2023 Assessment Newsletter

Social Influencers Social influencers help us reach their fans - our consumers - through their social media accounts. Today, unlike previous generations, consumers turn to their favorite influencers on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok for everyday meal inspiration. Our goal is to increase purchases by making consumers more comfortable with cooking sweetpotatoes, and influencers help us accomplish this. The social media influencers help keep us top of mind and on trend. They also help us increase our recipe collection for our new website! Social Media + Boosts Unfortunately, gone are the days when a brand could upload posts on social media and such posts would reach all their followers. Now, social platforms want to capitalize on every one of their pages and nothing is "free" anymore. Boosts help expand the reach of our social posts/messaging and beat the algorithm these platforms have created which basically hide content while pushing those who are paying. Trade Advertising One of the ways we reached retail buyers in 2022-2023 was by placing ads in trade publications throughout the year. These appeared mostly on trade websites and in their daily newsletters, but also in print. We targeted the publications that are buyers' go-to’s and adjusted budgets accordingly. This effort will be increased for this fiscal year in an effort to to stay top of mind and reach more buyers. This helps you when operations pitch their sweetpotatoes to buyers, as they have been seeing North Carolina sweetpotatoes in their inboxes throughout the year.

Weis Markets Dietitians We partnered with the Weis dietitian team, who offers fun and interactive virtual cooking and nutrition education services. This allowed us to reach consumers in the Northeast who want to lead healthier lifestyles and helped them feel more comfortable around sweetpotatoes and increase sweetpotato purchases. Weis dietitians provided four fun and engaging cook-along classes featuring sweetpotatoes and also engaged their audience with sweetpotato nutrition trivia in the form of contests to win gift cards and sweetpotato recipe cards along with fun kitchen swag.

Whitney Miller In the fall of 2022, we worked with Whitney Miller, Masterchef winner, influencer, recipe creator and entrepreneur has her values aligned with the mission and vision of NCSPC. Whitney created various seasonal recipes for our website. You may have also met her at FarmHER, where she was our keynote speaker and provided a set of her North Carolina Sweetpotato Casserole cookies for auction in support of Pretty in Pink! (This recipe is available on our website.)

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