The G's unwashed salad brand fresh & naked who's traditional staples of baby salad leaves, including a new variety of baby kale, has just undergone a re-brand, the focus of which was to keep it simple, and use strong colours to differentiate the products.
fresh & naked has been on the market since 2010, "We launched the brand in cardboard boxes which was iconic and very successful but difficult operationally and did not deliver the optimum customer experience that we wanted, so we migrated the product into paper-laminate bags in autumn of that year once the brand was established," explained Anthony Gardiner, Marketing Director at G's Fresh. "The bags made it easier to pack and were better for the shelf-life of the product. In 2013 they were updated for a trendier look, then again this May. The latest re-branding exercise was to make the bags eye-catching but simple; you can also see more of the product. The strong colours to identify the different varieties are still there, and of course the paper laminate bags which is synonyms with our brand."
One of the key features which makes the brand stand apart from other fresh cut products is that the leaves are unwashed, meaning no MAP or washing in chlorine; it also gives circa two days more shelf-life to certain products as the dry leaves keep longer.
There are five products under the fresh & naked brand, rocket, lamb's lettuce, the BIG mix (spinach, chard and rocket), super spinach and new this summer is baby kale. Anthony explains that having just 5 main lines has allowed them to drive focus and efficiency.
Less information overload on packaging seems to be a good thing for the fresh & naked brand. “You’ll see for example with our baby kale, which we believe will be bought by the more health conscious consumer, we’ve decided to make all of our back of pack nutritional information much bigger,” says Anthony.
These days the promotion of products has changed. Traditionally it would be on TV but fresh & naked posters are now in underground stations throughout London. The brand has been active on social media for a while now, as well as placing ads in foodie magazines. The brand enjoys national UK distribution, but the latest advertising campaign is concentrated in central London as that is where the bulk of our core customer sales are located.
What drives sales and brand loyalty for Anthony is consistency of the product and living up to the promise of fresh picked produce. “The more consistent you can make your product the better. With fresh grown produce it’s much more of a challenge because you haven’t got that consistency or control that you do with a manufactured brand.”
As a major grower of produce for the UK and Europe, G’s Fresh employs the most advanced technology and processes. “We give programs to all our suppliers and it is mandatory that they adhere to our technical supplier standards. We will also audit them for compliance. That’s how we control it,” says Gardiner. “Once we get the product into the factory we have some very sophisticated x-ray technology, which is very advanced and can pick up foreign bodies which shouldn't be there, such as stones etc. The technology keeps evolving.”
According to Anthony, consumers in the UK are not that interested in getting to know the grower any more, “When I moved into the fresh produce industry seven years ago there was a lot of photos of the grower and their story, but we did a lot of research and found that it was enough for consumers to know that it was British, or that it was from East Anglia. People tend to trust a brand."
Fresh, natural and convenient is what the consumer wants from G’s, according to Gardiner. “We’re well placed, we’ve got some unique products which are well focused, on trend and we’ve got some really good PR going as well.”
Pre-packaged, flavour infused and value added fresh beetroot products is a another of G's specialities. It is marketed under the brand 'Love Beets' and is an area where there is definitely room for growth, according to Anthony. “Brand View said the number of retail lines using beetroot had gone up 20% year on year. Sales of fresh prepared beetroot have gone from 30 million GBP to 50 million in the past 8 years,” he says.
Research on the health benefits of the newly labelled 'superfood' has also ramped up. "Universities are always looking at health benefits of different products. Beetroot juice and vegetable juice is still an alien concept in the UK, but not so in the US. Over there it’s already a massive category. We’re really well positioned for when the trend reaches a mainstream position here.”
