one woman who came back every day, literally every day. And she was bringing her friends with her and telling them about this amazing lunch she brought from a vending machine. And then one day she came back and she told me,

hey, just so you know, yesterday I got the wrong salad. It didn't vend properly. But I have to say it was also great. So that was like, you know, just knowing that you had a loyal customer and it was resonating with people. And that's back when the food wasn't very good. What's your next move in terms of moving the company's brand narrative forward?

Right now, we're thinking a lot about how to change the messaging for the audience in terms of the scale that we've reached. So it's really easy when you're in a food court, and it's just you and the customers in there. Now we're reaching millions of people every day and trying to think, like, how do we interrupt? How do we actually have a brand that stands out to you, doesn't feel like everything else? We're right in the middle of rethinking that again for the next 10 years of growth.

What tips may you have for entrepreneurs who are looking to scale their brand narrative? I think the biggest thing you need to be doing is talking to your customers, talking to your team, understanding what elements of your brand that are essential are they picking up on and why, and which ones aren't they and why, and then you adapt to that feedback. So this is it, Luke. We've talked about the vending machine,

but can you tell me how does your brand narrative show up in the presentation of the machine? So I think of the fridge as kind of the nucleus of our brand. So this is going to be how most people experience it for the first time. It's what you see as you're whipping through the airport or walk up in the middle of the night in a hospital. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to bring that to life. And it's everything from little details, like the idea for our logo is actually meant to represent cutting. So it's everything from little details, like the idea for our logo is actually meant to like represent cutting.

So it's almost like that's the shapes you'd get if you cut it or a little bit having the plane of the vending machine not be a straight line because then it just looks like every other vending machine. So immediately your brain says, well, wait a second, there's something different going on here and slows you down. The next thing that we learned is people really want to, like the way they judge freshness is looking at the food, which makes sense. They just want to see it. So everything is kind of in service of getting you to look here and see those beautiful jars, the layered salads,

is the lettuce fresh? Are those tomatoes as red as they can be? And then you're going to move here where it's really like, how do I actually engage and buy something? But the entire thing is just meant to pull the food forward and break that general mental model that you have for a vending machine without going totally over the top like I did on the first one. So we've talked about how the brand narrative shows up in the presentation of the machine. But can you tell me how it shows up in the packaging and the delivery of the product? Absolutely. So when you look in here, the first thing you see is just fresh, beautiful food. That's the number one thing we're going for.

We want full shelves, fresh cut lettuce. We want this thing to say, these guys care a ton about food. They're doing things that are crazy, like pickling their own onions. Like, how do I get this food and eat it? But there's other subtle cues. So for example, you won't see any of the spirals that you'd see in a typical vending machine. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out where could we find a machine that would actually have nothing to block that beautiful food. The elevator will actually come up, pick it up and deliver it right to you. So it's a much more elevated experience. It also allows us to merchandise food at different levels. And then just the entire

freshness is driven by getting that product in there and keeping it at the right temperature. So we're monitoring the temperature. We know every five minutes exactly what it is. And it allows us to just make sure that that food stays at its peak freshness for as long as possible. Not like your fridge at home where you're opening and closing it and letting in all that warm air. For starters, the jar is a really unique way to serve a salad. You've probably seen this on Pinterest or somewhere else. But we have this idea that putting the salads in a jar might be too much friction.

It actually keeps the food fresh. It allows you to see all those ingredients kind of blown up and on display in layers. It also is just what a farmer would eat their lunch out of, I think, every single day. And then we have the ingredients in there with the dressing on top, so you can dump that in and really shake it up. And I actually, like all the time, I'll just hold the salad with one hand, eat it with the other, but you also have plates on the side of the fridge so that you can take it and go and eat it at your desk. The secret is actually that we designed the whole business model around freshness. So we look at when is the lettuce grown and cut in California

and how long did it take to get from that field to our kitchen here in Chicago. And so the lettuce might only be on the truck for a couple of days, and then we're putting it in your salad and getting it to you, versus when you go to the grocery store, it might be 10 days later before you've even purchased the lettuce. So every little detail is how do we get that product to be as fresh as possible for when

you consume it. Would you say that this machine serves as a brand ambassador? And what are your thoughts on that? The machine is absolutely a brand ambassador. We don't have people, that's the entire point. There's hundreds of people making these fresh meals for you every day. But when you get there to buy it, it's just you in the fridge. So the machine really has to bring that to life. That's where bringing the food front and center, having a screen that communicates what we do, even just the speed of the transaction and the smoothness of it and being able to get your food every time. We think about every little bit of that down to the sundries that we put on the side of the fridge so that if you don't have a fork, you can grab something and keep going. But this is the moment where you're going to remember, did we do a good job? Did we bring the brand to life? And we only have 12 square feet to do it. So it's actually a pretty big challenge. And we thought a lot about how to distill that down and make it a great experience. Can you tell me what your favorite part of the machine is? What are you the most proud of? I'm genuinely the most proud of the fact that we have over 1,200 of these and they all look the same and bring Farmer's Fridge to life

