Daily Crunch

By Jenna Movsowitz

DAILY CRUNCH SNACKS

BUILDING AN OMNICHANNEL APPROACH WITH A MISSION

When Laurel Orley first tried her Aunt Diane’s sprouted and dehydrated nuts, she knew they couldn’t stay confined to the family kitchen. Her Aunt Diane had learned the sprouting technique from her sister, who had traveled to India and brought the recipe back with her. After soaking almonds overnight to optimize digestion, she dehydrated them at a low temperature to preserve nutrients and create the perfect crunch — and Laurel’s entire family, picky eaters included, couldn’t get enough of the transformed snack. Itching with entrepreneurial spirit and addicted to this new family snack, Laurel and Diane teamed up as co-founders to make Daily Crunch Snacks come alive.

This past year, Daily Crunch brought their sprouted nuts to market — during a pandemic. Like many brands that launched during this unusual time, they had to think creatively about getting the product into consumers hands. Here’s how they have steadily grown Daily Crunch in a changing retail landscape:

BUILDING AN OMNICHANNEL APPROACH

Amazon was an intuitive first step for Daily Crunch; while brick and mortar retail doors were closed during 2020, Amazon was booming. Daily Crunch launched with three flavors onto Amazon in June 2020. Though she was a firsttime entrepreneur, Laurel was no stranger to CPG and retail. Prior to launching Daily Crunch, she worked for 13 years on the Unilever business, and she knew that her product had potential to make it to the shelves.

Luckily, Daily Crunch had an early partner on board to help expand their presence in retail. In November, they launched with the KeHE Elevate program, a 2-year accelerator program for emerging brands. Laurel is the first to admit that she didn’t know what to expect when this program began, but was quickly blown away. “Stores from Maine to Hawaii started to pull in our products. Some of these were individual natural product stores that we simply wouldn’t have had the bandwidth to reach out to as a small startup,” Laurel says.

Daily Crunch is now in over 300 stores through KeHE, and the shelf space was only one part of this transformative program: “We regularly have sales calls with our category managers, who give us crucial insights into what’s working on shelf and what’s not. They open retail doors, but also share incredible advice and offer countless discounted promotions and access to trade shows. They both challenge us and cheer for us. KeHE Elevate has been nothing but a positive experience.” While KeHE Elevate earned retail space for the brand, Laurel was eager to further build out Daily Crunch’s omnichannel approach.

It was one podcast with Kara Goldin of Hint Water that altered the way she viewed her new company’s retail strategy: “When Hint was in Target, Kara had asked Target to communicate something to her customers, and Target said they can’t do that — the customers aren’t Hint’s customers, they’re Target’s customers,” Laurel recalls. “This single conversation with Target led Kara to restrategize completely. She knew then that she needed a direct-to-consumer platform for Hint customers to be her customers.” Inspired by this podcast and constrained by the pandemic’s retail limitations, Laurel took 2020 to sit back and rethink her omnichannel approach.

Direct-to-consumer, as Laurel learned from Kara Goldin, allows for the most direct relationship with a customer. This relational piece is the main reason that Laurel shifted her strategy, but she also notes that it has had a great impact on the operations side as well. “If you’re just focusing on getting into as many doors and groceries as possible, you’re constantly spending money on each launch. Each new store requires a promotion, each new pitch requires raising awareness. It can take months before you’re paid back.” Laurel says.

A solution is taking an omnichannel approach where the company can go direct-to-consumer. This allows for the highest margins and gets the company paid immediately, rather than waiting three to six months to get paid by another party. Then, Laurel learned, you can reinvest that money into stores so you can spend less time trying to raise funds continuously just to stay on the shelf.

