Whether you’re selling sausages or strawberry jam, potted plants or country crafts, honey or herbs – you strive to have the best product.
After all, that’s what every discerning consumer is looking for, right?
These days, not so much. Increasingly, shoppers are looking for the “new best.”
The ability to create new premium products has turned Trans-Herbe into one of North America’s top herbal tea producers. Most of its production is sold under private labels, but anonymity hasn’t hampered the company’s growth. The company doesn’t release sales figures but they are in the eight figure range, and Trans-Herbe is large enough to employ 120 people at its headquarters in Saint-Bruno, just east of Montreal.
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Johanne Dion, a food chemist, started the company in 1992, and since then she and her seven-person research and development team have created an astonishing number of tea blends. How many? Try 3,000.
Dion shrugs off that number as if it’s an everyday thing.
“This is something that’s very important for us because each of our clients wants something unique,” Dion says. “You cannot sell the same blend to every client.”
Now you’re probably thinking, ‘she has to do that, she has no choice.’ Fair enough, but Dion says consumers are increasingly addicted to what’s new and different.
“The new generation is not like the old. Younger consumers want new things,” she says. “Think of Coke and look at all the different types of Coke they have introduced and keep introducing.”
Dion sends her research staff to conferences and food shows to keep up with trends and encourages them to experiment at her expense. They often buy new products they find in stores, share them with their fellow tea blenders and brainstorm about whether they could somehow incorporate these new tastes into tea.
“We try to do something different and everyone on my staff has a different palate – some like sour, some like sweet – and this helps us come up with new ideas,” she says.
So consumers not only find strange ingredients such as fenugreek, rooibos and Siberian eleuthero root in Trans-Herbe’s Four O’clock brand teas, but also seemingly weird combinations such as licorice root, cinnamon bark and black pepper.
“It’s not always easy. Maybe a client wants a chocolate chai and we try one formula after another, and you have to do that many times before the client is happy.”
Not every client is looking for the unusual, but Dion says many recognize that creating unusual products can drive sales.
Now, I’m not suggesting every farmer who is direct marketing has to chuck their tried-and-true traditional products and come up with a new concoction that may, or may not, catch the fancy of trendy shoppers.
But why not shuffle the line-up a bit and try something that’s different and exciting?
Lots of farms are. Beekeepers are creating chocolate-honey syrups and mixing honey with balsamic vinegar to create a glazing sauce. Google bison cheddar sausages or cinnamon pickles and you’ll find there actually are such things being created and sold on North American farms.
The beautiful part about tapping into this “different is hot” trend is that unlike Dion, you don’t need a degree in food chemistry or a research department.
All you need is an internet connection, a credit card to order samples on-line and a willingness to experiment.
Glenn Cheater is editor of the Canadian Farm Manager, the newsletter of the Canadian Farm Business Management Council. The newsletter as well as archived columns from this series can be found at www.farmcentre.com.