in a way that doesn't feel really cookie cutter. And I say that as the person who like built the first machine. So it's just such a great feeling to know that like no matter where you are, the Farmer's Fridge is consistent and still has that human element to it and the fresh food is popping. What are some pieces of advice you could give for people who are looking to create a strong and effective brand? I think number one is what does the brand do for you as a business? So for us, we need you to know that the food is super fresh,

that it's going to be delicious, that you can trust this food. And so we try to bring that to life in all these different ways. Then how are you communicating that one thing that needs to be done for your business? So it's like everything resonates around how you communicate that point. And then three is like how you actually execute day to day so that that internal brand lines up with the external brand and the whole thing supports the mission for your business. I get a lot from hearing about other founders' mistakes or lessons learned the hard way, as I like to call them. Can you share something that you may have learned the hard way when building out this brand? I mean, the general hard learning is that there's still a lot of people that are very skeptical about fresh food from a vending

machine. So that's like 10 years in, I still meet somebody every day who's like, oh, I've seen that thing a million times, but I'm a little worried that there's fresh food in the vending machine. So I think for us, we continue to refine how we bring that to life, but ultimately just make sure we have the freshest, most delicious product and then we're there for you in that moment where you need it. Because once you've tried the product, then it's really easy. People understand, wow, this is kind of a crazy juxtaposition where I can actually get one of the best salads I've ever had from a vending machine. So there's really two things that we do.

One is we'll offer you a discount on that first purchase. So right now, you can go in the app and get your first meal free. Or I want the products to taste really, really good, so good that you actually want to talk about them with your friends. So like the number one way people find out about Farmer's Fridge is they see a fridge, but then there's somebody who's near the fridge

that's like, oh no, you have to try that. So if you go through an airport, you talk to somebody who works in an airline or in the airport, they're going to tell you this is a place that I go to get my lunch. How do you make a salad so good that you can't help but talk about it? Well, it starts with like about six months of work.

So we do a ton of research into like, what do we think people want to eat? And then we will, like, let's say, we're going to make a green goddess dressing. We might make 150 different green goddess dressings just to see which one holds up the best in the refrigerator and tastes great and people like. And then we do blind panels

so that people can tell us like real feedback. And then we do blind panels so that people can tell us like real feedback. And then we get data from the fridge. So I actually know like what's selling really well. And is that because a lot of people are trying that product and not repeating it? Or are they not that many people are trying it, but they're repeating it at really high rates? And so we lean into that feedback from customers to understand like, what didn't you like about it? And we actually are constantly refining things. We do sprints every few weeks to make the menu better. Can you tell me how technology supports your brand narrative?

Part of our brand is how are we taking technology and applying it to make this efficient at scale, give you a consistent experience? And so we have over a half dozen patents that directly support keeping this food as fresh and safe as possible. And that's something that those patented processes allow us to support our brand, but it's not the way you would normally think about a brand. So we actually have a patent on how we get food into the fridge and make sure that it stays fresh. And it comes down to, we make everything today, we don't know where it's going. At the end of the day, we're going to know the inventory in the fridges. We're going to know the probability of selling items in every one of our locations.

And we actually run a cost function to decide where to send it, pick pack it, and put it on trucks across the country. But it's this idea of rebalancing the inventory every single day in real time to make sure that the food that's the freshest gets to the people who want it the most. So that whole exercise, we built the whole business around that, compressing all of those teams into the same building so that we can get you the freshest food possible. But then there's other things like safety is a major goal for us. So we actually have a feature where we can remotely lock out any product in the fridge, every fridge across the network. That's something that no other company in the world could do. So if there's a food-related recall, you won't be able to buy

that salad 30 seconds later. Luke, what are you the most excited about when it comes to the future of Farmer's Fridge? Well, I think just the total amount of fridges we have now. We're over 1,200. We have 1,500 locations total with retail. We've grown 100% year over year, every year for 10 years. So it's just the idea that we are really starting to get to a scale where we're changing the way that people eat. So like millions of people are eating Farmer's Fridge every year, and that's having a real impact. We think about every detail. If that's not clear by now, that's like our whole thing. It's like every ingredient, every step of the process, every interaction that you have with the fridge.

Like we're thinking about that. How does it make this come to life for you and serve what you need? And ordering on your phone is no different. So if you want to order ahead, it allows you to see the inventory, get out of bed, reserve that yogurt before anybody else, get there, pick it up. You don't even have to touch the screen. You can just type in a code. We're working on a feature where you're going to be able to just walk up to the fridge. It's going to know you're there and vend your food for you. Today's been amazing, Luke. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for

coming all the way out to Chicago to check out Farmer's Fridge. I'm really excited to see what your next move is. That's all for this episode of Your Next Move. Our producer is Matt Toder. Editing and sound design by Nick Torres. Executive producer is Josh Christensen. If you haven't already, subscribe to Your Next Move on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Your Next Move is a production of Inc. and Capital One Business.