Building a Food Category One Relationship at a Time with Amy Zitelman

Figuring out how to compete in a new, or underdeveloped, food or beverage category is a challenge -- especially if you’re a disruptive natural foods business determined to shake things up! 

Today on the Real Food Brands Podcast, host and Brand Strategist Katie Mleziva takes us back to revisit a great episode with Amy Zitelman, Co-Founder and CEO of Soom Foods, to talk about how they build relationships with influencers like food bloggers and top chefs to create excitement for a relatively underdeveloped category in the US.  When thinking about marketing it can be easy to put selling your product as the focus. However, as Soom Foods has shown, by going a step further and focusing on building strategic but genuine relationships, successful promotion comes as a natural byproduct!

The original episode covers a lot of great topics about Soom Foods’ marketing tactics, but we also have an update from the team about how things have been going since we recorded the episode and what marketing tactic is really working well for them to build relationships today.

In This Episode: 

How Amy and her sisters started Soom Foods  How Soom built awareness for tahini, a relatively unknown product in the US market  Why it’s important to have a diverse team with complimentary skill sets  How to find and build genuine relationships with influencers, including bloggers and award winning chefs  How Soom utilizes user generated content (recipes) in social media  How to build associations with adjacent food categories to bring awareness to your own product  How demos can help build your brand even if store traffic is slow that day  Why Amazon can help small food businesses build an online presence  How the Soom team uses social media to build something meaningful beyond sales  What single # skyrocketed their visibility on social media

Resources: 

Soom Foods Website and Instagram  Real Food Brands Marketing Roundtable Facebook Group Real Food Brands website (download your Brand Checkup Scorecard here) Chef Michael Michael Solomonov — Zahav restaurant and cookbook