CASE STUDY
Learn how Specialty Produce uses TINT across each of their marketing touchpoints
Industry
About Specialty Produce
Specialty Produce is a family-owned food service business in San Diego, California. For the past 30 years they have strived to be the best organic food supplier in the country and currently supply over 600 food businesses with fresh produce daily.
The Challenge
As Specialty Produce had different sides to their business, the farm side and the restaurant side, each team member played a vital role in the farm to plate journey, but few employees could see how their work contributed to the full picture. The executive team wanted to show Specialty Produce’s entire operations process, how the produce was used, and the people involved. They believed this would inspire employees, increase understanding of each individual’s impact, and lead to more engaged employees. And, more engaged employees would ultimately lead to better service for their customers.
The Solution
Specialty Produce was looking for a software solution to find engaging user-generated content (UGC) from their employees and manage it in one place. How could they do this? Enter TINT. TINT’s software gave Specialty Produce the ability to collect user-generated content, identify the most relevant posts, and publish it across digital screens, websites, jumbotrons, mobile sites, and more.
“Our main goal was to engage our employees in the social process. Our hope was that they would be inspired by seeing their coworkers post and maybe spark a bit of friendly competition. We found out quickly that we were also able to engage our restaurant and chef customers, whose posts show up in our warehouse and on the front of our website viewed the world over”
Kelly Orange, Specialty Produce
How They Did It
Specialty Produce encouraged their employees to share social content using #SpecialtyProduce. Employees would see their posts displayed in the warehouse, on the website, and eventually at partner restaurants. As this inspired more sharing and content creation, Specialty Produce had built a library of assets that they could re-purpose in digital campaigns and print collateral, which meant a big decrease in content creation costs. Moreover, the posts together created a brand story based on reality, and the pride, excellence, and service that Specialty Produce worked hard to establish throughout their business naturally emerged.
The Results
Over the past couple of years, Specialty Produce set up a number of TINTs for their website, office displays, and partner restaurants to showcase different content for different purposes. Some of this content is intended to build the Specialty Produce brand, and some of this content is intended to spread awareness about the farm to table movement.
500M+
impressions across social networks
Contributions
by The Food Network, Alton Brown, SELF Magazine, Cucina Urbana
79K+
Posts to their hashtag #SpecialtyProduce
TINT Analytics
TINT Analytics gives Specialty Produce the ability to see stats like the location, time, and network for each post so they can better understand their traffic and where it comes from. They can even see their most influential and outspoken contributors.
TINT and Beyond
Growing beyond their original need, Specialty Produce’s executive team now wants to use TINT in their partner restaurants as well as their screens at their headquarters to continually showcase their real brand story through the eyes of their biggest advocates: employees and customers. Their goal is to get TINT into 100 of their restaurant partners and spread their hashtag while educating consumers about farming, food, and cooking. What started out as a way to increase employee engagement has grown into a full communications strategy and resulted in new contracts and revenue for the business. They foresee a long partnership with TINT as the solution to power their UGC marketing.
“We are currently working to get TINT into our partner restaurants to help build their business and help grow our #SpecialtyProduce hashtag along with many others that we have started along the way to document the process of Farm to Table. We love the simplicity of TINT and we hate that we didn’t have it 10 years ago!”
Kelly Orange, Specialty Produce
