DTC growth Show. Welcome to the DDC growth Show presented by banknotes minted by hashtag pay. My name is Ian. And each episode we talked to leaders in the DTC space about e commerce and all things DTC and retail. Today I get to speak with Carter Jensen, who is senior manager of E commerce and global lead for commerce, innovation and direct to consumer for General Mills. Yes, General Mills, as in Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch Lucky Charms, and a number of brands. You may not have heard of the Carter, thanks for joining us.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Awesome. Well, yeah, tell us about this really unique position that you have with General Mills and what it all entails.
Yeah, so I've been at GMI now for just over two years, joined in June of 2020. From my basement, which as you can imagine, was a really interesting experience. And I just feel super grateful. I think I landed in, obviously an industry that was transformed in an incredible way by you know, the pandemic and just kind of shifting grocery habits from from consumers across the United States. But yeah, my role today, I lead a team that focuses on new and emerging platforms within the commerce space. And one of the key territories that we focus on is direct to consumer. So over the last two years, we have been working to kind of harness the energy of DDC across all of our brands, and really build a global capability that allows us to go to market and interesting ways through direct to consumer channels.
Yeah, that's, that's awesome. So sounds like you're working in a couple of different verticals, in terms of education, in terms of branding, in terms of sales. So a couple different goals that you have. Can you talk a little bit about that? And what brands fit within those goals?
Yeah, for sure. So when you take a step back, you know, two years ago, when I joined the organization, we had pockets of DTC energy happening, right, the good and the bad. We had brands that were going to to see really successfully on a small scale, we had strategies that we believed you to see might not be the best fit for us. And I think that all of those were right at the time. One of my focuses and when we built this team was to really look at saying, how do we harness these packets of energy? How do we build a capability that allows brands to go to market kind of on their own terms? Like how do you need to or how does this brand need to use the to see in order to benefit whatever that objective might be. And so what quickly came apparent was like three very specific categories where we are accelerating DTC here at GMI. And as I go further into each one, I'll give you some good examples. But I think what people are going to understand is, DTC is probably not even the right word for what we're doing. We're finding new ways to bring connected commerce to the modern consumer, but DTC is the traditional way of talking about it. But back to those three categories. And you're mentioning so I can go into each individually. But we decided that we had a really interesting cohort of really small brands, incubator brands from our intrapreneur kind of group that were looking to go to market quickly to learn. So we call it DTC to learn, understand what's product market fit, what's branding, how to kind of marketing messages worked as the product format fit, you know, they're innovating, it's white space in the markets, they want to get those products out into consumers hands gets feedback as quickly as possible. And so we enable the capability to go D to C to learn and we can launch these sites in a matter of hours and days, which we're really proud of. The second category kind of fell within what we call our brand experience team. And that's the idea of DTC to brand build. And this is where, you know, we have brands that have been around for 100 plus years and so the best followings around and where we enable these followers to really kind of get a piece of of the product that is exclusive So an example is we did a really great partnership this last year with cause the artist and Reese's puffs where you could actually order a special edition acrylic encased box of the of the cause box that Reese's put out. And, you know, we sold through those in a matter of minutes. Again, a great example of how we're building brands by putting the product in the hands of the consumer. And the third one is the most traditional, but I believe we have a little bit of a spin on it. And that's really kind of a more traditional way of talking about DTC to sell now, with a few brands think Lara bar think ratio thing, Nature Valley thing fiber, one who actually are really ripe to go direct to consumer in a very specific way. And I would love to talk more about that. But we also support that where they're more always on traditional ways of going direct to consumer. And I'm happy to go into some case studies on that as well. But that is the three kind of categories DTC to learn, brand build and actually to sell that we're currently supporting here at GMI.
So, there's a lot to unpack there, obviously, for sure. And I don't even know which direction to go in, to be honest. I mean, we have like you are scaling up sites rather quickly. So there's got to be an underlying tech stack there that's supporting that. And then also just dealing with all these different brands and understanding what the different KPIs are, and building a team to support each and every one of those And yeah, there's just a lot to unpack there. So maybe let's, let's talk with the how you attack how you attack each of those categories? Like what are you looking for in the brand experience? What are you looking for in the website experience? And how are you building that?
