Podcasts about fresh direct

In 10 quick but memorable minutes I'm sharing my observations and experiences with marketing strategies I had close encounters with over the recent Memorial Day weekend. From an innovative Fresh Direct pop-up, to a Rosé Soirée in the Hamptons with missed promotional opportunities, these are my thoughts on some effective ...and ineffective ... marketing tactics. And I borrow from one of the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, by brilliant marketing strategist, Jack Trout. First, learn how my friend Joanne (who happens to be Jack Trout's daughter) and I popped into a pop-up for Fresh Direct. We were in pursuit of coffee but got a surprise stimulating conversation with the interim CMO, instead: Jackson Jeyanayagam. He explained their strategy was to build awareness for their new delivery service and display the quality of their products "IRL."  Fresh Direct PopUp store Learn which of the 22 immutable laws Jackson was aiming to apply; and the overlap with he, that law and AB InBev! Then, we had a blast sampling 20 kinds of rose', but can we remember which one we preferred -- to buy again? Blame the drinking, sure, but I think it was more the missed marketing opportunities at the Soiree.  (TWO really stood out, though, which you can read about in my new Substack Newsletter, "Moss Hysteria"!)  Then, I popped over the next day -- back in NYC -- to check out Cognitiv AI's pop-up at Grand Central, promoting mental health and positive news. It was a blooming success. Learn why.  Overall, great experiences that showed how valuable experiential marketing can be! Key Moments: 00:32 Fresh Direct Pop-Up 03:17 The Importance of Branding and Communication 04:27 Applying Lessons from Ries & Trout's "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" 05:54 Event Marketing: The Rosé Soirée 09:31 Memorable Marketing: Cognitive AI Pop-Up 10:17 Get More in my NEW Newsletter, "Moss Hysteria" on Substack Please Follow, Connect & Share the Love of Insider Interviews: With Media & Marketing Experts LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mossappeal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insiderinterviews Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/InsiderInterviewsPodcast/ Threads: https://www.threads.net/@insiderinterviews Blusky: https://bsky.app/profile/mossappeal.bsky.social If you enjoyed this episode, please share with another smart business leader, give me five stars... and leave a comment on @Apple or @Spotify or on @YouTube.  Or a tip in my jar to help me tip my producer, Jim Mullen!: https://buymeacoffee.com/mossappeal! 

Voor de tweede dag op rij is het miserie voor de koers van ons grootste beursbedrijf. Want de cijfers vallen ook na een nacht slapen nog steeds tegen. Het lijkt erop dat beleggers het vertrouwen kwijt zijn, en daardoor raakt ASML ook nog eens een titel kwijt. Want het is nu niet langer het grootste techbedrijf van Europa. Je hoort of en wanneer ze die titel, en het vertrouwen van de aandeelhouder weer terug kunnen winnen. En we hebben het deze aflevering ook over LVMH. Bij het bedrijf zijn sippe gezichten te vinden. Het luxemerk achter Louis Vuitton, Tag Heuer en Dior noteert voor het eerst sinds de pandemie een krimpende omzet. Het weet maar geen oplossing te vinden voor de groeiende afkeur van de Chinese consument. Daar lopen de verkopen namelijk hard terug, en zitten de verkopen zelfs op het niveau van de pandemie. En Just Eat Takeaway heeft het er maar lastig mee. Het verliest op zo ongeveer alle vlakken klanten, en die klanten leveren ook nog eens minder inkomsten op. Zelfs een samenwerking met Amazon mag voorlopig nog niet baten. Alleen in Noord-Europa lopen de zaken goed. Maar weten ze daar lessen uit te trekken?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Voor de tweede dag op rij is het miserie voor de koers van ons grootste beursbedrijf. Want de cijfers vallen ook na een nacht slapen nog steeds tegen. Het lijkt erop dat beleggers het vertrouwen kwijt zijn, en daardoor raakt ASML ook nog eens een titel kwijt. Want het is nu niet langer het grootste techbedrijf van Europa. Je hoort of en wanneer ze die titel, en het vertrouwen van de aandeelhouder weer terug kunnen winnen. En we hebben het deze aflevering ook over LVMH. Bij het bedrijf zijn sippe gezichten te vinden. Het luxemerk achter Louis Vuitton, Tag Heuer en Dior noteert voor het eerst sinds de pandemie een krimpende omzet. Het weet maar geen oplossing te vinden voor de groeiende afkeur van de Chinese consument. Daar lopen de verkopen namelijk hard terug, en zitten de verkopen zelfs op het niveau van de pandemie. En Just Eat Takeaway heeft het er maar lastig mee. Het verliest op zo ongeveer alle vlakken klanten, en die klanten leveren ook nog eens minder inkomsten op. Zelfs een samenwerking met Amazon mag voorlopig nog niet baten. Alleen in Noord-Europa lopen de zaken goed. Maar weten ze daar lessen uit te trekken?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ooit vond Frans Muller het een prachtige toevoeging aan de verzameling van Ahold-bedrijven: FreshDirect, een boodschappenbezorger in de omgeving van New York. Maar het bleek een groot fiasco. Na twee jaar aan verlies verkocht Ahold Delhaize het bedrijf aan Getir, maar hoeveel ze er destijds voor kregen, dat bleef een raadsel. Tot nu! Ahold zou er het symbolische bedrag van één dollar voor hebben gekregen, en eigenlijk maakten ze nog meer verlies. Naar verluidt meer dan een half miljard dollar. In deze aflevering hoor je of het weggeven van FreshDirect de juiste keuze is geweest voor Ahold. Daarin hebben we het ook over Boeing. Dat waarschuwt alvast voor de kwartaalcijfers volgende week, het wordt namelijk geen prettig bericht. Er komt een recordverlies aan van ongeveer 6 miljard dollar. En de topman grijpt meteen in, want er worden zo'n 17.000 banen geschrapt bij de vliegtuigbouwer. En beleggers in laadpalenproducent Alfen krijgen eindelijk een opsteker, want concurrent EVBox wordt opgedoekt. Moederbedrijf Engie is klaar met de verliezen van de laadpalenmaker en zet een punt achter het avontuur. Dat betekent meer ruimte in de markt voor Alfen, iets waar aandeelhouders het hele jaar al op zaten te wachten.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ooit vond Frans Muller het een prachtige toevoeging aan de verzameling van Ahold-bedrijven: FreshDirect, een boodschappenbezorger in de omgeving van New York. Maar het bleek een groot fiasco. Na twee jaar aan verlies verkocht Ahold Delhaize het bedrijf aan Getir, maar hoeveel ze er destijds voor kregen, dat bleef een raadsel. Tot nu! Ahold zou er het symbolische bedrag van één dollar voor hebben gekregen, en eigenlijk maakten ze nog meer verlies. Naar verluidt meer dan een half miljard dollar. In deze aflevering hoor je of het weggeven van FreshDirect de juiste keuze is geweest voor Ahold. Daarin hebben we het ook over Boeing. Dat waarschuwt alvast voor de kwartaalcijfers volgende week, het wordt namelijk geen prettig bericht. Er komt een recordverlies aan van ongeveer 6 miljard dollar. En de topman grijpt meteen in, want er worden zo'n 17.000 banen geschrapt bij de vliegtuigbouwer. En beleggers in laadpalenproducent Alfen krijgen eindelijk een opsteker, want concurrent EVBox wordt opgedoekt. Moederbedrijf Engie is klaar met de verliezen van de laadpalenmaker en zet een punt achter het avontuur. Dat betekent meer ruimte in de markt voor Alfen, iets waar aandeelhouders het hele jaar al op zaten te wachten.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

With the Olympics off to an incredible start, Jim welcomes a guest on The CMO Podcast who's in the middle of all the excitement–Gene Foca, the Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer at Getty Images. Founded in London in 1995 by Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein, Getty Images is a global visual content creator and marketplace, with annual sales approaching $1 billion. Getty has an enormous library of stock images, editorial photography, video, and music; each year they cover more than 160,000 news, sports, and entertainment events. It operates primarily as a B2B company, with clients in advertising and design agencies, media companies, and in-house creative groups in corporations. Gene has worked as CMO at Getty for seven years, and the company added Chief Revenue Officer to his remit last year. Way back, Gene studied accounting as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, but quickly shifted to a diverse career path in marketing. Gene spent 10 years of his early career at WarnerMedia, before working at News Corporation, Amazon and Fresh Direct and then moving to Getty in 2017 as CMO. As the world celebrates the Olympics, Jim speaks with the CMO who helps bring those images home. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tiffany Wilburn is the Fractional CMO at Clever Disruption, where she helps food and beverage brands, agencies, and tech companies scale. She is also a Business Mentor and Coach at The DEC Network, which pairs entrepreneurs with business veterans who can identify emerging opportunities. With over two decades of global marketing leadership, Tiffany has transformed CPG and hospitality businesses through her expertise in brand management and strategy, product innovation, retail merchandising, and consumer insights. In this episode… In a crowded market overflowing with identical products, brands must tailor their product marketing strategies to various consumer demographics. Some of the world's most iconic brands have fully repositioned themselves while maintaining customer loyalty. What can e-commerce brands learn from their efforts? CPG brand marketer Tiffany Wilburn has driven revolutionary brand repositioning and product launch strategies for renowned companies like TGI Fridays, Fresh Direct, and Southern Comfort. These approaches included refining marketing messages for new consumer demographics, launching unparalleled bespoke products, and optimizing operations for sale. Tiffany emphasizes conducting ethnographic research to observe consumer behavior for insights into purchasing decisions, enhancing targeting and marketing efforts. You should also allocate funds across both brand and performance marketing to foster a lifelong relationship with consumers. In this week's episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Tiffany Wilburn, Fractional CMO at Clever Disruption, about creatively disrupting and elevating brands for the modern consumer. Tiffany shares how to balance the marketing flywheel, how she identifies optimal positioning in a crowded market, and her advice and philosophies on presence and non-attachment.

This episode was sponsored by Hummingbirds. Go to hummingbirds.com/startupCPGThis episode was sponsored by Cin7. Go to cin7.com/startupcpgThis episode was sponsored by Grassroots Marketing. Schedule a call at https://calendly.com/grassrootsmarketing/grassroots-x-startupcpg-intro-call)Join Grace Kennedy in this bonus episode of the Startup CPG podcast as she delves into the flavorful world of House of Kajaana, a pioneering plant-based Indian food brand owned by Sabah Ashraf. Sabah unravels the remarkable transition from investment banking to culinary entrepreneurship, and discover how House of Kajana is redefining frozen meals, prioritizing taste and inclusivity by crafting gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, and nut-free dishes like roasted cauliflower tikka masala and coconut Malabar curry.Explore their strategic approach to product selection, rooted in building strong consumer connections through familiar flavor profiles. Delve into their expansion strategies, including partnerships with renowned retailers like Fresh Direct and an upcoming launch in Whole Foods stores nationwide.Gain insights into House of Kajana's commitment to engaging consumers through in-store demos and digital platforms like Instagram and Aisle. Learn about their vision for the future, centered on providing convenient access to healthier meal options across the country.Tune in to this mouthwatering conversation and join the plant-based revolution with House of Kajana!Listen in as Sabah shares about:House of Kajaana Mission and IdentityEarly Influences and Love for Indian FoodProduct DevelopmentLaunch Strategy and Retail ExpansionPreparation for Nationwide PresenceNavigating Distribution and Finding Great PartnersChallenges of Being a FounderAdvice for Other FoundersFuture Plans for the House of KajaanaEpisode Links:House of Kajaana's WebsiteSaba's LinkedInDon't forget to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoyed this episode. For potential sponsorship opportunities or to join the Startup CPG community, visit http://www.startupcpg.com.Show Links:Transcripts of each episode are available on the Transistor platform that hosts our podcast here (click on the episode and toggle to “Transcript” at the top)Join the Startup CPG Slack community (15K+ members and growing!)Follow @startupcpgVisit host Daniel's Linkedin Questions or comments about the episode? Email Daniel at podcast@startupcpg.comEpisode music by Super Fantastics Cin7 Links:Get a free month trial and then 50% off your first 3 months. Check out cin7.com/startupcpgHummingbirds Links:Find case studies, content + an exclusive chance to win a FREE custom managed campaign. Visit Hummingbirds.com/startupCPGGrassroots Links: Special Startup CPG community pricing and no minimum # of demos with Grassroots Marketing, our official in-store demo partner. Schedule a call at https://calendly.com/grassrootsmarketing/grassroots-x-startupcpg-intro-call

Join Tanuja Randery, Managing Director of Europe, Middle East, and Africa for AWS and Hatice Evren, US Group CEO of Getir/FreshDirect, as they discuss Getir's culture of diversity, attracting tech talent, leveraging data and AI for operational efficiency, and the importance of adaptability in leadership. Evren reflects on managing her company's hyper-growth phases, and how leaders should think about growth during economic downturns.Resources:Learn more about Amazon Bedrock, the easiest way to build and scale gen AI applications, and Amazon Q, a gen AI-powered assistant that can be tailored to your business.

In Folge 9 machen Kristina und Max wieder einen #kassensturz und besprechen die aktuellen Marketing und eCommerce News. Um sich in Sachen Social Commerce besser gegen TikTok wappnen zu können, hat Amazon gleich zwei Partnerschaften angekündigt - mit Meta und mit Snapchat. Kristina und Max diskutieren, welche Plattform welche Strategie verfolgt und welche Vor- und Nachteile für alle Beteiligten entstehen. Bei Meta gibt es dann gleich noch weitere News. Wie bereits angekündigt, hat Meta nun in Europa sein werbefreies Abo-Modell ausgerollt. Kristina und Max erzählen euch, was das ganze nun kostet und ordnen nochmal kurz ein, warum Meta diesen Schritt gegangen ist. Doch nicht nur Mark Zuckerberg hatte einen spannenden Produkt-Launch, sondern auch sein Boxgegner Elon Musk. Der hat nämlich seinen eigenen AI Chatbot namens Grok an den Start gebracht. Bei uns erfahrt ihr, was der Bot kann und wie er sich von anderen Anbietern wie ChatGPT oder Bard grundlegend unterscheidet. Außerdem gibt es wieder Gerüchte um einen angeblich bevorstehenden Börsengang seitens SHEIN. Max und Kristina verraten euch natürlich die heißen Details und vor allem, was einem möglichen IPO noch im Wege stehen könnte. Am Ende noch zwei spannende Entwicklungen aus dem ReCommerce und Food Commerce – Bei refurbed gab es in der Series C frisches Kapital und GETIR kauft den US-Lebensmittellieferdienst fresh direct. Inhalt 00:00 Folgenübersicht 6:28 SHEIN plant an die Börse zu gehen 13:33 Amazon schließt Offline Fashion Stores 15:52 Remazing/Appinio Studie zum eCommerce Kaufverhalten der Deutschen 17:29 Amazon schließt Social Commerce Deals mit Snapchat und Meta 38:55 Meta rollt kostenpflichtiges, werbefreies Abomodell aus 43:07 Elon Musik launcht Chatbot Grok 48:44 Refurbed sammelt €54 Mio in Series C ein 50:20 Getir kauft US Food Delivery Anbieter fresh direct Shownotes & Quellen > ⁠⁠⁠Quellenübersicht⁠⁠⁠ Social Links > ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ > ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ > ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ > ⁠⁠⁠Weitere Plattformen⁠⁠⁠ Logo Design: Naim Solis Intro & Jingles: Kurt Woischytzky Fotos: Stefan Grau Intro-Video: Tim Solle

This week on the Modern Retail Rundown: Rapid delivery app Getir acquired New York-based Fresh Direct to expand its grocery delivery business. Meanwhile, TikTok has officially shut down its infamous Creator Fund, which is being replaced by the Creativity Program. And, Amazon reportedly struck a deal with Meta to integrate in-app shopping features on Facebook and Instagram.

Today on the show Matt Johnston and I have a compelling conversation that will change the way you think about pricing and selling your work. The most important thing to keep in mind when working with your potential clients is that you are the expert who can provide something to help them achieve their goals. You aren't selling video, you are selling solutions. This understanding paired with the mindset to commit to your business and believe in yourself will help you grow your business into something that is successful and fulfilling! Key Takeaways Price your offerings based on the problems that you solve for your clients Position yourself as the expert to lead the sales process to a successful outcome Use empathy to create real connection and communicate value About Matt Johnston  Guide Social Founder, Matt Johnston, is a social video pioneer - helping invent the format, system, and science of viral videos in the publishing world at Business Insider, NowThis, New York Magazine, Men's Health, and others. He is also the author of Producing Empathy: The Secret Method I Use to Get 100 Million Views on Videos Online. He has produced and overseen over 2,000+ pieces of video content (both branded and editorial) that have generated well over 10 billion video views, and millions of dollars in sales across platforms. He's also worked on viral video campaigns with brands such as Toyota, the National Football League, Campbell's, Chase Bank, Verizon, Adobe, Tidal, Fresh Direct, and many others. He is the creator of the HERO system for viral video and the 3PP methodology for predictable, scalable video sales. These systems have driven millions in sales - for a wide array of Shark Tank clients, numerous members of Ezra Firestone's Blue Ribbon Mastermind, and countless others. In This Episode  [00:00] Welcome to the show! [02:41] Meet Matt Johnston [07:08] Creating empathy [09:27] Be specific with your target audience [12:22] Rethinking sales as a video creative [24:50] Don't compete [26:37] Take control of the sales process [35:10] Mindset for success [40:38] Outro Quotes “You can't sell anything to someone until you understand what their struggle is.” [14:42] - Matt Johnston “You're not selling video, you're selling solutions to problems.” [15:12] - Matt Johnston “Your mind will make you way more money than any tactic.” [39:01] - Matt Johnston Guest Links Find Matt Johnston online Follow Guide Social Global on Instagram Follow Matt Johnston on Instagram Links FREE Workshop Available "How to Consistently Earn Over $100k Per Year in Video Production While Working Less Than 40 Hours Per Week" Join the Grow Your Video Business Facebook Group  Follow Ryan Koral on Instagram Follow Grow Your Video Business on Instagram Check out the full show notes

This week on the podcast we have an a fun and lively interview with Kim Murstein and her grandmother Gail who are the dynamic collaborators behind the social media hit Excise My Grandma that shares perspectives on generational differences in dating, sex and relationships.Started during the pandemic as Kim navigated the dating world, Grandma Gail got a birds eye view of millennial relationships and had a few opinions about it so they decided to share the trials and tribulations on social media. Shortly after, the followers started pouring in and their new found fame has continued to grow ever since.We chatted about how it all started, the mistakes that millennials might be making, dating apps, finding “the one”, summer dress codes, fun date night ideas in the Hamptons and their favorite spots to shop and eat out east.Thank you to our sponsors for this weeks episode: The Robert Allen Foundation, US Ban and Fresh Direct.On Instagram:@madeinthehamptonsmedia@excusemygrandma@freshdirect@usbank

Actual Veggies is creating delicious, chef-crafted, fresh & refrigerated burgers that celebrate vegetables instead of trying to mask them. We're a team that believes in the power of real food and have set out to provide everyone with the most delicious and satisfying veggie burgers ever made. Actual Veggies' are committed to simple, clean ingredients and no scientific methods or processing. We're reducing environmental strain while also making tasty food options that are convenient and healthy too. Actual Veggies debut product line features always fresh, substantial, 1/4 lb. vegetarian burgers, made with only real vegetables, natural binding units, no preservatives, and no additives. Our first four burgers are vibrantly colored and showcase their farm fresh veggies by looking and tasting like works of art. No labs, just kitchens. They don't taste like meat because they're not trying to, and that's okay because, well, veggies are great too! We are just what our name says — actual veggies — and always will be. Backed by Big Idea Ventures, Actual Veggies was founded in March 2020, and is available directly on Hungry Roots, Imperfect Foods, Fresh Direct, and Sprouts locations nationwide. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/genius-juice/support

In this episode, we speak to John Sheldon, the CMO of SmileDirectClub, a leading provider of dental alignment solutions.  We talk about how John built the marketing team to drive growth and build brand for Smile Direct Club. SmileDirectClub was founded on one simple belief: everyone deserves a smile they love. We are the industry pioneer and the first direct-to-consumer medtech platform for transforming smiles. Through our cutting-edge teledentistry technology and vertically integrated model, we are revolutionizing the oral care industry. Our clear aligner treatment addresses the large and underserved global orthodontics market. An estimated 85% of people worldwide suffer from malocclusion, yet less than 1% receive treatment annually. Our goal is to improve penetration into this untapped market by democratizing access to a more affordable, convenient, and accessible solution for a straighter smile. John Sheldon is the Chief Marketing Officer at SmileDirectClub. In this role, he focuses on delivering the best possible experience to customers in order to continue growing SmileDirectClub and reach more people searching for affordable access to a straighter and more confident smile. As the Chief Marketing Officer, John oversees all digital media, paid media, creative development, social media, communication tactics, and experiential initiatives for the brand. As a results-driven marketing leader, John continually builds a track-record of success and is a champion for creating strategic plans based on key insights. John has a strong background in digital transformation and innovation across a range of industries. He previously served as Chief Revenue Officer of Fresh Direct, a food tech company and the Nolrtheast's leading online fresh food grocer. He was also the Senior Vice President of Innovation Portfolios for Mastercard driving innovation globally for the company, and the Head of Strategy at eBay Enterprises Marketing Solutions. He has launched and worked with dozens of digital-first brands and lead the strategy to bring many great brands into the digital ecosystem. John earned a B.S. in Economics with a concentration in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Learn more about John Sheldon, Smile Direct ClubLearn more about Smile Direct ClubFollow Peter Mahoney on Twitter and LinkedInLearn more about PlannuhJoin The Next CMO CommunityRecommend a guest for The Next CMO podcastProduced by PodForte

Brooklyn's own Kilolo Strobert is a true Crown Heights Affair. After attending high school on the Upper West Side, culinary school at Johnson and Wales, her love of wine, hospitality, helping friends with wine pairings and recos solidly pushed her into wine. She has worked all aspects of the business including retail at Morrell and Le Du's and Fresh Direct, the Hotel Parker Meridien, Zagat and more. 18 years ago, she took a job at a wine store in Prospect Park, today she is now the owner of that same store, Fermented Grapes. Kilolo is committed to wines that are natural, highlights diversification, globalization, women and the BIPOC winemaking community.Photo courtesy of Clay Williams.Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support The Grape Nation by becoming a member!The Grape Nation is Powered by Simplecast.

Grant Farhall has been with Getty Images for 10 years, the last two as chief product officer. Earlier, he worked for Rogers Communications as a broadcaster/newsroom assistant at radio station CFFR. Before that, Grant was a studio manager for Evolvs Media Inc. Gene Foca has been with Getty Images since 2017. In his role as chief marketing officer, he reports directly to the CEO and serves on the executive committee that oversees the brand's global marketing and communications efforts. Before joining Getty Images, Gene was senior VP of marketing for Fresh Direct. Earlier, he spent four years with Amazon, ultimately rising to the post of senior director of marketing.  In this interview with Lippe Taylor CEO Paul Dyer, Grant and Gene focus their thoughts on the merging of marketing and product teams, data-driven visual-content procurement, the trust-damaging impact of deep-fake technology, and what Getty's acquisition of free photo source Unsplash might mean to creatives. Here are some key takeaways from this talk with Gene Foca and Grant Farhall: Visuals of all mediums are in a crisis of trust.  It is becoming ever easier to produce "deep fake" photos and videos, which is causing consumers of media to question whether anything they're seeing these days is real - representing a trust crisis for visual-based companies and news media alike. Grant said part of the response to this emerging crisis of believability must be an insistence that creators of visual content clearly label their works as real or augmented—and, if the latter, to identify the CGI elements so that prospective users can exercise informed consent before buying. Beyond that, multiple measures are being taken to ensure that all changes and alterations made to visual files (both video and images) have an indelible record of alterations visible to anyone with the file.  Marketing pros must embrace the merging of their discipline and that of product managers. Grant said it once was common for marketing and product development to be separate entities that each did its own thing, but more and more, they're being pressed to work collaboratively. Consequently, said Gene, marketers have to be "less hung up" about having control of the things traditionally within their discipline and to instead partner with the product team in order to more successfully support the customer journey. This is a naturally cohesive path forward that integrates marketing insight and consumer demand with product development, enabling insight-based innovation. In order to rise to a position of leadership in your organization, become better at finding problems and turning yourself into a solutions architect.  Both Gene and Grant agreed that people on their way to the top need to be able to play well with others. Additionally, Grant said ladder-climbers should be on the lookout for shortcomings in the organization's operations, take ownership of them, and figure out how to fix what's broken or not running right. “Be the expert in the area that needs an expert,” he said. Meanwhile, Gene cautioned against misunderstanding what it means to “follow your passion”—according to Gene, “people too often think that following their passion means they can and should jump from the tasks they don't like to those they think will be more satisfying. But to understand the underpinnings of the business, you first have to do the tedious, menial work. You have to learn how the pieces connect. From there, you start being able to exercise your passion.” Thanks for listening to Frictionless Marketing! If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with your friends and colleagues on LinkedIn. Don't forget to follow the show on Instagram @Lippetaylor, and to learn more about us, visit us at http://www.lippetaylor.com (Lippetaylor.com. ) Thanks again for listening to Frictionless Marketing.  ----- Produced by https://podcastlaunch.pro (Simpler Media)

Hailey Swartz is a co-founder and co-CEO of Actual Veggies, chef-crafted veggie only burgers. Actual Veggies started in March 2020 with the intent to make plant-based burgers that celebrated veggies instead of masking them. Each Actual Veggies burger is naturally colorful, made with only clean ingredients, filling, and is most importantly delicious. You can find Actual Veggies in Wegmans, Fresh Market, Sprouts, Plum Market, on Imperfect Foods, Hungryroot, Sunbasket, and Fresh Direct. Website: https://actualveggies.com/ Instagram: @actualveggies

Sometimes life gets busy and cooking feels daunting. For others of us (wink wink) we just don't cook...or shouldn't cook! Then meal kits came along. From the OGs of Blue Apron and Hello Fresh to newcomers like Purple Carrot and Sun Basket, Jenn gives us the rundown on these popular cook-at-home options. They certainly simplify cooking but are they all worth the money? Will they help us reach our health goals faster? Consider this your cheat sheet to meal kits! You're welcome :)  Outline:Welcome back & welcome back StephanieIntro to today's topicChefs PlateBlue ApronHelloFreshFresh DirectAmazon KitchenFresh n' LeanSunbasketSakara LifePurple CarrotProlon (cleanse)Daily HarvestBistroMDFreshlyRastelliNutropiaYumbleGeneral GuidelinesThe foodThe scheduleThe cost/benefitYour food needs (modifications)The quantitiesThe trade-offs (pick your battles)Final thoughtsQuotes:"How closely does this resemble food you'd make yourself?" – Jenn Trepeck"You don't have to measure anything or fill your pantry with odd seasonings you'll only use once."  – Jenn Trepeck"Prepared food tends to be more saucy than what I'd make for myself."  – Jenn Trepeck"Check the day/time by which you have to select or freeze the next week...and set an alarm!" – Jenn Trepeck"You give up some choices like organic and grass-fed or antibiotic-free when you use these kits."  – Jenn TrepeckLinks:Become a MemberConnect with us! FB Page & Private FB Group Jenn's InstagramTake the free Weight Loss Profile, Jenn will send you a Menu PlanAs promised: BistroMD ( with 6% Cashback), Rastelli (with 9% Cashback), NutropiaJenn's favorite Resveratrol for US & Canadian Listeners, for Global Listeners

Courtney Harwood is the Chief Marketing Officer of Denver based Everside Health, one of the largest–and most innovative–direct primary-care providers in the US, with 350 healthcare centers in 34 states. Courtney has an eclectic career path and one impressive track record. She has worked on a variety of brands and business models. She's got experience on the ad agency side, with roles at BBDO, and Lowe Lintas, as well as the brand side working for the Financial Times, Fresh Direct, (online ad platform) Ad Keeper, (shopping app) Keep.com, Xerox, (biometric identity company) CLEAR, and most recently, Everside.This conversation is incredibly valuable. Courtney opens up about recognizing burn out, accepting challenges that stretch your limits, and encouraging your team to question things. Plus, understanding your customer and having them tell your brand's story, mentors, inspiration and more.CMOs often hold one of the most innovative and challenging roles in business today. Those who excel can operate at the highest level to drive growth and create value for their organizations. To learn more how Deloitte helps bolster the value CMOs deliver, visit www.cmo.deloitte.com.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Have you ever wondered how your food gets from the farm to table…..we have! To better understand the supply chain and logistics process, the podcast team sits down with Mike Beveridge, who is a Senior Associate Merchant of Meat & Poultry at FreshDirect. Located in the Bronx, New York, FreshDirect has been perfecting their online grocery delivery business for over 20 years and delivers over 100,000 orders a week!! Tune in to learn:What is the business model of FreshDirect and how do you source your products?What are the steps in the supply chain? How do grocers balance the constant supply and demand fluctuations? How long do products sit in warehouses or grocers before being consumed?What are the online grocery trends and how has COVID affected FreshDirect?All this and more, on Generation STEM!Want to see more from the Generation STEM team? Check us out on social media @genstempodcast, or visit us at our website at www.genstempodcast.comThis podcast is powered by Black & Veatch - www.bv.com

Shilp Agarwal, Co-Founder/CEO of Blutag joined me to discuss the state of voice commerce.  Blutag works with retailers to help them build voice-powered interfaces for devices powered by automated assistants like Alexa or Google Assistant.  Clients include Bloomingdales, L'Oréal, and Fresh Direct. Investors include the Amazon Alexa Fund, Vulcan Capital, Act One Ventures, AET Fund, Techstars Ventures, Chris Cunningham's C2 Ventures, and Progress Ventures. This interview is the fifth in the Startups of NRF series.  I'll ask each of the startups exhibiting in either the Innovation Lab or Startup Zone the same 8 questions listed below.  Tell us about your company the problem you are solving? The “pigeonhole” question:  Where does your solution sit Where are we in the adoption cycle for this technology? What is the message you're sharing at NRF? How do you see 2022 shaping up? What advice can you offer budding entrepreneurs? What skills that you use now that you wish you paid more attention to? How do we get in touch with you? Give it a listen and let us know what you think? Podcast Guest Shilp Agarwal, Co-Founder/CEO  Blutag https://blu.ai  Podcast Hosts Jeff Roster Twitter https://twitter.com/JeffPR LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-roster-bb51b8/ Website https://thisweekininnovation.com Brian Sathianathan Twitter  https://twitter.com/BrianVision Website https://www.iterate.ai Podcast Website https://www.podbean.com/pu/pbblog-f8asf-af2782 https://thisweekininnovation.com Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/this-week-in-innovation/id1562068014 Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/2QDqTUnt6jebdRHbRzSTJN  LaunchPadOne https://www.launchpaddm.com/pd/This-Week-in-Innovation?showAllEpisodes=true  Listen Notes https://lnns.co/2QPSfnizE5K     #Shopify,  #Magento, #nrf2022, #StartupsOfNRF,  #innovation, #intelligentmirror, #Startup,  #Startups, #Retailers,   #retail, #retailers, #thisweekininnovation, #DigitalTransformation,#retailtechnology, #retailtech, #futureofretail , #retailtrends, #emergingtechnologies, #podcast, #retailpodcast, #unifiedcommerce, #socialcommerce, #mobile, #VentureCapital, #VC,  #Founders, #Entrepreneurs, #Gartner,#unifiedcommerce,#socialcommerce,#5ForcesOfInnovation,#ArtificialIntelligence , #AI, #cloud, #data , #conversationalai, #InternetOfThings,  #IoT, #machinelearning, #Blockchain, #LowCode. #Data,   #pos, #loyalty, #livestreaming, #SaaS, #metaverse,     

