Your Salad Story

A new Fresh Express program gives consumers a behind-the-scenes look. Photo courtesy of Fresh Express

Fresh Express Emphasizes Trust, Connectedness with New Program

By Scott Christie, Managing Editor

The biggest name in fresh-cut salads is entering a new era in its business practices – one of trust and connecting with consumers.

Fresh Express launched a new outreach campaign on its Web site called “Your Salad Story” that provides consumers with a behind-the-scenes look at the quality assurance and food safety measures of Fresh Express products. The site, at www.freshexpress.com/story, allows visitors to explore the growing regions, read about how salads go from seed to the bag, find out about food safety and quality and use the new Leaf Locator tool that shows where the ingredients in a particular bag came from.

The new campaign is based on the concept that not all salads are created equal, and increased transparency will show people why Fresh Express bagged salads are different. The goal of “Your Salad Story” is to double the size of the category and see significant increases in foodservice sales, said Tanios Viviani, president of global innovation and emerging markets and chief marketing officer for Fresh Express.

“We created the Fresh Express ‘Your Salad Story’ micro-site to show consumers that not all bagged salads are created equal and to provide them with a tool to discover the origin of their salad,” Viviani said. “The micro-site and Leaf Locator tool tell a unique field-to-fork story about the meticulous care we take to ensure each bag of Fresh Express salad is fresh and full of flavor.”

The new campaign is part of a three-prong approach to doubling the bagged salad category. The first prong is having safe, fresh products that consumers want. The second prong is creating awareness to differentiate the products, and the third prong is building community around the products and brand. That’s where “Your Salad Story” comes in, Viviani said.

The “Your Salad Story” micro-site has two components: the first landing page allows visitors to learn as much or as little as they want about the company and products, and the Leaf Locator adds another layer of complexity where visitors can go deeper into the individual components of the salad.

The Leaf Locator lets consumers see where ingredients came from by entering the SKU from a bagged into the Web site. The Leaf Locator tool also provides easy access to complimentary recipes and a button to send a message to the Fresh Express call center.

Fresh Express sells 60 SKUs at more than 24,000 retail outlets in the United States, and the Leaf Locator currently features eight growing regions – Salinas Valley, Imperial Valley and Huron, Calif.; Yuma, Ariz.; Belle Glade, Fla.; El Bajilo, Mexico; San Luis Valley, Colo., and Imlay City, Mich. For each growing area, site visitors can see the average climate, growing season, agricultural history of the area and a map of where crops grow in the region. The company is qualifying seven additional regions that will be updated on the site, including Texas, North and South Carolina and Ohio, Viviani said.

Visitors can not only explore the growing regions, they can learn about how the bagged salad came to be – from seed to the delivery to the retail store. The site highlights six areas – seed selection, harvest, cooling, salad blending, food safety and the supply chain. Each step tells the story through an actual Fresh Express employee (called “Our Salad Experts”), which allows for a one-one-one connection with consumers through real spokespersons.

“We didn’t want to use actors,” Viviani said. “It’s the story of who we are and what we do.”

Food safety and freshness is also what Fresh Express is all about. The micro-site highlights the steps and technology on the Freshness Promise page, where consumers can find the “7 Steps of Prevention” – sound and safe agricultural practices, multiple points of certification, care and excellence, security, training and education, traceability and rapid response. There is information on each step that provide a “behind the scenes look” at how food safety and quality are handled at Fresh Express, said Mike Burness, vice president of global food safety and security.

“We want to provide insights into that commitment,” he said.

There are two key messages in the Freshness Promise, Burness said, where the product is going and what steps of care are taken to get there. He calls it “food vetting,” finding where a product comes from, where it’s going and what happens to it.

The launch of the new Web tools have been in development for the last 18 months and the launch has been planned for some time, but it came at a time when consumer confidence is low and there are increasingly calls for food safety enforcement.

“We couldn’t time this any better, because what we’ve found out through consumer research is that one of the barriers to eating fresh produce, especially bagged salads, is a lack of confidence,” Viviani said.

Fresh Express launched a television campaign to promote “Your Salad Story.” In-store advertising also spread the word about the tools. The company is running a contest promotion through the end of May to win free salads for a year and a blogger competition that ran for two weeks in April.

Viviani said consumers responded positively to the micro-site and Leaf Locator during testing. The information was just what they were looking for to gain a better understanding of where their food comes from, and the added benefit of building a community helped reinforce the brand image to consumers.

“Fresh Express is empowering consumers with a comprehensive resource and tool to learn more about our salads, where they come from and the extreme care taken to deliver the freshest and most delicious salad in the market,” said Fernando Aguirre, chairman and chief executive officer of Chiquita. “For the first time, consumers of value-added salads will gain new insights into the rigorous safety practices used in making their salads and will be able to learn important information about where they are grown. This new level of engagement will further enhance the trust consumers place in the Fresh Express brand and underscores our commitment to invest in new advancements, technologies and practices that benefit our consumers.”

Fresh Express is giving consumers what they want by providing in-depth information and interactivity. Rather than pushing information at retail customers and talk “at” them, consumers can visit the micro-site at their leisure to talk “with” Fresh Express and learn as much or as little as they want. The company hopes that this will not only increase sales for the brand, but will double the size of the bagged salad market to benefit the produce industry as a whole.



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