Yeah, for sure. And you mentioned tech stack. And we'll talk a little bit about that, because I think your listeners are gonna, you know, find it quite interesting in some of the tools that we're using here in a big corporation, a little less traditional than I think most kind of big CPGs have been going about it. But you have to keep the eyes are super interesting. As I mentioned, if we just pick on that first category, right, like brick, etc, to learn, inherently, sales, and profitability is not a tough KPI for those brands, right? They are brand new brands, brand new products that are looking to figure out, do people actually want this? What's the feedback? Are we meeting the need of this consumer? And so like a KPI for them might be user reviews, maybe it's feedback. Sometimes they're just looking for initial sales to say, Hey, did the format of this we were selling bars, maybe we should sell smoothies? Maybe we should sell shakes, maybe we should sell chips, right? And so they're going in and saying, how do we get insight from actual consumers through a kind of fast turn, DTC go to market plan. And of course, the feedback they get is some of the best because you're actually looking to consumers, and you have this one on one relationship now that we don't necessarily have when we go through our normal retail partners. And so for that case, like the KPI is huge in terms of the insight and kind of the feedback they're getting. But, you know, we kind of see a similar kind of non traditional approach and each one of those categories, because, you know, we have all the tools now at our fingertips. So, you know, DTC learns all about brand insights, you know, to brand build, obviously, KPIs, they're kind of fueling the the most avid brand fanatics figuring out ways to abridge online and offline experiences. And I can go on, but yeah, definitely a non traditional list of KPIs,
how much how much are those insights being shared? General Mills wide, but for other products, so I mean, this is really legacy enterprise company using DDC for a new age way of market research. And so So yeah, how are those are those insights being shared amongst other brands, under the General Mills, umbrella
100%. And I think, you know, our G works organization, which is kind of the intrapreneur group, which is really kind of building new products against these white spaces is an incredible organization that has continued to grow over the last couple of years here. And, you know, without getting into too much of the anatomy of how that team works, each one of these groups is kind of innovating in a different space that we believe has potential, right, it has the unmet needs of our consumers. And so the more that they learn about those spaces, the better that they can serve them, right. And so we had products all the time that might fail a certain round doesn't meet the criteria, or it didn't meet the expectation, or the consumer feedback wasn't right. That doesn't mean it was a failure, right, they can take a step back, and they can say, Great, here's what we heard, here's where we sold, you know, maybe that the sales volume was really good with this consumer demographic, and not for the target demographic. And all those insights are brought back into the organization to say now we know that much more and we can integrate more. So I would say the learning is focused specifically on the G works organization. But obviously, the insights that we're gleaning have huge impact, obviously, on our more mainstream products as well. And so we're doing our best to say like, specifically for that category of you to see, like, it's a research engine, how do we make sure that it doesn't necessarily only have impact on those specific brands? But also we can we can share it with some of our biggest worldwide brands as well?
Can you have an example of, you know, something that you learned or brand that hey, and you were like, Oh, my gosh, like we need to you know, this is this is huge. This is a surprise, you know, the consumers consumers wrap their arms around this.