EP283 - Year End Review  It's our final show of 2021! We recap the US Dept of Commerce November Advanced Retail Sales Data. We do a deep dive into the retail industries growth from 2019 through November 2021. In those 23 months, the retail industry grew 22%, historically fast growth. There were clear winners and losers. If you want to follow along on with all the data, here is a visual recap of retail growth 2020-2021. (PDF Download). We also highlight the six most important trends of 2021. Amazon fulfillment capacity growth (Amazon and Walmart become shipping companies) Social Media becomes the discovery channel for e-commerce (led by live-streaming) Ultrafast delivery services Amazon invents and starts to scale a grocery store (Amazon Fresh) with just walk out technology Retail Media Networks explode, led by Amazon's $30B in ad sales. Retailers now compete with social media networks for eyeballs Apparel has shifted from designer led to consumer led, as evidenced by the meteoric rise of Shein We're so very grateful to our audience, both for the time you have shared with us, and for generous opinions, feedback, and knowledge that many of you have shared. We wish you all the very best holidays and New Years, and look forward to seeing you in 2022! Episode 283 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, December 21st, 2021 http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 283 being recorded on Tuesday sept December twenty first twenty Twenty-One I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason how are the holidays treating you so far. Jason: [0:46] They are treating me really well it's been super interesting what's going on in our industry and getting ready to take the family to California to see my mom and brother. Scot: [0:59] Very fun California versus Chicago seems like a smart smart choice this time. Jason: [1:04] Yes early and my relationship with my wife we agreed that we would visit her Michigan in-laws and Thanksgiving and my California relatives in December seems weather prudent if nothing else. Scot: [1:16] Yeah smart I like your like you're negotiating strategies so we are recording this here live on December 21st so we are in the very last tail end of holiday 21 and Jason you had some some interesting data that you had parse through that I thought we could start with it's going to be largely kind of the November data but it's kind of the best data we have, until we get into January and see how the holiday played out and then we'll do a quick checkpoint on what you're hearing from clients and then I think both of us wanted to kind of share our big stories for retail and e-commerce for 2021 so why don't you kick us off with some data. Jason: [1:57] That sounds amazing so yeah so the data we are talking about is the US Department of Commerce data we get a an update every month so you know last week we got the, the update that includes November and in general November sales were up sixteen percent from November of twenty twenty so I always coach people that we should look at year-over-year not month over month so pretty healthy growth in 2021 from 2020 if you look at year-to-date so January through November we are up about 18% from 2020 and if you look at e-commerce we were up about 12 percent from November of 2020 so I you know I always put this data out on social media and I got a ton of, interesting responses this year on that data everyone's like hey Jason why are you comparing to November of 2020 like we're in the middle of the pandemic everything was all topsy-turvy like it's like comparing, pandemic 2021 numbers to pain demick 2020 numbers isn't very helpful to me because everything is so confusing. [3:13] And so I kind of took that to heart like you know it is the best kind of comparison we have about how we're doing but I said oh you know the more interesting comparison is maybe we take. One step back and we compare the. The the last two years of data to two years ago so we kind of compare how much growth we've had during the pandemic with what girls look like before the pandemic and I hadn't hadn't really done that in a while and what I found was interesting and in a few cases it surprise me. Scot: [3:46] I feel like we should create a new word for this I'll work on it in the vein of a ship again yeah that's just boring I don't know. Jason: [3:54] Yeah yeah de or. Yeah every CEO in America has learned to say you're over two years ago by the way and for it's super funny for non-gaap metrics in the and in the 10-qs they. Like it's they kept they completely cherry-pick like if the number is good they take versus last year and if it's bad they take versus two years ago. Scot: [4:18] Yeah yeah that's the nice thing you need everything every number needs to be up into the right. Jason: [4:23] My takeaway there is you CEOs are oily. Scot: [4:25] We know we're strategic. Jason: [4:29] Got it potato potahto. Scot: [4:31] Cool what did this year over your year over year over last year review. Jason: [4:37] Yeah so if we say hey from how much has retailgeek grown in 2020 and 2021 as a two-year stack it has grown 22 percent, so you know people talk about like all the struggles and challenges we had during the pandemic but if I see if I got in a time machine and no pandemic just told every retail CEO how would you feel about growing 22% over the next two years, the vast majority of CEOs would have jumped at that and then if you said and our life is going to be totally disrupted by this pandemic. [5:14] I think every retail CEO in America would have said I'd be thrilled to get through the next two years with 22 percent growth so that was interesting and then I said I wonder how that compares historically so I got in the hot tub time machine and I pulled all the data from 1990 through today and I restated every year as its growth versus the previous two years to kind of come up with this standard metric to compare against the 22 percent and 22% is unprecedentedly high it's by far the biggest two-year growth we've had since 1990 there's only a few years that that just tickled 15% so I can 2000 we hit 15 percent and in 1994 we hit 15% but like, most of the. The this last decade we were kind of tickling in the kind of six to eight percent growth so 22 percent growth. On average for the whole retail industry is a huge win and unprecedentedly more growth than we would traditionally get does that surprise you at all. Scot: [6:26] It doesn't sort of make sure I understand it's all retail so it's offline and online in Aggregate and then you can't just divide it by 2 right because there's compounding in there so it's not really two years of 11 it's probably like I don't know 12 in an 8 or something. Jason: [6:41] Yes so you are correct now and. That 20 yes and all of this data it does include compounding the the compounding is an interesting point which will come up in a another piece of data in in just a minute but yeah so this is all like literally looking at the. Aggregate sales for 2019 and the aggregate sales for 2021 and saying how much bigger was 2021 than 2019. Scot: [7:08] Yeah did you run a kegger so in MBA school they would say well you can actually unpack the compounding by look at the compounded annual growth rate. Jason: [7:17] Yes yes I am familiar with the math I did not. Scot: [7:21] Okay it was two years it's not going to be that substantial yeah repeat. Jason: [7:24] No that's the yeah it's right typically like with like a five-year Horizon it makes a lot more sense but yeah it would have been interesting but it just I had to your data so I was just trying to come up with an Apples to Apples. Scot: [7:36] Not feels feels like a wind. Jason: [7:38] Yeah so then I said alright well that's interesting on average retail is a huge win. [7:44] Very obviously there are winners and losers so I said alright well let's look at all the categories that the US Department of Commerce gives us. Based on that 2-year stack and there were you know and who was at the industry average who wildly outperformed the industry average and who underperformed the industry average and there are some things that made total sense to me and we're not surprising and then there were some pretty big surprises in there so, the the category that out of the US Department of Commerce data that grew the fastest was, non store sales which is kind of our e-commerce proxy right and it grew 39 percent so almost twice as fast its total retail that's pretty intuitive you know again you're hearing a lot of. E-commerce growth is slowing. Wagon November as more people went back to stores you know compared to this like you know pandemic impacted 20/20 but when you look at onto your stack, e-commerce is still the fastest growing part of retail at group 39% from 2019 and that certainly didn't surprise me the next two categories sporting goods and building materials, also really didn't surprise me because we kind of talked about them being, the big pandemic winners that like you know people then go to the gym so they bought stuff from Dick's Sporting Goods people didn't go on vacation so they built a new patio with materials from Home Depot and so kind of all the that Services Revenue. [9:14] Shifted into retail and that gave sporting goods and building materials a big a big kiss. Motor Vehicles which at one point people were saying like oh my God that's going to be a horrible category in the pandemic Motor Vehicles actually outperformed the industry average so they grew at 24 percent versus 22 percent for total retail. And then here's where we start getting surprises. Slightly below the industry average was furniture and Home Furnishing so that grew at 21 percent versus the industry average of 22 and if you just asked me to bet I would have said in the same way that building materials and Home Improvement stores. Got extra spending from the pandemic I would have expected furniture stores to get extra spending from the pandemic as well and so it surprised me that they were only at the industry average and the only my only hypothesis is. Did they have more disruptions from supply chain like why. Was it just harder for them to scale up to make more sofas to meet the increased demand and so they, they grew healthy but they didn't grow as healthy as they might have because they they couldn't double their us Workforce to build more couches. Scot: [10:23] The feels right the furniture industry has been here in North Carolina that's our primary one and they're just destroyed by the supply chain they can't there was a series of events that couldn't get phone because of the fire and awesome remember that that seems like a year ago but it actually wasn't go to the summer and then with this quote-unquote Supply pain they haven't been able to get the other inputs like anything fabric while that stuff made in China and shipped over here and sitting on a boat somewhere. Jason: [10:50] Yeah and I feel like it's a double whammy for them because it's harder than ever to make stuff but there's actually they could sell more than ever before if they could make it so it's like, it almost feels worse than knowing there's demand that you can't meet. Scot: [11:01] Yeah it's painful. Jason: [11:03] Yeah so then general merchandise grew at 16 percent versus of retail 22 percent and then the one that surprised me most that I talk about a lot is grocery grew at 16 percent versus the industry average of 22 percent and I would have said man a ton of spending shifted from restaurants to grocery stores they were another pandemic winner and so I'll be honest I don't have a perfect hypothesis for why. Again sixteen percent is Healthy Growth and by historical standards it's better than any two-year period since 1990 so I don't want to say oh you know they had a rough time they had a good time but surprising that they were below the industry average to me a little bit. You have any great Insight that I didn't think of on why that would be. Scot: [11:52] I don't maybe it's like a mix thing underneath the hood like the e-commerce grew so much doesn't it like well I'll be in this category are rules so if. Jason: [12:02] Imperfect yes so you are right like one of the wrinkles in all of this is. The way the US Department of Commerce treats e-commerce as another category which is unfortunate right because you know when someone shifts from buying a exercise bike in a Dick Sporting Good to buying a dick exercise bike from Dick's Sporting Goods.com. The sale leaves the sporting good category in enters the non-store category and so that's. That's not really Apples to Apples and then of course this is all done with surveys that are in perfectly filled out by human beings and so how different retailers respond to that survey is also inconsistent so you got it. This data is super helpful directionally but you definitely don't want to get too wrapped around the axle of the minutiae of the data because it's just an imperfect methodology. [12:52] And so then the the categories they did the worst, do make sense with one outlier for a couple hours for me so gasoline only grew at 14%, you know again make sense to me that they you know underperformed when people aren't commuting to work surprising 14% sales are still pretty good growth clothing is near the bottom at 12% growth so again clothing over the last two years did not shrink they still grew at 12% which might have been their average rate of growth I should do that waiters pulled just the category growth over the last 30 years. But compared all these other categories obviously closing was was poor and the Very lowest category is restaurants and bars which still grew six percent so that all makes sense but then there were two two categories in the cellar that I would have expected to do better health and personal care grew at 11% and Electronics and Appliances grew at seven percent so those are both pretty far under the industry average and you know those are two categories. They had some complication they had pros and cons you know within that category but by and large I guess I was surprised to see them so well. Scot: [14:06] Yet Health and Beauty one because Aaron was zooming like the makeup sales shot way up so it's got to be a you know it was e-commerce. Jason: [14:15] Lipstick sales actually went way down because of the Mask but mascara and skincare went way up it's so funny bye. Um so, then I just did one other sanity check so you know people like a couple people a couple of Industry analysts even like responded to my data and said yeah just don't believe the numbers and I'm like just some understanding you you're saying you don't believe the US Department of Commerce numbers not like I didn't make any of these numbers upright bike. [14:45] And and the US Department of Commerce data is imperfect I would argue it's. The best we have access to and it's it's a bunch of you know PhD in statistics that have you know the force of law to you know to enforce compliance with their survey so I it's better than any other survey out there for whatever that's worth but so I thought how can I do a chance sanity check on this data and I'm like oh all the public retailers are required to report their growth every quarter so we could try to create a year over two year growth for all of these public retailers and compare it to the industry data and some of these public retailers are in a particular category so you can you know pretty safely assume all their sales are in that category so you could kind of use that as a sanity check so I pulled I don't know I guess it's about 25 companies and I converted their quarterly growth into a two-year stack and here I will confess I took a shortcut and if there's any mathematicians that want to help me solve this problem I will toy do it these. Draws numbers are not compounded growth so the problem is we don't have annual growth rates from the Retailer's we have quarterly growth rate so basically you have to. Aggregate for quarters of growth and then. [16:11] Calculate it over two years and so I took a lazy shortcut and I just added their. 20 growth to their 2021 growth so we have basically seven quarters of growth for most of these retailers and it's it's what they call a two-year stack which means growth from 2019 plus 2020 and while the math is not right there by the way right because of. Like the compounding problem of your 2020 growth include your you know growth over 2019. This is how most retailers reported in their earnings so when they talk about to your growth for these non-gaap measures where they try to put themselves in the best light and they report their two year growth they're almost never talking about a compounded number like if you read the footnote. They're they're adding the growth from those two years so this is how they're doing the math in most cases for whatever that's worth but so that's way more precursor than we need the retailer that grew the public retailer the grew the most over the last two years total shocker to me I would not have expected in a million years is Burlington Coat Factory. That Drew 85% and to put that in perspective, they sell apparel which did not do very well in the pandemic and they turned off their website their e-commerce site the month before the pandemic. So they didn't sell any a long line. Scot: [17:34] They're not really opening a lot of stores either. Jason: [17:36] No I mean they may have opened a couple stores over the whole two years but like this is mostly comp sales growth so it actually kind of, factors out new store. Scot: [17:46] Okay so it's cops okay. Jason: [17:47] Yeah this is these numbers that ye are based on currency adjusted comp sales just in the u.s. wherever possible so so Burlington's a total outliner congratulations to them surprising to me Amazon is was the second fastest grower and all public retail at 61 percent over two years which. Doesn't surprise me that super impressive but you'd expect to see them near the top of this list then you see Dick's Sporting Goods at 57 percent and again, like from from the industry data Sporting Goods was the second fastest growing category behind e-commerce so Amazon as a proxy for e-commerce and dicks is approximately for sporting goods makes total sense but then things start getting interesting the next fastest grower was Ulta which is personal care at 36 percent so they grew much better than did the. The personal care category now they're less than half the personal care category the slightly bigger version of them would be Sephora but Sephora is actually owned. Buy a house of Brands and so it's harder to get their data. [19:01] Bed Bath & Beyond group 35% which is impressive Target group 34 percent, Home Depot which again was in one of these these outperforming categories grew 33% was group 28% by comparison Best Buy grew 29% in this it doesn't surprise me the best bike route 29 percent but this is. Makes that the fact that Electronics was one of the slowest growing categories at 7% make even less percent make even less sense I guess it's it's hard to imagine how. Electronics only grew seven percent over the last two years when you know everyone bought all this extra equipment for homeschooling and home entertainment and then with Best Buy growing 29 percent it's even harder to imagine. Scot: [19:53] Yeah maybe in a perfect world you could then split like something like that into store non-store store / e-commerce and maybe that would tell the story. Jason: [20:00] Yeah yeah again that's like one of the few the, my few answers to to a number of these anomalies and then I know this is like all these numbers in a podcast sock but like then you start getting into like Abercrombie & Fitch 28% Costco 26 percent, Cole's Nordstrom's Walmart grew at 21% which again for you know a huge company, the fortune one company to grow at the industry average is pretty good Nike grew at 20%. T.j. Maxx at 15% and the the bottom three. A surprise into not surprises so the second worse and third two words were Dollar Tree in Dollar General at 10% growth which is kind of surprising. You know consumers were kind of flush with cash with all the extra economic stimulus they weren't really slowing down their spending and so like you know maybe it wasn't a great season for the value shoppers but a lot of the news was about how these dollar stores were opening tons of stores and we're really thriving so interesting that they both only Drew. 10% and then the the worst performing public company on this was Macy's which grew six percent over the two years not totally surprising. Scot: [21:18] Isn't that the one that Prophet G said was going to crush. Jason: [21:24] Be there be there the future of retailers Macy's not Amazon yeah this chart unfortunately yeah contradicts that prediction so we'll have to wait and see are you Scott Galloway fans you just hang on hang on to your stick to your guns. Scot: [21:38] Good luck with that. Jason: [21:41] Yeah so that's my the rabbit hole that the stupid November numbers took me down so as you can imagine none of my clients got any deliverables in November. Scot: [21:52] When people tell you they don't believe the data what are they reacting to. Jason: [21:57] I think there's a couple categories there are people that are like hey it's the the month-over-month is interesting but like. Who cares right because these are all anomalous months and that's why I went for this two-year stack and and so. My point was I think like when people are saying hey I don't I don't believe the data I actually don't think they meant they don't believe that this is the data that the US Department of Commerce reported I think they're both saying in some cases, I don't think the US Department of Commerce can count very well and what they mostly hang their hat on is is the non store sales not being right and that's fair right like when someone at Best Buy fills out a survey the US Department of Commerce would like them to put their e-commerce sales in one box and their store sales in another box. [22:47] And do they do that I don't know right and does every retailer do that. Properly and consistently I can tell you that the person assigned to fill out the surveys is generally not the most senior accountant at the it's usually not the CFO. Um so so that is imperfect and then what I think they're saying more is. Maybe don't make all your future plans based on like this snapshot of the world because you know we are looking at a unique set of circumstances that resulted in this data right so if you mistakenly thought my takeaway was retail is better than ever and you know everybody should double down because you know retailers is the most thriving industry in the world 22 percent growth is amazing and it's going to continue forever. [23:36] Yeah no that's not what I'm saying I'm just saying that like it's interesting there were positive and negative impacts on all these businesses as a result of the pandemic but on the aggregate. The impact was disproportionately positive and I don't think that that is sustainable right like I you know I think we will hope to drop down to the regular the sort of pre-pandemic growth levels and potentially. We pulled some growth forward and we might even see some more lean years because we you know absorb so much growth this time. Scot: [24:10] This a long way of you saying you now agree with the the Goldman Sachs chart that showed five years of acceleration. Jason: [24:15] No no I think that still is pretty clear and they were primarily talking about e-commerce which definitely didn't happen. Scot: [24:23] Checking. Jason: [24:25] So that's my my deep dive into data and if there's there can't be anything more fun than listening to a podcast about a bunch of dudes being a bunch of numbers so I will I'll do two things I'll try to put some of this data in the show notes but what I'll do is I'll put a link in the show notes to download some charts with this data in it. Scot: [24:46] Very cool I actually like you spewing data so maybe I'm just an audience of one. Jason: [24:53] You may be in a liar. Scot: [24:56] So what are you seeing so that kind of gets us through November what are you seeing here in December I poked around on the usual spots for the Adobe and the sales force and a couple others and it's really weird they've been kind of quiet since since kind of the Cyber week what what are you hearing from your clients. Jason: [25:17] Yeah so I don't know like there's not good data that's already reporting December sales for holiday but so anecdotally talking to a bunch of clients and talking to some of these companies that do have internal data. December is looking like a good month right and so the. My kind of aggregate estimate is holiday for 2021 is going to end up being about. Nine percent bigger than holiday 2020 and again you say well as nine percent good or bad by historical standards it's pretty darn good most most years we get about a holiday grows less than the rest of the year because there's so much extra volume in it so most years we get about five percent growth in holiday in 2019 we got four percent growth 9% is a big number and last year was a pretty big growth year and so. Um you know also around nine percent so nine percent on top of 9% is a. Pretty big deal I have seen some estimates that think it'll grow even more than nine percent this year to put that in perspective the last time before last year there grew nine percent would have been like 1999 so so not only do we have great growth over two years we do have great holiday growth one huge caveat. [26:43] The trend up until about a week ago was, that more people were returning to the store store traffic was going up we were seeing kind of pre-pandemic shopping behaviors and e-commerce was still a big deal bigger than ever before but the rate of growth was swelling because, there was so much pent-up demand and go to stores lots of people were planning on getting together with their family like there was a funny Walmart stat about you know how much bigger the turkeys were that got sold this year than last year because people were, we're entertaining a lot more so, unfortunately in kind of real-time chats with most of my clients in the last week we have seen foot traffic to stores dramatically curtail and it feels like. We're very quickly getting a lot of negative Media news around and I say media but I guess it's based on the data about Omicron and the hypothesis is there either, Omicron has people scared and so they're not going to stores or a second hypothesis is everyone desperately wants to have their family gathering so they're being extra cautious leading up to Christmas but in either case, we're seeing this last-minute pivot to e-commerce and that has some impacts like the shipping companies that actually been doing. [28:04] Much better job this year than last year on keeping up with ship again in but if suddenly everyone you know runs towards e-commerce these last two weeks that could really put. [28:15] Shipping in Jeopardy in a in a really vulnerable time when they have a lot of Labor challenges so yeah I don't know it's kind of a Debbie Downer bit of news in this whole thing. Scot: [28:26] Yeah yeah I'm a crime that has a it's going to put next year kind of up into a question mark of what happens is and then. The thing that's really frustrating trying to operate a business during this time frame is the bookmarks of good and bad are so wide that. Dirty you have no idea but you drive a truck through and right there 180 degrees so you read one new source it's like oh it's super mild and it's almost going to act like its own vaccine then you see another source and it's like we're all gonna die. Somewhere hopefully we're somewhere in the middle there. Jason: [28:58] Amen Ya Know It's Tricky yeah and kind of evaluating all these data sources that's like the new the new societal challenge right. Scot: [29:09] It really is. Jason: [29:12] So I'm wondering so that's that's kind of my holiday snapshot some good news and some bad news in there I wanted to take a couple minutes on this podcast because I think this is going to be our last show of the year to kind of zoom out from the minutiae and just kind of think about the year in totality and kind of, don't know you know highlight what we think are the big things that happened in our industry this year that might impact us going forward how do you feel about that. Scot: [29:39] Let's do it you want to go first. Jason: [29:41] I mostly wanted you to go first because I thought I would surprise you and make you get bet answers while I thought about it. Scot: [29:48] Okay I'll go first so so I'm going to try to limit it to three because we. Yeah we could go on for for a long time here so I think the highlights of this year for me, it would be a Jason and Scot show if we didn't think a little bit about Amazon the. Build out of Amazon's shipping infrastructure and I feel like we say this every year but it's accelerating and there's some really good data we want to have a guest on that's publishing some data on this just Amazon has built more capacity in the last two years than they had in the last 10 so they've used the pandemic as a you know the response to it and they've gotten kind of cover I guess you could say is to really. 10x down on fulfillment infrastructure where where you get the most feeling of that is that the last mile which is this DS p– program that they've just really scaled up massively. This touches my my day job because it's Biffy we'd service a lot of these folks and they're just they're everywhere and, you know it used to be they would kind of work out a fulfillment systems then they built these fulfillment centers now they've got these see the last word of station what are they call them. [31:02] Delivery stations that have a whole new nomenclature where they now are have these forward-deployed areas where the dsps are almost housed and Aggregates you'll go to these places and it's pretty well that I've seen several of them now and they'll be like 20 dsps operating out of there these little micro businesses and you know just. [31:22] Prime Vans as far as I can see. Where is the stat that I think is kind of the most interesting is the Amazon did disclose that they plan to ship more than then FedEx this year and then I think they said in the next couple of years they'll exceed the USPS as far as package delivery it doesn't surprise me just given the scale that they are throwing at this thing. For example you can't buy a van today because the Amazon is just pretty ordered all the vans so it's pretty fascinating the scale they've done there. The thing that in our will do our annual predictions but I've been annually predicting that they would compete more directly with FedEx and UPS by offering just package delivery to anybody I just feels like we're a lot closer to that but I say that every year so we'll see, the other surprise for me is the explosion of this 15-minute grocery delivery world the most people have probably their first experience this or the first company heard was go puff and it wasn't really a 15-minute thing it was just kind of faster it was almost hours then you had instacart really scale up and then what's happened is the service level on these things it's got lower to the point where they're all trying to get you something in 15 minutes. It's a smaller number of skus than you would get with like Amazon's 300 million skus available so it's typically going to be. [32:43] You know you probably have a cool word for it but it's like snacks and oh my gosh I'm out of a soda I need or ice cream things that you kind of have an urgent hankering for and are willing to pay to scratch that itch a little bit more. On the shipping and handling fees and those kinds of things these are kinds of things when I talk to people they're like yeah that little the economics will never work in the be no one will ever use it and then everyone's always surprised because you can never underestimate the convenience or any consumer that when you give them the choice to do something with convenience they will, they will do it and they will order things you would never have thought about. I remember when Amazon rolled out Prime now they were shocked that the toilet paper and personal products were such a high considered item and it's just you know. People people don't plan ahead and they run out of stuff and they want it right then and there willing to pay extra for it so that one's pretty interesting and you track this probably even better I do Amazon's going after this one and then there's like, 10 startups in there that are have all raised, billions of dollars go puff just announcer one and a half billion dollar extension of their last round by layering on some debt so there's one called like gorillas or gorillas and. [33:55] Tons of these things out there but Amazon scaling it up too so it's gonna be interesting to see if any of these guys can make Headway against Amazon or Famas on will just crush them. [34:05] And then the last one is live-streaming this one sputtering in the US, every data point outside the US indicates it's a thing and I do think this one's going to translate from I've seen it I've seen data that shows that as a has expanded out of China and that's kind of where maybe a year ago we were talking about it largely on Alibaba platform. But now I think it's there's European startups I'm starting to see some categories in the US where this is interesting I followed the collectible category and there's a couple of the hot companies are they do these live streams where they will do. Unboxings so they will they will buy a pack of cards from like the 80s and then they will open them live and and see what's in there and and you know, it's kind of riveting if you're if you're into that and you're like I wonder you know there's a one in 100 chance that this has a Michael Jordan rookie card or something and they pull that the column poles that can be fascinating so there's a lot of. Kind of very specific category activity going there that I think I think a lot of us thought okay Amazon's and do this Amazon is tried and it's been pretty terrible but I think it's going to come from these really niche of Articles at first and they're going to figure it out and then you'll see it get more more momentum up into the broader retailers so those are those are my three. Jason: [35:27] Wow those are three good ones I feel like you stole my three I'm just kidding um no but I totally agree with all those I do think like we've actually seen Amazon launch some. Selling of shipping services and I've seen Stan said they're going to deliver 90% of their own packages this holiday so like I think that definitely is a thing even Walmart is now, selling shipping services to other people including Home Depot so that's totally interesting Trend hundred percent agree on the live streaming like I kind of call it the D bundling of shopping and you know we have all these e-commerce sites that are good at buying things but we're not very good at product Discovery and it seems like social and video or where a lot of the, the new product discoveries coming from and then that that ultra-fast delivery for filling orders to give you all the words you are asking about the that that's a huge thing and if you think about you know how much retailers are struggling with with grocery profitability like it's a double whammy that wow they're trying to figure out how to solve for profitability the consumers moving to this even you know inherently less profitable order so it's going to be that that's going to be an interesting disruption of the industry so if I were to add 3 to that. I do think just the whole pandemic. [36:41] Acceleration of great digital grocery like is when I talk about a lot and I still think that that is a huge thing like all those predictions about how much the pandemic was accelerating e-commerce for probably wrong but grocery delivery Ecommerce probably did get accelerated five years and to me maybe you know what will ultimately end up being one of the most important things that happened during the pandemic is Amazon invented a new grocery store right this Amazon Fresh concept and it's starting to scale there's more than 30 of them now they have just walk out technology in them which I would have bet against them having this quickly and there are there are lots of investigative journalists that have found. Some interesting real estate footprints that would imply that it's going to scale their that there's a business plan footing out here that had like 300 of these in the UK which is a small island um I think we could look back five years from now and see Amazon is a very meaningful brick-and-mortar grocer and and I think 20:21 is the year it it happened without us totally acknowledging it so I think Jay W groceries an interesting Evolution one that I end up talking about a lot with my clients also driven by Amazon is retail media networks right so you know Amazon, is that a run right now of about 30 billion dollars in ads it's probably the most profitable business Amazon has I think this this. [38:08] Battle for eyeballs between retailers and traditional digital platforms is super interesting and I think you know you set the layer who is. One of the the. The key guys at Amazon media like we had him on the show when he moved to Fresh Direct and he's now running Walmart Connect Four for Walmart so you're seeing the Retailer's hire these like credible media sales people and I think that's a. [38:37] A going forward a significant part of every retailers plan is how to be their own media Network how to get eyeballs and how to monetize those eyeballs and that's a new new skill for a retailer so I think that's a big deal and then the last one I'm gonna throw out, is one that I am surprised doesn't get talked about more but it's the apparel retailer she in and I think they are super interesting they've had phenomenal success they're probably globally the largest apparel reseller on the planet right now and their their annual revenues are more than than H&M and Zara combined so so remarkable. [39:18] Story of fast acceleration but the bigger story here is, to me Sheehan is very representative of the democratization of apparel that like for the longest time we expected Mickey Drexler or Versace or Yeezy to tell us like what was cool to wear and then we waited until we can buy those clothes and we bought them and I just I think that model is totally dead now I think the apparel that sells best the stuff that she and sells the stuff that target cells the stuff that Stitch fix cells is frankly based on customer data it's watching customers finding out what they like and then making it really fast and so Sheehan isn't isn't fashion driven by a stylist It's Fashion driven by Tick-Tock right and an Instagram and I think that's a, a lot of apparel companies haven't gotten the memo yet that the consumer is now squarely in charge of these fashion trends. Scot: [40:18] Yeah saw an article about these guys were this this one lady she did this Argyle Sweater outfit and. It was on Instagram it got some viral love they took that and it created a hole the outfit they had copied it or I guess fast fashion and I don't know how the how the IP Works in this world but they had replicated it and they I think they even used her picture which I think was with articles about that she didn't really you know, realize that that effectively shows open sourcing this thing to the world and then it became a top seller for them like in 60 days it was insane how fast that they identified the trend and get the. The product out there it was like you know NASCAR fashion or something. Jason: [41:03] Yeah it's crazy if you think about like the fashion traditionally worked like. Dudes would show up in Paris at the Fashion Show and show these cool Styles and then everyone would steal those Styles and send them an effector he's and two years later those fact those Fashions would be available at Neiman Marcus. Two years later and in so the genius of Gap was that they got those Fashions to the mall, 18 months later instead of two years later and the the disruption of H&M and Zara was that they got them to the mall six months later instead of 18 months later right. She and sees that woman in the crop-top Argyle Sweater and they have they have that fashion available in a week and here's what super interesting they don't make a million of them and hope they sell which is what all those other retailers had to do, they make 12 of them and if those 12 sell in 8 seconds versus 20 seconds then they make thousands of them. Right and so it's really data-driven real-time a/b testing on apparel trans at a speed that that these kind of traditional apparel Brands can't even imagine. Scot: [42:13] That's because they have the factory right there that they're able to do that or like to have some. Jason: [42:17] Yeah and they. In Shane's case they don't own the factories they have a net like that it's a gig worker economy for factories right like so in the same way that boober recruits a bunch of Uber drivers she and recruits a bunch of factories that they then go to and say hey we've got some some ideas for some new models and find one of those factories that accepts the order and makes the the stuff and so in sometimes there's our Factory driven ideas sometimes there she and driven ideas but but yeah that's that's the model and you know there is a Dark Side to this I got you know a lot of its there's a lot of questions about the labor standards and practices at a bunch of these factories and of course there's. You know a lot of the stuff that gets bought on Shion is super cheap and gets worn once and so it's a ecological disaster I would argue the industry it's disrupting is also. Kind of a you know it has a lot of dark sides and and is not very sustainable so I like I'm not sure she and improves on on any of those problems but from a pure consumer demand standpoint, I don't think we're ever going back to you know these like anointed tastemakers that like decide what we're all going to wear for the next year. Scot: [43:32] Yet clearly clearly that model is sailed having. Jason: [43:36] Indeed well listen Scott I know we both have to run but that is probably a great place to wrap up our final show of 20:21 I need to take some downtime not to see my family or anything like that but in early January we always like to record the forecasts show and hit traditionally you crush me and so I feel like I need to spend a lot more time thinking about my forecast before the forecast show comes up. Scot: [44:07] Yeah challenge accepted I will also be thinking about this in a background processes I'm enjoying the holiday I think this is a good time to thank our listeners you know we've you know we've seen our listenership grow pretty steadily over the years and we really appreciate everyone giving us time to your day to talk about the topics we talk about and we get a lot of great feedback and really engaged set of listeners and we really appreciate you listening and if you want to share your appreciation one of the ways you can do that is through a five star rating so fire up your favorite podcast listening technology and if you would leave us a five starters we that would be the perfect holiday gift for us. Jason: [44:47] Yeah that's exact five stars is exactly my size to Scott. Scot: [44:50] How about that. Jason: [44:53] Awesome well most of can't appreciate enough the listeners for spending this time with us every week this is a lot of fun for us to do and I learned so much from the the chats I have with folks after they listen to the podcast so I'm that is one of the things I'm super grateful for. Scot: [45:10] Everyone have a great holiday Jason you how enjoy your trip to California. Jason: [45:14] Thank you you have a wonderful holiday as well and until next time happy commercing!  

Voice Spark Live Sep 29th 7PM EST Coming @U #Voicespark Live Nick(@ASR_Podcast), Ben @(benjaminfalvo) and Emily (@EmilyBanzhaf) will be taking a look at Domino's Pizza, Kasa (this is with notes on Phillips Smart home) and Fresh Direct! #voicefirst #voicetech #voiceevents #freevoiceevents ⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎------⁎⁎⁎----- Subscribe to Voice Spark Alexa & More https://bit.ly/310VmaH

In This Episode You'll Hear About:What it was like to grow up in a great family that valued homegrown food and home cookingHow he found his way into a passion for sustainable food while at Yale and had opportunities to not only be a part of farming but also part of helping others enjoy good foodHow he got a lot of experience and education working as a buyer for Fresh Direct and had a few light bulb moments noticing some gaps in the industry, and then came back to the Northeast to work for Happy Valley MeatHow his roommate had been learning a lot about the food industry as well and became the perfect person to co-create a solution to the healthy snack options conundrumWhat the product development process was like and how it all came together in a unique way with a final product that provides the answer to the problem they set out to solveHow they went to market and how they dealt with COVID coming at about the time they were set to fully launch What challenges Leland and his team have overcome and continue to work through What advice he has for aspiring entrepreneurs and what's next for Slow Up in both retail and in the DTC spaceTo Find Out More:SlowUp.coQuotes:“There was a real live and interesting tension between staying completely committed to like really strict set of rules and values and ethics and growing quickly.”“We thought about what is the deal with the distance between how satisfying and exciting meals are and what we're living on in between meals?” “We heard over and over again that options that were healthy weren't tasty, and that options that were tasty weren't particularly healthy, and that everything had too much sugar. A lot of dissatisfaction and the nature of the dissatisfaction was pretty clear. So that smelled like a business to us.”“We just turned Chef Caroline loose and said, "Make something healthy and delicious that feels like a recipe, not a formula, and feels like it came to you from a chef.'”“The nucleus is that breaking that healthy/tasty compromise, using fresh ingredients like you would at a restaurant or in your own kitchen and coming up with a product that felt like a recipe, not like an extruded lab product.”“This has been an education for me in not saying, here's a delicious thing, how do we take it to market? But instead, like, here's a market, how do we make something to address it?”“We really think of ourselves, despite riding on the refrigerated bar coattails, as creating a new category. It's an unfamiliar product that really only resembles a bar in its shape, really not in its experience.”“Getting creative around where we belong in the grocery store, who the right buyer is, and who the right distributors are is part of the project.”“We like to say good food goes bad.”“Get a handle on the business first and then get a handle on what you think you can deliver, then take that and make the slide deck.”“You just got to jump in the cold water. I think that's the big advice. Hard to feel prepared, and with a little bit of the benefit of hindsight, pretty impossible to be prepared unless you've done it before. So just send it.” “There's always another hill to climb. Another problem to solve. Problems shift or grow or shrink, but they don't disappear. So once you've jumped in, recognizing that you just got to get comfortable in that. There's always another hill to climb.”

“This is a product that was created for me. It was something that I couldn't find on the market when I stopped eating meat.” Jason Rosenbaum (04:18 - 04:24)   The term “plant-based” gets thrown out a lot, especially in recent years, as more people are going towards a vegetarian/vegan diet. But not all “plant-based” products are created equal. While some *are* plant-based, they can contain a lot of other excess additives like salt and preservatives that counteracts the advantages of not being meat focused. Actual Veggies is standing above the rest, keeping true to their name and creating products that are “veggie-only”. You can see it not only in the ingredients list, but in the burgers themselves.   Actual Veggies Co-Founder Jason Rosenbaum has always been an entrepreneur but never had a company he was truly passionate about. Thinking he was eating well, and fairly fit, Jason actually had fairly high cholesterol due to his genetics. After going through different options, he decided to cut out meat in 2019. With his favorite food being beef burgers, Jason was on the hunt for a way to replace them. In his findings, he discovered there are essentially two vegetarian burgers on the market: imitation meat, which is filled with sodium and extremely processed, and veggie burgers that are frozen and packed with preservatives. That's it.    “I started doing research and I was looking for a refrigerated fresh veggie burger because it wasn't something that I was able to make of my own. I couldn't find anything on the market.” Jason Rosenbaum (06:57 - 07:06)   After seeing that there wasn't much innovation in the veggie burger market, Jason decided to take matters into his own hands.   Coming from the tech industry, primarily with small business owners and entrepreneurs, Hailey Swartz had a desire to make her ideas a reality just like them. Health conscious herself, when Hailey learned the issue Jason brought to the table, she was on board to work on executing his vision. The two, alongside Hailey's brother Alex, all teamed up to create Actual Veggies. Not knowing exactly how to create the burger themselves, the three partnered with a chef and created four flagship burgers: The Actual Black Burger, The Actual Orange Burger, The Actual Green Burger, and The Actual Purple Burger. All aptly named as you can see, taste and smell the veggies that are in them.   While Actual Veggies are obviously veggie based, Jason doesn't particularly like using the term “plant-based”, but instead saying they're “plant-only” or “veggie-only” because they don't want to be grouped with other plant-based products that might not actually be.    “There's so many products out there that are called plant-based” then you look at their ingredients and you go ‘wait there's not really many plants in here'” Jason Rosenbaum ( 16:34 -16:41)   Now the timing of creating Actual Veggies was tough, as it was around March 2020. But as the world shut down, they opened up. After launching officially in January 2021, Actual Veggies are already available with Imperfect Foods, Hungryroot and Fresh Direct, along with Sprouts stores nationwide and direct to consumers on their website. With no preservatives, Actual Veggie burgers are something that's unique that isn't really being done in the market right now. As such, they're primarily found in the refrigerated section, not frozen.   While veggie burgers are a staple of their product line right now, Hailey, Jason, and Alex have other veggie focused foods they're looking to innovate. Since we all eat with our eyes first, they want to focus on color to make whole, veggie-only food fun for everyone.   How to get involved Join The Produce Moms Group on Facebook and continue the discussion every week!  Reach out to us - we'd love to hear more about where you are in life and business! Find out more here.    If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a quick review on iTunes. It would mean the world to hear your feedback and we'd love for you to help us spread the word!

Healthy supply chains are vital to modern life, from ecommerce to retail. Udo Lange, president and CEO of Federal Express Logistics, and Nitin Chaudhary, senior vice president of technology from Fresh Direct, a leader in online grocery delivery discuss how businesses can protect and innovate their supply chains with Honeywell Senior Vice President and Chief Supply Chain Officer Torsten Pilz.

