• by Les Luchter , Staff Writer, 8 hours ago

Kate Farms, the provider of plant-based nutritional shakes as well as formulas for both infants and tube-feeding patients, has been on a brand-building push following its acquisition by Danone in spring 2025.

Over the past year, as Kate Farms has continued a long-term transition from marketing strictly to and through healthcare providers (HCPs) into a more CPG-oriented approach, “we’ve shifted more of our brand investment dollars to broad awareness building and building out our foundational brand elements, (with) 30% more investment in top-of-funnel,” CMO Catherine Hayden told a recent Reuters Events webinar titled “Design Brands that Drive Devotion, Not Just Clicks.”

The new emphasis, Heyden said, has been helped along by a specially developed metric called “brand love,” which she described as a composite score of such indices and attributes as emotional connection, loyalty, attachment, quality, perceived differentiation, and awareness.

One learning from that metric, Hayden related, was that Kate Farms -- which “operates at the intersection of healthcare and consumer” -- is “a loved brand for people that know us, but few know about Kate Farms. We're approaching nourishing almost 700,000 people in the U.S . since our origin [which she put at eight years ago] but that's still a really small number.”

The brand, she said, also learned “that clinical research and efficacy are really important. So  a key part of our overall go-to-market plan is making sure the product works… and that we have the right substantiation and clinical research rigor behind it.

“At its core, building something for a human need is most essential in terms of long-term brand equity,” Hayden declared.

How Kate Farms serves such human needs was unexpectedly brought up by Citi Global CMO Angela Culver-Gleason, who otherwise provided a financial B2B perspective on the two-person panel.

“My mother was in ICU for 100 days a couple of years ago,” Culver-Gleason related. “An allergic reaction to a drug caused a cascade of different comorbidities to happen, she had to go on a feeding tube, and the first set of nutrition they gave her did not work. They ended up bringing in Kate Farms (and) it started the healing process…it helped calm down her system.”  

Culver-Gleason  added, “It's a brand we didn't know until we experienced something that was just not what you expect to experience in life.”

Other real stories are at the heart of Kate Farms’ recently launched first-ever brand campaign, “Here for the Champions,” which Hayden said is “about changing the perception of Kate Farms.”

“Many consumers still viewed us as a medical nutrition, a niche, and our opportunity was to expand the relevance beyond that,” she said.

She cited a couple of data points to support that direction:

1. “Six in ten Americans have a chronic health condition, so chronic health conditions are actually not a niche: they are the majority.”
2.  “We also wanted to celebrate and honor the journey, what individuals are navigating every day, similar to what Angela was sharing. It became about celebrating and honoring the people.”  

For the campaign’s start, Hayden said, “We've predominantly focused on creator partnerships and user-generated content…highlighting the way that nutrition supports everyday life, not just during medical moments. The content that has performed best has led with personal stories rooted in caregiving, resilience and human experience.”

For examples, see here and here.

Over the past year, Hayden noted, Kate Farms has expanded its brand experience team by about 300%, from five employees to 15, “and one of the core groups that has expanded is social."

She also revealed that “real life activations” during “more culturally relevant moments” are in the planning stages.

“A lot of the creators we work with are registered dietitians,” Hayden added. “So they are healthcare professionals sharing to their audience.”

Here’s an example of a hospice nurse who’s also a dietician, and of a nurse practitioner.

By the way, Hayden said she’s seeking a marketing exec who’s also a registered dietician.