Yeah, 100%. And I'll talk to something a little more selfish. And mice actually was a commerce technology that we were thinking was going to be a huge hit for, for this product. But it was a product called dooleys. And incredible founders team, and your listeners should check it out. So it's dooleys.com. And it's a specific product that's made for for kids, right, as it goes after dietary needs of children. And, you know, being a dad myself, and I think there were other parents, I knew the other parents on the team, we thought, you know, what better way than to make reordering as easy as possible, right? And so we partnered with the startup and we decided, hey, like, Let's do instant reordering on pack, right? So we had this really cool little QR code, it would open up an app clip on your phone, and with a single tap, you can reorder the product. And for us, we thought this was gonna be a really new interesting way to kind of drive repeat purchase. You know, you're in the moment, busy breakfasts. I think parents who are listening know exactly what I'm talking about. Like you run out, just quickly reorder, it'll be at your doorstep in two days, convenience play. And what we found is that the numbers were a lot lower than we really wanted them to be in that in that experiment, we found out that, hey, yes, we deployed only to 1000 products right or 1000 orders however, our numbers were really low. And we realized that at the end of the day, regardless of how easy it might be consumers aren't in the shopping mindset in that moment, right? They're actually in the moment, they don't actually think about how to reorder, no matter how easy you make it. And so what we were able to do is, instead of deploying to a million orders, making huge investments in that technology, we deployed to 1000, we got that test out the door in a matter of a week or two, and we're able to fail super fast to understand that, you know, hey, in this specific scenario, incident reordering is not the way to do it. And we're able to pivot really quickly. And it's a great example, you have to have a learning that now we know, like, we understand now a little bit more about the mindset of that specific consumer in that moment. And we know, it's not a great place to invest in innovation. And if we are going to invest in that space, and we're going to do it a little bit differently, but it was where we prove that a something we thought was gonna be really great, didn't work. And now we're taking that insight and being able to apply to our future tests.
I imagine a lot of people within General Mills are jealous of of your position, and how iterative and quickly you're able to totally move on certain technology and certain disease, what do you get
when you get credit for failures, it's a good job to have. Our KPIs are, are quite fluid, because we are expected to fail, right? If we're if we're not falling, right, if we were probably not testing Enough, enough in the market. And so we're constantly just trying to figure out new ways. We're connecting with consumers, and the DTC platforms, as your listeners know, like, give us perfect sandbox to try it out. Right. And so it's, I'm very lucky to have that. In my world,
your team is the cool kids just run around saying, iteration and sprints. And
yeah, if you just, if you just surround that with a bunch of buzzwords, you got the exact version of that. So you're perfect.
Exactly. Cool. So let's talk about the tech stack a little bit. I mean, you guys are responsible for how many sites.
So we will launch 35 sites this year, in this fiscal year, the actual number of sites that we support hovers right around that number. And as you can imagine, we're gonna talk a lot about DDC to learn. I mean, these sites are constantly rotating, right? And so depending on how many sites are live at the moment, but it's right around that numbers, it's a pretty good size list that we keep an eye on throughout the year.
And you're able to, you're able to spin them up rather quickly.
Yeah, and that's, and that's the thing that's been really differentiated just differential for us. You know, these founders teams, and I keep talking about that, but it's the same with our marketing teams. It's the same actually, with our brand teams, even who are looking to go to market and DTC way. Traditional tools really kind of put them back a year almost right. If you if anyone's launched the DTC site, or I've done actually any digital initiative within a big corporate environment. It's not quick, right? It just takes some time. And for a lot of reasons, it's legit, like I understand why it happens. But when we built this, we wanted to make sure like, hey, if a founders team wants to try to go to market next week, because they got a product they want to test, like, who am I to say, You can't do that, because of tech limitations, or if we have a new drop of some influencer that wants to, you know, really push something interesting into a greater, we have a brand who wants to be live before the end of fiscal year because, you know, budgets allow it to happen. Like there's technology in the world today that it makes that possible. And so we've built this entire tech stack, contrary to the more corporate systems, looking to things like Shopify, and so we are 100%, a Shopify shop, which I think for a lot of people, if you if there's people who are listening, who are in kind of the corporate environment, is an anomaly. And we continue to fight tooth and nail for that. And we do a lot of work behind the scenes to maintain that to enable our brands and enable our leaders here to go to market and need to see way or in a new connected commerce way, and hours and days versus months and years.
