Commercial Food Manufacturing Marketing Case Study

The Client

Driving the next generation of growth for a half billion dollar food manufacturing partner

Crider Foods is a fifth-generation contract food manufacturing and packing partner with a history of leadership, both in its local community and the manufacturing space at large. As a respected white-label partner to some of the world’s most well-known brands, its state-of-art production capabilities support the most recognized, pouch, and frozen foods products on the market – from popular lunch meats to ready-to-eat family meals. Its products can be found on grocery store shelves as well as local food banks, inside ready-to-eat military rations, school lunches, and much more.

The Pain Point

Big Growth on a Small Marketing Footprint

Crider Foods began laying a foundation for growth into the enterprise food manufacturing space in late 2018. Its process started with a brand audit – an exercise in which mixed consumer sentiment surfaced as a recurring opportunity for growth. In turn, the company wanted to leverage its history of community leadership – including charitable work, professional development, and civic engagement – to help shape its reputation, support recruiting, and drive increased demand among its increasingly consumer conscious business clientele. Making the pivot would require a wide range of ongoing and tactical communications expertise though and a team to oversee it.

The company didn’t have a large marketing footprint and its long-term business strategy didn’t include building one. As a sales-based brand, it wanted to stay lean and focused on its charter by leveraging outside partners to deliver supporting strategy, resources, and expertise. Its ideal partner would embed into the organization’s existing infrastructure, taking direction from an internal marketing executive and delivering ongoing marketing support on both an ongoing and tactical basis. Not only would it need a full-stack team of expert resources, it needed one that could spin up or down quickly, based on various new opportunities and painpoints.

The Strategy

Reposition a Global Leader in Food Manufacturing with Integrated Marketing Strategy

Catalyst’s integrated strategy was designed to soften and fill out the company’s brand narrative with community-focused content deployed through ongoing embedded digital and communications marketing initiatives.

Branding

Our brand team worked to humanize the organization’s visual and editorial style making them feel more contemporary, friendly, and community-focused. We aggregated its materials into a design system that could be used to administer the brand across silos.

Content

We developed a wide array of content supporting the organization’s updated brand strategy, from copywriting to multimedia photo and video content used to support the brand’s online communications as well as sales collateral, billboards, public relations, et al.

Digital

We collaborated with the company’s sales and marketing leaders to design, and build a community-forward website that highlighted the brand’s outreach initiatives, capabilities, and leadership and positioning it a trusted business partner for quality focused brands.

Communications

Our team assumed management of the brand’s social media, email, and public relations channels, shaping messaging consistent with its recent brand overhaul and built to communicate the company’s most important community-focused news and announcements.

Out-of-Home

We worked with the company’s human resources department to create and deliver an array of out-of-home marketing campaigns including billboards and retail posering supporting its hiring efforts and other community outreach initiatives.

THE PARTNERSHIP

Keeping the Team Focused on Growth

Catalyst’s project team embedded directly into the company’s existing marketing operations workflow working with departmental stakeholders to begin implementing the updated strategy. Task setting is conducted by its VP of Marketing and Human Resources with collaboration administered through a third-party chat application and email with semi-monthly sprint meetings to discuss past project results and additional upcoming projects. Outgoing communications are proofed and approved by senior managers from around the organization through Catalyst’s publishing platform and assigned via Catalyst’s external project management software.

“I can’t say enough about Catalyst’s team. We worked with the company as part of a process to prepare our brand for the next stage in growth. It included branding and a website as well as ongoing social media, email marketing etc. They’ve done a great job, every step of the way.”

 5/5

THE OUTCOME

A Food Manufacturing Marketing Strategy that Works

Catalyst completed the company’s updated set of brand strategy and began rolling out updates within six months of starting the project. The work has been used to inform a wide array of newly formed communications including both internally and externally facing social media, email, public relations, out-of-home marketing and soon, its new website. The response among internal stakeholders has been overwhelmingly positive with additional increases in hiring, lower attrition, and increased interest from current and prospective clients.

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