Francis Ford Coppola Winery Scores with ‘Digital Endcap’ On Meal-Planning Website
CPG brands are looking for ways to promote themselves and their products in an increasingly digital environment. A meal-planning outfit called eMeals is giving them a new way to achieve visibility and drive sales in a grocery-retailing landscape increasingly oriented around e-commerce. It’s a sort of “digital endcap” that echoes effective product and brand merchandising from the physical world of the supermarket, by calling out specific products that could be included in or complement eMeals recipes.
Francis Ford Coppola winery is one CPG brand that already is in its second round of working within eMeals’ weekly meal plans through linkage to the week’s recipe content. After a March campaign in which the Sonoma County, California, winery promoted its relationship with the Academy Awards via eMeals, the eponymous brand named for its famous Hollywood-director owner celebrated Francis Ford Coppola’s 80th birthday in April in part by joining with eMeals.
“We understand that the wine consumer is hungry for education, but often [is] really intimidated,” Dennise Rivers, director of trade marketing for the Coppola winery, told CPGmatters. “Being able to capture the consumer, the shopper, in the planning phase makes it a lot less intimidating. We found [eMeals] was a unique opportunity for very organic integration.”
The eMeals platform fit into Coppola’s overall strategy of “hitting that consumer in a very organic way” at “multiple points through their journey, whether it’s pre-shopping, in the store or post-shopping,” Rivers explained. “We provide them with the necessary education to feel like they’re getting nuggets without being overwhelmed by how much typical wineries educate their consumers.”
Forrest Collier, CEO of Birmingham, Ala.-based eMeals, said Coppola is “thrilled with the simplicity and measurability of what we do. We’re providing a real service to the consumer and, as we do, highlighting their brand and product.”
Other CPG brands “have really just turned the page with us to begin discussions in the last few months,” he said. One major CPG company is interested, Collier said, because “we emphasize the customer first, and then allow the product to be shifted into the online world where otherwise CPG brands can lose touch with consumers.”
Collier explained that, “in yesterday’s world, a CPG brand paid money to be on an endcap at Kroger. Now you can be on our app, listed first in an online cart. Our app makes shopping lists so that certain products [populate] an online shopping list. That provides a ‘digital endcap’ – placement on that shopping list.”
The digital-endcap idea, Collier explained, is the logical outcome of the evolution of eMeals to meet customer demands. “For a decade, we have helped users get dinner done,” he said. “Consumers want fewer and fewer decisions. So, if we make product decisions in their shopping list, that further simplifies things. It doesn’t mean they have to use that product, but it does give them the ability to put in first place certain products across our meal inspirations.”
eMeals hires registered dietitians and nutritionists to write its recipes and then deploys the recipes online, organized into diet regimens including Keto, Low-Cal and Diabetic, as well as Budget Friendly. There are 15 different “food styles” in all. Consumers choose one and are offered seven recipes that fit the genre; then the app comes up with a one-stop shopping list that covers the ingredients for all the recipes.
For example, eMeals is catering to the growing number of consumers who area adhering to the keto diet with a new “4-Week Keto Plan” that delivers a week’s worth of keto meals to the app every seven days. Each installment includes seven dinner menus along with ideas for breakfast, lunch and dessert to help consumers stay in ketosis. Dinner options range from skillet chicken with spinach cream sauce to slow-cooker beef-and-cheese-stuffed chiles, meat lover’s pizza soup, shrimp scampi over zucchini “noodles” and lettuce-wrapped turkey burgers with avocado mayo, each with step-by-step instructions and keto-approved side dishes.
“We curate our stream of recipes across those food styles to help moms, dads, single people get dinner done,” Collier said. “We’re not providing just an occasional idea – nor are we putting up a million recipes that you have to go figure out how to find. It’s a curated stream for what you want, and there are plenty of recipes so that you can get as much variety as you want.”
As Collier put it, eMeals and its new digital-endcap approach help time-strapped consumers move on from the do-it-yourself chore of “compiling shopping lists by sitting at the kitchen table writing them out, or finding recipes on Pinterest and doing a lot of hunting and pecking and figuring out how that recipe works. We’re making recipes shoppable. We have ongoing relationships with users who are looking to solve everyday dinners. It’s not hard for CPGs to see the impact that relationship can have in their world.”
If a consumer has a list of recipes and four of them require cheese, for instance, the eMeals app “will yield one bag of cheese on the list and the required package size” to cover the ingredients in all the meals. “It’s not a dumb list, so that you have to figure out exactly how much cheese you need.” Plus, a user of the app “can push that list through to Walmart for pickup, for example, or to Instacart or Shippt for delivery.”
Coppola wanted to complement its official wine sponsorship of the Oscars with a way to enhance the home-viewing experience, Rivers said. “That was a natural tie-in,” she explained. “So, we developed an occasion plan that tapped into very specific varietals of our wine and worked with the eMeals team to find those complementary recipes that would enhance the flavor of the wine.”
Coppola promoted the platform on its social-media channels and in an integration with Wine Enthusiast magazine online, while eMeals promoted the cooperation to its own database. For Coppola’s birthday, the winery created a content-driven microsite “with all of his favorite things,” Rivers said, including celebrations in the Italian tradition around drinks and food. EMeals provided “very specific blog posts and developed recipes that tied into the healthy-lifestyle approach” favored by the director.
Overall, Collier said, “We’re making it easy for people to try online grocery purchasing. We’ve taken all of the friction out between inspiration and pick-and-go, for that order to be gathered for pickup or delivery. We’ve increased the basket size for retailers as well as the frequency of shopping. We get people on the regular rotation of solving their dinner through eMeals.
“Consumers tell us in survey data that they cook more meals each week because they can use the app. That’s adding more meals to the grocer’s side versus McDonald’s or some other drive-through,” he summed up.
Fine wine, great food and digital innovation, three of my favorite things!
?Article shared by Jonathan Gross, senior partner and founder of AMG. As experts in CPG shopper marketing, we encourage brands to consider where and how they may engage shoppers to increase the conversion from browsing to purchase. And AMG is available to help guide the way. Avid Marketing Group is a 32 year old shopper marketing firm with a focus on helping consumer brands win at retail. www.avidinc.com.