So talk about I mean, that process, the benefits, and the give and take, I mean, right, there are definitely some limitations, but also your ability to just spin things up so quickly, and to theme things out, and that sort of sort of thing. And to reuse SAS that you like to just implement SAS on the fly. So yeah, and I think
you bring up a good point, it's absolutely like like, our founders love logging into Shopify love giving them the keys to the, to their kingdom, right. And it's, it's so interesting to actually see even our brand leaders who are saying, Hey, I was diving into the reports, and I was looking at, you know, it's like, that's what we want to see. I think often with enterprise tools, you got to go through the six hour training in order to understand the dashboard and then you write your login and then you like rely on some analyst to give you the report. And it's just like not, I believe, a modern way to go about things. But yeah, so So the tech stack, you know, we rely on Shopify and a myriad of other plugins and kind of tools that sit alongside and on top of that, in the give and take, obviously, you know, the, what we get from it is speed agility. The accessibility, this nimble nature that I think, you know, we can lead the CPG industry with. And again, I stress, it's not necessarily only D to C that Shopify is powering, we push, we have this theory of connected commerce trying to create the shortest, most friction free path to purchase for our consumers. And regardless of we're shipping it ourselves, or we're connecting them to a retail partner, Shopify, and the associated tools within this tech stack have allowed us to do some crazy things at breakneck speeds that I think have really pushed us to the forefront of kind of major CPG. The the work behind the scenes has not been small, though, as you can imagine, you mentioned like, of course, there's gotta pay the piper at some point in time. Yeah. But the the big thing I've had to do is like, I want our team to worry about that, right? That's what our team can worry about, like our team of kind of digitally first kind of technical minded individuals. I want our brands to focus on how they're, they're going to market like and how they're serving their consumer and not worry about the back behind the scenes. And so basically, what we did is we said, hey, we want to do Shopify. What do we need to do to make that possible? And so we're doing things like actually customizing the Shopify installations and Shopify kind of deployments in a way that integrate perfectly with our cybersecurity team, or integrate perfectly with our data and privacy team. And so though, they're really nimble, to the people who are actually using them hands on keyboard, behind the scenes, these things are incredibly robust to meet and exceed, obviously, the incredibly high security standards that we have as a major company here in the United States. And so one of the things that our team is constantly doing is working with cybersecurity working with our ADA accessibility teams working with, you know, kind of everyone behind the scenes to make sure like, how is it we make sure our deployments are perfect. And then on the flip side, our founders or our brands, or our marketers don't need to worry about that. Because the kit that we give them in two hours, though, they seem to think it's fast, all the work we've done behind the scenes is already been done, and we can scale and deploy that in a really interesting way.
Yeah, I mean, you've you've built a platform, you've built a platform on a platform. Right, which is, which is, which is pretty, pretty impressive. I mean, I think a lot of people think, you know, Shopify, turn on site, get sales, obviously, there's, there's a lot more to it. And if you want to create good experiences and secure experiences, like you have to have a strong DevOps team. So I mean, and you guys have built that. So you've you've mentioned founder, team and marketing team quite a bit. Can you talk about the structure there? And so product X comes in under the umbrella like, who's the founder team? What are they responsible for in the marketing? Like, how are you going to market with this product?
Well, if we focus on like, some of our more traditional brands, like, let's say, you know, as you can imagine, go down your favorite breakfast cereal, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Reese's Peanut Cheerios, those types of things, we'll focus on breakfast, it's still recording this, right. So we focus on some of those key brands, you know, we work with, with a lot of people who touch those, right? As you can imagine, we have some of the largest brands in the world, we've been around for over 150 years, we have really incredible deep teams that are supporting every aspect of that. And when we look at that, we have our marketing organization, which is called brand experience, which focuses on how does that brand connect with the consumer of today? And oftentimes we're working with them, how are we bringing promotions to life? How are we you know, really kind of bringing that physical good into the world that's mostly now virtual or digital. And I think, you know, the recent example is a great way where we worked with brand experience the marketing organization here at GMI, to make that come to life. But on the sales side, and we're working with brand leadership, right, people are responsible for the p&l actually getting those products on the shelf, what are your numbers at the end of the year, and we love working with them too, because what we see DTC is a new channel of growth for them. And again, I talked about this as a channel of growth and I stress, DTC a General Mills isn't necessarily us shipping a brown box to someone's front