Food Marketing Nerds Restaurant and CPG Marketing Podcast - How COVID-19 is Impacting the Wine and Spirits Industry, with Luke Lahman, Business Development Manager at E&J Gallo

How COVID-19 is Impacting the Wine and Spirits Industry, with Luke Lahman, Business Development Manager at E&J Gallo

10/07/20 • 29 min

Food Marketing Nerds Restaurant and CPG Marketing Podcast

Luke Lahman, who is a long-time friend of mine and repeat guest on Food Marketing Nerds joins us on the show today out of Scottsdale, AZ. Luke is the Business Development Manager at E. & J. Gallo, the largest winery in the United States.

Luke joined us back in Season 1 to discuss in-store marketing, which I’d strongly recommend if you’re interested in learning more about merchandising and influencing purchase decisions at the POS. It was one of our most downloaded episodes of last season, so we invited Luke back on to talk to us through the impact COVID-19 has had on the wine and spirits industry.

If you’re not already familiar, E & J Gallo is a winery and distributor; they have a ton of household names in their portfolio and, fun fact, they’re also the largest exporter of California wines.

By the nature of Luke’s role, he has a great pulse on consumer behavior around wine and spirits, and he’s tapped into what’s selling at both a category and brand level. We’ll be covering all of that in this episode, along with a few of Luke’s thoughts around how you can adapt your in-store marketing to the current state of socially distanced store layouts.

For full interview transcripts, visit FoodMarketingNerds.com. Food Marketing Nerds is a production of Blue Bear Creative, the Social Media Agency for CPG and Restaurants.

If you’re not already familiar, E & J Gallo is a winery and distributor; they have a ton of household names in their portfolio and, fun fact, they’re also the largest exporter of California wines.

For full interview transcripts, visit FoodMarketingNerds.com. Food Marketing Nerds is a production of Blue Bear Creative, the Social Media Agency for CPG and Restaurants.

Previous Episode

Performance Marketing Like the Pros with Margaret Fortner of Hydrant

We’re chatting with Margaret Fortner, Head of Growth at the digitally savvy Hydration mix company, Hydrant. The company has thrived as a direct to consumer brand; so much so, they’ve recently expanded into the retail space. Hydrant is as data-driven as companies come, which has helped them dominate the world of e-commerce.

As Head of Growth, a big part of Margaret’s role is to help make sense of the company’s sales and marketing data, making sure important learnings are taken into account throughout her team’s ongoing efforts. Looking at their digital advertising, Hydrant may have 50 or more different ads running at any given moment, testing and uncovering what levers deliver the highest ROI.

And in this episode, you’ll learn:

How to adapt the creative review process for rapid iteration
What incentives convert interested leads into buying customers
Why you need to update your approach to split testing

And plenty more.

Just a friendly heads up, in a couple of sections of the conversation, we get a little more into the weeds of data analysis than usual, but those parts are relatively short. If that’s not your thing, bear with us, because there’s plenty of practical insights around performance marketing applicable to all food and beverage brands with a growing digital presence, D to C or otherwise.

So without further adieu!

Next Episode

Creating Change: Outmaneuvering the Titans of Industry, with Chloe’s Fruit CEO, Michael Sloan

On the podcast today, we have Michael Sloan, CEO of Chloe’s Fruit. If you’re not familiar with the company, you are seriously missing out. Chloe’s makes several different varieties of clean ingredients, frozen treats that I can say from personal experience, are incredibly delicious and very quality.

Whether you’re a rising startup or the industry leader, product quality is critical to long term success. But, as you likely know as a listener of this podcast, there’s so much more than goes into which challengers become and remain household names, and which ones become statistics.

In most David and Goliath scenario’s, Goliath often wins. But in this episode, Michael tells us the story of how Chloe’s mission to create more accessible better for you options, not to mention a lot of savvy tactics met with great execution, has taken the company from a single shop in New York to the freezer aisle of over 10,000 stores across the country.

We get into a lot of things...

Pricing strategy when your ingredients are more expensive
How licensing deals can help create opportunities for more distribution
How to innovate your way to more shelf space...

...and so much more.

Michael is an amazing thought leader, and you’re going to come away from this episode with a lot of new thinking around non-traditional ways to build your company through the rapid changes in the food and bev industry.