Collaboration Wins: Love Good Fats Talks Trade Solutions

Love Good Fats is a company dedicated to spreading the good news about healthy fats – selling a “ridiculously delicious” line of keto-friendly, gluten-free protein bars and shakes.

And, they’re growing fast!

After becoming a staple consumer item on Canadian store shelves, Love Good Fats launched in US retailers like Whole Foods, Kroger and The Fresh Market.

Love Good Fats has a dynamic distribution driven business in the US and split direct in Canada, so effective promotion management has always been a leading aspect of the company’s focus.

As Love Good Fats quickly expands its presence in-store and online, they realized that managing trade programs on Excel wasn’t cutting it.

“With the Excel format we continually encountered errors and became time inefficient,” says Sherrie Bogojevic, Love Good Fats Director of Sales.

Software Selection

The team dove in and vetted 5 trade promotion management and optimization software vendors.

Their goal was to find a solutions provider “that could work with the size of our company and adjust and grow with our needs.” They found that “Blacksmith offered the ideal option.”

The key to this partnership: Collaboration. “The team at Blacksmith Applications is very collaborative.”

Blacksmith cares about accommodating customer timelines. “Our timeline was very short – we were set up and had loaded all 2021 trade activity by the end of September 2020; pretty remarkable to do for both sides,” adds Bogojevic. (That’s just 9 weeks after project kick off!)

Love Good Fats Trade Spend Goals:

1) Have a handle on trade spend, in a more accurate capture

2) Gain a trade function that can assist in production / forecast management

3) Manage spending within an account – be profitable and make the right decisions on activities with the accounts we are partnered with, which will in turn accelerate growth

Reporting

“Blacksmith is willing to work with us on the needs of our business. Since Blacksmith TPM and Blacksmith TPO can be implemented together, it enables better business decisions.”

For Love Good Fats, running excel-based reports was a time suck. “One of the great things about using Blacksmith’s tools is that you can really visualize your trade spend. You slice and dice the reports to see just want you want – all spend, a specific retailer, a specific product, and then share those reports with your team,” says Blacksmith Applications Director of Presales, Shelley Fow.

Bogojevic continues, “We have some tweaks for reports which we are collaborating on. Those tweaks will benefit both companies – that’s why Blacksmith was the right choice; it may not be there today but they see our need and they’ll work on it, to make it there. It’s a great mentality.”

Process Improvements

Joe Miesse, Blacksmith Sales Executive notes, “The reduction of manual process errors and intuition-based economic decisions will really improve quantifiable ROI on Love Good Fat’s trade spend investment. Now, they have visibility into all contracts, promotions and critical post-event data in one location. That’s more than 33% improvement in resource efficiency.”