door. We've, if you look at you know, one of my favorite case studies, we launched this summer was a brand called ratio foods. And if you go to ratio foods Comm, you'll see an example of this. But we've really crafted a whole new way of going direct to consumer where if you want to ship something to your front door in two days in a brown box, and the General Mills logo on the side of it will take care of that. Yeah, so 100% that will go to market. But what we're stressing is to say, I bet you're driving by a target on your way home today or on your way to pick up the kids or I bet you already have a Walmart Plus account, right? And we're lucky enough as General Mills to have distribution in nearly every retail location around the country. And so when we talk about direct to consumer sent a brown box that comes out of my office here, it might be if that's what the customer wants, but we're trying to figure out like, hey, if if we have it at Target, like who am I to say you can't just go pick it up curbside of the rest of your groceries. And so what we're trying to do is create the shortest most friction free path to purchase possible and that's our main objective with our DTC platforms. And that's where and I go back to your question he and I'm like, Who are you working with? That's where the brand, the brand leaders are really kind of igniting an excitement, right? Because all of a sudden, it's like, oh, man, we don't have to worry about every single box. It's not what you know, it's not box by box, looking at the p&l, we sell another 1000. Today, we're saying, Whoa, this is not only a new sales platform, but it's a new marketing platform as well. It's a conduit to our customers, our customers being our retailers that we rely on so much. And that's awesome. There's like new vision of direct to consumer that we're really pushing here. And that's what we're really excited about. So I kind of hijacked your question there, Ian. But the net net is we're seeing applicability of this new vision of direct to consumer, and really every spot within the organization and I think that's why we're seeing kind of this growth happen.
Super. Yeah, super interesting. Very interesting. So let's talk about CPG overall, no, it's obviously you're having quite a moment. I mean, you can go into any any Walmart or Target or anywhere and seeing any host of just new drinks offer you know, tons of new drinks, tons of new shakes, energy drinks, can Bucha whatever it may be, and then there's the DTC aspect of it. You guys we talked about your your your department, like you guys are the cool kids within General Mills. But to the maybe broader twist Twittersphere if you will, you guys are enterprise Right. Like you're you're exactly. Talking about Yeah, talking about that balance. Because I mean, I think there's there's like, Oh, hey, it's ecommerce, a CDC, but yeah, it's General Mills, like, you know, like, there's they're stealing, you know, the Indy thunder, if you will, of the emerging CPG brand. So yeah, talk talk about that given taken, is it rising tide lifts all ships is just like, hey, it's learning for all of us.
Yeah, you know, I think it's, uh, you know, to go into your local retailer, depending on what your flavor is, like, it's, it's amazing to see how many brands have been able to go from zero to the shelf at Walmart target in such a short amount of time. And I think that is such a testament to the tools and technology that the last to your point, he in the last five years has brought the idea that you can go to market and get some serious sales for a good product with some good marketing strategies and beyond, you know, be in front of a buyer at a Target or Walmart or Kroger and show data and show how your product is the best and why it's working. I mean, it's amazing. It's amazing to see, I think I will admit that, you know, big CPG has always been looked at as being on our heels, right when it comes to not necessarily the growth of that but connecting with consumers in that type of way. Right? I think these smaller indie CPGs have found ways just to drive cult followings, whether that's through influencer programs, or just their good marketing, or it's often a good product market fit. And I think that, you know, when you look at what what we're doing, we look up to those brands, right, we look up to the speed that they've been able to get to market, we look up to the connection that they're able to have with their consumer. And I think we want to, you know, look at them and say, Wow, that's really amazing. How can we learn from you, I think there are things that we can learn from them, and they're things that they can learn from us, for us, you know, we've been manufacturing food for over 150 years, you know, we have some of the most robust brands around but at the same time, they've been able to figure out how to break into a market in such a short amount of time. And so, what we love is, is kind of, you know, we were at a couple different conferences over the last few months, you know, we went to the DTC conference room to grow, we went to a couple other places where we saw a lot of your team and, and it's so inspiring to see just the growth that these smaller brands are getting and how they're getting there. And we hope that we can lend to a similar helping hand to say, like, you know, hey, maybe your, you know, your potential for our venture capital arm, like is there a way that we might be able to help you guys out? Or how can we share some of our distribution tactics or some of our strategies and unique ways? And so I think I don't look at us as bigger better or lesser I think we're actually kind of on this reared equal playing field now because of honestly some of the core functions of direct to consumer.
