How To Build a Food and Beverage Brand That Lasts With Casey Harshman

Casey Harshman is the Founder and CEO of Frooishen Strategy & Design Collective, a branding and package design collective that helps CPG brands build clear, distinctive identities and bring them to life across the marketplace. With 22 years in branding and package design, Casey leads strategy and creative work for emerging and established brands, shaping brand platforms, packaging, storytelling, and activation. His approach centers on building strong foundations that create consistency, differentiation, and lasting consumer connection.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[2:30] Casey Harshman’s journey into branding and the evolution of his approach to working with CPG brands
[4:43] Why building a strong brand foundation matters before scaling marketing and growth
[8:06] How Casey uses brand strategy to guide creative decisions and keep teams aligned
[15:29] Preparing food and beverage brands for retail, buyers, and long-term sell-through
[18:51] What brands should consider when balancing founder vision with consumer needs
[22:48] Casey’s approach to evolving established brands without losing valuable brand equity
[27:24] The role of consumer research and validation in branding and packaging decisions
[33:44] AI, emerging creative tools, and the importance of keeping humanity at the center of branding
[42:21] Casey’s perspective on building brands that earn lasting consumer trust and loyalty

In this episode…

Building a food and beverage brand that lasts takes more than a great product and strong packaging. It starts with a clear brand strategy that can guide growth, marketing, and every consumer touchpoint. So what does it really take to build a food and beverage brand that can scale and stand out?

As a branding and package design expert, Casey Harshman believes the answer starts with defining the brand before scaling the business around it. He recommends creating a clear platform for mission, values, positioning, messaging, and design so decisions are driven by the brand rather than personal preference. From there, Casey says founders can sharpen packaging for retail, prioritize the messages consumers need most, validate key decisions with research when possible, and evolve established brands without throwing away valuable equity. The result is a more distinctive, consistent brand that can grow efficiently while earning consumer recognition and trust.

In this episode of The Missing Ingredient, CJ Bruce sits down with Casey Harshman, Founder and CEO of Frooishen Strategy & Design Collective, to discuss building a food and beverage brand that lasts. Casey covers brand foundations, retail-ready packaging, and balancing founder vision with consumer needs. He also touches on consumer research, AI in creative work, and protecting brand equity during a refresh.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments:

“Establishing that foundation is essential to drive that consistency of brand through everything forever.”
“If the human isn’t ready for the mission, then they’re going to retract.”
“Ideally, we could find a unique design system that nobody else can own and that you can fully own.”
“AI can be really useful in that… it’ll be good enough to… bolster a concept.”
“I think that… investment upfront helps synergize and makes everything else easier moving forward.”

Action Steps:

Build your brand foundation before scaling: A clear brand platform gives every future decision in packaging, messaging, digital, and retail a consistent point of reference.
Anchor creative decisions to the brand, not personal preference: Using defined mission, values, purpose, tone, story, and positioning reduces unnecessary revisions and keeps teams aligned.
Bring agency partners together around shared goals: Coordinating creative, social, web, and advertising teams creates efficiencies, reduces duplicated work, and keeps everyone focused on what is best for the brand.
Get your brand and packaging retail-ready before approaching buyers: Strong branding, packaging, sales materials, and sell-through support demonstrate preparedness and give buyers greater confidence in the brand.
Prioritize consumer needs when building your messaging hierarchy: Leading with what helps shoppers understand and want the product, then introducing the broader mission, can make the brand easier to recognize and choose.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, a food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. They partner with purpose-driven brands to drive growth through smart, results-focused marketing — without the “set it and forget it” approach.

From brand awareness and paid media to content, influencer partnerships, and loyalty programs, they act as true strategic partners invested in your long-term success.

To learn more about how they help food and beverage brands grow with impact, visit themissingingredient.com today.

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Full Transcript

Introduction and Guest Background

Intro: 00:01

Welcome to The Missing Ingredient podcast with CJ Bruce, where food and beverage founders, operators and experts share the real strategies behind building successful brands. Let’s jump into today’s show.

CJ Bruce: 00:15

Hey, I’m CJ Bruce and welcome to the show. This is the podcast where founders and leaders of high impact food and beverage brands who are serious about scaling. Each episode, I sit down with the people who power the food and beverage industry, brand operators, agencies, vendors, creators, and retailers to unpack what actually works for brands in the 5 to $100 million range.

This episode is sponsored by The Missing Ingredient, or food and beverage marketing agency that believes a better future starts with food. We partner with purpose driven brands to drive growth through smart, results focused marketing for brand awareness and performance marketing to content influencer partnerships and AI driven workflows. We act as a true strategic partner invested in your long term success. To learn more, visit themissingingredient.com today.

