Should We Sell Food Like Jewelry?

Luxury Exec Brings New Perspective to Agricultural Marketing

Richard Christiansen is a luxury brand executive who had an opportunity to partner with struggling farmers during COVID to help them find markets for their goods and in the process developed a multimillion dollar company. His high end marketing expertise at work in the ag sector is changing the way we think about telling farm stories and growing profitable businesses.

Should Farmers Take a Cue From Corporate America?

Christiansen is doing two interesting things that have the potential to reshape the way we sell agricultural goods in the future. One, he’s marketing agricultural inconsistencies; not every yield is the same. And two, he’s prioritizing the customer experience over educating shoppers.

A large majority of branding tactics revolve around building trust with consumers based on bringing the exact same product to market, every time. But the very nature of agriculture is altogether different. Yield sizes are different from harvest to harvest, flavors are different from year to year and if you’ve ever had a backyard garden then you know even the size and shape of foods can be different. 

Based on the success of the ugly food category we know consumers are willing to purchase food items that don’t look like the symmetrical or aesthetically cohesive options we typically see in the produce section at the super market. The Misfit Market- Imperfect Foods partnership serves over 800,000 homes in the United States. But where the misfits might say ugly, Christiansen says unique.

Flamingo Estate, Christiansen’s business, sees small batch products as luxury items and in doing so he’s taking an aspect of agriculture that seems risky and making it profitable. He’s not sourcing mass quantities of ingredients to fulfill a certain quota, which is a move that has proven to jeopardize quality. Instead, his business has grown out of finding strategic ways to utilize whatever ingredients he has access to. 

What began as an effort to support small farms losing buyers when restaurants shut down during COVID has turned into a store filled with specialty batch pantry goods, beauty products, flowers and seasonal produce. With the support of A -listers harvesting honey, making olive oil, and most recently canning pickles, that agriculture consistently offers one of a kind experiences has taken hold quickly.

The way Christiansen sees it, there are a lot of people making really incredible products with no marketing strategy. Take a stroll around your local farmers’ market and you’ll see soaps, jams, coffees, and specialty sauces. They are made from high quality ingredients, unique flavors and often a significant amount of labor. But, sellers are lucky to make back the money they spend renting their weekly booth. They have something great to offer, but they don’t know how to market it and too often, they sell their process not their product.

From Christiansen’s experience, selling concepts like sustainability and regenerative ag hasn’t worked.  Most people are trying to sell their products with fear based marketing strategies or overloading potential customers with information. However, shoppers are enticed to get something they need, a great tasting coffee, a flavorful olive oil or shower soap. And they feel urgency to make a purchase if what they want might not be available next week. When they enjoy the purchase they made, they will return for more and in the case of Flamingo Estates be happy to know that they contributed to small regenerative farms. 

In a world where the idea of giving products a sustainability score alongside a price tag is tossed around as a marketing strategy, focusing on consumer experience and farm values as the timeless story that builds resilient supply chain ecosystems seems radical.  If you purchase a product from Flamingo Estate, you are contributing to regenerative agriculture practices, but Christiansen doesn’t need you to care about the environment, he just needs you to love his brand.

Will Flamingo Estate Disrupt Markets?

Could leveraging inconsistency in agriculture and prioritizing consumer experience shake things up for Big Food? The United States boasts one of the most safe, resilient and reliably available food systems in the world. We hold that position because we have long prioritized predictability and efficiency in food production. The top down business model works to guarantee that farmers know what markets are available for their goods and they often plant in accordance with demand from big food companies at home and abroad.  

For General Mills, PepsiCo, or even companies like Chipotle a change in tactics would be a huge risk to bottom lines. Could they afford to stop sourcing exact ingredients and instead make due with what became available season by season? Would customers continue buying if the flavors changed and availability was inconsistent? The answer is probably, no. This scope of food production relies on purchasing ingredients well in advance and giving shoppers the exact same product every time they visit the grocery store.

Christiansen’s model could be a huge step for regionally strong agricultural business. He’s proving that you can be profitable without being big. In fact, staying small, offering high quality products and reminding customers that they can’t get this exact product anywhere and everywhere are the very pieces of the story that could help small farms turn a profit and find realistic avenues to scale. 

Flamingo Estate is also reminding food producers that innovation doesn’t always win out. If you’re choosing between a product full of ingredients you’ve never heard of but that has seven official labels and a bag of coffee beans that smells amazing, odds are, you’re going home with the coffee.  Christiansen’s model has scaled quickly because he’s offering things people are going to purchase anyway so he doesn’t have to convince them of the value of olive oil, he just has to entice them to buy his olive oil.

Food might never be viewed as a luxury item the way fine jewelry is and we also can’t afford to shift all of our food production into a Flamingo Estate business model. But, perhaps rural America could take a page out of the corporate executive playbook when it comes to marketing strategy.