Yeah, that's super interesting. Yeah, I have young teen boys and they recently got into Shark Tank. And we're watching like, we were watching like season one or two and it was a CPG like sports drink and and they're haggling over it and I'm just like, gosh, I put on Twitter like we had no idea like we had this season to watch Shark Tank and like how many drink brands are going to be out there eight years 10 years later.
What's your DTC go to what's you know, you go into your local Target or Walmart I think the question is is what DTC brand have you found to be a favorite of yours?
Yeah, well, I I'm an ugly drinks guy personally, I love what he did there. And yeah, we will have we will have forget some of the names of them. But yeah, I like a good drinks. I still haven't tried. Gosh, what's the water brand that everyone goes crazy about?
Yeah. Liquid death.
Liquid death. Yeah, I keep tweeting like what's what's the deal with liquid death? But yeah, I do have to I have to do that at some point. But you do have to try
go liquid death. And I'll give kudos to that team. And there's such an amazing group, you know, they were one of the founding kind of brands who I think was doing such a good job. If you think like, you know, your listeners are, you know, probably think of logistics like shipping water, like, yeah, how hard and how expensive that is. And what I loved about the liquid death format, is that if you go to liquid death.com right now and look at how you purchase product, they're doing, you know, they're doing very similar things where they're saying, Yeah, and I think they actually might have taken off the actual DTC functionality like you could buy from us. It's gonna cost you 1999, I got shipped water across the country. Yeah, sure, if you got an Amazon Prime account, we already have a few pallets of it at the Amazon distro center down the road, right? Or if you want to buy it at Walmart, you can have that too. And I just loved and we, you know, we're very similar strategies in that way where it's like, they're at a spot where they have distribution. So like, they don't need to ship water case by case. But if you really want to do it, you can. And a shout out to pair commerce, who runs the kind of back end of that we're working with them now too, but I just think liquid death was kind of one the first I saw do that the brand is obviously next to nothing. So
yeah, just go to your whole foods. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. I saw it actually at Whole Foods. Someone carrying out a whole cart full the other day.
Yeah, I think they were willing to sell we continue again. That's what I saw on the Twitter's. Yeah, super interesting. So back, kind of going back and forth a little bit on the back on the tech stack side. Sure. We talked about the importance of Shopify, what else? What other what's like a go to extension app that you've you've found the sites or are using enjoying our or functionality. It doesn't have to be a status, but just
Yeah, so we're actually starting to use a lot of kind of clivias marketing tech stack in an interesting way, which of course, you get really technical quickly. But the idea that we can kind of do the same thing we did for b2c, but for email marketing, SMS, marketing, those types of things, and actually go to market and do one on one customer communications really quickly. It's really interesting. And so so we've been doing a lot of that. And of course, we're working a lot with kind of the subscription services. The other thing, though, they'll say is like, you know, when you look at kind of the modern SAS ecosystem right now, you guys know that so well, like the Shopify app store is your oyster, right? I think we've had teams who've just like discovered new functionality, it's actually were gonna do custom packs, and this new UI that allows people to combine different products and different flavors and build this custom pack. I'm like, awesome, like, do it. And then ultimately, like, we found this plugin, and I was like, that sounds great. Let me run it through our security screens quick. And like, go for it. And I just love how, you know, again, we're taking that mindset. And we learned it from the best, most digitally native brands around who are these b2c challenger brands? Who are like, yeah, we can do that doesn't cost us hundreds of 1000s of dollars or weeks of dev time, when there's an app for that. And we just install the app into Shopify, and we get moving. So of course, we're doing it to your point or to your question, you have general email marketing, etc. Obviously, subscription services and a couple other things. But then we have kind of this new world that our teams can pick from
Yeah, it's super it's super cool. And then even some of these apps with just like a slight bit of customization goes along the way. I mean, I think I know Mac Weldon does some amazing stuff with our loyalty program that I love on their Shopify site. You know, some of its apps some of its custom build, but um, yeah, and then on the CPG side, like to your point, Phillips is a brand it's like a cheese puff CPG brand that I recently came across and they do Yeah, that that pack builder like did a did a you know, a bag of this a bag of that a bag of this and it's so easy and seamless.