Now, before introducing today’s guest, I want to give a quick shout out to Nosh Live, which is how Casey and I met. You can check them out at nosh.com. They’ve got some great summits for the natural food industry.

Now to our guest, Casey Harshman is the Founder and CEO of Frooishen Strategy & Design Collective. With more than 22 years of experience in branding and package design, including a decade as client director at Interact. He has led strategic and creative initiatives for both emerging start ups and iconic household brands. Since founding Frooishen and in 2015, Casey has assembled a collective of industry experts dedicated to mastering the art of creating impactful, emotionally driven CPG brands through smart strategy, compelling design, and authentic storytelling, and fun facts. Casey and I have a couple mutual clients and Boardwalk Frozen Treats and Mochi Love, so shout out to them and welcome to the show, Casey.

Casey Harshman: 01:49

Awesome. CJ, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. And one way or another, all roads lead to Jon Landis via Nosh. and he would have a big part of our introduction to each other. So shout out to him for sure.

Why Casey Built Frooishen as a Collective

CJ Bruce: 02:04

Love it. All right, so let’s get into your background a little bit into the beginning of Frooishen. So you were, you know, years inside large CPG before founding Frooishen in 2015, curious and not as a traditional agency. So what, what made you start Frooishen in the way that you did? And you know, where did you feel like emerging brands or any brands weren’t being served in the way that you wanted to serve them?

Casey Harshman: 02:30

Yeah. And I think my time at interact, we were an emerging agency at the time, and Blake has done an amazing job to grow in Iraq to, into being one of the finest branding and package design agencies in the country or the world, honestly. So, so it was great to kind of cut my teeth there. And then as I left and, and starting to think like, okay, well, I need a creative muse to to do a branding and package design agency with I wanted to typically what bigger agencies will do is they’ll get a bunch of clients or a lot of big heavy workload. They’ll hire in a bunch of talent.

And as soon as that work is over with, if there isn’t additional work there, there isn’t enough room financially to support all of the people. And then ultimately people get let go or put on the bench. And I wanted to take a different approach to bring in a collective of industry experts who are super passionate about being an entrepreneur themselves and, and really building something that gives us like, we only have an, A team, we don’t have a B team and a C team. So if you’re working, if you’re a client of ours, you’re working with me, you’re working with Sarah, you’re working with the, the, the key cogs of our company. And so I thought that was a better way to be nimble and fast to meet the.

You know, we both know this. The brands have a variety of needs and they shift based on any number of things. So I like if they have a need to go to market with packaging, with brand activation, sales materials, etc., we want to be on the front line of that and help uplevel their marketing efforts so that they are putting their best foot forward into the marketplace.

CJ Bruce: 04:21

Yeah. That’s great.

CJ Bruce: 04:22

And that kind of connects to my next question is, you know, you define Frooishen as the point at which the product is realized. Yeah. You’ve also said that once, once the packaging is done, the game is really just begun, which touches a little bit on what you just said. So can you talk a little bit about how that, you know, you, you kind of see that process in packaging and then how that really is, is the beginning.

Casey Harshman: 04:43

Absolutely. I think a lot of people and no, no fault to it. If, if you are a teacher, whatever profession you have and you want to launch your brand, you might not have $250,000 in your back pocket to afford what needs to happen. So a lot of times people will start with, I just need a logo and a package design. And what I think then is it’s self-serving for me to say as a brand or in a package design expert, that the to stress the importance of those things.

But it really is essential to build that foundation of brand because then all of the brand activation things that you need to do in terms of the consistent expression of your brand through all trade and consumer touchpoints every day for the rest of the life of the brand. That’s a big ask, right? And so the, the better we’re able to define from a brand and a package design standpoint that in a brand platform and that foundation, well, then the rest easy isn’t the word, but it should be clearer in terms of how we need to express ourselves On from a branding, from a product, and from an overall comms perspective or, or any sort of hierarchy of communication on pack or off. And I think of that as recipes and ingredients. So if I have 50 hot plates in front of me and I’m working with eight different brands and they have 15 different needs that are happening at one time.

Well, if I know what those recipes and ingredients are for the brand, then we’re able as a team to very quickly provide them with the necessary creative and messaging assets to take advantage of whatever opportunity is in the marketplace while driving that consistency through everything. So there are moments I’ve started to talk to my team about moments of Frooishen. So when the branding and the package design is done well, that is a moment of Frooishen. And honestly, when the way we do the work we do with clients, we do it with them. So it isn’t like we’re separated for them.

We are one team. So sometimes it’s important collectively client side, agency side that we pause and say, hey, we just did this together. It’s not done. There’s a ton more left, but let’s just honor what’s happened to date. And now let’s continue to build from this as the brand goes into web and email and social and Amazon and digital and trade and all that stuff.

