No-one enjoys the pang of guilt you feel when discovering half a lemon mouldering in the back of the fridge.
Especially in the midst of a climate crisis, looking for ways to limit your impact on the planet is important.
Thankfully, Food Huggers are making it a little easier for you to do just that with their reusable food savers, helping you reduce food waste and usage of disposable plastics. Loni Slatkin, their Communications Manager, says:
“We want to make sustainability simple and fun. That’s our goal. And along the way we get to reduce food and plastic waste.”
Their products are made from the highest quality food-grade silicone which fits your leftovers like a glove. Not only does it keep your food nice and fresh, helping you reduce food waste in the process, it stops you needing single-use plastic like clingfilm.
In Loni’s words - “we’re small but mighty!” Since having a successful launch on Kickstarter in 2013, Food Huggers have grown to 15+ employees around the globe. They’re now stocked by big-name retailers and have been featured by some of the world’s leading media outlets.
Visual content is vital to Food Huggers
The creatives Loni and her team create continue to play an important role in growing the business. They’re key in educating on what a Food Huggers product can be used for. Loni explains:
“Our creative assets are the most important assets that we have. A photo or video of Food Huggers does a better job at clearly illustrating their purpose and function than words often can.”
Visuals support their marketing campaigns to prospective customers, and also help their network of global retailers and distributors sell their products.
“We want to ensure our wholesale partners have all the creatives they need. We want our creative assets to show exactly how to use our products while being an accurate representation of our brand.”
SmugMug and Drive weren’t up to scratch
Before Dash came along, Loni and her team were using a combination of Google Drive and SmugMug. SmugMug is where their photographers go to upload new images from their product photoshoots.
Their partners and media contacts used to have access to their SmugMug and could go in and grab the product pictures they wanted.
But there were two problems with that. Firstly, it was hard for their partners to sift through the thousands of product photos in SmugMug to find what they needed. And secondly, the images they ended up using weren’t always the best-possible representation of the brand.
“We were lost for a little bit, we didn’t know how to streamline our multimedia process and flow. Should we have our photographers upload everything to Drive? But Drive is really expensive when storing raw images. We needed a place that was going to be easy and intuitive for both our partners and media contacts.”
That’s when they found Dash.
Building a new home for Food Hugger’s brand-approved content
Improving the experience for partners, team members and media contacts when they were searching for Food Huggers’ content was really important to the company. They needed a digital asset management system which made it as easy as possible for partners to find the specific pictures they need. The company first heard of Dash from one of their trusted partners, Eco warehouse, and it turned out to be just what they were after:
“Originally, we kept all our creative assets in SmugMug. We would share that with clients, but it just wasn’t up to scratch. We needed a place to curate branded content for our external team and a separate location where our internal team could access the rest of our creative library. That’s why we moved to Dash. Dash is great, it’s exactly what we want.”
To keep all their assets organised in Dash, they’ve kept their folder structure simple and intuitive. Each Food Huggers product - like Hugger Bags and Reusable Bowl Lids - has its own folder. Nested underneath each product-level folder are subfolders for lifestyle shots or ‘on white’ product images.
Every quarter, Loni and her team meet to decide which of the thousands of assets they’ve had from photographers, influencers and designers get uploaded to Dash. Their partners, internal team members and press contacts are then able to go in and use them.
That’s not to say they ditched Drive or SmugMug completely. They just realised Dash gives their partners a better experience when they need brand-approved visuals from Food Huggers.
“It’s like we had two team members, Drive and SmugMug, who were doing the work of three. So we brought in a new team member, Dash.”
Getting visuals to journalists
Food Huggers have been picked up by an impressive roster of online media outlets since they launched back in 2013. In fact, Loni credits it as one of the key ways the business achieved its growth.
And having top-quality visuals a journalist can use quickly in their articles plays an important role in whether you’ll get featured or not.
So to speed things up, and make it simpler for journalists, Food Huggers use Dash.
“The press can easily go to our Dash, download what they need without having to send us requests for specific content. It’s much quicker which means we have a better chance of being featured again and again."
Their media contacts can pick the format they’d like a Food Huggers image in, crop it so it meets the requirements of their publication, and download it - all from Dash.
And it’s working! In 2022 alone, they’ve been featured in The Kitchn, Glamour Magazine, Mashable, Epicurious - to name just a few.
Dash helps Food Huggers save time
Loni is using Dash to cut out a lot of the repetitive tasks she used to do. Food Huggers’ partners need content, and by having everything in one place they don’t have to come through her. It’s faster and a better experience for both sides.
“Dash is saving me a lot of time. It’s convenient that our different partners can go in and find the content themselves, without having to email me and wait for a response.”
Would she recommend Dash to other growing ecommerce brands? 😇
"I would definitely recommend it! Dash makes life simpler and my work day easier. Dash is a great tool for brands to stay organised and make asset management seamless. There’s so many helpful features like being able to download images presized for social media. Having Dash takes so much work off our plates.”