Ellen talks about J.Lo and A-Rod, Seinfeld Episodes, Surveys, Fresh Direct, Vaccine, Masks and more.

Marissa Dobbins and Courtnie Beceiro are the General Manager and Brand Director at Haven's Kitchen. With Ali on vacation this week, the two of them take over ITS to talk about their experience leaving Fresh Direct to build a start up, their management styles, and how to work with a Founder (hint: learn how to say "no" to them...).Heritage Radio Network is a listener supported nonprofit podcast network. Support In The Sauce by becoming a member!In The Sauce is Powered by Simplecast.   

In this episode of the Engage Video Marketing Podcast, I’m excited to share my interview with Matt Johnston as we discuss the world of viral video. Matt helped invent the format, system, and science of viral videos in the publishing world at Business Insider, NowThis, New York Magazine, Men’s Health, and others. He produced and oversaw over 2,000+ pieces of video content (both branded and editorial) that generated well over 10 billion video views across platforms. He’s worked on viral video campaigns with brands such as Toyota, the National Football League, Campbell’s, Chase Bank, Verizon, Adobe, Tidal, Fresh Direct, and many others. He’s also driven hundreds of millions of page views in content to websites, and built many successful content and video teams from scratch. Matt left the publishing world in 2018 to bring viral branded video and disruptive, content-based PR to innovative companies across the globe.  Support this podcast

In today’s podcast episode I’m speaking with Craig Rispoli, a renowned chef with over a decade of high volume production, restaurant, retail, R&D, and catering experience. Having previously worked with companies like Gourmet Boutique, Financier Patisserie, Dean &DeLuca and Fresh Direct, Chef Rispoli joined fresh&co as the Executive Chef. There, he leads the culinary development and innovation team where he oversees all seasonal menu roll-outs, menu enhancements, and recipe development for all corporate and franchise locations.   Chef Craig shares fun insight into what it’s like to be a chef at fresh&co as well as tips for developing healthy eating habits. Here are some of my favorite takeaways from our conversation: When it comes to eating healthfully, it’s important to enjoy what you’re eating, so keep your palate entertained by considering both the taste and nutritional value of the food you eat. The cost of putting good food in your body is nothing compared to the cost of the healthcare you’ll need if you don’t. The best and easiest way to build flavor in the meals you prepare is to eat seasonally. Healthy living is being happy with who you are, what you’re doing, where you’re going and where you’ve been.   Want to learn more about Chef Craig and the food he creates? You can connect with him via his fresh&co (http://www.freshandco.com/), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/freshandconyc/), Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/FreshandCoNYC/), Twitter (https://twitter.com/freshandconyc) and Chef Craig’s s personal Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/chefcraigrispoli/).

Dara Pollak is the founder of The Skinny Pig Inc., a consulting company specializing in digital content and social media. She's also the owner and operator of The Skinny Pig NYC (www.theskinnypignyc.com), a food-centric website covering restaurants, travel, and recipes. In addition, Dara is a recipe developer and video producer, creating cooking "how-to" videos for the web and social media. Past partners include Fresh Direct, Coastal Living Mag, Thrillist, McCormick, T-Fal, Martin's Potato Rolls, Chobani, P&G, and more. Last but not least, Dara is a social media and branding consultant as well as a social media influencer (@skinnypignyc - 91K+ followers on Instagram) for Public Relations and Hospitality groups in the Tri-State area. Where she writes press releases, pitches media, creates custom content, organizes custom event executions, and maintains the digital presence for brands/restaurants. CONNECT: TEXT : (914) 996-4569 - any questions, comments, or if you just want to talk shop. EMAIL : Inserra@sabre.life - straight business. AND, DON'T FORGET TO FOLLOW ME! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kyleinserra YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuiy3a6JnMAs7vwXrGhWfg/videos?view_as=subscriber TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@restaurantsandrealestate?source=h5_m Twitter: @kyleinserra Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kyleinserrarealestate --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/restaurantowners/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/restaurantowners/support

In these days when we’re continuing to stay safe and families are opting to eat at home instead of dining out, premium delivery services have become ubiquitous and oh so necessary. We’ve all become familiar with Farmer’s Fridge, Instacart, Fresh Direct, Hello Fresh, and Amazon Prime which deliver either groceries or pre-packaged meals to your doorstep. I just found out about a new food tech startup that sends you premium meals on a subscription with get this, your very own oven. It’s called Tovala. You simply scan the barcode and the oven knows exactly how much time to cook it for. What I was most fascinated about is that it can scan other bar codes like packages from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. I recently tried making my favorite Trader Joe’s Manadarin Orange chicken and the dish was cooked perfectly. In addition to this high-tech capability, it can be used as a standard toaster oven for pizza, bruschetta, etc. I am so excited to be interviewing the CMO of Tovala, Lesley Butler. Meet My Guest: WEBSITE: Tovala.com INSTAGRAM: @lesleytodbutler FACEBOOK: /lesley.todbutler LINKEDIN: Lesley Butler Mom Haul: Portal from Facebook

EP246 - Q3 Results  The US Census Bureau published its retail monthly data and quarterly e-commerce data this week. We also saw earnings reports from Target, Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot, Walgreens, and Kohls. We also discuss Amazon’s entry into pharmacy.  Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Episode 246 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, November 20th 2020. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 246 being recorded on Thursday November 19th 2020, I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners. Jason it’s getting to be holiday and I don’t know about you but I am constantly being pummeled with. Carrier pigeons direct messages tweets linkedin’s friend stirs just messages from every possible venue and guess what they’re asking. Jason: [1:05] They are asking you to buy early from their store. Scot: [1:10] I know that yes I am getting this but what I’m getting from our listeners are people saying Scott what can I get you guys have given us so much pleasure over the year through this podcast what can we do in return. And my answer is all Jason I want for the holidays this year is your 5 star review. So if you can hit pause real quick and this is best in your app that you’re using if you’re on the iPhone it’s pretty simple kind of need to do it in the podcast app, believe that five-star review that would that would be really great and that would make our your for us here at the Jason’s got show we’d really appreciate that so whatever app you’re in go in there leave us that five star review that really helps us a lot. Keeps us at the very tippy top of the e-commerce podcast realm so we would really appreciate that. [2:04] So alright welcome back hopefully you did pause and leave us that five star review we appreciate it. Jason we are T minus seven days until turkey day and this is the time of the year where we really start to feel it you know kind of that nervous energy. Here in the Commerce retail e-commerce world, everyone holds their breaths and they been working all year planning for this they’ve got all the server’s lined up all the clouds clouding, and just hoping that the next 20 days are super awesome but they’re also scary for everybody so. And then this year with covid everything is going to be cranked up to an 11 we’ve talked a lot about ship again we’re going to do an update on that so we thought the days show we would. Kind of stay on news because there is a lot going on and first of all I thought we could hit some of the really interesting Amazon news. Jason: [3:05] Amazon news new your margin is their opportunity. Scot: [3:17] Jason you have I think you’ve been I can’t remember where it’s been all cheer now I can’t remember if you predicted this but you’ve been really kind of keeping an eye on Amazon’s aspirations to get into the pharmacy world and if I remember they bought that pihl company was at pillpack and then there was some news this week update us on what happened and what you’re thinking what’s your what’s your point of view is it time to stop going to Walgreens and CVS. Jason: [3:46] Yeah so side note I was actually revisiting that prediction Show recently because I was trying to cheat and edit in that I predicted a global pandemic. Scot: [3:57] No that’s not fair no cheating. Jason: [3:58] No I would never cheat but if you happen to notice that there I must have in fact predicted it. But yeah so we’ve talked a lot about this we’ve talked a lot about Amazon and Walmart’s General aspirations around Healthcare, and for sure I think for the last several years I can’t even remember which year we first predicted it but like we predicted in the past that Amazon would get into Pharmacy. And we we’ve seen sort of three previous Healthcare actions, they actually applied for and received a number of their own Pharmacy licenses so you have to be a pharmacy you have to be licensed in every state they got licensed in a bunch of states for medical equipment so that’s not actually the, the the medications that’s things like. [4:48] Pulse ox monitors and glucose meters and and orthopedic equipment and prescribed equipment that customers might want to buy so so they kind of. [4:59] Did their first step in getting some pharmacy license has a lot of us speculated that that could be a precursor to getting a medical dispensing pharmacy license. So then they bought pill pack which is a pharmacist and online pharmacy that already had a bunch of Pharmacy licenses so they kind of got. If memory serves something like half the country covered just by buying pillpack and for listeners that aren’t familiar pillpack has kind of a unique value proposition, they’re a mail order pharmacy that mail your your prescriptions to you but instead of giving you all 60 of your doses of Lipitor in a bottle, individually packaged your pills for each day so if you’re taking three conch medications you get a little plastic. Vacuum-sealed bag with the three pills you need to take each day so make it make it super easy to take each day’s thing and so they bought pillpack they’ve been continuing to operate pillpack they’ve even done some pretty extensive, marketing and advertising for pillpack. And then right around the beginning of this year they bought a medical technology company that does like. Telemedicine medical triage it’s kind of like artificial intelligence for what are your symptoms and I’ll tell you what likely is wrong with you kind of stuff. [6:23] And then they’ve used a lot of those Technologies. To roll out some for some health care clinics but the health care clinics are not for the general public at the moment there for Amazon employees in specific cities like. They’ve opened a number of clinics near. Near some of the FCS and they’ve opened a clinic near their corporate headquarters in Seattle and they I think they even develop their own covid testing. Capability that they use in those clinics to test employees. Scot: [6:51] Yeah when we went in our deep dive I remember them saying they were doing you know tens of thousands of daily testing so pretty pretty substantial just internal testing effort which was pretty interesting. Jason: [7:03] So that’s all the history of Amazon and Healthcare and what we’ve been waiting for is when do they do something that strikes fear into Walgreens and CVS and the answer is probably this. Scot: [7:16] Yeah saw the stock I’m not a big tracker of those stocks but I saw CVS was down from like the mid 70s and mid 60’s so kind of a 10% drop in I imagine Walgreens with similar. Jason: [7:28] Yeah and I think they one or both of them had earnings calls recently and. Somewhat counter-intuitively and maybe sometimes we get into this the those pharmacies are not. Beneficiary major beneficiaries of covid in fact like their comps are down. So so they are ready we’re kind of a little soft and then this Amazon announcement they all had an impact. We’re still trying to figure all the details out but a so Amazon has announced that you can now there a nationwide Pharmacy and you can buy your your prescriptions from Amazon and you’re not. My my understanding is you can now get like a normal person gription from Amazon it doesn’t have to be the pillpack configuration. And it’s available Nationwide but what they really focused on they didn’t give a lot of details about that about how you would order your your traditional prescriptions, if you had Insurance because what they really focused on is they had done a partnership. With a I think the company is called The Insider RX to dispense prescriptions to people that don’t have insurance and give them the best possible price. [8:50] So it feels like this first segment that they’re targeting for their kind of Nationwide Pharmacy offering are uninsured customers or underinsured customers, and help them get affordable access to a prescription, outside of the insurance system and there’s a variety of reasons that are probably doing that it turns out there’s. A lot of exclusive deals in the insurance networks and so it’s probably really hard for Amazon to, say hey Scott order your prescriptions from me and will submit it to whoever your insurance is and will get reimbursed. Scot: [9:29] Do you think when I go to my doctor soon I’ll be you know they always say what’s your favorite drugstore I’ll be able to see Amazon Pharmacy and then that’ll connect those things are as that a naive the other. Jason: [9:37] So that that is petition clear because here’s going to be the problem say you have some new medical problem and the doctor wants to prescribe some a one-time thing for you, they’re going to they’re going to write the script and most insurance company your insurance company is going to pay no matter where you feel it so they your doctor can probably send that to Amazon and a big part of this on Amazon offering is 2-day delivery so if it’s. If it’s something you need you know that you can start taking two days from now that could totally work. Often when the doctor writes a prescription for some acute problem in the office you’re going to stop on your way home from the doctor’s office to fill that prescription. And so Amazon’s not super competitive at that, but in most cases that first prescription the most credible insurance companies are obligated to compensate the dispenser for that so there’s not a lot of controversy about that, what gets controversial is, if you have some chronic condition that means you’re going to take some medication for the rest of your life like the most popular which is like a Statin for high cholesterol. Right so a lot of insurance companies now say. Hey we don’t want you to buy that every 30 days from a retail pharmacy and pay the highest price we want you to use our Pharmacy and they’re going to send you a 90-day Supply and will only cover this under insurance if you get it from us. [11:04] And so the NAT those mail-order pharmacies are often operated by Rite Aid and CVS and Walgreens so they all they all have you know CVS Caremark for example, the do that mail order on behalf of insurance companies but there’s a lot of exclusives there and that’s the. The part of the the pharmacy business that I don’t know for a fact but I would imagine is harder for Amazon to crack because they would literally have to go to these, these insurers and get them to too. Except Amazon is a dispensary and they have to negotiate pricing rates and they probably already have an exclusive deal with another for provider. [11:46] So if your Amazon you’re trying to grill and Pharmacy you go oh the these ad hoc prescriptions is one place I could grow but really I need to do like one hour fulfillment for those which Amazon did not announce here. And then the other category is a huge chunk of prescriptions are sold without insurance and so it seems like that’s where I Amazon’s really focusing and so that’s actually not the. The bread and butter of Walgreens and CVS there are third parties that provide, discounts and promotions to those retail pharmacies so these are companies you’ve now seen television ads for good RX and. Shoot what’s the one with Martin Sheen something care. It’ll it’ll come to me later but there’s a couple companies out there that are kind of in the business of, aggregating coupons and letting customers get a cheaper price when they have to get a prescription from Walgreens without a, a prescription and that is basically what Amazon is offering so the well Walgreens and Rite Aid like took a little bit of a value hit like who really took a value hit was good RX. Because it seems like Amazon’s competing directly with them. Scot: [13:07] Single care. Jason: [13:08] Single Care thank you I knew it was something here. Scot: [13:11] One of our one of our interns were handed over to you. Jason: [13:13] Yeah so like the the kind of Market. Whiplash action like really hit those guys and I’ve seen the number of analysts that follow the industry pretty close and they’re like you know what there’s a bunch of nuances, Amazon is not going to be able to to kind of immediately impact those those businesses and the in the trade agreements are kind of complicated so, my sense is that some of the stocks have already rebounded from this initial kind of. So you know every so I mean kind of we’re getting a little in the weeds but rolling all this up there’s there’s a theory why everyone shouldn’t be afraid of Amazon but of course you and I know as a general premise everyone, should be afraid of Amazon so this first offering may not be you know the one that that, dramatically impacts any of the existing players businesses but it certainly reaffirms Amazon’s interest and intent in disrupting this industry. Scot: [14:17] Yeah and whatever you do if you’re an executive at one of these companies never ever say that you’re going to Canvas ons but or you’re not worried about them or they can’t do your your business. Jason: [14:28] Yeah I the exact phrase you probably shouldn’t utter is Amazon’s great at selling X but our business is uniquely complicated and difficult. Much different than all the businesses Amazon successful and therefore Amazon has no chance of succeeding. Scot: [14:46] Another one you probably shouldn’t utter is we’re a hundred percent Amazon proof. Jason: [14:52] Exactly we’re Amazon’s partner not there their competitor yeah so I feel like and besides Amazon’s never made a profit so there’s that. Scot: [15:01] That is so true so true you and I have that till the cows come home. Course that’s a little Amazon update and we’re going to keep an eye on this Pharmacy very closely because we do think it’s going to be this could be a billion dollar pillar if you know this is a nibble and you know this kind of the second Noble after pill pack I would kind of say, but it’s clear Amazon has their sights set on this one just General Health Care and so does Walmart so it’s pretty interesting Battlefield coming up, let’s pivot over to ship a getting one of our favorite topics so, because you and I are the ship again guys we are getting hit with all the ship again news and in fact, if folks have hair dryers they’re taking a while to get to them or let’s see iPads or anything you and I to know about it so that’s part of the fun of being the ship again guys. Jason: [15:50] I like being the ship again and Guy exactly. Scot: [15:52] I do too I’ve learned a ton so let’s go through what kind of do a lightning around here, first thing I’ll apologize listeners I talked about putting a model out in the last show and my day job has been kind of busy so I have not had chance to work on that I’m hoping to work on that this weekend, so stay tuned. The speaking of Amazon they had an article today where they are telling folks and I think this is I mentioned at the top but you know we should say, it does look like we’re having that that V or swishy shape at least from a covid perspective so cases are hitting all times Highs hospitalizations are at all-time highs, so we’ve got kind of the second wave of the pandemic and I think what Amazon is saying is if they have to go back into kind of that March centrioles only mode. If that climbs the holiday it could be kind of cataclysmic so so I would say, you know if we were keeping track of some kind of a scorecard of ship again every week since we’ve introduced it I think the chance of it getting worse than you and I even predicted are increasing. Let me pause there and see if you agree on that. Jason: [17:04] Yeah no totally and I think to try to mitigate this a lot of people try to entice customers to shop early and I my sense is that that mostly hasn’t been successful so. Scot: [17:17] So Amazon came out and said hey you know you got really really seriously you need to shop early this year because even we won’t may not be able to get you what you need so that was pretty interesting for them to being there of course people kind of are like sure they want to shop early so there’s it’s going to be saying there’s going to be a segment of consumers that I kind of think it’s fake news if you will and they do not take advantage of this and you know the Doomsday scenario is Amazon gets and you know swamped and has to move into Central kind of stuff stores go through shutdowns in certain areas I think California actually is doing it in Chicago or are your store shut down. Jason: [18:00] Yeah so we’re on a advisory which is like the softer language of a shutdown and it basically meant stores. That were previously allowed to be at 50% maximum occupancy or now a 25% so they haven’t closed them but they’ve more severely constrained the traffic that’s allowed in. Scot: [18:19] Yes that’s one news item and then, several folks have reported to us drop buying products directly from Apple that most of those products are showing a inability to get anything by Christmas and this is before Thanksgiving started so. If anyone in your you know if any of your holiday gifts are going to be of the apple variety you need to really look at that closely and then, um I’ve had I had this exact same situation and I found you can go to Best Buy and some of the other kind of apple Outlets if you will and they, they have little bit more inventory than Apple interestingly enough. [18:59] And then friend of the show Erik Heller he saw an Amazon van and this is kind of part of this DSP Network I don’t think Amazon directly to this but it was clearly a UPS van that had been painted with the Amazon Prime on it so, so I think a very clever Amazon DSP partner, you know there’s this problem that new Vans are just all spoken for for for six months and I know this from my day job, and so people are going out and finding anything they can so there’s the used market for delivery vehicles these are things that are like. [19:33] 10 to 20 years old at this point there are basically taking anything you know that runs imagine someday we’ll see, some old yellow school buses painted with prime paint and stuff with packages and they’re putting them out into the fleet I’ve little Battlestar Galactica kind of a fleet that that’s going on out there. And in addition to that I’m getting a lot of interesting pictures of what I would call Super janky vans that, that are being used to deliver packages now so yeah I saw one that was looked like it had been maybe in Beirut and it had like as part of the FedEx ground which is a 1099 Network kind of like the DSP program, and then add like the tiniest of FedEx stickers on it is really funny it was like a nine by nine square it was like FedEx Ground in this like sea of denser along the side of the packet the truck so. That is the ship again news did you see anything else that was interesting. Jason: [20:31] No I think you you covered most of it it just a reminder that, this is by far the most acute version of the van problem member but they’re like a version of that plays out every holiday, um you know FedEx and UPS maybe aren’t trying to acquire a ton of new Vans but they would like to have more Vans available so they go out and rent a bunch of vans. And then we end up with this porch piracy problem. People see like an unmarked rental van like pull up and some you know none uniform Guy come out with a bunch of packages and they often it’s a legit. Delivery person and they get reported to the police as a potential porch pirate so I imagine all these Jinky Vans are going to make that even more cute. And then I just want to plug this one side note in my market here in Chicago Amazon key for business has been going door-to-door to all the buildings, and they’re offering to install like the secure access system so my I live in a little 12 unit Condo building and we just installed the Amazon key so now all the Amazon drivers. Can open my front door without without having to call us on the call box and drop our packages off. Scot: [21:45] The front door to your interior door or the building door. Jason: [21:49] Building doors so they get in they can now get access to our mail room to drop off packages. Which is interesting because Amazon can do it and it’s all Wireless and it’s it’s access controlled so they can only deliver. You know during appropriate hours and and there’s a log but like FedEx and UPS can’t do that. Scot: [22:18] Yeah and then I know you’re on pins and needles to jump into this there was a data drop that you want to tell listeners about. Jason: [22:26] Yeah it’s a datapalooza week I’ve been super excited. So this is a fun week for me on Tuesday of this week the US Department of Commerce the US Census Bureau. Drops their monthly retail sales data so we got that data on Tuesday and then once a quarter every three months, they drop this supplemental e-commerce report so on Thursday we got the Q3 supplemental e-commerce report. So both of those. Are kind of fun and in general and in particular in covid times when things are changing so much it’s super interesting to get fresh data about what’s going on in our Marketplace. Scot: [23:11] Yeah and if listeners are interested we had a full show on this the episode so number escapes me while you’re talking I’ll get one of the interns to work on it but but yeah so I always kind of because I don’t live in this data like you do I always have to go refresh myself but but walk us through that data and what was exciting. Jason: [23:31] Yep so first of all that was episode 239 which was back in the beginning of October that we had to Paul and Scott on from the US Census Bureau to talk about how they prepare this data and kind of, talk about some best practices and how to use it, um so the first data set to come out is the monthly data and in basically every retailer in America fills out the surveys. And what they sold in a given month in the US Census Bureau Aggregates it all up and so you know about 19 days into November or 17 days in November we find out what sales were like in October. So retail sales in October where up. Eight point five percent year-over-year so that means. October 20 20 in the middle of covid we sold 8.5% more stuff than we did October 2019 which is very healthy. Like that cat. Scot: [24:32] Pretty crazy like last year we were going like everyone was excited like 3% Yeehaw it’s crazy crazy Tom. Jason: [24:40] Exactly and so we can get into in a second into why retail sales are so up there’s some good reasons for that covid is. Stop spending in some non-retail categories and it’s actually shifted that spending into retail categories so, you used to go to restaurants which are not retailgeek, and instead you’re going to grocery stores now which is retail and you used to fly in airplanes and stay in hotels which is not retail and instead you’re buying stuff to fix up your house which is retailgeek. Scot: [25:13] Some would say it if you charted it looks kind of like a v-shaped recovery. Jason: [25:18] Yeah in West you look at all the categories in that V and those people would now say as a w-shaped recovery for the record because it’s. Like probably because of covered right now it’s going the wrong way so we’re probably going to get two v’s right next to each other but that that aside the so eight point eight point five percent, year of your growth is awesome again you could take categories out of that there’s a category in that that’s called non store sales which is kind of our proxy for e-commerce, it was up 29% so almost thirty percent which is interesting, if you pull some of the categories out that aren’t traditionally very e-commerce e like if you pull auto and gas out of the retail number then you’re over your sales were even up better they were up like 10.8%, um so, so Healthy Growth interestingly a lot of the reporting on the data was negative because what they mostly looked at is the change in sales from September to October, and the growth from September to October was very modest it was 0.3%. [26:34] And so a lot of people interpreted that as, kind of the recovery petering out and Scott being wrong and it not being v-shaped but In fairness to Scott I’m going to say. I don’t actually care about month-to-month growth because, every month has a different set of shopping intense attached to it and it’s, it’s just like the month-to-month changes just aren’t traditionally that linear and they change every year depending on the number of days, um you know weekend days versus weekdays and all these other factors so I just in general I care a lot more about seeing Healthy year-over-year Growth than I do the month to month growth but the people that worked at the month-to-month growth were like oh, things are slowing down. Scot: [27:27] Got it yeah you’re over yours Waco. Jason: [27:30] Yeah and so yeah and so in general if you then break it down into categories there were category like building materials is up 20 percent from the same month last year. E-commerce I mentioned was up 29%. What else is a big cars or up big like 11%. Scot: [27:55] Yeah the Auto industry is on fire right now. Jason: [27:59] Yeah well yeah dip their two sides of the audio and Industry that you would know better than me right like the guy selling vehicles are doing great the guy selling gas are not doing well. Scot: [28:08] People are buying cars and then promptly not driving them which doesn’t make a ton of sense. Jason: [28:13] Exactly. Scot: [28:14] I need a new car that I’m not going to drive. Jason: [28:16] Yeah and then grocery is up like 10% so those are the categories that had like like frankly like huge tail winds from, from covid you didn’t go on a vacation and you got a stimulus check so you bought that new car and you’re thinking your your vacation this year is going to be a car trip right so you bought that new car, you’re not going to restaurant so you’re buying more groceries you’re you know you’re not traveling as much so you improve your house right so those categories were the big head winds and then exactly as you would expect, there’s a categories that were big losers gas is down 14% people aren’t driving to work right apparel is down thirteen percent you know people aren’t wearing as much clothes department stores are down 12%, and restaurants are down 15% so, that that’s kind of how the the monthly data played out and I would say these were all trends that we saw in September and they continued through to October and so I didn’t see any like. Dramatic changes of Direction this was this is all pretty what we would expect at this. Scot: [29:27] Yeah and what I peeked at the data one thing that jumped at me is it looked like, you know the pork kind of fashion industry is just taking it on the chin and it seems like it’s getting worse is that is that your read on it like it’s decelerating even more. Jason: [29:44] Well so yeah it depends on how you worked it got really decelerated early in covid when people weren’t going to stores and going to malls, and then it started to recover a little bit like there is a hypothesis that like. You might need some warmer clothes even if you’re not going anywhere and one more clothes are more expensive than summer clothes and so like, in general you want you expect to see a little bit of a lift in Winter I don’t think we’ve seen a lot of that and it’s just this triple whammy like apparel had a bunch of head winds before covid-19, there’s they have more head wins in covid and the majority of places where people buy clothes separately have a bunch of head winds from covid so it’s a. Triple whammy against the apparel industry and and I would say just in general, ten years ago you spent six percent of your income on close today you spend three percent of your income on clothes so it’s just like there’s no there’s no good news in the apparel space. Scot: [30:47] Yeah so I’m an e-commerce guy and I like the simple version of this so this data said and Q2 Commerce group 45%, this data drop isn’t the one that really pinpoints e-commerce right that’s the one. Jason: [31:02] Two days later we had that one drop right so last quarter exactly you said 45% e-commerce growth and so this quarter was lower it was 36% e-commerce growth 36.7%. Scot: [31:16] Okay so that has dropped okay yeah so the non-store being 29 isn’t just e-commerce they do this other drop that just e-commerce and that was higher than that 29. Jason: [31:25] Exactly exactly and and the that 2019 was a monthly number the the 36.7 percent is a quarterly number. Scot: [31:34] Okay good alright. And then but that’s interesting because Amazon came in at 37% but that’s, total Amazon North America was 39 and then if you took out physical stores which I think is the best comp they were at like 40 percent. Q3 Jason: [31:57] Close to this 37% right like so they they tracked last quarter so Amazon last quarter was 43 percent and the industry average was for the quarter was 45%, this quarter Amazon’s 39 percent in the US and the 44 your point if you want to take out the stores and the industry average is 37 so they’re there, they’re right in line and not shockingly Amazon is a reasonable. Surrogate for this quarterly data now another thing you get to see in the quarterly data is what percentage of all retail e-commerce is. And so last quarter to two retail was like e-commerce was like sixteen percent of all retail including all the categories that. The US Census Bureau includes in retail which does include like gas and restaurants, I’m sorry not restaurants but it does include gas in cars so so last quarter was sixteen percent of all sales this quarter it’s dropped down to fourteen percent of all sales so what. This is totally intuitive but what could have happened is for part of Q2 brick-and-mortar retail was closed or less accessible and so e-commerce was the only alternative right so as we moved into Q3. [33:11] People are continuing to lean on e-commerce e-commerce is still super important it’s the fastest-growing way for people to shop and new people that learned how to shop that way are continuing to use it but. People do have better access to brick-and-mortar stores in Q2 and so in Q3 than they did in Q2 and so the brick-and-mortar sales came back a little bit more which means the ratio of e-commerce to Brick and Mortar drop down a little bit. [33:39] Does that make sense and that’s also frankly why I mean 29 percent is or I’m sorry 36 percent is still unprecedented growth white compared to a normal year. Yeah but so the reason it didn’t grow quite as big as because you didn’t have this you know hey all the clothing stores are closed and I need socks. Scot: [33:58] So one way to read this is if we kind of draw a line from Q2 at 45% and now we have Q3 at 36 percent you could say Q4 continue to decelerate be like you know low 30s right or you know I guess what I’ve been thinking is we’re going to see a pickup again where it’s going to kind of. I think the more likely scenario is it will stay at this elevated kind of high 30s and there’s a chance it could go up into the 40’s like we saw you too especially if we have this covid situation and I’m specifically talking e-commerce here. Does that do you agree with that or did you come to a different conclusion now you’ve seen the data. Jason: [34:38] It’s hard because I’ll call it like the five-factor model right like so if Q4 was just another quarter like you’d probably predict like a linear Trend here and so the rate of growth would probably slowed a little bit more, um but Q4 isn’t a normal quarter it’s a quarter that has accelerated consumption overall and accelerated spending and so in a world win a disproportionately high percentage of that spending is online that should actually. Accelerate the rate of e-commerce right so that’s that you know the second Factor the third factor is that the. The. Fourth quarter like was already an uncharacteristically high quarter for e-commerce why people have already learned a shop online more for gifts than they do for their day-to-day needs, so that would it’s hard to grow from the bigger number so the fact that Q4 is the biggest number of last year means the rate should slow down a little bit and then we have the ship again in factors like, do retailers have enough inventory do they have enough shipping capacity so you kind of apply all, you know some some estimate for all five of those things and like I think we’re going to end it a super healthy number I kind of put that 33% out there is like where we’ll probably land so that’s, so I D celebration from this quarter but still you know very healthy by historic standards. Scot: [36:01] Yeah cool and then there’s also so on top of this data there was a plethora of folks we covered Amazon and really dive here but we we’ve had a good more than a handful of retailers push out their results what were some of the highlights you saw there. Jason: [36:19] Yeah so yeah it was a good week for earnings so Cole’s announced this week in their comps are down, it’s so funny how Wall Street works by the way right like so cold like Cole cells apparel apparel sucks their comps were down 13 percent but because the expectation was that they would do even worse that was actually favorable to their stock right, e-commerce for Cole’s was up 25% which compared to all the other categories we’re talking about isn’t that healthy but for Cole’s where e-commerce has been a challenge for a variety of reasons like that’s pretty Healthy Growth, it’s a dramatic deceleration like coals had 45% e-commerce growth in Q2 they’re having 25% e-commerce growth in in Q3, and so that’s interesting right. The next retailer that announce earnings this week was Walgreens and they announce earnings before this Amazon news by the way so I don’t think this Amazon news head. [37:19] I mean I didn’t have any impact on their earnings so their us comps were up three percent I think they’re Global comps their their their parent company owns boots and UK I think overall complement of actually been down so I’ll your flat but us comps were up three percent which is kind of traditional grown on covid growth, e-commerce was up 39 percent and what’s interesting and Walgreens was a little bit of an outlier their e-commerce was up 39 percent in in Q3, 30 commerce was only up 23% in Q2 so they’re one of the few companies we’re going to be talking about today. Who’s e-commerce is actually accelerating which of course bucks the industry trend. Scot: [38:02] Yeah I wonder why. Jason: [38:04] Yeah I don’t know the real answer part of it could be that none of these companies were. Awesome and e-commerce before covid and so you could imagine that like hey as they suddenly had a lot more demand for e-commerce they scrambled. Improve their e-commerce amenities and stabilize their site and do all these things and that they got better operationally in Q3 but I don’t know if that’s actually true. Scot: [38:31] Yeah or they rolled out curbside and that gave him an attribution her. Jason: [38:34] They for sure did roll out curbside in the middle of all this yes. Scot: [38:37] Yeah yeah that helps yeah or speaking from anecdotal evidence they now have hand sanitizer so maybe that drove it. Jason: [38:46] Anybody that has hand sanitizer you would totally want to to be betting on right now, so that the next two people that do earnings where the do-it-yourself stores Lowe’s and Home Depot and reminder they’re one of the huge winners in covid people people are spending way more money on their home as a result of covid-19, and solos comps were up 30 percent which is nosebleed like that’s amazing. Why do you spend your whole career in retail and you never have a 30% like comp for the entire network that’s crazy their e-commerce was up a hundred and six percent. E-commerce is very significant is the stores but as a percentage of total sales it tends to be kind of below because they sell a lot of items that aren’t that convenient to ship. So as curbside picks up like e-commerce gets unlocked for a lot of these guys but hundred 6% is way above the industry average and then to compare that and cute, to Lowe’s was 135 right so they had a huge e-commerce quarter last quarter and there. They had another big one but their rate of acceleration has grown but man a lot of people walked in the store and spent a lot of money. [40:04] And then Home Depot also like very impressive like just doesn’t smell quite as good as well as their us comps were up 24-point 16% which again is amazing, unless your your direct competitors up 30 their e-commerce for the quarter was up 80%. I’m trying to remember they were a hundred percent last quarter so same same kind of story they went down from a hundred percent Q2 e-commerce to 80 percent growth Q3 e-commerce, and then they also announced which I like to keep keep an eye on 60% of other e-commerce got fulfilled from the store so either it was a store pickup or they ship the products direct from a store. [40:47] So that’s the do-it-yourself guys and then the last guys are too big General Merchants Target and Walmart both announced this week, and let’s do Walmart first Walmart had, very good comps on a very big number right so there comes where 6.4 percent which doesn’t sound as impressive as the home-improvement companies. [41:10] You know if you consider the Walmart is the largest retailer in the world like growing 6.4% is. Ginormous we meaningful to Walmart, their Q3 e-commerce was up 79 percent versus they were up 97 percent for Q2. So so though that was widely considered like super solid numbers across the board and well above expectations for Walmart so they had a good. Good earnings call Walmart owns a separate retailer Sam’s Club which also had good comps they were their comps were up 11.1%. They’re the club e-commerce isn’t quite as big a deal so Club e-commerce for Sam’s was up 41%, and Sam’s announced that they had 10% membership growth as these club guys are all membership-based so 10.4% membership growth so so both Walmart and Sam’s Clubs did well, the what’s interesting though is. Hard yet which is much more than Walmart but you know probably the most direct analogous competitor to Walmart, and Target like in my mind may have the most phenomenal performance of all these companies so their comp growth was 20.7%. [42:32] Which for a general Merchant with as big as they are that 20.7% is huge, they’re they’re digital drums was a hundred and fifty five percent which is way down from last quarter’s a hundred and ninety-five percent right so so but unlike where we were talking about these big numbers in the Home Improvement guys, Target is one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the US so the fact that they’re like growing at this pace is super impressive and of course. [43:05] Target is excellent at Boba so they own the shipped vendor and they a lot of their e-commerce is, same day at stores so they’re they’re same day delivery sales were up to hundred and Seventeen percent so people are, totally taking advantage of those amenities, and in to me this is an inside baseball step but it’s one of the most eye-popping things of all 95% of all of targets orders are fulfilled from stores so target has amazingly said, we’re not going to build a network of fulfillment centers and have all this fragmented inventory and, rely on FedEx to get our stuff to you we’re mostly going to sell our store assortment to people and make it really easy to come and get it or will drive it to your house as a last mile solution and that’s working phenomenally well for. [44:10] Yeah you do like after this year probably want to retire those places because you probably don’t want to be comping against all this the I will also say just some interesting like inside stats and Target. [44:23] I’ve seen similar stats in the past from Walmart but so targets ticket went up pretty considerably like the average orders up 15.6 percent. [44:33] Which means that traffic was only up 4.5% right so, like people are going to the store less and they’re buying more when they go to the store like Walmart version of that’s even more extreme like their traffic might actually be down in their average ticket might be even higher, so Walmart and Target are beneficiaries of this right and for a variety of reasons, um at the moment you want to be a retailer that sells a lot of different stuff because if consumers want to visit fewer stores they’re going to go to the stores that have all the stuff they want right so, Target and Walmart win on assortment you for sure want to have essential good so that you’re not forced to close at any point when the covid spikes and Target and Walmart both. Both meet that criteria and for a variety of reasons you want to be a big company with a robust supply chain and leverage over vendors so that you can get products on your shelf to be able to sell, and so covid is disproportionately benefiting big healthy chains over small independent retailers and Target and Walmart are both big healthy chains so, that’s that’s basically what’s happening in unrelated news that I totally don’t understand but I’ll just mention it while we’re talking about Target Target also announced that they’re cancelling their subscription program which totally surprised me. [45:55] Because like subscribe and save it at Amazon is a very successful very important program and it’s a bunch of vendors toy lean into it there’s a lot of reasons to say that consumers, are really interested in these auto-replenishment Solutions like subscriptions, and so you know you’re seeing a lot of retailers that don’t have robust subscription programs trying to add them, Target canceled there’s and what they said was, customers like our same-day pick up so much that what’s happening is they they don’t want to be on auto-replenishment they just want to know that like as soon as they realize they need something they can get in an hour with home delivery or store pickup. And so. I believe Target’s good at one-hour delivery through these same day Services I totally get that and I get like that therefore, their utilization of subscription might be less than some other retailers but I just I would have imagined there was still a loyal cohort that preferred subscription, and and didn’t you know it just surprised me that they had something they turned off I guess. Scot: [47:04] Yeah well maybe yeah they listened to our customers got it. Jason: [47:08] Yeah yeah I mean I trust that they know what they’re doing and their results kind of speak for themselves so that it I just found it interesting so that was kind of the, the stick on earning so that was a ton of super exciting stuff I did see just a couple other little news news bits. Scot: [47:27] It does always make me scratch my head though because you know all those were significantly greater well there’s this attribution problem but I think I think the attributions about the same if I remember, the the guys so if all these guys were a hundred percent Amazon grew in line who grew is zero or negative I guess you have like JC pinions here’s like the. Jason: [47:49] So you notice there were no in this hat week there happened to be no department stores that reported right and so all those department stores are going to be soft, there was one apparel retailer it was Kohl’s and they were significantly negative right but if this had been an earnings week where we had 20 apparel retailers. White might you know you you would have expected all or the vast majority of them to have negative comps right, so we do have Gap I think is coming up next week like that will be an interesting one to watch from an apparel standpoint, we also have a Best Buy and dicks and they’re going to be more interesting to me because I can like I’m sure the expectation is the gaps going to have pretty severe e- comps, Best Buy and dicks are boat like so sporting good stores are kind of another beneficiary of covid so you’d expect them to have really good cop. And slightly surprisingly. Electronics has been mostly like a minor beneficiary of covid so it’s been a bump but not a very big one. Scot: [48:57] Yeah so a couple of things so we’ve got some new iPhones so that could surprise us and then the gaming consoles I don’t know if you track this but the the new Xbox and the PlayStation are sold out everywhere and there’s a, just unmitigated frenzy for those unlike I don’t think I can remember, maybe when the we came out it was like this but I haven’t seen quite such a frenzy for those two units as we’re seeing right now so the problem is no one has them so so I don’t know if they’re going to be able to be in your your. Jason: [49:28] Well that’s like I’m assuming they wouldn’t be in Q3 comps anyway I’m assuming like they’re like even if you did it took a pre-order in Q3 I don’t think you recognize the revenue until you can fulfill it. Scot: [49:38] Yeah iPhone Pro was right 12 Pro 12 and. Jason: [49:41] Some a subset of the Apple stuff started to be in Q3 but the bulk of its going to be in Q4, the the video game platforms are going to be in Q4 I totally agree I like there’s a lot more Tailwind e stuff for consumer electronics and Q4 just like, there was a lot of tail in windy stuff for electronics in the very beginning of Q2 like when you first went home. Everybody upgraded their home office right so everyone bought a monitor and they bought a laptop for their kid to do school at home and you know so there was this covid Spike for electronics it just wasn’t sustained you didn’t you just you didn’t keep buying new electronics over the last six months and for your point. There’s going to be a lot of people like you know treating themselves Q4 and so you know I it won’t surprise me at all if, if Best Buy has a good Q4 but I’m kind of not expecting them to have a very spectacular Q3 but I’m not a stock analyst so we’ll see. Scot: [50:40] Yeah be interesting to keep an eye on it. Jason: [50:44] Yeah and then any of that surprised you Scott or do you feel like. Scot: [50:51] These numbers are just like so high it makes me a little suspicious like yeah I think so I think Walmart continues to benefit from grocery Target doesn’t sell that much grocery do they. Jason: [51:03] They’re leaning pretty heavily in the grocery and so it’s they’re not as good at grocery as Walmart but it’s a much more meaningful part then it was even six months ago. Scot: [51:12] Yeah I wish we could peer inside of there and like you know kind of like the department of the Census Bureau level of category data I think what we would find is it’s kind of interesting but. Jason: [51:22] And so I should say one side no non-target well they are selling a lot of grocery and they’ve dramatically improved their merchandising and offering and grocery what they haven’t had until just now is, e-commerce for grocery so all that curbside pickup and same-day stuff it has not has been for general merchandise not fresh, and like I think only as of like four weeks ago or they now starting to really sell fresh through that stuff so I suspect that will be another, another bump for them when they get that up to scale. Scot: [51:54] Yeah it’s going to be interesting to watch The Apparel guys I think that’s where we’re going to see the big loss is coming from and you know I think they’re they’re suffering and we’ll see how that doesn’t further closings are not going to do well for me. Jason: [52:07] No I agree I think the department store guys in the apparel guys it’s going to be pretty rough. And then like just to slight news Tibbetts I’ll just throw out there for those of you that want to go read up on your own the I just thought interest were interesting one of the trends I talk a lot about is, um Brands going direct so you know major well-known Brands going direct to Consumer we’ve talked about PepsiCo has a direct to Consumer site, so fun fact there it seems like they’ve refreshed that site so snacks.com, seems like it has a lot of new content but the new one this week is Coors Molson, launch the direct-to-consumer site and nobody would have had that on their bingo card right like delivering alcohol like a major Brewery delivering alcohol to home, why is a pretty interesting pilot that I hadn’t heard a lot of people talking about now it’s in UK it’s called the Revel I don’t know a ton about it but that I just that was an interesting thing that I have on my. [53:13] My notes to learn more about and then obviously I follow digital grocery a lot it’s super important Trend in this whole covid thing ahold, just bought fresh direct which is a native digital Grocer in New York and it’s super interesting to me because, Fresh Direct is a hold in very high regard their their small grocer that was born digital I would argue they have a much more mature Richard digital grocery shopping experience than almost anyone in the u.s. because they’ve been doing it better and longer but they’re their promise scale like they, don’t serve a lot of customers you know they’re in there in one geography, a hold is a much larger Global grocer but has kind of a modest footprint of stores in the US until recently a whole don’t. [54:05] Like the best fresh direct competitor which would have been Peapod here in Chicago and so what’s what’s odd to me is like the month before covid ahold got divested themselves shutdown Peapod. Which was bad timing, but and now you know fast forward six months they’re buying something that looks like a better version of Peapod although smaller Market, in infrastructure so that’s super interesting, the one thing I’d say is I think it was a real Miss from some of the bigger more traditional Grocers they should have bought fresh direct has an echo higher because they, you know Kroger Walmart and Target all need to learn how to sell better better groceries online. But so that that’s interesting little acquisition in the space. Scot: [54:52] Yeah absolutely. Jason: [54:54] And Scott I feel like we finished a little early so as a Thanksgiving treat I think this is the last show we’re going to record before Thanksgiving, I thought as a Thanksgiving treat that we might finish up a little early and give our listeners back some some free time to plan their Thanksgiving meals. Scot: [55:15] Yeah yeah Happy Thanksgiving everyone we are thankful for our listeners listening to the show and giving us all the feedback that we get and we really appreciate our little Community here on the Jason Scott show and hope everyone has a safe restful and filling and filling Thanksgiving. Jason: [55:33] Yeah I will Echo all those sentiments I hope everyone has an awesome Thanksgiving and stay safe and until next time happy commering.