So establishing that foundation is essential to drive that consistency of brand through everything forever.

Using a Brand Platform to Guide Creative Decisions

CJ Bruce: 07:23

Yeah, I love that. And I think just would echo from our perspective, it’s such a critical piece. And we’ve had, we’ve had situations where brands didn’t have that set and it makes everything else more challenging, take more time. You know, people aren’t on the same page versus having that, that solid foundation. And then you can, you know, you can build and iterate and grow from, I think is, is great.

Sure. I wanted to dig into just, you just brought up the process in working with clients. And I think there are a number of agencies or freelancers out there where it is a little bit like, hey, we get a bunch of information from you. We go and do our thing on our own, and then we come back and we’re like presenting something and there’s that back and forth. Can you talk a little more about that collaboration and like how you work with brands when you’re working with them in that process?

Casey Harshman: 08:06

Yeah, for sure. And ideally that it really goes back to the start of if we’re doing branding and package design, we do a whole discovery and, and it’s understanding everything that is potentially out there in the path to market for a brand that we’re working with. We distill those things down to tension and opportunities. The next step in our process is what is what we call brand platform. So mission values, purpose, tone, story positioning, etc. this is an internal document that anchors everybody who’s working in service of the brand to this document.

So this is the beginning of recipes and ingredients. Even though we have to solve all of those things. So with this brand platform in place, well, if naming hasn’t been done yet, naming would follow. And then design pathways, design execution, at least through package design. And now as we get into brand world and start to bring that to life, that brand platform really drives all of our decisions, right?

And when ours I meaning the brand decisions of how they’re moving forward to market. So this is, this is critical because when you get into round six. So in your scenario, if someone says, hey, I need you to do this, but we really don’t have there isn’t a brand platform. There aren’t brand guidelines. Well, now it’s the human who gave that direction.

If they’re wrong, well, then the agency who was then working in support of them may get into five, six, seven rounds of revisions for whatever it might be. And it never is all the way, right? Because the we. We don’t have the right directions. We’re solving something, but we’re not solving the right thing.

And this is boy, that’s hard to identify. But from my perspective, if we don’t, then it’s malpractice. So I may ask five more questions at the start of a project. Sometimes a client might be irked by this of like, just do it. And it’s like, no, if you can just give me these five answers, I know what I’m going to bring back to you as a round one is going to be really tight and really an option to solve the issue that’s at hand, right?

And so if what that requires then is one person or several people must be in control of the brand, not based on their own personal opinion of what the brand should be. But if we’ve done, if we’ve built the brand properly and we have a brand platform, then if I’m saying, no, we don’t do that as a brand, someone may take issue with that. That’s cool. It’s not my personal opinion. It’s what the brand demands.

So when we anchor all of those decisions to how do we show up on the website? How do we capture humans with our products? What’s that? What kind of angle? What kind of lighting are the humans looking directly into our eyes as we are consumers looking at the website?

All of those things, if done through the lens of brand, should make it easier to roll out and apply everything. And you ideally would move more quickly. And all of your output creatively or from a messaging standpoint, is going to ideally support the spend that these brands are going to be putting into digital ads or promoting posts on social, etc.. So it’s all connected one way or another.

CJ Bruce: 11:34

Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. It’s always this like lane of conversation always makes me think of like background working in, in production and like TV and film production. And there’s a saying that a dollar spent in pre-production is worth $2 in production and $4 in post.

Yeah, I always think about that with this. It’s like, spend that money up front, get that right, and then that saves you a ton of money and time and headache and, you know, disagreements and tension on the other side of it.

Casey Harshman: 12:00

So especially when there’s multiple agencies involved, right. And, and I think it’s also important that if there are four agencies, if there’s a web and an email, a social, a digital ad that, that somebody from the brand side, or if there’s an agency that’s kind of in a leadership position, which sometimes we are in that we gather all of those humans together to say, hey, we’re going to check our egos at the door, although we could each do maybe what each other is doing, but we’re gonna stay in our lanes. And because this brand can’t afford for us to have a pissing match of who’s in control, we need to come together and put our minds together because it takes an army of humans to, to scale a consumer brand, that the better we can do that together in service of the brand, well then that should be better for the brand in general. And sometimes it’s hard for agencies to kind of check that ego at the door. But our approach is always what’s best for the client or for that brand.

And if that means we need to extract ourselves from something or it’s not our if it’s not something that we can guarantee or feel really confident about a strong part of our wheelhouse, well, we’re never going to step into that because that could be a moment of risk or the opportunity cost of us trying to do something for the brand is not what’s best for them. So we always try to do to the best of our ability what’s best for the brands that we’re servicing.

