Sterling Rice Group

2013 Top Natural and Organic Trends. Is Mainstream Grocery Next?

The recent uptick in organic and natural foods is hard to ignore. Impossible, actually. Grocery store shelves are exploding with new health-focused products. As these products vie for shoppers' attention and dollars, they increasingly respond to consumer demands for nutritious, boundary-pushing, and even indulgent products. Here at the Sterling-Rice Group, we've paid close attention to this growing market and identified the most meaningful changes driving this industry. Pay close attention—you're likely to see these trends influence mainstream grocery shelves soon.

Sterling-Rice Group Hosts Fourth Annual Bolder Innovation Executive Forum

SRG proudly hosted an inspiring, fun, and insight-rich 2013 Bolder Innovation Executive Forum on May 2 and 3 at the St. Julien Hotel and Spa. The event brought together leaders of academia and business in a think-tank environment to ignite conversation, spark new ideas, and challenge conventional thinking. This year featured a number of incredible speakers from Stanford, Yale, Starbucks, Annie’s, PepsiCo, Honest Tea, and many more. The highlight featured a moving talk by Erik Weihenmayer, the only blind person to successfully summit Mount Everest. Below are 10 of the bold ideas that came out of this day-and-a-half event. To view video from the forum, click here.

Open Your Door to Delicious™ with Schwan's

Pulling off a creative and delicious family dinner night after night is no easy task. Families often get stuck in the same mealtime routine with little inspiration to make something new. Knowing this, we invited moms to open their doors to delicious with Schwan's Home Delivery and discover how easy it is to create inspired meals that everyone loves.

Liberation Cocoa, truly liberating chocolate

Liberation Cocoa had a seemingly impossible dream: to help former child soldiers reintegrate into society by paying living wages to restore abandoned cocoa farms across Liberia, which would allow farmers to sell their premium cocoa at a fair trade price. Yet this new operation had never before sold much more than a few hundred pounds of beans. No one knew anything about Liberation Cocoa or what they were trying to do. And if they did, they certainly weren’t seen as a capable exporter of cocoa. They needed help.

By way of the Unreasonable Institute, our own Rick Sterling became mentor to the project, constructing a strategic plan to introduce Liberation Cocoa to the world market and set them up for exponential growth. Our creative, design, and digital teams put together a new identity for the upstart cocoa brand and developed an informational website that even led to their first international order. Today, Liberation Cocoa has grown to become a collective of farms, committed to economic and social justice—as well as exceptional chocolate.

You Belong Up Here

Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia is the mid-Atlantic's largest ski resort, and it boasts enviable snow and vertical feet to boot. For the last several years, Snowshoe's marketing message had become inconsistent. They had experienced turnover in their marketing team and, as a result, no longer had anything on which to anchor the brand visually or emotionally. Snowshoe had stopped standing out, and the many other resorts in the area had begun to assert themselves. With the help of a new consistent look and feel and a digitally led targeted media plan, we were able to, not only celebrate Snowshoe's impressive on-mountain attributes, but also shine some light on another key differentiator from other regional resorts—their downhome, heartfelt hospitality. In the end, it was the feeling of being a part of this resort, this community, and this great mountain that stood out—to be able to immerse oneself in the region's only genuine resort experience.

Since the campaign launch, web visits, orders, and revenue are up by double digits. So now, more than ever, skiers in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast are starting to understand why, at Snowshoe, "You Belong Up Here."