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Meet the Next Generation Honest Tea: Just Ice Tea

Honest Tea co-founder Seth Goldman has named the successor to the bottled organic tea line that Coca-Cola has discontinued: Just Ice Tea. Goldman made the announcement on his company’s website and in an interview with Gourmet News.

“The name builds on our Fair Trade commitment, the working conditions and wages paid, and it also looks at the environment, we’re choosing organic over chemicals, pesticides to maintain pristine ecosystems,” Goldman told Gourmet News. “And it also speaks to the taste. It’s just sweet enough.

“We use recognizable and minimal ingredients in every recipe,” Goldman wrote on the website, “and of course nothing artificial. You will taste the essence of the tea, and not much more.”

Coca-Cola acquired Honest Tea in 2011.

Coca-Cola’s announcement in May that it was discontinuing Honest Tea was “a gut punch to all the sweat, tears and incredible passion that went into building our beloved brand,” Goldman said in a post on his LinkedIn account.

“But we bounced back well!” Goldman told Gourmet News.

Goldman expects Just Ice Tea to be on shelves this fall.

Read more about Goldman’s new ice tea, created with Chef Spike Mendelsohn, in the August issue of Gourmet News. Subscribe now so you don’t miss anything!

QVC, HSN Showcase Hiatus Cheesecake for Pride Month

Hiatus logoQurate Retail Group’s Small Business Spotlight, an initiative to strengthen diverse small businesses through increased exposure and various other pro bono in-kind services, has selected Maryland-based Hiatus Cheesecake to showcase during Pride Month.

Hiatus Cheesecake’s story began appearing on QVC’s and HSN’s websites and social pages in June 2022, and the company will be highlighted on air on June 29th at 1 and 7 p,m, ET on QVC and at 2:55 and 8:55 p.m. ET on HSN.

Hiatus Cheesecake is a local, family-owned business based in Baltimore.  Founder Matthew Featherstone developed a passion for baking while baking with his mother as a child.  After 15 years in the restaurant industry, his friends and coworkers convinced him to start his own business, so he left his job and founded Hiatus Cheesecake.

Low profit margins, expensive ingredients, specialized staffing needs, and unpredictable ordering patterns from customers require most businesses to outsource desserts, Featherstone said. One of the major downsides to this strategy is that these outsourced desserts typically lose their in-house pastry chef taste and texture.

“We want to help solve this problem. At Hiatus, we keep it simple with one dessert – cheesecake. We make the highest quality premier cheesecakes in the market with all natural ingredients and we wholesale them to restaurants and grocery stores. We offer a creative selection of flavors and competitive pricing. Our customers are seeing a 50 to 75 percent net profit on their cheesecake order by capitalizing on our exclusive wholesale prices.”

The Qurate Retail Group program, which launched in 2020, builds on Qurate Retail Group’s longstanding foundation of supporting small businesses and reflects the company’s commitment to increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups.

Qurate Retail Group, a vCommerce leader that includes QVC, HSN, Zulily and several other brands, is using its production resources, television broadcasts and digital platforms to help Hiatus Cheesecake share its story with millions of consumers nationwide.

“We appreciate QVC and HSN for supporting and putting a spotlight on our small family owned business,” Featherstone said. “I am so excited about this opportunity and I’m looking forward to sharing our cheesecake with everyone so that they can, ‘Escape with Every Bite.'”

“Hiatus Cheesecake is looking forward to scaling and expanding our business to consumer operations with the increased brand awareness that will be generated as a result of sharing our story and products with millions of consumers during our small business spotlight,” Featherstone said.

For updates on the specialty food industry, subscribe to Gourmet News.

H-E-B, Amazon, Amazon Fresh Top eCommerce Grocers, dunnhumby Says

A ranking of eCommerce grocers by dunnhumby

In a near statistical tie, H-E-B edged out Amazon and Amazon Fresh as top ranked eCommerce grocers, according to data science miner dunnhumbly in its inaugural eCommerce Retailer Preference Index, a nationwide study examining the emerging $100 billion U.S. eCommerce grocery market.

