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Flowcode creator spotlight showcases the talents and skills from our community. Today, get to know Courtnie Beceiro. She’s the Director of Brand atHaven’s Kitchen , a packaged sauce company with the goal of making cooking easier…and more fun.
Haven’s Kitchen is a line of fresh sauces, made with 100% real ingredients, created to help make home cooking faster, convenient and delicious.
My first job in college was working at my dad’s bread distribution company in NYC that he started the day I was born. So, I guess you can say that I was raised in the food industry. As I built the foundation of my career outside of the family business, I quickly found my niche in the Natural segment of CPG, while working at FreshDirect as a merchant/buyer for the Pantry category. That’s how I meant Alison, the Founder of Haven’s Kitchen. Since 2018 I’ve been guiding the brand through building up to a national launch at the height of the pandemic and now settling into the “new normal” of consumer behavior.
Getting shit done.
In my experience - anyone who claims to have the “secret” to anything, is selling you something. I’ve worked with so many founders that have a great product and think that’s all they need to build a global brand. But there are plenty of not-so-great products out there and they sell like crazy.
But it’s something of a perfect storm, you need a solid infrastructure (so think, manufacturing & distribution), your product needs to solve a problem, it needs to stand out on the shelf, and if you happen to have a delicious tasting product, even better!!
If I could see the future, I would be rich and probably living on a beach somewhere. However, in my experience, the levers that are here to stay, regardless of the category, are elements like transparency and education through content. The days of consumers blindly trusting brands are over. Consumers are more educated now than ever and have instant access to research, verify and learn. As brands build more intimate relationships with their consumers through social media, SMS, etc. consumers are more likely to feel betrayed when they learn something about a brand that they don’t like. So being transparent and being a source of trust will be essential to emerging brands, not just pushing product.
I remember in 2018 my now husband suggested we put QR codes on our pouches and told him that QR codes were dead. At that time, while easily accessible, QR codes were slightly ahead of their time, most people overlooking them as they buzzed by, and the off chance that someone did scan, the content was rarely maintained by the creators, so they fell flat.
All of that changed with the pandemic - As a brand we knew early on that our super power was content which is great for digital awareness. However, we also understood that we are a brand that consumers are primarily shopping for in grocery stores. Since then, the mission has been to figure out where the sweet spot is that content meets the shelf.
Early 2021 we were finally able to update our packaging artwork (IYKYK). That was then I started my QR code research. I got introduced to Flowcode and the rest is history.
We utilize Flowcodes for everything so that we have the flexibility to use a direct link to a digital coupon, direct them to a special landing page, or swap in a Flowpage if we wanted to. The Flowpages are really fun for everything from product packaging to digital business cards for the team.
Those of us in the grocery industry understand that most retailers are pretty old school and bound to processes that aren’t necessarily flexible or affordable when it comes to giving small brands visibility. Which is hard for a small CPG when you don’t have the budget or the capabilities to support those initiatives. Having QR codes allows us to take a bit more control over.
I’m most excited about using QR codes to grow our email subscriber list! On every QR code we have the contact collection form turned on for people to sign up for our email and SMS. We then segment them out and target them differently than we would people coming to us from social media or our website. These people are coming to us from the shelf, so their experience is different from those coming to us from a viral TikTok, so why wouldn’t we speak to them differently and begin to introduce the rest of our brand little by little.
It’s another touchpoint for the consumer to interact with us. Why NOT?!