CJ Bruce: 13:27

Yeah. And I think that’s such a good takeaway too, for, for larger brands, working with multiple agencies, that it really is essential to have the agency partners talking to each other and communicating and in sync on projects. And I think that’s something that, yeah, we’ve, we’ve seen work well where it’s like, okay, we’re all together and like, let’s talk about it. Like you said, stay in our lanes. This is what we’re focused on.

But be open to feedback and, you know, ways to level up whatever everyone is doing. And then we’ve been in situations the opposite where it’s, you know, there’s like somebody on the brand side that’s trying to kind of silo and control and play the game of telephone between teams, which always ends up in, you know, in my opinion, in lower quality work and ends up taking up more time and, you know, a lot of wasted time.

Casey Harshman: 14:06

That’s the checking your ego at the door, right? Yeah. Especially like photography or any of that or video. Well, if you, you should be bringing your social team together with your ads team with your website. And then let’s create that shot list with everybody in mind, because we might be able to shoot something at four different angles or crop it a certain way.

And now instead of needing 40 photos, maybe we need 15, but we’re going to crop them, or we have different angles of the same kind of shot that then we can repurpose across all of these touch points, right? So the efficiencies from a spend perspective, from a client’s side that I think we should take great care about. Let’s not just willy nilly just go and do things that that aren’t as comprehensive as they could be to support all aspects of the business.

Preparing Food and Beverage Brands for Retail Buyers

CJ Bruce: 15:03

Yeah, absolutely. All right. Let’s get into some some tactical things here as well. I want to talk about your trade trade readiness checklist or hierarchy of needs before any awareness on you talked about. So you know, for, for a brand that’s, you know, maybe getting into their first conventional retail set, like what, what do you see on this?

You know, what’s on the list? And then what are the things that maybe brands are skipping or trying to jump over?

Casey Harshman: 15:29

Yeah, I think anytime that you as a brand, put your branding, your packaging in front of a buyer, let’s say. We should have our house in order, right? We should have our brand in a really great place. They should see that in the deck that we’ve that we’ve produced. They should see that in the overall branding and the package design and all of that should really flow through so that we’re the, the buyer then can, can assess us from a like, wow, you really have your stuff in order.

Your brand is in a good spot. Your product is amazing. Your packaging is up to par with industry standards or category standards. So that’s always the if, if a client of ours wants to go into a buyer and they’re and they’re just like, oh, we’re just gonna do this for now, and then we’ll kind of fake it until we make it. My philosophy or my experience has shown, no, let’s go.

We can kind of fake it. We can make it look like all of this exists, but we can go in with a very The strong foot forward and let them see that we have branding and packaging, and we have the rest of of we’re ready to support the sell through, like retailers going to take our brand and product in into store. The brand then needs to hit some sort of velocity metric for that category. Well, then everything that we’re doing, if they’re not selling direct to consumer, but they’re in these markets, well, then every single thing, all the levers we have to pull as a brand should serve driving consumers, creating that awareness to drive consumers into the store, to pull those products off shelf. That’s the best that we can do from a branding or package design or brand activation perspective.

And then the product has to take it home from there to be able to inspire someone to come back and try it again. Right? So sales presentations, sell sheets, if there’s, you know, if, if, if we mock up shipper displays as much as we can do to to help the brand go in to the buyer so that the buyer can look at them and say like, wow, you have all of these things down. You’re not trying to move into categories that you don’t belong in. You’re not trying to overreach into too many doors too soon.

And I think that diligence, both on the branding and design side, as well as just how they’re running their business, speaks volumes to a buyer.

CJ Bruce: 18:04

Yeah. That’s great. So going yeah, packaging, you know what, messaging goes on and off packaging. And so you worked with Snacktivist. Yeah.

AM I say, am I saying that right? And so that you had the regenerative ag messaging, you moved off the front of the pack. And I think this is something that we’ve come up a few times on the show where you think about like, what are the messaging, messaging hierarchy? And there are these things like values driven, you know, sustainability driven or sometimes founder’s story. And then, you know, the common thread is like taste, you know, taste and flavor.

Taste is really what drives everything. So but I’m curious from your perspective, you know, you have a mission driven founder that you’re working with and like, this is why they built the company. And then you’re telling them like, we’re not going to talk about that. How do you work that conversation?

Casey Harshman: 18:51

It’s a great question. And I think the vision of the of the founder is, is kind of the ultimate deal, right? The anchoring everything that we might do from a branding and package design and communication hierarchy should support and represent that founder’s vision as best as possible, but also overlaying the dynamics of the category and the consumer. And so I think we’ve seen a lot of like some brands will lead with that mission, but it doesn’t mean that like, we think we need to get the consumer’s attention and win, especially in a category if they don’t know who you are, If. If we disrupt the communication hierarchy by by leading with the mission.

