Hive, a new online marketplace for independently-owned food and grocery brands launched this fall as a way to bridge the gap between small purpose-driven CPG companies and consumers looking to buy more sustainable goods that support the causes they care about.
Launching in 2020 was fortuitous for the brand, a time when consumers are purchasing groceries online more than ever, and more and more people are buy from brands that support social causes.
Co-founded by digital marketing and CPG execs Scott Morris, Tom Ellis and Katie Tyson, the site has set out to solve the challenge that they were seeing for emerging purpose-driven CPGs. “Smaller, emerging brands could have an amazing product, an interesting, mission-driven story, be contributing to causes and taking care of sustainability, and still really struggle to make it,” says Tyson, co-founder/CCO of Hive.
The site has more than 100 small brands, from cleaning products to nut butter and chocolate, and each item is vetted for the sustainability of its ingredients, packaging, carbon footprint, social impact and supply chain. The site makes it easy to shop by grocery items such as coffee or salsa, but also by cause such as “Community & Economic Development” or “Environment.”
“We really started to see that there is a huge opportunity in the world of shopping sustainably from a values-driven perspective,” says Tyson. “We believe that that is where the ‘proverbial puck’ is moving. We believe that more and more people are wanting to shop that way, in a way that aligns with their values, be conscious of what they are purchasing, make more sustainable choices and support brands that are reflective of their individual values and the causes they want to support as well.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Tyson to discuss sustainable shopping, site navigation and the booming online grocery business. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What is the idea behind Hive Brands?
What we saw when we started exploring that was that there is a growing group that wants to shop by values, but it’s very difficult to do today, as the research of figuring out what makes a brand sustainable is falling on the individual shopper. It’s tough to find that information, it’s time consuming to do all that research. When you think about the world of groceries, in which you are buying and using a multitude of products, to think about an individual doing that level of research for every product they use on a day-to-day basis just feels insane.
What Hive is trying to do, is – we’ve got, on the one hand, these great mission-driven brands that are doing amazing things and trying to grow in scale and build, and, on the other hand, we have these consumers that are really wanting to shop those brands – we at Hive Brands come in as the retailer, the third-party conduit to bring those two different entities together and create a more conscious shopping experience.
Who is your target audience and how does offering sustainable shopping connect with this audience?
Our target audience is more of a psychographic target. We talk about them as “The Conscious Shopper” or “The Awakened Shopper.” It’s basically any individual that’s really looking to vote with their dollars and make a difference, make an impact through their purchases. We have found that our audience tends to skew a little bit younger. This is endemic and inherent to millennials and Gen Z specifically, but even so, the age range is not limited to that. There is a much larger and growing swath of individuals in their 40s-50s who are also really looking to shop this way. That’s how we think about it.
What marketing channels are you using to drive people to the site?
We are just starting to test out different advertising platforms. Right now, we are very focused on your classic digital marketing channels. Over time, we are going to do a lot more on the marketing side, and work on building a word-of-mouth network too. We have an amazing group of over 120 makers on the site that are really fueling a lot of traffic. We believe that that will help drive people to the site as well. We really believe that this is the type of shopper, the Conscious Shopper, who not only wants to find and make more ethical and conscious decisions for themselves, but also wants to tell their friends about it too. We think there is a lot of word-of-mouth potential for the business.
Tell me more about the makers you are working with.
When I say “makers,” I am referencing our brand partners. We are very firmly committed to not doing private labels on our site, so every single product on our site is made by an individual or a business that is solely dedicated to making that product. We have an amazing collection of brands on the site. It’s another area that’s an interesting point of difference for us: we are really bringing individuals behind the brands to the forefront. You get to see the pictures of the people making these foods, you get to hear their stories, you get to see the farmers in a way that you often do not get to see or understand in other shopping environments.
So storytelling is key to your content strategy?
Yes, 100%. [Storytelling] is a huge piece and something we focus on a lot. We wanted people to really easily understand what shopping and making an impact actually is. So, we have built out a lot of the backstory of the brands on the site and really made that front and center.
