TCHO
Once the leader of American craft chocolate, today TCHO struggled to find differentiation among a sea of competitors. With grocers deprioritizing TCHO on the shelf and limited e-commerce capabilities. TCHO needed a way to directly connect with their customers.
TCHO's flavor experts made exceptional chocolate because of their rich knowledge of the science and art of flavor, but their mastery had never been shared with customers.
TCHO had little customer intel and needed to define a target audience. Tapping into TCHO’s customer base, I&CO led quantitative & qualitative research, assessed market trend reports, and assessed shopping behavior to identify TCHO's first profile: The Gastro-Explorer.
See food as an expression of culture and a way to get a peek inside someone else’s world: food is a window through which they can be transported. Not focused solely on the expense of dining, but on the experience.
A limited-release subscription kit exploring flavors inside and outside chocolate. Every quarter, members receive an at-home kit with products, educational resources, and experiment ideas allowing them to dive into a new flavor theme. In addition to their kits, members have access to online resources that keep them exploring TCHO chocolate and developing their own tasting credentials
Each Taste Chasers kit included multiple ways
to enhance your experience with online touchpoints:
Exclusive virtual events to learn from TCHO’s experts and their favorite collaborators
Online community to share ideas or get advice from TCHO’s team
Recipes and experiment content, augmented by instructional video, and more
Working closely with TCHO, I&CO helped analyze optimal kit pricing and forecast profitability scenarios. We developed a launch plan for iterative validation and a scaled launch, to optimize the program and mitigate risk. The next steps were for TCHO to develop a physical prototype for in-home testing. Plans to scale included a Beta Launch with a closed invitation before a national launch on the website.
Average margin to TCHO with pricing analysis
Projected ROI on a Beta Launch with 100 Kits