If the human isn’t ready for the mission, then they’re going to retract. They’re going to back up. They’re not going to trade off of what they’re buying today. Because ultimately, if you’re launching a new brand or you’re redesigning or optimizing an existing brand, you’re trying to get new humans to recognize your packaging on shelf and take it home. And so through that communication hierarchy, if we if through the math, because I look at this as math, one plus one is two plus one is three.

But then if we have plus one is 87, well, then the consumer is like, wait a second. They’re they’re uncertain. I have children. If I go to the store and I’m gonna buy a baking mix, I’m gonna make pancakes the next morning. Well, if those pancakes aren’t good, my children will be a little perturbed at their dad for trying something with their friends.

And no one’s happy. And I’m throwing away pancakes, right? So thinking about that consumer experience when as we design or come up with a communication hierarchy, it’s critical to think through those things. It seems logical. Like, why wouldn’t you think through that?

But I don’t know that that enough people do that. And from an Snacktivist perspective, candidly, we thought we recommended changing the name, right? So naming is incredibly difficult. So we thought that Snacktivist was too forward of a mission. But Joni, as the founder, she’s the tip of the spear of regenerative ag, amazing human being.

And we changed the name. We started to design the new brand. And I met with her. She was in we met up in Cleveland. We had lunch and she was emotionally overcome to say, Casey, I can’t change the name.

And I said, well, there, that is your reaction. You’re the founder. It’s your vision. Then we’re not changing the name. We’re going to go back to Snacktivist, and we’re gonna ride that horse and it’s going to be we’re going to make it as great as we can make it.

Right. So each decision we made about that specific communication hierarchy, we, we were constantly balancing. Let’s, we have to win with the human on taste and, and have this most appetizing for all the products that they have, then let’s invite them secondarily into the mission of the business, right? Or into the mission of the brand versus leading with that mission, and then hooking them or getting them on board from a product perspective. So I think that plays better into the mental math of the consumer as they stand in front of the shelf or they’re shopping online.

So that’s how we’ve approached it.

Modernizing a Brand Without Losing Existing Equity

CJ Bruce: 22:14

That’s great. It’s a great story example. So talk about, you know, starting from scratch and kind of building the brands. I want to touch on, you know, like a refresh, right? Or updating an existing brand.

So I know you had the looked at the Zoup! Case study. And so this just to talk a little bit about that, like you’re modernizing the brand, protecting the existing equity. Yeah. And so when you’re coming to a product like that where there’s already, you know, there’s already equity, it’s already has some placement on shelf. Consumers know what it is.

How do you approach, you know, those projects and decide what’s safe to change? What are you gonna keep the same?

Casey Harshman: 22:48

Yeah. Our approach is pretty exhaustive. So we would do all that upfront research, right? We have to understand everything from a brand perspective. And Zoup! has certainly in the Midwest where I’m at, there are Zoup! soup and sandwich shops all over the place.

Right? So this there is a great deal of awareness out in the marketplace. And then they’re selling their soups and broths and concentrates in grocery. And so they had a Zoup! as the brand name. But then they had a tagline of good, really good.

And those two things worked together in the space of what I would say would be a traditional logo. And they kind of looked at it as that. They had two brand names. And so working through this, because sometimes these things are, they’re difficult conversations where we, through all the research to kind of it just isn’t a hypothesis on our end, but we proved it out through secondary research and all of the, the examination that we did in the marketplace. And so creating a really strong brand, read and recall and block for Zoup! was really important.

And so we removed the tagline is what I would call it. So good, really good became our North Star because that’s in essence, the whole impetus of the brand was to make the very best soups that you could make, right? Following old school recipes. So what netted was a really strong rebrand, where soup certainly stands out in a super, super powerful on shelf and differentiates itself from the competitors in the set and really stands on its own. And the yellow color really helps capture the consumer attention on shelf.

And so that one was really tricky to make sure because of the equity that they have in the marketplace. As we approached it from a design perspective, which is how we always do it. We set an edge. So if it’s an optimization, well, our first 1 or 2 concepts are going to honor that existing brand very, very closely, sometimes to the extent of where the normal consumer would be like, yeah, this might be different, but I can’t really tell the difference. Right.

To then to an edge of where the, the founder or the CEO might be like, oh my God, that’s like, that blows my mind. That’s too far. Okay, cool. Well, we’re under the hood of the brand. Let’s, let’s make sure that, and we always start with design pathways.