Walmart landed in the fourth spot and Sam’s Club rounded out the top five eCommerce grocers. Kroger, BJ’s and Sprouts had the next highest scores in the RPI, with all three finishing in the top tercile. The dunnhumby eCommerce grocers RPI was released as part of The dunnhumby Quarterly: a strategic market analysis of key retail themes, with the first edition being focused on eCommerce.

“H-E-B’s impressive performance proves that it’s possible to compete and win against Amazon when it comes to grocery e-commerce. Their success offers mid-size and regional retailers a roadmap on how to succeed online,” said Grant Steadman, president of North America for dunnhumby. “H-E-B’s eCommerce journey goes back to 2015, when they first started with curbside pick-up, and they have since built up a powerful online ecosystem. The combination of a simple and easy to use shopping experience with a fantastic emotional connection with customers shows how grocers can thrive in this multichannel landscape.”

The overall RPI rankings are the result of a consumer survey-informed statistical model that predicts how retailers execute on the customer needs that matter most for driving eCommerce performance and emotional bonds with online shoppers. The eCommerce RPI methodology calculates eCommerce performance through a composite score of Change in Web Visits (2019 to 2021) from SimilarWeb, Share of Wallet Online, and Online Penetration of a Retailer’s Total Shopper Base.

Retailers’ preference driver score and emotional connection score were gathered from a customized, online survey of 3,000 U.S. households that shopped online at least once in the 30 days prior to being surveyed. The five drivers of customer preference for eCommerce are: 1) owned digital asset usage, 2) ease and reliability, 3) substitutes, 4) product, 5) price.

Key findings:

  • H-E-B captured the top ranking of eCommerce grocers due to a number of factors, including boasting the highest level of emotional connection and online share of wallet among their customer base, out of all the retailers studied. Although they are relatively new to offering online shopping compared to Amazon and Walmart, H-E-B customers were the ones that migrated their spending online the most after the pandemic hit, increasing their grocery spending online by 27 percent, which resulted in H-E-B having the highest share of wallet online.
  • The eight top performing retailers in this study all have well-established eCommerce capabilities, with scale and size as a key competitive advantage. Scale and size allows them to have more funds to invest in eCommerce and greater operational efficiencies. In addition, first tercile retailers have a clear strength in their own digital assets, versus relying mostly on intermediaries, having achieved a higher adoption with three out of five customers shopping on these assets during their last online trip. This has likely given retailers greater control over the customer online experience.
  • Unlike the dunnhumby U.S. Grocery RPI that ranks prices as the most important customer preference driver, for ecommerce success the most important drivers are 1) owned digital asset usage and 2) ease and reliability because they have the strongest positive correlation with customer sentiment and eCommerce performance metrics. This means that banners that scored highest on these two drivers, also had the strongest emotional and eCommerce performance in this study. Walmart, Amazon and Amazon Fresh are the three top ranked retailers for owned digital asset usage. Sam’s Club, Amazon Fresh and Aldi are the top three retailers for ease and reliability.
  • Retailers who lean more heavily on intermediaries have lower scores for the ease/reliability customer preference driver, higher bounce rates, and fewer pages/visits. In these cases, customer loyalty is with the retailer, not the intermediary. Instacart, Shipt and Door Dash had lower emotional connection than nearly every grocery retailer measured.
  • Omnichannel shoppers look very different than brick and mortar shoppers and are more likely to be motivated by caregiving of children and pets. Omnichannel shoppers, which can be up to 40% of all shoppers, are defined as customers who purchase with a retailer across multiple channels. Thirty-eight percent are between the ages of 25-54 and have at least two children. They buy online two times per month with three out of every five visits to a retailer grocer occurring online. On average they spend $531 per month across all the stores they shop and spend $131 per month – 25% of their share of wallet – with a single retailer. In contrast, brick and mortar only shopper is at least 50% of a retailer’s shopping base. Fifty-seven percent of them are 55 and up, and are either empty nesters, retirees or both. On average, these shoppers spend $382 per month across all the stores they shop and spend $111 per month – 29% of their share of wallet – with a single retailer.
  • Covid accelerated grocery growth for eCommerce, but it may have just brought the grocery sector closer to its eCommerce sales ceiling at a faster rate, rather than raised the height of that ceiling. Rising inflation, a subsiding pandemic, and increased consumer mobility are putting the brakes on eCommerce growth.

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