Pets.com. Webvan. Kozmo.com. All these companies met their demise when the bubble burst. But their ideas live on today, in Chewy.com, Fresh Direct, Postmates, and many other start-ups. Looking at 2020 through the lens of the dot-com crash, what's changed about the tech industry and the way we think about technology, and what's stayed the same? And are we in another bubble? From Epic Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Hosted by Julia Furlan. Enjoyed this episode? Rate us ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, then share it with your friends! Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear our next season by subscribing in your favorite podcast app.

Closing a deal in 2020 can be challenging, particularly when the parties involved operate in different countries. Yet HKW announced in July that its portfolio company Fresh Direct Produce, a fresh produce importer in Western Canada, had acquired Mike & Mike's Organics, a distributor of fresh certified organic fruits and vegetables headquartered in Woodbridge, Ontario. On the podcast, HKW Partner John Carsello and Vice President Tom Shaw describe how they moved the deal forward during the pandemic, despite restrictions on travel to Canada from Indianapolis, where HKW is based, and why Mike & Mike's was an attractive target. Carsello and Shaw are joined by Davis Yung, Fresh Direct Produce's president and co-founder. Yung describes his company's growth trajectory leading up to COVID-19 , and how it has dealt with supply chain and safety challenges. He also offers insight into the Canadian grocery market, and how it compares with its U.S. counterpart. The Middle Market Growth Conversations podcast is brought to you by the Association for Corporate Growth. To learn more about the organization and how to become a member, visit www.acg.org.

EP227 - Amazon Dash Cart and Other News Jason recent events: Publicis LinkedIn Livestream: Trends & Insights Live “The New Reality of Retail” RetailTouchpoints: Retail Strategy 2.0: Separating Urgent From Important Brick and Mortar Reborn Rob Gonzalez, Peter Crosby, and the Digital Shelf Institute/Salsify “Creative Commerce in the time of covid” Jason Upcoming Events NRF NXT Tuesday, July 21 11:45am–12:30pm EDT “Future of Platforms” CommerceNext July 29th 4:10 pm EE “Lesson Learned and Thoughts for the Future” The Great Debate Are we in a long-lasting, deep recession, or is at an artificial recession will quickly bounce back from? What should retailers and brands be planning for. Jason and Scot has it out. Who will be right? Amazon News Amazon Dash Cart Echo Frames are frames are shipping Q4 restrictions on 3pl warehouses Prime day in October Employee Health Clinics Amazon becomes worlds largest advertiser spending $11B a year Earning results next week Other News US Census Bureau Data for June is out. US Real Retail sales were up 5.8% in June, (down from 17.7% in May) but representing a 2nd month of retail recovery. Total retail sales back above Feb levels. (Numbers adj for inflation and including auto). E-commerce up 23% YoY. Nike leaves Google Shopping Google shopping fast shipping tags Nike RISE new store concept in Guangzhou, China Walmart and Amazon healthcare battle Walmart+ coming soon? Is digital grocery profitable? Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 227 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Friday, July 17th, 2020. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 227 being recorded on Thursday July 16th 2020 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners, Jason as you know the last three episodes we’ve had a what I would call a blue-chip roster of guests on the show and we want to take a little breather and catch up listeners on all the retail news going on first of all Jason I think we have to address this super awkward elephant in the room a lot of listeners have pointed out to me and I’ve seen it on Twitter that you have been presentation and pot cheating on me so go ahead and tell listeners all these other things you have going on. Jason: [1:13] I do plead guilty I feel like I’m vast as per usual in vastly Overexposed I’m gonna. Preempt your question with two other quick points I just wanted to throw out number one. I’m thrilled to be here alone with you we’ve we’ve had these like three great shows in a row with great guest that I super enjoyed but the bumper of that is I don’t get to just make fun of your wrong positions and things because it wasn’t just the two of us so. Scot: [1:43] Yeah we’re going to definitely carve out some time for that on the show so it’ll be fun. Jason: [1:46] Yeah so I’m thrilled to have some alone time with you Scott and I it’s come to my attention that there’s a few listeners that don’t listen to every episode, all the way to the end of the episode and so for those of you that don’t and I don’t forgive you for that. At the end of every episode there’s two very important things we make a plea for you to go onto iTunes, and leave us a 5-star review so for those of you that get so much value from the front half that you don’t listen to the back half I’m throwing it in now, after tonight’s episode you need to get yourself onto iTunes and leave us that five star review you owe it to us by this point I feel like we’ve earned it. And number two I have a witty catch phrase that I could include every episode with and I’m not going to tell you what it is so you. You’ll know what you’re missing. Scot: [2:39] I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of either I’m usually you usually put me to sleep by the time I get there it is an hour later I’m sorry. Jason: [2:44] Yeah yeah yeah it’s okay yeah no I’m grateful that you’ve never listened to a show after we published it because you wouldn’t realize how much of you is edit out of the show. Scot: [2:53] That’s totally true I hate listening to myself so then I could actually listen in now. Jason: [3:00] Oh my God yeah that could be a whole another show but I have all these horrible verbal crutches and it’s it’s crushing to hear me saying over and over again on the show and you don’t do that for the record. Scot: [3:12] Well sometimes I miss us going to trade shows together and so I play our podcast at half speed and I get to have drunk Jason it’s like being at a trade show. Jason: [3:19] Nice some. Scot: [3:21] Play Jason if I play Jason after three Starbucks I put you on 3x. Jason: [3:25] I like it I like. But so yes you have correctly busted me I’ve been I’ve done a bunch of stuff including cheating on you on some podcasts. So last week my company publish a pretty cool livestream on LinkedIn they called Trends and insights alive. And there’s sort of a beta tester of of live casting on LinkedIn. So they’ve done Eight Episodes this season that eighth is the final episode in the season and so you know that’s when they wanted to roll out the really big guns so the 8th episode was all about retail so we call the new reality of retail and, two of my colleagues and I got to chat about some of the big. Big evolutions and Retail that we’re seeing so you can watch a video of that on LinkedIn and I’ll put a link in the show notes. Scot: [4:20] Since nobody knows LinkedIn has this I’m sure there is a huge audience. Jason: [4:23] Yeah well it shows up in your activity feed so it’s like you you’ve. It’s a pretty big beta so not just anyone can stream yet although you’ll be glad to know that the Jason and Scot show has been pre-approved. For streaming on LinkedIn so if you want to do a show we could do it yeah we have clout with LinkedIn. Scot: [4:46] Influencers. Jason: [4:47] There’s also a retail publication out there that a lot of our listeners are probably familiar with called retail touchpoints and they do sort of video podcast Series so I sat down with them and did a, interview that they entitle the separating urgent from important because I think that was one of my topics that we talked about in the show so I’ll put a, LinkedIn to put a link to that in the show notes there is a podcast, specifically focused on the evolution of brick and mortar retail which I know you would you would have some strong thoughts about called brick-and-mortar reborn so I got to do an interview on that podcast. Scot: [5:28] Or alternatively the path to chapter 11. Jason: [5:31] Exactly maybe not but okay and then there’s a SAS Pim product out there called salsify in the the content team and the and one of the founders of salsify started a cool. Podcast about the digital shelf that’s in fact called the digital Shelf. And so I sat down with Rob Gonzalez who’s the one of the founders of salsify and Peter Crosby who’s the chief Storyteller there and we had a good. Good conversation for an hour so in the extraordinarily unlikely event that people don’t get enough of me on this podcast there’s like four more hours of me from the last two weeks you can get and. That’s not all if you want the freshest stuff I have like three things coming up next week too so. [6:22] Yeah so on start Monday Tuesday and Wednesday of next week is in RF next which is sort of the, the spiritual successor to to the shop dot-org trade show so normally this would have been a, in-person event in Las Vegas this year it’s going to be a virtual event it’s two days a bunch of great speakers and I’m doing a presentation on Tuesday the 21st, right around lunchtime 11:45 Eastern Time called the future platforms and I’ll be talking about sort of the evolution of e-commerce platforms and. What people should be looking for and what what pitfalls that they might make in choosing choosing a platform so that’s a topic I used to talk about all the time and I haven’t talked about in a while so I had to do a pretty. Pretty significant update of my appeal for that. Scot: [7:12] I would avoid going all in on Elliot just BTW. Jason: [7:15] Yeah yeah I debated whether to bring it up at all. And for westerners that are following closely Elliot’s that eCommerce platform whose one of their Founders was on this show and they imploded this month and I’m not clear whether. They just like weren’t able to ship and bring it over the finish line and kind of folded or whether it was. More significantly vaporware and was never close to the finish line but I don’t know if we’ll ever know. Scot: [7:44] There was an article that I tweeted that made it feel more of a prairie. Jason: [7:49] That seems entirely viable to me unfortunately and so then the week after that another former guest of the show Scott Silverman who was one of the founders of shop dot-org has his own. Event series that is also going virtual this year called Commerce next and so I’ll be giving a the the closing keynote on July 29th at 4:10 p.m. Eastern Time called Lessons Learned and thoughts from the future. So that will be cool and then in the event that you’re interested in my opinions but you can’t stand my voice well which you would not be alone I do have a column in Forbes and I have a new article I just put the finishing touches on and I think I’m gonna, publish that on Forbes over the weekend and that is called that retails great. From traffic to to revenue per customer kind of talking about how all retailers are having to make this big shift from. Trying to get as many people as possible in the store to having fewer people in the store and having to make more money on each one. Scot: [8:55] Nice Thanksgiving us all exclusive preview of that. Jason: [8:59] Exactly so I appreciate it if folks folks to take the time to read that and give me your feedback so that’s all my stuff I’m exhausted already is the show over. Scot: [9:09] So I guess if people listen to this save it for next week you could have a week of Jason essentially if I’m doing the math right you could read the article on that off day yeah got a week of Jason coming up. Jason: [9:20] Yeah yeah or you could just binge all 227 shows of the Jason and Scot show. Scot: [9:29] You do the math in a presentation what is it like 3 weeks or something if you didn’t go back to him. Jason: [9:36] It’s longer than any yeah I think that like if there was a remake of Abu ghraib we might feature prominently. Scot: [9:42] When you do that in audience ever looks at each other like to see really think we’re going to do that it’s hilarious in a office kind of a. [9:52] Cool my kids would say cringy, all right so before we jump into the news another piece of listener feedback that we’ve gotten is folks have really enjoyed hearing kind of our opposite views of the economy so in our covid show you and I had a little friendly Spar I guess I would say about you know what we think is going to go on so we’ve gotten a lot of there’s kind of a team Jason team Scott thing forming they’re obviously the team, Scot crew is huge than team Jason is a couple lonely Souls but in my experience when you have these kind of different opinions one of the best ways to kind of settle it is to make some predictions you and I do that on our annual prediction show which is kind of more about you know e-commerce Trends and things of that nature but I thought at the top of the show would be good for here for us to kind of like update our positions and then make a little bit of a prediction one of the one of the key differentiators where everyone’s disagreeing right now and I think you and I fall into different camps here too so this is probably a good framework is the shape of the recovery so so the options are V which would be you know we’ve kind of come down and we’ll come right back up as quickly as we went down so that V shape you which would be like a delayed recovery so you know call it Q3 kind of middle to late next year we do come back but it’s. [11:14] Takes over a year to get there then there’s the L some people call it a swish that’s kind of a super slow recovery so more like 20 22 before the economy’s kind of cooking and then there’s the dreaded W which is the we have a V and then we get into the fall, the virus surges and then we have to go back into the bottom of the V again which then you know and then you come back out so that forms that w and then you have seen some other shapes out there but those are the main ones so so. A do you agree with that Framing and then be why don’t you go first and give us our view if you agree. Jason: [11:53] Sure yeah so I feel like there’s some room for variance in in some of those descriptions but yeah those like those are certainly all all, versions of a recovery that have been hypothesized and and, my own opinion is that it is going to be a check mark shaped recovery which would be the Swoosh but maybe not quite as slow as you described so I think we are still going to be significantly impacted economically and likely health-wise by covid for all of 20 21 and so. You know I think holiday 2021 will be better than holiday 2020 which I’m not expecting to be very good but I don’t think we’re going to get back to true pre-pandemic well levels until 2022 so, so maybe it doesn’t take all the way till Q4 of 2022 I think January of 2022 might be on parity with January of 2019 so we may lose two years here. That is kind of my stick and I’m I like to call that the realistic position and then I think you we’ve given the the delusional position to so why don’t you tell us what that is. Scot: [13:14] This is why predictions matter so will some one of us will be right and it will at least be able to they’ll they’ll have they’ll be goalposts Elise so I I’m increasingly so I’ve fought for a while and I’m increasingly seeing that we’re in a v-shaped recovery so so first of all unemployment is interesting I think unemployment’s. Misleading because so so you made a point earlier about you know this is the worst economic. Depression since World War II which if you use the correct definition of depressant you’re right. But there’s you know those were not caused by a pandemic so those were caused by other you know. Economic impacts the government essentially cause this one is a reaction to the pandemic so, so it’s very unusual from anything else you can’t use those past things, this is my theory and prediction you can’t use those past like 2008-2009 which did have these very slow recoveries as a comp so I think it’s a v-shaped recovery the data I look at is first of all my favorite data point is consumer confidence. [14:29] And consumer confidence is actually right around a hundred which is pretty good you know I think people would say it’s kind of neutral it’s not super negative not super positive when it goes way over a hundred people are like super positive and then when it goes under a hundred if you look at 2008 at the bottom of the Great Recession it was like 20 I think it touched like 25 or somewhere in there and that was like one of the lowest ones I’ve recorded so so you have this anomaly where, GDP is low unemployment’s High yet people feel pretty good and what’s causing that is the fed and the government just pumping tons of money into the economy the unemployment thing is actually huge problem because in I’m sure you’ve heard this from retailers it’s actually impossible to hire anyone right now because they’re making so much on unemployment so once that once that goes away in July or is diminished we have to kind of see where the government lands on that but I think they’ll be something there I think you’re going to see employment come roaring back because essentially people will have an incentive to go back to work so so that’s going to, that’s going to solve a lot of things there and then the other data that’s really interesting and someone had kind of tweeted This Is Us retail sales is a perfect V we’re like literally already back to the pre covid levels now you could say well. [15:49] Yeah we don’t know if it’s going to be W or not that’s where time will tell that’s another one there’s also these really weird data points coming out where consumer savings are at one of the highest rates they’ve ever been so people are saving a ton of money that’s because they’re not traveling as much their they did they delayed their vacations and these kinds of things you know it’s not all that being said I do think, macro we’re gonna have the V shape but there are going to be some segments to get left behind I think the ones are going to be hit the hardest are Airlines you know so, people are not really traveling by are nearly as much as they used to it’s come back some so if you look at the TSA data we’re at about 750,000 Travelers a day, a year ago it was two, eight million so we’ve lost two million Travelers a day so the airline industry is going to have a huge challenge oddly enough it looks like the cruise industry is going to come back before their line I don’t understand that personally but, there you go. And then you know the other thing is I work with a lot of startups and there’s a fairly large percentage of companies that are not going to go back into office space for a long time and. [16:52] That part is going to be delayed so those Industries will be hurt but I think we’re going to see other parts of the economy pick that up and we’ll still have that V I also am bullish and I know you strongly disagree with us that there’s going to be a vaccine so I think we got two good candidates in moderna and Oxford and I get all my medical news from CNBC so don’t take any advice for me but this is this is my again I’m making predictions to try to, see where we land on this and I do think this project Manhattan thing is interesting and you know there’s all these arguments that say well we’re going to need three billion vaccines I don’t think that’s right I think if you go and vaccinate there’s a clear, there’s a clear set of people that have a much higher impact from this virus so if you start at the 85 and older the people that are immunocompromised and have existing conditions that’s a significantly smaller number you’ve protected a really big part of the population that buys you time to go do the other ones you also have herd immunity kind of meeting in the middle so I think there’s probably, and the US are 20 million thing over three or four months that get you there so so I’m very bullish and all that and so my prediction just kind of summarize all that is it’s going to be a V shape and you know definitely by q1 of 20, one we will be at the kind of back where we were and I think it may be as fast as Q4 so. Jason: [18:18] Wow Q4 of 2020. Scot: [18:19] Yeah. Jason: [18:20] Okay I write so let the record show I hope to God that I’m wildly wrong in your wild rewrite like I’m certainly rooting for you. Like a couple of things that caused me to have some concern like first of all you have a hypothesis which is perfectly reasonable but I don’t agree with that it’s a government caused recession so I for sure, we took actions that that. Substantially contributed to a recession and potentially triggered the recession in the US but there’s but worldwide there’s a bunch of countries that didn’t take any of those actions and they’re still in a recession right so sweet and in shutdown people aren’t spending in Sweden in a bunch of people are unemployed Taiwan didn’t shut down people aren’t spending their right so, there’s some evidence that even if there had been like you could debate whether the government action was helpful or not helpful and, and if there could have been better government action almost certainly there could have been but if there were no action. [19:25] The my hypothesis based on all the international evidence is we would still be in a recession. It could be worse could be better the truth is we’ll never know. I would also say I actually think there’s a very good chance we’ll have a vaccine I mostly agree with you it’s it’s possible we won’t like as much as we all want to be optimistic and we’re we’re. Making the most prompt medical progress in the history of humankind to potentially create this vaccine it was described to me once that like making a vaccine is very hard it’s like. Scoring a goal in hockey from half half ice but the good news is we have more Wayne Gretzky’s on the ice taking shots right now than ever before right so. I think it’s totally possible we make a vaccine most vaccines have. [20:20] Problems with limited efficacy. Aren’t effective in everyone that takes it vulnerable populations often are the ones that are least likely to be able to take it it does, it is difficult to distribute a vaccine there’s a bunch of people in the US that just don’t believe in vaccines and aren’t going to take it, even if we do have one and so for all of those reasons even if the science goes perfectly and we have a decent vaccine in q1. I just don’t think you have enough immunity to turn the economy around and toll Q4 and that means you won’t start seeing the economic results of that turn around and talk q1 2022 which is where my. My estimate sort of comes from and again I desperately want to be wrong I hope you’re right but that’s my my concern. Scot: [21:14] Well we’ve got our stakes in the ground on there’s a good year in there too. Jason: [21:18] Other depressing news on this point from this week just to throw out there is all the banks had their earnings call this this week and the common theme from all of them is they’re all reserving tens of billions of dollars because they. Massive default on all of their. Their loans and mortgage properties right like that the you you hit the hammer the nail on the head it’s the weirdest recession ever because there’s this. Very high unemployment and very high savings rate like because per your point like all this stimulus money and stuff caught and and bolstering unemployment benefits, caused everyone to like the average American had a huge cash influx. At the same time they weren’t working so that’s a weird weird dichotomy but all those benefits are scheduled to end in. Couple of weeks there was a more people than ever that miss their rent payment this month there’s a even higher cohort of people that say they don’t know how they’re going to pay next month’s rent and then all these benefits are going to, expire so there’s a chance for. All sorts of cascading negative Financial events to happen and it feels like all these earnings calls from the banks are kind of a foreshadowing that they think it’s going to happen for whatever it’s worth. Scot: [22:39] Yeah it’s really weird because I heard someone say that it’s like having two different movies playing on one screen because then like car sales are up. Jason: [22:47] Yeah so you know it’s funny about that like you mentioned like oh retail sales are kind of back like the V is there. That’s a hundred percent true if you include Auto Sales like are are, what month did we get the reporting came out for June today so so the June retail numbers with Auto in there, the June total sales number is higher than the February total sales number so complete recovery but if you take Auto out of that like we’re still definitely trending in the right direction but we are still below are like February level. So it’s weird like cars are disproportionately affecting that I’ve heard one hypothesis is because. Air travel is so curtailed a lot more people are taking, are using their cars more I’ve heard Harley-Davidson as having a huge Resurgence people are buying motorcycles and going on on, driving vacations instead of flying vacations, you would know more about this than me but I have heard that as all the rental car companies declare bankruptcy and and sell off their their fleets that that’s going to put a damper on the auto sales as there’s going to be a, full out of inventory. Scot: [24:01] The other kind of treating them internally so we’ll see I don’t know how much of this so-so. I would say real car usage is. Going crazy right now which is odd because it’s usually tied to air travel but they become disconnected because people are saying I don’t want to travel on airplanes therefore I will drive from Chicago to Detroit and I you would normally fly that so and then they kind of say well I don’t want to put those what does that 3,000 miles on my car I’ll bring the car and do it that way, yeah so it It’s tricky to read and that’s what makes the prediction that much more fun we’ll see. Jason: [24:39] And before we jump into other e-commerce news several listeners have asked over the last week there’s been a lot of get spiffy news and I’m wondering if you can just share a quick update on on some of that for our listeners. Scot: [24:52] Yeah yeah I guess the biggest new so we are we’re experiencing this V which is what I think probably influences think so we definitely had a huge dip in demand largely from fleets and then obviously office Parks have been hit that hasn’t come back but the fleet stuffs come back pretty dramatically consumers have come back so it’s actually been pretty tough hiring so we’re hiring technicians at a pretty good pace and then one of the biggest inbound requests we get is for people that want a franchise so we’ve kind of carved out the 50 what I would call Amazon Prime cities as you know and. [25:28] Love Amazon and there in about 50 cities with Prime and those tend to be the cities we want to Target as well I figure Amazon has a pretty good idea where those Prime households are so but then we get tons of requests from smaller cities like Wilmington North Carolina a will see Memphis Tennessee that are will probably not be able to get to you for years because we’re in 17 of these 50 that we’re focused on so we’ve decided to open up those kind of next to your market so three hundred thousand eight hundred thousand people in the Metro areas to franchising so we were able to announce that, feels like last week yeah last week and that has had a really good response so that’s been fun you know at Channel visor one of the things I loved every day was I got to work with thousands of entrepreneurs some of them were intrapreneurs they were like you know early digital people in the side of Nike like we’re leading the charge but then at the same time you would deal with these entrepreneurs like rock-bottom Golf and these crazy brothers that were selling golf stuff and so there’s a lot of fun so I’m looking forward to look at working with a bunch of other entrepreneurs in that capacity. Jason: [26:38] Yeah that’s awesome I just take it as a good sign because I’m thinking about all of the those that cumulative carwash and capacity and I’m doing the math on how much crystal meth you must be selling to need to launder that much money so that. Seems really encouraging. Scot: [26:55] Yeah I get this a lot as a car wash guy the reference it for those who don’t know is the TV Show Breaking Bad the guy by his car washes to essentially you know clean his cash so. Jason: [27:09] Literally and figuratively yeah. Scot: [27:10] Yeah we do not for fully of total transparency we do not do that. Jason: [27:18] Or so you say okay. Scot: [27:19] Cool well it would not be a Jason Scott show with Al. Jason: [27:26] Amazon news new your margin is their opportunity. Scot: [27:39] Yes this was a weird one and I want to check your memory because I feel like I’ve lived seven years in the last four months so I got this notification that said congratulations Scott you are in the day one program for Amazon Echo frames so I ordered those and they’re coming this weekend and, I forget if we knew about this or not and if we talked about it on the show so is this new or has an I just like him. Jason: [28:08] No it’s super it’s super annoying so, it was announced over a year ago when they launched the echo buds they actually announced a variety of new Alexa enabled devices so they, they had, the earbuds they also showed a a ring that you wear on your finger and they announce these frames that you get prescription lenses in, and for the the ring and the. The frames you had to apply and you and I I know for a fact both applied on the first day that you could apply, and so the reason I’m super annoyed is not even that you got in and I didn’t and that you don’t remember, registering the reason I’m annoyed is because after I found out you got in, I went into my Gmail spam and found out I got in in March and my invitation is already expired. Scot: [29:04] Well next time you see me I’ll be having a conversation with my eyeglasses and you’ll be you’ll be. Jason: [29:11] This is another reason why I see Jeff Bezos point that I should whitelist him but I’m still not going to do it. Scot: [29:18] I think Jeff loves me best. Jason: [29:20] He probably does your more lovable to me frankly you’re more of a wide-eyed Optimist the the he has definitely experienced a v-shaped recovery. Scot: [29:28] Yes he he’s well on the he’s on a V with a rocket ship on the tail, which is actually interesting because they are going to announce results next week they haven’t announced the day I’m thinking July 23rd If you kind of look at last year so we’ll do a whole show dedicated that because I do think you know, as Amazon goes it’s really a good indicator of what’s going on in online I’m going to, predict it’s going to be a blowout quarter based on everything I’ve seen but another thing that was really interesting kind of in your world of grocery and there was a very robust discussion on Twitter was this idea of the Amazon – cart and you and I were aligned on this one oddly enough so let you know so this is a cart that. [30:21] It’s really weird because everyone had one image of this thing so you can tell it was like from a press release it’s going to be in the store that is not a ghost or a not a Whole Foods I don’t know what this evening to be called I don’t know if you know the name of it and it’s gonna be this cart that you can put some items in, it’s really hard to tell from the pressure release if it uses image recognition when you look at the card it clearly has some cameras mounted on it and then it has a digital display most of these cards use RFID in my experience so it’s not clear if it’s going to have some kind of belt and suspenders where there’s an image recognition and an RFID or not. [30:55] W my guess but it’s really interesting cart and then online we had this really interesting discussion where someone said and I think it was the target guy so he met, be a it may be you know on a different team here but he was kind of like this is the stupidest thing why would you have Amazon go and do this dumb cart you’re wasting time in Cycles what’s going on this is or you know I think the conclusion he came up with this is this is an admission that Amazon goes not going to work, and then you and I and other people pointed out hey you know, Amazon’s a 1.6 trillion dollar company I don’t think because they’re trying three or four things you can kind of say this is a signal that they have failed at, thing number one in fact Amazon has enough experiments they could run 50 grocery experiments and to me it actually the opposite is essentially saying Amazon is really serious about groceries so they’re running a lot of experiments these are the ones we know about there’s quite another 50 coming that we don’t know about so that was a really interesting discussion what did you think about that car. Jason: [32:01] Yeah so well I was first and foremost excited so I’m excited about this whole deal. Amazon has had home delivery of groceries for a long time in Amazon Fresh and dirty secret Amazon Fresh hasn’t been very successful are caught on very well in fact. Walmart basically is kicking Amazon fresh as but. Um so then Amazon bought Whole Foods and they started delivering and doing curbside pickup from 80 of the Whole Foods and that’s been a pretty successful service and so, pandemic kids people want way more digital grocery in and in typical Amazon fashion they dramatically scaled their delivery of Whole Foods from 80 stores 260 stores and, and all kinds of amazing things to expand their capacity so so Amazon’s main success in grocery is Whole Foods and so what I’ve been excited about for a long time is. Whole Foods is super expensive groceries that only cater to affluent markets in Big City centers. So it doesn’t you know solve the grocery problem for the bulk of Americans so a while ago it became clear that Amazon was going to open a new physical grocery store. The first of which would be in Woodland Hills California which is a suburb of La that is not a Whole Foods brand a grocery store so this is not something they acquired this is a grocery store that Amazon is inventing and. [33:26] You know my experience Amazon does a lots of cool inventions if they’re going to reinvent grocery I want to see what they think is going to work, so we’ve all been excited I visited the construction site before covid where this thing was scheduled to open it was supposed to open this summer. [33:42] It did not open instead the rumor has it that they’ve been using that location as a dark store for deliveries, and the reason they’re probably doing that is one of the things we figured out over time about this grocery store is it has a big micro fulfillment center in the back of it so it has a robot, there holds a bunch of the groceries and automatically fills a bag with a customer’s order so it’s much more efficient at, feeling bags of groceries for curbside pickup or delivery then humans are and that is clearly part of this new grocery concept that Amazon has, um I’m super interested to shop a store see how that all works they have now discovered another one of these grocery stores under construction that’s promise to open sometime in 2020, in a suburb of Chicago so I’ll get to visit one whether we’re flying or not so I’m excited about that so the new news this week is yes that, one of the other things they’re going to have in this grocery store are these smart carts and my guess is a little different than you, I think it’s a little simpler I’ll be shocked at the store has RFID I don’t think they’re going to put RFID tags on all the products for sale and in fact, I think they might have a lot less products that you put in the cart yourself because I won’t be surprised. [34:57] If you use the micro fulfillment center even when you shop in the store so you order your, peanut butter and mayonnaise and cereal and the robot picks them and puts him in the bag won’t surprise me if you’re only pushing the cart around in the Meat and Deli area and picking your own produce and your own meat. [35:14] We’ll see how that works but to me the smart cart looks like it’s primary feature is, scan and go self checkout so lots of retards let you use your phone in the camera on your phone at products and kind of check out as you go Sam’s Club has a store that that’s the only way to check out call them, Sam’s Club now you can do scan and go in all the other Sam’s Club, Apple was one of the very first people to have this experience and they still use it broadly a problem with that is the the, the camera in the phone isn’t perfectly situated not everyone has the right apps on their phone there’s a lot of user are it’s not the fastest experience in the world so my theory is there’s Amazon grocery stores going to let you do skin and grow on your phone of you want but it’s also going to let you push around in one of their carts that has a. Special-purpose camera dedicated to the task of doing scan and go in the cart so I think the. [36:14] That cart is going to be a way to do scan and go but the cart also has a screen in it and I think they’re going to use that for media so I think they’re going to sell ads, two vendors as part of the Walmart Amazon Media Group, and they’re going to pop up ads in that grocery store when you’re in the appropriate section of the store so I think that’s another way to monetize it and I think there’s going to be a bunch of secret cameras and sensors on that cart, that are carefully keeping track of everything you do while you’re in the store and they’re going to use that for analytics and data for for you know future experiments and Improvement so. I think that’s going to be the main use case of the card I don’t think you’re going to have to use a card to shop in there I just I just think it’s going to be an option and I like per your point I totally agreed with Chris that like. It’s just walk out or nothing like I do agree with Chris. Doing just walk out technology in a 50,000 square foot grocery store is actually. [37:13] More than linearly more difficult than doing it in a 2000 square-foot convenience store so I think there are reasons to think. Amazon Go technology might work in a bunch of categories but grocery wouldn’t be the most obvious one where works so it doesn’t surprise me the Amazons trying to invent something else that fits better for these bigger stores and I also think if the smart cart thing. Wear to work well and become popular it would be much easier to retrofit that into all the Whole Food stores they already own whereas. Um you know go would be easiest to deploy if you’re building a store from the ground. Scot: [37:47] I can’t get over the mental image of you in a construction site wearing a hard hat where you’ve taken an Amazon sticker and put it on there and. You’re just like walking through like you know what’s going on in your like using a tape measure to be like oh this is where the robots going to go and. Jason: [38:02] You just described a way smarter cooler version of what I actually did now. Scot: [38:07] You’ve got a laser measuring device. Jason: [38:09] Coach I should have gotten some coaching from you I probably would have gone inside but yeah. Scot: [38:13] And then you do like a mission impossible repel and they like you’re hovering two inches off the ground and you’re like then a bead of sweat drops that how it. Jason: [38:20] That’s basically how I roll that’s that’s what I like to call Tuesday. Scot: [38:24] Oh man that kills me. Jason: [38:30] Yeah so it’s exciting I think Amazon’s inventing new stuff I don’t know whether this like, smart cards have been tried before and didn’t work it’s not going to shock me of Amazon Does It Better Than People have done it before there are some smart cards that are better than this that do cooler stuff in China that apparently people do like so there there are you I think you commented man that smart cart looks like it has a huge bed or if it’s just running the the electronics that’s kind of weird I wonder if it’s self-powered and there are smart cards in China JD.com has a store with smart cards that actually, like follow an RFID tag in your on your wrist around you in the store so you don’t even have to push the cart there the car just follows you around. Scot: [39:10] Yeah almost wondered if there’s a little Kiva robot hiding in there and it looked just like pop out and just start moving products room W fun mmm, so couple of their Amazon items in Q4 they announced they’re going to be restrictions on third party stuff and warehouses this has been kind of an ongoing thing where they’re just kind of totally tightening the screws of the one area of Amazon where they raise prices which is access to the Fulfillment by Amazon side of things and then Prime day didn’t they so they had moved it they were going to have like, Prime Vibes and then nothing really happened there and then they moved Prime day to September and now haven’t they just totally punted on it. Jason: [39:52] Yeah so the latest rumors are that it’s going to be October I somehow got some inside information and for the life of me I don’t know how but I somehow knew it was going to be in October for several months so everyone’s like oh my gosh we just heard it was in October and I’ve been like wait it’s been there for a month so somehow someone did me a favor and I didn’t, I didn’t realize it and I will say super quick on that on the on the 3p Warehouse I agree with you they’re gonna have a good earnings this quarter and there’s lots of reasons to think they are. It does seem like fulfillment capacity is likely to constrain them like if anything slows them down it’s going to be, capacity and the thing that jumped out at me in this announcement was not that they’re constraining, capacity it’s that they’re like by the way we’re bringing 60 fulfillment centers online this year to increase capacity and. We’re still going to have to constrain it and you and like I don’t know if people are falling at home but like the next biggest e-commerce site in the United States of America has 8 fulfillment centers total. Scot: [40:55] Yeah it’s just its fulfillment centers matter and I think they do it is so far game over it’s not even funny there’s no way anyone could you have to spend like. Foreigner billion dollars or something to catch up with where they are where they’ve been you know they just been like knocking in these things out over so long the asset they have built there is massive, it’s a Death Star. Jason: [41:17] Another thing I’m watching kind of closely is Amazon has made some some minor health. News lately they have announced that they’re opening health clinics in a couple cities in these clinics are adjacent to fulfillment centers because these are not health clinics at the moment, that we believe are to treat their public there to provide Health Services for Amazon employees and so it definitely seems like. As we’ve talked about for a while Amazon has some significant Healthcare aspirations and it feels like they’re dogfooding a lot of those aspirations by, using by testing, new health care approaches internally so you know for a while like Amazon’s had some interesting telemed services for employees they bought some some. Digital diagnostic tools companies and they made those available to employers and now they’re going to open some dedicated health clinic so. What’s interesting to me is that it’s probably a precursor to them having some big big consumer offering in healthcare space and so we’re watching that closely. Um Scot: [42:26] Yeah you’ve kind of predicted Walmart would get into this and hasn’t. Jason: [42:29] Yeah and they have yeah I thought we were going to maybe talk about this later but the Walmart has opened. Clinics that are pretty substantial in Atlanta and now they’ve announced a bunch of other states including Chicago where they’re going to open these clinics, and they’re pretty impressive stand-alone clinics that provide a bunch of services at. You know Walmart level prices shockingly low prices even without insurance and that has kind of been Walmart’s ammo like they did a big thing with Pharmacy where they sell almost all generic prescriptions for four dollars so you know a bunch of people. Even with insurance had some deductible they could never achieve and so they like literally couldn’t take the The Chronic prescribed medicines that their physician prescribed. And you know now through Walmart they can afford them and in much the same way lots of families can afford to get an annual physical and have their kids get an eye exam and dental cleanings and things like that even with no insurance through these Walmart clinic so it’s kind of a. Interesting approach to cost reduce Health enough to make it accessible to all the, the Americans that that are pretty vulnerable with regards to Health Care at the moment so, this is another initiative I hope to God Walmart and Amazon beat each other’s brains out with awesome new inventions and healthcare because we we need it. Scot: [43:48] Yes so bad that there’s like so much room for. Jason: [43:50] Yeah it’s a huge industry and it’s you know ripe for disruption and you know Walmart and Amazon are probably the two company like unless maybe Apple also wants to get into that. You know those are two pretty good private companies to be solving it’s a shame that we’re having to depend on private companies to solve our health care problems but, venturing into politics and we don’t want to go there my funnest fact of the week. [44:16] Is add a age and they’re probably mad at me because it’s 50/50 whether I’m thinking a De Jour adweek in there too competitive Publications but one of them published a report that Amazon is now the largest Advertiser in the world. So they’re spending 11 billion dollars a year on ads they have this novelty stat that means they’re spending twenty one thousand dollars a minute on ads but to me what’s cute about that is. We keep talking about their ad Network and how they’re becoming a meaningful seller of ads and they’re kind of the Third. Biggest digital platform behind Google and Facebook and you know the forecast were that they were going to sell like around there on a run rate to sell about 10 billion dollars in ads, in a calendar year which is still a distant third from Google and Facebook but it’s it’s bigger than, Twitter and a lot of other Pinterest in a lot of other digital Network so it’s pretty impressive, but what where their unique is they’re the only company in the world that’s buying 11 billion dollars of ads and then selling ten billion dollars of ads so they’re they’re buying eyeballs and then selling them back to Brands which is kind of funny. Scot: [45:26] Yeah I would not have expected him to be the largest Advertiser because you you know when you think about what you watch on TV you don’t see a ton of Amazon ads on TV. Jason: [45:36] Then they do they have ads in Market all the time they are like a big Super Bowl Advertiser which is a big big chunk but the bulk of their spend is not TV it’s digital it’s like they’re there Google’s biggest customer. Scot: [45:50] Yeah living the dream it’s funny because for the longest time they said we’re going to we’re not going to spend money on Advertising we’re going to put it all into free shipping and stuff like that and I guess they finally got to the point where. They just had so much money they had to spend some one-on-one marketing. Jason: [46:05] Well another thing where they’re a complete anomaly is I guarantee you they are the only top 10 an Advertiser in the world where nobody can name their CMO. [46:20] Yeah I mean I yeah but the like they do not have like a big public-facing. Marketing department right like you think of the mark Pritchards of the world that are like you know constantly out there for PNG which has historically been one of the biggest advertisers and it’s a it just Amazon is a very different approach so it’s going to be interesting. Scot: [46:40] Cool stats that was a lot of Amazon news what other news is on your radar. Jason: [46:45] Well today I alluded to this earlier but the middle of the months it’s been super fun for me because there, the US Census Bureau publishes the retail data for last month about 18 days into the month so, this morning they published the June retail sales data and. I don’t know if we want to get into all the technicalities of it like there’s a bunch of different ways to slice the data so everyone reports the data and the numbers always look different and it’s because it’s this. This Rich data set you can report retail sales without, food or restaurants you can report it with restaurants you can report it without gas and Automobiles or with gas and Automobiles you can report it with adjusted for inflation and you can report it seasonally adjusted so. If you’re reading I say all that to just tell you if you’re reading any of these statutes. [47:42] If the person cited and did a good job they told you all those details but that’s why you’ll see a lot of variance in the data but so in general the. The adjusted for inflation month-over-month retail sales were up. Five point eight percent in June over May which is a, um by historical standards of very large jump it was a smaller jump than last month which was the hugest jump of all times and that obviously followed a couple months that were the hugest, drop of all times but it it per your point on the economy it is trending in the right direction and it’s trending in the right direction pretty fast. Um The so that’s two months in a row of retail sales growing know basically you know forget the number and no matter how you slice it it’s above above average growth. Um and basically as we discussed you we’ve kind of caught back up to our February sales levels which were the kind of pre covid-19, numbers especially if you if you keep car in there, a weird one this data is really bad I hate it for reporting e-commerce sales but they try they have a thing called non-store sales which used to be catalog sales and now it’s, it still has catalogs in it but it’s mostly calm and their number there is weird it’s down 2.4% so you go. [49:10] Since when is e-commerce been down and why would it be calm down now when everyone’s adopting digital as a result of covid and a couple of reasons. Month over month growth like is not a awesome metric you have to really. What you’re thinking of yeah I mean seasonality is a problem but also it just it’s so dependent on what anomaly happened the month before right like it’s much better to compare. June of 2019 with June of 2018 and spoiler alert. June of I’m sorry June of 2020 is 23 percent better than June of 2019 so so the real Trend here is e-commerce as way up. E-commerce was so way up in the beginning of the pandemic that now. As it normalizes a little bit e-commerce books down also the e-commerce number in the Department of Commerce isn’t huge and so the number of days in a month can actually impact it so there was one less day, this month and so that you know if you take that out you know month-over-month it was actually up two percent so. So yeah I wouldn’t I wouldn’t agonize over that number they have slightly better e-commerce data that they report quarterly and the next reporting of that quarterly data is, August 18th so August 18th is going to be a big date because we’ll get the quarterly e-commerce and we’ll get the July retail numbers to see if we can make it three months of recovery in a row. Scot: [50:34] Yeah I think Amazon’s cleaner data than all the stuff. Jason: [50:38] Yeah, most of the people that like even like the adobe’s that you know have a lot of clients and aggregate their data like most of the the comscore panels and stuff they’re all going to tell you e-commerce is up so when the the, Census Bureau reports is down its kind of goofy. Scot: [50:56] A couple quick ones on Google shopping so they rolled out this is kind of the consulate testing thing so it’s hard to know if this is a test or a permanent feature but you know a one of our guests saw that they have this fast shipping tag and then another one of our guests Faisal said hey it’s only been 15 years and they finally realized people that shop online want to know when they’re getting the products boom I want to report a murder and then another astute online person know. Jason: [51:28] It’s a side note on that comment faysal actually works for Google. Scot: [51:33] That’s it no it. Jason: [51:35] Yeah yeah he works like in in the like especially like he’s in the autonomous vehicle division of Google. Scot: [51:43] Okay that’s alphabet it’s different he’s in he’s in a whole nother part. Jason: [51:47] Yeah those those crappy sales. Scot: [51:49] He’s a w and that’s all day. Jason: [51:51] Are still paying his salary I guarantee you. Scot: [51:53] Yeah he’s over in W crap it over on G so it’s alright it’s he’s like in the whole back end of the alphabet all right and then Nike someone noticed pulled all their listings from Google shopping which is interesting because you know I think we just reported. Like a week ago that Nike CEO said they’re going to move to 50% direct cells so they must have thought they weren’t getting the brand, whatever Roi and they wanted from Google shopping. Jason: [52:22] Yeah and Nagy does have this philosophy which is pretty bold that they’re really only going to sell their product through retail experiences that offer a differentiated experience and so mostly you know people took that to me, retail and so what that means is. If you’re a boring store that puts the Nikes right next to the Reeboks and doesn’t give them a Nike a chance to tell their unique Brand Story in any way that they’re going to fire you as a customer and they have fired them bulk of their retailers and even the ones they haven’t fired. Are increasingly not getting the good hot new Nike products and so to me this Google move feels a little bit like that right like the Google shopping still isn’t a very good experience it still has a bunch of flaws as Joe pointed out like it’s a complete cluster with regard to win am I going to get it shipping times and so to me it feels kind of on brand for Nike to say I’m not just going to put my shoes in a catalog tile in a mediocre selling experience. Scot: [53:21] He had this this data points like three to five years old but I just have a hard time believing night not the Google solved it but a lot of Brands not just in the shoe category but we’ll use that as ample they get they get really frustrated with how Google presents their products right so so there’s all these crawlers this algorithm spits out and says but here’s here’s here’s the best Nike running shoe or something like that and then Nikes like well that’s like six years old and you pulled it off eBay and it’s used that that’s that’s not if you’d asked us that’s like not even in the zip code of like one of our top shoes and you know where the heck did you get that as a top shoe. Jason: [53:57] It’s weird because everyone tells me that AI is perfect it’s weird. Scot: [54:00] I don’t yeah it’s maybe Nikes wrong. Jason: [54:03] Yeah the the fun side note on my favorite Google shopping story is someone a couple of Reed here’s got together and they’re like hey I’m seeing something really weird in my analytics the you know we always have a lot of cart abandonment and carbonates Hoover High and we’re always trying to you know figure out what it is and we do cord cohort analysis and stuff to try to figure out you know who’s who’s abandoning carts and we notice there’s one user that has huge cart abandonment, across all of our sites and his name is John Smith like someone’s typing John Smith in in a bunch of cards and abandoning their carts and they’re like. You know who is this what is it and you know they did some some digital Sue thing and found out that it’s a Google bot for Google shopping. Scot: [54:49] Driving a cart abandonment stats everywhere. Jason: [54:54] Yeah speaking of Nike the the the more interesting Nike news to me. Is that Nike has announced yet another new, Nike owned retail concept so in Nike store that they’re calling Nike rise this first one is opening in China in the, ganju District just opened a week ago. And you know I’ve been kind of impressed with Nikes digital in-store efforts so Nike has a store concept called Nike live which is very personalized order that leverages, data from local Shoppers to a sort the store and it has some cool omni-channel amenities then they open this huge flagship store concept called House of Innovations there’s now several of those and they’re to me the best example of letting customers, use their phone in the store to legitimately enrich the shopping experience and now they have this other concept which I actually obviously haven’t been to yet, but that also its primary emphasis is around digital shopping in a physical store and using your mobile phone in the store so, I feel like there the market leader in doing that and I’ll be interested to see how Nike rise is different than the house of innovation. Scot: [56:14] Yeah when it opens I want to have a suture Rita on the show because her tweet was your like oh my God I’m getting about Nike rise I can’t wait to just like can someone explain this to me in English I don’t understand what this is supposed to be this store is supposed to reflect quote the pulse of sports and a member City and quote this is like the retail equivalent of abstract art. So I’m picturing going in and it’s like a Picasso painting where like the shoes are all in cubes and melty and stuff. Jason: [56:43] So my interpretation like so a every retailer when they open a new store concept they issue this like you know fluffy press release with all the cool experiences in it and the reality is. [56:54] One or two of those experiences are super valuable to customers and customers like them and resonate with and other ones are ones that some executive thought was cool but that no customers ever going to care about right so maybe I’m just more cynical than suit Cerrito I’ve never had a press release for a new retail store that didn’t have some silly fluff in it and I suspect she’s right, some of the features that Nikes touting of this door probably will end up being super silly fluff and I think the one she’s pointing to the way I interpreted them is they have some kind of. Um augmented reality experiences where you can use your phone to kind of have a, a virtual Sports tour of the activities in the city where the store is so you’re a tourist and you know maybe you get the experience if you’re if there were a Nike rise in New York you might get the experience of being at the finish line of the New York Marathon or you know being in jet Stadium or something like that so, I don’t know if I’m interpreting that right but I would kind of agree with her like that’s like a kind of tangential shopping experience. Other experiences on that list I’m much more excited about for example there instead of using those Oldham rulers to measure your feet they’re using, image recognition to to measure your feet and prescribed shoe sizes to you and I think. [58:20] It’s shocking that it’s taken this long to improve on that that shoot of ice that’s now a hundred years old. Scot: [58:26] Do you step on it or like it you walk in the store and a camera sees. Jason: [58:27] It’s just a camera that like it when there’s a home in the US there’s a home version that you can use in the Nike app but I’m guessing this is going to be a slightly more optimized version that the so the sales associate uses in the Nike rise store. Scot: [58:42] We’re up against time and we have 60 more topic let me so the one I really want to hear about what we reward folks are making it this long is there’s been a lot of chatter about Walmart’s new kind of quote-unquote prime killer I thought I thought it’s kind of funny because, I think people are missed it it’s really grocery Focus so I was kind of because you’re the grocery Guru I was curious about your take on that. Jason: [59:08] Yeah I’m of two minds so like to summarize it Walmart is launching a subscription program you you get a membership I think the speculation is that it’s like a hundred bucks and you get some shopping benefits for that that. That bent that subscription. Walmart has announced any of this and in fact Jenny Whiteside the chief customer officer who was on our show a few months ago just did an interview on LinkedIn yesterday and they asked her and she said I have nothing to announce right now. But but stay tuned because it’s it is going to be out in like a month so we don’t know what’s really in it, and here’s my two minds if it’s pay $100 to get free one-day shipping for your general merchandise, I think that’s going to be stupid because like it’s going to be trying to compete with Amazon Prime with a way Lamer offering right like. [1:00:09] Amazon has way more assortment than Walmart and and whatever assortment Walmart can ship in one day is a small subset of Walmart’s assortment so– it’s not just a matter of like some products can get there in one day like way more Amazon products are going to get there in one day than Walmart products I’m pretty confident in that so if that’s all it is, it’s not going to be very interesting but I will be surprised and disappointed if that’s all it is I’ll bet you they’re going to bundle some sir some Walmart benefits in there that are different than things Amazon can bundle right so, um therefore there has to be a grocery component in there like you could imagine that there’s free fast home delivery of grocery included in that, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a healthcare offering in that that they’re offering some premium Healthcare stuff so I’m going to reserve judgment until I see whether offering I hope it’s not an Amazon me-too product, if they can come up with a compelling list of values super smart and important. [1:01:15] That they build us a recurring Revenue model for Walmart like you know as retailers are getting more and more strained on margins recurring revenues where it’s at like the the most successful in the retailer in the US by many standards is Costco, and it’s because of that membership fee like you know when you look at Amazon success it’s all around Prime, so I think Walmart smart to figure out what its recurring revenue is going to be eager just like everyone else to see. [1:01:44] If this first offering next month is unique and differentiated and it can attract people or if it’s a silly shadow of Amazon Prime. Scot: [1:01:54] Yeah I think that’s compelling it’s like hey pass $99 will give you two flu shots and a bag of groceries let’s see how that sells. Jason: [1:02:06] Yeah well but I mean you can omit like there’s a bunch of healthcare services that people have to pay for like you could imagine them taking a hundred hours a hundred dollars out of the cost of that and then you getting all these other benefits right and that’s. That sounds wacky but like you know when Amazon first rode up the the memo and said we’re going to give free shipping and free movie rentals, in Prime that sounded wacky to now everyone’s like well of course you get those. Scot: [1:02:32] Two billion dollar behemoths battling each other is good for consumers so I’m all for it. Jason: [1:02:37] I and I think more retailers need to invent this there was I know we’re crushing time there was a bane report that came out that got widely distributed where they sort of did the math on the profitability of grocery and, this is a these numbers unfortunately are painfully familiar to me but like a normal profitable growth Grocer in store makes two to four percent gross. [1:03:01] So it’s a pretty pretty thin margin business and so anytime you then pick the groceries for the customer and drive them to the customer’s house. Um you’re going to lose money right so all of this digital grocery stuff is not profitable there’s been a lot of Articles written about and Walmart. Digital grocery not being profitable the easiest way you’d make it profitable as you charge more fees for that right and in general consumers haven’t been willing to pay those fees and so. The the hypothesis is like that a recurring membership program may be the best way to collect fees to make grocery profitable, and so you can kind of think about Walmart plus being Walmart’s answer to the profitability conundrum of digital grocery. I will tell you we talked about the micro fulfillment centers and doing automated picking for groceries, and that’s actually the real way to make groceries profitable if you use a robot to fill the bag and you have the customer pick it up in the parking lot instead of driving it to them, you can basically make digital grocery higher capex than a regular grocery store but hit the same operating margins so then. You don’t have to charge any fe