So each part of our process really has like a check and balance or a gate system. So we don’t just go designing things just because we have a whim of what it can be. We create a foundation of a strategy of design and then then execute against that. But as we execute against that, we want to set the edge. And so sometimes you have the answer to the solution is something that’s close in because the equity is too great to to be too disruptive.

And other times it’s like, no, we, we’ve earned the right and it’s the right move for the brand to separate us from what’s happening in the category. And, and so all of that is done with great care. And often we might move two concepts forward so that it’s like we have a safe one and then one that is maybe safe isn’t the word, but it’s a little bit more powerful, maybe. So if that’s the one that’s going to gain the consumer attention and recognition on shelf, well then the winning option, it always rises to the top. And normally clients would be like, I don’t need this for six months.

As soon as they see the winning concept, then the conversation changes like, could you give final art next Thursday? Right. So which is real then? You know you’ve got the right solution, right? If a client is emotionally overcome by it, or they change their whole operational system because they want to move this faster, you can feel pretty confident that you’ve hit the right mark.

CJ Bruce: 26:50

Nice. That’s great. Okay. I want to talk about our our friends at Mochi Love a little bit. And so this one.

So you know their cream. Cream mochi and not ice cream. So people think about mochi. They think of its ice cream. And so you, as I understand it, use focus groups and research to land on the actual name for the product.

And so could you talk a little bit about how, you know, how you validated that, how you thought about testing that or even coming in with that challenge of how do we communicate clearly that it’s not ice cream up front?

Casey Harshman: 27:24

Yeah. Brandie and Will as clients, they’re amazing humans, right. I think you’ve understood this as well. But to take the vision that she had, and it just it’s been a magical experience with them. Right?

So she has such a clear vision of which of what she wanted and, and our ability to kind of match or meet her at, at the arc of what she wanted for her brand has been a really fun thing to do. So as part of that, we, we wanted a unique name to describe the product and, and it, and to kind of like speak to the experience of the product. So we were debating several different options and we used design analytics to test the names. So I forget what that secondary option was, but we put cream clouds and then whatever the secondary option was, same, everything else was the same. And then had a battery of questions that that were asked to the to the group.

And all of this was done online. And then there’s lots of verbatims that can come from that. And so that really helped drive that. Cream clouds was the winner by far. And, and that consumers understood what it was.

And then we had lots of verbatims through it. So sometimes clients don’t have budget to go and do that research. And we just have to use our experience, our knowledge, our understanding of the consumer and the psyche around that to choose a name in this situation, like cream clouds. And although that was our leading option the whole time, it was great to get that consumer validation. And then from a brand side, you can use those that information to then put it into a sales deck and to help validate to the buyer that, hey, we’ve done our diligence and this just isn’t off the whim that we’re doing this.

And so anytime that we can get some true research validation of, of what we’re stepping forward with, it just helps certain first make the decision. But secondarily, it can go into a sales deck and to, to let the buyer know that we’ve done this research and that 87% of those who responded agreed to loved this or whatever it may be.

Making Consumer Research Accessible for Emerging Brands

CJ Bruce: 29:44

Nice. Yeah. Right. Double click on that research piece a little bit, because I think a lot of brands and brands we’ve worked with two, there’s just varying levels of one interest in, in paying or taking the time to do research at different stages. Yeah.

And then two, just the, again, the, the ability to, to actually do anything you want to do it. Like they can get very expensive. Yeah. And I’m curious your experience in, you know, you talked a little bit about just based on, you know, what your experience has been working with brands. You can bring some of that to the table to then say like, yeah, we’re confident in this direction.

Are there different? So there’s that approach. But then are there different ways of like levels of investment in research? If you know, clients wanting to do that, and how do you think about incorporating research in your work?

Casey Harshman: 30:28

Definitely. So design analytics is kind of one of our go to partners for this type of work. And they, they offer a variety of, of options and price levels. And so bigger brands might go and do 2 to 4 different cities, Boston, Columbus, Denver, what have you as focus groups. And I’ve been a part of those.

I’ve helped lead what we’re, what we’re trying to extract from from a focus group. And often you can have one really strong, powerful human that dominates those focus groups. And you. And, and then if the questions aren’t asked properly, you might just bake in and answer that you want versus truly getting the answer that you need. So that’s always really tricky.

And most of the brands that we work with don’t really have a $50,000 research budget. So a company like Design Analytics allows an emerging brand who, who wants, who maybe is debating internally about what the right solution is, or they need that X percentage of people said this to then go into a sales deck and, and so if they have the space or the budget to do it, we’re always for that. But most of the clients that we work with don’t really have the budget or the time to do that. And so, yes, we’re relying on what we’ve learned from the founder, what we’ve established as the overall brand essence and ethos. And so as we approach design and communication hierarchy, that is a branded exercise.

