• by Les Luchter , 2 hours ago

Q: What do pH-D Feminine Health, an 11-year-old marketer of boric acid vaginal suppositories, and The Matzo Project (TMP), a four-year-old kosher food manufacturer, have in common?

A: The founders of each company comprised a panel on category disruption at MediaPost’s recent CPG Brand Insider Summit -- and, as figured out by TMP’s Ashley Albert, “We’re both against yeast.”*

As “the first competitor to the American Matzoh market in 90 years,” TMP had a “wide open field” when it launched, Albert noted. The company set out to make Matzoh sexy through such innovations as Matzoh chips and quips from a “snarky” Jewish grandmother on every package. “It’s a good neutral cracker, more versatile than a pita chip, more elegant than a saltine, more flavorful than a water cracker, and you can use it in all sorts of ways,” she explained.

Largely because of its packaging, TMP products found their way into “spots where we ordinarily wouldn’t find matzoh,” Albert said. These included museum gift shops, minibars at the Four Seasons, and Jet Blue upgraded snack boxes, “which is a big thing for us, because so many people get it in their hands every single day.” There was also a partnership with New York City’s Carnegie Deli (“if you order their soup, you get matzoh chips and our matzoh balls”) and noted mail-order food purveyor and Ann Arbor, Michigan-based deli Zingerman’s (“they swapped their matzoh ball soup for our matzoh ball soup, the first time they changed their recipe in years”).

“Originally, we weren’t going after the big matzoh brands,” she recalled. “We were going after the pita chips market. We wanted to be like rye bread -- Jewish food that’s something you put your ham and cheese on.”

Then, Manischewitz decided to make a matzoh chip, and “they rebranded completely, they tried to add humor and bring them into the modern world.”

“They’re putting all these products out,” Albert said. “So now we have ‘Operation Take it to the Man.’ We are systematically trying to pick off every one of their facings. If you go to a kosher aisle, you’ll see just a sea of Manischewitz. There will be three brownie mixes. Soon, there will be two Manischewitz brownie mixes and a Matzo Project brownie mix. We’re slowly, but surely taking on ‘Big Matzoh.’

pH-D Feminine Health, meanwhile, has had to take on an entrenched industry – and the FDA, according to founder & CEO Deeannah Seymour.

“I found an ingredient that was backed by published clinical data -- boric acid in the form of vaginal suppositories,” she related. “It had been used in the healthcare community for decades, physicians loved them, but they could only get them from a compounding pharmacy and they were very expensive.”

Yet, while the product is sold to fight yeast infections in Canada, “in the U.S., we’re required to market for vaginal odor, “Seymour explained, joking that “when I was growing up, I did not anticipate that I would be the face of vaginal odor.”

A few years back, she continued, “the largest challenger brand attempted to weaponize the FDA against us…Every day when I woke up, I didn't know if I would have a company by the end of the day because we were fearful they would come and try and shut us down. “

“I found out through the Freedom of Information Act that [the competitor] had been untruthful and I was able to prove that to the FDA,” Seymour elaborated.

Then, “I ended up lobbying over 200 members of Congress successfully to get language put into the appropriations bill to protect our ingredient. And recently, I had to get a law amended in California to protect our company.  Never in a million years would I have dreamt that advocacy would be one of the main things that I do, but it is because women's health is so overlooked and there's so much misinformation out there.”

pH-D’s product is now on the shelves at Target, CVS, Walmart and more -- 55,000 total “doors” in the U.S. and Canada.

Getting into Target was a major coup, she said. “We were a one-SKU wonder, and Target just doesn’t do that.”  But Target’s buyer “believed so much in our mission, and the way we were  marketing to healthcare professionals, that she begged her VP.”  Then, Walmart came calling.

Online sales also remain very important: “A lot of people still feel uncomfortable going into the store to purchase a product like this, particularly when it's behind glass and they have to ask for a key.”

• Get it? Vaginal yeast infections aren’t good, and matzoh is made without yeast, which is what makes bread -- forbidden during Passover -- rise.