Bant Breen:

Nature Box is a truly nationally recognized, tech-enabled CPG company. It’s it has already sold over 3 million snack boxes to consumers and corporations and maintains the largest collection of wellness snacks infused with adaptogenic plant-based ingredients to help people live better, more balanced lives. Tell me a little bit more about the path there and how that has shaped over the last couple of years. What is exciting for you right now?

John Occhipinti:

The path is kind of interesting. I never thought I’d be in the snacking business. I’ve always been interested in mindfulness and being very much conscious of how I live my life. The focus initially on the company was, “Hey, what are we great at, where’s the business model? Where are we going to focus instead of doing five things, let’s do two things extremely well.” Initially, we said, “Listen, let’s focus on our corporate snacking business. Then direct to the consumer side, we have these better-for-you snacks that are great, they taste great, but what can we do to elevate that?” That game brought us back to the consumer side. We were on the path of doing this corporate stacking business in 2019. We focused on the customer, we took our NPS scores from like low 20s to over 80, which is pretty unheard of, and we had a growing, successful business and then something happened to me personally. I have three kids. My second daughter was in college at the time when all this happened, but earlier in her life, she had suffered from sensitivities to her skin. In middle school, she suffered from migraines that turned into massive migraines that would last a week long. She had called me she was in college and said “Dad, I just can’t function. I have this week-long migraine.” I said, “Listen, come home. Mom’s out of town.” I say like how are we going to solve this. Tom Brady drinks a gallon of water and he’s super healthy and only eats leafy green vegetables. Let’s change your diet. hired him sous and others working and then a friend of ours said, “You should try this. A plant-based extract comes from a hemp plant called CBD.” We bought a small tincture of CBD to drop a span under her tongue. Her headache would just disappear I said to myself, “Wow, that’s kind of an amazing ingredient that helped her level out her endocannabinoid system and helped her manage her serotonin levels.” It was a stress that triggered these headaches. She’s super sensitive. This particular plant ingredient changed her life. I was like, “Wow, what if we infuse CBD into a snack? What would that do?” I went to my VP of marketing, and she’s like, “You are nuts. Like, that’s not what we do.” And I said, “Well, let’s just do a survey, let’s merchandise this thing on the site and see if we get any clicks on it, we’ll get a reaction.” We sent out an email saying we’re thinking about launching the CBD snack and our site traffic doubled overnight. That kind of led us on this journey of “Okay, how do we change the way we think about snacking snacking is something we’ve been doing for years?” right. We started building these plant extracts into the snacks. Every day, we live our lives unconsciously, it’s like Groundhog Day, especially today with COVID lasting so long. We get up, we go down to maybe our office or desk, and we live our lives unconsciously our cortisol levels in the afternoon are high. We grab Doritos, and we grab snacks, and our bodies are sort of unconsciously asking themselves to be sips soothed. What we’re trying to do is change that to a more mindful experience where you’re taking a snack, this tastes just as good as Dorito, but may help you level your cortisol levels in your body and help you manage stress. That’s the mantra that we’re coming back to. Sorry this is long-winded but NatureBox was about the fundamentals of bringing that company back to its fundamentals of focusing on customers, but then also weaving in what I was passionate about. It’s about mindfulness and trying to create, and reduce the stress in our lives. Those two things, when you bring purpose to a company may flourish and that’s what we’re excited about.

Bant Breen:

As you’re thinking about the next steps with NatureBox, what does 2021 like for you guys, and maybe after that?

John Occhipinti:

Here’s what’s interesting. I think about 2021 for us. So most e-commerce businesses have a fundamental problem. That is, how do I acquire new customers? Then how do I monetize them? There’s sort of this CAC to LTV ratio. CAC is the cost of customer acquisition and lifetime value. Most e-commerce folks have to spend oodles of money on Facebook to get a cost-per-action and get a consumer into the door. Then they have to have, hopefully, a 3x revenue multiple on top of that. What’s interesting with us is that we think that we have kind of cracked that code like how we are getting free consumers through this corporate channel by landing 1000 employees at a time with a corporation through a wellness program. Maybe they’re using wellness dollars, through their insurance, it’s free, we get on board all these new folks. We think that we’ve kind of cracked the code on how to grow an E-commerce business in the work of the home consumer. I’m excited about the kind of growing and evangelizing that, at the same time, delivers these kinds of products that could make a difference a small difference in someone’s life and help them manage stress by helping them break those unconscious habits of eating Doritos. Give them an alternative, that’s a better for you a healthier alternative. I think there’s more attention to that, we’re all coming out of COVID. We look back, and we say, “What are we more grateful for? What do we care about? What’s important in our lives?” There’s more of a sense of well-being and managing my stress levels now that those environmental stress levels hopefully are coming down. We’d like to continue to see those come down, I can live my life again, but maybe I’ll live my life a little bit better than I did before COVID. 

Bant Breen:

John, thank you so much for being on UNCAGED today and we look forward to having you back. 

To see the full interview on the Uncaged YouTube channel, go to:

https://youtu.be/BjAButx7j24

 

 

 

E: qstudio@qnary.com