Thursday, August 25, 2011

Blog:

Of Whoopie Pies, ketchup and tech innovation

By Bobbie Carlton

What do Whoopie Pies, water filters, coffee, dipped fruit, Weber kettle-grill conversion kits, chocolate and homemade ketchup have to do with technology, you might ask?

The 29th edition of the monthly Mass Innovation Nights (MIN) on Aug. 10 was the annual “Foodie” event, showcasing food-related innovation. Usually MIN has a wild assortment of new products — medical devices, websites, mobile apps, and enterprise software on the high-tech side, but there are also toys, consumer goods, new services, and, yes, food.

This year’s MIN Foodie event included some high tech products — specifically websites focused on the foodie movement and a tool designed to help restaurants put their menus on Facebook — and these tech products were being shown against a backdrop that included a lot of non-tech.

The mix of industries is an important part of the MIN concept. It drives important lessons in bringing a product to market, primarily around monetization. Everyone knows you’ll need to sell your water filters and baked goods. No one expects the Whoopie Pie bakery, Chococoa, to give away chocolate treats forever, or the father and son team from Pure1 to supply everyone with free green water filters. Ingredients, materials, manufacturing, inventory and shipping all cost money. The explanation of how the coffee system, Brew1, was going to compete with single-cup-brewing giant Keurig was easily boiled down to the razor/razor blade analogy. (Sell brewer cheaply; keep selling them the coffee in the little cups.)

If you are talking with the purveyor of a physical product, you tend to skip over the entry-level money conversation, and get right to questions around competitive pricing and margins. But if you are talking with a website developer, it’s a different story.

During the presentation portion of the evening, inquiring minds wanted to know how the websites were going to make money. Evocatus and LocalPickins both presented websites of interest to local foodies and both had founders still holding down day jobs. Evocatus feels that its gourmet tastes and pairing reviews website will be able to utilize QR codes within stores and at events to connect food manufacturers and retailers with consumers for a “chargeable” moment, whereas LocalPickins is looking at a freemium model where basic listings on the site are available for free, and expects that sizable traffic someday will entice retailers and gourmet food suppliers to upgrade to a paid listing.

Meanwhile, Menu Platform provides a way for restaurants to upload their menus and daily specials to Facebook. From my experience marketing restaurants (most recently Red Clover Inn and Restaurant in Vermont, and Mombo in Portsmouth, N.H.) I know this is a real issue. Both restaurants espouse fresh farm-to-table style menus, and let’s face it, these things change, a lot. As a chef, you may be planning on a wonderful dish with fresh bok choy but the arugula looks gorgeous and, well, there’s now arugula on the menu. This menu needs to somehow get online because that’s how your potential guests are making their dining decisions. More guests, more receipts. Can you say “monetization”?

Publisher’s Note: Bobbie Carlton’s role in running Mass Innovation Nights gives her a bird’s-eye view of the local tech and innovation scene — at least a nighttime view, and from a perspective that is at times journalistic, at times boosterish, and always entrepreneurial. Frankly, we think it’s a view that this region needs: Someone who asks good questions, hopes for the best in all of the region’s innovations and has some skin in the game.

And that’s why we’ve asked her to become a regular contributor to Masshightech.com.

Bobbie’s background includes lead public relations roles at large tech ventures (Cognos and PTC), agency work with clients such as the MathWorks, Lexmark and FTP Software, and heading up marketing for the Beacon Street Girls, a brand with a book series, social network for kids, and line of gifts and accessories. She founded Carlton PR & Marketing in 2008. Her weekly Innovation Breakfast series offer entrepreneurs a chance to talk about their startups, particularly their marketing plans and she is a regular mentor at MassChallenge. She is also the head of marketing at Accounting Management Solutions, one of the area’s larger sources of part-time CFOs and controllers. Over the last two years, monthly Mass Innovation Nights events have provided a local venue for new product launches — more than 300 to date.  MIN is a monthly product launch party and networking event that mobilizes the local social media community to support new product launches with increased visibility: blogging, tweeting, “liking,” or posting online video and pictures.
 

— Doug Banks