So Cram Clouds fits in the emoji love branded world. In addition to being a strong descriptor of what it is that the product is all about, right? So when we anchor to the brand and we take a look at what are the table stakes in the category, what do we have to say that everybody else is saying? But what can we say that makes us uniquely our own? That’s where the magic lies in terms of how do you distill down what the communication hierarchy should be and what those words should be?

We we very much look at that as a competition there. It should be a battle royale for if a client wants ten things on the front, maybe there’s only room for seven. So the top seven are going to make that cut. The next three would be the next three things that if you turn the package over, that’s what would greet you in some form or fashion so that the if the consumer picks up the pack, it’s probably 80% of the time it’s going home, right? So if they pick it up and they turn it over and it’s validating what they’ve just read in the front, that’s the that’s the best that we can do from a branding and package design perspective.

CJ Bruce: 33:17

That’s great. Okay. I want to shift into some rapid fire questions. So one AI talk about AI on every episode. It’s it’s everywhere.

It’s affecting everyone’s work. And so I’d love to hear from your perspective. You know, they, I mean, there’s some obvious things that like people could go in and say, I want packaging and here’s what my idea is. And it could spit something out. So I’m curious where, you know, where is AI useful in your process and where does it may be, you know, overblown.

Casey Harshman: 33:44

AI has been useful from a standpoint of, of doing some research upfront or, or for me personally, like I think of it as a second mind for myself to do work for me while I’m doing other work. I know from a creative perspective, we may use. So we’re, we’re never really a fan of stock imagery. So when we do concepts, it’s typically we’re using some sort of stock image to build out, say, an appetite appeal image for a product. AI can be really useful in that, that it’ll be good enough to like bolster a concept.

But just like if we put stock imagery in the concept and we would want it to be uniquely our own as a brand, well, we probably want to go in and shoot the composition of what we’ve shown in a concept. So I think that has been a powerful piece to and I’m in the artist would be able to speak to this more powerfully, but I think instead of scouring hours and hours of stock, stock image sites trying to find the perfect image, they can go into AI and ask it to produce the image that they envision. We use that to sell in the concept and then go and shoot photography if that’s in the budget or, you know, I guess we could go to print with an AI image. But typically like if AI does a package design for you, I don’t believe they’re kicking that out to you in Adobe Illustrator that’s ready to go to a printer, right? So conceptually, that may be something interesting to look at, but there’s a soullessness I see in whether it’s AI packaging or some packaging that really doesn’t capture the heart of the brand because brand identity should be everything everywhere, all the time.

And you can really see that soullessness. Or if you can remove your logo and put anybody else’s logo in there and it kind of still makes sense. Well, I don’t know that that package has captured the unique essence of said brand, right? So peace and love to everybody who’s designing things because I know it’s a very challenging deal, but that’s where I think has been most impactful. But I see my AI is the humans that we work with and they bring their human intelligence and heart to what it is that we’re designing.

And that I think comes through in the finished product.

Real Food, Transparency, and Long-Term Brand Building

CJ Bruce: 36:17

Yeah. That’s great. And then we’ll just look ahead. So looking at, you know, at shelf and food and beverage and do you see any, you know, interesting packaging or brand building trends that you are excited about?

Casey Harshman: 36:33

Yeah, I think it’s when obviously real food is something that that seems to be like, I would rather eat real food, right? I’d rather know that what I’m putting into my body is as clean and as good for me as possible. I don’t see that changing. I think the the transparency of that probably only continues to increase. And, and it’s a lot of fun when we have an opportunity to work with an emerging brand who is doing something that isn’t just.

They want to make a dime. They. They truly want to impact the their community, the country, the world and doing something better. Right? That’s, that’s a lot of fun for us to work with somebody like that.

And so I think the real food movement is, is something that we all subscribe to, not that something that isn’t so good for you that we wouldn’t we wouldn’t touch that. But that’s kind of what I see happening. And then really, truly building brands and not just doing package design and logos, that to me, these are two very distinct things. If you build the brand, you have the foundation from which everything you can build upon, and a logo and package design could lead to an activation. And the rollout of Everything Everywhere is that you’re debating is our social media post on Tuesday.

Do we look and sound like this, or do we look and sound like that? And if you’re doing that every Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday or whatever, that social cadence is, my God, are you wasting time? And then I’d also, if that’s your ad system as well, I get nervous that we’re just taking a wad of cash and lighting it on fire and throwing it in the air. Right. Because that synergy of everything everywhere, if that’s not there and we’re debating and we’re solving these key aspects of the brand on a daily basis, we’ve, we, we can do better than that.