Our Instacart definitive guide and shopping analysis, finds grocery delivery service fees, taxes, and tips add 20% to the food costs that may have a markup over in-store. Importantly, Costco offers the greatest value for consumers, followed by Aldi, Wegmans, and BJ's. Remember, even buying through Costco from Instacart, you will still likely pay an average online markup of 15%, or more, versus in-store. Therefore, while it offers a nice aspect of optimization for a busy New Yorker, it is not the most frugal and economical source of groceries. Grocery Delivery Near Me, Now Damn It! We live in an instant gratification economy. While this might not necessarily be new, technological advancements are increasing the options for consumers. People increasingly want to use their smartphones via an app, or computer, to place orders online. For instance, they expect short delivery times, in a matter of days, if not the same day, more recently. Web-based services like Amazon Prime, Netflix, and Hulu, among others, offer OnDemand movies and TV shows. Instant gratification provides significant value for consumers when done right, according to an article written in Forbes, What The Instant Gratification Economy Taught Me About Happiness, by Ashik Ahmed. Within the article, he notes the following; "In a world where consumers don't just desire instant gratification, but expect it, the window for a startup to impress customers is smaller than ever." Like many New Yorkers and others, for instance, you want to optimize your limited time. Oftentimes, this means paying a premium to have someone else provide a service that used to be part of daily routines. For example, this includes the premium an Uber driver charges for door-to-door car service to some remote part of Brooklyn for a loft party. A shoeshine at Grand Central. Dinner prepared by a restaurant and delivered from Grubhub. And our topic of today's discussion, grocery delivery. Grocery delivery around New York City (NYC) is an increasingly competitive market spanning national services to those more regional. Moreover, there are options galore for consumers, and they appear to be increasing with time. For example, there are many grocery delivery services for NYC, including Amazon Fresh, DoorDash, Fresh Direct, Grubhub, Instacart, Peapod, Postmates, Shipt, TaskRabbit, Uber Eats, Whole Foods delivery via PrimeNow and numerous others! We are going to focus on one service now, Instacart. Moreover, what are the lowest cost grocery delivery stores from Instacart in NYC? The goal is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the lowest cost grocery stores through Instacart as well as a definitive guide. Why? Because we need our guac, now! We are a needy species. How Does Instacart Work? First, Instacart differs from some other grocery delivery services because it doesn't have its own stores or warehouses. Rather, it creates relationships with your local grocery stores to offer a delivery service. Second, it merely acts as an intermediary for grocery shopping with no inventory to keep on hand. In addition, for those more community conscious, it drives local grocery delivery business to stores in your neighborhood. As a user, you gain value from the grocery delivery service, optimizing your life a bit, at a cost of course, while also continuing to support local stores and employment. Conversely, services like Amazon Fresh, Fresh Direct, Peapod, and others use their own networks of warehouses as the source for your grocery delivery. Instacart, however, utilizes its network of shoppers to visit your local store you have chosen to order from, gather items ordered, then deliver them to your doorstep. Time needed: 20 minutes. Step-by-Step Guide for Getting Started with Instacart Visit www.instacart.com, or download the app (Apple app here or Android here) for your smartphone or tablet. Enter your email address and choose a password.

The CSE's Barrington Miller sat down with Jason Ackerman, the CEO of TerrAscend Corp. (CSE:TER) to dig deeper into his vision for the company as the recently appointed CEO of the organization. In this discussion, the reformed banker and online grocer shares how his past experiences have equipped him for a career in cannabis, including his thoughts on how delivering cannabis is a lot easier than convincing people to buy fish online (3:53), how previous crises (e.g. hurricanes) have helped him build a playbook for COVID-19 (8:31), and why banking reform for cannabis businesses will dramatically reduce the cost of capital and help legal business compete with black market suppliers (11:50). Listen until the end to hear how TerrAscend is attracting new customers in today's market, the strategic relationship with Canopy Growth, and why he's excited for the upcoming M&A cycle in the industry.Related linkswww.terrascend.comthecse.com/en/listings/life-sciences/terrascend-corp

Lifestyle expert and retailer Ted Kennedy Watson joins Lisa Birnbach to help listeners find out how to survive the CoronaVirus Lockdown in style.Lisa’s 5 Things: 1. Regularly-scheduled Zoom call with her Exhibits™, 2. Words With Exhibit C ™, 3. Roast beef sandwiches, 4. Food delivery services Fresh Direct and Instacart, 5. Seeing her mother and brother Jon.Ted Kennedy Watson’s 5 Things: 1. His husband, 2. His pooch Bailey, 3. Flowers, 4. Seeing and being with friends, 5. The US Postal Service & FedEx delivery folks

Voice shopping on Alexa and Google Assistant smart speakers is a $2bn market today, and is forecast to explode. I've wrote about the potential of voice shopping for the Harvard Business Review last year, but things are starting to pick up.According Amazon's Patrick Gauthier, 20% of Americans are ready for voice shopping now, and 39% of all Americans will complete some part of their purchase journey via voice by 2022.And while it might not generate a huge percentage of sales today, the learnings that you'll gather through observing and collecting data on how customers are interacting with your brand, will be worth its weight in gold when the volcano erupts. Presented by SparksSparks is a new podcast player app that lets you learn and retain knowledge while you listen.The Sparks team are looking for people just like you: podcast listeners who're also innovative early adopters of new tech, to try the beta app and provide feedback.Try it now at sparksapp.io/vuxIntroducing Shilp Agarwal, CEO, BlutagOur guest today is Shilp Agarwal, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Blutag, the voice shopping platform making it possible for retailers to sell on Alexa and Google Assistant with ease. Shilp talks us through how he sees the voice shopping landscape today, how it's changed over the last two years, and why it's going to explode in the next 18 months.Some highlights for retailers considering Alexa for voice shoppingSelling via Alexa skills can have an ROI and offer some key learnings. Fresh Direct increased its shopping cart size by 12% with its Alexa skill, powered by Blutag.But the ROI is about more than sales. You can get ahead of your competition by excelling in customer experience, offering voice options at different stages of the customer journey. From product research and consideration, through ordering and delivery tracking, right through to post-sales.And you don't need to be all things to all people straight away. Instead, try focusing on smaller parts of the shopping experience that'll help you get moving quickly, offer some value immediately and learn from your users. Things like repeat purchases or delivery checking are ideal.One thing is for sure, voice shopping is on the horizon and getting ahead now will put you in a great position.LinksVisit blu.ai See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We sit down to kiki w/ the best thing to happen to "Summer House" — former tennis pro Hannah Berner! We go behind the scenes of filming Summer House including how they kids have to order & unpack their own Fresh Direct and deal with hidden cameras in the headboards. We chat about her former day job as a video creator at Betches, her experiences with Vanderpump Rules cast members including DJ James Kennedy, Jax, Brittany, Stassi & Beau. We also learn about her life growing up in Brooklyn as a tennis pro, coached by her father and what led to her eventually giving up that career to pursue comedy in NYC. In reminiscing about her time as a tennis pro, she shares an amazing story about being paid to play doubles against Chelsea Handler. Follow @outinthewildpodcast

Matt helped invent the format, system, and science of viral videos in the publishing world at Business Insider, NowThis, New York Magazine, Men’s Health, and others. He produced and oversaw over 2,000+ pieces of video content (both branded and editorial) that generated well over 10 billion video views across platforms. He’s worked on viral video campaigns with brands such as Toyota, the National Football League, Campbell’s, Chase Bank, Verizon, Adobe, Tidal, Fresh Direct, and many others. He’s also driven hundreds of millions of page views in content to websites, and built many successful content and video teams from scratch. Matt left the publishing world in 2018 to bring viral branded video and disruptive, content-based PR to innovative companies across the globe. Vesta: https://brands.vestamedia.io/getvesta/ Producing Empathy (My book): https://amzn.to/36mqySg My site: http://mattjohnstononline.com Guide Social (company): https://guidesocialglobal.com/

Robert Jakobi is a serial food entrepreneur who founded Metcalfe, Itsu, and is now CEO and Founder of BOU, a company reinventing bullion. What makes Robert’s story so fascinating is that he made successful companies in two different countries. Originally from the United Kingdom, he built Metcalfe and Itsu, and now is growing a successful bullion company right in the United States. You’ll get a great overview of Robert’s history, on all three companies that he’s built or is building, and then we dive straight into dissecting his whole story, so this episode is structured a bit differently, because you’ll hear everything upfront and then we get into the heart of what makes a successful food business. You’re going to get some amazing advice no matter what stage of a business you. You’ll get advice on how to start a company, what to do with your money whether in the Seed round or the Series A round, and being at the right place at the right time, but finding the pattern to turn an old category on its head. About Robert Robert Jakobi is the CEO and Founder of BOU, the innovative food company bringing joy back into cooking with its versatile range of bouillon, gravy and miso broth cubes, and instant soup cups. A serial food entrepreneur, Robert was previously the CEO and Co-Owner of Metcalfe’s Food Company, which he launched with renowned entrepreneur Julian Metcalfe (itsu and Pret-a-Manger) in 2010 and quickly turned it into the fastest-growing privately-owned food and drink company in the UK. In 2015, they launched their spinoff brand, Metcalfe’s Skinny, a leading premium popcorn brand which was acquired by Snyder’s (owner of Kettle Chips) in 2016. In May 2017, Robert launched BOU in the US with COO Kunal Kohli, disrupting a section of the supermarket that had not seen innovation in decades. An overnight success thanks to major stockists such as Amazon, Fresh Direct, Wegmans, Wholefood, Krogers, Walmart and 6,000 more retailers, BOU encourages people to rediscover the joy of cooking with its convenient cubes full of big, bold flavors that are US-made with non-GMO and no artificial ingredients. To date, BOU has raised $7.8M with backers including Nebari Ventures, Andy Gellert (Gellert Group) and Shelly Stein (Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits). Robert holds a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Sponsor We’re excited to be partnering with Smart Kitchen Summit {SKS}, the leading food tech event bringing together leaders across the food and cooking ecosystems. Now in its fifth year, #SKS2019 is *the* conference shaping the future of food, technology, and the kitchen. Well-known leaders within the food tech industry will all be speaking on engaging topics such as food robots, alternative protein, and connected kitchen devices such as smart refrigerators. Trust us, you’ll want to be there. Use code FOODJOB15 to get a 15% discount on tickets and I’ll see you there on October 7-8 at in Seattle. Just go to smartkitchensummit.com to register. For easy access, just click on our link for this episode’s show notes. Show Notes Wharton in Penn Barclay’s Capital in New York PODBites Pret a Manger Metcalf Food Company Metcalfe Skinny HouliHand Lokey Diamond Foods Snyder Lance Itsu and Itsu Grocery Boullion Cube When did you start feeling entrepreneurial?: At Penn, I started a nightlife promotion company Also Fashion Retail What’s the difference between the UK and US market?: Quite a few things. US is a great opportunity but it’s very crowded How did you get rid of the noise?: There are a  ton of different pieces. You need a great product and savvy marketing. For example, social media, trade shows What are the big challenges for brands?: New media and channels will be introduced and new competition will always show up. The right people and the right systems matter in this business. How do you spend money on your business?: Pre-Series A: Design and Product and Product-market-fit Series A: After we launched in Whole Foods: Money to support the brand scaling nationally. Bigger and better marketing programs Consecutive Series help grow the brand What advice would you give a budding food entrepreneur?: Believe in yourself and don’t be scared of failure. Go with your gut. It might not work because there’s so many things that build a brand. Really believe in yourself and your ideas. Having the ability to listen well is super important My Food Job Rocks: I get to work with smart, passionate people What type of food trends and technologies are exciting you right now?: Trends that last. Anti-examples: Cricket. Examples: protein, popcorn, etc. What are your thoughts on innovating ramen?: It’s happening. Asian is hot right now and we havea  Miso version. Our products have better-for-you Vertical Integration: Our manufacturers are our cofounders Favorite Quote: Winston Churchill: We shall fight….. We shall never surrender Where can we find you for advice?: Robert@bouforyou.com I’m always reachable and happy to chat.