We have also made the impact of making those shopping decisions pretty front and center as well. On the product pages, there’s a section called “How It Does Good.” We really highlight within our brand-vetting criteria, how they are actually making a substantive difference to the world. We talk about their ingredients, their sourcing, if they are fair-trade, if they are organic.
We talk about if they are doing anything from a carbon-offsetting perspective, or anything else to lower their carbon footprint by using renewable energy. We talk about their packaging and how recyclable it is inherently. We talk about any causes that they are supporting, any donations they are doing, major philanthropic efforts. We try to make that really clear and easy to understand for the shopper. We take that research that they would maybe try to do on their own and really make it easy and digestible.
This site navigation offers shoppers a unique way to shop. Why did you decide to curate by cause?
We wanted to give people a couple of different ways to shop. You can obviously shop the more traditional way of knowing what product you want. We wanted to give people other alternatives as well. “Shop By Cause” is a really unique feature. There are six major cause buckets on the site. If you, as a shopper, are really passionate about brands supporting poverty and hunger for example, you can click into that, and it gives you the full assortment of every single brand and product that is supporting that in some way. And we also give people the ability to shop by brand. That plays two ways. Firstly, if you are looking for a specific brand or maker, that’s a really easy way to find them. Secondly, it shows all the makers and all of their photos in a yearbook style way, and there is something that feels really powerful about starting from a place of understanding the mission and the humans behind the food you are about to consume.
How do you decide which brands to carry?
Early on, we set a criteria for curation that we call The Hive Five. This covers the sustainability and impact pillars which I mentioned earlier: low impact ingredients, low carbon footprint, recyclable packaging, and supporting a social cause. The fifth criteria is something we call “Rave Worthy” which is basically a quality check. We go out into stores and have a good sense of what we are looking for within a category. In certain categories, the Hive Five criteria is more readily available than others.
We really look for what is best in class and best practice. Coffee is a great example. In the world of coffee, from a sustainability perspective, there is a growing practice called Shade Grown, which is what we prioritize first and foremost, because coffee growing and farming can be so tied to deforestation. That’s our number one priority. A lot of the coffee growers are working and operating in third world countries. So we look for brands that are meaningfully contributing to helping grow and improve the economies they are operating in as well.
We set that high level criteria, we go out, we source brands, we taste and try them across multiple members of the team. We debate and only want to bring forth brands that not only taste and perform well, but that we would be excited to share with other people in our lives and truly have a share-worthy potential to them. From there, our sustainability team goes to work and digs deep into the weeds of supply chain, operating principles, packaging, and what causes they are supporting. They go off and dig into that information so that they check as many of our boxes as possible.
Not everything on the site meets all five of the Hive Five criteria, but I can say confidently that everything meets at least three, and the majority of our brands meet four. But it depends on what’s available in a different category.
2020 has been a big year for shopping for groceries online. How does this benefit Hive?
We started working on this well before COVID. The original inception of the idea was around February 2019. Definitely a coincidence to be launching an online grocery player during this time. It’s been very exciting to see how much online grocery has exploded because of COVID and what’s been going on. That’s not something we would have ever wished for, of course, but it’s made this an even bigger opportunity than we originally anticipated. For us, so far, we’ve really captured that values-driven shopper as opposed to shoppers who shop online to mitigate their risk. We are excited to also cater to that audience.
What does 2021 look like for Hive?
2021 is going to be an exciting year. As you know, we just launched. This year, in particular, we are very focused on running water through the pipes. As a new business, we just want to make sure that everything is working effectively and that we’re catching anything as we ramp up and get more customers through the door.
In 2021, we will start to put the pedal to the metal, as they say. We will ramp up marketing spend significantly. We have a great fulfillment partner that we will be doubling down on to expand distribution centers across the country. We are really excited to continue to build out our assortment. Especially for a brand new company, we’ve done a great job at touching a lot of categories that matter, but we definitely want to continue adding depth and breadth to our existing assortment. There are other categories we are excited to expand into like personal care and beauty, things of that nature. I think things will continue to get more and more exciting in terms of the types of products that we are offering.
