What a 100 YO agribusiness can teach us about innovation
2-min read
The cheese category is still up double digits while most other grocery categories have normalized post-Covid. Last week, I said this had to do with specialty cheese – the kind you find in the deli section – that includes local, artisanal cheeses.
What’s interesting is many of these cheeses have been around for a long time and the seemingly new white space isn’t new – it just happens to have product/market fit right now. Taking advantage of the trend to grow your business does require innovation. Just a different kind of innovation.
I’ll illustrate with a case study.
I met Brian Fiscalini of Fiscalini Farmstead three years ago, right when the impact of Covid began to affect their business.
A fourth generation California dairy farmer and premium cheese maker, Brian and his sister Laura Genasci run the family operation which includes 540 acres, a herd of 2,800 dairy cows, and a farmstead cheese processing plant. All located on the premises in Modesto, California.
The Fiscalini’s had just started a brand re-fresh, but imminently needed to deal with a massive hit to their business – the loss of revenues coming from their foodservice business – due to Covid shut downs. They had to quickly pivot to ecommerce, which I’m happy to say they did beautifully. More on that in a sec.
Brian and his sister Laura LOVE this business. They love the cows. They love birthing them and raising them. They care about their comfort.
They think about their work as something to be nurtured and as something to share with the world through their award-winning cheese.
I point this out because I don’t think many people think about the food business this way. I think most of us agree with “do no harm” but some of the more disruptive alt protein businesses are using that narrative to malign any use of animals for future human sustenance. So why is cheese up +15% from pre-Covid? This is not normal growth for such a mature category.
What these producers offer that the big cheese cos do not is summed up by Wade Miller, VP farm resources and sustainability at Organic Valley:
“The white space in the market is the realization that small, grass-based and diversified family farm dairies deliver many benefits that an industrial model does not. The benefits include local food sovereignty, supply chain resilience, social justice, naturalized animal welfare and regeneration of natural resources.”
Fiscalini Farmstead was able to quickly move to third party ecommerce retail because they hit on all the sustainability points important to the conscious consumer. When I recently caught up with Brian Fiscalini, he told me that sales have doubled since last year. They were not only successful getting their own branded products accepted into new distribution, but landed private label business too, because they were able to offer a superior product with all these bragging rights:
· Cheese made using only the milk from their cows
· grow nearly all the feed for their cows
· made by hand, on-premises
· energy independent through a methane digester that powers them and will soon produce low carbon fuel
· robotic milkers will soon eliminate the worst paying jobs and allow for pay increases through training on higher value work
· robotic milking is more comfortable for cows and allows them to stay in their natural environment making for “happy cows”
Investing in modernization while maintaining tradition is what makes this 100-year-old dairy innovative today. The lesson here is – innovation can be actions taken inside business. In the case of Fiscalini Farmstead, it was reducing the human burden and lessening their environmental footprint – all while keeping with the tradition of artisanal, hand-made cheese.
All my best,
Jennifer