Steve Gardiner of Nature’s Bakery On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand
An Interview With Martita Mestey
Be Flexible: With the peaks and valleys that brands experience as they grow and scale, the ability to remain agile — from processes to planning — is key to helping you stay the course.
As a part of our series, “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand,” I had the pleasure of interviewing Steve Gardiner, Chief Executive Officer at Nature’s Bakery.
Steve Gardiner is the CEO at Nature’s Bakery, a best-selling, plant-based, nut-free, better-for-you snack bar brand, which is part of the Mars family of companies. Since joining in 2019, Gardiner has helped Nature’s Bakery become a top 10, fastest-growing granola and snack bar brand in a $4B category. On a mission to nourish and enable every family to thrive, Nature’s Bakery believes snacks should taste as good as they make you feel. Prior to Nature’s Bakery, Gardiner worked at PepsiCo for nearly 25 years as a sales leader for brands including Quaker, Tropicana and Gatorade. Outside of work, he enjoys riding motorcycles and spending time outside.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your “childhood backstory”?
I was born in the United Kingdom and spent my formative years in Canada from grade school through college. I was young when my family moved to a small, remote town just above North Dakota. Being from England, we had to adapt; the weather was bitterly cold and our new community was grounded in farming, mining and hockey, of course. Looking back, that environment pushed me to be curious, engaged and open to new things.
During my high school and college years, I always looked for creative ways to make money. My entrepreneurial efforts lead to a small distribution company that I started with a friend after college. After building and running the business for several years, I moved to Florida and began my career at PepsiCo where I spent nearly 25 years in sales working on both large and emerging brands.
Can you share with us the story of the “ah ha” moment that led to the creation of the food or beverage brand you are leading?
When the recession hit, Nature’s Bakery’s father/son founders set out to make healthier snacking available to everyone — they wanted to challenge the snack bar industry to make premium products without the premium price. In 2011, they turned their dream into reality and launched Nature’s Bakery with a mission to make delicious, wholesome and accessibly priced snacks for the whole family.
I’m proud to say our founding principles still guide the Nature’s Bakery of today.
Let’s imagine that someone reading this interview has an idea for a product that they would like to produce. What are the first few steps that you would recommend that they take?
Well, a great product can’t reach its potential without a solid consumer base. Along with the development of your product idea, I’d recommend defining your target consumer and how you’re serving them. Put yourself in their shoes, understand their pain points and ensure your product solves it for them. From there, you’ll have a product that appeals to shoppers and meets a real need. At Nature’s Bakery, we are laser-focused on making snacks for ingredient-conscious gatekeepers seeking healthier products for the whole family and who don’t want to compromise on taste.
It’s critical to set the right prices to support a healthy P&L. You’ll also need to develop a solid supply chain network to maintain supply as you grow and scale. Whether you’re starting with a team of five or 50, stay true to your brand — don’t waiver on your product principles, mission or founding values even as your business grows. This will help you maintain a consistent message and product story to scale in a way that always resonates with your target consumers.
Unless your business is solely direct to consumer, you have to build confidence with potential retailers and continue to nurture those relationships once you make it in store. Reinforce your points of difference, share your vision and show your brand’s value so they can see the opportunities your products will bring.
Many people have good ideas all the time. But some people seem to struggle in taking a good idea and translating it into an actual business. How would you encourage someone to overcome this hurdle?
Put pen to paper. Document your ideas, ambitions and goals, then organize them into a business plan. A viable business plan allows for profitable growth over time. From there — and this might take some courage — share your ideas with trusted colleagues, mentors, family or friends. Stay true to your vision but seek constructive feedback to strengthen your idea. Our company was founded on the idea that wholesome snacks should taste great and be accessible to all — this mission gave us a clear foundation and a springboard to carry out and evolve our founding principles. Identify a clear vision and build from there.
What are your thoughts about bootstrapping vs looking for venture capital? What is the best way to decide if you should do either one?
It depends. I’ve experienced both sides and there are advantages and disadvantages either way. Funding can be difficult to obtain, so many brands will need to bootstrap for quite some time — or forever. It might take longer to scale and grow but for business owners and stakeholders that want to maintain independence, venture capital might not be a fit. That said, additional resources, access to industry experts and — most importantly — the financial support will help you staff up and scale faster, which makes venture capital appealing. VMG Partners was key to accelerating Nature’s Bakery’s growth before we joined KIND; great partnerships with trusting, supportive VCs that believe in your brand make a difference.
