Farm Brothers – Thoughtful delights

Farm Brothers Herman & Teyler have an ingrained love for simplicity and the purity of homemade snacks. This never disappeared, even after they were pulled away from the country side. That’s why they left their jobs and started hunting their dream of providing the world with wholesome and delicious organic grain cookies: to share the “Good Stuff” with a predominantly big audience. The taste and goodness of this organic delight enables the brand to create positive impact: making organic agriculture a growing niche and top of mind among consumers.  

The progress of goodness

Farm Brothers is a slow-baked cookie brand, aiming to make organic the standard. The brand does this by creating impact as a B-corp with organic and healthy products. It’s about exploring and sharing their passion, that’s at the core of the product. Teyler tells us “we’re pursuing our dream by making organic and tasty food accessible to a large audience – bigger than it is now”. Currently, ‘organic’ only takes around 2,5% of the total food sales in the Netherlands. To really make a change, create impact and become the norm, this share should start growing. “When availability increases, we could grow awareness and make ‘organic’ more top of mind with consumers than it is now”.

Creating an impact brand story

We focus on specific elements that, to our belief, can help grow our impact: Firstly, it’s about making products that are irresistible and taste great. Second, the packaging ensures that our product jumps out of the shelf and attracts the consumer’s attention. Also, the strong brand story that we created, is to preserve the feeling of trust among consumers. They can and should trust our product and brand. Lastly, Farm Brothers’ cookies should be affordable and available via different channels. From organic retail to quality coffee places. Creating visibility in different places and moments are key for the brand “in convincing others to buy organic, this is the way to go for us”, Teyler adds.

Farm Brothers has a clear goal and strategizes its way towards it with various elements as the brand’s mindset, story and packaging. These are all put in favor of the main goal of contributing to the growth and promotion of organic farming. In pursuing this endeavor, the two make sure they won’t miss a single opportunity:

The Dutch are big coffee drinkers. And they expect a cookie with that coffee: handing over a lot of engagement opportunities to Farm Brothers….

Selling a new experience

In convincing consumers of the benefits of organic cookies, the competition of all other tasty snacks comes in. With this belief in mind, it’s important to focus on a tasty and good-looking product that nicely packaged too. If you can persuade consumers with such an exciting product, you’re halfway there. “Nowadays, consumers know what they want. They’ll only buy your product again if they really, really enjoyed it”.

Therefore, creating the right experience for your consumer is key – and making it work, in the best way possible. For Farm Brothers, it’s in only using premium ingredients, that are 100% organic and make it as healthy as possible. That means: less and unrefined sugar, different types of whole grains, more fiber, no palm oil or egg and no unnatural additives or preservatives.

Giving shape to tasty

In starting up Farm Brothers, Teyler and Herman held on to their vision and always kept implementing their personal ethics in a natural way. Last year, the two came across B Corporation, that certifies companies as B-corp when they have ‘a force of good in their core’. Since recently, Farm Brothers can call itself a certified B-corp.

The assessment interrogated them about how to manage this young company; regarding local ingredient sourcing, recycling the packaging, working with people with a distance to the workforce and supporting charity with its revenues.

It’s not easy to start something from the ground up and it’ll take time to shape your company as you envisioned

Making more impact steps

According to Teyler, Farm Brothers wants to become a food brand people can trust, without needing to read the back of the packaging. In other words: “people should know where Farm Brothers stands for; high quality and ingredients that are better for you and the planet. Also, we are the European no. 1 go to organic food brand that has delicious products in different segments of the market”. A well-thought ambition, regarding the food industry and growing skepticism among consumers.

Also, in the future Farm Brothers would like to help farmers with the transition from conventional to organic farming by setting up a foundation. “We strive to be a company that people love to work for, and hope to continue to make a positive impact on people’s lives and the planet. We try to do that by promoting organic agriculture through the sales of organic food”.

To create impact, I want to clarify that it takes time, perseverance and willingness to work really hard for nothing. Try to define a longer term ambition and just go for it

These impact creators don’t take ‘no’ for an answer and keep pushing until they get a ‘yes’. From that moment onwards, it’ll get easier. The world of organic food is pretty small and even though Farm Brothers wants to break through this, there are still many entrepreneurs facing comparable challenges.

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