A subscription service that delivers ugly produce to your door, making meal cards with different dinners on them, and a calendar to put them on the convenience of Fresh Direct, making a birthday party special, and printing photo books from the parties. Janine Territo, Co-founder of Take the Cake, shares her mom products and services with Michelle Park and guest host Sophie Elgort.

Fresh Direct is an online grocer that disrupted the traditional food supply chain by sourcing food where it’s produced and delivering it to consumers without going through additional retailers. Fresh Direct launched in 2002 from its headquarters in a former paper plant in Long Island City, Queens. Jason speaks with Jessica Harris about how he […]

Sometimes, the best episode ideas happen in the middle of recording an episode. Here's one of those episodes, where we: -Eat presidential chicken from @EatAtState and talk about how delicious it is! -Indulge you to try this recipe we ate during the episode: https://bit.ly/2IAe5ly. -Continue the (not so) subtle ASMR podcasting. -Feature Caleb's Review Corner (with Sprite, Presidential Chicken, salad dressing, ALDI, Fresh Direct, Nice Tattoo Parlor). -Lied about the episode image because we changed topics halfway in! -Almost ate funky cheese. -Discuss tattoos in general and tell the stories of our tattoos! -CHEW REALLY LOUD AND TALK WITH OUR MOUTHS FULL, SORRY EVERYONE! -Talk about the stigma of tattoos and how it's going away. -Give advice about getting your first tattoo. Thanks everyone for listening! Check us out on social media @justwhateverpod and send us your tattoo pictures! Send us an email here: justwhateverpod@gmail.com. Sign up for our weekly email updates here: https://forms.gle/8KwZhfuNQB7VRPb37 Love, Jamie & Caleb --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/justwhatever/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/justwhatever/support

Nicole Centeno is the founder of Splendid Spoon, a holistic wellness brand delivering ready-to-eat, plant-based meals. She’s previously trained at the French Culinary Institute and managed a New York City catering business. In this episode, she shares how she took her business from side hustle to what it is today, why she feels energized by taking massive leaps, the bold moves she made to build brand awareness, how she landed a partnership with Fresh Direct, her trick for moving through fear, and more!   To learn more about Nicole Centeno and the resources mentioned in this episode, visit the show notes.   Follow Me On: Facebook Instagram

Great faux-leather leggings, feeling healthy with a busy work schedule, 100 free Peloton bikes to those in need, great services for working moms, and the blessing of Marie Kondo. Carolyn Tisch Blodgett, SVP/Head of Global Brand Marketing at Peloton shares her mom products and solutions with Stacy Igel and Michelle Park.In this episode: Michelle shares some faux-leather leggings made by Lysse that might as well have been designed for the mom on the go How the Pelaton has helped Carolyn stay healthy and feel like herself while trying to manage a hectic work schedule Pelaton’s new 100 Bikes in 100 Dayspromotion where Pelaton subscribers are listening to people’s stories to decide who should receive a free Pelaton bike Glam Squad, Fresh Direct, Amazon Prime, Rockets of Awesome, Mac & Mia, and other services that all make being a working mom so much easier How Marie Kondo has changed Michelle’s home life To share your #MOMSGOTTHIS MOMENT just call 833-844-THIS-MOM (833-844-7666) and leave a voicemail with your first name and city along with your moment.

Lenny Stern is a founding partner of creative marketing communication agency SS+K, the advertising agency that created the youth campaigns for the Barack Obama presidential campaigns of 2008 and 2012. Lenny grew up in Queens, NY and started his career in the competitive, zero-sum world of politics. His background instilled in him a unique approach he still uses today: Define yourself. Define who you're for. Define the competition. Define the stakes. Engage, don't simply communicate! As one of the co-founders of SS+K, his passion is developing creative solutions to guide organizations through moments of change and challenge--whether it’s re-establishing iconic brands, launching new ones, helping insurgents disrupt an existing category or helping organizations stand for important issues. Lenny has guided relaunches of brands like Delta, Wells Fargo, Pfizer, Time Warner Cable, Travelers, Comcast and GM, while his work creating new brands for TiVO, Chevy Volt, Fresh Direct, Honest Tea, Kraft MiO and Jet.com has helped numerous Davids go up against category Goliaths in tough competitive markets. Lenny, a self-proclaimed recovering lawyer, has been a visiting professor at Yale School of Management and Duke University, and sits as a National Board member of Communities in Schools (CIS), the nation's largest and most effective dropout prevention organization.   The post 100: What It’s Like To Build a Creative Marketing & Communications Agency w/ Lenny Stern, SS+K, Founding Partner [Main T4C episode] appeared first on Time4Coffee.

Amazon plans to split HQ2 to two cities Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities (WSJ) Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Between Long Island City, N.Y., and Arlington, Va. (NY Times) GroceryShop Recap GroceryShop is the first year of a new show focused on disruptive trends, technologies and business models in grocery & CPG that includes both established and startup CPG brands, supermarkets, c-stores, drug stores, discount stores, ecommerce players, warehouse clubs, grocerants and non-traditional grocery retailers.  The show took place October 28-31 in Las Vegas, at the Aria Hotel and Convention Center. Jason's Activities Jason interviewed Sanjiv Mehra, co-founder and CEO EOS products for a keynote fireside chat Jason moderated a panel "Evolving CPG Retailer relationships" with Constellation Brands, e.l.f. Beauty, and Fairway Market Jason moderated a panel "Using product content to build brands" with Boston Beer Company, Chobani, and The Wonderful Company Keynotes Yael Cosset, Chief Digital Officer, The Kroger Co. Andy Katz-Mayfield, Co-Founder & CEO, Harry's Sanjiv Mehra, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, eos Products Apoorva Mehta, Founder & CEO, Instacart Chieh Huang, CEO, Boxed Nina Barton, President, Global Growth, Kraft Heinz Luke Jensen, CEO, Ocado Solutions Narayan Iyengar, SVP, Digital & eCommerce, Albertsons Companies Nick Green, Co-Founder & CEO, Thrive Market Key Themes Digital Disruption of Grocery Store picking vs. Dedicated Fulfillment Center   Startup Brands vs. New products from established Companies Private Label/Owned Brands Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 150 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, November 5th, 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 150 being recorded on Monday November 5th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:41] Jason welcome back Jason Scott show listeners. Jason you just recently got back from sunny and blazing hot Las Vegas Nevada for the first annual grocery store. And that's what really to see what today show is going to be is a grocery shop recap but before we jump into that we did want to cover some breaking. [1:03] Amazon news your margin is there a opportunity alright well we've been talking about this on the chauffeur about a year ago Amazon announced that they are going to look for a second headquarters that would has 50000 employees. I am if it was kind of this huge process and we're coming down to the end of it and there's two I'm confirmed reports out today, one from the Washington Post one from your times and it looks like Amazon is first of all going to split this is also not confirmed us the Wall Street Journal says Amazon's actually going to do two cities instead of one so it's kind of like HQ one and a half and hq2 and they're splitting the jobs pretty even Lisa 25,000 jobs in to eat City. The two cities that seem to be most rumored are Crystal City which is a suburb of the DC area and Northern Virginia. The other one is a suburb of New York City called Long Island City Jason what do you think about this result if it's true and how true do you think it is. Jason: [2:17] Yeah well it does sound pretty true there's a lot of rumors earlier in the week and it seem like Amazon was actively. In some cases refuting them and or scolding the leakers and they they seem completely silent about this which makes me feel like. It is on the markings pretty credible news organizations that are setting multiple sources so seems pretty credible and if it's true it. It reaffirms a lot of people's hypothesis that this was, sort of largely a marketing stunt in it it makes me feel like Seattle is actually the big winner because. Like these this would definitely would not be co-equal headquarters now that they're dividing up the jobs and I'm going to assume that that the center of gravity and most of the senior leadership are going to continue to put on in Italy live in the, in the Seattle area in this scenario. Scot: [3:18] Yeah yeah it's my Logic on this was. It never made sense to me that they could hire 50,000 people cuz to my logic is the retail part of Amazon is pretty stacked up in packs you know robots replacing humans a lot of times in the, Commerce part of Amazon so this feels like largely AWS engineers and you know it's very hard to go find 5000 much less 2000 50,000 folks that can work on AWS so so I think they started kind of come to that same conclusion the dust splitting them up and I imagine those 25,000 10 years or something. You could possibly hired that mud many AWS qualified people even in those dense text cities to to work on stuff so it'll be interesting to see how this lands. So we just wanted to cover that really quickly because it's been the source of so much speculation but we want to spend the bulk of our time tonight on grocery shop so it's Jason. I was not able to go but you went on for so how was House Las Vegas did you end up making money losing money. Jason: [4:31] I go to Las Vegas too often so I am no longer much of a wager or so I I did lose some money but I lost it spending a week in Las Vegas not at the table. Scot: [4:43] Visit your favorite Starbucks. Jason: [4:46] I did not so dedicated listeners or remember I spent like 18 days in a row in Las Vegas at the Venetian earlier this year which I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy this show was at the Aria so I did not make it to the Venetian Starbucks but I I did get to reacquaint myself with a several Starbucks in the vicinity of the Aria. Scot: [5:10] Awesome so so for the the grocery shop show maybe Orient for listeners you know how this show came to be who puts it on and how did this compare to kind of shot Talk Money 20/20. Jason: [5:25] So that the show did the first year of the show is put on by the same folks. It started shoptalk and money 20/20 as you mention money 20/20 was their first show and it started at the Aria as well. And then it eventually it it felt like the show doubled in size every year and it eventually outgrew the Aria Convention Center and then had to move to the Venetian. I'm in after 3 years of growth. They actually sold the show to another event company and they started simultaneously they started the second show shop talk and Shop talk also started. At the Aria and it also doubled every year last year it outgrew the Aria and moved to the Venetian. And they this year they started to new shows or show I don't know a lot about this in the healthcare ligori and they started this show grocery shop which is all about digital grocery. [6:19] And the show started the Aria it. It felt very similar to the first year of money 20/20 or shoptalk and I mean that in a good way I feel like these guys have. Have built a pretty good template for an event so they they do a really good job of recruiting. Interesting speakers that people want to hear from and they're great digital marketers and they Market the heck out of their speakers which causes other people to want to go in network with those folks. And you know at this point kind of three or four shows into their their progression. I feel like they have a a really solid template eyes execution, did they run and you know they invite me to speak at all of them because they use caricatures of you and I feel like I'm just cost-effective because they already paid to have my character children. Scot: [7:10] I'm sure that's what it is. Jason: [7:12] Yeah I think that's my main value-add a fun fact for speakers is that they. Send you a coffee mugs with your charger on it so I have a complete collection of shop talk, money 20/20 and now grocery shop mugs that my mother-in-law has claimed so if you ever get coffee at my mother-in-law's house be prepared for the jarring image of my face and this year they upped the ante they sent us a cookie with my my characterture on the front of the cookie in frosting. Scot: [7:48] I remember I had jokingly asked one of the folks at shoptalk who does the character in the show that's her that's her most closely held Secret. Jason: [7:58] Yeah so you know what's funny about that I I believe they did say that to you if you went to an early money2020 that guy was working in a a shop a money 20/20 booth and you could stand in line to get your own character children. And eventually apparently he became so so popular and beneficial to them that they they hit him behind the scenes but like there were attendees from those first money2020 is that actually got there, their characters are drawn while they were attending the show but the big controversy among the speakers on Twitter earlier this year when the cookies went out was. Can you infect eat your own face like is that is that weird. And you know there was a lot of talk about that and I defended we solve the The Dilemma when I tweeted out a picture of my three-year-old gleefully. Diving into my face to eat it. Scot: [8:48] Eaton Trinidad face. Jason: [8:53] So more than listeners want to know about the logistics from the show but I feel like at a high level they picked a really good topic for a show I think they were hoping like a thousand people would attend in the show and they sold out the show at 2200 people which is the capacity for the the convention center they had so already. Don't be surprised if you see the show move from the Aria to the Venetian next year or I guess there is a rumor that the Aria is expanding their. Their facility so maybe maybe I'll stay in this expanded facility but it definitely felt like there there was unmet demand for folks in this industry to be able to get together and share some ideas and best practices and I feel like, a lot of people were we're excited to come people are super engaged and all the feedback I got from people on the way out of town or from from my own team after we got back was was super favorable that it was a good event and everyone wants to have a, a bigger participation next year so congratulations to the the folks at grocery shop on on doing a great job for the first year. Scot: [10:02] Awesome. Let's dig into some content first of all as mentioned you were quite busy so that I kind of thought they should have called it Jason talk so you gave the keynote and you led to panel so it was kind of go through those and sequencing and not good to some highlights of what you learned there I'll start with a keynote I saw on Twitter that a lot of people took this one picture where it looks like you were putting some lipstick on tell us about that one. Jason: [10:29] Yeah I'm a very Metropolitan dude what can I say so I feel like you're being slightly generous and calling into keynote so that it it it it was a keynote but I'm not sure I gave it so what this was a fireside chat format so I was interviewing, gentleman named Sanjeev who was one of the founders, I have this cool company that that listeners are probably familiar with that may not know called EOS products and it cos it actually is a acronym for the evolution of smooth. [11:04] And, little over 10 years ago they invented a new lip balm for women that was in this sort of round egg-shaped format in there now ubiquitous in super popular, but anyways go sort of, invented or was an early Pioneer in influencer marketing they they started out with her than affiliate program where you could earn credit and free product by getting your friends, to share EOS products on social media and back then sponsored social media was not a thing, and a bunch of celebrities sort of got in on the ACT in organically started promoting this product and so you know today the the the sort of early eye doctors of this product it was like Miley Cyrus and Kim Kardashian and and all these these people that would today would cost millions of dollars that they got to sort of endorse the product early which caused this product to, completely take off in Skyrocket so one of the the very first sort of. [12:15] Influencer viral product out there so it's interesting to talk to sanjiv about his. His experiences with that and you know I just got a chance to interview him and I I did in fact apply some some EOS lip balm during during the talk so I think that's maybe the tweet that you saw. Scot: [12:33] I can't right now in Las Vegas I never really need like chapstick type stuff but in Vegas I do the kisses so during dry out there. Jason: [12:41] I'm 100% with you I normally would not use lip balm but I do always bring ChapStick and like to Saint jeans credit like. Part of the genius of this product is whip-whip Bomb is predominately bought by women and all of the products were not very women-centric right and so they're all convenient form factors for you and I to put in our pocket but a lot of women's apparel doesn't have pockets and so these things go in purses and so they designed a product that was very well intentioned to live in a woman's purse which ironically makes it super inconvenient for guys until I had to smuggle it onto the stage because it would have look silly in my pocket. Scot: [13:20] Now that's kind of a healthcare item not something you'd find in a grocery store symbol surprise that's so am I done for this kind of had also kind of the drug stores in the whole thing and the healthcare are the the beauty category as well. Jason: [13:37] Yes I think they would characterize this is more Beauty than then Healthcare and it's it's sort of. Affordable impulse Beauty and so it is so like actually at the cash wrap and a lot of grocery stores and also drug stores and convenience stores and I do think there was some overlap I think that the show is primarily targeted at grocery which meant, a lot of the retailers that attended where Grocers but then equal or more attendees were brands that View Grocery as a super important Channel, and it just so happens that a lot of those brands also sell in, mass and and the convenience and Drug so you had a lot of the the Wakulla food and non-food cpgs and so yeah I definitely think that that many of the conversations and takeaways expanded Beyond pure grocery but grocery was sort of the epicenter. Scot: [14:42] Cool and then you're so you let that keynote you Fireside chatted that up and then you had a panel called a balding cpg retailer relationships that sounds pretty intense. Jason: [14:53] And so that panel was we had three panelists and they're talking all about the Dynamics of retailers and Brands and how they work together in a lot of the challenges in in the new world of digital marketing. You know how there's there's a lot of frustration on both sides retailers generally feel like. The brands are behind and aren't really ready to partner with the retailers digitally and retailers are asking for like a lot of support for e-commerce initiatives that Brands aren't always. Well prepared to meet so there was a lot of talk from the retail side about Heather they expire for the brands to sort of catch up. And on the brand side there's a lot of talk about like the lack of. Of data and transparency and and you know it it not feeling like an equal partnership on the part of retailers to this panel was a lot about best practices and started making that relationship work and so we had. Wingo on who's the VP of e-commerce at constellation Brands which is a well-known alcohol. [16:00] Manufacturer with a bunch of popular brands. The Wayne also had formerly been on the e-commerce team at Walgreens so he kind of talked about his experience at both places. We had that the VP of brand from Elf Cosmetics which is another affordable Beauty brand that kind of represented the brands perspective in this. In this a dynamic and elf 10 years ago started out as a direct-to-consumer brand then they they sort of got really popular and became like 90%. Wholesale and now they're starting to shift the balance again and then we had a retailer whose. A well-known Market in New York City called Fairway Market. Well known local chain with a bunch of like really high-end Gourmet products as well as a full. Call grocery store and so Jason is work there long time and talk about their overall perspective but today the portfolio he mainly owns is. Private brands for Fairway and so he talked about some of the unique Dynamics with partnering with brands on on exclusive products so that was. A good set of conversation in the audience that seem engaged and we got some nice feedback about that panel. Scot: [17:18] Did you get to the so we talked up private label then you started using the term owned products have to have you as a cut on what's what's what's the difference between the two. Jason: [17:31] Yeah they question if it's definitely one one of the themes at the show maybe we'll talk a little bit more about later but. [17:38] In general I call private label sort of this hundred-year-old practice of a retailer offering a a, more value oriented version of a national Brand Products what has the exact same product attributes as the national brand it just sold at a lower price point without the brand name on it, generally a hundred percent of the marketing for the product is simply the fact that it's on the Shelf next to the National brand so you get a headache you go to Walgreens to get Advil and on the Shelf next to Advil as well bupropion. [18:11] And it says right on the package compared to the active ingredient in Advil and it's a little cheaper right so to me that's private label and there's this show there's a lot of talk about private label and it's an important part of the mix for retailers in it obviously has an impact on profitability and there's there's a bunch of good reasons why private label is important but to me, the thing is getting more traction is this evolution of that idea, where retailers actually wants their own unique products that are different from the national brands in most cases the retailers using their intimacy with the customer to design a product that's in a gap that's not well met by the national Brands and in most cases retailers, have to learn all of the skills that the brands have in terms of building a brand and marketing and advertising it and so to me owned brands are these, all brands that just happened to be owned by a retailer versus private label are these sort of value-oriented alternatives to the National brand and there's a lot of talk about both of those at the show. Scot: [19:13] And then your last panel was called using product content to build brands. Jason: [19:20] Inside, what you're not getting a lot of practitioners at the show so there a lot of like directors and VPS that are trying to learn best practices and I'm both sides of the fence like one of the primary areas were Brands and retailers really have to work together is on this digital Shelf. [19:37] And so you know one of the ways this comes up most often is oh my god Amazon didn't used to be relevant in this category and now it's super relevant and. You know increasingly searches are shifting from Google the Amazon and so how are we going to get our products to show up in the Amazon search engine like they used to show up in the Google search engine. And once people find our products how are we going to get them to learn enough to decide to buy a product and send it alternative instead of the the that what we in e-commerce called that product detail page. You know brands are thinking of is the digital equivalent of their retail shelf and so there's a lot of conversation amongst friends about what the best practices are in content. For that digital shelf in the overwhelming majority of cases Brands create that content and then they syndicated to the retailer. To show up on all these various e-commerce sites and so there's. [20:32] Different retailers have different request and criterias and preferences about how to execute that content different brands have different philosophies about how much to invest in and what the best practices are so we had a really good rub us conversation about. Like what what some of the the best practices are and what some of the new ideas are and what some of the pros and cons are tough. The various approaches in investing in. This content to you notes or to build a brand in a in a world in which a lot of purchase decisions are are substantially digitally influence. Scot: [21:09] Are these guys struggle with just basic digital assets cuz you know in the traditional grocery store model them really had to provide much chaga tea or short long title or, all that kind of stuff. Jason: [21:24] Almost all of them have followed this way great like slow progression of maturity so when you're selling Oreos to Walmart like you you if it at the base level needed to provide about six attributes about the about the Oreos bike how many cookies were in the bag with the net weight of the bag was like what you know a basic description that could show up in ER P&B printing on the on the Shelf label in the store, it's always super simple and every brand new how to provide the six attributes that Walmart wanted as e-commerce really took off. You know Amazon Walmart ask for for 60 and increasingly more attributes about the product is a gluten-free is it you know does it have any allergens in it. You know what's all the nutrition information in the in the old world they just provided a picture of Ninja trition label to the store, now they have to provide all this data and is you alluded to a super important attribute is images and how many to take and what should they be pictures of, and is there any rich media going with that and you know any any comparison copy and they're off all of these. [22:29] Evolutions of best practices and so you know his you kind of alluded to, early on you know that's a Walmart sales guy like you know filling out an Excel spreadsheet and emailing it to his buyer at Walmart. And frankly in the early days not caring very much because. 99.9% of sales were happening through the the Walmart by owner in Bentonville and only you know .1% of the sales were happening on walmart.com and so you know. It's in the walmart.com guy with what he needs to go away. You know that rapidly evolved and you became a very meaningful part of sales very quickly and eventually retailers you know sort of used the, their store volume is leverage and said hey we're going to give you a shelf face in the store if you're not complying with all the the new digital content requirements we have and we want you to send the Kate ratings and reviews and want you to do all these other things inside of the kind of like. Sales guy hiring some company to fill out a spreadsheet turned into. These internal teams and centers of expertise creating all that content and and you know, buying or building the kind of tools that they would use for product information management in content syndication in all that and if I'm not mistaken I think Channel advisor plays this pretty significant role in in parts of that echo system for a lot of Brands as well. Scot: [23:51] Yep yep you know we talked about the capability to take your eCommerce products and, push me around and under the hood it's very similar to a set of capabilities 2 so those were the things you got to speak about and then did you tell if you were super busy between Starbucks runs applying lip balm and in all the stuff did you get a chance to go to any other talks or can you summarize some other things that we should know about. Jason: [24:26] I did I think I made it to all the Keynotes and I made it to as many of the other breakout sessions as I could and then of course there we're a couple of friends of the show former guess that were also with the show by tweeting a lot of the sessions and so is pretty funny a lot of times I was in one session you know trying to consume the content myself and I'm following like Michelle who's been on the show from euromonitor who is doing a fabulous job of what I've tweeting the. The session she was at and so so I feel like I got a pretty good feel for the overall show despite the fact that that. There and she'll like this there is a fair amount of fear of missing out that you're going to go to one session and it's going to. Not be what you hoped and and you'll miss some really good content in another. Scot: [25:14] Yeah, so what were the highlights. Jason: [25:17] So high level I kind of broke the show up into these for big themes and the biggest Theme by far is this overall digital disruption of grocery. That essentially you know grocery ad in pretty stagnant for. For a long time and that now digital shopping for groceries digital influencer sales in grocery and increasingly. Delivery and curbside pickup of grocery is gaining huge traction it's going to be a meaningful part of grocery I think emarketer publishing data that it's like. 1.3% of grocery sales right now or digital the grocery same stories e-commerce groceries growing at like 2%. But digital grocery is growing at like a 20% K Garceau. You in the next five years that 1.3% is going to be more like 3 or 4% of all Grocery and it's the overwhelming majority about growth in the grocery category so you know all the other themes and most of the content in the show is all about how Brands and retailers and consumers are responding to this, this digital disruption of the traditional grocery model. [26:34] So then the three sub themes under that that I felt like came up a lot is there's a lot of conversation and opinion and evolution of, the idea of how you get all the groceries into the grocery bag right so there's a lot of traditional grocers that own a bunch of stores. That you know feel like. [26:59] Sending professional employees to pick groceries off the shelf and put them in the bag is the most cost-effective model because it leverages all this fixed assets that the retail already have it leverages all their existing inventory it shares the inventory between, in-store customers and digital customers you know it's it's the Leverage is all these fixed assets that that that retailer already has and so you think about like what Walmart curbside pickup and Kroger curbside pickup are both. [27:30] Are both sort of in store picking models and you know most notably instacart which is now past like 3 billion dollars in sales is all sort of in-store picking in so a lot of traditional grocery all feel like that's the preferred model but then there's a lot of digital startups that have said actually that's super inefficient in the unit economics are really challenging there because in a traditional general merchandise e-commerce site you know an average you're lucky if you sell two or three items per order and so the amount of picking her order is pretty small but a typical grocery order might have 30 to 60 items in it and so the cost per item to pick is is a much bigger part of the overall cost. [28:19] Of an e-commerce order and paying people to walk around stores that are not efficiently assorted for Pickers but instead are designed for Discovery and browsing is really inefficient and so you you have dedicated digital Grocers like Fresh Direct or Peapod or a super successful digital Grocer in the UK called or Colorado that all have this model where they use dedicated automated. Grocery up fulfillment centers that are much more optimized for picking costs and in one interesting case ocado which is based in the UK is partnered with Kroger and they're there. [29:03] Opening fulfillment center using okada's technology and software in the US so Kroger is both doing store picking and there now piloting these microfilaments centers Albertsons which is like the second largest. Dedicated Grocer in the u.s. made a big announcement that they were launching micro fulfillment centers and they felt that that was a superior more cost-effective model in the long run so they're like, it's still early days but there's a lot of pros and cons on both sides in this whole whole conundrum of what's the efficient supply chain. You know when you're dealing with perishables and fresh and and you know cold chain and all these these products that have to be kept at. A particular temperature so that it was an interesting pros and cons from various practitioners around those picking models. So that was kind of something one sub theme to is this whole debate about. [30:02] New start-up Brands versus new products from existing brands in so you think about like a Harrys Razor which would be appear startup brand. Or a new product being launched by Kraft. And you know a lot of the buzz in the industry is all about these new digital native startup Brands we talked about a lot of them in general but there are also a lot of them that are in the grocery space. And get a lot of buzz but also in the grocery space are more products. That our new products that are either launched by big companies or. New products that are launched by companies that are intended to be sold through wholesale versus. Direct-to-consumer so you think about like Chobani yogurt for example like that emerged in quickly disrupted the industry and took a huge chunk of Dan and sales because, Dan and didn't you know jump on the Greek yogurt trans quick enough in Chobani like became a very big company. Shivani doesn't really focus on selling yogurt direct they sell it through all these grocery wholesalers. It's a lot of interesting discussions about the pros and cons there and like my big takeaway is. [31:16] All of these dedicated startups that are focused on direct to Consumer are making more Innovative products and they're iterating them faster and they're getting them out in the market and getting initial customer adoption much quicker. Then that the big brands are or than the wholesale distributed products are but all of them seem to hit this plateau and really struggled the scale. So I'm calling the the direct to Consumer startups really good at Innovation and product development and early launches, but the really challenging to scale in on the big side the products that they get to Market are doing much better and scaling and becoming much more significant in the marketplace, but in general are there's far fewer of them in there they're much slower to come to Market and there's in general that's innovation in them and so there's kind of this interesting thing that you had these two models that he. Each have their pros and cons and you know how do you kind of get the best of both worlds and is is that. Harry's launching is a direct-to-consumer brand and once they hit that plateau. You know they they shifted to today the majority of their sales are now wholesale then and so you know there's kind of some of those those conversations. Internet the third big trend is this whole private label owned Brands thing that we discussed earlier. [32:40] But I would say both of those Trends are becoming increasingly prominent in so you think about like all the Keynotes at the show and like Kroger, I have a huge private label it's the most successful, organic food brand in the US called Simple Truth and Kroger's grocery store in the US but in China Kroger's a brand because they're selling simple truth on Alibaba, in China we've talked a lot about boxed on this show which is an Innovative a retailer that started out selling wholesale Goods today a big chunk of all their sales are own products that they're developing. One of the founders of Thrive Market which is sort of a online version of Whole Foods in a way talked about. The overwhelming success of their own products and how you know they were differentiated in the marketplace so that that was a big Trend in those. You know I think of you up there all the key notes in a lot of the breakouts you did see them like pretty neatly fall into those three big trim. Scot: [33:43] How how do you nod out on jobs pick one so we talked a lot about delivery versus curbside was there any conclusive evidence on either of those. Jason: [33:55] No I think the jury is still out I will say like I have in a pretty flippantly run around saying hey the big winner is going to be curbside that the unit economics really don't work. For for home delivery for grocery in perishable and kind of the Reader's Digest on my Logic for that is. [34:16] General merchandise e-commerce is generally what we call a route based delivery like you get 300 orders you put them all in the UPS truck the guy drives to 300 addresses, and deliver them all and so you know each one of those delivery is paying for one 300 that trip. And the UPS driver could show up at your house or work any place within kind of a 10 hour window and deliver the goods and it would be no problem. And fresh and perishable if you order milk or you order ice cream. You need to be home exactly when that delivery arrive so that you can put those products in a refrigerator or freezer. And generally the way that that retailers have to do that for most of the country is that to do a point-based delivery which means a guy drive straight from the store or fulfillment center to your house, and now that delivery has to pay for 100% of that trip instead of one 300th and so, in general because of that the unit economics are much more favorable to curbside pickup. And curbside pickup is good enough from a convenient standpoint like a lot of families fine, super convenient to order their groceries digitally pick them up at their convenience maybe on the way home from soccer practice and they're stored in a climate controlled storage facility and they they get put in your trunk really efficiently. And that's a really high customer satisfaction experience for most consumers so. [35:40] Put all that together and curbside pickup is the big win and I still believe that's true but I got to express that point of you do some really smart operators that a bunch of these grocery stores, and and they're kind of feedback which I do take the heart is hey Jason you're probably mostly right, but you're actually under estimating the fact that the picking is way more expensive than the delivery and so you know that the unit economic problem is more around, if you if you have a really expensive pic of 30 or 60 items you then can't afford to do a point delivery, but that if you have a really efficient fulfillment center and you can get the picking cost down a low enough. You can put those deliveries on a refrigerated truck and you may not be able to do the the 300 deliveries that a UPS driver can make in a day but you still can make multiple deliveries, guarantee tight delivery windows in a climate control truck from a dedicated fulfillment center and so they were arguing that that you know maybe there's more. [36:47] Communities that have enough density to support delivery than I was originally thinking so I'm I'm starting to amend my thought process I think the clear answer is, that the world is going to have all of these delivery modalities sometimes you're going to want to go to the store and pick the stuff out yourself and that's going to be your preference sometimes you're going to want to leverage curbside pickup and other times you were going to want delivery and so you know good good retailers are going to have to figure out a way to support all those modality. Scot: [37:16] And then in the whole kind of digitally native vertical brand startup versus brands from existing companies where where did Jeanette Allen. Jason: [37:27] Yep that that is interesting so the it feels like then the. Digitally native brands have more Tools in their their tool belt to overcome, their deficiencies than the big brands do right now right like so you you go talk to the big cpgs and you talk about what their strategy is to infuse Innovation and have a you know a faster pace of new products and have product that are better suited to the consumer and you frankly get a lot of blank stares and you get a lot of. [38:03] Kind of the same unfulfilling answers that oh we're going to set up an innovation team or we're going to act as a venture capitalist in and go unifund a bunch of projects, but you know these big brands have just not demonstrated the ability to get much faster and get much more Innovative and these big brands that are exclusively selling through wholesale are fundamentally disintermediated from the customer so they do not have the customer preference data to use to design and execute new products very well and I I just haven't seen any of them you know really like, clearly articulated solution to some of those deficiencies whereas the the the native direct to Consumer products have the ability to take advantage of all of the strengths of the direct to Consumer space and when they get to the point where they kind of max out on the scale they can reach direct-to-consumer they they have the option to them in pivot to a a wholesale distribution model or a blended model or they're in a position to establish a reasonable valuation and get acquired by one of these big companies and so it, like you know why there are challenges on both sides it appears there's more ways to overcome the hurdles if you start out as a new digital native brand then there are if you start out inside of one of these these big brands at least least for now that's that's how it seems to me. Scot: [39:33] If I come pull the thread on that so we talked about so some of these grocery stores like Kroger creating their own private label or our own Brands but then if I'm a cpg it it seems like. That's another reason to go direct other than the channels kind of being complicated to navigate without a team so cpgs going director or is that just not happening in grocery. Jason: [39:57] No no no it so it's often discuss there's not a ton of success stories right and so usually when a cpg tells you about their direct-to-consumer 6s they're going to be telling you about a direct-to-consumer brand. [40:10] But they're all talking about it and frankly like I strongly advocated and I think you and I have talked. In general I feel like developing a direct-to-consumer capability and strategy needs to be an important part of every one of these Brands because if yeah. You you sort of look at this at the moment and you've got a bunch of brands, dinner depending on on wholesale retailers and you look at the retailers and they're they're super distressed and have them bunch of head winds their number one tactic for overcoming their head wins is in differentiating themselves from our our friends in Seattle or when I'm soon going to have to say our friends in, Seattle New York Virginia. Is to have exclusive products and have owned Brands and said the retailers and brands that used to be you know super synergistic have are increasingly becoming Frenemies or direct competitors and it and the retailers are frankly having a lot more success with that at the moment then the brands are so a bunch of retailers are becoming super successful at building Brands we talked about a couple in the groceries Facebook like. Yeah oh my God I target has one strike three brands that sold over a billion dollars in their first year none of the digital native brands that we talked about on the show have and have done that right and so retailers are getting successful at making. [41:39] The transition to build products, and in that world there is a left there's less shelf space for the brands in a world that's increasingly becoming have a winner-take-all you kind of imagine some future when. When you know we're all going to get the bulk of our purchases from. In Amazon Monopoly in North America or maybe a Amazon Walmart duopoly there's a lot less points of presents to carry that brand product and so. [42:07] That brand is going to lose all the leverage to the unit few set of aggregators at the top of the echo system on the less. They're also able to sell the wrecked unless they can build a relationship direct with the consumer even if it's not high volume and profitable in the short run. I feel like they need to develop the skills just so that they get some customer intimacy so they can start building more relevant faster, more agile products and I feel like they they need a lab to test and learn all this digital shelf content and all these digital best practices that we. Been talking about on Today Show so when they execute at Walmart, they're not just you know sending an image that they have no way to test and hoping it sells well in Walmart like far better to be able to test all that content on your own direct-to-consumer channel Gatorade it really quickly and then take a hero image that you know work since indicated to Walmart so for a variety of reasons I think that's an important a scale for cpgs to evolve and I would say they are they are doing that cautiously and slowly. Scot: [43:09] We haven't done it wouldn't be a Jason in the sky show that will Amazon and we recovered at the top of the show but I didn't see anyone from Amazon speaking on I may have missed that but sometimes these conferences it's funny people are avoiding talking about it and stay 800-pound gorilla in the room was was there a lot of Amazon talk to at least find the scenes. Jason: [43:31] Yeah so to my knowledge Amazon really didn't have a presence at the show which on the one hand isn't surprising but on the other hand I would say the founders of this show have actually been pretty decent at getting Amazon speakers to their other shows now admittedly the speaker's they get are the ones that you don't have the most vested interest in. In selling their products to the industry so not shocking that pay by Amazon is happy to go to money2020 and talk about their digital wallet right and not shocking that that the Amazon Marketplace when that used to be a separate and into the you know was was happy to go to shop talk and kind of Recruit new Sellers and things like that. [44:18] The but they did have the prime now folks I have spoke at several of the shop talk shows and so you might have thought they would be there, it would have been fascinating to hear from some of the Amazon Fresh people are now that you know that the folks responsible for the Amazon Whole Foods in a graichen in and none of them were publicly there I'm sure Amazon secretly had some people there but. Almost every conversation when you say digital disruption of grocery, everybody points to the same event that like there was a lot of talk about digital disrupting grocery but nobody nobody was personally experiencing it or nobody was very worried about it until the day that Amazon announced today, they purchased Whole Foods and that that really sort of Kick this whole. Disrupt digital disruption of grocery in a high gear and caused by you know almost all the people we saw speaking were people that got hired as a direct result of that acquisition. [45:19] Mom said they were definitely on everyone's mind even if they weren't there in 4 in in person. Scot: [45:26] Put in the other high like showing it. Jason: [45:29] I think those were the big ones it is interesting that this is one of the spaces that I like doesn't feel like Amazon has one yet and they actually, probably have some intrinsic disadvantages versus some of the other players so. I'm by no means prepared to say oh my gosh they're not going to win Amazon on the Rhone you know dabbled in in fresh fresh, for I want to say amazonfresh is like 10 years old right and never really got a ton of traction and then after they bought Whole Foods I've been really impressed by how fast. Amazon's been able to integrate a lot of their digital chops in a Whole Foods and then some test markets like the one I live in they have some really compelling Whole Foods delivery options and Whole Foods curbside pickup options which are great but the reality is Whole Foods is a tiny percentage of the whole grocery market and they've you know implemented these tests in a tiny percentage of the whole food so you know you look at the the folks that Walmart or Kroger is touching with digital grocery versus the amount of customers Amazon's touching and right now. Walmart and Kroger have a head start now I would argue Amazon the way faster more agile company than Walmart or Kroger and so you know I think we can expect to see Amazon continue to make up ground but it is always interesting to see see a market where Amazon probably has to try harder than some other folks if they want to win. [46:58] I don't know. What do you think. Scot: [47:00] It's going to be interesting so you know they are pushing the Whole Foods pretty hard I've noticed in my Prime now recently there they're kind of integrated Whole Foods delivery right in the prime now in her face which is used to separate set of inventory and yeah I think it's too early to call account Amazon out of any fight. Jason: [47:20] No no I I totally agree I'm so in and it's going to be fun to have a ringside seat to watch it all play out I will throw one other teas are out there we did get to talk to several of the friends of the show that have been on the show a number of times before and so shortly after this episodes available will have a couple episodes live from the grocery shop show and we will get some other folks perspectives on the show in the industry and so you know if you're if you're trying to figure out the the digital grocery space I would encourage you to look for those upcoming episodes as well and with that this is going to be a great place to rap because we have used up our allotted time so as always love to continue the conversation on Facebook if you have any questions or feel like we got something wrong we love to hear from you and as always if you love this show we sure would appreciate if you jump on the iTunes and give us that five star review that's the the biggest favor you can do for the show. Scot: [48:24] Awesome thanks everyone for joining us and thanks Jason for being our Jason Scott representative in the field in Las Vegas. Jason: [48:32] It's it's never as fun without you but you were that you were certainly there in spirit so hopefully next year we'll get to do it together and in total next time happy commercing.

