Kate Farms Ran 800 Variations to Get One Flavor Right with Catherine Hayden
Recorded live at eTail Boston 2026. Listen to the episode:
Catherine Hayden is Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Farms. She sat down with Isaac at eTail Boston, a few months after the last time the show caught up with her at eTail Palm Springs, and the first thing she reported was scale.
“Since we met last, we have expanded distribution at retail. We are now opening 6,800 doors across Walmart and CVS with our high protein nutrition shake.”
Then the number that stops you.
“We also have launched an additional flavor of high protein nutrition shake that took 800 variations to get right because we wanted the flavor to be exceptional.”
Eight hundred. For one flavor. In a category where the easy move is to ship something adequate and let the label do the selling, that is a decision about what the brand is willing to put its name on.
The insight behind Here for the Champions
Kate Farms launched its first ever brand campaign, Here for the Champions, backed by OTT investment. The strategy underneath it reframes who the customer is.
“The idea and the insight behind that is six in ten Americans are living with a chronic health condition. So health needs is not something that’s niche, it’s the majority.”
That single line does a lot of work. Medical nutrition gets marketed as a specialty product for a small population. Hayden is arguing the opposite, and the campaign follows from it.
“Often what we’ve seen with folks that are going through some health journey is they are advocating for themselves, they are a caregiver advocating for someone, and we wanted to celebrate that.”
“We’re starting with a lot of user-generated content, testimonials and talking through the journeys that they’ve been on, the impact that nutrition has had, and really celebrating them in their real life moment and journey.”
The champion is the patient or the caregiver, not the brand. For a company moving from clinical channels into 6,800 retail doors, casting the customer as the hero is also how you stay recognizable to the people who found you first.
Where Kate Farms will and will not let AI touch the work
Talk Commerce ran a survey across the show floor asking whether companies ought to use generative AI for content creation and marketing. Hayden’s answer drew a line plenty of brands are still fumbling for.
“I think there is a role that AI can play as a collaborator, as a helping with the editing process, but the the origin, the responsibility, the ideas needs to be held by the company and the brand and needs to be authentic and true to that brand.”
Origin, responsibility, ideas. Those stay human. Editing and assistance can be machine. That is a workable rule, and it is notably stricter than what a lot of marketing teams practice.
Where she is happy to hand work to AI is service and listening. First, resolution speed.
“We have an AI chatbot on KateFarms.com called Farmhand and it just helps access information that is already available on KateFarms.com for a customer much more quickly and effectively.”
Note the scope. Farmhand surfaces information the site already publishes, faster. It is not inventing answers about nutrition for people managing a health condition, which is exactly the restraint you would want from a brand in this category.
Second, and more interesting for anyone running a consumer brand, is what they do with feedback.
“Another new way that we’re using AI is through a platform or partner called Unwrap.ai and essentially it takes all of our social platforms, Reddit, customer reviews, Amazon, post purchase surveys, and we can start to see trends where things that are working well and things that are friction points.”
“That’s actually presented out on a weekly basis, which gives an awesome read across the entire landscape where we can identify issues quicker and solve them.”
Plenty of brands have all of that feedback and read almost none of it. Social, Reddit, reviews, Amazon and post-purchase surveys sit in five different tools owned by four different teams. Collapsing them into one weekly read of what is working and where the friction is turns scattered complaints into an operating signal.
What retail expansion does to a brand
Hayden was at eTail Boston to give her first fireside chat, a follow-on to a panel she joined at eTail East about authenticity at retail.
“This will go into more details in that session about the brand, what we are still holding true as we go into retail, what is changing, customer loyalty, and even some new AI tools that we’re using as well.”
“What we are still holding true” and “what is changing” is the right framing for a distribution jump this size. Something always changes. Naming which parts are not up for negotiation is how a brand survives the shelf.
Her closing answer was about the half of the market that has never heard of them.
“I’m most excited to share the details of Kate Farms, what’s important to us as a brand, and continuing authenticity as we expand into retail. I’m also excited for, there’s probably many people here who haven’t heard of Kate Farms and continuing to build awareness.”
Three things worth taking from this
Product standards are a marketing asset when they are specific. “We tested 800 variations” lands in a way that “great taste” never will.
Category size is a story you choose. Six in ten Americans living with a chronic condition turns medical nutrition from a niche into a mainstream market, and the campaign follows the reframe.
And the AI line Hayden draws is worth copying. Origin, responsibility and ideas stay with the brand. Speed and pattern-finding go to the machine. Farmhand retrieves what the site already says, and Unwrap.ai reads the feedback nobody has time to read.
Catherine Hayden is Chief Marketing Officer at Kate Farms. This conversation was recorded at eTail Boston 2026. Find her on LinkedIn and learn more at katefarms.com. For more at-event interviews, visit talk-commerce.com/events.