Well imagine 10 years ago, the amount of dev time and capital investment you need to put into just that functionality right like it just be out of the out of reach for so many. And I think that's just what's been causing it to kind of leveling the playing field
over the past 10 years I have had the benefit or lack thereof of working Drupal sites and working Magento sites so yeah, yeah, there's quite a bit of depth that goes
on I learned WordPress is my go to you know, 10 years ago building WordPress sites that were far from unstable and barely get out the door. But they were there but yeah, exactly the same thing.
So So as we start to wind down I mean, what's what's trending what we're what's coming down the pike we you know, the question I hate to receive, so I'll give it to you is no two, three to three years from now. Like what's what's gonna, what are we gonna see in specifically like the EECOM CPG space?
Yeah, one of our big focuses right now I keep talking about like, what's the shortest most friction free path to purchase? Right? It's kind of the core A line that I keep keep talking about. But I think, you know, I keep using a DTC is not the traditional way of how we're thinking about things. I think we're trying to figure out, like, where are consumers spending time? How do our products show up? And how do we make purchasing easy on that platform? And so if we look at the amount of time people are spending online, right now, I joke with our teams here, like no one is sitting in front of the TV, watching The Bachelor, like hanging out on ratio, food.com. Right, or hanging out on Epic provisions or cheerios.com. Right? There's sitting spending almost three hours and a couple of core social platforms that everyone knows about, right? And what was interesting about that is like, I think our our focus and how we want to shift kind of commerce and kind of how we go to market or next couple years is like, how do we collapse the funnel into those platforms. And I know, there's been a lot of bad press about social commerce and Instagram pulling back. And I think for a variety of reasons that that can be looked at in different ways. But I think at the end of the day, it's like, you know, consumers are less and less deciding to go down the cereal aisle, their lessons going into store. So discovery is changing, right? How we discover products, if you discover a new cereal brand, that might be one of ours on Instagram, I want to make sure that you can get that in your target card in a clicker to write or ideally in less than one. And the technology that's out there is a little more challenging than it may seem. However, we are on the verge, I think of coming up with some really interesting kind of proprietary tech that will allow us to really kind of revolutionize the grocery shopping experience with retail partners on these core social platforms. And so that's what we're looking to do. We're looking to say, why do we need a.com? Like, if no one's gonna go there's adding zero benefit, like, you know, e comm can take place in the places where people are, and that's going to change. But how do we have an infrastructure? We've talked about this a lot in our last 30 minutes, like, how do we build an infrastructure that can bend and flex based on where our consumers are spending the time and providing them the best experience possible?
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I mean, I've long it's been a weird balance for me in my arguing this in that, you know, I social commerce, and live stream commerce doesn't necessarily work right now. But by the same token, yeah, like the death of the native.com. Like people, there's no reason to go to it in the end, like, why why are we going to continue to push people there? And I completely agree with that. Yeah, that that, that makes a ton of sense. Great, well, hey, this has been awesome. This has been really fast. 32 minutes, and I feel like we covered covered a lot. Carter, tell us where to find yourself on social and where to find some of the projects you're working on? Yeah, for
sure. So I mentioned a couple of products. You know, I think we can probably throw those in the show notes. Definitely check out the sites as we talk about the depth of the.com. A lot of our work still lives on our beautiful brand sites that allow people to purchase this as quickly as possible. So check out some of our founders seems like dooleys are good measure, you can check out some of the promotional sites, they'll send the Cinnamon Toast Crunch and the recent sites over and over more established brands, you know, check out epic provisions or ratio foods are all great sites to take a look at. I'm a big LinkedIn guy would love to hear from anyone who's listening and wants to talk shop as you can tell over the last 33 minutes that you and I have been talking. We're really proud of the work we're doing here. And of course, everyone loves to talk about themselves. But LinkedIn is the best way and reach out if if that's something that's of interest.
Awesome. Yeah. We'll put all those in the show notes. When this is posted. So great. Thanks again, Carter. It's been great talking.
Yeah, thanks again for having