Every business has different needs at different points in their brand stage.
Can you share thoughts from your experience about how to source good raw ingredients, how to source a good manufacturer, and how to find a retailer or distributor?
My present day perspective? Hire a fantastic team of experts who are driven to source the best ingredients, the best vendors and work hard to land your dream retailers. I’m fortunate to have a talented team at Nature’s Bakery that’s nimble and motivated to work with the best partners and foster strong relationships with retailers and distributors. In the past, I’ve been the person working to expand and secure distribution. It’s hard work that takes a lot of determination, tenacity and strong partnerships. Never give up on networking, relationship building and putting your brand out there until you reach your goals.
Here is the main question of our discussion. What are your “5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage Brand” and why?
- A Great Product: Building a brand that consumers love starts with a quality product. Stay true to your product principles — ingredients and beyond — no matter how big your business grows. In 2019, we rebranded to better highlight our bars, ingredients and product attributes on our new packaging. We leaned into colors that reflected our flavors, which modernized our look to better stand out on the shelf — and with consumers. A huge part of our success and growth over the last several years is attributed to our rebrand; this serves as a reminder that your products should be your greatest inspiration.
- Know Your Consumers…And Your Category: Be consumer-obsessed. They’re your most important advocates. Stay aware of what’s happening in your category and lean into your points of difference. As the world continues to evolve, so do consumption and usage occasions. Keep your eyes peeled on market and category changes and pivot as often as you need to.
- A Defined Brand Mission and Vision: A fantastic product will take you far, but to build a brand consumers love, and to further make your mark, define your brand beliefs and live and breathe it in everything you do.
- Be Flexible: With the peaks and valleys that brands experience as they grow and scale, the ability to remain agile — from processes to planning — is key to helping you stay the course.
- Be Resilient: This is a big one. It’s equally important to celebrate your wins as it is to brush yourself off when you encounter roadblocks. Stay focused on your goals to help you bounce back even stronger than before.
I wouldn’t be the pragmatist that I am without adding a healthy dose of reality to these tips for success. We’ve experienced incredible highs over the years, but with that comes growing pains. Like many brands, we’ve had to navigate inventory constraints and production limitations. Our team has had to pivot more times than I can count, but we remain committed to transparency and finding solutions to best serve our consumers and retailers. Keep your team’s spirits high by celebrating the wins but know that you’ll encounter headwinds — be prepared and ensure you have the tools and teams in place to navigate the hard times.
Can you share your ideas about how to create a product that people really love and are ‘crazy about’?
I believe creating a brand that people love is all about staying true to your founding principles, fulfilling the needs of your consumer and always keeping them top of mind in everything you do — and every product you make. From trade shows to events and social media, we interact with our consumers on a daily basis and receive so much positive feedback that fuels our team’s motivation and love for the brand. For us, we’re at the intersection of wholesome ingredients, delicious taste and accessibility — these are product promises our consumers expect and value, so they’ll remain priorities for our team. Creating a trusted product with a point of difference that solves consumer needs leads to loyalty.
Ok. We are nearly done. Here are our final questions. How have you used your success to make the world a better place?
We’ve got an amazing team here at Nature’s Bakery and in my time as CEO, I work hard to lead with empathy and care. I want everyone at our organization to come to work happy and leave feeling the same so they can feel their best out in the world. As a brand, we’re spreading joy — and wholesome snacks — that offer a better, more accessible alternative to all families. This is something we’re really proud of. Our brand mission is to nourish families and enable them to thrive, so I encourage our team to champion causes that bring this to life — an example of this is our recent donation to No Kid Hungry, an organization committed to eliminating child hunger in the U.S. On the consumer front, we created a platform called, “Snack Sized Adventures,” that provides family-friendly activity ideas to help them spend quality time together without the planning — or the screens.
You are an inspiration to a great many people. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Alright, I’ve got to show the first sentence of this question to my kids! That’s kind of you to say and I’m proud to lead this great team and amazing brand.
As someone who loves being outdoors, I believe the combination of fresh air, sunshine and physical activity helps your mind, body and spirit. I’d like to encourage people to spend as much screen-free time in the great outdoors as possible to help them reset and feel their best. Beyond this, spending more time outside leads to greater appreciation of nature — let’s work towards preserving it.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
Steve Gardiner of Nature’s Bakery On 5 Things You Need To Create a Successful Food or Beverage… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.