Creating a New Type of Energy Snack.
And the market test to validate it.
Clean Fuel for athletes
90% of new food products fail.
Clean Fuel is a first-of-its-kind product. An energy snack made from only natural ingredients, that tastes like real food. We needed a low-cost, reliable way to learn if Clean Fuel would be in the 10% of new products that succeed.
We created a minimum viable business (MVB) to run a market test - a way to sell Clean Fuel to real customers, in the real world, and measure its success. A simple Shopify store provided the digital infrastructure to run the MVB, and track results.
Services: strategy, brand, creative, Shopify build, fulfillment, business planning, marketing.
Market test & minimum viable business (MVB).
90% of new food products fail.
It can cost brands hundreds of thousands of dollars to find out whether a product will succeed - often through a large scale launch. A market test will generate the same information at a fraction of the cost.
Clean Fuel is a new type of energy snack for athletes.
Most sports food is highly processed, and tastes like candy. Clean Fuel is made from natural ingredients, and tastes like real food. There’s no other product like it for athletes - or general consumers.
A market test needed answer three questions:
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Would athletes buy Clean Fuel?
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Would they buy it again?
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Would they recommend it to others?
Minimum Viable Business (MVB)
An MVB is a high-fidelity market test. The simplest version of a business required to measure the viability of a new product - through sales to paying customers, in the real world.
Launching Clean Fuel to a sample of its target market, as part of an MVB, would generate data-driven answers to those questions. The results would be predictive of the larger customer population.
Demand for Clean Fuel outstripped supply.
With no marketing:
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Clean Fuel became the highest selling sports nutrition product in California’s largest chain of bike shops.
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Repeat purchase rate and lifetime customer value (LTV) beat category benchmarks by 50% and 180% respectively.
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After an initial product sampling program, Clean Fuel’s customer base grew beyond program participants through word of mouth - to other cities, other states.
Clean Fuel created more demand, and opportunities for growth, than the MVB’s supply chain could support.
The test also revealed a larger total addressable market than expected, and shaped the strategy and plan to capture it. We are currently fundraising to launch Clean Fuel on a larger scale.
A simple Shopify store
Shopify provided the digital infrastructure required to run the MVB.
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Built to sell one product, and measure its success with customers.
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Supported direct to consumer (DTC) and wholesale sales.
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Provided all digital infrastructure for the business, including payments, shipping, data collection and more.
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View at teamkitchen.co