BRAND CONSISTENCY + GENUINE MISSION = REPEAT CUSTOMER + DEVOTED PARTNERS

Though Laurel knew from the get-go that direct-to-consumer (DTC) was going to be a key strategy for Daily Crunch, she also acknowledges the significant amount of work it takes to solidify a DTC purchaser, let alone a repeat purchaser or brand ambassador. “It’s crucial to put spending behind DTC to discover what your customer is receptive to. Do A/B testing, gain a pulse on what interests them, and stay consistent.” It takes three to five touch points for a consumer to make a purchase, so retargeting is imperative. But if you have one ad that doesn’t look like another ad, the consumer won’t connect the dots. “Stay true to your branding, call to action, and tagline in every promotion you do.”

Consistency doesn’t stop at colors and promotions. Laurel notes that one of the most crucial pieces in solidifying a repeat customer is building a brand they can get behind. Daily Crunch is an incredibly sustainable brand, sourcing their almonds exclusively from Certified Bee Friendly farms with solar-powered irrigation. But they never wanted sustainability to be their core mission. Like nutritional benefits and innovative branding, Laurel and her co-founder Diane always thought of sustainability as a baseline component of any emerging CPG brand. Mission, on the other hand, was to be larger than the product or what it contained. Daily Crunch’s mission of mental health awareness has nothing to do with sprouted almonds — but everything to do with the people behind the brand.

After Diane lost her college-aged son to suicide, she founded The Support Network to bring mental health support and awareness to college campuses. This cause is near and dear to the Daily Crunch team, who not only experienced this tragic loss, but also have their own personal stories and struggles relating to mental health. The team always knew that a portion of their proceeds would go to The Support Network, and that they would work behind the scenes to continue reducing the stigma behind mental health. Without a clear connection between the product and mission, however, effective communication and education becomes critical.

On the back of all Daily Crunch Snacks’ packaging, it says that they donate a portion of their proceeds to The Support Network. But Laurel quickly realized that this declaration didn’t do enough work in communicating the “why,” or tying the brand to the mission. In the same way that your branding has to be consistent across all fronts, so does your mission. “We recently received feedback from a major awards program that they wanted to know more about our mission, but couldn’t find it on our website,” Laurel says. Currently, their mission is woven into the ‘About Us’ section of their website. But this feedback emphasized that the mission deserved its own section to explain the connection between the mission and brand, and share resources to get more involved. The team is now working to build this out as a separate tab on their website as well as incorporate it more in promotional materials related to the product. They also have been dedicating more space on their social platforms to share mental health resources and experiences. For Mental Health Month, the social team opened up the platform to share personal mental health stories from members of the Daily Crunch community.

“We now share our own story at every single touch point, from suppliers to co-packers to buyers and investors,” Laurel says. “When you are finally able to speak to a buyer or potential partner, you may only have a few minutes. We are always sure to use our limited elevator pitch as an opportunity to start dialogue around our mission.” Integrating mission in their team’s rhetoric not only invites others to personally connect to the mission, but also ensures that all potential brand partners feel passionately about the cause.

“We were talking to a buyer for a large chain store a few weeks ago and brought up our mission. The buyer wrote to me a few days later not just to rave about our product, but to thank me for sharing my mission because it resonated with her so much.” For Laurel, it’s a grounding moment to remember that seemingly transactional relationships can be rooted in a meaningful mission. “It feels authentic because it is authentic. It’s something we can talk about on a personal level. It’s something that makes us memorable for more than our product.”

Laurel Orley is CEO and co-founder of Daily Crunch Snacks. With more than 15 years of media and advertising experience, Orley largely oversees the marketing, and strategy of Daily Crunch Snacks. After working 13 years at Mindshare on the Unilever business, she found herself loving the consumer-packaged goods world, but wanting to work for a brand she could create from the ground up. While on the Unilever account, Orley worked on flagship billion dollar brands such as the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty and staple brands Dove Men+Care, Hellman’s, Lipton Tea and the Suave portfolio. While on maternity leave, she kept finding herself reflecting on how she was so inspired by Diane’s snacks and their differentiating factor in the marketplace. Orley then joined her aunt, and founder of Diane’s Snacks, Diane Orley, to launch Daily Crunch Snacks.