Courtnie Beceiro and Charlotte Myer are buyers at Fresh Direct and Foodkick. In this episode of In the Sauce, Ali askes them all about the future of grocery shopping, what they're looking for in emerging brands and what they do with all the dozens of samples they receive every week. In the Sauce is powered by Simplecast

The cold brew coffee market has exploded over the last few years, with sales reaching $738 million dollars in 2017 alone, popularized by major chains like Starbucks.When Matt Bachmann and Ben Gordon met at Columbia Business School a few years before the cold brew craze, they knew that they wanted to start a business, but had no idea what to build. As their friendship grew over the next 6 months, they realized they both shared an interesting passion - really more of an obsession. Making their own cold brew coffee at home. Over the next year and a half, while still in school, they developed what would become Wandering Bear Cold Brew Coffee, launching a first of its kind boxed coffee in the process (think Franzia for coffee). In this episode we breakdown how they came up with their minimum viable product (first consistently good tasting batch of coffee), and what they did to test various go to market strategies for their business. We uncover how they identified an opportunity to rapidly generate revenue for their business, and the steps that they took to end up in over 1,000 stores across the United States, landing major partnerships like Fresh Direct, Whole Foods, Target, and more. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

EP121 - Shoptalk 2018 Recap Part 1 ShopTalk is an annual trade show held in Las Vegas focused on retail and e-commerce innovation.  In it's third year, it has become the fastest growing can't miss event in our industry.  This year 8,400 industry professionals attended the event (up from 5,400 last year).  The 2018 version took place March 18-21, 2018 at the Venetian in Las Vegas. There is so much content at the show, that we've divided our recap into two parts.  In Part 1 we cover: Macy's Keynote Target Keynote Amazon Go Keynote Future of Grocery - Moderated by Jason Goldberg Zia Wigner Keynote (Global Chief Content Officer for ShopTalk) Ulta Keynote Nike Keynote Ocado Keynote Pinterest Keynote Fresh Direct Keynote Facebook Keynot Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 121 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, March 19th 2018. http://jasonandscot.com Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this episode is being recorded on Monday March 19th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason and rare time when we're together and this is actually the second week in a row so pretty exciting where live live live here from the Venetian in Las Vegas. Jason: [0:53] I know I feel like I have won the lottery getting to hang out with you this much. Scot: [0:56] I know you're you're a very lucky man that's all I can say. Show listeners we are we recording this at the end of the day on Monday consumed 2 out of 4 days of content so I can call this the shoptalk halftime show. And the show this year is really dense and we thought it be important to give you guys, real-time update of what we're learning about the show some of the more interesting ass, so that we can kind of have at least have two updates with me actually put a third depending on what kind of content comes out in the next couple days so. Just a quick overview of the show this year it looks like the attendance is about double I think we decided Jason is that right, so I think they're saying somewhere north of 8400 attendees definitely feels like it the show outgrew the Aria and is now at the Venetian, I'm in I guess it used to be called The Sands conference in your butt and now they caught this fancy Palazzo or whatever it is Conference Center. And another thing that's really interesting this year is they've added a couple of new tracks there's there's a grocery talk track which I know is near and dear to your heart so there's this kind of acknowledgement that groceries undergoing digital change really kind of in a bike. Not only that but actually on the show floor and then there's a whole track around Ai and machine learning which is been one of our favorite topics. The the big me coming from the vendor world the show floor is absolutely huge this year last year there was like these little mini meeting room kind of things and this year they went full show room and they've done it I don't know the square footage of that but it is as big as. [2:32] Shoptalk it's as big as shop.org it's his maybe half the size of a retailer I would say. But for a shows for sure you're having an exhibit floor it's pretty impressive I would say that. You know they've done a really good job with that another thing I really like is it under that they've done is a lot of the food and then to get to the general Keynotes you have to walk through the exhibit floor, I and the vendors are well aware of that and they are lined up and ready for ready for action that's who hugs so that's that's interesting and any other kind of, the macro things you want to talk about that you notice this year before we go into the details. Jason: [3:12] I mean just said the one interesting thing the way they were arranged the the exhibit floor is in these sort of subject-matter Pavilion so there's like. AI Pavilion that you know is largely companies focused on a and a grocery Pavilion so if. If you're looking for a particular type of vendor they've sort of Consolidated those all together which I like I think it makes it easier to find relevant stuff. And then. If you're a retailer you could come to the show for free if you agreed to take a certain number of meetings with vendors so the program that other shows have done that I've never seen it done on the scale they've done here so they. Paid for a bunch of retailers to fly here in the end their hotel rooms they arranged a bunch of meetings with vendors and as big as the trade show floor is there's a whole huge back half of the trade show floor, they just all these meeting tables that are like speed dating between exhibitors and vendors and it's it's a little bit like Tinder, the vendor had to say they wanted to meet with this particular retailer in the retailer had to say they want to meet with this particular vendor. Scot: [4:23] Double opt-in. Jason: [4:25] Exactly. Scot: [4:26] Swipe left swipe right. Jason: [4:27] Yeah and so the the BD people for my company we did several those meetings and felt like they were all all valuable in in favorable so. It's approximately. Scot: [4:38] Does that come with the exhibit space or is it kind of separate. Jason: [4:40] Yeah there's a bunch of bundles you could buy that were like this amount of space in this mini meetings. Scot: [4:45] Is there a popular in Europe I know are European Folks at Channel visor participate in these meetings and always felt weird from the US perspective that you were kind of like. Paying for the vendor to meet with you but I. They've always worked worked out pretty well for your PIN folks it's interesting to see them kind of bring that over date they did just do their European show shoptalk I wonder if that's something a best practice they brought over as part of that. Jason: [5:09] Actually it does appear so they did a Europe shoptalk last year and it and they cancel that show so I didn't get to go I assume it wasn't. Quite as well adopted as the u.s. won and now they're calling this the global show and they're trying to get all their European attendees to come here. But you're you're absolutely right like they could have definitely lifted some of those best practices and I frankly I came here a little skeptical about the meetings because. There there were some logistic hiccups weeding up to it like if a vendor opted-in and we opted in but it didn't fit in one of the time slots they had available. I think we bought more meetings than we got so they had to give us some credits back and and not to sound too vain but where. Better known brand than a lot of vendors on that floor so if they struggled give us the meetings we bought you could imagine some smaller lesser-known vendors. Scot: [6:03] But it seems like the space was constrained not the demand. Jason: [6:07] Exactly yeah and then like once we got here it sounds like it went real well so agree with you like this feels like one of the few shows in our space that's vibrant and growing. Scot: [6:19] Yeah yeah and that's what sticking to some of the content highlights I got in late Sunday night super late and then you were here all day so why don't you could get off and tell us some of the highlights from Sunday. Jason: [6:30] So I am in back taking residency here in Las Vegas I'm here for 16 days. In the hotel room that you and I are sitting in right now so that's a new experience for me and Sunday night had some good key notes that I was looking forward to hearing the first one was Jeff can that who's the CEO of Macy's. And so he was talking about some of their progress they had their first. Favorable quarter and I want to say like 11 consecutive quarters and and so you know he was very optimistic that that they're there. Turn around program that they called the North Star is starting to work since we talked about a couple of the the upcoming initiatives they have a program they're calling growth 50 which is essentially. They selected these 50 Macy's store. The Dare going to. Put all of their best practices and capex investments into in 2018 in the idea is to see which of those things work best and deploy them into all there the rest of the Macy's Fleet in 2019. So it'll be interesting to figure out what those 50 stores are and keep an eye on them. Scot: [7:40] What does 50 stores are and keep an eye on them and it goes Herald Square. Jason: [7:45] Seems to be somewhat shocking of that was not one of them. Scot: [7:48] Does that mean like the giving up on the other 50 is at Macy's shutting stores. Jason: [7:54] Closed a bunch of stores but they're still in business will check me on this but I don't want to say that it's going to be like 2000 store so that it's still a lot of stores and what you don't do is just. Do a bunch of expensive things and I'll mm hope they work so so picking 50 stores as Pilots kind of makes sense. Scot: [8:11] , complex offline av-test. Jason: [8:14] Yeah as we caught a match Panel test actually but that's sort of the original Navy test. So that's interesting they announced that they are deploying mobile scan & go check out to all their stores by the end of 2018 so what that means is. You've installed at Macy's mobile app you you scan the items you want to buy. For it on the mobile app and you walk out without ever having to get in the checkout line if there's loss prevention tags on the apparel which there is on a lot of the apparel. You have to walk by a security desk show on a digital barcode on your on your phone and they'll remove your tags but that potentially eliminate. What date Macy says is the number one complaint about Macy's which is hard to find a cashier or too long a wait in line. So they were they were pretty bullish on that. Scot: [9:13] Surfin you're doing that or that's just like part of their point of sale and stuff. Jason: [9:16] They did not disclose that they were partnering with the vendor to do it it seems like something they built or not ganic Lee you are you are absolutely right there are third-party vendors that you can hire to facilitate that for you but. I somewhat suspect that Macy's is not using a third-party to implement it another one that was interesting to me and I haven't seen the meteor really pick up on this year. But he talked about their desire to clean up their promotional calendar and. Scot: [9:43] Sounds familiar. Jason: [9:44] That's retail code for we want to get away from all of the crazy promotions were doing and he specifically said we want to eliminate the need for a Shoppers to do quote on quote Macy's math. To figure out how to get the best deal. Scot: [10:01] This is longtime listeners will know this is kinda killed JCPenney right. Jason: [10:04] Even more more funny it it absolutely kills Ron Johnson's 10-year JCPenney they were highly promotional he tried to dramatically clean up their promotional calendar and. Just didn't work. A time a lot of us criticize Ron Johnson because we were pointing out that retailers like Macy's had tried this in the past and it didn't work for them so it's even more ironic. That Macy's that has frankly past experience trying to move away from from promotional pricing models is going back to it and we we talked on listener question shows about the fact that. Everyday low prices seems like the future pricing and because of transparency these promotions aren't as appealing as they once were. But it's really hard to shift once you have a customer base that used to promotional pricing. Scot: [10:53] Now so Terry Lundgren so he is transition. His big thing was to add that discount store inside of Macy's but I didn't hear you saying about that is that stole, is that the kind of makes sense if your have this discount like Dollar Store jammed inside of Macy's or TJ Maxx is probably more appropriate analogy then I think it does make sense to then you could have at least kind of a, a way of balancing out the promotional things is that still tragedy but or or is that off the table. Jason: [11:21] I I think that still is a strategy Macy still does have these off-price stores that I think the most Perfect Analogy is that are you notice or to Nordstrom Rack equivalent but they were mentioned it all in the keno. So either you like they didn't double down on it or say they're moving away from it you can interpret moving waste and promotional calendar that you know they're there. Trying to Jack the margins up in the main line Macy's stores but you're exactly right like they could be to differentiate it from the discount concept Moore, so we'll have to see how that plays out the next keynote was Target so this is Brian Cornell is the CEO of Target there another retailer that you could kind of say is in the midst of. Turnaround strategy and he spent he did a couple interesting things about his was a little more. West tactical in the Macy's keno and he talked a lot about. The their migration to digital and how they've embraced digital and he he talked about this he didn't called The innovator's Dilemma. That's essentially what it is he's like you know there's this natural inclination when you have all these stores in the stores are profitable in these new shopping behaviors come in to say you like why would I ever invest things that discourage. Customers from going to the store that that's just your natural instinct. And he claimed that like Target had overcome that instinct and was now short of embracing. [12:55] Digital and they were largely converting the stores in to fulfillment hubs and that they they ship something like 70% of all their eCommerce orders from the store. Brought on stage with in the CEO of shipped which is a logistics company they just bought. You said that they bought them specifically because they wanted to be the first national retailer to offer same-day delivery in all markets. Scot: [13:19] And then just last week they announced they're growing that out and more stores. Jason: [13:24] So I think their intention is to get eventually get it in all stores that are also experimenting with curbside pickup which we've talked a lot about here. So a lot of interesting things there and then he pivoted to another topic that I think is going to be very common this year which is there they're doubling down and reinvestment in owned brands. And this used to be the thing we call private label the the purple an hour when they talk about own brand they're talking about Brands they created offense. That in some cases they even sell it other other channels of distribution I'm so potentially sell on Amazon. And target has been very successful own brand they're also talking about brand exclusives so we'll sell stuff from National Brands but. Excuse that are only available in our store and will sell limited edition stuff so the stuff you know that there's a constrained Supply Target some what famous for that with promotions they've done for people with Lilly Pulitzer in others. So that is one of their big plays that's most retailers big play against Amazon has to sell stuff that Amazon can't sell. So that was kind of his big talking points. Scot: [14:42] So I know they room essentials is there like furniture brand and then what is a jack and. Kids one cat jacket are there any examples where they sold those other places. Jason: [14:59] So I haven't as Machine Target sell their own brands in other places. Scot: [15:04] Costco has. Jason: [15:06] Costco very famous he does there's more Kirkland on on sold on Amazon than on Costco.com I think. Scot: [15:12] Yeah but there are other. Jason: [15:15] I'm trying to remember if Target invested in or owns method but method is sold elsewhere so there's. Scot: [15:20] I swear Dakota velvet with that a designer Michael Graves Sr. Do one of our interns to research them. Jason: [15:28] Yeah yeah yeah let me know how that works out for you so that was an interesting keynote and then. Sort of the perfect transition the third keynote on Sunday night was to VPS from Amazon that are responsible for the Amazon go store so this is Gianna Parini. Responsible for who started the. The business leader for Amazon go and then dilip Kumar who's responsible for all the technology used in the Amazon go store and is also responsible for the Amazon bookstore. So the very first thing they did which was just I thought hysterical after both. Target and Macy's had mentioned kind of Scan & Go. Amazon of course came on and threw shade at what a pain in the neck skin and go is and how we really built the store just because customers don't want to have to scan each item as their. As their shopping. Scot: [16:29] Is that a learning from the book store cuz that's how the bookstore model works. Jason: [16:33] Yeah well I don't know specifically I mean. Scot: [16:35] Typically the kind of throwing shade at the bookstore. Jason: [16:38] Yeah and I would argue the bookstore is in many ways the worst version because you like literally can't find out the price without. Scot: [16:44] Face can't even find a price there's more scanning you would even get it at Macy's. Jason: [16:48] I told you it was not a very hostile interview so let me just say that question was not asked. Either of them but it was a little bit funny this was the keynote I was most looking forward to Amazon Prime now was at the show last year and I felt like. They shared a lot of new information about the prime now program that they least I wasn't previously aware of. It was less through this time so I didn't do was not a lot of like major new disclosures normally trying to figure out his. How to get a roll go out to more stores are you getting to put it in Whole Foods your new announcements like that at this it is Keynote. They did talk about what some of the best sellers in the store was and apparently there's this chicken sandwich that's been there Perpetual number one seller but it is a lot of food stuff so that Amazon makes their own meal kits in that store in the doors are top sellers. Fresh fruit is a top seller there's an odd thing about Amazon and fresh fruit. This store is in the corporate headquarters in this corporate headquarters Amazon has way less employee amenities than almost any other big company. So the rare amenity that that Amazon liked out a lot is. Did they give free bananas to all the employees and apparently this has killed the market for bananas in downtown Seattle. The smoothie shops used to charge to put bananas in the Smoothie now they let you bring your own smoothie your own bananas in to put in a smoothie because everyone in downtown Seattle gets free bananas from Amazon. Scot: [18:22] Does the banana thing so when Prime took on Arrested Development there was a big. What is running jokes I'm not a huge Arrested Development person but there's a banana stand thing in there and I think they started it as kind of like to celebrate that it's kind of kept going is that is that true or did I make that up in my head. What decimal burx Amazonian Institute election. Jason: [18:43] Or just is this odd fruit thing with Amazon so then I found it funny that like this. The store which is largely the employee cafeteria is really what the Amazon go store is the number one seller is fruit so it made me wonder if they're going to stop by the bananas. They can monetize the bananas in the ghost. Scot: [19:00] How we don't sell a lot of bananas in the guest room. Jason: [19:03] No I imagine that it's fresh fruit other than bananas but there were a couple other interesting things so delete was talking about like. The ghost are we talked about a lot it's based on. Very Advanced machine learning around computer vision so this is mostly done with cameras and the interviewer asked why they chose cameras there all these examples in Europe in elsewhere of people trying to do similar concept with RFID tags. And they they felt like aspirationally a store model where they have to constantly apply tags and sensors to all the Shelf some product. Wasn't very interesting to them they felt like that the much more scalable long-term solution was to invent this computer vision model. Scot: [19:49] Now I know you're very passionate about RFID tags how do you feel about that. Jason: [19:52] I think he's right I think RFID tags are item level RFID tags for products in a store. Is a pain in the neck and unless we get to this thing called Source tagging where all the manufacturers put the RFID tag on in the factory it's it's never going to take off. Scot: [20:09] Can you do RF IDs for like a fruit and stuff. Jason: [20:13] Potentially yes so at the moment. Scot: [20:15] Yeah at the moment. Jason: [20:19] Yeah it there's a man. Scot: [20:21] RFID on my app. Jason: [20:22] So there's a sticker on every one of your apples now and that sticker could essentially be an RFID tag. That sounds like a Farfetch'd example like there's an argument in the future of food that you're going to want to know a lot more about that Apple before you buy it like how many, days ago was picked and all these other things and so like you you could imagine them wanting a tag each individual apple for a variety of reasons. All that aside it was just interesting to hear them talk about how they debated tags versus cameras and went with the cameras. Scot: [20:55] Another nice thing with with cameras is once you get on digital then more law should kick in where RFID tags rising to this manual. Process that is not going to change the scale and will always be subject to let you have a robot that can put the tags on her which. Jason: [21:12] What kind of software vs. Hardware really like an unlike General lease offers I have a lot more profitable because as as you scale at the the normal cost is very well. Scot: [21:22] Yeah then you have the the nurse's other acceleration I don't know so Moore's logic we all understand that you don't processing power gets doubled every two years but then, you know I wonder if there's some correlated to that with machine learning like the system get smarter every X things that sees Pride another there's some pretty interesting thing there that also is. Jason: [21:43] Yeah I mean there's a couple examples of that like the the. Accuracy of computer vision which is this specific subset of artificial intelligence this towards using has been improving faster than more as wise as a noun yeah. Scot: [21:56] You think it would yeah and then I hit some kind of like. Jason: [22:00] Resume wait I had some flat toe because it's unlike chips which could always get faster at some point your computer Visions perfect. Scot: [22:09] How do they tell like a chicken sandwich in a tuna sandwich but do they have to put different containers on it to help her. Jason: [22:16] So that was a good question that wasn't asked but there was a similar one that was kind of interesting so because there no sensors on on the items the camera has to recognize every skew in the reporter said like. Do you struggle the tell sugar-free Red Bull from regular red bull. And he's like yes we do it right like that those are the the the really difficult edge cases and I thought about that before they like different flavors or or subtle differences your chicken versus tuna sandwich being up in exacerbated version of that. Would be really hard and then he pointed out of part of the problem I haven't considered before. Not only do we need to tell sugar-free Red Bull from regular red bull the moment when we need to tell them is the exact moment when you picked it up and probably block the word sugar-free with your thumb. And so those sort of obfuscate abused that they get is obstructed views they get in the product is also a pretty tricky problem. Scot: [23:12] No Amazon in kind of the play but they've done with frustration free packaging you can almost see them going back to the manufacturing kind of having you know, air visionfriendly packaging where you make this one purple in this one yellow or something other than a small kind of text word for sugar. Jason: [23:29] And you've hit on one of the reasons like this works for ghost or the potential and other things everyone keeps calling at the ghost or a more accurate turn might be Go restaurant because they're actually is a big kitchen in the majority where they sell is food that is prepared. In that store and search your point they can solve their own problem by using square boxes for the chicken and round boxes for the tuna or whatever whatever they want to do. A minority of the skews in the store are National Brands so for their own Brands they can make the packaging distinctive enough. It does have that problem where has much harder to do a whole food store or something like that. Scot: [24:11] Wonder if they could even do have seen some examples this in retail, I want to take an overlay some kind of a machine readable but not human-readable thing on the packaging to write so the chicken in the tuna come in the same package but the machine can see maybe the UV level or something you know that something that very clearly you know, 2 blinking circles versus a red boxer and things in. Jason: [24:35] They can build cameras that seen in the infrared Spectrum or something like that yeah absolutely not discussed but interesting things to think about. Scot: [24:41] Did they talk about when they first launched we did a deep dive on that the. They had a room right there in the store where people were kind of like both checking the AI and then also you know I'm sure they are kicks out and says does not compute and there's some air right there in a human has to go, like figure it out. Do they talk about that at all but the air raid and. Jason: [25:04] Omelette no only very indirectly so they did not talk about how well the machine learning the Machine Vision is working or the Air Raids they were asked how many employees work in the store for any Dodge that question 2. She talked about. Three big classes of employees that they're like you seen how you been to the store you seen how many people are in the kitchen you seeing how many people on the floor helping and you've seen how many orange shirts there are. An orange shirt is if you been to the store is code for these employees that are working in the back room looking at the video displays and training the AI in so the implication was there still. An army of orange shirts watching a lot of people shopping and refining though I'll grow them. Scot: [25:54] It's a nurse and they don't use Mechanical Turk for that because I'm a janaz be real time so after like you. Jason: [26:00] Videos welcome to the store I bet you that video isn't like it was in real time going I mean it's a lot of cameras so even even Amazon would like love the 8 of us bills for doing that. [26:12] So that was interesting I would have like to hear some. Scot: [26:14] I'd like to hear some way you should have been the interviewer on that one but Amazon negotiates these things very carefully so I imagine there's a reason so that things didn't go to where we would like to see. Jason: [26:27] And then the only other thing that kind of came up with a bit that was interesting to me. Scot: [26:29] I put a bet that was interesting to me as they did talk about. Jason: [26:32] They did talk about the fact that. You have to have an app to be in the store cuz you you have to have the go app to register you so to walk through like a Subway turnstile to get in in one of the. The peripheral benefits of that is did they allow Shopper feedback to be given real time in the. And so unlike almost any other store went to Shoppers in the middle of the shopping experience and something doesn't go how the Shopper wants they can in real time. Give feedback and that feel it feedback is tagged with a contact that Choppers in so that shows she said that that's been a surprisingly valuable. Data stream for them to improve their operations in the store which. Scot: [27:19] You are using beacons they know where you are too or that the machine that visual stuff are knows where you are better than any bacon they don't. Jason: [27:25] Visually light and again it's a tiny store so I you're in front of one of three gondolas so like so it's like probably tagged with with that kind of contact information. Scot: [27:35] Now Jason Delray overtree code that you Commerce reporter he is kind of heard rumors are dug up some some data that indicates there's a plan to open for 5 more the stores and then did they talk about Whole Foods at all. Jason: [27:49] Only in that context that they said they have no intention of deploying this Whole Foods right now and said two ways to introduce. Usually win on Amazon and play emphatically says they have no intention of doing something you should sort of assumed they're going to do it right like because they have no intention of offering a shipping service they have. There's a lot of history of them denying something right up until the moment they do it in this case I think there's a lot of logistical reasons that Amazon go dozen. Legacy Whole Foods Fleet of stores particularly well so I sort of do believe them. Scot: [28:27] Let's talk about this I think it's interesting so why why doesn't it work in a Whole Foods is it just the cost or what. Jason: [28:32] So in this very smart 2000 square foot store there's more than 50 cameras to make sure that they have complete coverage on the store and. What they need to do is from the time you walk through that Subway turnstile they have to maintain line of sight on you at all times and have to maintain line of sight on every skew in that store. I'm so there can't be any blind spots where no camera can see you in there camping spots where every camera in the store loses track of you momentarily because then even when they saw you again. They don't know that you're the same person that had the app when you walked in the store right so this store was designed from the ground up. The perfect lines of sight it's a very boring square store with no displays in the middle of the store in a traditional store you have this thing. And those Donna was in the aisle obstruct your ability to see certain angles you have lots of displays that. You know for fruit and things that like tree blind spots in the store you have vendor provided displays that aren't even provided by Whole Foods that block lines of sight in the store. The amount of cameras you would need to eliminate every blind spot in a 25000 square foot Whole Foods is. Almost mind-boggling and then you still have another problem you can't let a customer go into an elevator where they wouldn't be on a camera you can't let a customer to go to a bathroom there's a whole host of things that you know just taking off. [30:06] The Whole Food stores that are D exist and retrofitting them with this technology doesn't feel very likely to meet could they build new Whole Food stores. They're intended to be more compatible with this yes could they use this technology in The Limited ways in that whole food could they use this technology to make you not have to get your wallet out when you pay and just charge your Amazon account. Scot: [30:29] Or the most popular part of a Whole Foods is the prepared section in a lot people just go and have lunch at Whole Foods so you could see I'm kind of like yeah. Jason: [30:36] Panda Express portion you can have an Amazon go store inside of the the Whole Foods or for sure. Scot: [30:43] I bet that's kind of what he's hitting at because he said he also said something like stay tuned yeah we have no plans to put in Whole Foods but stay tuned with a lot of people took to mean either there an open more stores are there was some plan to do something at Whole Foods it's kind of like different than the question. Jason: [30:57] And to me the most valuable thing that you can do with this computer vision that they could very easily do it at Whole Foods is just putting the camera at forget tracking the customer. Just putting the camera to see the shelf and to accurately track the inventory on the Shelf is hugely valuable. For the store stores are have very poor inventory and they spend a lot of money to maintain that poor inventory and leveraging the computer vision system to have more actor and inventory. That alone could be super valuable to Whole Foods. Scot: [31:32] That's the really bad part of the delivery so I'm a big instacart I've tried I use them all over it regularly now because because it's a maintained DC, so you're having cameras that then watch them and Tori and see the last apples been picked by in-store customer so that me the delivery customer. Or that apple and then get a stock-out you know that you're some really big wins on all side of the equation there I think you're right that's it. Jason: [31:58] Absolutely and I think that's going to come up again and some of the other Keynotes we're going to talk about as well. Scot: [32:03] Cool so that any other highlights from Sunday you don't hit any crazy off the hook parties where you were dancing on the table. Jason: [32:09] None that I'm contractually allowed to talk about. Scot: [32:12] Or that you recall that takes us to Monday and then I got in late late late Sunday night so I was able to hit some stuff Monday, the way it works this morning is you had two tracks in the way they're running these tracks as there's five parallel tracks as a, 20/20 build these events and always frustrate people that that event planners do this but they do it for a reason it's designed so that you'll bring, five people you in for friends from your company so and then they there they're very somatic this year I don't remember being as the Mac last year so they're there was a grocery track for example. I was, I attended the first track it was really interesting it was about Brands as in the grocery track that could have been anywhere and there was a VC there that invest in kind of nascent brands. Consumer Brands 7-Eleven was there and and then another investor of his rule was entirely clear to me but he's really all about subscription kind of products. I think there is when we hit on the show a lot where, you notes create a brand used to be like a PNG level event where you would have to go spend $92 to kind of say here's this idea for a swifter and it can be this or going to watch on TV with a 50 million dollar campaign to do the Super Bowl ad now, the world is swimming in Brands and in fact this panel was there so many Brands out there that, everyone's really struggling to kind of like figure it out one of the more interesting things I thought you would like is you know the interviewer has 7-Eleven is all this digitally need a vertical band saw it bother you that she said no it's great because. [33:50] Those companies you know once they get to certain scale we know they, control like it's when I have to test it in our store and then we can help them because most times if they're doing well digitally against the cpg they're selling cases and large volumes, they can help them a lot with itches and how to how do you single serve package these things and they talked about some they give a case that they wouldn't say the name of the brand, kind of the vibe it was. They are buyer how he said that one that they had a lot of insights Wednesday packaged it at 7-Eleven it did really well because the, the consumer they picked up a whole nother set of consumer because, there's folks that wanted to try it and they also wanted it served cold for their commute back home were or what not so it's really interesting kind of things there of they actually view the digitally native thing very positively because it actually kind of, you know already jumped the hurdle didn't have to build the brand in their stores pre-built and it made it easy for them to cherry-pick it down into the storm, then track two came along and that was your tracking for today I had a meeting and had to miss it but tell us about what you talked about. Jason: [34:56] So you made an excuse not to not to support. Scot: [34:58] Well I figured we would talk on the podcast I don't want to spoil it. Jason: [35:02] Got it okay fair enough so I did one of the the panels in the grocery track in this was called sort of. The future of grocery our grocery Reinventing itself until I had three panelists the first was. Kind bars and so that was a Jared who's the VP of e-commerce there and and this is a very. Interesting traditional case for me that's a traditional. Cpg brand that that mix products and very successfully sells them through wholesale so kind bars are you not very successful there in every Starbucks store and a Whole Foods and Amazon, and they hired Jared and experience e-commerce gaido launch their direct-to-consumer offering. And we talked a lot of brands that are interested in doing that in the big question is always why would a consumer want to buy from you cuz generally. You have the worst with just sticks in you're the worst price for your product and so it's interesting to hear kinds of you about that. The a big component is. Assortment so they're offering exclusive flavors and skews that the wholesale Channel. Doesn't want to carry or is out of our limited editions their heavily relying on a subscription program that a lot of the wholesale Channel doesn't offer and they feel like they have. Unique brand promise and there's a subset of the kind consumers that buy into the be kinder to each other. [36:41] Serta brand ethos in want to buy from the brand even though they're not going to have as good of a Justice or prices Amazon. Scot: [36:50] Yep I think kind is one of these, classic examples of a new newer brand that's really kind of leveraging that assortment packaging everywhere you go it's different from a consumer sometimes it's like frustrating because you want to go to Costco and my wife likes a certain one and then, either can't find it at one of the wholesale clubs are bundled with like some really crappy flavor you're not going to eat so there is very clever on the brand side but but I do think sometimes, be a little too clever on some of that stuff that makes it really hard from a consumer to get what you want. Jason: [37:20] And I feel like there's a bunch of brands that think they have that position with a consumer and they really don't kind I think probably does sit in the next episode. Scot: [37:30] Did they say how much as directed like do they give you any indication is that like 5-10 15% of their business. Jason: [37:35] They didn't but I I suspected the last than that right now it's it's it's it sounds like meaningful Revenue but it's still pretty nascent compared to their wholesale Revenue. So I would imagine it's it's south of 1% of their other two other total sales at the moment. The next company with Chef which that spelled Chef apostrophe D and they are. And some meal kids are at sort of an interesting part of the grocery echo system at the moment. A lot of people that think it's a fat and then it's not really going to be a thing or a lot of people think it's the future shopping whenever you say meal kids Denny when they immediately think of blue apron and Blue Apron famously. Has like apparently no business plan to ever be profitable. Scot: [38:27] But earlier go sits when their top sellers right now so I'm in there Snoop the Timbers like these things. Jason: [38:32] And shut his actual interesting that they do offer their own meal kits but what they mostly are. Form from young cats so they're actually the private label provider for a lot of grocery stores that are now offering their own meal kits and they have a lot of Big Brand Partnerships to offer Brandon meal kit so I, Campbell's is a major investor in Chef for example. Inside there you know there are so so that was interesting he had a lot of. Understanding and familiarity with that market. He talked a lot about the pros and cons of home delivery of meal Kids versus grocery store pick up a meal kits and the two takeaways I I had from his his. That were kind of new to me. She's very anti subscription in meal kits and he thinks that you know he's a fundamental flaw with most of these meal kits and most notably Blue Apron is you cantilever a meal and then reorder which is exactly opposite of how most of us. What are the spines in particular things we like and we repeat those over and over again. And he also believes that we all need a lot more personalization than the mule. Currently allow and so a big part of their platform is an infrastructure that allows highly personalized male cats and he eventually envisions. The distance can be highly personalized even. In the store on demand so you can get the the spaghetti with a lot of garlic or a little garlic and a lot of onions are all those all those sorts of. Scot: [40:09] And deserve their delivery remix. Jason: [40:15] They do have a a chef branded meal kit that they delivered recta home but mostly what they. Scot: [40:21] On demand not subscriptions. Jason: [40:25] Mostly what they do is facilitate a regional grocery store offering their own meal kit or someone else selling a meal kit through grocery store so it sounds like more of their stuff is in store pickup meal kids then home delivery. Scot: [40:39] And my regional it kind of makes it seem like they haven't cracked into the top five or six big guys is not like a Kroger or Harris. Jason: [40:45] So I think there is. I think it is pot like he was not completely transparent about who is Partners were so it's possible that he is white labeling for a big one and that part of their agreement is that they that they don't disclose that. , number of the big ones at this point now own their own meal. Scot: [41:03] So Safeway bought I can't remember who. Jason: [41:06] Albertsons bought placed plated plated thank you. Which is one of the biggest wins in history of Shark Tank by the way fun story there but so some of these guys out on their own Walmart owns their own. For just bought one car for the second largest retailer in the world they just bought one this week so. The market for the really big guys is probably smaller it wouldn't surprise me if they secretly have one but he certainly din-din disclose. Scot: [41:35] I feel like musical chairs and some you don't want me the guy off without a chair and then the meal world have their own meal than his distribution mechanism is like maybe some A&P. Jason: [41:48] Exactly so that was interesting and then the third panelist is this company I was also not familiar with call Daily Harvest and Daily Harvest I decided that milk it sounded too easy so they decided to do something. Scot: [42:03] Getting harder. Jason: [42:05] We're going to do direct-to-consumer home delivery of frozen foods. And so there's a strong. Scot: [42:14] Prison meals are like blueberries so I can make a smoothie. Jason: [42:18] Yeah so smoothie kits I think is the thing the best-known. Scot: [42:21] I think it's the thing the best known for so all the. Jason: [42:23] Show all the frozen fruit you need to make a smoothie but also like not not so much like complete frozen meals but like frozen fruit and produce that you might. I'm using a meal they seem very focused on. A lot of the altruistic we need to solve a lot of the problems in the food chain or we're all going to die of starvation kind of thing they talked about what you'd foodways there is in the world and how Frozen is a great solution to a lot of food ways. Throw away a lot of fruit just because it doesn't look perfect and nobody wants to put it in their fruit bin in the grocery store so what's what the industry calls ugly fruits and apparently when you freeze it and no longer matters that that fruit didn't love. Beautiful so. The bruised Apple tastes exactly like the regular Apple a lot of famous restaurants now try to primarily use ugli fruit. They're trying to turn around this trend of throwing away all this fruit that has cosmetic damage and so is interesting that they're they're trying to leverage ugly fruit as a big part of the next there's also this. Scot: [43:32] Ugly frozen fruit. Jason: [43:36] And another one was this concept that I never heard of called transitional organic. Say you're a traditional farm and you transition to becoming an organic farm you have to adopt a bunch of organic processes but then you can't sell your food as organic until you've been following the those processes for a number of years. Writer so there's a bunch of farmers that are in Linda where they're paying all the expenses of. Producing things in organic way but because they're only two years into their through your program that they're not allowed to call their product Organa. And so so she's buying a lot of this transitional organic. Products so that that was somewhat interesting and then because it's frozen and they've invested a lot in the technology to pack the Frozen stuff in dry ice and ship it through common carriers like FedEx and UPS. They're able to deliver nutritious food to a lot of places in the country that don't have convenient access to grocery store so we have a lot of these. Areas we call Food deserts that they're able to cater to so so that was somewhat interesting but they had to. Scot: [44:50] Ugly frozen food to food desert that's the fish. Jason: [44:56] They were able to raise money on it so. There's a investor for everything. But it was interesting thinking about all these complicated with Justice of the cold chain and. Yeah so hats off. Talk to her and if you think about it if each of these things are popular they just wrapped up portion of the traditional grocery business right so you know she pointed out the the. The Frozen I always the Wiest appealing part of a grocery store and that it discourages interaction with the product and I'll and all of these sorts of problems, and by the way you buy this Frozen stuff and then you throw it in the trunk of your car and it's not frozen by the time you get it home so. So if she's successful in direct-to-consumer with Frozen that potentially takes to rose out of the grocery store the meal kits potentially, take a lot of the individual ingredient shopping that happens today so so some interesting things thinking about how groceries Reinventing itself. Scot: [45:58] Absolutely cool so after that after Jason second track there, then we went into the Keynotes so kicking off the show kind of the the opening keynote if you will, which kind of strange I think they realize that a lot of people come in Monday or Sunday zo winter who puts together all the content for shoptalk kicked it off, I thought I was a pretty good good kind of Esprit shortest like 5 minutes but the summary was you nowhere in The New Normal which is kind of you know, in in 15 and 16 and 17 we had all this disruption going on and when you're in the middle of it you figure it's going to be. You'll go back to the old normal but they have that never happens and then she called The New Normal and abnormal is essentially where, I know you're not really reacting to disruptive innovation it's just you've adopted it and said this is going to be happening going forward so she really kind of had two pieces to it for predictions, where we going to go and Retail and you can tell this that shapes the content obviously, the number one back in technology will create new efficiencies in expectations number to Shoppers will come to expect experiences that are Cutting Edge today I kind of took that to mean yeah once Amazon sets the bar at, today one day just walk out than the customers tend to expect that I called a zero friction it's pretty interesting, human thing I'm Number 3 start up some traditional businesses or more line where I think we're seeing that you know we just talked about several is very very big trending in our industry be a grocery retail where you have kind of the you know the. [47:29] Analog dinosaur acquiring the digital DNA and smashing it together to create a new kind of, no I was using her language a new normal kind of combination. And then a wide range of new consumer product to hit the mainstream in this is kind of what was in the first panel where the cost to build a new consumer product is effectively gone down to zero and now you're going to see this huge swath of new products, your micro products micro kind of tribes that they appeal to and then she said those predictions field 7 trends, I never won the rise of Miss France number to the growth of experiential retail, we had a show in the can where will have some really interesting kind of examples of that and then the next keynote talk a lot about that, store associate will not go away but change what they do there so I can becoming an orange shirt or between prep and so check out and in the go example cashier list check out as a big thing automation to the warehouse, more transparent Supply chains in this goes to there's a lot of concern around food safety in that kind of thing, a lot of people talk about blockchain there I think there's a couple talks around that coming up in an explosion of AI machine learning. So after after yeah we went right into office of the CEO of Ulta was there and I don't know if it even some of these. These Keynotes they seem really interesting but then like there's kind of. People 20 minutes so you can't get into much detail and then the format seems to be show a video about the company. [48:59] Talk about some high-level stuff most people are dino and then talk a little bit about, diversity and maybe the company's culture seems to be the kind of formula you lived up to that expectation couple points that they hit on, and we talked about on the show this kind of your beauty is an area that's doing really well and, then why you know she said they're 90% off Mall property so they were smart to be off ma that three different shaders the real estate location which is off Mall product mix and services, and then talk about the benefit of the Loyalty program they have 28. Million members in that program and it represents 90% of their sales, and the other day it's pretty integrated between online and offline so it's omni-channel loyalty program and then the other day she talked about the consumer changing this is interesting you know she talked about, gender fluidity and now that actually helps them so now you have more and more people wearing makeup regardless of their gender and it used to be all these social things around you then wouldn't wear makeup you and I wear makeup because, podcast but now the so you know it's okay. Jason: [50:08] We're actually thinking about launching our own line of podcast. Scot: [50:10] The Chase, spoiler alert, forward facing cameras at selfies has really helped all these Beauty companies cuz now people take more pictures of themselves and they want to look good for those she didn't mention that those with a freebie that will throw in there. The you know. Today's consumer wants a personalized convenient experience I'm certainly living that with my new company where convenience is everything for folks and then personalized as well. Nothing I thought was interesting to see where she broke the script a little bit she went out on a limb and really said that they know is in her she paid homage and she's talking about we couldn't do this without our Partnerships with Google Google Express Facebook and then Spruce labs, I end up that was interesting that you went to Old diversity thing which was good you know that they have. Have a board that has over 50% women which is great and then officers in the company are over 60% so makes a ton of sense you know you know kind of, older middle-aged white dude song makeup doesn't make a ton of sense and I think this is a great example of both aligning with your customer and then also having really good diverse kind of input in the company to make it better, then how the Nike net was up so would you take from that one. Jason: [51:33] So that this was Adam Sussman who's the chief digital officer at Nike I think he's really tripping you in that really don't think Nikki's had a cheap digital out. Scot: [51:41] He said he was the first. Jason: [51:43] And so the heater is it Nike. When they spend a lot of time talking about was their membership program so they they have a thing they called Nike Plus Membership. And they probably have over a hundred million current members they want that to be 500 million in the next five years those members Ben Forex what non-member spend. And there's a number of specific experiences they have in the membership program that have even more dramatic conversion results so is interesting. I would have said that the general Trend in in Welty was that. The effectiveness of loyalty programs is kind of a roading in here we had to back-to-back key notes that were saying how successful their their membership programs are so I found that interesting. He also talked about their conversational Commerce initiative which is launching so this is called. Hertz on demand and you can use the Nike apps to have a text chat with a Nike brand expert that will give you advice and so you know. You mentioned that you get your running shoe advice from attend time Marathon winner. Probably doesn't want to be giving me advice about running shoes but but that's interesting in a bunch of the the conversational Commerce vendors that. At at the show were thrilled to hear him him supporting that experience personally I think the jury still out on. [53:17] Particular chat base conversational Commerce I'm not sure if Facebook's gotten all that the traction that they were they were hoping to get but but it's still early so we'll see. And then they did talk a lot like his corporate videos. Nikes done some really interesting product launches so that you know Justin Timberlake debuted a new Air Jordan Super Bowl. And they made that available for purchase through their sneaker app like the second he walked off stage and it's sold out instantly a month later the next version of that screw came out and they launched it on Snapchat with a. I really enjoy Innovative kind of want Commerce experience and you know he didn't explicitly call this out but one interesting point. Used to be that they would watch all these products through their wholesale partners and people like Footlocker would sell these and kids with a line up in the mall. And now he's talking about all these Innovative direct-to-consumer experiences that are owned by Nike. And the drink late relationship Nike has with his hundred million users in their Affinity program so to me Nikes really the poster child for someone that's transitioning from. Predominantly wholesale to the majority of their sales but but predominantly direct-to-consumer from experience stand for. Scot: [54:35] Yep sidebar I don't know if you fall or not but the average several Wall Street reports that to the shoe guys are really having a first company of tough, 2018 I don't know if if it's because they're losing a lot of these launches or what's going on but you're trying to see kind of the cause sneaker fatigue with with. That model seems like it would never run out but it looks like. The average Sneakerhead has X number of shoes that really interested in watches yet Brands like Nike moving that away from retail that could be sneakers have been kind of sustaining through them the retail apocalypse mall again so bit interesting to see if maybe the steps over. Jason: [55:09] Yeah yeah I think of the inside tip. The thing that sneakers need to save them now is much wider angle front facing cameras on that smartphone because the moment you can't see your feet in the selfie. Scot: [55:21] Yeah. Jason: [55:25] So the next keynote I think I was the only one that said in on so I think everyone left after Nike but I was really interested in this next keynote this is Tim Stein or who's the founder and CEO of a company that. To her listeners that probably heard of called a Cato Cato is a uk-based. To Consumer grocery store so you order online they have fulfillment centers they they deliver the groceries to your home. And there are quite successful they sell the equivalent of 2 billion dollars a year in groceries direct-to-consumer. Is we talk about an issue and UK 6% of all grocery sales are are digital where is here were less than 1% to. So I was super interested there that the digital pure-play grocery retailer in one of the most successful markets in the world. Scot: [56:16] Scot to be part of the UK but aren't there like I know our folks in UK almost they have like six people they can choose from that and some of her like Marks & Spencer. Jason: [56:26] Grocery stores all out for some Marks & Spencer Tesco as though which is Walmart in the UK car for they they all offer. Scot: [56:34] Is the only Pure Play. Jason: [56:35] Yeah but these this is the Pure Play and these guys are bigger digitally than any of those those other companies so it would be a little bit like what a Peapod sold more groceries then Kroger. Scot: [56:50] Amazon has a big mouth for Walmart. Jason: [56:53] And I don't know what their ownership structure is it if they're in play or not those are interesting questions but he talked a lot about. The benefits of. Being a pure being built from the ground-up to deliver groceries versus being a retailer trying to transition to groceries so, I have talked a lot on the show about how I think curbside pickup is the ultimate winner in this space and largely because it's something that traditional grocery stores can do and so we have this concept in the industry called store pic, and that's what the traditional grocery stores have decided to do is will will pay our employee to pick all the groceries instead of the customer picking it. And then we'll make it convenient for the customer to get those that store picked order and so he like very self-serving lie but with some credibility. Talking about how he doesn't think store pick can work in the long run and how these. From the ground up for filament centers for home delivery are better and he alleges that they've tried curbside pickup. Scot: [57:59] Pick up for their system in the customer always gives. Jason: [58:00] For their system in the customer always gives is always choosing home delivery over herbicide pickup Which flies in the face of my advice by the way. Scot: [58:07] So it's the. Customer experience not the economics of let me take this item put it onto a shelf in a convenient way for a shopper and then at Pea Picker to pick it in an inefficient way. It's not the economic so you saying it's when you give customers a choice they will choose delivery. Jason: [58:25] Exactly at the same price which is a big caveat in this and so so one thing. Is he talks about is he he showed the math and he took all the things that have to happen when you place an order with Tesco and they store pick that order and you do a curbside. Tesco delivers at your house and it a typical order by his math take 75 min. Scot: [58:51] And then. Jason: [58:52] And then he does that same order in his automated grocery fulfillment center that uses Robata. And he picks that same order in 15 min. So hit his fundamental premise is where 5x cheaper in these purpose-built things so store pick you know is really cost disadvantaged. Scot: [59:18] And if it's what the consumer wants regardless. Jason: [59:24] And I I buy that the. Purpose-built fulfillment centers are way more cost-effective than store picking in there other problems with store picking then we'll talk about in that in the next Keynote. I totally buy that where I'm I'm not as confident as him is the curbside pickup versus the the delivery and that you could I believe in that his customers want delivery in the US. We find lots of people aren't home to receive that grocery delivery and one thing he. Very much points out as he says we are at Price parity with all the traditional grocery stores so we scrape all Tesco's prices and our price to deliver it to your house is the same as Tesco's price for you to drive there and pick it yourself. And so no one in the u.s. does that everyone in the US that's trying digital grocery have all kinds of premiums and added cost. Scot: [1:00:21] Service is the dreaded Services yes. Jason: [1:00:24] And it's it's worse than just service fees it service fees and they charge more for the same skus when they pick them for you. So so a big difference between the two markets right now so his presentation was super interesting. Then the afternoon Keynotes there were three more so the first one was was Ben Silverman who's the CEO of Pinterest. And I'm just going to be blunt. That was the most boring keynote to me of the show so far and large he did a great presentation about how important visual Discovery is. Which I agree with him it is there was no unique inside the weight like a very self-serving for you know the business that the Pinterest happens to be in. Scot: [1:01:14] The governor there Rich pins and they also had a lot of marketplace initiative none of that no retail kind of tie on them. Jason: [1:01:17] Talk about any like it was it was purely like people aren't going to discover new products via text they need visual Discovery and where we build a business provisional Discovery and it was literally that abstract. Scot: [1:01:32] Go back on the K2 or however you say it one of the intern just came in they are a public companies are independent and they're listed on the footsie the London Stock Exchange and they're part of the foot C250 and have a market cap of about 3.6 billion. Jason: [1:01:48] So that's a perfect segue to the next keynote is. In some ways the u.s. equivalent which is much more company is Fresh Direct so this is Jason acreman of who's the CEO and founder of Fresh Direct. Resurrect is direct-to-consumer digital grocery exclusively in the Manhattan area. Scot: [1:02:16] I was going to confuse with hello fresh with their meal delivery company. Jason: [1:02:20] FreshDirect is like Aikido a built from the ground-up to deliver groceries to your home. The most thought of is a grocery delivery company which annoys Jason to know in because he thinks of them first and foremost as a food company so so the big thing that happens is. He buy stuff from the farm and gets it to your refrigerator in half the time that Whole Foods does so. Pressure it's going to last much longer they do these promotions like a lobster day when you order Lobster to be delivered to your house in Manhattan. It's been pulled out of the water in Maine less than 12 hours ago so that so the supply chain is super cool. Like Ikeda although I don't think it's quite as automated like they built this. Purpose-built fulfillment center so they're avoiding store pics and Jason jumped on the same bandwagon about why store picking isn't going to work right and. Hey price structure is problem number one. Problem number to none of the stores have accurate inventory something we aren't we aren't we talked about earlier and so they just can't fulfill your order properly like they're missing stuff and they make mistake eggs. Phone number 3 store pic doesn't scale and so his point is is store pick ever got really popular the customers in the store would be. Derogatorily affected as they're competing with all those employee Pickers in the store so then the customers will get irritated that they're losing out on the. [1:04:01] To the to the Picker and staying in line behind too many pictures in the cashier and. Scot: [1:04:06] This happened the other day I went to Harris Teeter Saturday night and there was more employees picking and instacart people picking, then us and daddy's giant things that you have these relatively kind of pallet size cards that you haven't seen him and it is it is cumbersome, I can tell our grocery store is also throttling so they have you know, when I go like a Friday to get started delivery it's already sold out so I think they're really limiting the number of deliveries which is another bad customer experience you're stuck between you know who's going to have the worst customer experience in-store person or the outer person and that's a, that's a tough tough decision to make for the customer. Jason: [1:04:46] For sure so that was all super interesting so this is two guys that were lobbying heavily in favor of dedicated delivery centers versus the the store picking model again there just are so many grocery stores that have all this investment like it's hard. They're going to be the best they can with the model they have but then he had another Insight which I totally haven't thought about it all that's super interesting. FreshDirect is launching a sub brand service call. And foodkick is 1 hour delivery normally FreshDirect is next day delivery. And so what are you wanting out is he said only about 40% of food purchases are planned purchases. So I'm going to do my grocery shop I'm going to shop from the list and it's fine that all those groceries get delivered tomorrow cuz I'm putting it in the fridge

