How Carbone Fine Food Uses Shelf Discovery to Drive Brand Switching
Going from zero to $100 million in sales in five years — and becoming the sixth-highest-selling brand in a crowded center-store category — requires a carefully constructed "cheat code," said Carbone Fine Food CEO Eric Skae.
Skae's path to success for Carbone's jarred pasta sauces has included such encryptions as obsessing on quality, telling your story, embedding yourself in the customer's lifestyle, not chasing "shiny objects," and maintaining a startup mentality, he said last week during a keynote presentation at Retail Media Summit, an event hosted by CGT sister brand P2PI.
Carbone is the fastest-growing brand in the category, and 77% of brand switchers are coming from value brands — not other premium brands like Rao's, which he once led, Skae said.
This premium "obsession" has paid off during tough times like the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic, because they have "a customer who could sustain an economic downturn; and secondarily, when they weren't going out as much, they were eating better at home," he said.
One of the benefits of building a premium brand is the ability to scaffold a sufficient margin structure to pay expenses and still, at some point, turn a profit, Skae said. Doing so answers the "What's in it for me?" question coming from all parties involved in bringing a brand to market.
"You've got a distributor that's going to get a margin, you've got a broker that's involved, you've got a sales staff," he said. "You've got the cost of doing business: you've got things like retail media, where you've got to spend, you've got slotting, you've got to merchandise. At the end of the day, you've got to win a consumer."
The obsession on quality starts with buying tomatoes in Southern Italy, along with ensuring the same 29-31 tomatoes in every can, and every so often pulling out a kettle and cooking up a batch himself, Skae said.
"Telling the brand's story can be done in any number of ways. I'm an unapologetic carnival barker," he said. "I talk about my brand as much as I possibly can. When I travel for work … I will have the Carbone shirt on. I want people to ask me about it. I'm building a brand. You've got to use your friends in the trade media. You've got to work with retail media to get the word out there, and you've got to spend in this area."
Skae calls putting jars on shelves the "simplest, hardest business in the world," and to figure out how to make it easier, he talks to customers — to find out where they discovered Carbone, and what convinced them to switch over.
"In many cases, it's in a smaller, specialty retailer where they found the brand, or they found it online because of some of the things they do," he said. "You never know why people are gravitating to your brand, but you find out at the shelf. You find out from talking to people who work in stores."
Carbone has embedded itself in customers' lifestyles in a number of ways, starting with images of its pasta jars during dinner parties, a favorite activity of Gen Z, Skae said. They partnered with Malin+Goetz to create a tomato-scented candle that sounded "crazy" to him but, at a $200 price point, sold out in five minutes online and led to 1 billion free media impressions.
And when chef and co-founder Mario Carbone, who runs an eponymous New York restaurant, cooked sauce on Alex Cooper's podcast, this resulted in "billions of impressions," he said.
When Skae talks about not "chasing shiny objects," he means staying focused on what's worked rather than stretching a brand too thin. Given Carbone's growth in pasta sauce, he said, "Why do something else? We've got other things that we'll do in the future, but they're very planned. And it's important to stay very, very disciplined to who you are."
Maintaining a startup mentality means continuing to do more with less, even after success, Skae said. Though Carbone expects to reach $165 million in sales this year, the company only has 35 employees and no physical office. "I don't like nickels and dimes falling off the table, as I tell my team," he said. "Everybody in my organization has something that they own. I want to understand what they own in the organization that they're going to drive through. … Those nickels and dimes go to other places."
This article first appeared on the site of CGT sister publication P2PI.