We can, we can start and build it and probably make a larger investment upfront. But my God, I think that that investment upfront helps synergize and makes everything else easier moving forward. So ideally, brands are, are more savvy upfront and, and really take that maybe it’s a little bit harder of a path, a longer path, a more expensive path, but it’s certainly less expensive in the long run if you can build it correctly from the start. Yeah.

CJ Bruce: 39:08

No, I’m totally agree.

CJ Bruce: 39:10

All right. Let’s talk about some some brands that you’re excited about. So they’re yeah, food and beverage brands that got you excited and that you think, you know, could use a shout out.

Casey Harshman: 39:20

Yeah. I will temper my enthusiasm to talk about the brands that, that I work with, although I may pepper some of those in, but yeah, in, in some like fish wife or Painterland Sisters, you know, some of those brands that are or Heyday Canning where you have a category that that’s kind of hasn’t ever really evolved, right? The method ization, so to speak, of what happened at target maybe hasn’t caught hold at within certain product categories, but to see a brand taking a strong stance and being uniquely themselves. And I have a lot of prospects will come to us and say, we just want a Magic Spoon. And it’s like, I get what you’re saying, but you don’t really want Magic Spoon for your brand.

You want what’s right for your brand. So let’s distill down into that. And then ideally, we could find a unique design system that nobody else can own and that you can fully own. And so some of those brands definitely, I think, fall into that category. You know, Mochi Love, like we’re pretty proud of, of what, what they’re doing as a brand, how incredible their products are.

And, and they’ve been, they get it from a branding perspective. So it, it makes the synergy of us and them working together to infuse brand everywhere makes it a lot of fun. And then the really Artisan Tropic Reelie just an amazing family, a great brand, incredible products. better for you? Allergy free, right?

All of these, like all the boxes are, are checked and they’re just amazing people. And, and we love what they’ve got going on as well.

CJ Bruce: 41:15

Awesome.

CJ Bruce: 41:16

All right. Casey, I’ve got one last question. But before I ask it, I want to point people to connect with you. So your website Frooishen.com, and that’s frooishen.com. Anywhere else you recommend people go to connect with you or the work you’re doing at Frooishen?

Casey Harshman: 41:32

That’s probably the easiest email or, or call as well. I don’t know if you’ll put that up on screen, but certainly feel free to reach out on to myself or to email at any time. And the name Frooishen, really, you have to shout out to my wife. She came up with the name as being the point or plan at the the point at which a plan or project is realized and, and it’s the phonetic spelling of Frooishen. And many people have difficulty saying it, which I get, but I’m.

If people struggle to say the name and they know who the heck we are, well, then I’ll take that just the same.

What Separates a Product From a Trusted Brand

CJ Bruce: 42:09

All right. So last question is, you know, you’ve been in this work for a long time and curious how you define the difference between a product people buy and a brand that people trust.

Casey Harshman: 42:21

Yeah. I think to what we’ve been talking about is when we build the brand first and everything that we do comes out as brand, then yes, obviously brands sell products and people buy products. But I’m a Simon Sinek believer of people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And we’ve always approached it that way. So if in the why can sometimes be difficult to it’s a could be a nebulous thing, sort of like the way a founder might say.

It is very clear. How do we express that? Why? Through packaging design or brand design. And that’s the nuanced piece of it, right?

That’s where the human intelligence piece comes in. And, and I think when the brand is built and it’s and this kind of universal expression and this consistent expression lives everywhere, it makes it easier for the consumer to find themselves in your brand. So that’s how we approach this, where, yes, they want a product, but they, but consumers, I think, want to find themselves and they want to go tell everybody, look what I found and look how awesome this is and how it’s changing my life. So not that that can happen there. I’m sure there’s plenty of brands that have just launched as a logo and a package design, and they’ve succeeded.

But the numbers of failures, I think, is 80% of brands that launch fail within two years. And man, that that keeps me up at night. I don’t that’s not Frooishen. right? That’s that there’s some level of failure, and there can be a million reasons why a brand fails, some that are totally out of their control.

Right? If a co man goes down or steals their product or, or they lose a huge shipment or whatever it is, like there’s, there’s so many things that impact that, but truly anchoring from a brand, a holistic brand expression that’s unique to itself. That’s always the winning formula. And consumers will get that and buy into the why of the brand and that just enjoy the products as they do.

CJ Bruce: 44:32

Great. Great note to end on. Okay. We’ve been talking to Casey Harshman, Founder and CEO of Frooishen Strategy & Design Collective. Sure, check them out at Frooishen.com.

Thanks so much for being on Casey.

Casey Harshman: 44:42

Thanks, Jay.

Outro: 44:45

Thanks for listening to The Missing Ingredient podcast. We’ll see you again next time, and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.