John R. Leeman is the co-founding and managing director of True Customer. They provide customer-centered marketing, media, analytics, content, and eCommerce consulting that drives scalable growth. John R. Leeman - From Advertising to CMO John started in the traditional brand and advertising business. He worked in the on major brands such as Campbell Soup and General Mills and Johnson and Johnson. John then moved on to work in digital CRM and media for companies such as Microsoft, Procter and Gamble and American Express. CMO to Entrepreneur John melded his two areas of expertise together to begin work in the CMO field. His stint at Fresh Direct as chief marketing officer was an invaluable and exciting experience for him. After his work with Fresh Direct, John took the leap to entrepreneur. He co-founded True Customer in November 2013. Why the C-Suite Changes are Scary The C-Suite is always interested in optimizing the business. There is a lot of money that goes into marketing and most respect that marketing is an investment and not a cost and there's a certain amount of return that is happening with the marketing today. When you talk about radical changes in how you do your marketing investment, it's scary. Companies wonder if it will be successful because you cannot go back and undo it. It's not visible or easy to figure out how this optimization, analyses and analytics will work.  They want the benefits but are not sure which choice to make. Big Companies, Big Steps You have to have an attribution solution in place. For half of the Fortune 1000 companies, don't have anything, believe it or not. The first step for them is huge because they have to figure out something to do. The bigger the company is, the more conservative their practices are supposed to be. - John R. Leeman It's tough because they have a lot of choices. Everyone positions their product as the solution to all of this. Marketing Mix Modeling The other half of the companies are using marketing mix modeling. The big decision for those companies is what do they do with that data. Do they stop looking at it if the ROI for TV says a $4.00 ROI for one tool and a $6.00 ROI for another? Which is right? For these companies, it becomes a sort of paralysis. They've been telling finance and everyone else for years and years how supposedly how accurate or inaccurate this is so now what? To hear more about John R. Leeman and his company True Customer,  download and listen to the episode! Quick links to connect with John R. Leeman: TrueCustomer.com Linkedin Sima loves to hear from her listeners with input, questions, suggestions and just to connect! You can find her at the links below! LinkedIn Twitter simav.sg-host.com Sima is passionate about data and loves to share, learn and help others that share that passion. If you love data as much as her, subscribe on iTunes and don't forget to leave a rating and review!

In this second installment of the James Beard Foundation Food Summit 2017: Consuming Power, listen as author Mark Schatzker moderates a discussion on taste and industry titled Leading with Taste with chef and author Dan Barber (The Third Plate) and Mary Wagner of MK Wagner & Associates. Then journalist Tamar Haspel moderates a panel titled Money Where Your Mouth Is: Companies Adjusting to Changing Consumer Beliefs, Behaviors, and Tastes, with speakers Josh Anthony (Campbell’s and Global Nutrition), Alexia Howard (AB Berstein), Mehmood Khan (PepsiCo’s Global R&D), and Jason Lepes (Fresh Direct). Hear them discuss the ethics and psychological complexities of modern food consumption, the intersections of purchasing power and bodily health, and how what we buy impacts the current state of the planet and our Earth’s farmers. Finally, Kris Moon moderates Levers for Change: Grass Roots Advocacy and Action as he chats with the co-directors of the Food Chain Workers Alliance Joann Lo and Jose Oliva, where they examine how the current political climate in regards to immigration policy will heavily impact our food supply and labor pathways, followed by a speech on the power of litigating for change by Kim Richman (Richman Law Group). Heritage Radio Network on Tour is powered by Simplecast.

Host Jessica Harris talks with Jason Ackerman, founder of Fresh Direct, an online grocer. Harris also talks with Jessamyn Rodriguez, founder of Hot Bread Kitchen.

Queen & J. are two womanist race nerds talking liberation, politics, and pop-culture over tea. Drink up! College, how bad it sucked, and why maybe you should go anyway. Or don’t go. Who cares. Also, urban food deserts, white luxuries, and friendships among women. Drink up! This week’s hot list: the MTA, gentrification, Fresh Direct for everybody! feminism, the Golden Globes, Hidden Figures and white fragility, to go or not go to college, women/girls & friendship, the Lip Bar vs. The Lit Bar. Tweet us while you listen! #teawithqj @teawithqj EVENTS Queen is hosting her first "Vision Board and Goal Setting Meet Up!" for Ms.Vixen magazine! Join us on January 15th at Von in NYC. Click the link for more info and to RSVP: www.eventbrite.com/e/vision-board-…ets-30625202806 WEBSITE www.TeaWithQueenAndJ.com SOCIAL MEDIA Twitter & Instagram: @TeawithQJ Facebook: www.facebook.com/TeawithQueenandJ Tumblr: teawithqueenandj.tumblr.com EMAIL teawithqueenandj@gmail.com DONATE www.paypal.me/teawithqj NOTES & EXTRA TEA There is not one book store in the entire borough of The Bronx. Help Noelle Santos change that by supporting The Lit Bar. Crowdfunding begins in a few days! Visit http://www.thelitbar.com/ for more info. Check out our friend Dom Sindayinganza’s work at www.sindayiganza.com Queen loves her Lip Bar lipstick! Check them out https://www.thelipbar.com/ This week’s closing clip “’Hidden Fences’ Was A Smash At The Golden Globes” by The Colbert Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4D867Ku78 Libations to Ohene Cornelius for our show intro, check out his latest album Flight Risk available everywhere online now. You can find Ohene on instagram and twitter @ohenecornelius and online at www.ohenecornelius.com Libations to T.Flint for our News That's Not News intro! Find him at www.TFlintVoices.com

The 2016 New Zealand Organic Market Report. Organic produce sales have increased 11% per annum across the country, as New Zealanders are becoming more mindful as to what they are putting in their mouths and swallowing. This interview covers the era (and error) of the 1st World War where newly concocted chemicals were introduced in armaments etc, that were seen to also have an effect in seemingly speeding up growth in plants. This onslaught continued into synthetic chemicals and the challenges we have today with industrialised factory farming becoming intoxicated from pesticides and herbicides. That then turned into industrial agriculture - a particular ‘culture’ (not really farming) and now we are coming to the end of this industrial age plus its ‘so-called’ mythology. Pesticide and (herbicide) use is everywhere in our civil society, our road and parks management, in conservation and agriculture, and it begs the question:– Are we going to continue to poison our environment, our soil, our food, (that means spray poisons directly onto food), then eat it? Is this going to be our normal practice, now and into the future? Any sane person has to say, NO I do not think so! This does not make sense! Thus NZ society is waking up to the realisation we have to clean up our act and quickly. Few people are aware that the NZ organic movement has been in existence for 75 years and it was on the 7th April this year that Organics NZ celebrated their anniversary in Parliament, in the ‘grand hall’ - sponsored by a pan party Primary Production Select Committee, –where this event actually garnered some media attention. That Parliament was open to this Organic presentation showed that change is coming to the halls of power as a result of decades of honest toil and work by the organic producers sector. So in the words of Brendan, organics is going “gangbusters” and if we discipline ourselves this sector can grow quickly with huge benefits to people, the country, our health, to the ecology, longevity and our children’s future. Organics in NZ grew from 2008-2010 by 8% per year –and from 2012 -2015 it is up to 11%, with plenty of room to expand. Not only that there is more awareness in general, but people are becoming more conscious of what is happening to their food. People are wanting to make a deeper connection to their food source and one of them is ‘through ’certified organic’ products’ The Market Report for Organics Aotearoa NZ that was produced, was sponsored by New World and Countdown, Ceres, Fresh Direct and Vespry. Here is mainstream NZ in behind this report saying this is the way to go.  Though Brendan tempers this by telling us that instead of using the organics slogan “We are the answer”, to now saying “We have solutions”. Very real solutions. Today, Fonterra’s organic milk powder has a value 5 times more than conventional milk powder. This should be an eye opener to NZ dairy farmers! Especially, in a fickle and topsy-turvy world market. So who is it buying organic products? It’’s Generation Y, born in the 1980s and 1990s, comprising primarily the children of the baby boomers. They want authentic foods and are prepared to pay for it. Buy Pure New Zealand - why? Because the world wants what we are growing here, isolated away from the big industrial polluted northern hemisphere. The big question being, are we prepared to listen to what people want and deliver that back to them in the way that they want it? The market report is positive and there is a ground swell heading our way. This interview covers: How do young NZ people get back on to the land? What does it mean to identify with place and merge with your land and farm, developing one's intuition, and being at one with the elements, knowing that you are gifting from the soil the highest quality food that retains its life force. Using appropriate technology and knowledge to be at the forefront of land management. That we can have healthy soil, healthy food and healthy people and are delivering on biodiversity and ecology. That NZ becomes the biological - ecological producer of nutrient dense organic food for the world. The new way forward is based more on relationships from –the farmer, to the customer who is the consumer. The 3 organic keywords are ‘growth, celebrating diversity and confidence’– because Organics Aotearoa see that this is achievable. Note, that contrary to mainstream media’s message, most food in the world is grown through gardening and not through farming. This is provable. Having your children work in the garden, do chores etc. Letting them understand the connection that plants grow in fertile soils to produce tomatoes and corn, that eggs come from chooks etc. That when children spend quality time in the garden they embed themselves in connection to natural systems that is very real - it’s not a fantasy, it’s not a TV show or an iPad game. Organic standards, what are they in NZ? – Bio Grow being the leading certification agency. Today Countdown and New World have 77% of organic retail sales across NZ. Countdown has its own organic house brand. Brendan tells the story of 500 hundred year old trees in the Ureweras here in NZ giving honey to Koreans –but, they don’t see it as ‘just honey’ they see it as medicine from an elder, one that is 500 years old. When it comes to organic food production and land use the best results by far is when you are inclusive and participative. That your dealings are open and clear and when we involve ourselves in this intent, it becomes a relentless pursuit and endeavour to bring NZ land management, health and wellbeing - into fruition. Managing continuous 11% growth needs very focused attention and nurturing where you can not take short cuts. Organics engenders integrity of being and of effort.   Now we in NZ need top down assistance, –we have done decades of bottom up grass roots work, now we need support from government to shift the energy for the whole country. 11% each year  - it is happening! It may be an intergenerational shift, but it may come faster. If we get some major support from a ‘conscious’ NZ government - magic could happen. Now we need some enlightened policy, some regulation, and it can not be political. This is what is best for New Zealand and ultimately, our planet. http://www.oanz.org

Welcome to episode two one in our second season of the NYCFC Fan Podcast! Today's episode I am joined by Robert Hobson and Joe Scarchilli (Sky Blues of NY). Show link: http://nycfcpodcast.com/nycfc-s2e2-what-has-this-preseason-told-us     Topics discussed on the podcast episode Joe Scarchilli discusses what his favorite NYCFC off season moves are and where he sees NYCFC in his Power Rankings. What we expect from our 3 DP's. Robert joins us midway through the recording and we discuss if a stadium could be built in Long Island City now that Fresh Direct sold their massive warehouse. How we all felt about NYCFC this time, last year. NYCFC expectations for the US Open Cup Petition to refer to the supporters section as "The Pigeon Coop" or "The Stoop" An awesome poll conducted by the NYCFC sub reddit Tirzah and Patrick's announcement about getting married on the home opener. Join our Fantasy MLS League! http://www.nycfcpodcast.com/fantasy Don't forget to: Reddit Poll: https://www.reddit.com/r/NYCFC/comments/47kcgk/results_of_rnycfcs_2016_survey/ Join our Fantasy MLS League! http://www.nycfcpodcast.com/fantasy Leave NYCFC Fan Podcast a voice message at NYCFCPodcast.com/chat. It'll be played on the next episode! Email the podcast info@nycfcpodcast.com If you enjoyed this podcast please share it with our NYCFC Family by leaving an honest rating and review on iTunes. Leaving a 5 star rating and review will help other NYCFC fans find this podcast! Your reviews truly motivate and inspire us! Find the NYCFC Fan Podcast on iTunes and Stitcher:       Follow and interact with NYCFC Fan Podcast on:

Our guest today is someone that you’re going to love hearing from if you’re entrepreneurial, into the all-natural food trend, or if you like adult beverages. Chris Wirth founded American Juice Company in 2012, which manufactures all-natural cocktail mixers for premium bar establishments.Chris founded the company with his friend Massimiliano Matté, a renowened mixologist and nominee for the prestigious "Perfect Barman de Paris" award known for his collaborations with celebrated chefs like Alain Ducasse and Heinz Beck. Their mix blends are created with fresh, natural ingredients. Each variety is designed to stand alone or work in combination so you have endless opportunities. They recently launched into retail in the last 6 months through Whole Foods, Fresh Direct and a number of independent retailers in New York City. In the interview we talk about his experience of growing up and his foray into finance and entrepreneurship. How does a young guy in college actually develop a sophisticated company like this with no money, really? His biggest failure so far. You’re going to go through a lot of failure as an entrepreneur and he shares one of the biggest catastrophes that involve getting his product to market. Plus, his number one habit that helps him with his finances that then also supports his ability to be entrepreneurial. For more information visit www.somoneypodcast.com. 

Ruben Diaz, Jr. first entered public office as a member of the New York State Assembly in 1997, and is currently serving his second full term as Bronx Borough President, having been reelected in November 2013 with more than 89 percent of the vote. As Borough President, Ruben Diaz, Jr. has led the implementation of a “New Bronx” agenda — economic development, housing, education, and public safety — in every corner of the borough. The Bronx has seen over $7 billion in new development of all kinds since Borough President Diaz took office in 2009. This includes more than $600 million in housing, building over 14,000new units. More than 15,000 new jobs have been created in The Bronx since 2009, thanks in large part to the continued partnership between Borough President Diaz, the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation and those seeking to do business in the borough. Major projects such as Fresh Direct, the Kingsbridge National Ice Center, new retail developments in every corner of the borough and the Cary Leeds Tennis Center in Crotona Park are among the major contributors to the “New Bronx” renaissance, led by Borough President Diaz. Since taking office in 2009 Borough President Diaz has provided millions in funding to projects of all types in every Bronx neighborhood, including new technology upgrades to borough schools, green roofs and boiler upgrades, park improvements and more. A lifelong resident of the Bronx, Borough President Diaz lives in the Southeast Bronx with his wife Hilda Gerena Diaz and their two sons, Ruben Diaz III and Ryan Isaiah Diaz. He graduated from Lehman College, City University of New York, with a Bachelors degree in political theory. Borough President Diaz is also the recipient of honorary doctoral degrees in civil law from Berkeley College and Mercy College, and a doctoral degree in humane letters from the Metropolitan College of New York.

Do you know how much your time is really worth? Today we discuss when to trade money for time and vice versa. There are things we all hate to do, mowing the lawn, painting, cleaning, food shopping.  Or maybe you’re a weirdo who loves those things.  That’s okay. Takes all kinds.  How do you decide if you should do these kinds of things yourself or pay someone to do them for you? Math, that’s how.  The simplest way to get a yes or no answer is to work out how much you make an hour, even if you’re not paid hourly.  You’re worth $20 an hour, it costs $5 a week to have Fresh Direct deliver your groceries.  It would take you two hours to drive to the store, shop for your items, pay, drive them home and bring them inside. Unless you’ve turned food shopping into a speed sport like Matt has and can bang the whole process out in fifteen minutes.  If you hate food shopping, then it makes sense for you to pay for Fresh Direct. But it’s not always just a matter of dollars and cents and time.  Maybe you work from home you lucky duck.  And you have plenty of time to clean your house.  You’ve done the math and financially it doesn’t make sense to pay someone to do it for you.  But you really hate cleaning your house.  So maybe from a quality of life stand point, it does make sense for you to outsource a hated but necessary task.  That’s okay too. Or on the flip side.  You loooove cleaning the house.  But you make thousands of dollars an hour.  While you’re happily mopping the floor, you could be making bank by spending those two hours working.  By all means, clean that house you freak!  Come do mine too if it will make you happy.  I want the best for you. So while you can easily answer this question with math, life is a bit more complicated than that.  As long as you’re not putting yourself in a hole, outsource what you don’t like to do and spend your time doing something you enjoy. Show Notes Red Hook Audible Ale:  Today’s tipple of choice. Rescue Time: A resource to help you eliminate time drains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Well folks, it's that time of year again-green beer and corned beef for all!...If you're not exactly thrilled with the prospect of sporting some seriously stained teeth and boiling meat and potatoes, don't worry-you're not alone. While we are all big fans of the Irish-and don't necessarily mind the once-a-year corned beef and cabbage dish-we can certainly come up with something a little more appealing to celebrate with.Something appealing, something green....hmmmm.....Well, for starters, as soon as March rolls around you should pretty much know that winter is coming to a close. This weekend marks the "spring forward" in daylight savings time and the winter chill is finally starting to wear off.Birds all across the New York metro area have been chirping.Fortunately, the coming of spring means a whole new season of delicious vegetables and herbs to choose from. Our favorite green this month is the artichoke. Delicious and versatile, this veggie is truly one of nature's gifts to us-and March is one of the best times to buy it. If you've never prepared an artichoke, the task may seem a little daunting. Please don't fear it-the pay out is amazing. There are a number of great websites out there to help you with the basic preparation of an artichoke. We love the Becks and Posh blog for the breakdown. And, after you work on technique a bit and come to realize that you can never live without this particular vegetable again, you will be ready for our Artichoke Dip Recipe. It is a classic.Although the dip uses canned artichoke hearts, you will need to prepare at least 2-4 actual artichokes, so that you can serve the leaves. If you live in the New York metro area, visit Fresh Direct to get both tasty canned hearts, and fresh produce. And of course, if you're feeling adventurous, and you have some time on your hands, feel free to skip the can and go for the real thing!Have fun bragging to your friends this holiday about who's really the MOST green this year!Erin Go Bragh!Artichoke DipWe thought it would be fun to post the video for you this week. No going back and forth between the website and the blog!